The Portable Virgin

by Anne Enright

  What she noticed in the pub were his eyelids, that disappeared when he looked at her, and made him look cruel. She couldn’t understand most of what they were saying and they laughed all the time. He was wearing a nylon-mix jumper, cheap denim and bad shoes.

  ‘I thought the friend was the kind of Oh-so-interesting bastard,’ said the letter, ‘with that glint in his eye that cuts me right up. You know capital P. Primitive, the kind that want to see the blood on the sheet or the bride is a slut. What I mean is … Attractive to the Masochistic, which, as we all know, is the street I’ve been living on even though the rent is so high. What I need is a romantic Irish farmer who is sweet AND a bastard at the same time. So he’s looking at us anyway like we’ve been Sinning or something equally Catholic and I just started to fight him, all the way. He says “Did you have a good time then?” and I said that “Kevin was the best fuck this side of the Atlantic.” DUMB! I KNOW THAT! and Kevin laughed and so that was … fine. And then I said “Maybe that surprises you?” “Not at all,” he says. “That’s what they are all saying down Leeson Street,” which is their kind of Fuck Alley. And I laughed and said “Hardly,” I said, “seeing as he’s never done it before …” and there was this silence.’

  She went to the toilet, and when she came back, his friend was gone.

  ‘Why did you pick me, if it doesn’t mean anything? That’s what you are saying, isn’t it? You’re saying I shouldn’t have stayed.’

  ‘Don’t worry, you’re great. You’ll make some woman a great lover.’

  ‘You should have fucked Jim. He understands these things. You both understood each other like I was an eejit.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  He was no longer polite. He walked her back to the flat when he should have gone home.

  *

  ‘Welcome to aggressive sex,’ she said. ‘I enjoyed that.’ He had broken her like a match.

  ‘You’re all talk.’

  After a while he turned to her and felt her body from her shoulders to her hips, passing his hands slowly and with meaning over the skin. She felt herself drifting off the bed through the black space where the door should have been. It seemed to grow in the dark and swallow the room.

  ‘When I was a kid, there was a monumental sculptors in the local graveyard and the polishing shed was covered in marble dust. The table was white, the floor was white, the coke can in the corner was white. There was an old wardrobe up against the wall with the door hanging off, all still and silent like they were made out of stone. And outside was this rock with “Monumental Enquiries” carved into it like a joke. Which just goes to show.’

  After he left, she saw the shadow of flour on the carpet, where his clothes had lain, like the outline of a corpse, when the clues are still fresh.

  Juggling Oranges

  WHEN THE PLAY ends, the fading light clings to his body on the stage and pulses gently. His body has been distracting all evening, it moves slowly. He is a good mime, even in speaking parts. His skin looks as though the whiteface has seeped into the pores and will never wash away. In the centre of his face that is blank like a sheet are two human eyes. The only uncomfortable thing about him are his hands, which grow out of his wrists like plants. He is a man to spend your life with.

  At the age of nine the world was full of facts, lists and catalogues. There are more pictures than things. He spends the day in school writing down the names of trees in a long row, and sticking dead leaves on sheets of card. The pictures of birds get names as well, but the only one he knows in real life is the single magpie that haunts his mother through the kitchen window.

  He does a picture of the sunset in class, because they only have pink and orange paint, and he is bewildered when the teacher sticks it up on the wall.

  Billy is easy to love, with his blotting-paper face. The teacher finds him in the corridor talking to himself in three different voices.

  ‘Are you not in class? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s not me,’ and he runs away.

  Billy sits in the tall grass with his legs stuck out straight like an infant. There is a beetle on his hand talking to him in a big grouchy voice that wears a suit and a tie.

  ‘Where were you at six o’clock? I was expecting you.’

  His father has a video camera and tries to catch him unawares on the beach. Pat pat pat of the spade on the top of the bucket, that is red and has mountains inside. Billy hears the whirr of the camera. PAT PAT PAT. He ignores the eye of the lens, but empties out the sand like Shirley Temple having a good time while her mother is killed in a freak accident. He starts to sing.

  He can sing anything from the television and re-enacts entire Tom and Jerry cartoons without a mistake. He whistles songs into milk bottles half-full of water and learns how to talk backwards. He is fluent in Pig Latin and in Morse Code. He makes a set of keys from wood, grass, bottletops, abandoned pieces from his mother’s sewing machine. ‘This is the key to the chest, this is a secret, this is a key to Jerry’s house and I don’t know what this one is.’

  The girl down the road shows him how to make a bow and arrow and they shoot raspberry canes over the telephone wires.

  Later, Billy talks vaguely to his body in the bath about the state it is in. He lifts his right leg, then the left, out of the water, like a train moving out of a station and he watches the way the hairs all flow one way, and then the other. The dirt of the water reminds him of bubble bath when he was little. Men’s bodies look so industrial. When he is on stage he moves like a boy.

  Billy tells stories when the mood hits him, never before or after. He sits in silence for large parts of the day and whistles from time to time; coloratura snatches with long grace notes that fade into piping conversations between small animals that live in the attic. His stories are long and excited, like a child come home from school. He takes all the parts and has to move around the room. These stories are an expression of love for the listener and they end abruptly, leaving an air of embarrassment.

  He has fifteen stories of falling off his bicycle. He closed his eyes on Whitefriar Street at four in the morning and shouted the numbers between one and ten to see how long he could travel blind. If you part his hair you can see the furrow made by the parking meter like a fire-break between the roots. Or he talks to himself and falls off. What were you talking about?

  ‘Nothing. It wasn’t me.’

  *

  If anything, he should be a gardener. On the windowsill in his bedroom is a single morning glory, one seed in one pot. The morning will find him in front of the window, scratching his belly slowly and looking at the speed of it. He has forgotten to dress. Proof positive comes on his birthday when it flowers in a silent trumpet blast.

  Billy cuts his hair when the time comes to do so, so that the pictures of his teenage years become hilarious. Even so he recognises the face behind the Status Quo shag as a smell and a laugh, and the sensation of snogging at a disco. He can sense the lights and the girl – and the bewilderment he feels when she smiles like she wants to see him again. When it comes to dancing he plays all the parts and they have to clear a space for his drumming, never mind the guitar.

  At college, Billy can stand on his head, or sing in falsetto, do long-multiplication in the supermarket to find out what percentage tax would make South African oranges commercially non-viable. A young man, his shoulders sticking out of a T-shirt with ‘Can I help you to find something?’ on the front, asks if he needs help.

  ‘No no no not at all,’ says Billy and reads the message on the T-shirt to himself, out loud.

  Perhaps he drifted into acting. He is certainly not stage-struck, nor is he trying to avoid a job selling advertising space. The stage is where he is eccentric, where he concentrates well. He knows how many people are in the audience without counting the heads. Sometimes, at the end of a long scene, he looks at the faces in the front row and wonders what they are doing there.

  Just when he starts to get uncomfortable,
he wins a place at a school of movement in Paris. He stays late in the studio and stares at himself in the mirror on the wall, lifting his leg as high as a girl. Slowly, his body separates out from himself and begins to do extraordinary things. His face starts to float. His teachers scream about his hands, which are absent-minded and start up conversations with the audience when the rest of him is elsewhere. He is sleeping with a woman who puts all her masochism into his automatic wrists and requires him to talk her to sleep.

  He knows that he will always remember the light in the room and the rumpled sheets that look like a perfume ad. He loves the sound of voices that come up from the alley. Across the way he can see a sweatshop from his window, where twenty Vietnamese women work all the hours that he is awake. On hot days he practises juggling for them stripped to the waist, with five oranges in front of the window, where they can see. He is grateful for their generosity. They throw him a glance and a smile, even though they are shy, even though it is hot and they would like to eat the props. One day he throws an orange over and a window breaks.

  This is what Billy means when he says that he is a political actor; a man whose social conscience is eased by playing Wilde, if it is done in the right way. At first he takes any job that is offered, but he is easily embarrassed and hides his performance from the more flamboyant members of the cast. Directors start not to like him, although they can find no complaint.

  When he is unemployed for long stretches, Billy starts a one-man show in his kitchen, using the wok and the cooker. By an amazing feat of virtuosity he both mimes cooking and does it at the same time. He juggles red peppers and stirs the pan like a big, hairy witch. The sound-track is made up of snatches of Shakespeare and the ‘Gay Byrne Hour’.

  ‘Why should a dog, a horse a rat have life.’

  ‘And it was cancer, lovie, was it.’

  ‘See there, see there, see there.’

  ‘Oh I know, the liver. The liver.’

  Billy teaches his daughter how to juggle and how to ride a bike. He buys her a fish tank and she takes the Neons into the bath with her and smothers them in the hot water. She starts to imitate his voice on the radio, in ads for heavy-duty paint, and she dances like a stripper. He bans the television from the house and, on her nights out, the woman he is living with complains hilariously about the amount of time he spends on the toilet. When she leaves, Billy keeps the child.

  Billy and his daughter act out her bedtime stories in a co-produced extravaganza that lasts for hours. No one knows what they say to each other. He buys the child a telescope. He teaches her how to make a bow and arrow.

  Rose grows older and fatter. The more weight she puts on the more insubstantial she seems and Billy cooks remarkable meals for her, miming all the time. Before he can wake up to her, she is doing exams and is seized with anxiety about what she should do with her life. ‘It doesn’t make any difference,’ says Billy, ‘I mean, it doesn’t matter,’ and he makes her cry. Her attempts at using make-up are a disaster. Billy takes her into the bathroom to show her where to put the eyeliner and the blusher, and realises halfway through the lesson that she is deeply ashamed of him. All that afternoon, he clears out the caches of food that she has secreted, like a hamster, around the house.

  He has worked in radio for her sake, and for too long. Over one summer Billy acquires all the props of an ordinary actor, an answering machine, anxiety at parties, various different smiles. He realises that he has been annoyed at himself all his life, and it relieves him to give in at last. It is when he succeeds that he finds that something has broken and his work is bad but popular. He still has the embarrassing ability to move like a boy although his face is middle-aged, and he cheapens the effect. Directors find him useful, they enjoy handling him with little tricks. The audience love him.

  He starts to exercise in the front room and recite other people’s monologues. When he catches himself singing or talking he cuts it off with a grunt and goes upstairs to sit in the bathroom. His accent sharpens.

  Rose moves out of home and lives with her mother while she goes to art college. When Billy sees her at the weekends she is thinner and thinner and her make-up is very pale. Rose is beautiful all of a sudden and very nervous. She discovers a fashionable slimming disease and there are long fights with her mother over the phone.

  At the age of forty-nine Billy disgraces himself by falling in love. The girl is a juvenile lead with little experience, hired for her looks and not her talent. She mangles her lines and smiles coyly. Everything about her talks to him about the failure of his profession and he is craven when she walks into the room. The rest of the cast smile indulgently and see that his behaviour is correct. They say that his performances are getting better and better as he shames himself every night for the sake of her smile.

  The lights whirr and crack as they heat up. All the traditional smells are there, including greasepaint, though Billy does not find them intoxicating. He puts on his make-up in the dressing room. He looks in the mirror like a blackbird that fights with his reflection in the glass, until the sun goes under a cloud and he sees into the room beyond. The country behind the mirror, Billy used to say to Rose, is the Land Where Fish is King. It was the place where their stories happened.

  Ghosts that can not be seen in the room are seen in the mirror, and vampires are the other way around. Billy wondered who was who on each side of the glass, as he picked at a wandering trace of lipstick, and rehearsed his lines one last time. It would be good to send his reflection out on stage, instead of himself, it was so neatly painted and costumed. But twisting between his eyes and the eyes in the glass was a cord that he did not like, and could not break. In the mirror, everything looked the same, except it could not feel.

  He is playing the fop in a restoration comedy, and so carries an orange in a lace handkerchief close to his nose to drive away the smell of disease.

  He stands in the wings and watches the end of the first scene, just before his cue. The girl is out there, with an enchanting décolletage – too rich and heavy for real life. The lights crack and fade. There is a slight pulse in his eye as he looks at her, as though the light is reluctant to let her go. Her stillness suddenly becomes an artifice, a representation of stillness. The audience clap and she sweeps past him, breathing through her nose.

  Perhaps it was the sight of her cleavage, which looked so crass off-stage. Perhaps it was the smell of the orange. Billy walks on in the blackness, looks down at his carefully rumpled hose and points an elegant toe. The light comes up. He starts to speak.

  The audience is distressed. There are whispered conferences in the wings. The girl makes her entrance again and Billy’s hands go on playing the part as his voice withers away. The orange, the handkerchief and his fob watch circle around him at speed. The young actress panics and skips to her next line then smiles sweetly and goes rigid. One of the older players blasts on to the stage with the book in her hand and a ‘is there a doctor in the house?’ expression on her face. Billy knows his lines. He knows his lines backwards and so he ignores them both. He knows his lines so well that he whistles them as he juggles, just for her.

  It is hard to believe that the hair on his legs is iron grey – one of the surprises of age. He steps out of the bath and sees himself in the mirror. His body looks like it has been pulled out of the canal with a grappling hook, but at least it is his own. He whistles as he dries himself and talks to his belly, then he forgets to dress and waters the vine that creeps over the bathroom wall.

  Rose comes over once a week and he mimes cooking a perfect dinner for her – and cooks it at the same time. He says to her ‘Now where else would you get tomatoes like that?’ and she agrees. He says, ‘I grow a very Platonic tomato. It is both the ideal tomato and the real rolled into one. The miracle is that you can eat it at all.’

  ‘No wonder,’ says Rose, ‘I went off food.’

  ‘You were as fat as a fool when you left me,’ says Billy. ‘You were a little troll.’

  Rose worr
ies about him talking to the plants even though it is one of the things he does that she loves most. Every couple of months she trims his hair, sits him in an old vinyl chair and wraps a bib around the back of his neck. He tells her the story about the scar on his scalp, how he closed his eyes cycling down Whitefriar Street and counted to ten. She uses a small hand-mirror to show him the back of his head until he plants it in the garden in a scheme to scare away birds. When she leaves the house, she finds that a hair has stuck in the back of her throat. It is barely there and it doesn’t shift when she coughs.

  Revenge

  I WORK FOR a firm which manufactures rubber gloves. There are many kinds of protective gloves, from the surgical and veterinary (arm-length) to industrial, gardening and domestic. They have in common a niceness. They all imply revulsion. You might not handle a dead mouse without a pair of rubber gloves, someone else might not handle a baby. I need not tell you that shops in Soho sell nuns’ outfits made of rubber, that some grown men long for the rubber under-blanket of their infancies, that rubber might save the human race. Rubber is a morally, as well as a sexually, exciting material. It provides us all with an elastic amnesty, to piss the bed, to pick up dead things, to engage is sexual practices, to not touch whomsoever we please.

  I work with and sell an everyday material, I answer everyday questions about expansion ratios, tearing, petrifaction. I moved from market research to quality control. I have snapped more elastic in my day etcetera etcetera.

  *

  My husband and I are the kind of people who put small ads in the personal columns looking for other couples who may be interested in some discreet fun. This provokes a few everyday questions: How do people do that? What do they say to each other? What do they say to the couples who answer? To which the answers are: Easily. Very little. ‘We must see each other again sometime.’