by Mari Reiza
In any case, it was not our fault. We did not control our calendars. These events and calls were living organisms that imposed themselves upon us like rapidly multiplying bacteria. Our dinner invites, our holidays, our wives’ birthdays, were all controlled by our assistants once we became Fathers. We were Enterprise leaders and Enterprise set the pace now.
‘Hey kid,’ Peter once said to me, ‘think it of as if time, money and love have become limited resources we compete for in a world where you either win or lose.’
Miriam trouble
Despite the relentless chaos I was living, I still hoped occasionally that I would rejoin the life of the living one day.
You, the Reader, are at this point thinking that you don’t believe me. But I was, I was still holding out that things would turn out right. I still had some friends like Carlo, though I hardly saw them. I had my parents. I had my wife... Maybe.
Miriam had given up having any children, at least with me. I did not have time for them. For Christ’s sake! I did not even have time to make them and that was supposed to be the easy part. But of course, it was not all right with Dad, for whom life was centred on procreation, ‘If you are not killing yourself for your children then who (the fuck) are you doing it for?’ He did not say ‘fuck’ but I knew he wanted to. ‘What will happen to the famous Choudhary name?’
How could I grasp what was occurring, let alone to start taking the situation in hand?
I had no time. I was on air 24/7.
My mind wasn’t anywhere it ought to be. I was by now sleeping less than five hours a night and travelling over twenty-thousand air miles a week. That was when I wasn’t based in Southern Europe, clocking road miles. That week Bari-Assisi-Aosta-Roma-Bologna, which Niccoló kept sharing with pride had made me feel like a lorry driver. I kept thinking that we may run into Peter’s dad, the truck driver, at some petrol station, bringing some English celery into Niccoló’s beloved Republic.
I constantly woke up in unknown hotels where I asked for espresso at the wrong time in the wrong language, was shipped around in cars which all looked surprisingly similar, to patient buildings that looked surprisingly similar, to sit in offices which were surprisingly similar, to say things that sounded surprisingly similar for around five minutes, and would spend the rest of the day hooking into identical, ten-minute, back-to-back conference calls across geographies and time zones, with thousands of similarly bored, tired people with nothing to say. The only thing that changed was the coffee. I could still distinguish good from bad coffee when I could get one, and they were mostly bad coffees.
I had stopped hoping for any decent food, alcohol or entertainment. My whiskeys, my poems, my sitar, all a long lost dream.
Except when I was travelling in BA’s business class, those seats that had become my hole of misery, smelling of greed and anxiety, of warmth and comfort. At least they came with decent wine lists. With all the miles I was clocking and the advice I was giving the pretty stewardesses (I ignored the ugly ones, obligatory), I thought that I should get a cut from BA wine buyers’ salaries.
Fellow passengers abhorred my funny noises as, with my lips pursed, I drew some airplane breeze into my mouth and exhaled it through my nose to air the aromas of the wine. I was convinced this worked even better with the rarefied air of the plane Frank Sinatra had talked about. That noise had been a long-standing joke with Carlo, from our wine-tasting course days, and it was my signature. ‘Screw everyone else!’ I would say. ‘If they want to have a silent plane they can travel by private jet, the fuckers.’
Fuck the miles and the BA companion ticket and all that shit my peers talked about. All I wanted from BA was a cellar in the skies, so I could get utterly drunk. Drunk to forget.
‘Drunkenness is so often necessary in this difficult life.’ Pretty stewardesses loved that line.
And then, one foggy morning, December 2009, I landed home, sleep-needy from the red eye.
Nothing special about that.
After a hellish drive from Heathrow, I got to Elgin Crescent, the flat that Miriam and I had chosen because of its back door opening onto bramble-filled communal gardens where our kids were going to run free at the heart of the big city.
I opened the door.
It was dark and it smelled empty. I saw a note by the entrance, on the floor, handwritten. I thought it would be from our cleaner. We had one, right?
It was Miriam’s. I was used to her abusive text messages, my phone was awash with them. But I could have never remembered what her handwriting looked like, nor what her hands looked like, when I thought about it.
The note read, ‘What you need is not love but a social convention. You want the care of a reassuring mother who sets you free. All love must be circular. Unrequited love doesn’t survive, it is a paradoxical myth. I am moving to New York. You are finally free. Wife.’
As I read ‘Wife’, I was still holding on to my Tumi in my left hand and I used it to steady myself. In doing so, I saw my wedding band, shining at me in defiance. I banged the wall with my right hand and hurt my knuckles. I wanted to get at my own stupidity but I had never been a violent man. I could not even hit right.
What had I hoped for? A fairy-tale ending?
Dear Reader, I know you are judging me again, that you are thinking that you saw it coming, I know. But I was still gutted.
Had she texted me rather than old-fashioned writing, we could have arranged to see each other at JFK before my return, providing the schedules matched, I thought. And I immediately knew that I was becoming a horrible man. I went upstairs gasping for air and sat down on that hideous Fendi sofa.
I could not blame her. There is more demand for kids’ dancing lessons in New York. I had predicted it, hadn’t I? Her latest idea. She could not teach or dance, but her monied friends gave her that sense of security that everything could be achieved in life, that you had to follow your dream. ‘Monied ennui,’ as it was later defined by the office psychologist, ‘a current ailment that has replaced typhus these days.’ Amongst the people who could pay his fees!
Next the psychologist had said that she would come back.
‘What the fuck! She will not. I would not if I was her.’ And I didn’t need an overpriced psychologist to tell me otherwise.
Miriam had wanted to be a busy lady of leisure living in a partial brew of bourgeois boredom and hippy hedonism, a successful entrepreneur cum trophy wife cum free artist, a cool young thing with dogs and big expensive handbags, and coffee mornings and days spent flapping around in horrible gym leggings and trainers. ‘Curse the trashiness of those who can afford everything!’ I said aloud that fated day on the Fendi sofa, hoping to find relief. It had always bothered me, her trashy fad. It would have to be the title of a future poem by Vittal Choudhary, once I got my head around my waste of a life.
Miriam had really wanted a dog. ‘A dog is a transition into adulthood,’ she had once told me. ‘You get another level of consciousness, before kids.’
And it was no dogs in handbags anymore but large big dogs and doggy friends if you wanted to do it right. Then, after having kids, she would have wanted to hang out with the well-heeled bohos dropping their overachieving daughters off at their ninth extracurricular class of the day, after attending Pilates and brunches at 209 in Westbourne Grove, and ahead of evenings busy networking for her next big venture of the minute.
Miriam had wanted a classy 4x4 (if such a thing exists) with a Filipino constantly by her side to pick up the bags, the dog, the toddlers in uniforms by Stella McCartney of which there would be three, and to help her carry them around a Gucci Kids Christmas Charity Ball organised by her obstetrician, or a photo shoot at ilovegorgeous to jump start their modelling career, or to generally get on with the business of having nothing to do outside the charity ball and modelling seasons and the extracurricular activities and the grove brunches.
Please, Reader, don’t get me wrong. I know women like Miriam are clever, but sometimes they don’t help themselves.
>
This Filipino nanny should have come after a period of service in South Arabia, because those who did were the most obedient and grateful, apparently, after you had rescued them from their modern-day slavery. And you could feel better, too, for your charity. And Miriam would have insisted that this Filipino devoted herself to organise my socks. Because she hated having to do so. ‘I can hardly believe you were ever chosen to join Enterprise given the state of your sock drawer!’ she used to say.
And good on Miriam that she wanted all these things, because at that precise moment, at that precise moment we were living through, her dreams looked better than my aspirations. And I did not look the part for her dreams, though my money smelled right, because I did not look any part, because I was not there. I was not living. I was not anywhere physical or real. I was on air. I had chosen to be above everything and everyone. And we did not have kids, and Miriam really hated live-in nannies and they hated her, and our 4x4 would have felt really empty, and even our dog would have been sad. So it was just Miriam left alone with her great ideas, her big handbags and her trashy leggings. She was a bunch of unfulfilled dreams in bad need of someone to fulfill them with.
It must have been quite difficult to be married to someone who lived in another world like me, and to be consoled by friends who Miriam felt were overtaking us and rubbing it in. We were not part of the ‘Rotten Hill’ gang anymore and it hurt her. People around you influence who you are, and I wasn’t around to counter-influence one iota. What would I have had to offer anyway in my state? And now we were to become one of those London–New York couples I had always been mesmerised by.
I was getting all nostalgic, sitting on that hideous Fendi sofa.
I remembered when I first met Miriam and took her to that cinema in Oxford, the arty one. We ate hamburgers beforehand from a stall, over the filthy pavement. Or it could have been fish and chips stinking of vinegar, wrapped in newspaper. We went to that cinema so often. Once it was a film about writer’s block, Barton Fink. It was excellent. It was not there anymore, the cinema. I didn’t think so. Health and safety reasons, I believed. Another thing that had wrecked our lives.
But if I could have re-lived these last few years, would I have done anything differently? If I could have time-travelled to the past and changed my future, would I have made alternative choices? ‘All the time travelling in the world can't make someone love you.’ Who had said that? I say it cannot make you love someone either. Maybe I just didn’t love Miriam. It was easier to think that.
But still I knew I was at fault, that I had been absent-minded, living out of this world. The things she talked about had become of no concern to me, I had been so preoccupied with Enterprise. It was my insatiable quest to become a great man that had blinded me to the boring stuff. ‘Work only near the impact line. Focus on the impact line.’ Doing menial chores, following social rules, even paying taxes was just for normal people. I must have felt I was above that stuff and that my time was too precious to be wasted on it. If you got paid over a grand an hour for your work time, you wouldn’t waste ten minutes loading the washing machine right? (Not that I would have known how to.)
In practice, this meant that I was unprepared for any input into normal life other than offering Miriam my salary (she took it anyway). I didn’t know that dishwashers needed salt, or that washing machines and cooker hood extractor fans had filters that needed to be periodically cleaned or replaced. One day Miriam had complained about a water bill, and for a minute I had been surprised that water wasn’t free!
Someone had always taken care of these things for me, so that I could concentrate on moving up in the world. And after we married, that someone was her, Miriam, and in exchange I was to provide a lifestyle. Wasn’t that enough for a marriage anymore? Since when was this social convention to be abhorred? Had it been me who had turned our lives into Revolutionary Road, hopeless emptiness? We had not even moved to Richmond yet! At least it would never come to Gone Girl now.
Suddenly it hit me, ‘How will I tell Dad?’ There was no place to go, nowhere to run to.
I looked for the track and danced it, jumping on the sofa, hoping it would break.
The next morning, it was a Saturday.
I was yanked out of my sleep by the intercom. I jumped out of bed thinking that it might be Miriam, like the man who wakes up in the hospital hoping the crash had only happened in his head.
It was some missionary. ‘Do you have a moment to talk about Jesus Christ?’
‘Oh dear, what has he done this time?’ I said. ‘Fucked up his marriage to Mary Magdalene?’
I was sure, had the guy been in my shoes, he would have understood, but he seemed genuinely offended.
I calmed down over some shitty black coffee next. The milk had gone off.
I tried to re-assess my situation. I was a forty-ish, divorcé-ish, and I had a whole free weekend ahead to sort out what to do with my life. ‘What next?’
I searched frantically for hours.
All clues were telling me that keeping up with the Joneses was so much last year’s fad. The new thing now was FOMO, the Fear of Missing Out. And who better than a singleton to play that game? I would have time without Miriam not to miss out on anything now.
FOMO was apparently all about the era of post-materialistic values, self-actualisation, having experiences rather than owning stuff. It was a higher form of mental disease. In a way, I thought, I had played this bettering-myself game all my life. Don’t-miss-out seemed like a fun version of it. I was sure I could excel at it. A divorcé could not just stay at home hoping for a mermaid to come out of a can of sardines and save him. Or could he?
I was already making myself frantic, planning all engines running to go for the path less travelled, which seemed quite travelled after I collected all sort of funky ideas from different websites: from a week-long ritual mortification otherwise known as the Hoffman process; to a soul-enriching two-day rebirthing on the edge of mount Fuji; a life-affirming visit to Iceland’s Golden Circle; a four-day program sitting silently listening to Puccini and completing a tapestry; the very obvious running a marathon, canoeing in Zambezi, trekking through Bhutan or meditating in Thailand; Tai-Chi by night, watching the eruptions of Mount Stromboli; three days of tennis at sea at Kismet Kusadasi; reading V.S. Naipul to the blind; nude model classes From Pain to Paint; or the Mahabharata in Dutch, read by an Iranian storyteller.
I could have done with a flip chart and regretted not keeping one at home.
In the end, I thought maybe I could adopt a donkey, Pooh from Ivybridge, who ‘would do anything for a tasty snack, even picking up the bucket in his yard’. The donkey company promised updates by text. Or I could buy an iguana... I would buy a pet iguana, I had almost decided.
It was such a load of wank it was depressing after a while. Why did we do this to ourselves?
The ability of small things to forestall reflection on the weightiest issues.
Except when you were an Enterpriser you had reached a certain level of society, and you did not do simple things anymore.
What about going to a club to dance the night away?
Not complicated enough. Not fucking expensive enough!
Perhaps what I really needed was to spend time with people who could go somewhere beautiful, like China White nightclub, and look at the gorgeous girls rather than log into Bloomberg or listen to a BBC world news update over a bad connection on YouTube. But years had passed and I had become too old for that vibe too. China White may have even closed down for all I knew. Maybe Home House or the Electric Club or that club we used to think was for dirty old sados… Would I meet the right people there, people who were nothing like the people at Enterprise?
I knew in my heart I needed to leave Enterprise, but I certainly couldn’t do it now that Miriam had left me.
I consoled myself that, at least, I was not father to some pampered prats, with a bitchy ex-wife freaking out about everything from rose-scented self-cleaning natural fabric n
appies to organic, gluten-free cupcakes specially cooked by a local chef who had never seen a peanut, forced to spend my little free time in the unwanted company of terribly aged ex-friends also turned into utterly boring foolish parents, anxiously overlooking their spoiled, third-degree genius sprogs. It could have been worse and I was going to prove it to the world.
Vittal abandons himself to work
Fuck all that initial determination during that fatal weekend. After Miriam left, I resigned myself like a sleepwalker to let work interfere with me, to improve me and to save me.
Coming back to things that have always failed, I thought, may be the first sign of madness. But then again, habits are hard to break and that’s why they are called habits.
I also reasoned that, as any man’s course of life is governed by accident, we always find that he increases in superstition. (David Hume?)
Maybe Miriam leaving wasn’t an accident, so it must have been meant to smooth my path to devote myself to Enterprise. That was my superstition – would it prove to be tomorrow’s science?
I knew that my brain was no use to me. It was supposed to think for me, to give me the strength to make me human and better, but it was no use to me at all.
Soon after Miriam left me, Hammi became the Patriarch of Southern Europe at Enterprise, and he was back to liking me now that I was a Father.
I thought that perhaps being temporarily based in France (although based was a loose concept for global people like us) would help me, that Mum and Dad would nag me less, and I ran to Hammi with open arms, pretending that nothing had happened in my personal life, which was the case as far as Enterprise was concerned.
I even considered moving to Paris permanently but the balance of things was stacked against it. French people were known not to wash much, Hammi excepted. On the other hand, patisseries were open after work and I had always dreamt of being one of those chaps coming back home with a warm baguette under my arm. ‘I suffer the romance of the baguette,’ I had once confessed to Miriam back when we had been together. But patisseries were not open until 2 am, my average finishing time those days, and I could hardly go through a baguette every night on my own anyway. Yes, Paris was romantique, but I concluded it would be more helpful at this time to go for pure easy sex, for which London fared better. Sex was back permanently on my mind. Sex in London and work in Paris would keep me away from thinking about anything else.