As he crossed the curtain of bamboos that separated Frank’s gullied no-man’s-landscape from next door’s hygienic lawn and weedless beds, William saw his girlfriend’s back through the window of her bedroom. She appeared to be looking down at her phone. She jumped when he rapped at the window.
Wim couldn’t remember the last time he’d used the front door. It probably predated his voice breaking. As kids, they went in and out of each other’s houses without knocking. Tara’s family moved into the house next door when Wim was still in middle school. Back when the neighbourhood kids attached fake speedometers to their handlebars, and pegged playing cards to their spokes. They would cycle around the neighbourhood for hours on end on their pretend motorcycles, riding them down the gentle stream that cut their street in two. Sometimes they cycled all the way down to the lake, off the canoe dock and into the water. They bummed roll-ups from Tara’s older brother and smoked them in the tall grass field behind the bakery. In the summer, they spied through the hedges on the stunning blonde who sunbathed topless by her pool. Rumour was she’d been on television in the eighties and had a twenty-year-old boyfriend. If she left for the weekend, they annexed the pool at night, adding their cigarette butts to her overflowing ashtray. In late September they had rotten-apple fights in the trees.
Wim climbed through the window and put the mince pies down on the desk. He kissed Tara on the mouth for a long time. The bedroom had that familiar smell of patchouli incense that also infused all of Tara’s clothing, books, hair and skin. The smell was strongest in the crook of her neck.
‘Hi,’ he said.
She kissed him again, and they moved to the bed. Tara ran her fingers through Wim’s too-long, messy hair. ‘When did you last get a haircut?’ she asked, taking her shirt off. Wim thought it would be nice to take a nap, save the Talk for later.
In the second year of senior school, Tara started hanging out with the theatre crowd, which put their friendship on a two-year hiatus. They still saw each other around all the time. At the bus stop. At school. On the beach. The canoe dock. At the bowling alley on a Friday or Saturday night. Then Tara got a boyfriend – a kid who worked as a ski instructor in the winter and a kiteboard instructor in the summer. She lost her virginity to him, and it lasted through two seasons. Wim did not have a girlfriend in high school, although he could have gone out with a girl called Sophie had he wanted to. Somehow the realistic option of a senior-school girlfriend proved satisfying enough for him, on top of which he was spared the need to engage in humiliating displays of frenching in corridors during break.
And then, before they knew it, senior school was over.
The night before he left for London to study economics, Wim bumped into Tara in the old town, in a bar frequented for its two-euro tequila sunrises. She was there with her theatre posse, a purple cocktail umbrella behind her ear. She gave him hell about his choice of degree, and asked why he wasn’t going to art school like her. Or film school. Anything but economics. She brought up the cloud-tank video. ‘Is it because of your parents?’ she asked. ‘Despite them,’ he answered.
Later, they walked home together along the cycle path, stopping at the marina for the summer’s swansong swim. The water was warm, and the sand beneath their feet shone silver in the moonlight. The mountain across the lake was yellow and cratered. At its feet was the other bank, its magnificence on hold until sun-up.
After the swim they dried off with their clothes, and Wim lent Tara Frank’s Albertville 1992 T-shirt. As they lay on the dock, gazing up at the stars, he noticed the Olympic flame go up and down with the heaving of her chest. The thought of Tara’s breasts and heart under the fabric of his shirt was a revelation. Over the years, he and Tara had skinny-dipped in the neighbour’s pool, shared a tent, spent hours together at the beach, and yet, somehow, he’d completely missed the fact that she had a body. Tara caught him staring at her and giggled.
They walked home the short way, cutting through the field at the back of the supermarket. When they got to the car park Tara grabbed Wim’s hand and pulled him close. For almost an hour they made out against the shopping-trolley shed, stopping every now and again to say nothing. The next day, Wim left for London. They didn’t see each other again until the following summer, when Tara’s plan to go backpacking through Italy fell through because her girlfriend came down with appendicitis.
At first they met at the municipal beach. She moved her towel close to his. Then it was shows, a movie, a music festival. Hiking and smoking weed in the mountain behind their houses. By the middle of the summer they were spending each day together, stocking up on their reserves of one another for September, when Wim would return to London and Tara to art school in Lyon.
Commitment excited them. It wasn’t something you were meant to take on at their age – the precociousness felt reckless. The relationship was something they shared, something that set them apart from their peers, but it was also this thing they got to take back to university with them, individually, like a habit.
They used every tool their generation had to offer to manage the distance. Had long text conversations about what would happen next, when Tara was an artist, and Wim understood the economy. Wim wanted Tara to join him in London, where he’d find a job in the City. She thought she might, but also, perhaps they could both go to Berlin instead, and live in a squat. In a flat, said Wim.
William was the sensible one, but in a sense he was also the most artful, if not artistic, because his chosen career path required feats of imagination that even Tara couldn’t begin to comprehend. Wim planned one day to own a huge house with a studio for Tara. A small sailing boat with walnut berths. A holiday home in the part of Sicily his great-grandmother came from.
‘I want to tell you something,’ he said.
‘No you don’t.’
Tara climbed off him and sat on the edge of her bed. She looked beautiful, unflawed, not like his sisters, who were women who had grown up and become less attractive, but more interesting. Wim sat up and kissed her again. Breathed her in once more.
‘If you wanted to tell me something, you’d just tell me,’ she said, putting her shirt back on. ‘This preamble means you’re either scared to tell me or you don’t know how to.’
The first crack had been during reading week. He was due to come back to France to spend the week with Tara in Lyon. He ran out of money for an airfare, and instead drove to Whitby with his room-mate and his room-mate’s friends. One of the friends was Ruth. When it became obvious to him that if he continued talking to Ruth, they’d continue to find common ground and edge closer to each other until something happened, he stopped seeing as much of Ruth, but resolved to break up with Tara so he could see more of Ruth.
Tara had watched him grow into a man across a divisive bamboo hedge. Had watched him navigate adolescence and senior school, which was like watching someone almost bleed to death but then make it. Their attraction was complicated by the past. Any future together could only ever be a continuation of their shared childhood. The point was, she reminded him too much of him.
With Ruth, he had to start from the beginning. At first it felt childish to compare favourite bands and films with a girl. Childish but imperative. He and Tara had skipped that stage, where lust is built on common ground and texting songs is foreplay. They already knew those things about each other, and in time revised their childhood friendship as one long flirtation.
It wasn’t that he didn’t love Tara – it was more that their love was a project. It was possible he would end up with Tara one day, and it was possible he wouldn’t. She was everything that was familiar, and she was a far-fetched possibility. Besides, the two-year break-up was more or less written into their history. Once, Lois told him it was unlikely he’d grow old with a girl he’d once pelted with brown, rotting apples. Unlikely he’d marry the girl with whom he smoked cigarettes without inhaling.
He tried to bring his head closer to Tara’s face to inhale her reassuring patchouli essence.
‘No,’ said Wim.
‘But you would like to. If the opportunity presents itself.’
Wim thought he must be stupid to let such an intelligent woman go. It reminded him of fishing with Frank, of how they would sometimes catch and release. You released the fish, not because it wasn’t perfect, not because it wouldn’t feed you, but because it happened to be the first one you’d caught. At the end of the day you’d take home whatever fish bit, but while the day was still young, it was just sport.
‘I knew it,’ she said.
She didn’t give him enough credit. She was acting as if he was a disappointment. He’d gone for months without thinking this. For months he’d been deeply committed to their relationship, giving other girls the cold shoulder and responding to all of Tara’s texts – even when he was out at night. This wasn’t the culmination of months of shitty behaviour away from her. There had been no lies. This was a recent, responsible decision.
He thought of that night, a couple of weeks ago, at a nightclub called the Coliseum. It was a nineties night, which was too far back to mean anything, but not ancient enough to merit an entire night. Ruth was at the club with some friends. She had on tights that were laddered, and wore black nylon stockings as a top over a black bra. He watched her make out with someone up against a mock-Grecian column. On the bus home he texted Tara that he loved her. He didn’t know what it meant to be thinking of that now.
He wondered if Tara had met someone else. She was smart, gorgeous in a way that defied statistics. He didn’t ask. Instead, he opened the tin of mince pies Joan had packed.
‘I always thought we’d be the ones to make it,’ said Tara.
‘Me too.’
‘But also I didn’t.’
‘Yeah.’
The mince pies released their reliable Christmas taste, which mixed in with the sweetness already in the room. Wim felt like an adult. He had done something even his parents couldn’t pull off. He would go home to them now, and to his sisters, who were each following their chosen course, and for once the big change would be happening to him. It almost felt good to give up on the perfect woman, knowing full well you’d done nothing more than what the world had expected from you all along.
*
Capping a pyramid of ice chips, the oysters looked like a back-to-front mountain. Like a stony drift come to rest on a pile of snow – and not the other way round. At the foot of the oyster mountain, a garland of seaweed emanated the smell of brine from its shiny green blisters.
Cole pulled out a number from the ticket dispenser: 636. Their house number.
‘What else do we need?’ said Nick, pulling out Joan’s shopping list, which had been scribbled on the back of a restaurant bill from Chez Josée. ‘Milk, lemons, baking powder, toilet paper, FORMULA, clams.’ He read aloud, trying to do justice to Maya’s capitalisation.
‘Does she say what kind of formula?’ asked Cole.
‘No.’
Cole hoped there were only three kinds of French formula, and only one of them organic.
‘How do you say tin of clams in French?’ asked Nick.
‘Clementine,’ said Gitsy, rocking the shopping trolley to and fro.
The number 631 appeared on the red LED display behind the fish counter. A woman stepped forward and ordered some cooked prawns.
‘Gitsy, why don’t you run over there and get the lemons,’ said Cole, pointing to the fruit section. Gitsy skipped off.
‘They have clams right here,’ said Cole.
‘Oh no. They have to be the shitty kind in a tin. For clam dip. It’s this thing my parents always make at Christmas.’
Nick thought of his parents, and how it would be just the two of them tonight, eating clam dip and listening to Christmas jazz albums. He’d taken Lois home one year. But his parents’ Christmas routine was so well honed at this point that it allowed parallel experience, but not inclusion.
‘What’s Christmas like at your parents’?’ Nick asked Cole.
‘Oh, just like here, but without any of the French stuff.’
Nick marvelled at how well Cole seemed to have found his place in this family. His effect on the family was one of simplification. Grandparenting was easier with him around. He spoke French effortlessly, thus simplifying mealtimes with Frank. He took care of his wife in the way parents dream their daughters be taken care of.
Nick, on the other hand, was a man post-humiliation. Expected to hurry up and feel once again the legitimacy of being the man Lois had chosen to bring into this fold. He wanted them all to understand that if anyone was on probation right now, it was her. Back home at his parents’ house, his baby stocking still hung from the fireplace – proof that he too was the centre of a world.
Gitsy returned with a bag bulging with lemons.
‘That’s far too many lemons, darling,’ said Cole.
She tried to swing the bag over the side of the shopping trolley but lost her grip, and the lemons fell to the floor, rolling away from the trolley in all directions.
The number 633 flashed on the display screen.
Cole and Nick chased the scattered lemons, crouching down to pick them up, under the gaze of French people who seemed not in the habit of dropping lemons like tourists.
Number 633 ordered a thick slab of pink seafood terrine and scallops on the half-shell. Cole wondered whether number 633 had been sent on an errand by his wife, and how many errands a typical week contained. How were tasks divided in his household? By which process did each chore fall on either side of the line? Or perhaps number 633 lived alone, and would spend Christmas Eve with friends. Maybe he would drive home through town later tonight, return to a solitude he either valued or bore.
Number 634 was a child barely older than Gitsy. The child said something in French, and the fishmonger walked over to the lobster tank. Gisty followed the boy to the tank and watched the man pull four brown-spotted lobsters out of the water.
‘What is he going to do with them?’ she asked, turning to her father.
‘Drop them in a big pot of boiling water,’ said her uncle.
Gitsy looked at the boy, who circled the tank to receive a plastic bag of live lobsters, their impotent claws fastened with blue elastic bands.
‘Can we do that?’ she asked.
‘No, we’re having oysters,’ said Nick.
‘I don’t actually like oysters,’ said Cole. ‘But I think I’m expected to participate anyway.’
A participator. That’s exactly what he was.
Earlier, Nick wondered how often Cole and Maya had sex. If that part of their lives was just a continuation of the efficiency on display elsewhere. He was sure he’d seen Lois wince the other day. It was a passing look, but as it flashed across her face it left its mark there.
Number 635 in the line went unclaimed and the display changed to 636. Cole and Nick both took a step forward, and Gitsy walked hopefully back to the lobster tank.
‘You go,’ said Cole.
Nick asked for three dozen oysters. The oysters came in a wooden crate, packed in ice. Gitsy sat in the trolley next to them, holding the too-many lemons in her lap.
Cole hesitated in the formula aisle, picking up the boxes and scrutinising the labels. Watching his brother-in-law pick out feed for his son, Nick suddenly felt quite free. Like he hadn’t fully anchored himself to these people yet. Like a floating island. An island in the middle of a pristine Alpine lake. An island that might just wake up one morning and decide to float away.
*
It took Finn forty-eight hours to nuzzle into the smell of his grandmother. At first he cried whenever Maya left the room, but now he was quite happy to play at Joan’s feet, and to direct his big questioning silences at her. Happy to take a handful of her trousers in his little fist and pull himself up to her knees. Finn went to his grandmother like the dog went to her. Silently, and unsure of what it was he needed.
Cole and Gitsy were taking a
nap upstairs. Lois and Nick were somewhere in the house, and Frank... Well, Frank. Maya kissed her baby on the head and bent down to strap the leash to the dog’s collar.
‘Oh, he’ll be fine without that, darling,’ said Joan.
‘Well, I don’t want him to run out in front of a car.’
‘Why would he run out in front of a car? He’s not stupid.’
Simon did not alter his expression to confirm this. The gormless face, he found, appeared to make the humans feel the most secure.
‘You need anything, Mum?’
‘Pick up some yogurts for the kids.’
‘They don’t eat them.’
‘Pick up some yogurts for your father, then.’
‘OK.’
Maya wrapped her mother’s scarf around her neck and put on her mother’s fur toque. She and Lois always helped themselves to their mother’s clothes. She didn’t mind, they thought.
Outside the sky was blue like an inkpot, and the mountaintops were still fishing for the light that drained from the valley. As soon as she left the driveway, Maya took her phone out and dialled Liz.
‘Hi. You’ve reached Liz. I can’t get to the phone right now but leave me a mess—’
‘She’s at work,’ Maya told Simon, but what she meant to say was, ‘I love her more than she loves me.’ She was shocked to realise she had just spoken to the dog.
Simon was taking a piss, and wishing Maya would slacken the leash. How could she not understand how unpleasant it was to have to feel the tautness of a leash while pissing?
Maya removed her glove to text Liz. She thought of Liz, spending Christmas in Turkey where she was leading a workshop on gender equality in the workplace. She wondered what kind of women would be attending the workshop.
Hey. I miss you. Pick up.
Simon shook his back leg and stepped into the road. The wet road scintillated in the orange street lights. The lights were ugly and efficient, and buzzed as if they were on a permanent timer. The first time Nick had visited their parents’ house, he’d told the girls it reminded him of LA. Maya had scoffed, but years later, after a trip to LA, she knew exactly what he meant. Balconied hills and no two houses the same. Greenery everywhere and hidden driveways that snaked off to lush gardens – some of which had pools. Random fields for walking. A dictatorship of hills and monticules. Maya’s phone buzzed.
Stories We Tell Ourselves Page 12