Watermelon

by Marian Keyes

  “Yes,” I managed to reply, feeling slightly nauseous with lust.

  “The car chases are good, aren’t they?” he said.

  Now, I should tell you here that there were no car chases in any of the books we were talking about. They were serious, profound books about life and death and similar matters.

  “Jesus!” I thought in alarm, “handsome, intelligent and funny. Am I ready for this?”

  And then James smiled at me, a slow, sexy smile, a knowing kind of smile, totally at odds with the pinstriped suit he was wearing, and I swear to you, my entrails turned to warm ice cream. You know, kind of hot and cold and tingly and…well…like they were dissolving, or something.

  And for years afterwards, long after the initial magic had worn off and most of our conversations were about insurance policies and dry rot, all I had to do was remember that smile and I felt as if I had just fallen in love all over again.

  We exchanged some more words.

  Just a few. But they were enough to let me know that he was nice and clever and funny.

  He asked for my phone number.

  It was a fireable offense to give a customer my phone number.

  I gave him my phone number.

  When he left the restaurant that first night, with his three cronies, a blur of briefcases and umbrellas and rolled-up copies of the Financial Times and somber-looking suits, he smiled good-bye at me, and (well, I say this with the benefit of hindsight; it’s very easy to foretell the future when it’s already happened, if you know what I mean) I knew I was looking at my destiny.

  My future.

  A few minutes later he was back.

  “Sorry”—he grinned—“what’s your name?”

  As soon as the other waitresses found out that a suit had asked for my phone number and, worse again, that I had actually given it to him, I was treated like a pariah.

  But I didn’t care. Because I had really fallen for James.

  For all my talk of independence, I was actually a very romantic person at heart. And for all my talk of rebellion, I was as middle-class as you could get.

  From the first time we went out together, it was wonderful. So romantic, so beautiful.

  And I’m sorry to do this to you but I’m going to have to use a lot of clichés here. I can see no other way around it.

  I’m ashamed to tell you that I was walking on air. And I’m even sorrier to have to tell you that I felt like I’d known him all my life. And I’m going to compound things by telling you that I felt that no one understood me the way that he did. And as I’ve lost all credibility with you I might as well tell you that I didn’t think it was possible to be that happy. But I won’t push it by telling you that he made me feel safe, sexy, smart and sweet.

  (And sorry about this, but I really must tell you that I felt that I had met my missing other half and now I was whole, and I promise that I’ll leave it at that.) (Except perhaps to mention that he was funny and great in bed.

  Now I mean it, that’s all, positively all.) When we first started going out together I was waitressing most nights, so I could only see him when I finished work. But he would wait up for me. And when I came around, exhausted, after hours of dishing up char-grilled whatever to the people of London (or the people of Pennsylvania or Hamburg, if I’m to be more accurate), he would—and I can’t believe it to this day—he would bathe my aching feet and massage them with Body Shop peppermint foot lotion. Even though it was past twelve and he had to be at work helping people fiddle their tax returns, or whatever it is that accountants do, at eight the following morning, he still did it. Five nights a week. And he would bring me up-to-date on the soaps.

  Or go to the twenty-four-hour garage for me when I ran out of cigarettes.

  Or he would tell me funny little stories about his day at work. I know that it’s hard to believe that any story about accounting could be funny, but he managed it.

  And my job meant that we could never go out on Saturday nights. And he didn’t complain.

  Weird, huh?

  Yes, I thought so too.

  And he would help me count my tips. And give me great advice about what to invest them in. Government bonds and that kind of thing.

  I usually bought shoes instead.

  Shortly after this I had the good fortune to be fired from the waitressing job (a silly misunderstanding involving me, several bottles of imported lager, a “dinner-in-lap” scenario and a totally unreasonable customer who had absolutely no sense of humor; anyway, I believe his scars faded almost completely).

  And managed to secure another position with more regular hours. So our romance proceeded on a more traditional timetable.

  And after a while we moved in together. And after a bit longer we got married. And a couple of years later we decided to have a baby and my ovaries seemed to be game and his spermatozoa registered no complaint on that score and my womb had no objection so I got pregnant. And I gave birth to a baby girl.

  Which is where you came in.

  So I think we’re pretty much up-to-date here. And if you were hoping for, or expecting, some kind of awful gory de-piction of childbirth, with talk of stirrups and forceps and moans of agony and vulgar comparisons with excreting a hundred-pound sack of potatoes, then I’m sorry to disappoint you.

  (Well, all right then, just to humor you, take your worst period pain ever and multiply it by seven million and make it last for about twenty-four hours and then you have some idea.)

  Yes, it was scary and messy and humiliating and quite alarmingly painful.

  It was also exciting and thrilling and wonderful. But the most important thing for me was that it was over. I could kind of remember the pain, but it no longer had the power to hurt me. But when James left me I realized I’d rather go through the pain of a hundred labors than go through the pain of losing him that I felt then.

  This is how he broke the news of his imminent departure to me.

  After I held my baby in my arms for the first time, the nurses took her away to the baby ward and I was brought back to my ward and went to sleep for a while.

  I woke up to find James standing over me, staring down at me, his eyes very green in his white face. I smiled up at him sleepily and triumphantly.

  “Hello, darling.” I grinned.

  “Hello, Claire,” he said formally and politely.

  Fool that I was, I thought he was being grave and serious as some kind of mark of respect. (Behold my wife, she was delivered today of a child, she is woman, she is lifegiver—you know, that kind of thing.) He sat down. He sat on the edge of the hard hospital chair, looking as if he was going to get up and run away any second. Which, as it turns out, he was.

  “Have you been to the baby ward to see her?” I asked him dreamily.

  “She’s so beautiful.”

  “No, I haven’t,” he said shortly. “Look, Claire, I’m leaving,” he said abruptly.

  “Why?” I asked, snuggling back into my pillows, “you’ve only just got here.” (Yes, I know, I can’t believe I said that either, who writes my lines?) “Claire, listen to me,” he said, getting a bit agitated. “I’m leaving you.”

  “What?” I said slowly and carefully. I must admit he had my attention now.

  “Look, Claire, I’m really sorry, but I’ve met someone else and I’m going to be with her and I’m sorry about the baby and everything and to leave you like this, but I must,” he blurted out, as white as a ghost, his eyes bright with anguish.

  “What do you mean by you’ve ‘met’ someone else?” I asked, bewildered.

  “I mean that…well…I’ve fallen in love with someone else,” he said, looking wretched.

  “What do you mean, another woman, or something?”

  “Yes,” he said, no doubt relieved that I seemed to have grasped the basics of the situation.

  “And you’re leaving me?” I echoed him disbelievingly.

  “Yes,” he said, looking at his shoes
, at the ceiling, at anything other than my eyes.

  “But don’t you love me anymore?” I found myself asking.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so,” he replied.

  “But what about the baby?” I asked, stunned. He couldn’t possibly leave me but he especially couldn’t leave me now that we had had a baby together. “You’ve got to take care of the two of us.”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t,” he said. “I’ll make sure that you’re taken care of financially and we’ll sort something out about the apartment and the mortgage and all that, but I have to go.”

  I couldn’t believe we were having this conversation. What the hell was he talking about, apartments and money and mortgages and crap? According to the script we should be cooing over our baby and gently arguing about which side of the family she got her looks from. But James, my James, was talking about leaving me. Who’s in charge around here? I’d like to complain about my life. I distinctly ordered a happy life with a loving husband to go with my newborn baby and what was this shoddy travesty that I’d been served up instead?

  “Jesus, Claire,” he said, “I hate to leave you like this. But if I come home with you and the baby now I won’t ever be able to leave.”

  But wasn’t that the whole idea? I thought, bewildered.

  “I know that there’s no good time to tell you something like this. I couldn’t tell you when you were pregnant, you might have lost the baby. So I have to tell you now.”

  “James,” I said faintly, “this is all very weird.”

  “Yes, I know,” he agreed hurriedly. “You’ve been through a lot in the last twenty-four hours.”

  “Why were you at the birth, if you planned to leave me the minute it was over?” I asked him, holding his arm, trying to get him to look at me.

  “Because I promised,” he said, shaking my hand off his arm and not meeting my eyes, looking like a chastised schoolboy.

  “Because you promised?” I said, trying to make sense of this. “But you’ve promised me lots of things. Like to cherish me and to love me till death do us part.”

  “Well, I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “But I can’t keep those promises.”

  “So what’s going to happen?” I asked numbly. I didn’t for a second accept a single word of what he was saying. But the band keeps playing even though no one is dancing. I was having what to all intents and purposes might appear to the impartial outside observer to be a conversation with James. But it wasn’t a conversation at all because I didn’t mean anything that I said and I didn’t accept anything that he said. When I asked him what was going to happen, I didn’t need an answer. I knew what was going to happen. He was coming home with me and the baby and there would be no more of this nonsense.

  I think I almost felt that if I kept him talking and with me he would realize how silly he was being.

  He stood up. He stood too far away for me to be able to touch him. He was wearing a black suit (we had often joked in the past about his wearing it to oversee receiverships and liquidations) and he looked grim and pale.

  And in a way he had never looked more handsome to me.

  “I see you’re wearing your undertaker suit,” I said bitterly. “Nice touch.”

  He didn’t even attempt a smile, and I knew then that I had lost him. He looked like James, he sounded like James, he smelled like James, but it wasn’t James.

  Like some fifties science fiction film, where the hero’s girlfriend’s body is taken over by an alien—it still looks like her on the outside (pink angora sweater, sweet little handbag, bra so pointy it would take the eye out of a spider, etc.)—but her eyes have changed. The casual observer might still think it was James. But I knew from looking at his eyes, my James had left. Some cold unloving stranger was in his body. I didn’t know where my James had gone.

  Maybe he was in the alien spaceship with Peggy-Jo.

  “I’ve moved most of my things,” he said. “I’ll be in touch. Take care of yourself.”

  He turned on his heel and quickly left the ward. In fact, he almost broke into a run. I wanted to run after him but the bastard had taken advantage of the fact that I was bed-bound courtesy of several stitches in my vagina.

  He was gone.

  I lay in my hospital bed, very still for a long time. I was stunned, I was shocked, I was horrified, I was disbelieving. But in a very odd kind of way, there was something I did believe about it. There was something almost familiar about this feeling.

  I know it couldn’t be a feeling of familiarity, because I had never been deserted by a husband before. But there was definitely something there. I think there’s a part of everyone’s brain, certainly mine, that keeps a lookout on some rocky outcrop high in the hills, waiting for signs of danger. And it signals back to the rest of the brain when trouble is afoot. The emotional version of “the injuns is coming.” The more I thought about it, the more I realized this part of my brain had probably been flashing mirrors and sending up smoke signals like crazy over the past months. But the rest of my brain was with the wagon camp down in the pleasant verdant valley of pregnancy and didn’t want to know about impending danger. So it completely ignored the messages it was sent.

  I’d known that James was miserable for most of the time that I was pregnant, but I had put that down to my mood swings, my constant hunger, my raging sentimentality, where I cried at everything from Little House on the Prairie to The Money Program.

  And, of course, our sex life was drastically curtailed. But I had thought that as soon as I had the baby everything would be back to normal. Except better, if you know what I mean. I thought that James’s misery was just a result of my being pregnant and its attendant side effects but, looking back, maybe I had ignored things that I shouldn’t have.

  So what was I to do? I didn’t even know where he was staying. But some instinct told me to leave him alone for a while. Humor him. Pretend to go along with it.

  I could hardly believe it.

  Leaving me, indeed! My normal reaction to feeling hurt or betrayed was to go on the warpath, but somehow I knew that it wouldn’t do me any good at all in this situation. I had to stay calm and sane until I could decide what to do.

  One of the nurses squeaked past me in her rubber-soled shoes. She stopped and smiled at me. “How are you now?” she asked.

  “Oh fine,” I said, willing her to go away.

  “I suppose your husband will be in to see you and the baby later,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t bet on it,” I replied bitterly.

  She gave me a startled look and moved away quickly, over to one of the nice, civil, polite mothers, clicking her pen and throwing me nervous glances.

  I decided to call Judy.

  Judy was my best friend. We’d been friends since we were eighteen. We had come over to London together. She had been my bridesmaid. I couldn’t cope with this on my own, and Judy would tell me what to do.

  I cautiously and gingerly levered myself out of bed and, as quickly as my episiotomy would permit, I made my way to the pay phone.

  She answered the phone immediately.

  “Oh hi, Claire,” she said. “I was just on my way over to see you.”

  “Good,” was all I said.

  God knows, I wanted to bawl and tell her about James’s allegedly leaving me, but there was a line of women in pink terry cloth robes behind me waiting to use the phone (no doubt to call their devoted husbands) and, against all the odds, I had some pride left.

  “Smug bitches,” I thought sourly (and irrationally, I must admit) as I limped back to bed.

  As soon as Judy came I knew that she knew about James. I knew because she said, “Claire, I know about James.” Also because she didn’t arrive with a huge bunch of flowers, a bigger smile and a card the size of a kitchen table with storks all over it. She looked anxious and nervous.

  My heart sank to my boots. If James was telling other people, then it must be true.

  “He�
�s left me,” I said dramatically.

  “I know,” she said.

  “How could he?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “He’s fallen in love with someone else,” I said.

  “I know,” she said.

  “How do you know?” I demanded, pouncing on her for the information.

  “Michael told me. Aisling told him. George told her.”

  (Michael was Judy’s boyfriend. Aisling was a girl who worked with him.

  George was Aisling’s husband. George worked with James.)

  “So everyone knows,” I said quietly.

  There was a pause. Judy looked as if she would like to die.

  “Then it must be true,” I said.

  “I think it is,” she said, obviously embarrassed.

  “Do you know who this other woman is?” I couldn’t believe my best friend knew that my husband was cheating on me and hadn’t told me. I was pissed off at her, but the highest priority was extracting information, at this point.

  “Er, yes,” she said, even more embarrassed. “It’s that Denise.”

  “What!” I shrieked. “Not nice Denise from downstairs?”

  A miserable nod from Judy.

  It was just as well that I was already lying down.

  “That bitch! ” I exclaimed.

  “And there’s more,” she mumbled. “He’s talking about marrying her.”

  “What the hell do you mean?” I shouted. “He’s already married. To me. I hadn’t heard that they had made polygamy legal in the last day or so.”

  “They haven’t,” she said.

  “But then…” I trailed off, bewildered.

  “Claire,” she sighed despondently, “he says he’s going to divorce you.”

  As I said, it was just as well I was already lying down.

  The afternoon ebbed away, along with Judy’s patience and any hope that I might still harbor.

  I looked at her in despair.

  “Judy, what am I going to do?”

  “Look,” she said matter-of-factly, “in two days you’ll be getting out of here. You still have somewhere to live, you have enough money to feed yourself and the baby, you’ll be going back to work in six months, you’ve got a newborn child to look after and give James some time and eventually the two of you will work something out.”