Addition (8 page)
At the grocery store I take a green basket and fill it with all the toothbrushes of my brand and type that they have. 14. The colours don’t matter but they must be medium, not soft or hard, otherwise the number of bristles might not be the same.
He’s wearing calico pants and a chambray shirt. His hair is dry this time. He’s buying a half a roast chicken, mutilated by the girl with the kitchen shears, and some exhausted vegetables. His shirt is tucked into his pants and I can see the tail of it bunched up near his bottom.
It’s when I’m walking to the checkout that I see him.
I can only see his back but it’s him.
It’s like I can smell him.
He can’t smell me.
I need to be still. Maybe if he turns around, he won’t see me.
He turns around.
He sees me.
I sleep in a single bed because I have a horror of the vast expanse of doubles. Before my sister’s wedding we stayed, each bridesmaid in her own room, in a five-star hotel in the city filled with gamblers and couples. The bed was a king-size, designed for those enormous American kings, and I lay still all through that long night because each movement of my legs broke new cold ground. I never knew for certain where the edge was.
In my own single bed, I know. I know its width and length in hand spans and kicks and there is no spot so far from my body that it cannot feel the heat of my blood. A double bed is a dare, a question. A single bed is complete with just me in it. A double bed is a vacant promise. A threatening Miss Havisham. The thought of having one in my house makes my lower back ache. I wouldn’t know how to lie in it.
That’s how I feel right now. I thought I knew this supermarket. I certainly know its dimensions in steps. The width of its aisles. But now that he’s looking at me I’m adrift. I can’t think of a rule to follow. His presence distorts the walls. They’ve moved now. The air has ripples through it.
We’re standing 5 paces apart. Or would be if the world was still the same.
‘Dinner,’ he says, gesturing to his basket.
‘Oh,’ I say.
‘I’m absolutely starving.’
There’s no emotion on his face. No anger. No surprise.
He continues. ‘I usually eat earlier than this.’
‘I see.’
‘But tonight I’ve been flat out. I’ve got a new hobby. Memorising menus.’
‘Look, Seamus…’ It’s too hard to tell him I’ve had more important things to worry about.
‘It was a good one, too. Risotto pescatora, spaghetti marinara, spaghetti della nonna. That’s chicken meatballs. Even fettuccine calabrese, with extra chilli, the way I like it. One day I’ll have to eat there.’
The rest of the supermarket has faded away. He’s taking up all the space. ‘Look, Seamus, something came up.’
His face turns pink. Amazing that can happen so fast. ‘You could have told me if you didn’t want to come. You could have called. Or sent me a text.’
It’s true. I could have called him or sent a text. But that would have meant opening the napkin and reading his numbers, and punching them into the phone. And then his numbers would have stuck in my memory; become a part of me so that years from now I might still remember the 10 numbers of Seamus.
‘It was nothing like that. I didn’t feel well. Really suddenly.’
He blinks and his lips purse into a half smile, yet he doesn’t avoid my eyes. His voice is soft. He nods. ‘It’s okay. You don’t have to say that. Life is a series of maybes and what-ifs.’
The lights in the supermarket are too bright. Everything around me is hard surfaces, shiny floor, beaming glass. He is not hard or shiny or beaming. He’s soft and frowning. And he’s right. Life
is
a series of maybes and what-ifs. Suddenly I wish I had met him at the restaurant. I wish I’d had risotto pescatora and a glass of red wine and shared a tiramisu and sat and talked with Seamus Joseph O’Reilly until they packed up the chairs around us. Suddenly it seems rather an important thing to have missed.
‘I’m so…’ ‘God. You really do live in a house filled with supermodels.’
He’s looking down my basket. I swing it behind my back. ‘Not really. Really I’m an amateur toothbrush designer. These are for research.’
He smiles, this time with his eyes. The skin around his temple relaxes. ‘So you’re either a supermodel, some kind of apocalyptic bulk shopper or a frustrated oral health stylist.’
‘Or all of the above. Or perhaps my hobby is collecting personal care products. Star Wars dolls, Princess Diana plates…they bore me. These babies’ll be worth a fortune in a few years.’
I realise I’ve said this to make him smile.
Somehow the stillness that is in the store is now inside me as well. Stillness races through my veins instead of blood. My body feels light; my hands, my face.
‘I’ll give it another try if you will.’ It’s only when I hear this that I realise it’s my voice speaking. It’s only when I see his face that I realise I mean it. I gesture to his basket. ‘I haven’t eaten.’
Chicken and vegetables. For a change.
He is quiet for a long time. ‘Let’s aim a bit lower. Is your car outside?’
I shake my head. ‘I walked.’
‘What if I walk you home? If you’d like.’ He pauses for a moment and bites his lower lip with his front tooth. The left one.
It leaves a dent.
‘I’d like.’
He looks politely at the chewing gum and chocolate bars as I go through the checkout with 14 toothbrushes. He pays for his half chicken and vegetables. We go outside. It’s quiet except for a boy collecting shopping trolleys; coasting on them, squeaking, from under the streetlight where they’d been deserted. Seamus reaches across me to take my plastic bag of toothbrushes. A well-brought-up boy. Chivalrous. His fingers take the two white plastic straps from mine. His fingers are not mine. Are different from mine, so different I’m amazed that he also has ten. I notice the size of his hands. Their colour. The tiny pale hairs on the back of his fingers.
We reach the corner before I realise I’ve forgotten to count the steps.
The mathematician and engineer Charles Babbage, inventor of the first computer, got it. When he read Tennyson’s poem, ‘The vision of sin’, he was most upset.
He was so upset he sent Tennyson a letter. It went:
‘Every minute dies a man, Every minute one is born’; I need hardly
point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total
of the world’s population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is
a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase.
I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition
of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should
be corrected as follows: ‘Every moment dies a man, And one and a
sixteenth is born.’ I may add that the exact figures are 1.167, but
something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre.
I know this letter by heart, and as I leave the supermarket next to Seamus I think each syllable with my footfall but I don’t count. All the way home I don’t count. The street is empty and it’s been raining. The water makes the tram tracks shine in the street lamps and we don’t speak. A car goes past. And another. We don’t speak. A third splashes some water on to my feet. He stops, takes my arm and manoeuvres me so I am no longer walking on the street side. He puts me on the inside.
Charles Babbage definitely got it. Most people don’t. They don’t understand that numbers rule, not just the world in a macro way but their world, their own world. Their lives. They know that E=MC
2
because they heard it in school or it was the answer to a quiz show question. They don’t really understand what it means: that matter and energy are the same thing. That their skinny latte and iPod and nipple ring are all energy; little packets of energy constrained very close together. That everything and everybody are connected by a mathematical formula.
Would Seamus get it if I told him?
At the lights he pushes the walk button. This is the only time it’s awkward, right now, waiting for the lights to change.
‘Have you lived here long?’ He turns towards me as he speaks.
‘Forever. Prahran or Brunswick would be groovier, I know, but I like the spaces. I like the spaces between the people better than the people themselves.’ The green man appears. The beeps begin. I sound like an idiot.
He frowns. ‘Space. Everyone needs space.’
As we walk I realise our pace is almost identical although he is taller. He is slowing his gait to match mine. I take a deep breath. ‘Sometimes I feel my thoughts can’t properly develop if they run into another person as soon as they’re born. They need room to work out exactly what shape to take.’
We’ve been walking for at least ten or eleven minutes and he’s said almost nothing. Walking these streets together, it feels like we’re in church. I fight the urge to whisper. There’s no wind. I hear nothing but cars in High Street, shushing through puddles, and the sound of our steps. We’re so quiet we surprise a possum on a light pole. We keep walking. You mind your business, we’ll mind ours.
We walk down the side street now and we’ve reached the spot where I need to make a decision. I need to lean across him and take my bag of toothbrushes back, if that’s what I’m going to do. I can do it easily; I can say, ‘Thanks, officer. I can take it from here’ or ‘I don’t want to take you out of your way’ or ‘Did I mention I have a communicable disease?’
But I don’t. Instead, at the corner I stop and say, ‘So are you planning to polish off an entire half chicken by yourself ?’
He lifts the hand with the bags in it. ‘This miserable runt? I think it’s a tall quail. And three petrified potatoes and a bit of soggy pumpkin. This isn’t exactly what I had in mind when I invited you to dinner.’
I lean back against the lamp post and cross my arms. ‘Luckily we supermodels don’t eat much.’
He smiles into my eyes, and bows. ‘In that case, my quail is your quail.’
As we walk up the path, I think of Nikola and Westinghouse. How different they were. How perfect for each other. Westinghouse bought forty patents, including the induction motor he desperately needed, from Nikola for a complicated blend of cash, royalties and shares. Nikola left New York and moved to Pittsburgh to help Westinghouse overcome any difficulties in the manufacture of the motor. No regrets. No fear.
At the top of the stairs I fumble for my keys in the pocket of my track pants. We go inside. My last proper visitor was in October of the year before last when Larry slept over, on the couch. Jill and Harry had gone for a skiing weekend. I’d like to think they had in fact gone to a mad three-day key party in a lodge with a spa, six cans of whipped cream, one midget and one latex batman suit but, knowing them, it probably was a skiing weekend. Having Larry here felt right—we watched the late movie until past her bedtime, had ice-cream for dinner and made nuisance calls to a boy she liked at school. Having Seamus here is different.
‘This is it,’ I say. ‘My lair. It’s here I hatch my plans for world domination. I’m saving for a white Persian and a monocle.’
‘Nice. No supermodels or bomb shelters, I notice.’ He puts the chicken, vegetables and my toothbrushes on the kitchen bench. He opens the bag and rifles through them. ‘So, Grace. Are you going to tell me why you’ve bought so many toothbrushes?’
I pretend to think for a moment and fold my arms. ‘Ah…No.’
He shrugs. ‘Fair enough.’
His hands are in his pockets and he leans his left hip against the bench. My flat is made for me, measured for me, for the length of my tibia and fibula and ulna and spine. His bones are longer than mine and if I lined my limbs and back and fingers up against his I would find a difference in length and also in thickness. The room is out of proportion now, like long hair on a baby or a mansion surrounded by one metre of lawn and a high fence. He takes up all the room.
There’s no space now for my thoughts to develop and they fall stillborn on to my dark green carpet. Now, I do understand E=MC2. I understand that the little packets of energy that are my thoughts have become matter. A solid body. Flesh.
Sometime the next day or the one after that, I kiss him. Or maybe it is two minutes after we walk in the door. I am still standing in my kitchen and he is still leaning on my kitchen bench, hands in pockets. I move my body across until it is close to his. My kiss, this first one, is more a pressing, lips closed and soft. For one instant he is still. For one instant I think that there is nothing I can say to erase such a foolish act. Then he moves towards me. He trails his closed mouth across my top lip so I can feel the tiny prickles. His mouth brushes along the line of my jaw and scoops up the side of my face. Along my eyebrow. My left eyebrow. He licks my eyes closed. His tongue is pointed.
His hands come out of his pockets and cup my face while he kisses my mouth. Inside his mouth seems too soft for a man, so soft that I wonder how he chews, how he bites the ends of pens without lacerating it. His mouth is warm. He knows how to kiss.
This skin near my hip is cold against his hand. His hair is soft, threaded through my fingers. He pulls up my sweat shirt, and my T-shirt under that, and his fingers are so much darker than my skin that I seem brand new. He does not seem afraid of my body. He does not scan my moles to see if the edges bleed into the skin around them, and his fingers smooth my flesh but do not check for lumps that should not be there, waiting under the surface.
He can’t want me.
I should have worn a bra. I should have worn a red lace bra, something French or designed by a singer. But I don’t own anything like that. I should have thought this out a bit more carefully and waxed or at least shaved my underarms. Is my deodorant still working from this morning? His left hand has found my right breast; it is cold and quite rough for someone with a desk job. He pauses for a moment. He exhales; perhaps he is also disappointed that I’m not wearing a red lace bra. Or perhaps I look panicked, like a woman who’s only had five lovers in her entire life and none at all for 3 years come April 6. He frowns and swallows and tilts his head so that our foreheads touch.