Sex and Death (23 page)

He chuckled. ‘This is Spain, all laws are advisory and it has done little to prevent the development of certain subcultures. Get your bathing costume. Norman is awaiting.'

‘Henri, please. Just because you have taken a shine to her and you're curious about the things going on out there. We're too old. We'll kill ourselves. Drown Norm.'

‘Hey. You think I'm crazy? We have three good life jackets.'

The sheltered waters off the coast of Porto Baso lie between two distinctive headlands positioned five miles apart; on the promontory of each, a tall lighthouse is suspended high on the point above the rocks and waters. Those steady white pulses, which seemingly signal from one lighthouse to the other and back again, have become familiar to us at night – their rhythmic light crawls over the whitewashed walls of obscure apartment buildings and across tiled roofs in our small town. Down the years of retirement you discover those surprising beams everywhere, signalling through the branches of orange allotments, in car parks behind restaurants you have never visited before. Yet you can only see both lighthouses simultaneously when you sail far enough out from the coast toward the east and are roughly two miles offshore. Two miles further out to sea lie the main shipping lanes and forty miles beyond that the Balearic islands.

Upon this black Mediterranean, a mighty gibbous moon laid down an unsteady slick of pinkish light which jittered on the surface. Through this element Henri steered us on our three-hundred-horsepower steed, with the lighthouses of home steady on our stern.

Our faces were dry yet coated in salt. We had gone so very, very fast in the darkness, when I leaned to starboard, out into the slipstream from behind the shelter of Norm's shoulders, my cheeks and lips had blubbered like the flesh under a forceful hand dryer in some men's toilet.

I was seated on the very back saddle and though the spray was dampening the rear of my life jacket, I had two good rubberised hand grips by my thighs. I noted occasionally, Norm placed his arms around Henri's ample waist as we crossed a patch of rougher water.

Henri very cautiously throttled back in increments and the water craft sank slightly deeper. It had been impossible to talk before but now Henri turned off the engine completely.

‘What's wrong?'

‘Nothing. It's just, so very strange out here.'

It was true. The water slapped slightly at the lips and flanks of the sleek-shaped hull but with the abysmal depths below and the settlement lights of the coast so far distant, there was indeed a curious silence far out here upon these waters. I shivered and drew up my feet a little further from the black surface. I noticed the three of us were breathing hard as though we had all just ceased some illegitimate sin.

Henri slightly turned round, more in gesture, to speak. ‘My God, you guys. I'm gonna have to buy one of these.'

‘They really are something.' Norm nodded.

I pointed. ‘Tanga Island isn't its real name, that's just a nasty tourist name. The island on satnav is called Isla Granbolo, just over there about two miles south and further in too; we've come out a bit too far, Henri.'

‘Yes, yes.' Henri nodded and he wiped something aside from his face.

Norm coughed and announced, ‘I don't hear a thing.'

‘What do you expect? The howling of wild beasts? Joe's laugh?'

Henri chuckled in the dark. ‘With Homer, is it not the Sirens singing their promise of love which lure men and their ships to destruction upon the rocks?'

‘Exactly,' I said, coldly.

‘Some people,' said Henri, ‘believe all of Homer happened on
this side of the Mediterranean, that charmed Odysseus fell for Circe right here in these waters.'

‘Bollocks. That's an invention of bloody hippies on Formentera in the sixties. You don't need to pull out classical allusions to gloss over what you two are up to. Get over there and satisfy your curiosity.'

Even Norm was ready to foil my line of attack. ‘Don't be vulgar, John. She's in trouble and we need to help her, like gentlemen. Get her home and get those models out of her swimming pool. The future of Porto Baso Scale Modellers is our responsibility. She is a fellow member in need of assistance and guidance.'

‘Well when you meet the cannibals on those shores you better sew your swimming trunks to your T-shirt.'

Norm added, ‘You know none of us will be covered by our med insurance for activity like this.'

‘You can say that again.'

The plastic key hung from a string attached to a bracelet on Henri's wrist. He started the engine and we began to steam south, parallel to the coast, watching the lighthouses but also squinting ahead for possible obstructions on the surface. We did so for about three minutes before Henri suddenly cut the engine again and the jet-ski slowed down to a halt far more abruptly. We floated.

‘It's that flashing red light?' Norm was nodding round Henri's back at the dashboard on the handlebars.

Henri was taking something out the front pocket of his life jacket. ‘Now I put on my reading glasses it reads “Fuel”.'

‘I did point that light out to you back at the canal, Henry, I thought it a bit fishy that it was flashing.'

‘I thought it was the power setting. And please, my name is Henri, please.'

After a few moments of contemplation, Norm reached into the pocket of his life jacket and an eerie, unnatural illumination shone upon the dark wavelets by the side of the jet-ski. With a
disinterested voice he said, ‘No reception.' The light was curtailed.

We sat that way, one in front of the other. Henri leaned on the handlebars, our six legs thrown over our mount. None of us spoke as we rocked lightly from side to side. Now I thought I could actually hear gleeful shouts of abandon towards the south, but we seemed to be drifting another way. Eastward, out to the shipping lanes.

The moon had sunk much lower and high above us in the vaults of heaven two cherry lights crossed, linked by a steady pulse of cyan. A moment later we heard the low turbo-prop groan which just as quickly faded. All three of us had turned our heads upward as if this might – inexplicably – be the coastguard already. In the dark, Norman lifted his bare arm with its wristwatch and rustled his life jacket. Norm told us – and that ancient, uncaring sea all around – ‘I say, that'll be the Iberojet ten to midnight, out of Ibiza for Madrid. Seems to be running a touch late.'

They had just moved into a new house when he told her he wanted out. It was such a great house, too – they'd never been able to afford to rent a whole house in the city where they used to live. And the rent was half what they had paid for their last apartment. The house had two bedrooms, a finished basement. It was cute, forties-era, unostentatious in that timid, post-war mode of cautious optimism. An outlook that seemed in line with what was happening in their lives. That is, their life, together.

It had a massive back yard, with black, needly trees looming above, squirrels scrambling up and down the trunks. The cat went insane for them. The cat stayed out all day, stalking squirrels, stalking birds, stalking crickets. She would bring the crickets inside, look around to make sure someone was watching, and gulp down the frantically clicking insects in a kind of performance. These were the happiest days of the cat's young life.

They bought a barbecue and there was enough room to set up the croquet wickets in a fairly challenging course that wound its way around the picnic table and the fire pit. The cat went around examining each of the wickets like a foreman investigating a construction site. Once they had finished making friends in this new city, they would invite the friends over for barbecue and croquet, was the plan.

Anyway. He didn't want to be with her any more.

He had been going to work every day and she had been looking for work. She had also been looking for friends. She was lonely and about to get lonelier. She didn't know that. She was trying
to be upbeat. She was being upbeat about everything because he seemed so nervous about the move and his new job and was drinking so much and saying cold and pessimistic things when he did and she was trying to be supportive. She, in her turn, was being cheerful and optimistic. He had a job! They had a house! After more than a decade in their grad-school, low-wage holding pattern, at last real life could begin.

He blurted it out. One night when he was really drunk. He had to get really drunk and blurt it out because all the months of getting drunk and saying cold and pessimistic things hadn't made her want to leave him. All the times he woke her up in the middle of the night to accuse her of sleeping with other people hadn't made her want to leave him. The time he stuck one of his ear-buds into her ear in the middle of the night when she was fast asleep and started blaring music into her head – that didn't do it either.

She had been so worried about him. She was trying to be supportive.

After that, it was nothing but blurtings moving forward. He would blurt, You never say anything! You never said a word all this time. Everything was crumbling around us and you wouldn't say a word.

It wasn't true, exactly. She would say things. She would say she was concerned, the next morning, and ask for reassurance, and he would give it. He would hug her and say everything was fine. But now he was angry at her for believing him, that's what he was angry about. He was angry at her for not reading the signals, not being the grown-up and insisting they both come clean and lay their cards on the table. It had been a standoff of conflict-aversion.

But why did he expect her to be the grown-up all of a sudden? The whole relationship was about no one ever having to be the grown-up.

So they broke up, as the euphemism goes, like ice in the
ever-warming Arctic. They broke at the close of summer. He moved out. He had to start work again in the fall, he needed his head clear, he couldn't be dealing with all this.

He did that thing that men do when they move out – she only learned this afterwards, that men did this thing, she learned it from talking to people like herself – he moved out and took only what he needed, a few items of clothing and toiletries – and left everything else behind. He packed light.

So, here she is now – as we move into the now. She is a sudden caretaker. She oversees The Museum of Us, the place where they were once a couple who lived together, showcasing the physical yin/yang of their cohabitation. His art, her CDs. His rocker, her knitted throw, thrown atop. Her desk, his chair, the former tucked neatly inside the gap beneath the latter.

She oversees his sweaters and his shoes and his one formal suit and his books on Derrida and his books on Agamben and his books on Deleuze and Guattari, and one of the things he blurted that he was so mad at her about, that he hated her for (because –
blurt!
– turned out he'd been hating her much of these final months), was that he couldn't talk about Deleuze and Guattari and all those guys with her. She wasn't keeping up with his research.

Here's the thing, though – this is the thing right here: he comes back whenever he needs something. He does this – just plucks random items from the museum, her museum, to take away. It's getting cold, the weather. He comes back for a couple of sweaters. His winter jacket. His winter coat. His boots. He calls her to make an appointment, then picks up whatever he requires as the cat follows him around, meowing, perplexed, openly haranguing in a way you might expect the woman in this situation to be doing.

They have a massive dining-room table. One of the displays in the museum is a massive dining-room table – that they bought together, specifically to fill the spacious dining room of this very
house, a grown-up purchase anticipating guests, feasts, lively evenings playing host/hostess. One day, she gathers all his things and piles them on the dining-room table. No – she doesn't actually pile them. She puts them in boxes. Neatly – folding whatever needs to be folded. Astoundingly, she is still looking after him. In all the years of their couplehood, she never thought she was that kind of woman, in fact they made jokes about her not being that kind of woman, it was a leitmotif of their relationship. But it turned out she'd been that kind of woman all along without either of them quite realising it. It's like with the cellphone bill. He took the cellphone, still in her name, because the house had the landline. So she gets his cellphone bills. Secretarially, she emails him, every time a bill arrives, so he can pay it.

The fact is, she is worried about him even now. She wants him to be okay.

Anyway. He shows up one day to pick up a scarf and his Portable Foucault or whatever. He is shocked when she points him to the table and the boxes. He indicates his shock by smirking – puffing air out from between his puffy lips.

Oh, he says. Are these the ‘fuck off' boxes?

His feelings are hurt, you see.

*

Anyway.

The first sign was that he started saying ‘whatever' all the time, like his students did. ‘The young people today,' they used to joke with one another, as if they didn't really believe they were growing old themselves – as if the idea was laughable. He'd come back from teaching and complain bitterly about colleagues during their brief dinners together, how they were conspiring to destroy him, and it should've occurred to her to wonder how it was he could be feeling such scalding anger and betrayal toward people he had
only just met. Anyway, he'd always end these angry soliloquies with this new word. ‘Whatever.'

‘Anyway,' he'd say. ‘Whatever.' And head outside to drink alone on the step.

And sometimes he'd say it like this: ‘What.
Ever
.' Gesturing with his hands for emphasis.

Imagine feeling the need to
emphasise
such a word!

*

She is in a city where she doesn't know anyone and the weather is growing cold and the only job she can get is talking to people all over the world who want to write stories. They call her at strange hours to talk, because of the varying time zones at play. A woman named Nancy – a bouncy-haired, 1970s name like the blonde daughter from
Eight Is Enough
or the friend who grew breasts before Margaret in
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
– is writing a story about a wife who bashes her cheating husband's head in with a Farberware meat tenderiser. They talk for a long time about Nancy's choice to include the brand name of the murder instrument. On the one hand, it's a little distracting because Nancy never just calls it ‘the tenderiser', she doesn't employ any quick euphemisms like, say, ‘the little hammer' or something. It's always ‘the Farberware meat tenderiser'. It gets repetitive. At the same time it's one of those grounded-in-reality details a creative writing teacher should approve of.

The story is called ‘Meat Hammer'. It's meant to be a ‘playful' title, says Nancy. ‘Meat Hammer' refers to the Farberware tenderiser, of course, but also the husband's penis.

But really all the talk about the Farberware meat tenderiser is just preamble before they can get to a more troublesome aspect of the story. She's not quite sure how to raise this with Nancy. The husband comes across as an unrepentant villain, is the problem.
It's okay for the wife to think of him that way, but the first half of the story is in the husband's point of view. And it's not realistic. He drives around in his sporty car luxuriating in thoughts of his horny, sexy mistress. And these thoughts comprise the most detailed and intricate part of the story – are clearly what Nancy laboured hardest over. The husband and the mistress fuck and bray like goats, and Nancy goes on for paragraphs about the way they grunt and shudder and lie around afterwards laughing ‘throatily' and stinking of sweat and genitals. At any moment you expect the floor to belch a sudden, fuming hole into itself and a red, scaly hand to yank them both, still stuck together like a pair of moths, into the waiting furnace below. Meanwhile, his poor dolt of a wife wanders in their lonely yet beautifully appointed home (he's a big money-maker, this bastard husband), pausing every once in a while to gaze with a certain vacancy at their sweet, oblivious infant son who lies sleeping in his crib, reeking of innocence.

I don't think, she tells Nancy, the guy would actually think this way. I don't think he'd exult in his deception. I think he'd rationalise. He'd want to think of himself as basically a nice guy trying to do the right thing. That's how anyone would want to think of themselves in his situation – we all try to excuse our worst behaviour. Unless he's a sociopath. Is the husband meant to be a sociopath?

I don't know, says Nancy. I just know he needs to get his brain bashed in with a Farberware meat tenderiser.

The conversation stalls. She and Nancy listen to the landline silence that isn't quite silence, but a distant, inexorable hum.

Nancy? she calls across the line after a while. Nancy lives far away, northern BC, Prince Rupert to be exact. Nancy told her at the beginning of the phone call that she is sitting on her front step watching the sun dip into the ocean like ‘God's great, shining toe'.

Nancy? she says. It reads like a revenge story. It reads like a revenge
fantasy
. You have to think of the guy as a real person. As
someone like you. I know that's hard. You have to put yourself in his shoes. He's not a monster. The story can't be realistic if he's a monster. It would have to be a different kind of story if that were the case. What are your other stories like?

I have no other stories, says Nancy.

I mean what stories have you written before this?

I haven't written any other stories, says Nancy. I only ever write this story, Lynn.

*

Anyway. She keeps getting bills from the cellphone company and every month the unpaid balance at the bottom of the gently phrased corporate reminders gets bigger and bigger. Pretty soon correspondence from the cellphone company becomes less breezy in tone, more standoffish. I thought we were friends, the tone says. But frankly, I don't know where we stand in relation to one another any more. I'm not sure you're the person I once supposed you to be.

Herewith we descend into the squalid, petty domestic details of a North American couple as it disentwines. She emails him about the phone bill. He emails back that he's very busy because of his job and he has a lot of expenses now that they are living apart. A different kind of woman, say a woman in a Nora Ephron movie – someone smart and sassy, vulnerable yet take-no-shit – someone who is
going to be okay
– would have many wry, sardonic things to say at this point in the correspondence. She would sputter, briefly, in disbelief before unleashing a stream of verbal devastation. But this woman, sitting in front of her computer, has no such resources. She has nothing to say. She never says anything.

She starts to email him back after sitting there for twenty minutes. But something starts to burn on the stove and she goes to turn it off. It is, was, a sausage. She realises she has been trying
to cook it for the last three hours. She had been thinking: Sausage is easy, you just fry it. If I can just get this sausage cooked I can steam some broccoli and then I will have eaten dinner. But it's been three hours and the sausage plan has failed.

She sits back down and types: You have been using the phone and I have been getting the bills. I sent you the bills and you haven't paid them.

He protests that he hasn't been able to pay the bills because the phone is in her name.

At which point the Nora Ephron character she isn't throws her hands into the air and stalks back and forth across the room, muttering.

She emails back that every time she forwarded him a bill, she explained what he needed to do to pay them – he just had to enter her password. It takes her another hour or so just to compose this short message. Because it's impossible, this exchange. It is lose–lose. She can feel the portrait taking on clarity every time she emails him back. The version of herself, in his eyes, that she is helpless not to become. Portrait of the Artist as Vindictive, Grasping Ex. Clinging to petty grievances. Trying to punish him with this small-time bill-paying bullshit.

There was the thing with the candles for example, which she knows is in his mind as they bat their terse missives back and forth. She'll never be able to live those candles down. But the inner Ephron still insists that she was in the right. She had a collection of pillar candles that she'd bought for the house and artfully placed in the blocked-up hearth of the house's former fireplace. She saw it in an Ikea catalogue and thought it looked nice – you could have a little fireplace even after the official fireplace had long since been taken away. Anyway. He'd asked for a couple of the candles. For his new apartment. He needed, he said, something to ‘warm the place up'.