Al's Well

by Dark, Gregory

  “Take my advice, you should know Marian Keyes. Now, what the hell was it, now I’ve got that out of my hair, that was a two-edged goddamn sword? What got me started on all that? Right: Love! Love, is what I was going to say. Love is a two-edged sword. No, it’s not. What am I talking about? No, love, it’s rather more like owning, I don’t know, a Rottweiler or something. All sweet and lolloping and doting all over you … right up till the day he turns round and takes a hunk out of your right thigh. Until the goddamn thing, it savages you.

  “That savaging was the turbulence. The turbulence which went on and on. And which was churning up all the milk of human kindness inside of me into some kind of cheese – some really niffy cheese, at that – not nifty, hon, niffy: bad smell cheese, gorgonzola, kind of deal, past its gone-rancid-by date.

  “I was so mad. So completely mad. I had to do something about it. I had to.

  “I tried being pissed at Mike. Really I did. But I couldn’t hack it. Oh, I could get sore at him, irked by him, ‘miffed’ (as the Brits would have it) by him. – Great word, isn’t it, ‘miffed’? – Jesus, there were enough miffed-making things about him, for Christ’s sake. But ‘miffed’ didn’t do it. ‘Miffed’ wasn’t enough. ‘Miffed’ was not up to the job. ‘Miffed’ was the tortoise and I wasn’t the hare, I was the goddamn cheetah.

  “So mild was my miffedness with Mike, in fact, that I wrote him. I wrote him unmiffedly. I wrote him that I loved him and that I always would. And that I was real sorry things hadn’t worked out for us. And that I hoped they would for him. And that there were heaps more women out there for him, and heaps more heaps more attractive than I was. I tried to tell myself that the letter was a waste of time, that he wouldn’t reply, that even if he did it’d only be to whine like a baby. But not even that worked as a device for me to get mad at him.

  “So then I tried getting mad at myself. And that worked better. I had more things to be mad with myself about than I had with Mike. But know what? I may have gotten beyond ‘miffed’, may even have gotten as far as ‘mad’, but ‘mad as hell’? No, I couldn’t get there with me. I kept find extenuating … mitigating circumstances for me. And, just as I was travelling nice-and-smoothly towards ‘mad as hell’, the train of thought would stop. Or go backwards or something. Drop me off at ‘mad as purgatory’ or ‘mad as limbo’ or some place.

  “Al! Tailor-made. Al: designer-label vent-my-wrath-onner Al! I could get ‘mad as hell’ at Al. ‘Course, Al hadn’t really done anything either which would justify me getting ‘mad as hell’ at him, but – know what? – I could somehow justify to myself that I didn’t need any justification to get mad at him. He was one helluva getting-mad-as-hell-athim maker.

  +++

  … ‘Course, as we didn’t talk, I never said anything about this. And, to be frank, I’m not sure I would have said anything even if we had been talking. Because it’s not easy trying to say that kind of thing to someone else. And what good does it do? I mean, if I’d suddenly become aware that I felt sorry for you because you had chestnut hair and not blond, maybe that’s worth the saying: You can always choose to have your hair dyed. But if I become aware that I feel sorry for you because you have to breathe, what is the point? I mean, my feeling sorry about it is not going to affect – not by one millimetre – your compulsion to breathe. Your passion, Trove, that was as innate to you as your need to breathe. It’s what defined you. And, as so many things which define us,it was also probably going to destroy you.

  Which was not why I felt sorry for you. No. It wasn’t the destruction. It was the conflagration – the energy, if you like. I realized I was tired just watching your passion. It’s exhausting. I didn’t know where you got your energy from, to be so passionate. I’m not talking sexual passion here. (Well, I am, but only partially. And that part of it I’ll get onto in a little while. This section is about non-sexual passion.) I know you know what I’m talking about. I’m talking about eruptions over some presidential misjudgement or over the plans for a new flyover or over your niece’s refusal even to try snails. You could not not be passionate. You ate a boiled egg passionately, brushed your teeth, filled the car with gas, changed the sheets on the bed, all with passion. Not always positive passion, of course. You tutted with passion, sighed, remonstrated, even whined, again always with passion.

  And, of course, (although I’m still not talking about sexual passion) that passion too had to be involved with sex. Except that most sex is a cocktail. It’s a combination of the two people involved. If one’s 100º and the other’s 0º, the climate of their sex together will be 50º. And that was one of the problems. That was one of the bigger elephants of the entire herd which was stoically taking up residence in our kitchen. See, sex between us, I’d have been happy to have at a steady, oh, 25º, say. With the occasional splurge to 35º and the annual volcano of 50º. Your staple sexual fare, on the other hand, you expected to be 75º, with occasional slumps to 65º and an annual trough of 50º. (This, Trove, is all with the benefit of analytical hindsight. None of this was clear to my consciousness then, and I suspect not to my sub-consciousness either.)

  Christ, you know I’m no kind of meteorologist, but I’m sure something fairly dramatic happens when a tornado meets a sort of indolent, malleable, vapid front. And, of course, tornadoes want dramatic things to happen. Why else be a tornado? And they therefore get fairly pissed if indolent, malleable, vapid fronts just cede to them. They become King Lear, ranting without an audience. Sometimes without even the Fool for company.

  Passion needs passion. Maybe for its own survival. And it was inevitable you would have lovers. You had to have them. If your passion could not be reciprocated or echoed in other ways, at least it could be with sex. Now I completely understand that. Then? …

  You know, I really don’t know. I think I must have intuited something. Even if the something I intuited was only not to enquire too deeply. I think there were moments (looking back on it) when I suspected – there must have been an atmosphere, the unexplained grin or two. But … well, you have no idea how seductive comfort is. Only the passionate swim. Those of us who lack that dynamicism (or dynamo!), we need to be in a boat. And when surrounded by sharks you know what you don’t do to that boat? You don’t rock it.

  I was so comfortable with you. I mean, so comfortable. I’ve never thought of you as a possession – You must excuse me, Trove, if I tell you things you already know. I’m taking the stance in this letter that you don’t know anything. The danger otherwise is, if I assume knowledge, I may assume that there is greater knowledge than there is; or I may make the same mistake I have so many times in the past: of assuming that because I know something you will also know that something, or that something I surmised (or guessed or deduced or felt or reckoned) is something I have learned. How many of the world’s horrors, I wonder, have occurred because people have mistaken learning something for surmising it, or guessing, deducing, feeling it? – I have never thought your attention or time was exclusive to me. Indeed, not even that I had first call on either. If I thought about it, then I’d have to realize that that amount of passion simply had to find an outlet. And then I’d have had to ask myself all sorts of difficult questions. About whether I felt jealous, for instance. And if I did, whether I had any right to. About whether I was adequate as a lover. Whether the comfort of our sex together was enough. (God, that’s a really uncomfortable subject for me to touch on. I don’t want to but I’ll come back to this also in a while.) …

  +++

  My dearest Trove,

  Thank you for your letter. It was a sweet letter. Well, of course it was, it was from you. I’m very sad. Deeply sad. I have loved you in a special way. The special way in which I shall continue to love you will, yes, be different – but it will still be special.

  It’s hard, and probably fruitless, to describe the pain. It’s not even that it is one. It’s a series, rather, of pains. A chain. And not just of pains. Oh, there certainly are some pains, but there are also aches, s
tings, sores, jolts – a whole gamut, probably. And some are concurrent and others coincidental. At its best, it is extremely uncomfortable; at its worst, excruciating.

  But not for a moment (and this is the point of what I’m saying), not for a second – even knowing that there was this welter of pain awaiting me at its end – would I have taken another path. With you I touched something sublime, ate some kind of spiritual ambrosia. You were both the answer to so many of my prayers and the personification of prayer. But, as the axiom has it, when the gods want to punish us, they answer our prayers.

  And this is precisely how they do punish us.

  You may remember that at the start of our ‘amour’ I was worried that it might compromise our friendship. Today I have no such worry. Indeed, to the contrary. I have, as well as falling in love with you, fallen deeper in ‘like’ with you.

  If ever either that lover or that friend can tender you any help at all you need do no more than ask. In return for which, you can do me the favour of looking after yourself. With my love – Mike xx

  +++

  “I was going to go round and kill Al: Al, the s-o-b, the little shit, the total bastard. Al, the target of my wrath. I was going to boil him in oil, flay him alive. I’d give the cock-sucker a major piece of my mind.

  “The mad that I was? Well, all the way over to his, I was whipping it up into an ever steamier lather. And then, just before I knocked at the door, I gave it another whoosh or two – you know, like Brits making tea adding an extra teaspoon ‘for the pot’ – just to make sure it was all good and real whirry. Going to explode just as soon as the cap was taken off the bottle.

  “He blinked when he opened the door. Made me feel real welcome – about as welcome as Colonel Sanders at a convention of Yankee vegans.

  “‘I thought,’ he said, ‘we were going to let each other know. If we were coming visiting, I mean.’

  “‘Yeah, right!’ I said and simply pushed past him.

  “‘Now’s not convenient, Trove,’ he said.

  “‘Well, it’s convenient for me,’ I said. I was halfway to the kitchen by then. ‘I’m making some coffee. Want some?’ I asked him, being very hospitable in a glaring-daggers sort of way. The house wasn’t the total shambles it had been previously. That much was true. But it wasn’t going to be the cover picture either for ‘House Cleaner Monthly’ or anything. I, on the other hand, would have made the perfect cover for … I don’t know … ‘Fury Unrestrained’, say, or ‘My life as a man-eating Amazon’.

  “‘I’ve got someone …’ he started to blurt.

  “‘Oh, shit, Al,’ I spat back. ‘You think I don’t know about your sleazy little affair?’ Wrong, Trove! Not going to win the Nobel Peace Prize with that one.

  “‘How dare you!’ he hissed. ‘How dare you!’ And, know what?, for a moment there, I was frightened. Real frightened, I mean. Rabbit-caught-in-headlights time. I mean, this was emotion. Genuine emotion. Feeling. Gut feeling. And that was more scary than the fact that the emotion was anger. You know, it you’re at a temperance meeting, you’re more surprised that there’s booze there at all, than at what that booze is.

  “‘We need to talk, honey,’ I said. Suddenly Miss Reasonableness, Miss Sanity and Relationship Counsellor and Magical, Mysterious Miss Mystic!

  “‘No, we don’t,’ he replied, his eyes still covered in a sheen of anger. ‘We don’t need to talk at all, Trove. I don’t need to talk. And Monique – Monique, she’s the girl upstairs, my “sleazy affair”, as you so eloquently put it –, she doesn’t need to talk. Know what? I doubt even Mike needs to talk. You’re the one who needs to talk, Trove. You. And guess what? I’m not in the mood right now. So, I’d like you to leave.’

  “‘And the coffee?’ I asked, tail between legs which had shrunk from being a wolfhound’s to a dachshund’s.

  “‘I’m sure,’ he said, ‘you’ll remember there’s a café on the corner.’

  “I wanted to apologise. Really I did. But I just couldn’t. I just couldn’t. The words, literally, shrivelled inside my mouth. Shrunk to nothing. It wasn’t that they got stuck in my wind-pipe. When I opened my mouth, there was nothing there. You know how much today I regret that lack of apology? You have any idea the shit I’ve put myself through for not having made that apology? No, you can’t have any idea!”

  +++

  … Please don’t mistake any of this for the fact I didn’t care. Because I did. Care. I was going to write ‘passionately’, but that (clearly) would have been a mistake. It would also be wrong to say ‘dispassionately’. I would have killed anyone who had harmed a hair on your head. And I think you both knew that and know that. And now I think about it, there was passion. Of course there was. For Christ’s sake, that is passion. Oh, maybe not passion to the same degree or intensity as yours. At least not on the surface. But there was passion nevertheless. It’s just that … Well, it wasn’t a family trait, not a, as it were, ‘Tregunter’ thing, passion.

  When I shook hands with my father at our wedding, that was the first physical contact I’d had with the man since I was a child. (Yes, I do know you know that, Trove.) Was he a man without passion? Was my bookworm mother? She whose care was far more manifest stroking the dog than hugging one of us?

  Do you know what? Since my incarceration, I’m finding the passion in them too. The passion, I mean, in my parents. I’m finding a closeness, even an intimacy with them not only that I didn’t believe I could have but which (had I have been asked) I would have thought unhaveable. Not just between my parents and me. Universally I thought such intimacy did not exist.

  And do you know what else? The discomfort I used to tell you I always felt between them? Well, it isn’t. They may be cacti, but cacti have their place. And, to a cactus, another cactus is far more attractive than, say, a tulip or a pansy. And one thing more: Who am I to judge? Can a eucalyptus tree judge a cactus? Or a koala bear? Or a tube of toothpaste? Because me the tulip, I find it inconceivable to have a prickly partner does not mean that another tulip might not. And certainly doesn’t mean that another cactus might not.

  My parents – I can see this now – are really comfortable within what I perceive to be their prickly shell. And it is one shell – this I also see now – which they both inhabit. It’s not, I mean, that they both have separate shells, they cohabit within the same one. It’s not even the ascetic getting inured to the dankness of his cave and therefore feeling at home there. There is warmth between them, real warmth, between Mom and Dad, which is very Axminster carpet and Dunhill pipe and fur-lined slippers. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that they’re both, and together, considerably less cactus-like than I had imagined. Because their warmth rarely showed itself in tactile expression I imagined the warmth to be a coldness. And I got used to that coldness, as a child.

  The trouble with our childhood is that we’re so young when we go through it. Shaw said that youth is wasted on the young. And of course it is. But that’s only half the story. The young, more fully, don’t have the wherewithal to deal with youth.

  It’s a fundamental problem. And this is only now becoming apparent to me.

  I’m sure I read somewhere that, by far, the most intense learning curve of our lives is that which occurs between birth and six months. Which means our most intense bout of education is sifted through a sieve of perception that we are the center of the universe. By five, we have learned more than we’re ever going to learn again. Aged five our self-importance is still enormous. Is it any wonder, then, that humankind is so unbelievably selfish? To shed such selfishness would require us to return to our infancy and to unlearn everything we had then learned and then relearn similar information this time using the sieve of perception that we are not the center of the universe. How many of us would be prepared to do that?

  Unless, of course, you have – like a convicted prisoner – got plenty of idle time on your hands. ...

  +++

  Know what day it is? – T xx

  Yup. M xx
>
  Can I phone u? – T xx

  Please. M xx

  +++

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “Happy Valentine’s.”

  “To you too, Trove.”

  “This is really awkward. Don’t you feel awkward?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “I’m sure I should, honey, but I don’t.”

  “You ‘honey’ed me.”

  “I did.”

  “Was that deliberate?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ve missed you, Mike.”

  “I’ve missed you too.”

  “Dumb. This is so dumb. It’s Valentine’s and we’re apart. That’s so dumb. Doesn’t that sound dumb to you?”

  “It’s the dumbest thing I ever heard of, Trove.”

  “That was almost American.”

  “I do try.”

  “Will you come to me?”

  “Trove …”

  “No, no excuses, no reasons. No nothings, Mike. Will you come to me?”

  “I’ve got things planned here. I have to unplan them.”

  “I need you to unplan them, Mike. Come to me.”

  “I’ll call you later.”

  “Call me later. I’ll be waiting.”

  “You know I love you, Trove?”

  “Call me later.”

  +++

  “They decided to meet on neutral ground. Paris was considered neutral ground.

  “And three days later, that’s where they were. And the day after that, of course, was the night of the … ‘incident’, I suppose you’re going to call it, are you? The night of the murder, the manslaughter, whatever. And Al was in jail. And life would never be the same again.

  “How on earth did you get that scar on your breast? And how come I didn’t notice it before?”

  Chapter 14

  “Honey …”