by David Miller
He could neither sleep nor go to work. He decided to sit at the kitchen table until she returned, whenever it was. He was drinking brandy, and normally he never drank before eight in the evening. If anyone offered him a drink before this time, he claimed it was like saying goodbye to the whole day. In the mid-eighties he’d gone to the gym in the early evening. For some days, though, goodbye was surely the most suitable word.
It was late afternoon before his wife returned, wearing the clothes she’d gone out in, looking dishevelled and uncertain. She couldn’t meet his eye. He asked her what she’d been doing. She said “What d’you think?” and went into the shower.
He had considered several options, including punching her. But instead he fled the house and made it to a pub. For the first time since he’d been a student he sat alone with nothing to do. He was expected nowhere. He had no newspaper with him, and he liked papers; he could swallow the most banal and incredible thing provided it was on newsprint. He watched the passing faces and thought how pitiless the world was if you didn’t have a safe place in it.
He made himself consider how unrewarding it was to constrain people. Infidelities would occur in most relationships. These days every man and woman was a cuckold. And why not, when marriage was insufficient to satisfy most human need? Nicola had needed something and she had taken it. How bold and stylish. How petty to blame someone for pursuing any kind of love!
He was humiliated. The feeling increased over the weeks in a strange way. At work or waiting for the tube, or having dinner with Nicola – who had gained, he could see, a bustling, dismissive intensity of will or concentration – he found himself becoming angry with Vincent. For days on end he couldn’t really think of anything else. It was as if the man were inhabiting him.
As he walked around Soho where he worked, Bill entertained himself by thinking of how someone might get even with a type like Vincent, were he so inclined. The possibility was quite remote but this didn’t prevent him imagining stories from which he emerged with some satisfaction, if not credit. What incentive, distraction, energy and interest Vincent provided him with! This was almost the only creative work he got to do now.
A few days later he was presented with Celestine. She was sitting with a man in a newly opened café, drinking cappuccino. Life was giving him a chance. It was awful. He stood in the doorway pretending to look for someone and wondered whether he should take it.
Vincent’s eldest daughter lived in London. She wanted to be an actress and Bill had auditioned her for a commercial a couple of years ago. He knew she’d obtained a small part in a film directed by an acquaintance of his. On this basis he went over to her, introduced himself, made the pleasantest conversation he could, and was invited to sit down. The man turned out to be a gay friend of hers. They all chatted. After some timorous vacillation Bill asked Celestine in a cool tone whether she’d have a drink with him later, in a couple of hours.
He didn’t go home but walked about the streets. When he was tired he sat in a pub with the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past. He had decided that if he could read to the end of the whole book he would deserve a great deal of praise. He did a little underlining, which since school he had considered a sign of seriousness, but his mind wandered even more than usual, until it was time to meet her.
To his pleasure Bill saw that men glanced at Celestine when they could; others openly stared. When she fetched a drink they turned to examine her legs. This would not have happened with Nicola; only Vincent Ertel had taken an interest in her. Later, as he and Celestine strolled up the street looking for cabs, she agreed that he could come to her place at the end of the week.
It was a triumphant few days of gratification anticipated. He would do more of this. He had obviously been missing out on life’s meaner pleasures. As Nicola walked about the flat, dressing, cooking, reading, searching for her glasses, he could enjoy despising her. He informed his two closest friends that the pleasures of revenge were considerable. Now his pals were waiting to hear of his coup.
Celestine flung the keys, wrapped in a tea-towel, out of the window. It was a hard climb: her flat was at the top of a run-down five-storey building in West London, an area of bedsits, students and itinerants. Coming into the living room he saw it had a view across a square. Wind and rain were sweeping into the cracked windows stuffed with newspaper. The walls were yellow, the carpet brown and stained. Several pairs of jeans were suspended on a clothes horse in front of a gas fire which gave off an odour and heated parts of the room while leaving others cold.
She persuaded him to remove his overcoat but not his scarf. Then she took him into the tiny kitchen with bare floorboards where, between an old sink and the boiler, there was hardly room for the two of them.
“I will be having us some dinner.” She pointed to two shopping bags. “Do you like troot?”
“Sorry?”
It was trout. There were potatoes and green beans. After, they would have apple strudel with cream. She had been to the shops and gone to some trouble. It would take ages to prepare. He hadn’t anticipated this. He left her there, saying he would fetch drink.
In the rain he went to the off-licence and was paying for the wine when he noticed through the window that a taxi had stopped at traffic lights. He ran out of the shop to hail the cab, but as he opened the door couldn’t go through with it. He collected the wine and carried it back.
He waited in her living room while she cooked, pacing and drinking. She didn’t have a TV. Wintry gales battered the window. Her place reminded him of rooms he’d shared as a student. He was about to say to himself, thank God I’ll never have to live like this again, when it occurred to him that if he left Nicola, he might, for a time, end up in some unfamiliar place like this, with its stained carpet and old, broken fittings. How fastidious he’d become! How had it happened? What other changes had there been while he was looking in the other direction?
He noticed a curled photograph of a man tacked to the wall. It looked as though it had been taken at the end of the sixties. Bill concluded it was the hopeful radical who’d fucked his wife. He had been a handsome man, and with his pipe in his hand, long hair and open-necked shirt, he had an engaging look of self-belief and raffish pleasure. Bill recalled the slogans that had decorated Paris in those days. “Everything Is Possible”, “Take Your Desires for Realities”, “It Is Forbidden to Forbid”. He’d once used them in a TV commercial. What optimism that generation had had! With his life given over to literature, ideas, conversation, writing and political commitment, ol’ Vincent must have had quite a time. He wouldn’t have been working constantly, like Bill and his friends.
The food was good. Bill leaned across the table to kiss Celestine. His lips brushed her cheek. She turned her head and looked out across the dark square to the lights beyond, as if trying to locate something.
He talked about the film industry and what the actors, directors and producers of the movies were really like. Not that he knew them personally, but they were gossiped about by other actors and technicians. She asked questions and laughed easily.
Things should have been moving along. He had to get up at 5.30 the next day to direct a commercial for a bank. He was becoming known for such well-paid but journeyman work. Now that Nicola was pregnant he would have to do more of it. It would be a struggle to find time for the screenwriting he wanted to do. It was beginning to dawn on him that if he was going to do anything worthwhile at his age, he had to be serious in a new way. And yet when he considered his ambitions, which he no longer mentioned to anyone – to travel overland to Burma while reading Proust, and other, more “internal” things – he felt a surge of shame, as if it was immature and obscene to harbour such hopes; as if, in some ways, it was already too late.
He shuffled his chair around the table until he and Celestine were sitting side by side. He attempted another kiss.
She stood up and offered him her hands. “Shall we dance?”
He looked at her in surprise. “
Dance?”
“It will ’ot you up. Don’t you … dance?”
“Not really.”
“Why?”
“Why? We always danced like this.” He shut his eyes and nodded his head as if attempting to bang in a nail with his forehead.
She kicked off her shoes.
“We dance like this. I’ll illustrate you.” She looked at him. “Take it off.”
“What?”
“This stupid thing.”
She pulled off his scarf. She shoved the chairs against the wall and put on a Chopin waltz, took his hand and placed her other hand on his back. He looked down at her dancing feet even as he trod on them, but she didn’t object. Gently but firmly she turned and turned him across the room, until he was dizzy, her hair tickling his face. Whenever he glanced up she was looking into his eyes. Each time they crossed the room she trotted back, pulling him, amused. She seemed determined that he should learn, certain that this would benefit him.
“You require some practice,” she said at last. He fell back into his chair, blowing and laughing. “But after a week, who knows, we could be having you work as a gigolo!”
It was midnight. Celestine came naked out of the bathroom smoking a cigarette. She got into bed and lay beside him. He thought of a time in New York when the company sent a white limousine to the airport. Once inside it, drinking whisky and watching TV as the limo passed over the East River towards Manhattan, he wanted nothing more than for his friends to see him.
She was on him vigorously and the earth was moving: either that, or the two single beds, on the juncture of which he was lying, were separating. He stuck out his arms to secure them, but with each lurch his head was being forced down into the fissure. He felt as if his ears were going to be torn off. The two of them were about to crash through onto the floor.
He rolled her over onto one bed. Then he sat up and showed her what would have happened. She started to laugh, she couldn’t stop.
The gas meter ticked; she was dozing. He had never lain beside a lovelier face. He thought of what Nicola might have sought that night with Celestine’s father. Affection, attention, serious talk, honesty, distraction. Did he give her that now? Could they give it to one another, and with a kid on the way?
Celestine was nudging him and trying to say something in his ear.
“You want what?” he said. Then, “Surely … no … no.”
“Bill, yes.”
He liked to think he was willing to try anything. A black eye would certainly send a convincing message to her father. She smiled when he raised his hand.
“I deserve to be hurt.”
“No one deserves that.”
“But you see … I do.”
That night, in that freezing room, he did everything she asked, for as long as she wanted. He praised her beauty and her intelligence. He had never kissed anyone for so long, until he forgot where he was, or who they both were, until there was nothing they wanted, and there was only the most satisfactory peace.
He got up and dressed. He was shivering. He wanted to wash, he smelled of her, but he wasn’t prepared for a cold bath.
“Why are you leaving?” She leaped up and held him. “Stay, stay, I haven’t finished with you yet.”
He put on his coat and went into the living room. Without looking back he hurried out and down the stairs. He pulled the front door, anticipating the fresh damp night air. But the door held. He had forgotten: the door was locked. He stood there.
Upstairs she was wrapped in a fur coat, looking out of the window.
“The key,” he said.
“Old man,” she said, laughing. “You are.”
She accompanied him barefoot down the stairs. While she unlocked the door he mumbled, “Will you tell your father I saw you?”
“But why?”
He touched her face. She drew back. “You should put something on that,” he said. “I met him once. He knows my wife.”
“I rarely see him now,” she said.
She was holding out her arms. They danced a few steps across the hall. He was better at it now. He went out into the street. Several cabs passed him but he didn’t hail them. He kept walking. There was comfort in the rain. He put his head back and looked up into the sky. He had some impression that happiness was beyond him and everything was coming down, and that life could not be grasped but only lived.
THE TANGLING POINT
Tim Parks
Born in Manchester, Tim Parks (b.1954) has lived in Italy for most of his life, working as a translator – of works by Calasso, Calvino, Moravia, Tabucchi as well as Machiavelli’s The Prince – and academic. His award-winning novels include Goodness, Europa, Destiny, Judge Savage, Cleaver and Painting Death; a memoir, Teach Us To Sit Still, and several travelogues and collections of essays. His blog at the New York Review of Books is shortly to be collected in one volume. He now lives and teaches in Milan.
Before the dinner my wife told me that her boss’s daughter was obsessed by dogs. Her parents were worried about it, more than worried. In fact they had asked whether I might be able to help. I remarked that I had never heard that a love for animals constituted a pathology. My wife sighed and explained that the young woman, Emanuela, had a job teaching biology in a local school, but couldn’t be persuaded to leave home, claiming she needed all her extra money for her dogs.
“How many does she have?”
“Only two of her own. It seems she’s a dog saviour. She drives all over Europe saving dogs.”
My wife had finally returned to work after many years as a housewife and mother. I was anxious that the job go well and that she be happy there. Our marriage had run out of steam many years ago, the last child was leaving home and there was the prospect that we would be able to separate without too much trauma. A good job – she was p.a. to the Director of a busy pharmaceutical concern – could only facilitate this, giving my wife something to rebuild her life around. Hence, when she said her boss had invited us to dinner, I agreed at once, hoping this indicated an investment on both sides in their new work relationship.
“I think he partly invited us so as to talk to you about her. He seemed very interested when I said you were a therapist.”
We had arrived at the house, an attractive villa on the hills to the north of town. The automatic gate swung open, a yellow light flashing above one of the posts.
“What do you mean, ‘saving dogs’?” I asked.
“It seems people alert her when they hear of a dog being mistreated and she goes and rescues the creature and finds it a good home.”
“Sounds rather noble,” I said.
“Think if one of our kids were doing that,” my wife snapped back. “Be serious.” It was a while since we had spent an evening together.
Signor Fanna was a tall, bulky man, rather sloppy by Italian standards, but he greeted us energetically and with evident pleasure, rather as if he might be a big playful dog himself. Behind him his wife leaned forward from a wheelchair; in her early sixties she was dryly polite and wore an elegant green silk blouse. “Buona sera, Dr Marks,” she greeted me. I was struck by her lean wrists, braceleted in gold, but evidently powerful as she spun her wheelchair around and led the way to the dining room.
We went through the usual social rigmaroles, drinking something white and sharp. I was pleased to see that Signor Fanna was on easy and respectful terms with my wife, and she too seemed to have the measure of him, coming across as both sociable and sensible. For a few moments they talked about work and the arrangements for a conference in Germany that he was to be attending the following week.
“At which point I shall be left alone with the mad dog woman,” his wife remarked coolly to me.
It seemed a curious thing to say for someone who must rely heavily on domestic help. Shouldn’t Signora Fanna be glad to have her daughter around? I noticed that they did have an elderly Asian maid doing the cooking. Wearing a simple black dress that may or may not have been a uniform, this elderly woman brou
ght in a plate of mixed hors d’oeuvres and laid it on the glass table top.
“I hear your daughter is something of an activist,” I smiled.
“A terrorist, Dr Marks.”
I laughed. “I see no bomb damage.”
“Because we clean-up afterwards.”
Swallowing a vol-au-vent, Signor Fanna turned towards us and sighed. “You’ve studied psychology, Dr Marks. Perhaps you could tell us what would induce a young woman to sacrifice everything to dogs. Is there anything we can do?”
It is one of the comedies of being a mental health therapist that people imagine you have magical powers of divination.
“Evidently she likes her dogs more than the things she is supposedly giving up,” I said. “Why is it such a worry for you?”
“Honestly, she’s driving us crazy,” Signor Fanna began, but stopped. “You tell him, Elvira.”
The woman on the wheelchair, who had evidently been a beauty in her day, pursed her lips and frowned. “Five or six years ago, we were expecting Emanuela to marry and leave home. She had a nice boyfriend she’d been seeing for some time. They’d lived together on and off. A young lawyer. Then it fell through because he couldn’t put up with having dogs constantly lodged in his flat and even sleeping on his bed. It was sad, we’d actually become good friends with his parents, excellent people from Bologna. After the break-up she started bringing the dogs here. Every weekend she’s off in the car driving hundreds, even thousands of kilometres, either to fetch dogs who’ve been abandoned or to take the strays she’s gathered to some new home. Every afternoon after school all she does is feed and walk the dogs then get on the internet to plan her next ‘raid’. That’s what she calls them.”
“She was so smart at school,” Signor Fanna said. “Got an excellent degree in molecular biology from Milan. We had expected her to go into research. Instead she settled for work as a replacement teacher on the local school circuit. Now she’s thirty-four and seems to have no plans beyond saving dogs.”