by Tony Parsons
Cyd loved London the way only a foreigner could love it. She saw past the stalled traffic, the dead pubs, the congealed poverty of the projects. She looked beyond the frightened pensioners, the girls who looked like women, the women who looked like men, the men who looked like psychos. She saw beyond all of that. She told me the city was beautiful.
“At night,” Cyd said. “And from the air. And walking across the royal parks. It’s so green—the only city I ever saw that is greener than Houston.”
“Houston’s green?” I said. “I thought it was some dusty prairie town.”
“Yeah, but that’s because you’re a dumb Limey. Houston is green, mister. But not as green as here. You can walk right across the center of town through the three royal parks—St. James’s, Green Park, Hyde Park—and your shoes never touch anything but green, green grass. Do you know how far that is?”
“A mile or so,” I guessed.
“It’s four miles,” she said. “Four miles of flowers, trees, and green. And people riding horses! In the heart of one of the biggest cities on the planet!”
“And the lake,” I said. “Don’t forget the lake.”
We were in the café up on the first floor of a huge white building from the thirties on Portland Place—the Royal Institute of British Architects, right across the street from the Chinese embassy, a monumental oasis of beauty and calm that I never knew existed until she took me there.
“I love the lake,” she said. “I love the Serpentine. Can we still hire a rowing boat at this time of the year? Is it too late?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. It was the last week in September. “We might be able to get a boat for a few more days. You want to try?”
Those wide-set brown eyes got even bigger.
“You mean now?”
“Why not?”
She looked at her watch.
“Because I’ve got to get to work,” she smiled. “Sorry. I would have loved it.”
“Then how about tomorrow? First thing. Before the crowds get there. We’ll get an early start. I’ll meet you at your place after breakfast.”
I still hadn’t seen her flat.
“Or I could come to your place after I get through at work tonight,” she said.
“Tonight?”
“That way we would really be sure of getting an early start.”
“You’ll come to my place after work?”
“Yes.” She looked down at the clouds in her coffee and then back at me. “Would that be okay?”
“That would be good,” I said. “That would be great.”
***
Maybe the thing with Cyd had started off as some dumb infatuation when I was still reeling from Gina leaving me.
But after we slept together for the first time it really wasn’t like that anymore. Because Cyd’s mouth fit mine in a way that no other mouth ever had—not even Gina’s.
I’m not kidding—Cyd’s mouth was a perfect fit. Not too hard, not too soft, not too dry, not too wet, not too much tongue, and not too little tongue. Just perfect.
I had kissed her before, of course, but this was different. Now when we kissed, I wanted it to go on forever. Our mouths could have been made for each other. And how often can you say that? How often do you find someone whose mouth is a perfect fit for yours? I’ll tell you exactly—once. That’s how many times.
There are a lot of nice people in the world, a million people who you could fall in love with. But there’s only one person out there whose mouth is a perfect fit.
And despite everything that happened later, I still believe that. I really do.
***
In the early hours, I watched her while she was sleeping, loving it that she was on my side of the bed, happy that she knew so little about my old life that she hadn’t automatically taken Gina’s side.
I drifted off knowing that we had begun, and it was up to the two of us what side of the bed we slept on.
And then she woke up screaming.
***
It was only Pat.
Disturbed by drunks staggering home at the end of a Saturday night, he had stumbled out of his bed and crawled into mine, never really waking, not even when he threw a leg over Cyd’s waist and she woke up as if someone was kicking in the window.
She turned toward me, hiding her face in her hands.
“Oh God—I thought—I don’t know what I thought. I could see you. But I could feel someone else.”
I put my arm around her shoulders, trying to comfort her. Pat was out cold on her side of the bed, his mouth open, his arms above his head, his smooth round face turned away from us, but one leg still draped over Cyd.
“I’m all right, I’m all right,” she said, gently removing Pat’s leg. She slid over me and got out of bed, not sounding all right at all.
I thought she was going to the bathroom. But when she didn’t come back after five minutes I went looking for her. She was sitting at the kitchen table wearing a shirt of mine that she must have found in the laundry basket.
I sat down beside her, taking her hands. I kissed her on the mouth. Softly, lips together. I loved to kiss her all different ways.
“I’m sorry he scared you,” I said. “He does that sometimes. Climbs in my bed, I mean. I should have warned you.”
“I’m okay.”
“Are you sure?”
She shook her head.
“Not really.”
“Listen, I’m really sorry he frightened you like that. I’ll try to make sure it doesn’t happen again. I’ll put a lock on my door. Or tie him down. Or—”
“It’s not Pat,” she said. “It’s us.”
“What do you mean?”
“We haven’t really talked, have we?”
“Sure we have. I told you about Gina. You told me about the guy who was into the bamboo. The one who wasn’t Rhett Butler. We talked a lot. We got all the sad stories out of the way.”
“That’s the past. I mean we haven’t talked about now. We don’t know what the other one wants. I like you, Harry. You’re funny and you’re sweet. You’re good with your boy. But I don’t know what you’re expecting from me.”
“I’m not expecting anything.”
“That’s not true. Of course you are. Same as I am. Same as anyone is when they start sleeping together or holding hands in beautiful buildings and getting all dreamy over coffee and all that. Everyone is expecting things. But I’m not sure if they’re the same things.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well—do you want more children?”
“Jesus. We just slept together for the first time.”
“Ah, come on. You know in your heart if you want more children or not, Harry. I don’t mean with me. I mean with anyone.”
I looked at her. As it happens I had been thinking about it a lot.
“I want more children if the person I have them with is going to be with me forever. Okay?”
“But nobody can guarantee that they’re going to stay together forever.”
“Well, that’s what I want. I don’t want to go through it all again. I don’t like seeing all the pain and disappointment that you pass on to some innocent little kid who didn’t ask for it and who doesn’t deserve it. I didn’t like going through all that with Pat and I’m never going through it again, okay? And neither is any child of mine.”
“Sounds very noble,” she says. “But it’s not really noble at all. It’s just your get-out clause. You want more children, but you only want them if you’re guaranteed a happy ending. But only Walt Disney can guarantee you a happy ending, Harry. And you know it. Nobody can ever give you that kind of guarantee. So everything just—I don’t know—drifts.”
I didn’t like the way this was going. I wanted more kisses. I wanted to watch her sleeping. I wanted her to show me beautif
ul buildings that I never knew existed. And the boats—we were still going on the boats, weren’t we?
“You can’t just transfer your heart to another woman after your marriage breaks up, Harry. You can’t do it without thinking a little about what you want. What you’re expecting. Because if you don’t, then seven years down the line you will be in exactly the same place you reached with Gina. I like you and you like me. And that’s great. But it’s not enough. We have to be sure we want the same things. We’re too old for games.”
“We’re not too old,” I said. “For anything.”
“Too old for games,” she said. “As soon as you’ve got a kid, you’re too old for games.”
What did she know about having a kid?
“I have to go home,” she said, standing up.
“What about rowing on the lake?” I said.
“Rowing on the lake can wait.”
twenty-four
“It’s the ding-dong man,” Peggy said.
She was sitting on the floor playing with Star Wars figures, lost in some weird happy families game where Darth Vader and Princess Leia set up home on the Millennium Falcon and spend their evenings trying to get Harrison Ford to go to sleep.
Pat was standing on the sofa, massive headphones wrapped around his ears, groaning and rolling his eyes to the heavens and swaying from side to side as he listened to Sally’s tape.
“The ding-dong man is coming,” Peggy said to no one in particular, lifting her head with a secret smile.
At first I didn’t have a clue what she was going on about. Then I heard what her new five-year-old ears had picked up a lot earlier than my decrepit old lugholes—a chiming of distant bells that seemed to echo around the neighborhood.
They didn’t have the dull insistence of church bells. There was something tender and cheap and unexpected about them—they were an invitation rather than a command.
Naturally I remembered those bells from my own childhood, but for some reason I was always surprised to find that they still existed. He was still out there, still doing the rounds, still asking the children to put down their games and come into the street and stuff their happy little faces with sugar and milk. It was the ice cream man.
“The ding-dong man,” Peggy said.
I pretended I hadn’t heard her, turning back to the work that was spread out before me on the coffee table. Peggy wasn’t even supposed to be here. This wasn’t one of the afternoons that she came home with Pat. It was the day before the show and I had a shooting script to wade through, a task I found much easier when Pat and Peggy were not squawking on the carpet or listening to Sally’s tape and those songs about bitches, gangsters, and guns. Peggy was a sweet kid and never any trouble. But on a day like today, I preferred to have Pat squawking on the carpet alone.
Peggy was only here because her useless, chain-smoking babysitter had not been at the school to pick her up.
I had gone to meet Pat and found the pair of them holding hands at the gate, chatting away to Miss Waterhouse, their adoring faces lifted toward their young teacher.
Miss Waterhouse left us with a big grin and went off to do whatever primary school teachers do for the second half of the day while we waited for Bianca’s thin, sallow face to come coughing through the crowds in a halo of cigarette smoke. Except that Bianca didn’t show up.
So the three of us stood at the school gates holding hands and as all those young moms swirled around us collecting their children, I stood among their bright chatter and car fumes feeling like the neighborhood leper.
There were all kinds of young mothers outside those school gates. There were moms with Range Rovers and those waxed green coats that are made for the country. There were moms who caught the bus in ankle bracelets. And there were all the young moms in the middle who had enough sense not to have their partner’s name tattooed on their shoulder, but who weren’t rich or stupid enough to ferry around their five-year-old in an enormous four-wheel drive with hull bars on the front.
But whether they were in ankle bracelets or headbands, Prada or polyester, these young mothers all had one thing in common. They all looked at me as if I was the enemy.
At first I thought it was paranoia. I hardly had to explain that my marriage had broken up—just being there, a man alone, always without the company of a woman—unless it was my mother—was like drawing a diagram of our broken home and hanging it on the school gates. But these women didn’t even know me or Gina—so why should they dislike me? I decided that I must be feeling thin-skinned and sensitive after all the changes of the last few months.
But as the term wore on and the days got darker and shorter, I came to realize that it wasn’t paranoia at all. Young mothers didn’t talk to me. They avoided my eye. They really didn’t want to know. At first I tried to engage some of them in small talk and they acted as if I had asked them for a blow job. So after a while, I didn’t bother.
All those moms smiling sweetly at each other, they would really have preferred it if I wasn’t there. It got to the point where I tried to time my arrival at the school gates to the very second when the children were set free. Because I couldn’t stand being around all those young mothers. And they couldn’t stand being around me.
The teachers were always very friendly to me, and when I was talking to Miss Waterhouse it was easy to convince myself that I was part of the modern world where men could be single parents too. But that was proved to be a load of crap any time I had to pause at the school gates.
Whether they were from the big white houses or the projects, the mothers always gave me a wide berth. It had started on the first day of school and it had somehow continued through all the other days.
The women with headbands had more in common with the women in ankle bracelets than they did with me. The women who were single parents had more in common with the women who had partners than they did with me. At least that’s how they all acted.
It was all very English and understated, but there was no denying that the suspicion and embarrassment were always there. There might be understanding and enlightenment for a single father with a little kid out in the working world. But here at the sharp end of parenting outside those school gates, nobody wanted to know. It was as if Pat and I were a reminder of the fragility of all their relationships.
But when Bianca failed to show up and I stood waiting for her with Pat and Peggy, it felt like it was even more than that. Those mothers seemed to look upon me as a reminder of the thousand things that could go wrong with men.
Standing at those gates, I felt as though I was an ambassador for all the defective males in the world. The men who were never there. The men who had pissed off. The men who couldn’t be trusted around children.
Well, fuck the lot of them. I was sick of being treated like the enemy.
It wasn’t that I minded being considered an oddball. I expected to be considered an oddball. After all, I knew I was an oddball. But I was tired of carrying the can for every faulty man in the world.
I loathed Peggy’s babysitter—this girl who couldn’t even make it to the gates of a primary school at an appointed hour, this useless coughing cow who couldn’t even manage to get a phone call to the teacher to warn us that she wasn’t coming, bloody Bianca with her modern name and her modern assumption that someone else would take care of her responsibility.
But at least Peggy wasn’t her child. And far more than the bitterness I felt toward Peggy’s useless babysitter was the loathing I felt for Peggy’s useless parents.
It’s true that I didn’t really know anything about them, apart from the fact that her father was out of the picture and that her mother worked strange hours. But in all the important ways, I felt that I knew everything about them.
Peggy’s dad clearly took his parental responsibility about as seriously as he would a fortnight’s package holiday in Florida. And it didn’t really matt
er if Peggy’s mom was some hot shot in the city or if she was supplementing her welfare state pocket money with a dip in the black economy. She obviously put her daughter’s well-being at the bottom of her list of life’s priorities.
They were typical modern parents. They were incapable of looking after this child. And if there was one thing that I had grown to hate, it was people who bring a kid into the world and then figure that the difficult bit is done.
Well, fuck the pair of them too.
So after the crowds were starting to thin out, just when all the young moms had gone and the worst was over and I didn’t actually mind standing at the school gates anymore, we went into the front office and I told the secretary that Peggy was coming home with us.
Delighted at their unexpected chance to hang out together, Pat and Peggy squealed with delight as they crammed their little bodies into the front seat of the MGF. And I found myself making an effort not to cry, which was something I found myself doing every once in a while at those school gates. I felt sorry for Peggy just as I felt sorry for Pat. We mess up our lives and it is these forlorn little figures who pick up the bill.
Now I looked at her playing quietly on the floor, ignored even by Pat as he listened to Sally’s brutal songs, the bells of the ding-dong man starting to fade away, and I felt a knot of regret and shame in my heart.
“Do you want an ice cream?” I asked her, feeling about as inadequate as I had ever felt in my life, feeling that I owed her some sort of apology.
Sorry about the collapse of the modern marriage, Peggy. Sorry that adults these days are so self-centered and dumb that we can’t even manage to bring up our own children. Sorry that the world is so messed up that we think about our sons and our daughters about as deeply as the average barnyard animal.
But how about a Cornetto?
***
I was paying the ice cream man for three 99s when Cyd came around the corner.
“You want a 99?” I asked her.
“What’s a 99?”
“One of these,” I said. “A cornet with a chocolate flake stuck in it. They’re great.”