Four Letter Word

by Joshua Knelman

  Yesterday, too, I realised that I have never told you how much I like you – this before your text, by the way. Love is different. Love is ridiculous. Love can just happen, as it did to you when you saw me and asked Ifeanyi to introduce us (exactly seventeen months and three days ago) and to me as you tried to charm me with your watery knowledge of Achebe’s work, but like requires reason. And yesterday I marvelled at how much I have come to like you. I like that you know when to leave and quietly shut my door and that when you do I never worry that you are not coming back. I like your cooking (I have never complimented you because I keep imagining those silly women who over-praise men for cooking, and those silly mothers who like to say, ‘My son can cook-oh, so no woman will use food to tempt him’). I like the way your butt looks in your jeans, that flat elegance that you don’t like me to point out, and I like that you make futile attempts at the gym to grow muscles we both know you never will and I like that you underline sentences in books to show me. I like that you like me and that your liking me makes me like myself.

  I will, by the way, never write anything like this to you again. So smile all you want now, atulu. I remember when I was a kid, reading books in small dusty Nsukka, and often encountering characters eating bagels. It was an elegant word, bagel. I wanted desperately to have a bagel. Years later, in New York City (on our first visit to America as a family), I was flattened to discover that a bagel is a dense doughnut. I imagine you saying ‘From where to where with this story?’ as you read this. Well, my point is that I never wanted marriage and so perhaps it will turn out to be something good, unlike the bagel which I wanted and which turned out to be remarkably boring.

  I have been reading your text over and over since yesterday and I have never felt so alive. So, yes, I suppose we should begin to talk of the possibility of getting married soon.

  Chioma

  ADAM THORPE

  My Lord, I now propose to read a letter from the late Colin Stock-Tremlett, dated 29 May of the same year. Your Lordship will find it at tab 3 of the bundle of written materials relied upon by the defence. I would like to point out that the accused has in fact no gas supplied to his home, and subsequently – his curiosity aroused – intercepted this letter before it reached the person for whom it was intended.

  Marilynne,

  You said your husband never opens bills. Thus the disguise. This is not from British Gas, from some mad or mistaken clerk (do they still have clerks?). This is from the man you met on Saturday, at the Arts Festival’s private buffet do. The solicitor. The solicitor called Colin, although you said you’d no memory for names. The solicitor who hated being a solicitor, who was forced into it by his father and his grandfather, custodians of the family firm since 1928, as a perusal of the crooked little house in Northcombe Lane and its buffed brass plaque will tell you. Remember?

  I hope you are reading this on your own, or at least not within squinting distance of your husband. I imagine you have tremendous self-control beneath your vivacious exterior, so that even if this lovingly faked gas bill has magically transformed itself into a billet-doux at, say, the breakfast table – with your husband opposite, grinning over the toast – I know you will not look alarmed and give everything away. I know you will carry on reading me quietly as if examining the estimated consumption, the VAT, the glossy rubbish that always accompanies the pecuniary hurt (a mere pinprick to you, I know). Or perhaps fold me carefully, to peruse later in the privacy of your bedroom.

  Because you know already what I am about to say.

  How many hours were we together? Intermittently together, at that? Four, I calculate. Derek Bintwell’s cottage is small, though very charming (I dealt with the original transaction, and he paid through the nose for it), and the kitchen table too large. Thus we were all pressed around the food when I first glimpsed you. I had brought the unpopular rice salad, needless to say. Do you remember me telling you this, right at the beginning? It made you laugh. My heart leapt. My own wife never laughs at anything I say. But you laughed, showing your perfect teeth.

  You were trying to find a place for your superb avocado mousse, which reminded me of a delicate tabernacle under threat from elbows and knives; I cleared a place for it and helped you lower it on to the scrubbed deal. Our fingers touched. The very first proper thing I said to you, as we were lowering the dish together through all those greedy hands, was: ‘That’s going to go down a lot better than my effort.’ You asked me which my effort was. I pointed to it and said: ‘What someone tomorrow’s going to call “the unpopular rice salad”.’ That’s when you laughed. We were practically shouting, of course, because the din in the kitchen was dreadful. People talk too much. They talk all the time. Those involved in the festival are particularly loquacious. In a word, they are bores. Actually, they are ghastly, most of them. Culture snobs. Refugees from Ascot, they look like, except that the horses have more brains. I could tell you a thing or two.

  A solicitor tends to see the worst side of people. I never wanted to be one.

  What I realised, once we’d broken out into the relative peace of the garden, was that you were different.

  You were beautiful and exotic, of course, that goes without saying. But your beauty was at one with your voice, your laughter, your ‘attitude’, as the young(er) say. It sparkled in your eyes as you looked at me, patiently listening to my nervous twaddle, which you seemed to appreciate. I was nervous because you were having a serious effect on my middle-aged composure. It was dusk, the gnats were busy, the moon was rising huge and swollen above the rustling corn (the location of Derek’s cottage, although enviable, is not for hay-fever sufferers like myself), and I was experiencing the most intense flush of happiness I can ever remember. I wanted to fling off my tie and shoes and run about the garden with you, hand in hand. I wanted to take you in my arms – not violently, of course, but tenderly – and dance for hours in the balmy air. Instead, I talked: mostly about myself, about my oh-so-thrilling life, filling you in on the local area, the Rotary Club, my solitary weekend hikes, the way in which our respectable family firm had been inveigled to sponsor the festival’s modern art installation – those ridiculous rubber fire buckets in the High Street, which have been the inevitable subject of angry letters to the Chronicle.

  I made jokes which you found amusing. You even found my sneezes amusing – or the way I turned them into something comically self-deprecating. You called my sense of humour ‘English, real dry’. I had the sense that you had at last met someone who wasn’t a polite Home Counties bore. I filled your glass with the festival’s indifferent Chilean red, and talked wine. Every comment you made, however brief, was worth its weight in gold: intelligence shone from your every sun-gilded pore.

  Thank God most of the invitees were stuffing their faces in the house.

  Then, when I asked you what you did, you said: ‘Nothing.’ ‘Nothing?’ ‘Zilch. My husband’s loaded. He’s older than me. He’s fat and old. He gets drunk. There he is.’

  You Americans, you have such a frank way with words. I looked and there he blew. I was so very pleased to see that he was, in fact, disgustingly fat. He was dressed in a crumpled white suit and was talking to Sarah, Derek’s estranged wife – the festival broke their marriage and gave me yet another case, but that’s by the by. And I could see he was pretty old, although the folds of stubbled blubber on his face made any precise calculation impossible. He bellowed something and then let forth a very deep and wheezy laugh. (Sarah was chatting him up well, on behalf of next year’s festival.)

  I turned to you and said, ‘It’s either him, or the polar bear.’ You frowned, remember? Not understanding, not at first. I elaborated: ‘The right of our species to be rich and fat, versus the survival of the polar bear. No argument, is there?’

  ‘Don’t say that too near him,’ you murmured, leaning towards me and raising your lovely eyebrows; ‘he gets dangerous when crossed. I mean that. That’s why he’s a millionaire. He keeps at least three guns.’

  Wra
pped in your scent, I could scarcely summon a coherent reply.

  Now, my dearest Marilynne, I don’t want you to think that I am prone to insulting people, millionaires or no. I am not even particularly bothered about the polar bear: in the long run, it’ll be just one more rather spectacular extinction in a planetary history of extinctions that have mostly gone unnoticed, unhindered.

  Let me explain. The previous night, I had been watching Planet Earth on television, and feeling particularly low. Deep in a ‘funk’. Pointless and pessimistic. I had not been to any of these extraordinary places passing before me on the screen. Neither would I ever be going to any of them in the future, were I (or they) to stay intact long enough for me to do so. My wife Jane hates travelling, and we always end up in Wales where we bicker in front of the fire. Now I was slumped on the sofa, while she was checking her spreadsheets in the dining-room (she is in the social services, and has little time for anything else). I felt plump and horrible, watching these doomed creatures and habitats. As you know, I am on the thin side: the feeling was purely psychological. Thus, when I saw your husband guffawing on the lawn the very next evening, my revulsion was for something that I had only just felt in myself. But – and this is the important point – it was now outside me. It had fled me like a diabolic spirit from a possessed body. This is because you were there in front of me, filling me with a sense of freshness and exhilaration. I no longer hated myself – or the human species!

  I think I might be avoiding the L-word. I am cautious, generally. I see situations through a legal lens. Cut and dried, pros and cons. Objectively. We have to remain above reproach, we local solicitors. Not that all of us do. But this one does. That’s what our reputation is built on, in this area. Honesty, honesty – and extreme confidentiality.

  When I was eighteen, however, I had long, greasy hair and played the drums. I wanted to be a rock drummer, a star like Phil Collins. I took drugs, I went for long walks and even wrote poetry. Then I grew up. Actually, my mother died, then I had a severe attack of shingles and, on my recovery, I was a changed person. I studied law and slipped into my grandfather’s and father’s shoes. I met Jane on a camping trip in Derbyshire: she had precisely the same type and colour of rucksack. Like yourself, we are childless, much to my father’s consternation – the firm’s line will be broken, the blood in the ink will run dry.

  We are childless due to chemical incompatibility.

  While I was talking with you in Derek’s garden, I felt the drummer within me stirring. I have never felt this with any woman, including Jane. It goes far beyond the physical. Ah yes, I found you extremely attractive, with your very dark and flamboyant head of hair, your large green eyes, your delicate chin, your general shapeliness of body (just ever-so-deliciously tending to fullness and roundness in that long, low-cut yellow dress, with its Spanish frills, that was quite unlike anything those faded festival-committee baggages were sporting), but I am speaking of elements of attraction far deeper than flesh.

  And then came the clinching moment.

  Do you remember what you said? Probably not: the wine was flowing freely by the end. You had briskly recounted your difficult small-town childhood in Nebraska, your abusive uncles and drunken half-Comanche single mother, your first husband’s attempt to start a vineyard in California, your violent separation and his subsequent suspicious death in a car crash, your brief spell as a go-go dancer in Las Vegas, your two (or was it three?) abortions, the reconciliation with your mother, your five-year wanderings in South America, your time out on the pampas as a female ‘gringo’ gaucho where you think you met a famous German ex-Nazi whose name I forget – while all this was naturally fascinating to me, putting my own brief, rebellious phase into cruel perspective, it was something you said just before Helen Dipley (Festival Treasurer) came over to us that hurled me into the state that I have remained in ever since – of complete and utter adoration.

  I asked if, while on the pampas (trying to comprehend the endless, lonely grasslands you’d described), you were not near any reasonably sized town?

  And your reply came without hesitation: ‘Honey, we were so not near any town of whatever darn size, it wasn’t true!’

  I mentally recorded that sentence, as I’m wont to do in my profession. For a start, no one had ever called me ‘honey’ before, except in an amateur production at my school, when I played a waitress in Annie Get Your Gun. Second, the sentence was very wittily formed, and completely naturally so. If you remember, I gaped as if wonderstruck, then laughed. Our eyes met – properly, I mean – in the thickening twilight.

  And then you said: ‘I like you.’

  I was opening my mouth to respond in similar albeit stronger fashion, when Helen Dipley came trotting up with some major, all-hands-on-deck crisis concerning the sponsors of the printed programme for the harp concert in the Methodist Hall. And then, as you know, we were never left alone together for the entire remainder of the evening.

  So this is my reply to your ‘I like you’.

  It could be boiled down to just three words. You can guess which those three words are.

  No, I have not been able to stop thinking about you over the last few days, even through the most atrociously, grindingly dull piece of legal tittle-tattle. Most of my work concerns divorce and property and petty crime, often simultaneously. I am not popular with the local police, who lie in wait for me in hedgerows, trying to nab me speeding. This is because I am honest and stand up for victims of local injustice, however uncouth those victims might appear to be. So, you see, I have my moments.

  The quiet knight.

  Shall I come galloping to you, my dearest Marilynne? Shall I wrest us from our mutual unhappiness?

  In short, do you have any excuse to see a solicitor?

  Piningly yours in hope and expectation – and, of course,

  in the very strictest confidence,

  Colin

  LIONEL SHRIVER

  From: Alisha Garrison [mailto: Alisha.Garrison@gmail.com]

  Sent: 12 August 2006

  To: Kaminsky, Seymour

  Subject: No Games

  Seymour,

  I realise that all the how-to books on love – which would also admonish me never to drop the L-word even in passing at this early a juncture – would command me to wait to contact you until days, perhaps even weeks have elapsed since our reluctant parting. I shouldn’t seem too eager, too desperate, too ‘needy’. And after getting no sleep whatsoever last night, I ought really to be taking a good long nap! But when I got home to Shepherd’s Bush, I was so agitated, so excited, so intoxicated with the sudden gloriousness of life in general that sleep was out of the question. We dispensed with so much in fast-forward; surely we’re already beyond childish romantic games. I cannot, I will not be coy. Acting politic, hard to get, unhurried would not only be a lie, but would besmirch with scheming and calculation the clarity, honesty and instant mutual recognition that we discovered so serendipitously. So though it’s only been a few hours, they already seem squandered. All this time I might have been writing to you!

  First things first: You said this address was the best way to reach you since your mobile had just been stolen. (Being set upon along the South Bank by a gang of ruffians no more than ten years old must have been so, well, unmanning! But I admired that you told the story honestly. Most men would have put fifteen years on their assailants just to save face.) I promised to lodge my phone number in your email queue, since all we could lay hands on at Mandy’s party was that grubby napkin on which you scrawled ‘skaminsky2@aol.com’. I’m touched you were already so concerned that these fragile, paltry digits that could nonetheless prove the password to so much happiness be stowed in a safe place. So enter this in your mobile’s phone book when you replace it. For that matter, have it tattooed somewhere private, on a patch of skin I never want another woman to glimpse again! (020) 7274-6738. (I know, I must be the only woman left in London without a mobile. You see – before last night! – I
fancied my solitude, and wending my way through the city had no desire to be reached – perhaps in any sense.) Please ring, my sweet. I know you don’t have a landline, but such a marvellous man must have many friends with phones! I cannot wait to hear your voice again. This is such a frustratingly cold medium in comparison to the heat of your touch, the warmth of your smile, the glow of your expression when you catch my eye.

  Of course, the disadvantage of writing so quickly is that I have little to report – yet everything to report! After a single night, you have utterly transformed my whole landscape. Even on the tube home, all the passengers looked so fascinating, pulsing with poignant stories that broke my heart. Do you know they stared at me? I know I looked a tad dishevelled (your fault!), but I don’t think that’s why I drew so much attention. I think I had a look. I was exploding with satiety, with a positively obnoxious self-satisfaction! They all appeared so miserable in comparison. And even the colours have changed. You know that A.A. Milne poem, from When We Were Six, I think – The cold is very cold; and the hot seems so hot? (Isn’t it funny that we grew up with the same enthusiasm for Pooh – although I do hope you don’t spot a scatological fascination in the word. As you discovered, my sexual inclinations are deliciously normal!) It’s been like that. The yellow’s so yellow, and the black’s so black!