As early as that first night, when he saw me lying asleep with a yellow face and open mouth, the young seedlings must have attached themselves to the thin lining of my stomach. They’d taken root and begun to sprout, and a few days later tiny rice plants had started to spread in the warm, moist environment. Delicate green strands wound their way into the dark pit of my stomach, stealing all the nourishment that should have been mine. Organic life forms primarily take their nourishment from other life forms, as we know, and now my stomach offered the perfect habitat for a minuscule grain of rice.
He took a picture of me and showed it to his mother, eager to hear what she’d say. She and I hardly met these days—every Monday one of us would leave in the morning, and in the afternoon the other would come home. We each stayed with friends in the week we were away, and he wanted her to see the state I was in: gaunt, hyper, touchy and febrile. I had my back to the window in his photo, it was dark behind me and I stared into the camera with big, serious eyes. He hoped she would be shocked and take the initiative to meet me, that it might change things between us. But she just glanced quickly at the picture and commented that I’d let my beard grow. She had no idea, of course, that I was walking about with sprouting rice fields in my stomach.
Even I was unaware of the fact I had laid myself vulnerable to an alien life form. Though I may have had some idea about it, he thought, because he noticed that I studied myself in the mirror more frequently than before. My eyes were now deep in their sockets, and the surrounding skin was darkening like an old handbag. An angry-red eczema had developed on my eyelids. I was no longer just his father, I’d become a solemn, hollow-cheeked man who had lost his woman to another man. The mere thought of it was embarrassing. I often came into his room wanting to talk about life, about what I thought was our life, our family life, but which in truth only concerned me. He had to protect himself from me. He developed a sense of humor to hold me at a distance, calling me the Thin Man, the Skeleton and the Old Geezer. Yet we sometimes laughed more freely than before. He also saw his mother more clearly, now that he no longer saw her as part of the hermetically sealed couple she and I had been. She’d sit with him in the evenings after his little brother had gone to bed, she’d watch the movies he wanted to see, something she’d never done before. He noticed that she had to cover her eyes with her hand every time someone on the screen got shot or suffered abuse. He felt sorry for her, her hair had gone a different color at the roots, he’d never seen that before. He looked at her neck, and he thought she looked lonely and rather comical. She was a middle-aged woman who’d fallen in love with another man, she’d destroyed everything because of this infatuation. Now she wouldn’t talk about the other man, the man I referred to as Gloveman. Things weren’t right with her, that was clear.
He couldn’t feel any pity for me, I should have been more careful, I shouldn’t have let myself be humiliated. And of my own free will! He’d heard me declare it would be fine for his mother to have two lovers if she wanted. He could never forgive me for that. He realized that he had to look after his mother now, but had no idea how. He suggested she go to the hairdresser’s and get her hair colored again. He created an alternative family on The Sims, where she and I were still married, and we were still a family. He re-created the same rooms, with similar furniture, and we all had the same habits and routines. He made sure she still took exercise, but alone, and that I sat reading my books. He saw to it that we ate, that we tidied up after ourselves, that we slept at night and went to work in the morning. He was vigilant when it came to our earning money, nobody must go without. He watched as we talked together in excited or grumpy Simlish. He tried to get me to join in with his game, but I complained that I couldn’t relate to my avatar, a man with thick slicked-back hair. He tried giving me thinner hair, bigger eyes, hollower cheeks, a longer nose, but I was never satisfied with any of the alternatives. One evening, when he’d left me on my own with the game for a few minutes, my avatar set fire to himself. I burned to death in the kitchen as I stood there frying food, and together we listened to my wild screams and the crackling sound of fake flames. But outside the game I gradually started to change again. After a few months the rice field in my stomach wilted, no doubt the seedlings died from the lack of light. I shaved every day again, and started to put on weight. I soon began to resemble the person I’d been.
And he disliked that too, my being myself again, just as though nothing had happened. He was shell-shocked and would be for years. He had no means of defense, he’d had a sheltered upbringing, nothing could have allowed him to predict what happened to us. He was the one who was supposed to change, not us.
12
But none of this has happened yet. We still live together in the same house, Timmy and I still sleep next to each other at night and presume we’ll go on being lovers, despite any recent difficulties. It is March, a Friday night, everywhere bodies are dressing and undressing, in large rooms and small, but for us this night will never end, it will replay itself in the present ad infinitum: she goes back to the office after dinner. This is no longer an uncommon occurence. Two or three times each week she waits for this moment. She is sitting at the dining table, she has already checked her mail and the news several times, she closes her laptop, she straightens up and stretches lazily, hands above her head, just as always, and then says
—I’ll be off now.
and I answer, or rather, I don’t answer this time, I just nod. She knows without looking at me that I’m falling apart inside. I am disappointed in her or despairing over myself, she doesn’t know which and doesn’t want to know, she tries to push it away. Ever since she sat down at the table, she’s been waiting for the moment she can leave. She has kept an eye on the cooker clock, she has helped our youngest with his homework and whispered into his ear that he’s the best boy in the world. He sits with his breastbone pressed against the table’s edge, something he’s done this entire winter and spring. At every meal he sits at the table and watches us. Every single object that’s placed on the tabletop creates a vibration, and sometimes our voices create discernible vibrations through the tabletop too, and he catches all these small tremors with his skeleton. He is serious and very focused, with his short, glossy hair and soft hands. She strokes our oldest son on the back of his neck as she passes, he’s begun to pull away from any gesture of affection, but she needs to touch him even though he shakes her off.
At this moment she is the only person talking. Her voice doesn’t sound as relaxed and intimate as she’d hoped. I’m standing by the kitchen worktop, I turn to her with my eyebrows raised, she notices the deep lines that run across my forehead that the children liked to count when they were small, standing with bare feet on my thighs, reaching up and tracing their fingers along each furrow. She remembers their pale infant-bodies, naked white bellies and diaper-clad bottoms, first one, then the second a few years later, their hair always falling into soft curls after they’d been bathed, one moment they were leaping into our bed, the next they had started school and soon half their childhood had gone. She is touched by these warm, happy thoughts, then she grows agitated and wants to cry.
It feels like a fever—has she gone insane, what is she actually doing? But she must go and meet him, she can’t do otherwise. She inhabits two worlds. Just a few kilometers away he is moving around in his room, his hairless body, golden, smooth and lithe beneath his shirt, beneath the formal pressed trousers. She imagines him, the way he turns to her, the way he smiles and tilts his head, out of shyness perhaps or everything that’s built up between them, the attraction, the affirmation, the thrill of it all. It’s not true that their love has grown from nowhere, by chance, they’ve allowed it to grow, both of them, they’ve driven it on determinedly with each glance, each touch, every word they’ve said. And now they can no longer turn back, at a certain point an irreversible shift occurred: they feel greater loyalty to each other now than to anyone else. She does at le
ast. He says he feels his pulse quicken each time he sees her name appear on his phone. He says she is everything he didn’t know was missing in his life. Or he says something else perhaps, but every word he utters serves to strengthen her feelings, to raise her expectations. She lets herself be driven onward by the urge to make it happen, the urge to go all the way, whatever the consequence. Might it have been like that? Yes, it must have been. Later when she tells people about it, it sounds alien and unreal, like a story she’s made up. But now she is in the midst of it, she wants only this, nothing else, that is what she tells herself and him, and she releases her grip, lets herself fall into the warm darkness.
And I am standing in her way, it seems. I am concretely standing in front of her in the kitchen now, waiting for her to explain or defend her sudden determination to meet him again tonight. It will be the fourth evening this week. But there is no more to say, she thinks, she won’t be held down. I turn away from her and continue to tidy up, moving about the kitchen with studied calm. No plate will be slammed down too hard on the worktop to make her think I am irritated. I have encouraged her in all this. It might even be said that I’m still striving to make it easy for her, though I’m not doing too well. Emotional baggage travels faster than sound between living bodies, and she doesn’t even need to look into my face to know that this is not okay, that all is not well.
All those emotions she thinks she sees in me have surfaced in her before she even realizes she’s picked them up from me. She is impatient and gets up too abruptly, her voice sounds moody when she says bye for now, then. She regrets it, but she’s already late. She closes the door a little harder than usual. She sits on the bench in the hall and pulls on her boots, boots that are almost knee-high, soft suede, she gets up and takes down her coat, shoves her arms in the sleeves, straightens her collar and does up the buttons. Three large, white frosted buttons, her fingers push them deftly through elaborately embroidered buttonholes. She watches herself in the mirror. She thinks of his gaze, how he’d have seen her now. Her coat is a light blue, neat and close-fitting with a thin belt at the waist. Not so close-fitting as to be too tight, she can’t bear that, to feel restricted, but tight enough to make her feel good. On certain days, even now, she feels embraced as she buttons up this coat. She got it from me for Christmas, and she’ll use it long after I’ve become her ex-husband, the man from whom she no longer receives gifts, not even for her birthday. Yet nothing about this coat reminds her of me, or what we called our love. She has many things she can’t use because she got them from me: the short blue denim dress and the long gray cardigan, a pair of white jeans and almost all the jewelry she owns. She has stopped wearing jewelry. But she still wears this coat, it is somehow disconnected from me, even though I bought it for her. We gave each other expensive gifts that last Christmas, she tore off the paper and opened the box and found a sky-blue coat from an exclusive little boutique. She’d seen this coat herself just days before Christmas, in a shop I often went to when I looked for gifts for her, and in a momentary flash she hoped she might get it. And there it was, she held it up against herself and said, it’s amazing, so lovely, and it sounded like something she might have said in the past, it wasn’t quite right, and she felt it. Her mistake was to say anything she might have said a year ago. I got up and pulled the kids’ presents out from under the tree, I straightened up, she could see I felt uncomfortable, that I was offended. My face closed, everything that was alive in me vanished, retreating far into my body becoming invisible to all.
Presumably I shall miss her forever, she thinks. My impending loneliness is inversely proportional to her own tremendous happiness. And she is filled with both tenderness and malice in ever-changing ratio, which frequently blends into just one feeling: love’s last bitter offerings, frayed empathy, and grim tenderness not entirely well meant, in which every minor irritation fuses with her pity for me and desire to escape me without it looking like a betrayal.
* * *
—
We’d grown up together and we’d had children to confirm our love in new living flesh. A child is the final confirmation of love, even if that love proves short-lived, even if that love proves a fleeting physical attraction, or proves long-lasting but nonetheless lacking any deep foundation. Many people live together without any deep foundation, perhaps this was true, after all, of us? She had believed we were so deeply and closely bound, more than any other people we knew. But if this love came to an end, this would have retrospective power, we didn’t realize that yet, but the reality was this: if our love ceased to exist one day, then it had never existed at all.
The kids were still there, of course, but they were no longer a confirmation of our love, we released them from that task. They would be like other children whose parents are divorced, thrown upon their own resources and our divided care. But they didn’t know that, not yet, and neither did we.
* * *
—
Still standing on the steps outside our house, she throws a dark blue shawl round her neck, pulls it up over her mouth and feels the warmth of her breath. She closes the gate behind her and walks with hurried steps along the path. Snow, streetlamps, lighted windows in the houses. Her heart hammers behind her ribs. Her fingers curl up inside her mittens. Night is falling, but slumbering in the darkness is an indestructible metallic light. This light is about to wake from its sleep, she can sense it to her fingertips. Soon the snow will crumble, the evenings will grow longer, the grass will thaw in the gardens, as green as when the snows arrived. When she was a child some forty years ago, the grass always went yellow in the autumn, but now it stays green until it is decked in snow, and is still equally green when it reappears in April. These are the things she focuses her mind on now, so as to keep her excitement and anticipation at bay until she is far enough away from home. Soon the winter’s grit will surface on gray asphalt, and soon all those objects that were thrown into the snow by mistake or in violent rage will be unveiled to all, blanched, miserable, shocking to the eye. Soon the call of the sparrow and great tit and thrush will be heard in the early morning, et cetera, et cetera. Soon it will be spring, soon summer, and what will happen to the two of us then? She dare not think about it, she thinks, though she thinks about it every second.
Two or three nights a week and every Sunday she goes back to the office to see him. The office is one of the few places they can meet, when they’re not on one of their outings. They’re planning another project together, and this time they’re confident of getting management approval. It gives them the chance to work together at least. Hardly anyone works overtime in her department; besides, she can lock her door, nobody ever disturbs them. She generally leaves home after our youngest son has gone to bed, but sometimes earlier. It depends on whatever time suits Gunnar; he also has a family. He has children that need driving here or there, and a marriage that’s still a marriage, at least on the surface. She doesn’t know what he’s said at home, perhaps nothing. She doesn’t know what he thinks privately when he’s alone. She doesn’t know if he feels the same as her. Sometimes this puts her into a frenzy and she wonders Is this happening only to me? Am I alone in this? But come the evening, when he finally walks though the door of her office building, she sees the effect of her presence in his face. He takes a single step from the shadows into the light, and it is her own light she sees him in. She opens the door to let him in, they follow each other up the stairs, she walks ahead, and not before they enter the sketchily lit corridor does she stop and turn to look at him, finally allowing him to embrace her. Their faces seek each other. Human faces are so shockingly naked, easily read and expressive, and bodies search always for other bodies. And now it is she and he who have found one another, everything else disappears around them. He holds her. She holds him. They let go, step back to meet each other’s gaze. Shining happiness, mutual attraction. Who could resist? Almost nobody, and certainly not her, not now. She leads him into the office. It’s no
secret that they meet, they are working together, that’s what they have said, to families and colleagues. This evening they sit side by side in front of the screen, taking turns to use the keyboard. He moves his thigh close to hers, she presses her thigh against his. This has happened before, they frequently sit up close now, she knows I think this, they talk quietly, they laugh, they hold each other’s gaze. These little intimacies have become the norm between them, there’s no stopping now. And for a long time they’ve exchanged confidences about the everyday details of their lives, significant and otherwise, about their kids, about what they do when they’re apart. Each of them remembers what the other said, asks how things went with the child who fell down the stairs, the kitchen tap that suddenly sprang a leak and the plumber who came and repaired the bathroom tap by mistake. And so from a distance, yet with almost domestic familiarity, they follow each other’s lives. Their voices in that little office are hushed and intimate, they follow each other in pitch and intensity, they have started to resemble each other. Like a married couple, she thinks, as though they were already living together. Perhaps they’ve always been alike, it was an inexplicable stroke of luck that they, of all people, should meet each other now. Perhaps nothing would have happened if they hadn’t looked into each other’s eyes that little bit too long, she thinks later. Neither wanted to capitulate to the other, they drove each other on, their eyes refused to yield once locked. In both of them: an accelerated flow of blood through the very thinnest veins.
That night he suddenly puts his right hand over her left on the keyboard and lets it rest there. She stops talking. Feels his hand on hers. She can feel his pulse in his wrist, ticking against her skin like a minuscule organic clock inside his flesh. It is somehow moving, almost unbelievable that she can feel his pulse. He is talking, she has no idea what about, and she leans toward him as simultaneously he leans toward her. It’s strange that it’s never happened before, but they’ve resisted for almost a year, they have postponed this moment, and now it has come: she opens her mouth and meets his mouth, their lips are warm and dry, but the tip of his tongue is cold, she observes this, it strikes her that he must have been sitting with his mouth open, he’s been tense, he has known this was coming, and now he finally locks his mouth around her mouth.
The Story of a Marriage Page 13