Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

  January 2014

  1

  Once a year after Christmas Ciaran visited his father Peter where he lived near the Wicklow Mountains.

  He had left his small family in Denmark when Ciaran was seven years old. Every few years after that he would reappear in Copenhagen, wild-haired, weathered, spiteful, drunk, and take his son to dinner.

  The older he became, the more Ciaran grew to hate the emptiness of this occasional gesture and to hate Peter himself. And perhaps sensing the growing animosity from the beautiful brittle teenage boy sitting opposite him, Peter in turn grew hard and jeering.

  I went with Ciaran to visit in the January of 2014, leaving Waterford where I had spent Christmas. We took a train and then a bus and then a cab to where he lived, a barely inhabitable rented cottage, freezing and mucky and mouldy. He had been there a number of years by the time I visited, so his routine was embedded in the dirt of the place. He had his cafetière and his stove kept clean, and a desk where he wrote endless unpublished letters to newspapers about unacceptable failures in local roads and services. Everything else he ignored.

  It was something to see the old man come up against Ciaran. His features were handsome still, though brutally boiled looking, all of him purple and mottled. It seemed to me as though he must have waited all year, conserving energy in his little cave, so that he would have the strength to destroy his son. There was no action so meaningless that it could not be mocked with the manic acceleration of an insane stand-up comedian. I watched him do impressions of the sissy way Ciaran smoked a cigarette for so long that veins sprang dangerously from his temples, livid patches spreading on his cheeks.

  He served us dinner, mashed potatoes and supermarket chicken Kiev, and we ate it off our knees gathered round the fireplace. Ciaran told some banal anecdote about work, about a gallery running out of wine and bringing out instead some elderly cans of Druid Cider from a back room, and while he told it he was animated, his wrists rolled slightly in the somewhat camp manner that he had when excited. Peter set his plate down on the dirty floor and leaned forward from his seat by the fire, rotating his wrists and bowing his head down near his knees, let his tongue loll out of his mouth grotesquely – and then sprang back upright and laughed, catching my eye.

  But still Ciaran smiled and dragged a fork through his mashed potatoes. Still he would not break. This was a bargain they had struck – his father could let all of his poison and madness out on him, but Ciaran would not cry, would not raise his voice, would not storm out. He would bear it, and by bearing it could punish him. He was so superhumanly able to be still that there would never be any release for his father, no conclusion to the pain. This was how they came to know each other in adulthood.

  They were not similar men in superficial ways. Ciaran was disgusted by Peter: that his old clothes and half-rotten boots smelled of mildew, that his meals came largely from tins or ready-meal packages, that empty bottles were strewn about his house with no humility, no shame. But I looked at them sitting there that evening, enduring each other in the flickering light, and was startled by their identical expressions.

  Decades of resentment and things unsaid had calcified and left them paralysed in matching sneers. There was no way, now, that they could ever say that they loved one another, having never said it to begin with, but they were incapable too of naming their hatred. There may have been a time once when Ciaran was capable of saying, ‘I hate you for leaving me, for leaving me alone when I was a child,’ but if such a time had existed it had long since passed.

  And if Peter had ever been inclined to look his boy straight in the eye and say that he was sorry, that he had been young himself then and unsure, unstable – if he had ever wanted to reach out and steady Ciaran’s hand, the one that constantly worried the threads of his sleeve when he was with his father, if he had ever wanted to take that hand and say, ‘When I left you it didn’t make me happy. There was no pleasure in my life after I left. It was only that I didn’t know how to take care of you, but I wish I did know. I wish I’d known then, and I wish I knew now.’

  If he had ever wanted to slip his arms under Ciaran’s and hold him close, and say, ‘I am your father. Nothing will ever change that. I didn’t just help make you – there is a part of me which you made when you were born, and which will always be yours.’

  If he had wanted to do any of that – well, it was too late.

  When my own dad was a small child, he had a schoolmate whose father died, and he became convinced that his own father would shortly go the same way. He would sit at the bottom of their road at the end of the day, a newly built estate for a newly ascending working class, waiting for his father to come home from work. He gnawed on his little hands and pulled at the sleeve of his prickly school jumper, praying anxiously for the moment the big man would round the corner and smile his big devastating grin and hoist him up back home.

  When I was a similar age as Dad was then, I sang in a church choir, treasuring my occasional solos and shutting my eyes piously during the best hymns, still a believer. One evening I was expecting my dad to be there, I had a whole verse to myself, and grew increasingly panicked as the mass went on and I could not see him. Soon I began to cry silently up there in the choir, keeping my eyes as wide open as I could so that the people down there wouldn’t see. My tears streamed throughout my solo and then the mass was over and I cried properly, balling up my fists and digging them into my sockets and doubling over, certain – but certain – he had died.

  Then he ran to me, having been there all that time, having only been delayed by traffic, he took me in his arms as he told me over and over again he had been there all that time, even though I couldn’t see him.

  How lucky I have been that so much of my pain is from fearing the loss of what I already have, instead of suffering the absence entirely, as Ciaran did.

  2

  The annual staff party came around in March and I wanted to drink. I had kept my drinking more or less moderate, to a degree that prevented Ciaran from doing anything but irritably glancing at me.

  I had been good for a long time. Now, the feeling I used to regularly have before I met him, the restless and soaring need for a big messy night, was back and it seemed to have been growing privately all that time.

  In the days leading up to the party I bought a new dress made of a clingy grey material which knotted in the middle and had cut-outs which framed the soft neat curve where my waist became my hips. I bought new make-up and experimented with it alone before he arrived back in the evenings. I cut down on food so I would feel light and powerful.

  In a big anonymous club on Harcourt Street, forty of us assembled after work. I had got ready in the bathrooms with some of the other younger women, and they all gawked and whooped at my outfit, halfway between admiration and mockery. I was overdressed. I was dressed as I would have been in the before days, when I was going to the party of a well-known DJ, or the gig of someone I was trying to sleep with. My body spilt out of its dress generously and sexually, my heels were high, my make-up polished and harsh. I soaked up their attention, hoping they envied me, wanting to eat that up, the brief thrill of feeling better than them.

  In the club I drank glasses of frosty Pinot Grigio in no time at all, pounding them back and then wandering idly to another counter, another group of people, to get my next. I talked to people I never usually talked to, surprised myself and them by being funny and personable and interested in what they had to say. Nothing works like drinking does.

  By the time it was ten and all the bosses had left I was entering the stage of pure hunger, pure need. My heart rate quick and joyful, my conversation unthinking and unending. I smoked constantly and moved on to spirits, moved into that place where what you want is clear and foul-tasting things, want bitter powder that burns the back of your throat like bleach, where you are total want.

  A man I’d never spoken to before who worked in the IT department sidled behind me as I danced and put his hands on my waist
where the cut-outs were. I jumped and turned to face him and laughed and shook him off. He was short and pink and sweaty, twenty years older than me. His hair shone with gel.

  ‘Don’t you have a boyfriend?’ he asked me.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, startled.

  He leaned in and whispered in my ear, ‘Well, how the fuck did he let you out like this?’ And then he trailed his awful hand down my backside and roughly squeezed me and then let go and glided away quickly before I could shriek or push him off.

  I walked home later, the fifteen minutes up Rathmines Road, which took me much longer because of my shoes. As I went I thought, over and over again, How the fuck did he let you out like this? How the fuck did he let you out like this? How the fuck did he let you out like this? Trying to puzzle it apart, find its meaning and why it had stopped me cold.

  When I arrived home I was much later than I said I would be, and Ciaran was up, and I must have been acting strangely because he screamed at me and demanded that I account for my time and accused me of having been with another man, which he had never done before.

  I laughed and he grabbed my wrist and banged it against our kitchen table and I thought, Break it, why don’t you? Do something. How the fuck did you let me out like this?

  Then he recovered and remembered that the way to hurt me is to ignore me. He left and went to our bedroom, and I locked myself in the bathroom and lifted up the sexy new dress and masturbated, quickly and shamefully, thinking about the ugly man who had touched me at the party, the way he had confirmed that Ciaran owned me. And then, just at the end as I was starting to come, I thought of Ciaran accusing me of being with another man.

  It was the first time I had conceived of being with anyone but him since we met. I gasped, grabbed the sink.

  2019, Athens

  For someone I love to prefer another woman to me, to choose her body over mine even in the abstract, was once the most vile experience I could imagine. I could not bear to watch a film with Ciaran sometimes – wasn’t able to relax for the two hours in which he was seeing a person who was better to look at than me. I clawed my thighs slowly and deeply beneath the duvet. In my head I swore off sugar, milk, bread, anything that might nourish me. I vowed to wake at five a.m. and do sit-ups until I couldn’t breathe.

  I think that my easy offering of myself to others is a way to dispute this pain, to fight with myself. Who cared what anyone did, if I could do this? If I could disregard myself first, then what did it matter if he did too?

  I hate to write that, to put my facts in the hands of people who will sneer and feel annoyed by their tawdry debasement.

  Those who have been betrayed themselves, who cannot imagine cheating, who think of it as a crime that should be punishable by law, as some friends of mine do, will find it a self-serving and pathetic excuse for my infidelities.

  There are those of you, the enlightened readers, who will find my willing debasement embarrassing. You will say that my choices are my own and should not be refracted through the lens of my need for men and their approval. They believe that any sexual greed is only my right and should be embraced, that I should simply extricate myself from monogamy, from stern boyfriends and their paternal domination, that I should wallow in my incontinent sexuality and enjoy it without shame.

  But both things can be true.

  True, yes, that I love to have sex, and that my love of it is not only about the act but about the multitude. I love the sex of knowing someone very well for years and just what will make them crumble and break open, but I also love to have sex with new people for not much more than their newness. I wish, when I leave them, that I could stay and sleep with them a hundred more times until I’ve exhausted all their strangeness, but I know too that the fact I can’t is what makes the meeting so sacred.

  Those moments have been the rawest, most tender flaying of myself, a return to the simplicity of what I know to be more or less the point of life, of coming together with another person without care for what the next day will bring, unexpected connection without fear.

  True also, though, that despite my often sincerely shameless enjoyment of sexual greed, my promiscuity has sometimes been compelled by self-loathing. By a sudden and desperate need to have my beauty confirmed, because I missed a man and wanted to take revenge on him and on myself for losing him, because I wanted to throw away a good boyfriend I didn’t feel I deserved.

  Tedious, I know, to say such things. People talk more and more about female desire nowadays, which we all agree is good, is a step forward. But I am amazed to hear critics upset at any hint that woman’s desire may still be authored in some way by men.

  We should, after all, have our own desires, free of men!

  Of course we should. I can only imagine; I would love to feel it. I would love to have one moment of want in my life when I am sure what I’m feeling is all my own and nothing to do with men, with what has happened with men in the past, with what they have said about me and my body, what thoughts they have put in my head without me even knowing.

  It doesn’t mean that I blame them very much, or excuse myself from blame. Why do I have to call them bad, and myself good, to simply observe what takes place in the world? What power men have had over me seems more like a neutral fact than a reason for me to hate them. And who would I be to hate them anyway? Couldn’t I have made myself immune to them with will and education and pride, in this late century, couldn’t I have had some other great love in my life than for them?

  Of course I could, but I did not, and this, my story, is the story of that failure.

  3

  Ciaran flew to Copenhagen to visit his mother in April. I unravelled in the apartment, alone at last. I mixed tequila with soda and lime and sat on the couch drinking and smoking from six until midnight.

  I leafed furiously through glossy women’s magazines, always with one hand on the internet, checking, scrolling, refreshing. There was not a single night I did not go to bed shitfaced.

  My mind was a flapping, beating thing, never still. I realised in his absence that I had become used to killing this feeling with whatever Ciaran was doing at the time, whether that was fucking me or ignoring me or sneering at me. The hysteria, the upset was bad, but its absence was – was. It was absence. It was the great nothing of my heart, my own boundless greed and inability to be sated reflected back at me.

  It was a stroke of luck that I had chosen someone so aloof, so in love with another woman.

  Maybe I had even chosen him because of it, because he so resisted loving me.

  But it wouldn’t have mattered in the end.

  Whatever he offered me would never have sufficed. I had chosen someone who was by nature indifferent, and made it my project to make him love me.

  It had seemed impossible, but I had made it happen in the end.

  I realised this when he was gone. He called me and told me he missed me.

  ‘I want to be in bed with you,’ he said, and I could hear the smile in his voice and was startled by its fondness and lack of guile.

  How had I done it, broken down this man who seemed so like a statue, so unmoving and perfect? I marvelled at my own power.

  People said that you had to be yourself, and be strong and independent to be in love.

  They said that meekness and submission would only drive men away, that confidence was attractive. But I had done it, had worn him down with weakness.

  He did not love me – couldn’t, for what Me was there to love? What Me had he ever known? – but he had become attached to me, dependent on me.

  I had carefully created a circumstance in which a kind of love could be bred in him, like a scientist manipulating lab conditions.

  I had exhausted his reserves, eroded his natural resistance, and now I was finished.

  May 2014

  1

  At first I wrote my frustrations only to myself. I allowed myself to say to my diary, cautiously, that it was difficult to be with Ciaran, with a person so negative and la
cking in affection.

  Then, every few weeks, there would be some man who caught my eye in a particular way, made me feel vibrantly, visibly sexual. I had not felt bold this way in so long, and it came back to me how much I loved the brazen public nature of it.

  I stood on a tram gripping a handrail and looked up to see an attractively wealthy-looking man in an olive overcoat staring at me and I looked back just as boldly and for the rest of the journey we caught eyes again and again.

  When not looking directly at him I still presented myself to him, moving my lips, wetting them in a way that could just about be plausibly natural. My whole body was flush with the heat of it, between my legs bright with feeling.

  I wrote these incidents down. I wrote, timidly at first, and then with growing abandon, the kinds of things I would have liked the men to do to me. My diary became a valve. I got home from work and still I cooked our meals and asked how his day was, but would be looking forward already to when that was over and I could be alone with my thoughts. I wondered if he noticed that I no longer persisted when he ignored me or was spiteful, that I did not cry or panic or lock myself in the bathroom any more.

  We slept together less and less, but gradually enough that it was only cause for him to occasionally grumble, could be put down to the natural waning of long-term desire. He seemed not to notice that anything was really different in me.

  I still believed that I loved him. The love was so real to me. I wrote in my diaries about it. I blamed myself for what was wrong between us, my sexual wantonness and greed. I loved him, I wrote, but he wasn’t satisfying me sexually. I loved him, I wrote, but he just didn’t like the same things as I did. I needed to explore. I needed to experiment – but that didn’t mean I didn’t love him!