The Portable Virgin

by Anne Enright

  He crossed his arms with great ceremony, and not even the violence with which the coach turned corners could convince Mrs Hanratty that he was not rubbing her hand, strangely, with his 3 fingers, around and around.

  ‘I am a 55-year-old woman who has had sex 1,332 times in my life and I am being molested by a man I should never have spoken to in the first place.’ The action of his hand was polite and undemanding and Mrs Hanratty resented beyond anger the assurance of its tone.

  All the numbers were broken off the car parked outside the hall, except 0, which was fine – it was the only 1 she knew anymore. Mrs Hanratty felt the justice of it, though it made her feel so lonely. She had betrayed her own mind and her friends were strange to her. Her luck was gone.

  The 3-fingered man was last out of the coach and he called her back. ‘I have your ear-ring! Maeve!’ She listened. She let the others walk through. She turned.

  His face was a jumble of numbers as he brought his hand up in mock salute. Out of the mess she took: his 3 fingers; the arching 3 of his eyebrows, which was laughing; the tender 3 of his upper lip and the 1 of his mouth, which opened into 0 as he spoke.

  ‘You thought you’d lost it!’ and he dropped the diamanté into her hand.

  ‘I thought I had.’

  He smiled and the numbers of his face scattered and disappeared. His laughter multiplied out around her like a net.

  ‘So what are you going to win tonight then?’

  ‘Nothing. You.’

  ‘0’

  The Portable Virgin

  DARE TO BE dowdy! that’s my motto, because it comes to us all – the dirty acrylic jumpers and the genteel trickle of piss down our support tights. It will come to her too.

  She was one of those women who hold their skin like a smile, as if she was afraid her face might fall off if the tension went out of her eyes.

  I knew that when Ben made love to her, the thought that she might break pushed him harder. I, by comparison, am like an old sofa, welcoming, familiar, well-designed.

  This is the usual betrayal story, as you have already guessed – the word ‘sofa’ gave it away. The word ‘sofa’ opened up rooms full of sleeping children and old wedding photographs, ironic glances at crystal wineglasses, BBC mini-series where Judi Dench plays the deserted furniture and has a little sad fun.

  *

  It is not a story about hand-jobs in toilets, at parties where everyone is in the van-rental business. It is not a story where Satan turns around like a lawyer in a swivel chair. There are no doves, no prostitutes, no railway stations, no marks on the skin. So there I was knitting a bolero jacket when I dropped a stitch. Bother. And there was Ben with a gin and tonic crossing his legs tenderly by the phone.

  ‘Thoroughly fucked?’ I asked and he spilt his drink.

  Ben has been infected by me over the years. He has my habit of irony, or perhaps I have his. Our inflections coincide in bed, and sometimes he startles me in the shops, by hopping out of my mouth.

  ‘Thoroughly,’ he said, brushing the wet on his trousers and flicking drops of gin from his fingertips.

  There was an inappropriate desire in the room and a strange dance of description as I uncovered her brittle blonde hair, her wide strained mouth. A woman replete with modified adjectives, damaged by men, her body whittled into thinness so unnatural you could nearly see the marks of the knife. Intelligent? No. Funny? No. Rich, with a big laugh and sharp heels? No. Happy? Definitely not. Except when he was there. Ben makes me too sad for words. I finished the row, put away my needles and went to bed.

  *

  Judi Dench came out of the wardrobe and decided that it was time that she had an affaire herself. She would start a small business in the gardening shed and leave her twin-sets behind. And just when she realised that she was a human being too – attractive generous and witty (albeit in a sofa kind of way) – some nice man would come along and agree with her.

  Mrs Rochester punched a hole in the ceiling and looked at Ben where he sat at the end of the bed, maimed and blind. She whispered a long and very sensible monologue with an urgency that made the mattress smoulder, and we both had a good laugh about that.

  Karen … Sharon … Teresa … all good names for women who dye their hair. Suzy … Jacintha … Patti …

  ‘What’s her name?’ I asked.

  ‘Mary,’ he said.

  My poor maimed husband is having sex in the back of our car with a poor maimed woman who has a law degree and a tendency to overdress. She works for a van-rental firm. You would think at least she could get them something with a bigger back seat.

  My poor maimed husband is seriously in danger of damaging his health with the fillip this fact has given to our love life. And while he bounces on top of his well-loved sofa, Satan turns around in the corner, like a lawyer in a swivel chair, saying ‘Go on, go on, you’ll wake the children.’ (Or is that me?)

  She is the silence at the other end of the phone. She is the smile he starts but does not finish. She is the woman standing at the top of the road, with cheap nail-polish and punctured ears. She is the girl at the front of the class, with ringlets and white knees and red eyes.

  The phonecalls are more frequent. It is either getting serious or going sour. He used to head straight for the bathroom when he came home, in order to put his dick in the sink. Then he stopped doing it by accident and started going to her flat instead, with its (naturally) highly scented soap. Should I tell her the next time she rings? Should we get chatty about Pears, fall in love over Palmolive? We could ring up an agency and do an advert, complete with split screen. ‘Mary’s soap is all whiffy, but Mary uses X – so mild her husband will never leave.’ Of course we have the same name, it is part of Ben’s sense of irony, and we all know where he got that from.

  So Ben is tired of love. Ben wants sad sex in the back of cars. Ben wants to desire the broken cunt of a woman who will never make it to being real.

  ‘But I thought it meant something!’ screams the wife, throwing their crystal honeymoon wineglasses from Seville against the Magnolia Matt wall.

  I am not that old after all. Revenge is not out of the question. There is money in my purse and an abandoned adolescence that never got under way.

  I sit in a chair in the most expensive hairdresser in Grafton Sreet and a young man I can’t see pulls my head back into the sink and anoints (I’m sorry) my head with shampoo. It is interesting to be touched like this; hairdressers, like doctors, are getting younger by the day. My ‘stylist’ is called Alison and she checks my shoes beneath the blue nylon cape, looking for a clue.

  ‘I want a really neat bob,’ I say, ‘but I don’t know what to do with this bit.’

  ‘I know,’ she says, ‘it’s driving you mad. That’s why it’s so thin, you just keep brushing it out of your eyes.’

  I am a woman whose hair is falling out, my stuffing is coming loose.

  ‘But look, we’re nearly there,’ and she starts to wave the scissors (like a blessing) over my head.

  ‘How long is it since you had it cut last?’

  ‘About ten weeks.’

  ‘Exactly,’ she says, ‘because we’re not going to get any length with all these split ends, are we?’

  ‘I want to go blonde,’ says the wet and naked figure in the mirror and the scissors pause mid-swoop.

  ‘It’s very thin …’

  ‘I know, I want it to break. I want it blonde.’

  ‘Well …’ My stylist is shocked. I have finally managed to say something really obscene.

  The filthy metamorphosis is effected by another young man whose hair is the same length as the stubble on his chin. He has remarkable, sexual blue eyes, which come with the price. ‘We’ start with a rubber cap which he punctures with a vicious crochet hook, then drags my poor thin hair through the holes. I look ‘a fright’. All the women around me look ‘a fright’. Mary is sitting to my left and to my right. She is blue from the neck down, she is reading a magazine, her hair stinks, her skin is pulled i
nto a smile by the rubber tonsure on her head. There is a handbag at her feet, the inside of which is coated with blusher that came loose. Inside the bags are bills, pens, sweet-papers, diaphragms, address books full of people she doesn’t know anymore. I know this because I stole one as I left the shop.

  I am sitting on Dollymount Strand going through Mary’s handbag, using her little mirror, applying her ‘Wine Rose and Gentlelight Colourize Powder Shadow Trio’, her Plumsilk lipstick, her Venetian Brocade blusher and her Tearproof (thank God) mascara.

  I will be bored soon. I will drown her slowly in a pool and let the police peg out the tatters to dry when they pick up the bag on the beach. It affords me some satisfaction to think of her washed up in the hairdressers, out of her nylon shift and newly shriven, without the means to pay.

  My revenge looks back at me, out of the mirror. The new fake me looks twice as real as the old. Underneath my clothes my breasts have become blind, my iliac crests mottle and bruise. Strung out between my legs is a triangle of air that pulls away from sex, while my hands clutch. It used to be the other way around.

  I root through the bag, looking for a past. At the bottom, discoloured by Wine Rose and Gentlelight, I find a small, portable Virgin. She is made of transparent plastic, except for her cloak, which is coloured blue. ‘A present from Lourdes’ is written on the globe at her feet, underneath her heel and the serpent. Mary is full of surprises. Her little blue crown is a screw-off top, and her body is filled with holy water, which I drink.

  *

  Down by the water’s edge I set her sailing on her back, off to Ben, who is sentimental that way. Then I follow her into his story, with its doves and prostitutes, railway stations and marks on the skin. I have nowhere else to go. I love that man.

  Science and Nature

  I WANTED TO buy him balloons. His eyes had a clean, pained look, a wide colour. They were always disappointed to find no kites when he looked into the sky.

  It was not that he disliked sentiment. He was a sop of sentiment, nostalgic all the time. He just disliked the words that were put on it, the loss of secrecy. Nothing made him aggressive like the loss of a secret.

  We were working away at the kitchen counter, chopping carrots, onions and peppers with a precision that made it seem an unusual task. ‘You’re such a precise person.’ He turned as though I had caught him in the act.

  ‘No I’m not,’ he said.

  He loved graveyards and parks. They ‘emptied him out’. There is a feeling of connectedness in a graveyard, like a crossword puzzle that is all filled up. High-rise stacks of bodies along supermarket aisles. Parks, on the other hand, are full of accidents and nostalgia, bumped heads and ice-creams, social mixtures – before everything got too complicated instead of after. All of this, of course, I find suspect, and that is why I brought him to the zoo.

  The llama has a hare-lip. It has a nosy, indifferent air and a lip at the end of its face that splits to grab the foliage offered over the ditch. The ant-eater too, has a crippled face and kisses with its nose. The polar bears surprised me by the yellow of their teeth, as though I could smell the bad, meaty breath from behind the wire. I had wanted to concentrate on the primates, and make the trip a moral, or comic, trail, but the polar bears were as insistent as a famine on the nine-o’clock news. We saw them from the other side of the lake, criss-crossing all afternoon, walking backwards, then forwards, then backwards again.

  We theorised about the bears. I said that they walk hundreds of miles a day in the wild, and just couldn’t stop themselves. He told me of a dentist who claimed it was toothache that made them shake their heads from side to side, as though they were in pain. I countered with the fact that their fur was the natural equivalent of optic fibres: each hair was hollow in the middle to trap the rays of the sun and keep them warm. ‘They must be baked alive – carpeted with hot needles.’

  In the monkey house, marmosets played with their own dung and remained picturesque. Salient fact number thirty-four, I said, caged animals fight and masturbate, but do not mate.

  We had a trivia competition for most useless fact. He started.

  ‘There was a certain line of French nobles who considered it polite to shave themselves from head to toe on the day that they were married in order to spare their new wives the fright.’

  ‘Alright,’ I said, ‘but what about the Marquis de Champfleury, who was so shocked on his wedding night by the pinkness of his wife’s skin, that he ran away. Then he came back when she was asleep, painted her white from head to toe, and jumped on her.’

  ‘The ladies of Versailles used to lift their skirts in the corner of the room and piss.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ I said, ‘the ladies of Versailles had a special kind of china chamber pot that could be carried under their dresses, and it was called after the court priest because he gave such long sermons.’

  The monkeys remained picturesque as he recited the microfiche. ‘On the general index,’ he told me, ‘sex comes between “semiotics” and “social policy”.’ I laughed. (Is this how undergraduates do it?) ‘The actual index reads:

  “Sewage disposal

  Sex

  Shadow prices

  Shamanism

  Shape discrimination

  Sheep

  Sheldon High School”’

  He won.

  Winning always made him sad, which is what attracted me to him in the first place; he never did it conspicuously. His essays were neat and well developed; there was something seductive and clean about them, a melancholy in stating the obvious. It made me curious as hell. All my own tragedies were small and spectacular. They made him retreat into his Secret, whatever it was.

  Then on to the reptiles, a lot of depressed snakes in boxes. From Kiddies Korner came the sound of a cow in pain. ‘She’s in heat,’ he said. ‘What do the snakes do? Swallow their own tails?’ and he rapped on the glass with a bright new penny, shy and precise.

  It was a pleasant enough afternoon, apart from attacks of mental asphyxiation in front of one cage or another. His eyes remained clean and wide, as I tried to prise him open with an extremely seductive monologue on the miracle of the sperm whale, complete with literary references. I linked arms with him and talked about oceans, whale song, mating rituals. ‘Maybe there is only one left,’ I said, ‘can you imagine? In the spring it swims the length of the Atlantic, down around South America, and then it swings up through the Pacific, singing all the time. Listening for a reply.’ Perhaps I didn’t mention the singing.

  ‘No whales in the zoo,’ he said, just to annoy, and he checked the sky for kites.

  ‘Let’s hide in the bushes and stay the night,’ he said. ‘Let’s see what they do when all the people are gone. They probably watch the moon like we watch the telly. Have a drink, chew the cud, go dancing, make love a bit. A simple life. No one asking questions. No one looking on.’

  I was annoyed, ‘There are two young polar bears in Belfast Zoo,’ I told him, ‘that were bred in captivity. Totally shameless. They lie on their sides all day and stroke each other, nothing else.’

  ‘No,’ he said, for some reason, and it occured to me that his secret was simple. I was part of it. The Secret was me.

  We walked towards the sea-lions’ pool. where the whales were making love; with tidal waves and cracks in the concrete. The seals barked and applauded with their flippers while delighted children screamed at the rails, throwing in entire ice-creams.

  ‘I wonder where they bury the animals,’ he said.

  Men and Angels

  THE WATCHMAKER AND his wife live in a small town in Germany and his eyesight is failing.

  He is the inventor of the device which is called after him, namely ‘Huygens’ Endless Chain’, a system that allows the clock to keep ticking while it is being wound. It is not perfect, it does not work if the clock is striking. Even so Huygens is proud of his invention because in clocks all over Europe there is one small part that bears his name.

  Two pulleys
are looped by a continuous chain, on which are hung a large and a small weight. The clock is wound by pulling on the small weight, which causes the large weight to rise. Over the hours, the slow pull of its descent makes the clock tick.

  The small weight is sometimes replaced by a ring, after the fact that when Huygens was building the original model, his impatience caused him to borrow his wife’s wedding ring to hang on the chain. The ring provided a perfect balance, and Huygens left it where it was. He placed the whole mechanism under a glass bell and put it on the mantelpiece, where his wife could see the ring slowly rise with the passing of the hours, and fall again when the clock was wound.

  Despite the poetry of the ring’s motion, and despite the patent which kept them all in food and clothes, Huygens’ wife could not rid herself of the shame she felt for her bare hands. She sent the maid on errands that were more suited to the woman of the house, and became autocratic in the face of the girl’s growing pride. Her dress became more sombre and matronly, and she carried a bunch of keys at her belt.

  Every night Huygens lifted the glass bell, tugged his wife’s ring down as far as it would go, and left the clock ticking over the hearth.

  Like Eve, Huygens’ wife had been warned. The ring must not be pulled when the clock was striking the hour. At best, this would destroy the clock’s chimes, at worst, she would break the endless chain and the weights would fall.

  Her mistake came five years on, one night when Huygens was away. At least she said that he was away, even though he was at that moment taking off his boots in the hall. He was welcomed at the door by the clock striking midnight, a sound that always filled him with both love and pride. It struck five times and stopped.