The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay

by Andrea Gillies

  “Of pursuing new women,” Anna interjected.

  “It’s not about that,” he said, in his practiced tutorial fashion. “Why must you be so reductive?”

  “You don’t love me anymore,” Anna said, her voice breaking.

  “No, I don’t think that I do,” Robert told her, looking pained. “I don’t know why. I’ve felt this way for a while. I can’t explain it. It’s just something that’s happened. I’m sorry this is happening now. I’m sorry, Nina, that you had to be here for this.”

  Nina had fled to her room, and Anna had gone after her, to comfort her.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Everything had been fine, or at least in some kind of balance, or at least in abeyance, until Francesca became ill. The illness was a shock to everybody, but wasn’t at first regarded as a crisis, because it was thought that the cancer had been detected early. By mid-May in the year before she died she’d had surgery and chemo and seemed to be on the mend, and she and Luca went away to a swanky hotel to celebrate. The day they got back was also the day that Nina and Paolo went off to Rome for their annual visit; Nina accompanied him there on business every spring. Thanks to this overlap of away dates there hadn’t been any contact with Luca for over a week, and so when she got into the car at the airport and turned her phone back on, Nina was surprised to find no messages waiting. Ordinarily there’d be a backlog of them in all formats: texts and e-mails and things written to her via social networks. Ordinarily the most recent would say, Are you here yet? Talk to me. Tell me everything. Whenever she answered, even if it was hours later, Luca replied immediately, and if she didn’t respond fast enough for him there’d be increasingly dramatic accusations it was impossible not to laugh at. He was always predictably direct. If she said, Talk later, he’d reply, Talk now. Can’t wait. Medically urgent. Even though Nina was absolutely staunch in her belief that it was harmless behavior and harmlessly life-enhancing, this state of affairs could be tricky, domestically.

  Paolo was tolerant, but tolerance had its limits. She had to limit the text exchanges while they were watching a film, for instance, even though (as she always argued) most television was more entertaining if you were also bantering with someone else at the time. (The net result was more happiness, so what was the issue?) If she replied at the dinner table to the question What are you eating? Paolo might pretend not to notice. Or he might say, “Nina, enough. He can wait. Turn it off.”

  Sometimes Nina was irritated by this. “It’s just fun, Paolo,” she’d say. “It’s just Luca.”

  He’d wave at her from across the table. “Hello. Hello, Nina. I am here. Perhaps you’d be more interested in me if I texted or tweeted you.” Nina had to bite her lip because there was something in what he said. She and Luca had discussed this very thing: people did become more incisive, sharper, more lateral, when they were trained to be so by interacting online and by having to condense their thoughts; it was good synaptic exercise. Privately, she thought that Paolo could do with a bit of that intense verbal jousting and wordplay. But Paolo was disdainful about socializing on the Internet; it had become a sore point and she’d learned not to challenge him on it.

  When they got back from the airport, Nina went looking for Luca in all the usual places — she’d never known him to have twenty-four hours of absence — but he hadn’t updated his blog for nine days, and nor had he posted photographs from his holiday.

  Nina sent a message about Italy, and then another, and looked at her phone throughout the first evening home, wondering why he wasn’t communicating. Eventually she texted him. Are you dead?

  He didn’t reply until the following day. Too depressed for chatter. Hope Roma was fun.

  What’s up?

  Two hours later, her phone pinged. Meh.

  Okay, well if you want to say more you know where I am.

  This time the reply was immediate. Thursday. Lunch. 2pm at our usual place.

  The usual place was tucked away down an otherwise commerce-free side street and then around a corner, and wasn’t somewhere they ever ran into people they knew. Luca was late, this particular day, so Nina sat at their table in the corner and drank a glass of wine, eating breadsticks and watching the door. Eventually he appeared, looking ill-shaven and wearing apparently new clothes, a long black raincoat (it had been a chilly and joyless British summer), black jeans, and a yellow sweater, a black cap, his usual bag slung across his body.

  “Nina.” He sat down, shrugged off his coat, put his cap in his bag, and caught the eye of the waiter. “Vodka, please. Rocks, lime juice, no tonic.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It is fresh lime?”

  “Of course.”

  He picked up the menu and studied it while Nina waited. He hadn’t looked at her yet. “Have you ordered?”

  “No. What’s going on?”

  “Onion soup, sea bass, chocolate tart. What say you?”

  “That sounds good.” He raised his hand and told the waiter, busy squeezing the lime at the bar, that they’d both have the menu du jour. “What’s going on?” she asked again. “Did you have a nice weekend in Cumbria?”

  Now he looked at her. “I want a divorce.”

  “What? Why? Has something happened?”

  “Nothing ever does. That’s the point.” He raised his arms as if addressing a crowd, his voice like that of God in an old film. “We are sailing through identikit weeks towards death. Towards a flat-pack IKEA Valhalla.” He put his arms down.

  “You don’t mean it; you’re just freaking out again.” She was confident that this was true. He could be a drama queen on occasion.

  Luca said, “Cancer shouldn’t be a reason for staying in a relationship.”

  “You sound like an asshole.” This was the ultimate sanction. They applied it to one another sparingly.

  “I’m aware.”

  “She’s going to be fine. She’s going to be okay.”

  “You don’t know that, and in any case whether she is or she isn’t, our marriage has ground to a halt.”

  Nina frowned at him. “I thought you were going to shake things up a bit once she was past the treatment. I thought you were going to move house, go traveling; have time off.”

  “She wants to move, but it’s only so she can remodel another apartment. Not that she could fit that in, with the obligations and charities and lunches.” He rolled his eyes. “She never sits still. My having time off from work would really just mean being an audience for Fran’s mania. Let me tell you what happens when we go traveling … or rather when we go on holiday. We go on holiday; we don’t go traveling.” The waiter brought the vodka. “Thank you. When we were in Puglia, for instance …”

  “You had a lovely time.” She balanced his excitability with stringent calm.

  “No.”

  “Yes, you did. I saw the pictures.” Her calm exhibited itself as a near monotone.

  “That was the couple memory, not mine. The couple memory of any one thing is different to the individual one. Generally I subsume my own recollection of things to the Borg.” He was doing the voice again. Such theatricality was usually to do with being severely rattled.

  “The what?”

  “It’s in Star Trek. Cybernetic organisms, apparently individual but actually functioning as drones of a collective consciousness. Resistance is futile.”

  “Come on, Luca. You’re hardly a drone, and there wasn’t any sign of dissatisfaction at all, other than about having to come home. What went on in Cumbria? You’ve been very quiet. Has something happened?”

  “I keep thinking about the road not traveled.” He bit dolefully into a breadstick.

  “Midlife crisis, much?” Did she look okay with the concept? Because she was absolutely the opposite. Rapidly, precipitately, he’d strayed into the intolerable.

  “No.” He drummed his fingers briefly against the table. “The time is coming to break out, I think.” Horrified beyond words, Nina began to laugh. “You can laugh all you want,” Luca said
, “but I really think so. I need to get back to the man buried under twenty-five years of marriage, a man rendered unrecognizable by it.” He crushed another breadstick against a plate.

  She sat back and appraised. “Is that your first drink today? And what’s with the stubble?”

  He swigged thirstily at his glass, took a pause, and then finished it in another long gulp, before signaling that he’d like another. “It’s one of the things I’m going to do, when I start again.”

  “What is?”

  “I can have a beard if I damn well want one. I’m going to drink when I feel like it without having to be nagged. I can work all evening if the business is in trouble …”

  She was startled. “The business is in trouble?”

  “… without somebody sticking her head around the study door every five minutes and moaning that she’s been on her own all day. I can spend money on bad art if I want. I should be able to go to Berlin on a stag do, without having to deal with the big puppy eyes. I can buy a stupid flash car if I want one. Fuck off, Francesca: I work my ass off and I don’t have to clear everything with you. Plus, bliss, the quietness. I can have days when I don’t have to talk, without the twenty questions about what’s wrong with me and why I’m in a funny mood.” He paused while two flat bowls of onion soup were delivered to them. Oniony steam rose and intertwined above the table. Luca loaded a crouton with rouille and set it floating, then loaded and launched another two.

  “That’s just what’s needed,” Nina told him as she began to do the same. “A crouton regatta. That’ll help.”

  Luca put his spoon down. He opened his hands expressively. “I’m worn down by life, Nina. By living the wrong life.”

  “We all feel like that sometimes.” She needed him to stop this, to recant, but how could she say so?

  “My life’s disappearing into weeks that are indistinguishable from one another.”

  She persisted in trying to normalize things. “But that’s a normal feeling. You’re just tired.”

  He was nodding. “I know. Thank you, my love. I like that dress, by the way. Nice colors, silky. I like.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Lately, Francesca wants us to go out every evening. I don’t want to go out all the time. I’m deploying the full force of understatement here. Last night it was with her dull charity-organizing friends to the theater. I can’t tell you how much I hate the fucking theater. You wouldn’t make me go to the theater, would you?”

  “Not if you didn’t like it, no.” What was she doing?

  “You see. Exactly. Why go to the fucking theater, home of the witless middle-class dullerati, and be menaced by ushers and shushers, and sit with your knees jammed into the back of the passive-aggressive moron in front who turns to stare at you if you move, and have the best lines rendered inaudible by people eating, and pay thirty-five pounds for the ticket and almost as much for bad wine in the interval … Wow, I’m on a roll now —”

  “Yes you are.”

  “— when you could stay at home with a DVD and relax on your own sofa by your own fire with a plate of good cheese? She says she goes for social reasons. That’s only inadvertently accurate. Social climbing and showing off.”

  Nina put her head to one side and sighed. “You really are in a filthy mood.” There were two Ninas now. She saw the other one, sitting beside her, saying, How is it possible to go blithely on like this, jesting about the theater, after you’ve just said that you’re casting Francesca out? That other Nina was gathering her things to leave.

  Luca drank most of the second vodka and began to eat hungrily. He continued in the same vein. “Worse, the expectation that at the weekend I’ll be happy to go shopping with her and sit with all the other whipped husbands at the changing-room entrance waiting to say what I like and don’t like. That I’ll pay; that I’ll take her to lunch; that I’ll agree to go to whatever she’s organized without asking me. Sometimes a chap wants to do nothing. Sometimes a chap wants to go out in the car on his own, or sit outside a coffee shop and read and people-watch.”

  “Why can’t Fran people-watch, too?” The tone she was attempting was fond irritation. It was playacting; territorially speaking it was absolutely new.

  The rest of the vodka was downed. “She isn’t you, Nina. She doesn’t understand about silence. Ours is a house of death and hyperactivity and frankly I don’t want to live with either. I don’t. And I flat refuse to become middle-aged.”

  “We’re all getting older.” Her monotone was back again.

  “No we’re not.” He took his sweater off, revealing a white T-shirt, and dropped it onto the adjoining seat. “I’m not. I’m not going to. She’s become even worse since she got ill. She’s become a tedious seize-the-day guru, constantly telling me to live each day like it was my last. That isn’t always politically a good idea, when your husband is thinking of leaving you.”

  “Have you talked to her about any of this?” Nina’s brow was furrowed, which was fine, but her mouth was getting out of her control; it was showing her real feelings.

  “Are you all right? You have a weird expression.” Nina couldn’t answer. “Fran says she wants me to have my own life, my own friends, but then when I do she feels left out. Actually, what she wants is me willingly at heel. But I might want to spend the day in bed, finding new music online and getting crumbs in the sheets, or go into the hills with the walking club and have a day of men and man talk: why not? Am I not entitled to live my life a bit the way I’d like to live it, without negotiating all the effing time? I am not going to a hypermarket in the car on a Saturday afternoon ever again. I’m not. Nor am I going in search of new lighting. The house doesn’t need any more dressing. It doesn’t. It’s fine.” They ate their soup in silence a few minutes. “I want to go back to the path I didn’t follow.”

  “What path was that?” Nina smoothed hair back from her forehead. She was beginning to feel unwell. The room felt like it was oceangoing, like it had begun to float uncertainly forward.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t go down it, the path. I fucking hate the fucking wine business. I married a woman I had nothing in common with, because my mother would like her. Can I have some of your wine?”

  “After two vodkas?” What was this? This wasn’t usual.

  “It’s that kind of a day.” He opened both hands in expiation.

  Nina poured half her Sauvignon into his water glass, and he drank it down. She sipped at her own wine; it disguised the set of her mouth. “What happened in Cumbria?”

  “She wanted to do what we do here. She wants to go shopping, fundamentally. Acquisition is her life. Acquisition and a sunlounger. Now she’s pressing to go somewhere hot to recuperate; bloody Tenerife or somewhere. Tanning is another big interest.”

  She gave him a sidelong look. “Maybe you’re just very boring.”

  She’d intended this to be the start of their making fun of one another, and of themselves, because really that was the only way out of this, but Luca wasn’t so easily distracted. He tried to get hold of her hands. He said, “I can’t think how we got interrupted, you and me. I think I would have had a better life with you.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I don’t?”

  “Not when you’re sober. Did you drink before you got here?” She narrowed her eyes at him and he retreated, leaning his weight on the back of the chair.

  “I may have had a stiffener or two at the office.”

  “Aha.”

  He broke another breadstick into pieces with one hand, and corralled the shards into a heap. “That’s the point, though. I had to be drunk to tell you how I feel.”

  “And how’s that?”

  He was still gathering the last of the cracker dust. “You know what I mean. It’s been with us our whole lives. Our belonging together; our perfect fit.”

  “It wouldn’t have been different with me, though. We’d still have gone to the supermarket, sometimes even on a Saturday.” This was the truth, in two sent
ences.

  Now Luca sat forward again. “The thing with you and me is that we communicate. It doesn’t sound like the most important thing in the world, but actually it is. I wouldn’t mind being in a megastore with someone who also found it funny. You and me contra mundum.”

  “If we were together we’d be lonelier people.” There it was, a third truth.

  He put the glass down hard. “How do you figure that out?”

  “Because it would all have gone wrong somehow, or off the boil, and we wouldn’t have had anyone to go to.” As she said this it was already out of date.

  “That’s a sad philosophy.”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  “ ‘Yeah, whatever’? Am I boring you?”

  “You are a bit.” She could say that to him. There wasn’t anybody else she could say it to. That had always been the point.

  Their main courses arrived, and Luca ordered more wine, and they ate and talked about other things. Nina steered the conversation elsewhere, into their respective trips and what they’d seen and eaten. But when the plates were taken, Luca reverted.

  “Promise me one thing. If ever you decide you need a divorce, you think of me first.” He thought he saw in her eyes that she took him seriously. What else could it be, that strange, intense look in them? He went on, “But you’re right, of course you’re right. Our marriage is only perfect because it never happened. We haven’t had to deal with dishwashers and bills and recycling and dull sex.”

  “Dull, is it? That’s a shame.” The back of her neck felt as if it was seizing up.