Fifty Is Not a Four-Letter Word (31 page)

Since I am physically weak, it surprises me that I feel so, well, robust, psychologically sturdier than I’ve been all year.
Perky, almost. No hovering black cloud, no mouse gnawing at my solar plexus. Instead of regarding this latest drama as yet
another blow to my dented psyche, I’ve been jolted awake to the possibilities of living. Maybe a near-death experience was
what I needed to shake me out of my anxious self-absorption. My selfish poor-me funk.

With Mike and Stanko in the house, it’s been like one long party. I’m not sure exactly what we’re celebrating, but the atmosphere
at home has completely changed. Over the past few months, every time I’ve opened the front door, I’ve felt oppressed by the
weight of air surrounding me. I would wander from room to room, wondering if this steadfast Victorian house that I once loved
so much was somehow to blame for my ever darkening mood. It’s as though Mike and Stanko have drawn back the curtains, opened
all the windows, and let the fresh air and sunshine stream in, when in fact it’s cold and bleak outside and the windows remain
resolutely shut. Olly is all smiles, and even his footsteps on the stairs seem lighter; it may be my imagination, but the
music coming from his room seems more melodious, less thumping and aggressive than before.

I lie on the sofa in the conservatory, surrounded by newspapers and magazines, and while Mike’s at work, Stanko tends to me
and Susanna. He’s feeding me back to health, and as he chops and whisks and sautés, he sings hilarious approximations of songs
with English lyrics he doesn’t fully understand and can’t pronounce properly. I am astonished by the kindness of this man
I barely know, nursing and nurturing me in this way, so careful to cook only things he thinks I will be able to digest easily—such
as simple rice dishes, steamed fish, mashed potatoes, scrambled eggs. At first I could only peck at what he served, but now
I’m tucking in with increasing enthusiasm each passing day. There are guests for supper almost every night. I help with a
little bit of chopping or laying the table and leave the rest to Stanko. We eat at the table in the conservatory, so I join
in for as long as I have the energy, then retire to the sofa in the corner and listen to the conversation in the background
while I rest.

One night Olly’s mates James and Ravi came round, bearing a bouquet of white roses. They were exaggeratedly polite in my presence,
asking about my health and answering my questions about their exams and their plans with deliberate solicitude. After a beer
or two, they started to be more themselves. I love having these smart young men in my home, so ready and eager to conquer
the world. They talked animatedly about their gap years and where and when the three of them might meet up. I’m touched by
their bravado and carapace of cool, the way in which their manufactured facades seem to help them deal with the uncertainties
of striking out into the world for the first time. Olly will be traveling solo, for the most part. He’s got some work lined
up, teaching English at a school in southern India as well as a three-month research stint for the Murray-Darling Commission
in Australia, an organization that plans water and land resources for the vast area it serves.

Olly’s imminent departure is the most difficult thing to bear. Vanessa, practicing her psychotherapeutic skills, has suggested
I might view Olly’s going off as a kind of liberation, a release from eighteen long years of responsibility. “You’ll be free.
Free to do exactly as you please.”

“But I don’t want to be free. I want to wake up knowing that Olly’s dirty washing needs to be loaded into the machine and
that the biscuit tin needs refilling. I’ll even miss the mushroom-sprouting half-empty mugs and furry plates in his tip of
a bedroom.”

Olly. Olly. Olly. My true love. All through Olly’s childhood, I would hug him and say, “I love you so much I can hardly breathe.”
And he’d reply, “I love
you
so much I can hardly breathe.” Then we’d both play this silly game, panting like puppies, to show how loving each other had
interfered with our regular breathing.

“You’re going to have to let go,” says Vanessa bossily.

“Come
on
! I know I have to let go. And it’s not exactly the case that I’ve tried to hold him back. I’ve encouraged this whole gap-year
thing all along. I’m immensely proud of him for taking this first big step toward independence. Any parent would be. But for
me, it feels like a loss rather than a liberation. Honestly, it’s worse than Jack going. I shouldn’t say it, but it’s true.
I’ll get used to it, of course, but this is not something I’m going to deny.”

“Not denying is good.” Vanessa smiles.

“Beware of therapists spouting psychobabble.” I smile back.

It’s hard to believe how much I loathed Vanessa and how much I like her now. I just try not to think too much about her and
Olly alone together.

“You’re going to miss him, too, aren’t you?” I ask.

“That’s for sure.” There’s a slight catch in Vanessa’s voice, and I can see she’s trying to hold herself together. “But this
was only ever an interlude. I like to think of Olly as my Elastoplast Man. The one who’s helped to heal me while I was getting
over that bastard Derek. Olly and I will always be friends, no matter how many girls he has on his travels. And he’ll never
forget the tricks that his very first Mrs. Robinson taught him.” She actually winks at me. I wince. Vanessa notices and laughs.

“Too much information,” I say. “But if he’s helped put Derek six feet under, I’m glad for you.”

I’ve learned from Vanessa that the bastard who is Derek walked out on her when she was eight months pregnant with Poppy, her
second child. Maintenance payments go into her bank account once a month, but Derek lives in Spain now with his new wife and
a new baby. He sends the kids birthday cards with cash inside but never visits because he told Vanessa it would be “too painful.”
Vanessa didn’t get an answer when she asked, “Too painful for you or too painful for them?”

“I’d like to tell him where to shove his money,” she told me, “and the minute I’m financially on my feet, that’s exactly what
I’ll do. In the meantime, I’m prepared to act grateful.”

Vanessa pops by with the kids every day after school. While Damien and Poppy spend half an hour rolling around on the floor
with Susanna, Vanessa updates me on what she’s learned in her psychotherapy course.

• • •

Living with Mike and Stanko has reminded me of what a good relationship is all about. Mike is most certainly in love, and
I believe it’s reciprocated, even if up until now, before I was able to observe them at close range, I couldn’t quite get
out of my head that Stanko, who came to the UK two years ago, penniless and not knowing a soul, might be after Mike only for
his money. At forty-five, Mike’s a good decade older than Stanko. They met in a Soho coffee bar frequented by gays, where
Stanko, who had been a chef in Sarajevo, was sweeping the floor around Mike’s table. It was love at first sight of Stanko’s
biceps, Mike told me, as Stanko swished his broom back and forth over the crumbs under Mike’s feet. Physically, the two are
David and Goliath. Mike is small—not over five feet eight—and wiry, with close-cropped silver hair, a thin face, and a prominent
Semitic nose that looks all the larger against his bony cheeks. His eyes are as quick as his tongue, darting everywhere, missing
nothing. Stanko is over six feet two, with a Calvin Klein underwear-ad body, high Slavic cheekbones, and green eyes. And yet
it’s Mike’s presence that commands attention. Once you’ve sighed over Stanko’s beauty, you are drawn to Mike’s fizzing energy.
You wouldn’t think twice about the physical disparity if Mike and Stanko were a heterosexual couple, but as same-sex lovers,
they look almost touchingly incongruous. “Meet Stanko. She stoops to conquer,” said Mike when he first introduced me as I
gazed up into Stanko’s uncomprehending eyes.

Thanks to his job as a commodities trader in the city, Mike is flush with money, and he’s thinking of backing Stanko in business,
starting with a small café, but one serving proper food, and seeing how it goes from there. Stanko’s lottery numbers have
come up, I once thought cynically, but now I’m beginning to believe that perhaps the real winner is Mike.

Stanko talks with a great deal of passion for his beloved Sarajevo, the cosmopolitan city he grew up in as the child of a
peace-loving family with a Muslim father and a Serb mother, but when people ask him about the war, he pulls down the shutters
as fast as a bank teller due for his lunch break. Mike’s the only one who knows the full story, but out of loyalty to Stanko,
he says nothing. The only information Stanko has given me is that he was working as a chef at the Sarajevo Holiday Inn in
early April 1992 when the unarmed protest against the barricades set up around the city by followers of Radovan Karadˇzi´c
was met with gunfire from the top floor of the hotel. This is the incident that sparked the four-year siege of Sarajevo and
about which Stanko refuses to talk.

“Trust me,” said Mike once, “Stanko is a brave and good man. He has really suffered, as you can imagine, coming from a Muslim-Serb
family. His father died before the siege, his mother as a result of it. If landing me means he’s landed on his feet, he deserves
it.”

“He’s gorgeous and a great cook to boot,” I added, “so it looks as though you’ve landed on your feet as well. Would you marry
him if you could?” I asked lightly.

“I
will
marry him when the laws are finally changed. That’s if he’ll have me.”

“And can I be best woman?”

“Consider it confirmed.”

The more I see the two of them together, the more my concerns about Stanko dissipate. They are both so thoughtful around each
another. When Mike comes in stressed and exhausted, Stanko is ready with a drink. Not a meal has been served that Mike hasn’t
praised Stanko fulsomely for, asking him about the provenance of particular flavors, treating each meal Stanko prepares as
a gift rather than a right. When Mike talks about his work, Stanko really listens and asks the kind of questions that demonstrate
a genuine interest in Mike’s alien world, in which millions of pounds change hands at the press of a computer key. On weekends
they go to the gym together or shopping in Borough Market and out looking for potential sites for the café. Stanko struggles
to read the novels Mike enjoys so they can discuss them together. And I can guess about the sex, because creaky bed springs
and satisfied, half-muffled grunts give the game away. I’m happy for Mike, I really am, but sometimes when I watch the two
of them together, being so intimate and loving under my own roof, I start to ache so much I have to turn away.

I’ve come up with an interim career for Stanko—I wish I could do the same for me—and he’s been spending the time when he’s
not running around me working on his marketing plan. Stanko is just brilliant with Susanna and adores all dogs, even Maddy’s
little monster, so I’ve suggested he start a dog-walking business. Stanko and Mike think I’m a genius for suggesting it, and
Mike’s offered to buy him a secondhand van to transport the dogs to the Heath. Stanko has designed the leaflets on my computer,
printed them out, and started to distribute them all around the area.

What’s missing in this bustling household is Jack. Even when it’s filled with people, the house has a hole where Jack should
be. He’s nowhere and yet everywhere, too—in his favorite books on the shelves, in the few clothes that still line his cupboards
and drawers, in the way the wineglasses are stored rim up when I prefer to store them rim down. Oddly, since his departure,
I’ve been putting the glasses back on the shelf in the way that he prefers. All those petty disagreements. And for what? Twenty
years of sex and love and family life reduced to a domestic power struggle over which way to store a glass. Why is it so hard
to articulate what we really mean? And now that he’s gone, I have no trouble doing what he wants. It wouldn’t exactly have
amounted to a surrender if I’d done this before.

His scruffy old robe still hangs on the hook behind the bathroom door. I insert my hands deep into the pockets and press myself
against it. What once was the softest Egyptian cotton has gone crisp and bristly, the result of hundreds of washing cycles.
I make a mental note to buy him a new robe if he decides to come home. My hand curls around a crumpled piece of paper. I take
it out and open it. It’s the washed-out remains of what looks like a telephone number, and I replace it without interest in
the pocket. Yes, Jack is all around and yet quite invisible.

So now I share my house with two gay lovers and a teenage boy while I recuperate from life-threatening surgery. Not at all
how I expected my year of turning fifty to pan out. Tonight Jack’s coming for dinner; Olly’s working, Stanko and Mike are
going out to a movie. In his role as domestic Adonis, Stanko has laid the table, lit candles, and prepared some of Jack’s
favorite traditional English dishes, as briefed by me. A dinner of ham and pea soup, followed by Irish stew and bread-and-butter
pudding. Enough calories and cholesterol in a single meal to bring on a heart attack. All I have to do is warm everything
up and serve.

“Stanko, this really is beyond the call of duty,” I tell him.

“No problem. I like practice English dishes for when I have restaurant.”

“Mmm, but if the way to a man’s heart truly is via his stomach, I’m a tad concerned that Jack might fall in love with
you
.”

Stanko smiles uncertainly, not sure if I’ve made a joke. “Jack no love me. Jack love with you, I sure.”

Mike and Stanko are moving out at the weekend. I so wish they’d stay longer, but I can just about make it to the shops on
my own now, and I don’t need nursing. They go on Saturday, and the following Thursday, Olly will be off. Then it will be only
me and Susanna.

Although Jack has popped in lots of times since I’ve been home, there have always been other people in the house. This is
going to be the first chance I’ve had to talk to him since Nick raised his suspicions about Jack and Sally.
Do I/don’t I broach the subject?
I ask myself as I apply the first makeup I’ve bothered to put on since before the operation. My eyes look hollow. On the
plus side, my skin has a kind of translucent quality, and my eyes are bright, the result of my enforced ten-day fast. A detox
my former beauty editor would fully approve of. But I shan’t be trying it again anytime soon.