Lucy Sullivan Is Getting Married

by Marian Keyes

  But that was all.

  I didn’t cry, or anything like that. I didn’t even tell the girls at work. I just couldn’t be bothered to, I was too disappointed.

  It was only when the phone rang that I wasn’t quite in control. Renegade Hope managed to give me the slip and escape from its container to play hopscotch on my nerve endings. But never for long. By the third ring I’d usually caught up with it, forced it back into the container, and sat on the lid.

  The only phone call of note that I got that week wasn’t. It was from my brother, Peter.

  I couldn’t for the life of me understand why he was calling me. He was my brother and I loved him, I suppose, but it wasn’t as if we liked each other very much.

  “Have you been out home recently?” he asked.

  “A few weeks ago,” I admitted, hoping that his question wouldn’t be followed with, “Well, don’t you bloody well think it’s time that you went?”

  “I’m worried about Mammy,” he said. “She’s gotten a bit funny, strange.”

  “In what way?” I sighed, trying to be interested.

  “Forgetting things.”

  “Maybe she has Alzheimer’s.”

  “Oh, you have to make a joke about everything, don’t you, Lucy?”

  “I wasn’t joking, Peter. Maybe she does have Alzheimer’s. What kind of things has she started forgetting?”

  “Well, you know the way I hate mushrooms?”

  “Um, do you?”

  “Yes! You know I do. Everyone knows I do!”

  “All right, all right, calm down.”

  “Well, when I was out there the other night she gave me mushrooms on toast for dinner.”

  “And…?”

  “What do you mean ‘and?’ Isn’t that enough! And I said it to her. I said, ‘Mammy, I hate mushrooms’ and she just said, ‘Oh, I must be mixing you up with Christopher.’”

  “That’s shocking, Pete,” I said dryly. “We’ll be lucky if she lives to see the end of the month.”

  “Jeer all you like,” he said, sounding hurt. “But there’s more.”

  “Do tell.”

  “She’s done something funny to her hair.”

  “Anything would be an improvement.”

  “No, Lucy, it’s funny. It’s all kind of curly and blond, she doesn’t look like Mammy anymore.”

  “Ah! Now it all makes sense,” I said solemnly. “There’s no need to worry, Peter, I know exactly what’s up.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  “She’s got a boyfriend, silly.”

  Poor Peter got very upset. He thought that our mother was like The Blessed Virgin, only more chaste and saintly. But at least I got rid of him and hopefully he wouldn’t bother me with any more ridiculous phone calls. God knows, I had enough real things to worry about.

  Chapter 44

  Megan and her housemates were having a party that Saturday night.

  She shared a three-bedroom house with twenty-eight other Australians, all of whom did shift work, so there were actually enough beds to sleep whoever needed to sleep at any given time. It just meant that the beds were used on a time-share basis, around the clock, twenty-four hours a day.

  Apparently Megan shared a single bed with a roofer called Donnie and a night porter called Shane, neither of whom she ever saw. In fact, she liked to make it sound as if they had never actually met.

  She promised me that there would be thousands of single men at the party. (On Thursday, I had sheepishly come clean to my colleagues about Gus’s disappearance.)

  I was miserable on Saturday. Without Gus, and Mrs. Nolan’s promise of imminent marriage, my life was so, so, nothingy. There were no added extras, no human accessories, no soft-focus future, no soaring magic, nothing at all to enhance me. I, on my own, was colourless, dull, earthbound, unadorned. I had become the Amish frock of personalities and even I had lost interest in myself.

  I didn’t want to go to the party because I was too busy feeling sorry for myself, but I had to, because I’d arranged to meet Jed there. I couldn’t stand him up because he wouldn’t know anyone else. Meredia had other plans.

  Of course, Megan would be there, but she was the hostess, and she’d be too busy breaking up fights and having beer guzzling competitions to look after Jed.

  Jed and I met at the tube station at Earls Court, or Little Sydney, as it should have been called.

  Now, going for drinks with work people after work is one thing, but I always drew the line at having them spill over into my weekend.

  But Jed was different—he was wonderful, exceptional. By the end of his first week he’d already coined the name “Mr. Semens” for Mr. Simmonds, been late once, called a friend long distance in Madrid twice and could fit a whole chocolate cookie into his mouth at once. He was much more fun than Hetty had ever been. I think Ivor had already begun to feel as let down and betrayed by Jed as he had once been by Hetty.

  As Megan had promised, the party was packed with men—huge, drunk, boisterous men. It was like being in a forest. Jed and I got separated when we arrived and I didn’t see him again for the rest of the night. He was just too short to find.

  The giants were called things like Kevin O’Leary and Kevin McAllister and shouted drunkenly at one another about the time they’d gotten drunk and gone white-water rafting in the Zambia. Or when they’d gotten drunk and gone sky-diving in Jo’burg. Or when they’d gotten drunk and gone bungee jumping off some Aztec ruins in Mexico City.

  They were very foreign to me, a different breed of man from what I was used to. They were too big, too sun-bleached, too enthusiastic.

  And worst of all they all wore strange jeans—they were made of blue denim, but the resemblance ended there. (They’re jeans, Jim, but not as we know them.) There were no recognizable brand names and I think Jed was the only man in the house who had a button-fly, all the others had zippers. One guy had a parrot embroidered onto his back pocket, another one had a seam sewn down the centre of his legs, a kind of built-in crease. Another one had pockets all down the side of his legs and yet another one had jeans that were made up entirely of little squares of denim. It was horrible. There were even a couple of stone-washed pairs. These guys didn’t seem to care.

  I had thought that I didn’t mind how a man dressed, but I realized that night that I did care a lot. I liked a man to look like he hadn’t given a thought to how he dressed but it had to be a very specific type of not having given it a thought.

  All of them tried to get me into bed—some of them tried twice and three times—using the same lines.

  “Do you sleep on your stomach?”

  “No.”

  “Well, do you mind if I do?”

  After I had been thus approached for about the fifth time, I said, “Kevin, ask me how I like my eggs in the morning.”

  “Lucy, how do you like your eggs in the morning?”

  “Unfertilized!” I shouted. “Now fuck off!”

  They were impossible to offend.

  “Okay,” they shrugged. “No hard feelings.” They just moved on to the next woman who strayed into their line of vision, propositioning her in the same charming way.

  By about one-thirty I had drunk four million cans of beer and I was stone cold sober. I hadn’t seen one attractive man and I knew that things wouldn’t get any better. If I stayed any longer I’d be throwing good time after bad. I decided to quit while I wasn’t ahead.

  No one noticed me leave.

  I stood alone on the road, trying to flag down a taxi, and wondered in despair—was that it? Was that all I could expect from life? Was that the best I could expect from being a single woman in London?

  Another Saturday night over and nothing to show for it.

  My apartment was silent when I got in. I felt so depressed that I vaguely contemplated suicide, but couldn’t muster the enthusiasm for it. Maybe in the morning, I promised myself, maybe I’ll feel more energetic when I’m not so depressed.

  You rotten bastard, Gus, was
my last thought before I went to sleep. This is all your fault.

  Chapter 45

  A couple of weeks had passed and Gus still hadn’t phoned me.

  Every morning I thought I had come to terms with it and every evening when I went to bed I realized that I had been holding my breath all day, hoping, almost expecting, to hear from him.

  I discovered that I had become an embarrassment.

  By allowing myself to be dropped by Gus I had upset the delicate tripartite balance that had existed between my roommates and me. When the three of us had had boyfriends, things had been fine. If one couple wanted to have the living room to themselves—for whatever reason—all the other couples had to do was go to their respective bedrooms and make their own entertainment.

  But now that I was on my own, the couple who wanted the living room would feel guilty about banishing me to the sensory deprivation of my bedroom and then they’d feel annoyed with me, because annoyance is much more pleasant than guilt. Being dropped by Gus was regarded as being my own fault, a result of careless, slipshod behaviour.

  Charlotte decided that it was time for me to get a new boyfriend. She had a childish desire to help and a not-so-childish desire to get me out of the house once in a while so that she and Simon could play doctors and nurses, or whatever it was they got up to.

  “You really should forget about Gus and try and meet someone else,” she said, encouragingly, one evening when just the two of us were in.

  “Give it time,” I said. Surely she was supposed to say that to me and not the other way around, I thought in confusion.

  “But you’ll never meet anyone if you never go out,” she said.

  And, of course, she would never get to have sex with Simon on the hall floor, either, if I never went out. But she was nice enough not to say it quite so directly.

  “But I do go out,” I said. “I went to a party on Saturday night.”

  “We could put an ad in the paper for you,” suggested Charlotte.

  “What kind of an ad?”

  “An ad in the personal columns.”

  “No!” I was horrified at the suggestion. “I may be in a bad way, all right, I am in a bad way, but I hope I’ll never sink that low.”

  “No, Lucy,” protested Charlotte, “you’ve got it all wrong. Lots of people do it.”

  “You must be out of your mind,” I said firmly. “I am not about to enter that twilight world of singles bars, singles laundromats, men who say on the phone that they look like Keanu Reeves and then when they turn up they’re more like Van Morrison without the dress sense, men who say they want an equal loving partnership when they are really serial killers who want to bludgeon you to death. No way. Absolutely not.”

  Charlotte found that hilarious.

  “You’ve got it all wrong,” she wheezed, wiping her eyes. “It’s not like that anymore. It used to be sleazy…”

  “Would you do it?” I asked, cutting to the heart of the matter.

  “Well, it’s hard to say,” she stuttered. “I mean, I have a boyfriend…”

  “Anyway, it’s not just the sleaze that I object to,” I interjected angrily, “it’s being tarred with the ‘Sad and Lonely’ brush that upsets me. Don’t you understand Charlotte—my hope will die with my few remaining ounces of self-esteem.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Charlotte, sitting up straight on the couch and reaching for the nearest pen and a piece of paper, which turned out to be the Chinese takeout menu.

  “Come on,” she said happily. “Let’s make up a lovely description of you and lots of great guys will answer and you’ll have a great time!”

  “No!”

  “Yes,” she said nicely, but firmly. “Now let’s see, how

  will we describe you?…Hmmm, how about ‘short’?…no, maybe not ‘short.’”

  “Definitely not ‘short’,” I found myself agreeing. “That makes me sound like a dwarf.”

  “You’re not allowed to saw ‘dwarf’ anymore.”

  “Vertically challenged, then.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A dwarf.”

  “Why didn’t you just say that?”

  “Bu…”

  “Okay, how about ‘petite’?”

  “No, I hate ‘petite.’ It sounds so…so…girly and pathetic. Like I can’t change a lightbulb without breaking a fingernail.”

  “Fair enough. Maybe I’ll ask Simon to write an ad for you—after all he’s in advertising.”

  “But, Charlotte, he’s a graphic designer.”

  She looked blankly at me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that he does the, er, drawings, for the ads. Not the writing.”

  “So that’s what a graphic designer does,” she said, as if she’d just found out the earth was round.

  Sometimes Charlotte really scared me. I wouldn’t have liked to live in her head, it must have been a dark, lonely, frightening place. You could walk for miles and miles without meeting a single intelligent thought.

  “Please forget it,” I pleaded.

  “Well, why don’t we just run through the ones here in Time Out and see if there’s anyone nice for you.”

  “No!” I said in despair.

  “Oh listen, here’s a good one,” squeaked Charlotte. “Tall, muscular, hirsute, oh…oh dear…”

  “Yuk,” I squirmed. “That’s not my type at all.”

  “Just as well,” said Charlotte, a bit deflated looking. “She’s a lesbian. Such a pity. I was starting to like the sound of her myself. Oh well.”

  Charlotte continued reading. Every now and then she’d make an enquiry of me.

  “What does it mean when they say they’ve got a s-o-h?”

  “That they’ve got a sense of humour?”

  “So what’s g-s-o-h then?”

  “Good sense of humour, I suppose.”

  “Oh, that’s nice.”

  “No, it’s not, Charlotte,” I said annoyed. “It just means that they think they’re hilarious and they laugh at their own jokes.”

  “What does w-slash-e mean?”

  “Well endowed.”

  “No!”

  “Yes.”

  “Gosh! That sounds really sort of show-offy, doesn’t it? That would put you off, wouldn’t it?”

  “It depends. It would certainly put me off. But maybe not everyone.”

  “You wouldn’t be interested in weekday afternoon romps in Hampstead with a married couple?”

  “Charlotte!” I said outraged. “How could you make such a suggestion? You know I can’t get the time off work,” I added grumpily, and the pair of us cackled a bit at that.

  “How about ‘caring, affectionate man with so much love in his heart to give to the right girl’?”

  “No way! He sounds like a total loser. A male version of me.”

  “Yes, he does sound a bit wet,” agreed Charlotte.

  “Well, how about ‘virile, demanding hunk seeks classy, athletic, supple woman for adventures’?”

  “Supple?” I shrieked. “Athletic? Adventures? How vile and awful. Could he be a bit more overt about what he wants from a relationship? Jesus!”

  I was getting upset. It was terribly depressing. Sordid and sad. For as long as I lived, I would never go out with a man that I’d met through the personal ads.

  “You look lovely,” said Charlotte, adjusting my collar.

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better?” I asked bitterly.

  “I bet you’ll have a great time,” she said, tentatively.

  “I know for a fact I’ll have a horrible time.”

  “Think positive.”

  “Think positive indeed! Why the hell don’t you go?”

  “I don’t need to go. I already have a boyfriend.”

  “Rub it in, why don’t you?”

  “But he might be nice,” suggested Charlotte.

  “He won’t be nice.”

  “No, really, he might.”

  “I can’t beli
eve you’re doing this to me, Charlotte,” I said, still stunned.

  I really couldn’t believe it—Charlotte had betrayed me. She’d set me up with some man she had found in the personal ads. Without even consulting me, she had arranged a date for me and some American man. And of course when I found out, I was outraged.

  Although my reaction wasn’t as extreme as Karen’s. When she heard about “my blind date”—as Charlotte insisted on calling it—she laughed until she cried. She managed to stop laughing just long enough to call Daniel to tell him all about it, and then she convulsed for another twenty minutes.

  “Christ, you really are desperate,” she said as she hung up the phone and wiped tears from her cheeks.

  “It has nothing to do with me,” I protested angrily. “And I’m not going.”

  “But you have to go,” said Charlotte. “It wouldn’t be fair to him.”

  “You’re out of your crazy little mind,” I said.

  She stared at me, her big blue eyes filling with tears.

  “Sorry, Charlotte,” I said awkwardly. “You’re not crazy.”

  Simon had called her crazy a few days before and her boss called her crazy quite a bit, so she was a bit sensitive about craziness allegations.

  “But, Charlotte, really,” I blustered, trying to be strong, “I’m not going out with him. I don’t care how nice or normal he sounds.”

  “I was only trying to help,” she sniffed, tears trickling out of the corners of her eyes. “I thought it would be nice for you to meet a sweet man.”

  “I know,” I stretched up and guiltily put my arm around her. “I know, Charlotte.”

  “Don’t be mad at me, please, Lucy,” she sobbed.

  “I’m not mad,” I said, hugging her. “Oh, Charlotte, please don’t cry.”

  I hated to see anyone cry—with the possible exception of my mother—but I promised myself, no matter what happened, no matter how much she cried, I was not giving in to Charlotte, I was not going to meet this man Chuck.

  I gave in to Charlotte and agreed to meet Chuck. I’m not really sure how or why, but I agreed. Although I retained a small remnant of self-esteem by complaining bitterly about it.