by Bill Rowe
Gareth was about ten years older than Sian, with a gentle, sensitive face. I imagined, as the three of us made small talk, what Gareth and his poor wife must have gone through before Sian had left Cardiff for London, and what his poor wife was going through now. Love. Jesus Christ Almighty. Between the pain and pleasure love caused, which was the greater? Sian passed me my tea with a little lopsided ironic grin, gave Gareth his, and sat on the arm of Gareth’s chair, her hand on his shoulder. Gareth looked up at her with burning eyes of adoration. Pain. Yes, pain, by far. My brain filled with an image of Rosie. I drove it out and soon excused myself. I went upstairs looking for the company of Morton.
I CALLED MY PARENTS to confirm that I would be travelling to Egypt over Christmas. Mom started to say, “Oh, that’s why Rosie looked so—” but she stopped.
“Pardon, Mom,” I said.
“I was just wondering if you and Rosie were still…”
“Mom, Rosie and I are broken up.”
“I was wondering about that. I hadn’t seen her for a week or so, and then I saw her at Nina’s a few days ago.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. But I wanted to have all my plans in place before I called. What was she saying?”
“She didn’t say anything about that. I was there because Nina wanted me to be a trustee of Rothesay’s estate until Rosie reaches the age of majority, and that’s what we talked about mainly.”
“Are you going to do that? I thought you couldn’t stand being around Nina these days.”
“I can’t. In fact, as I told Rosie, I’d cheerfully murder her for what she didn’t know was happening around her own house. But I want to make sure of Rosie’s education. There’s enough there, with Nina’s disability pension, for them to live modestly and for Rosie to get all the way through university, with some part-time work and an assist from scholarships. So yes, I’m going to do it until Rosie can legally take over. Your father is going to help me.”
Dad now came in on the other extension. “Your trip up the Nile, since you’re already over on that side, is a way better idea than coming home. You’ll be home a long time.” He spoke as if he was talking about being dead. “Anyway, on to more pleasant topics, thanks for the picture of Sian. Undeniable proof that she’s a girl. How are the two of you making out?”
“She’s not here anymore, Dad. She’s gone back to Cardiff with an old boyfriend.”
“What? Jesus Christ, those theatre tickets I arranged cost three hundred bucks. Don’t tell me that’s down the drain.”
“Oh, Joe,” said Mom.
“I believe I got your money’s worth, Dad, while it lasted.”
“Oh, Tom,” said Mom. “You two.”
“Are you going to Egypt with anyone in particular?”
“Morton.”
“The chap in the picture… I see.”
“Bye, Dad. Bye, Mom. Love you both.” I hung up the phone and stood by it in the hall, immobilized. If my mother had been immediately able to see something in Rosie’s demeanour during the visit—Rosie, who’d been able to keep an unreadable, stoic face on for years, except for that period… A pain came into my chest of a needle piercing my heart. Perhaps I should call her and…
But I didn’t. That night I theorized to Morton that I loved all women in general so much I could never truly love an individual woman again. And I meant to put the theory into practice on the boat up the Nile. Morton was dubious. He’d already told his Angela in Manchester that we’d had to cancel one of the cabins while there was still time and that he was going to share mine, and she had not liked it. Indeed, she advised him to crawl into King Tut’s hole while he was at it and stay bloody there. Which had caused Morton some anxiety: “Tom, this sexual promiscuity you’re planning for me—I’m warning you—it had better be good.”
His anxiety proved groundless. During the eight-day cruise, Morton and I spent only the first night in our own cabin together. For the next week, our nocturnal to-ing and fro-ing, and the consequential displacement of cabin mates, helped create a domino effect of geometric proportions throughout the ship. By mid-trip, the opening and closing of cabin doors all night had so unnerved a prof from Oxford that he screeched at the tour organizer over breakfast, “No students ought to be allowed on these student tours.” And this guy was a professor of logic.
Back in London, although my memory of momentous sights seen through sleepy daytime eyes was hazy, my auditory recall of nighttime banters in bunks was clear.
The girl with the Irish accent, a student at Cambridge, the night after the boat’s visit to maybe Luxor, in the afterglow of lovemaking: “Not bad, Yankee boy.”
“I’m Canadian.”
“Canadian? Oh. Then that was outstanding.”
The thirty-seven-year-old wife of a Norfolk schoolteacher putting her clothes back on three o’clock in the morning, probably off Aswan High Dam: “This holiday, the first one without my husband, is supposed to put some zing back in our marriage.”
“And will it, do you think?”
She bent over and kissed my lips and then moved her mouth down over my chest and stomach and kissed the top of my subdued, damp penis. It stirred upright again, and she stripped off her knickers and climbed back on with a murmur of great fervour: “I don’t think so!”
The student at Oxford stimulating me to erection the night of perhaps the Valley of the Kings: “Not unimpressive. Zero to a hundred in seven seconds.” Her father had been a race car driver. I thought of Rosie. She had said something similar early in our lovemaking. Starting to go slack, I pushed her out of my mind.
“A hundred miles an hour that quick?” I said. “I’m impressed myself.”
“Kilometres, not miles. You blokes are always more impressed with yourselves than you ought to be.” She was pretty fast herself. Minutes later I was wondering what that professor of logic must be thinking to hear her squeal at one-thirty in the morning, “Gentlemen, start your motors!”
Over cocktails on deck in the late afternoon sun on the last day, I asked Morton whether we shouldn’t feel a bit guilty over having missed most of the recommended sights by being up all night and in bed after breakfast till mid-afternoon every day.
“No,” Morton responded. “My theory of Egyptology is, if you’ve seen one colossus, you’ve seen them all. The more pertinent question is, should this have been so enjoyable, our flitting from flower to flower like a bee on speed? Isn’t that what we should be feeling guilt over?”
“No,” I responded, “it’s the highest example of success in the whole theory of evolution—the male who spurts his genes into the greatest possible number of females.”
“But isn’t the success rather pointless, since I invariably wear a condom?”
“Yeah, but your genes won’t know that till it’s too late.” I told him that the only guilt I felt was over throwing away opportunities last summer like the one I’d described to him with the Norwegian beauty, Siggy. We laughed with the arrogant cynicism of late adolescent males.
Chapter 16
IN THE LATE AFTERNOON of the fifteenth of February, alone in my room off the Kingsway, I sat reading for diversion Grave’s Mythology. I’d told Annie, a student of Classics at London University, I was interested in the ancient Greeks, and she had brought the book along as a Valentine’s Day gift yesterday when she’d come to spend the night. I was reading about Theseus’s abandonment of Ariadne on the island of Naxos. As I read, my mind flitted to the news earlier this afternoon from home: my former nemesis, Cory the Moose Mercer, had been found behind an abandoned building in downtown St. John’s, dead of alcohol poisoning and hypothermia. Looking back a few years later, I would not be able to believe that every time in London that I thought about the poor wretch’s death, a surge of joy had hit my heart.
I glanced across the room at the Valentine card with its cartoon heart and mushy verse that Annie had placed on the table with a laugh and a kiss last night. A wave of self-disgust that had been lurking within me for thre
e months, but which I hadn’t admitted to myself, now broke through the surface and swept over me. For the first time in those months I saw what I had been acting like: not like a person who was fully human, but like someone possessing the arrogance of the divine. I had been acting like a demigod hero, forever exploiting the humanity of women, their human needs, their love, to screw them and drop them. Yeats got it right: “… before the indifferent beak could let her drop”—the swan with the god within indifferent after ravishing the girl Leda. Just as Theseus or any other hero with the god within would be off to another conquest in battle or sex with another woman without a thought, without a twinge of conscience, without a backward look, instantly forgetful, absolutely neglectful, indifferent. And that, I reflected, was precisely what I myself was doing. A self-absorbed hero as indifferent as if I contained within me something divine.
Suzy Martin’s bitter words to me when I’d been alone with her in the witness waiting room during Rothesay’s trial now sounded in my ears. I had wondered to her about the effect of Rothesay’s refined and cultivated handsomeness on the jury, causing Suzy to mutter, “Yes, you’d never say it to look at that elegant Adonis in there that he fucks little girls. He fucks them and he fucks them and he fucks them and then he drops them in the crapper.” The sound of Suzy’s now unbearably hard words in my head forced me to stand up. Suddenly I understood myself. I had been acting like an arrogant semi-divine hero, yes, but I had been acting against my true nature. I was not like that at all. I was, in fact, the exact opposite of a godlike psychopath like Rothesay. I myself had nothing of the semi-divine hero in me. And I’d been wrong to be carrying on as if I had. As I saw that truth, the love in my heart, suppressed by my three months of preoccupying lust, began to soar. What a blunder I’d made thinking a paradise of lust was better than the hell of love I’d been through with Rosie.
I paced and sat and thought and analyzed and found my feeling to be absolutely firm. I’d never stopped loving Rosie. I’d been sidetracked from the true path of my life. I had to get back on it right now. It wasn’t too late. It couldn’t be too late. I’d go out and telephone her and tell her directly that I loved her, always had and always would. I had been wrong, I’d tell her. Pathetically off the beam. She had to forgive me.
My mother had told me after Christmas that Nina and Rosie had sold the big house in St. John’s and bought a smaller one into which they had taken two student lodgers. I called from memory their old telephone number, hoping they had kept it. Rosie herself answered on the first ring. My heart leaped. A propitious start. “Hello, Rosie, it’s Tom. I hope I’m not calling too late in the night.”
“Who? Tom! Oh, sorry, Tom, I was expecting a call from someone else. Where are you?”
“Still in London. How are you?”
“I’m fine. Why are you calling? Because poor Moose Mercer is dead and your courage has come back?”
“No. Just to have a little chat if you’ve got a minute.”
“I don’t, really. Do you mind freeing up the line so my call can get through? Thanks. Bye bye.”
“I’ll call back,” I said, but she had hung up.
I returned to my room to muse on this. She was just showing her anger with me in unmistakable terms. Naturally, I needed to work on winning back her friendship and trust. What did I think—she’d be waiting for me there with open arms? Maybe she was seeing someone else. I’d check that out so that I knew what I had to overcome.
“Not that I’m aware of,” my mother replied on the phone. “Nina hasn’t mentioned that she’s involved with anyone. But Nina mightn’t know. Rosie doesn’t tell her much. She spends a lot of time with Suzy. Why do you want to know?”
“Just a friendly interest.”
Okay. This wasn’t going to be as hard as I’d thought. I wouldn’t play any games. I would tell her the simple truth and she would see everything clearly. I sat down and wrote that I had said things during our telephone conversation last fall I didn’t mean. I loved nobody but her. I had thought I wanted to be free to do as I pleased but found I did not want that. I wanted only to be committed to her again. I had discovered afresh what I’d already known but had been in denial about, that my love for her was so great it transcended every other consideration in my life. I begged her to forgive me on the grounds that I had undergone an emotional breakdown or upheaval following my terrible trauma in St. John’s. I had now passed through all that and had come out the other side of it healthy, seeing the light and loving her stronger than ever. She was to write me as soon as possible. Even if she felt she could not forgive me right now, would she please write anyway? I had to hear from her. I loved her more than life itself.
Letter mailed, I told Annie when she came to spend the night that I didn’t want to see her anymore. At the door she asked, “Who do you think you are, playing fast and loose with my emotions and my life, some big macho hero having a little fling?”
“No, I think I am a pathetic arsehole.”
“No argument here, except with the adjective. I would have said despicable arsehole.” She closed the door behind her.
I resisted so stubbornly all further opportunities to demonstrate the evolutionary success of my sperms that Morton said I should have my entire genetic structure examined in a lab for defects. But I was waiting for Rosie’s reply. After three weeks, when none had come, I woke to my first serious fear that none was ever going to come. But how could that be? I had abandoned her for intimacy with another woman, yes, but so had she abandoned me in the same way when we were sweethearts at eleven. Therefore, we were even. The absurdity of that comparison made me realize I was starting to panic. I had to act. I grabbed a handful of coins from my gas heater hoard and went to the phone to catch her before she left for the morning. The unknown female who answered said she was out. I asked her to tell Rosie I’d call back. The next three nights she was out or unable to come to the phone, and I left a message that I would be at my London number all day and night on Sunday and would be grateful if Rosie could please return my call that day at her convenience. Sunday, from seven in the morning till twelve midnight, I left my door ajar to be sure to hear the phone ringing in the hall even if I was in the bathroom. Seven calls came, including two for Morton and one from a behind-the-times male for Sian, but none for me.
I decided to take a harder line. At one o’clock in the morning, still early in the night in Newfoundland, I dialled Rosie’s number. A young woman, in the tone of someone disturbed at the dinner table by an insurance salesman, told me she was out of town for the weekend. I said in an authoritative voice that I assumed something like that had kept her from calling, but in case I was wrong, would she kindly tell Rosie to either call me back or convey a message to me that she was not going to call? There. No more pussyfooting. That night Rosie called.
The student occupying Sian’s old rooms knocked on my door at three in the morning. “It just rang and rang,” he said. “Long distance from Canada. I hope it’s nothing serious at this hour.”
Hope in my heart, I went out.
“Look, Tom,” said Rosie by way of greeting, “I know it’s late there, but I just got back in town and it bothers me that I have been so engaged in my own concerns that I haven’t dealt with this nuisance. We have nothing to talk about. Please stop calling me.”
“Rosie.”
“Tom. Listen. This is not a request. This is a statement. I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. Do not call me anymore.”
That night I phoned Suzy Martin at home. She sounded glad to hear from me, and we chatted cordially for a minute. Then I said, “I’ve made a big mistake, Suzy. I must have gone crazy or something. But last fall Rosie and I broke up.”
“I am aware of that. That was really dumb. You two were made for each other.”
“I need your help to get her back.”
“What? This is bizarre.”
“I know it is. But I love her more than anything in this world. I know that now. I always knew it, but I was stupi
d enough to let it slip out of my mind for a few weeks. Will you please help me get her back?”
“Tom, I can’t do that.”
“But I need your help. She told me not to call her again.”
“No, I mean it’s not possible for me to do anything even if I wanted to, even if I put my whole heart and soul into it.”
“But why not, Suzy? I know what I did was stupid. But isn’t her attitude an overreaction? Can’t you get her to talk to me? Even if she hates me, she can talk to me and at least hear my side of the story.”
“She doesn’t hate you, Tom. She just wants to have nothing to do with you. You are not part of her life. You had an absolute right to do what you did last fall. And she has an absolute right to do what she is doing now. She has wiped you out of her life. That’s all there is to it.”
“But, Suzy, I’ll do anything to make it up to her. Will you tell her that, please?”
“Tom. After all you and she were involved in together, you were capable of casting off her love and her trust as insensitively as if you were brushing off a fly. You acted just like—well, you know fucking who. For God’s sake, what do you think you could ever do to make that up to her? Bravely decide to come back home, now that the guy who made you run away is dead?”
“You know it’s got nothing to do with that, Suzy. That is just silly, and it’s wrong. This is not the way Rosie is. It is not possible. I love her and I believe she still loves me. She must still love me. It’s only been a few months. She can’t just decide to unlove me and have nothing to do with me just like that. She must have another boyfriend, does she?”
“Whether she has another boyfriend or not is totally irrelevant to all this.”
“Well, if she does, I’ll take him on and win her back.”