Gone (6 page)

She wants to ensure all the floorboards are secure before we put the last of the skirting boards down. I keep going with the lining paper, running it down to the floor. We work in inverse proportion to each other, the more corners I cut, the more care she takes in the details. I watch her comb her hair at night, as I have done every night for years. The slow rhythmical brushing, the decisive centre parting that I loved to watch irritates me. We would come to blows if it wasn't for exhaustion. She is still fighting the children in her head. The house is papered now, dressed from head to toe. One evening I come in and she has written poems on the walls in pencil. Sexton, Plath, Ozick, Rich, Bishop, Glück, Levertov. Poems pencilled neatly all over the house. The pencil will burn through the paint and I sit down under the weight of resentment. But she hasn't done it on purpose I suppose. Three coats will cover them, and then slowly, over the winter months, when the new occupants turn on the heating the poems will bleed through and reveal their past. I want to write poems too but can think of none. I caught this morning's morning minion. Dappled dawn. I go up to bed. She is already asleep.

I wake to the smell of paint. She is rolling the walls in the room that was to be her study. Bright yellow. Rolling wet sunshine. She should have done the ceiling first but I say nothing. All advice is accusation now. I go down and start the kitchen ceiling. Contentment settles in our working. I shout up if she wants tea and her yes sounds like the first casual word she has spoken in months. I go out and get fish and chips and we sit on the stairs eating them out of their bags. We talk about how much longer it will take. The papered walls insulate our voices; speech heavier now. I think about telling her how ashamed I am of my fear but don't. Work is the only refuge left in our marriage.

We go to Brefini's and Medbh's house on a Sunday afternoon to talk about books, a dull Dublin version of the Bloomsbury set. About a half dozen of her friends (only later would time teach me the sundering of friends) talk and talk, and the only aspect that appeals to me is the decadence of drinking wine in the middle of the afternoon. I hate the way they tear books apart for the sake of it. Everything for effect. They are like young barristers cutting their teeth. Today they are discussing Cormac McCarthy's latest book. Ursula and I had read it in bed together the night before. Rather, she read it and I occasionally read over her shoulder. We both hated it. Man's struggle with the Universe against an imponderable sunset. She finished the book late into the night. I remember listening to some of the locals coming home drunk. The next day battle ensues over the book. The men are attacking Ursula. I have learned to be careful and not to defend her for two reasons: I do not want it to seem I am defending her because we are a couple who have lost our intellectual identity for the sake of coupledummydom; and she has told me she is more than capable of taking care of herself. Lately, though, she has mentioned that I am too distant and so I decide to defend her. It is turning into the great tedious gender debate—the men liking the book and the women not—and I hope my erudite opinion will turn the argument around.

—Horseshit and sunsets in an America that doesn't exist.

—You haven't even read the book.

Everyone looks at her and then me. I smile my finest roguish smile. It doesn't hide a thing. I go silent and the men all laugh. On the way home I think about other times she has disappointed me, all of them as petty as this one. She asks me why I am silent and I can say nothing with the anger in me. She sighs, resigned to silence.

—You know what Medbh told me men want, Ursula?

—Tell me Stephen, what did Medbh tell you men want?

—Three things: To be fed from time to time, a good blow job, and never to be made look silly in public or talked about behind their backs.

—That's four.

—I didn't give a fuck about the book. I was supporting you.

—You lied. Arguments should be based on facts.

—That's the mistake women make in arguments with men. You think we work on logic. You can't beat men with logic. Men make the illogical sound logical. Get over it. But hey, if you want facts, we'll live on facts.
We will live with facts. Never expect me to defend you again. Never, never expect my trust.
The trailing unspoken ends of sentences. The ones that count.

*   *   *

It wasn't out of spite, the first affair with the Italian. It was more mundane and more pathetic. I still had acne and the need to be alluring when Ursula wouldn't look at me let alone touch me was important. Her name was Isobela and she didn't care I was married and neither did I. Ultimately I was alone. Didn't have the courage then to leave. Name that tune. It was not just a matter of courage; I felt I had to stand by her until we sold the house. I was flattered by the attention of the Italian and excited to meet a woman who had no qualms about being unfaithful to her husband. It was reassuring to have some laughter, some pleasure in life, no matter if it was wrong to betray Ursula. I wanted to live fully, as fully as the characters in the books I had read. I was gaining experience in the world and I knew the affair with Isobela would move me to act.

I met her at the Fellini festival at the Screen Cinema on D'Olier Street. She asked me for fire. I've heard Italians stop someone in the street since and ask for it and it sounds like practiced ignorance to beguile the natives but back then I didn't know a whole lot about anything. I told her she couldn't smoke in the cinema and she just smiled and wiggled her thumb in front of her cigarette as if it was a lighter and I lit it. I stared at the picture but wasn't able to concentrate. I could only be aware of her sitting beside me, smoking. After the picture was over we sat there while everyone else left and I turned and asked her out. We went across to what was then the Regency bar and had a drink. We gesticulated and laughed a lot. She was only three days in the country and had little English. She was reading
Ulysses
in Italian and when I told her it must be a hard book she didn't know what
hard
meant. I tapped the counter. Wood, she asked, raising her eyebrows. The way she raised her eyebrows, the charm of her befuddlement. She was flirting and making it clear she was flirting. She told me about her husband and somehow made it clear it was unimportant. She talked of him as if he was an aged relative. I couldn't talk of Ursula in the same way. I didn't want to talk of her at all. We went back into the pictures and watched another Fellini. The lights went down and she took my hand. My hand was sweating with nerves. After a while she pulled my hand down between her legs but I pulled it back. I couldn't do that, not here. She leaned over and said something to me in Italian and kissed me. Her hand was between my legs. Hard, she whispered, unzipping my trousers. There is nothing to compare to a woman's knowing mouth. I will take the memory of her lips to my grave.

*   *   *

I tried to write a story to make some meaning out of it. A young man fantasises about being with a beautiful woman he sees on the street. He takes the thought home with him and is rudely interrupted by his bawling baby and frazzled wife, Ulrika (I couldn't get away from the U). He doesn't have an affair. Instead he helps his wife to soothe the child. He realises how he has begun to look at his wife as a burden and how quickly they have grown apart. They go to bed. He has a nightmare and wakes up and realises the baby is screaming. In the last sentences of the story he gets out of bed and goes to the child:

I cradled our baby in my arms. “I'm so sorry,” I whispered to her pudgy face. I brought her into the bedroom and sat beside Ulrika. Her face carried hours of exhaustion.

“I love you,” I said.

She reached a hand out to mine and squeezed it. I stared at her, waiting. She said nothing.

“Really, Ulrika. I love you.”

“Yes,” she said.

What literature has lost. I was looking for some kind of understanding and forgiveness in the story I knew I would not find in life, not that I understood why I was writing what I was writing beyond the feeling of being trapped yet scared of freedom. Looking for a truth in fiction to deny the lie in reality, perhaps. In the midst of all this, Gerry phoned. He had emigrated to New York. He was drunk. He had work for a good painter. Big money. Ursula told me to take the opportunity but I didn't want to leave her alone in the house. She laughed and said it would be different if it was the other way around. She wouldn't want to leave me alone in the house. So I phoned Gerry and told him as soon as the house was sold I would come over. My protestations about staying were not honest. There was never any doubt that I would go just as there was no doubt that she would leave town if an assignment beckoned.

*   *   *

We are painting the house and can hear the music from the concert in Lansdowne Road. I am rolling the ceiling and she is doing the walls. I want it all to last as it was. With the cats and the roses and the sun on the bed in the morning. The sleepy slosh of her early morning piss. Driving her into the office. Letting her off in Baggot Street at the
Turbine.
Kissing. There would always be one last thing to say. I love you, I would say and she would smile a gluttonous smile and slam the car door with the noise of Dublin swirling around her. I would watch her in the quietness of the car. I would stare after her, waiting for her to turn. I was caressed with her through all the long day.

One morning, after I let her out at the corner, I see her wave to a man with a heavy duffel bag hanging off his shoulder. He is confident, easygoing. The way he carries himself. He smiles at her and she smiles back. The exchange flashes like a knife. She reaches into her briefcase and hands him a copy of her book. He shrugs and smiles at something she says and I sit there in the idling car wondering what she has to say to a man I don't know that could make him shrug and smile. He reads the blurb on the back of the book and hands it back. She bursts out laughing and slaps him on the arm. The horrible ease she has with him. Jealousy grips me and I have a stomach-churning insight of what she would feel if she found out about Isobela. You moral, Isobela said. We pray for Pope. We do not listen him.

I park the car and walk through Merrion Square, through the Lincoln Gate at Trinity, pass the chapel where Brefini and Medbh got married. They had said they would never marry—we listened to them rant about primitive Ireland, and then we watched them, as if in a surreal cartoon, marry and have Una and forget all the talk of changing the world. We had bought them a fridge that made its own ice cubes and they thanked us, missing our extravagant joke. Already their life was swallowed with baby burps and hoping the car would start in the morning. Getting married took the stress out of making the decision not to get married that they were making every day, Medbh said.

*   *   *

In the end I ran, not just from Ursula but from the crude trap of Dublin. The Tuesday before I left I told Medbh I was running.
Sometimes you need to run. Perhaps it's the only way to face your demon, we all have a demon, only one if we're lucky.
I can smell salt water when I think of what she said. Walking the pier in Irishtown. A boisterous day, the wind fighting with itself. Halfway down the pier, the heavens opened. We ran for the lighthouse.

I get up before Ursula. While I am waiting for the kettle to boil I walk out into the cold garden, Vomit and Willy bouncing about my feet. Full of meows and the happiness of morning. We have to let the little bastards out to empty their bladders—they still haven't worked out the cat flap. Rain during the night. Darkness loosening itself from a dirty sky. The absorbing silence of the city not yet awake. A bicycle squishes down the greasy hill. Then the dull plock of a tennis ball. They're starting early this year. The whack of a ball struck, the rattle of the protective wire between the end of the back garden and the courts. A ball lodged high up in one of the wire diamonds like an egg stuck in a startled mouth. A man's laughter from the tennis court. Willy scales to the top of the fencing to investigate. The kettle whistles and I go in and turn it off before it wakes her. Vomit sits on the builder's cement mixer, staring at her sister.

I blink with pleasure at the memory of her warm body, lost to sleep. Too early to wake her. I tap the foul-smelling cat food into the kittens' bowls and they race each other to their breakfast as I go to the toilet. Odd she never flushes. It smells of her. I gaze abstractly out the window as I urinate. The tennis players are rallying heavily. The man crashes a ball against the top of the net, curses and sets off to retrieve the ball that is marking his defeat. His partner takes off her tracksuit bottoms, flattens out the creases from her tennis skirt, and shakes off a chill. She hops on the spot, waiting. Aggression twitches in her calf. She embodies a certain kind of woman: a woman who dislikes men and, in return, is adored. They pursue her, searching for the nugget of her allure. I dislike everything her taut body suggests. My blood rushes through me. I see myself lifting her tennis skirt and fucking her: a stiff penis has its own opinion. The idea of rape in every man. The first day I met Ursula. The way I had to pull my eyes away from her as she walked downstairs to the toilet in the Palace Bar. The sway of her stout buttocks under a white skirt. I felt naked in the pub, as if it was obvious that I was longing for the impossible. I remember not liking her entirely. I drank deeply then to steady the craving. The tennis ball thumps off the asphalt. Have to get dressed. It's cold in the house. Tonight I'm cooking. The future wouldn't happen. I want a child. The whack of the ball off the tennis racket. But not with her. I open my eyes and the world is too real, the way life always appears to be in the midst of misery or ecstasy, as if it's happening to someone else. The sky stares at me indifferently. Cognitive dissonance. The presentation to the Japanese today. A child. The mirror stares at my stupidity. The Japanese won't order, I know it, feel it in my water. The mattress moans with her shift.