High Dive

by Jonathan Lee

  Looking back, Moose’s twenties and thirties felt fast and thin, somehow sketched in, important moments resisting depth. Whole years had the quick-scrawl quality of the notes Viv left on the fridge.

  He and Viv tried for a child. There were miscarriages. Grieving for these lost children briefly brought them together, did it? Made them feel well suited, almost, to the marriage they’d rushed into. Then they got lucky, and he immediately thought, Fuck, what have I done? With the arrival of Baby Freya, his life widened out into the blur of family life. He began to eat a lot of chocolate. Got back in touch with Wally. Started helping him with coaching on Saturday mornings.

  Fatherhood: the expense of it horrified him. More and more concierge work, saving up tips; he could do it in the evenings when Viv was at home looking after Freya. Less and less tutoring of little Cuthberts and Anthonys. Sunday afternoons travelling to his mother in Brighton.

  At some point he and Viv stopped sleeping in the same bed (his snoring was the first excuse to surface) and at another point he became unsure whether women of his acquaintance expected a single-cheek kiss or a double-cheek kiss. He compromised by providing a friendly pre-emptive hug.

  Vivienne began to go to a lot of academic conferences abroad. He became, for a while, the main carer at home. He felt like a single parent long before he was a single parent. He suspected her of infidelities. There were silent phone calls. There were receipts for dinners for two. There were coloured envelopes addressed to her in a small even script. But he didn’t want to be the kind of guy who suspects his wife of infidelity, who shouts down phones and opens another’s correspondence, so instead of confronting her about the potential affairs he tried to sleep with the babysitter.

  “What are you doing?”

  “What?”

  “Why are you touching my face?”

  “You’re beautiful.”

  “Mr. Finch, I’m repulsed by what you’re trying to do right now.”

  Repulsed. He felt sure Chloë, twenty-one and tanned, hadn’t meant to use such an unforgiving word, or indeed to tell Vivienne what had happened.

  What else from these years? TV became a close friend. News of the Colour Strike, the postal workers’ strike, the miners’ strike, the Ulster Workers’ Council Strike. Freya was quiet when images flickered on-screen. “UK needs a stronger leader, Phil.” This from his Uncle Mick.

  Then one day, in the newspaper, a gift. Next to an article claiming that Britain’s economy had slipped remorselessly down the international league table, he saw an advert. Diving instructor—head coach—at an American university. A chance to do what he enjoyed in a place where no one knew him. An opportunity to experience the life of higher education that should have been his first time around.

  His purpose would be to nurture young talent. It would be like maths tutoring, except there would be no more sedentary processing of textbooks, no more passed notes, no more rooms that smelt of farts, creativity exercised only in the labyrinthine daily excuses for unfinished homework. It would be like concierge work, except he’d get in shape again, and there wouldn’t be such a need to be servile. There would be no more London, with its gloomy summers and endless protests and its winter of discontent—a winter that seemed to have expanded to accommodate many more months than a season reasonably should.

  He cut the advert out. Put it on the kitchen pinboard. The idea of flight made him feverish.

  Morningside Heights, Manhattan.

  32 acres of land.

  State-of-the-art facilities.

  Probably he should always have worked on becoming a great coach rather than a great sportsman. His attempts to break out on his own as an athlete were supposed to have allowed him to get closer to living an authentic life, closer to that thing everyone agrees is to be desired above all else, which is freedom. Instead, the endless striving for independence had worn him out and made him hanker after everyone else’s homogenous middle-class dreams: more security, more money, a better kind of car.

  He got the job at Columbia on Wally’s recommendation. Wally was a guy who always knew a guy who knew a guy. Being offered it convinced him that this was Fate. He had been selected, rewarded. The world had approved his plan. He told Vivienne it was a great opportunity for them both. Told her it would be good for Freya too.

  But oh, the things Viv hated out there. The summer humidity, the graffiti on the subways, the way it turned out that subsidised campus apartments were only for the academic staff on tenure-track. The Dean’s secretary was very sorry if Moose had received the wrong information. Story of my life.

  Eleven months into their time overseas, his marriage crumbled under the accumulated weight of her daily complaints and his technique (masterfully executed, he’d thought) of pretending everything was fine. She said that every time she rang the number you needed to ring to get a Social Security card, they asked her to state her Social Security number. She said that when she went into the bakery for a blueberry muffin, they pretended not to understand her. Tiny shifts of emphasis. Language—the thing she cared about most—conspiring to make her misunderstood. She couldn’t get an academic position anywhere. Hadn’t published papers here. Said he’d stripped her of her self-respect by moving the family out of England.

  But she also kissed him sometimes and said “I love you” sometimes and sometimes—once—they went on an amazing trip upstate, and he felt again that she was the love of his life, so it still hurt badly, very badly, when she said she was sleeping with a guy called Bob.

  This was how he remembered it. She was on the sofa in their small Manhattan apartment. She seemed to find her own admission of infidelity amusing. He saw that on the carpet beside the sofa, under her limp right hand, there was a half-empty bottle of gin. Half-full, he thought, but he couldn’t change his mind. It was a half-empty bottle of gin.

  He thought of the time he’d spent six weeks on the sofa after his father died, eating food from foil takeaway trays. The time he’d screamed at Vivienne that life was not right not right not right. The time he’d somersaulted off the board too close, way too close, daring it to clip his head, to make him bleed, to change his situation in some small or major way.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. She’d felt ignored for years, she said. She was married to a man who preferred to spend all his time trying to make a living out of falling into water. A man who was content to fall and fall. Falling from three storeys high! Teaching others to fall! They’d never make enough money for Freya from that. “You’re a dreamer!”

  “No,” he said.

  “You are, Moose. Somewhere along the line…somewhere, you mislaid the ambitions you had for yourself. Now you want to claim they were stolen. Yes, you are, you’re a dreamer.”

  He blinked and his marriage was gone. She said she was going to make a life out here with Bob. Bob who loved her. Bob who knew her. Bob who understood her. Moose could stay here or move back to England alone. She was sorry. She was. “I’m sorry. So much of your life is repetition, Moose. So much of your life…”

  “Is repetition,” he said, and waited. If she was alive to this one cheap joke, maybe their relationship could be saved after all. But no, her eyes were cold, and he saw that the chilly sophistication of her sense of humour was one of nine or ten things that had doomed him from day one.

  Bob had a place in Midtown Manhattan. Bob had three daughters. One was at Oxford. He’d beaten cancer, had Bob. Bob was a fighter. Bob owned an early Joan Miró sketch. Money if he sold it. Bully for Bob!

  “You don’t even like New York!” he said.

  “Bob does. He likes New York.”

  “Bob sounds like a cunt.”

  “It’s too late,” she said, “for you to develop some spine.” Comebacks were always something she was good at.

  He thought, I love you, don’t leave me, I love you. Who was she to take his daughter away?

  “You can visit, Moose.”

  “With what money?”

  “With all the money you keep
saying you’ll soon be earning.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “You haven’t, not for a long time.”

  “Bob has,” he said.

  She looked at the carpet. “Yes.”

  “Ask her who she wants to live with,” he said, and felt detached from the new chill in his voice. “Just ask her.”

  Viv looked at him with a flicker of something fresh in her eyes. He saw with disgust that he’d impressed her.

  This conversation would come back to him over the years, slightly different each time. It was like one of those crazy tonsillitis dreams he’d had as a child, clutching a cool damp flannel to his face, his mother’s diamond-shaped ice cubes shrinking in a bowl by the bed.

  Vivienne asked Freya who she wanted to live with, and asked in the wrong way, just as he’d known and hoped she would. Vivienne told Freya what would happen. She said, “We’re splitting up, darling, I’m so sorry. You’ll live here with me.” Viv was cleverer than him, undoubtedly. But despite or because of her intelligence, she had no feel for others’ freedom, their need to believe they were in control, and he understood something of this—it was the biggest thing that life had taught him. As a toddler Freya had always complained when her mother carried her upstairs for a bath. On the nights when Moose was in charge, he took a different approach. He posed a question for his daughter: “Bath before or after dinner?” She made a choice and didn’t protest when asked to stick to it.

  In later years he’d waste a lot of time thinking about why Viv had so easily given up on their daughter. How Viv had seemed willing month by month to let a distance open up between them. Friends treated the situation with suspicion. It’s a truth universally acknowledged that middle-class mothers don’t abandon their kids. They looked at him like he must have threatened her, or beaten her, or slept with the babysitter. To one mutual friend all he could say, over and over, was: “I’m surprised too.” All he could add was: “Maybe some women are different to others?” And also, magnanimously: “It wasn’t that she was a bad mother.” Which she wasn’t. That was the sad thing about it. Wasn’t even a bad wife—they were simply a stupid match. The sight of her sewing labels onto skirts and shirts and jackets, all her daughter needed for a new school term, looking over the bridge of those huge glasses. The constant vegetable casseroles. He came to think she was so very depressed at that time that she didn’t want to go on living. Rather than killing herself, she wiped her life clean, started again, daughterless. But then again, this was only his version. They didn’t talk much those last few years, not about anything meaningful. In the gloom of their marriage it was possible he had blind spots.

  —

  He closed his eyes and dozed, observing in his dreams a dozen dark mysterious trees. The way some branches stayed heavy in the breeze. The way others were subtle and reactive. He was hang-gliding over a forest, naked, the proud owner of a friendly erection. His balls were unrealistically big. Down below, Margaret Thatcher and her Cabinet waved and went about their business. He passed through several commas of cloud and swooped into a red lipless tear in the sky. In haste and natural expectancy of compliance he nodded at God and God nodded back. Then someone vomited once, twice, and God sipped a beer and burped.

  6

  She’d thought French. She’d thought Italian. She’d thought coq au vin with scalloped potato gratin, or tortellini with spicy sausage in a bouncy-sounding sauce. Bon appétit, mademoiselle! Buono appetito, bella! But no: her fancy dinner with Surfer John turned out to be a takeaway curry, two bottles of cava, a polystyrene cup sticky with watered-down mango chutney, and a bag of fractured poppadoms. She made sure to claim the least broken one as her own.

  He said, “Can I come in and use your loo, before we go?”

  “Sure.”

  “Can you hold these?”

  “You brought booze?”

  “It’s BYO.”

  “What is?”

  “The restaurant.”

  “Which one?”

  “Not sure yet,” Surfer John admitted.

  “I thought you were supposed to be recommending somewhere? Booking somewhere? I thought you were picking me up in your car and we were—”

  “It’s at the garage,” John said. “Suspension. Think I put too much stuff on the roof.”

  She waited.

  “Maybe we’ll have a drink here first, Freya Finch? My mum gave me these two bottles from her party.”

  This was how it went. This was how, tipsy on cava, she found herself having to retrieve, at 9 p.m., the Coastal Raj menu from the back of the cutlery drawer in her own cold kitchen at home.

  They sat on the sofa and ate their food. Newspaper-covered cushions were on their knees and the plates were balanced on these. Her dad had bought the sofa last year second-hand from a woman in Littlehampton. As the woman had pointed out other items for sale in her house, and explained her decision to let her husband run off with an acquaintance—“My mother said be kind to less fortunate girls”—a gold bangle had crashed up and down her arm.

  “Are you happy, Freya Finch?”

  She held her fork in mid-air. “Are you getting deep, John?”

  “Just wondering,” he said.

  “Maybe. It depends. You?”

  He shrugged like it was a stupid question. “Cool,” he said. She saw that a scattering of dead hairs sat on the shoulders of John’s T-shirt. This provoked in her a jolt of empathy: he too had had a recent haircut, maybe even at the mercy of Wendy Hoyt, though probably somewhere better. His ears looked pink and vulnerable tonight, borrowed from a less confident boy. She liked those ears and liked the feeling of liking them.

  The cava bottle stood on the coffee table. A ripped bag of lettuce relaxed beside it. She was wearing her best knee-length dress, a little yellow number with polka dots and ruching at the shoulders. She should change into jeans, probably, but she was concerned about what that would say to him. She didn’t want to get too casual, because that would mean giving up on the idea of leaving the house. A cocktail bar after food—that was the revised itinerary.

  On the carpet was a leaflet that had fallen out of the Argus: a plea for support from the Society of Redundant Electrical Oven Salesmen.

  “It’s their own fault,” Surfer John said between mouthfuls. “They need to adapt to gas.”

  He retrieved the second bottle of cava from the kitchen. The window took the force of the cork. Fifty per cent of the booze frothed out on the carpet.

  “Sorry,” he said. It was his word for “I am failing badly at feats of manly endeavour.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said. It was her phrase for “Yes, you are.”

  They laid tea towels down on the dark part of the carpet. They drank beers they found in the garage. It occurred to her that if mice had peed on the cans then she and John might both die of a mouse-pee disease. They stared at each other, waiting for the next move. They talked about John’s art. He’d done a foundation course. She thought it was an interesting combination within him, art and sport, but the mention of painting seemed to send him into a low-level trance. He rubbed his eyes. The skin around them took on the pinkish blush of a faded ketchup stain. He said he was really bored with working at the hotel, that his parents were asking him when he was going to move out, what he was going to do with his life, when he was going to start getting serious. He glanced up and glanced away. She realised he was nervous tonight, that he’d been nervous since he arrived. This gave her an unexpected feeling of power. It put her at the centre of things.

  “Have you got a girlfriend, John?”

  A smile crimped the corners of his mouth. “I don’t know what you’re suggesting, Freya Finch, but you’re making me very uncomfortable.”

  She laughed at this and he laughed too.

  She swallowed a very small forkful of chicken and rice. Took another gulp of beer. He pointed out that she was an extremely slow eater. Much quicker on the drinks, he said. She felt warm now, alert. Playful, attractive. The cork had po
pped; something had changed. But what was she doing here? The thing with John had been stillborn. Everyone knew this to be true. If they were supposed to be together, they’d be together by now, wouldn’t they? Did she only want him in order to want somebody who would maybe want her back? She enjoyed being a small, thin, successful drinker. People assumed she’d be wasted after just a glass or two, but she could handle…How much could she handle? She hiccuped and the room seemed to dim.

  When John reached for his beer the logo on his white T-shirt stretched and the muscles in his forearm flickered. “How’s your dad?” he said.

  “OK. He’s hoping to be out of there in a day or two.”

  “Yeah? That’s good. He needs to get himself a healthier lifestyle, that’s all. Get down to the beach.”

  “He’s on his feet a lot in the hotel.”

  “Yeah,” John said. “But ideally the feet would be moving.”

  “Don’t be mean about my dad.”

  “You’re smiling,” John said.

  “I was thinking about him at this wedding, a party we went to for my cousin.”

  “Dancing, was he?”

  “Yep, that’s what he called it.”

  “Bad?”

  “It definitely wasn’t any dance I know. He was just causing his head, his shoulders, his two arms and his two legs to sort of tremble, pretty violently, at roughly the same time.”

  John laughed. “Diving’s supposed to require grace, right?”

  “Yeah. I’m not sure what happened. There are two halves of him, and in the middle there’s this gap.”

  It was weird the way some words could enact the exact thing they described. “Gap” opened a gap. The silence threatened to last. But John, maybe sensing this, began telling an unexpected story. It was about a time, just before starting his art foundation, when he’d spent a long weekend house-sitting for family friends in London.