by Lucy Ellmann
We leave, now both speechless.
Under the white light of the kitchen, his hands move up and down my body, lingering on my breasts. As I cling to him, I remember the charms of his body, that are by now listed, Marvel-like, in my mind. The black curls on the back of his neck, the soft flesh of his shoulders and the hard thighs. His jaunty step, and the way he fucks, frowning, murmuring, frowning, yelling, sometimes weeping. The thick fingers that have loved me, that are driving into me now.
I open my mouth to kiss the corner of his lips, his chin, the hard line of his jaw, and press myself against him. A child’s request for juice comes from the next room. Disentangling ourselves, the fridge is opened and the juice duly poured. Seated in a relaxed pose on a chaise-longue is a little girl with four dimples on each hand, watching a TV program that’s as incomprehensible to me at that moment as it is to her.
‘Don’t you sit around feeling your balls all day?’ I asked him one day, feeling his balls.
‘Not when I have a heavy schedule.’
‘There’s nothing like it!’
‘There’s nothing like a lot of things,’ he said, with his hand in my cunt.
‘I want to fuck you till your ears drop off.’
I knew I was in a bad way when I could no longer read a book. I couldn’t even get through the first sentence of a book. Never since my first painful exposure to Aesop had I been without the burden of a book.
The only things I could now read were personal ads, TV guides, problem pages, recipes, technical handbooks, and junk mail (I even stole Jeremy’s sometimes). My life proceeded roughly along these lines:
Do you know someone who would like the same peace of mind that you already enjoy as an AA member?
You can buy swimwear especially made for women who have lost a breast, but lots of ordinary swimsuits will fit you perfectly well. You can make a good breast form for swimming by trimming an ordinary synthetic sponge to the shape of the cup in your swimsuit and sewing it in. When you get out of the water, press your arm against the cup to squeeze out most of the water.
Wine is for drinking – not just academic study.
For this experiment you will need a spring balance and some rubber suckers.
ENRICHED FLOUR (FLOUR NIACIN, IRON, THIAMINE MONONITRATE, RIBOFLAVIN), DARK BROWN SUGAR, PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED VEGETABLE SHORTENING, SUGAR, DRIED DATES, WALNUTS WITH BHA ADDED TO PROTECT FLAVOR, SALT, SODIUM BICARBONATE, SODIUM ALUMINUM PHOSPHATE, NATURAL FLAVOR.
It was after watching a weepy made-for-TV movie about a child dying of leukemia that I finally knew how sad I was about my father. That he was wasting away, that he was being taken from me, out from under me.
I had tried rationality: everybody has to go.
I’d tried: what good’s life anyway – I want to die.
I’d tried viewing death as an injustice, an immense wrong done to every living thing. Apples falling off trees.
I’d tried general unfocused anger. I’d built a wall of it around myself, seeing everybody and everything – even spaghetti bolognese – in a ghastly new light.
I’d felt disgust, shame, indifference towards my father, and recoiled from his condition. I was so cold. I was so cold.
I’d tried self-hatred – thereby giving myself the excuse to slouch away.
And all to hide this little hurt, this little pain that was now revealed, the pain of loving someone who’s dying.
After all after all after all, he was someone I knew and loved, knew and loved, and he was dying.
Suicide was suddenly the opposite of my desire: I wanted the whole bloody world to live! Life isn’t so bad – there are redwood trees surging straight up, there’s Cornwall, there are lampshades made of straw wound sweetly round in circles, there are certain female arms by Picasso, there are men who fuck you tenderly in the dark, there are the perfect forms of cats, electric heaters available at a fair price, bel canto arias and the first few pages of Dombey & Son. What the hell, what’s wrong with it?
Only death.
The Dull, Stale, Tired Bed
Dear Professor Cruikshank,
I am writing to find out if my supervisor is right in thinking that I would not be eligible for another extension in order to allow me to finish my dissertation. I understood that extensions are given on the grounds of illness or compassionate circumstances. My father is ill and I am compassionate.
It’s like showing your cunt to a doctor, having to tell strangers your father is dying. You feel so grateful if they’re kind about it, since you’re showing them something much more important to you than to them. You feel so soft and pathetic.
I got no answer to this letter.
Shortbread has beneficial effects on the soul. The warm glow it gives is better than alcohol, and more readily available than sex. Only 90p for a box (cardboard) of the best brand. Doesn’t always work though.
I wrote letters all day, while vaguely stewing about Mr Wednesday’s trip to Devon with his wife. I was finding it increasingly painful, the fact that he was married. And his wife was not my only rival: when he joined three evening classes and bought himself a two-disc computer, I should have known it was over.
He took me to Belgium for a long weekend. The jet-foil moved us swiftly away from England, two adulterers with our multi-colored consciences, and my fancy nightwear – I contentedly experiencing a jet-foil for the first time, and he clutching our return tickets. I followed him around boats and trains, longing to fuck him.
We took a room with long windows in a Brussels hotel which had once housed the Dukes of Brabant, and tumbled around on the bed at last, saying things like ‘I’m hot for you.’ We later ate crustaceans.
He called home the next day and found out his wife was pregnant. Their first child (she was by now only willing to copulate on ovulation days). Also, the cat had been poisoned. One or other. I didn’t quite believe any of it, but couldn’t say so. We stayed on another night – he was anxious to get back, but it would have looked too suspicious for him to return from his Business Trip early. In Bruges, he bought a smoked eel, a decorative biscuit in the shape of a cat, and some Ardennes paté to take home.
Things that love nights
Love not such nights as these.
That night, hankering to be home, he lay on the hotel bed and meditated out loud on the unpleasantness of my face upside-down. He bit me quite a bit. His caresses turned into condescending pats, mid-stroke. I kept feeling my breasts bulging out from under him in unexpected ways. He commented on how cold my skin felt. He became pedantic or admonitory on all subjects of discussion.
The next day, we pursued a good time with what time was left, except that every time he mentioned his wife, I cried.
All time tables are subject to alteration or cancellation without notice. Connections are not guaranteed.
It’s the optimistic names of boats that make you feel sick when they sink: the Steadfast II, the Spirit of Free Enterprise, Q.E. III, Perfection Personified IV. We parted amicably enough at Victoria Station and took our respective tubes home with our respective duty-frees. I ate half a loaf of bread and slept for fifteen hours – I had not returned to England refreshed. As per usual.
Finally, clean the biting surfaces of your teeth. Hold the brush so the filaments are flat onto the teeth and use the vibratory brushing actions to remove any food particles from the grooves and crevices.
When they no longer vibrated like plucked strings in each other’s presence, they met up for a bad movie at the Screen on the Green. After it he told her he didn’t want to Jeopardize his Marriage. Suzy was sweet and understanding, and as he watched her walk down Upper Street, for a worrying moment he thought, ‘Why did I do that?’ But he was surprised later how she’d slipped his mind: in fact it was a great relief. He returned home to his pregnant wife and recuperating cat.
Suzy returned home to a scene of devastation: Lily’s toys lay sprawled about the dining-room, as if a massacre had taken place. One doll lay with her head to the side, l
egs slightly open, smiling in death. Even the corkscrew lying on the kitchen counter with its arms up looked dead to her.
‘The grave’s a fine and private place.’
Marzipan Fruits
Franny and John had decided to get married, which pleased Daddy, who wanted to see us all settled. He wanted me to get divorced (Americans can’t understand why this should take five years).
John wanted a Buddhist wedding: he’d been chanting his desires to the universe for many years. Franny was full of the joys of Spring. It did seem to be Spring. The necessity of flimsy attire, the Butlin’s feeling of mob merriment, the pressure on everyone to change all previous plans – how I hate English sunny days.
When I asked Daddy what he wanted for his birthday, he said, ‘Another birthday.’ Instead, I bought him a few books, though I felt it was a bit presumptuous to choose him a book, when he’d been guiding me towards books all my life. One goes on needing a book right up to death – it’s almost inevitable that every keen reader in the world will die in the middle of one, pages left unturned. On Daddy’s suggestion, I had begun Dombey & Son, but hadn’t gotten very far with it.
I made him a huge marbled chocolate and vanilla angel-food cake – like a foretaste of heaven – which Lily decorated with Marzipan fruit which he had always loved but could no longer chew, colored candy dots, and sixty-nine candles.
Franny’s book on artistic abuse of materials was something of a best-seller, as art books go. She didn’t bother to give me a copy, but I took a look at Daddy’s:
‘“I’m for an art covered with bandages, I am for art that limps and rolls and runs and jumps. I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life, that twists and extends impossibly and accumulates and spits and drips, and is sweet and stupid as life itself.”
The faculty of art to immortalize its creator has thus been eroded to the point where the impermanence of animal life is self-destructively emulated by the work of art.’
I was spending a lot of evenings driving around Chelsea, where it was easy to drive slow and look into lighted uncurtained windows. I was fascinated by all the different bijou decisions about decor, the disastrous lighting arrangements. But I hated to catch a glimpse of the inhabitants – I wasn’t sure if this was because I was scared of being taken for a voyeur, or simply because I hated people. I liked to stop at the Midnight Shop in Knightsbridge on the way home, to get provisions.
There is so much love in your heart, you could heal the entire planet.
Daddy asks me what I think of a Healing Tape some friend of Saskia’s sent him from California:
Allow the love from your own heart to flow through your veins, arteries, and capillaries, so that all your cells are joyful as they go about their business of keeping you healthy.
Diseases are the body’s way of telling us we are on the wrong track: every illness contains a lesson for us to learn.
But when we are ready to make positive changes in our lives, we automatically attract what we need to help us in that task. The very fact that you have found me and this tape proves that you have begun the process of healing yourself. Thanks for listening – I’ll wait for you on the other side of the tape.
My opinion is that there are probably a lot of people waiting for that woman on the other side of eternity. But I don’t say this to Daddy – Saskia might scold me for thwarting a potential cure. I avoid saying anything about it. I can’t even look at Daddy any more without care over my expression. I go hard and blasé so he won’t catch a whiff of my despair. So I won’t too.
The Oldest Hath Borne Most
I saw him get horribly, repulsively, frighteningly ill, but still I didn’t know he was dying. I knew he had a fatal disease, I knew his doctors had said he had little time to live, but I didn’t realize he was dying. For months I watched his friends trail through Oxford to say goodbye, but I didn’t say goodbye. They wrote him letters, but I didn’t. They knew but I didn’t.
On the morning before he died, my father was cold and gray, his lips turned blue, he could hardly breathe, he was barely conscious: I thought he might feel better after a sleep.
Franny and I stayed in the hospital that night, sleeping together in a little room for the first time in years. We were called back to Daddy’s bedside at 3.00 in the morning. He was dying and I told him I loved him. I thanked him for enabling me to have Lily. Franny told me to shut up, but I went on. He revived enough to take my face once more in his hand. I revived enough to finally try to fight his death. I held his dying body in my arms, I tried to pump his lungs to make him breathe. I said, ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy – breathe!’ The doctor shook his head: nothing more to be done. ‘Thank you for everything you’ve done for me, Daddy. Daddy. Daddy.’ I held my father in my arms, for the first time in years, for the last time, my dear father who was still warm, still hot from life, and urged him to fight like an American, and he died. He died.
Nothing will Come of Nothing: Speak Again
‘I DON’T WANT ANYBODY TO SEE MY FATHER, ESPECIALLY MEMBERS OF MY FAMILY, UNTIL YOU GET HIM OUT OF THOSE FUCKING RUFFLES AND THAT FUCKING PURPLE CURTAIN AND THAT FUCKING VEIL!’ I yelled at the night porter, while he tried, and failed, to keep from smirking. I’d just brought Saskia straight from Heathrow to see my father. He was wheeled into a tiny chapel for us, an annex of the hospital morgue, where he’d been dressed in a white cotton sac, adorned with baptismal frills at the neck. We stood in the fridge with him for some time.
Later that night I returned to London to collect Lily. I was tired of being ineptly comforted by kind people who didn’t want to touch me. When I got into bed with her, Lily seemed to know what was required and hugged me tight.
The betrayal of letting him die is matched only by the sense of sacrilege when I tell myself that he is dead. I’m fiercely angry. I sit on the floors of loos and plot obscene punishments for everyone involved. I go over the house, where Daddy so recently was, again and again, and steal things. I wear his sweater, his coat, I take his money and some books and a cuff-link box I’ve always liked (that perhaps I even gave him), as if he hadn’t given me enough. I take them as a posthumous show of love and try to forget what he hated about me. The Ph.D. that never saw the light of day, the light in Daddy’s eyes. I grew up thinking that Art History was the only profession worth pursuing, that everybody’s house is full of chaises-longues. What to do? What to do with the chaises-longues?
I want to murder his doctor. People tell me this is just a product of grieving, but I really do want to murder his doctor.
Dear Dr,
I am writing to you on behalf of my family to thank you for all you did for my father, and to express to you our sincere wish that you take your N.H.S. ‘courtesy calls’ and your ‘two sides to every issue’ and stuff them up your two-faced medicinal ass.
Franny is angry at me. She’s full of the mysteries of death and doesn’t want them disturbed by my anger.
Christmas Mourning
Oxford
We all get together for Christmas six months after Daddy’s death (as we must), Franny and I barely on speaking terms. The usual fury over the cooking, the gift wrapping and unwrapping, are all carried out under a cloud of mutual displeasure. I give her some nice earrings which she likes, and a star-fish pot-holder. She fails to give me a copy of her latest book, but offers instead a pair of naughty knickers that don’t fit.
Later that afternoon, we watch La Traviata on TV together, and weep.
A Note on the Author
Born in Illinois, Lucy Ellmann was dragged to England as a teenager. Her first novel, Sweet Desserts, won the Guardian Fiction Prize. It was followed by Varying Degrees of Hopelessness, Man or Mango? A Lament, Dot in the Universe, Doctors & Nurses and, most recently, Mimi. She now lives in Edinburgh.
By the Same Author
Varying Degrees of Hopelessness
Man or Mango? A Lament
Dot in the Universe
Doctors & Nurses
Mimi
First published by Great Britain 1988
This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © Lucy Ellmann, 1988
The moral right of the author has been asserted
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