Glover's Mistake

by Nick Laird

  They often drank in the Tavern. About four years ago the whole place had been gentrified and gourmandized, but it hadn’t really taken. The paint had begun to peel again and the locals had started to return. A handsome Rasta called Kevin led them into the back and up the stairs. The room was large and perfect for a party. After the busy lunchtime pub, it appeared very still and calming. Nowhere seemed more tranquil to David than an empty barroom with lots of seating: the silence was charged with absence, the same absence of noise you find in a shop selling musical instruments, where the guitars and violins and flutes hang, unplayed, on the walls. In fact here, too, a piano stood, unopened, in the opposite corner from the little bar, and a few tables were grouped around it. The two external walls each had three sash windows, and two leather chesterfield sofas sat beneath them, green, battered, basking in the afternoon sun. David perched on the arm of one and set his satchel on the table; the surface was heavily franked with the postage of past drinks.

  ‘You can bring your own music, CDs or an iPod,’ Kevin said. ‘We’ve got an adaptor in here somewhere.’ He reached down below the bar and bobbed up offering a black lead as thick as one of his dreads. ‘And we can do food if you like. Have you spoken to Phil downstairs?’ Glover shook his head. ‘Well, he’s got menus for you to choose from, hors d’oeuvres and whatnot.’ He sniffed hard, once, punctuating his little speech.

  Glover, leaning on one elbow against the mantelpiece, nodded his head a few times to some inaudible beat and said, ‘Well, I think it’s pretty good and it’s free on April 22nd, is it? On the Friday?’

  Kevin flipped loudly through a large black book by the cash register.

  ‘Uh-huh. Yep, it’s free.’

  ‘And what’s the capacity?’ Glover asked. He pushed himself off the fireplace and looked around again. He was wearing one of his new outfits—a pinstriped blazer over a red T-shirt—and he buttoned the middle button of the blazer now while adopting a serious, officious expression, the look of a house-buyer who’s about to start knocking on walls and turning on taps.

  ‘Around sixty. There’s no minimum bar charge. It’s one hundred and fifty all in, and you can book it by leaving a deposit of half. You’ll have a bartender for the evening—if you’re very lucky you might even have me.’ He flashed a set of gappy teeth and bobbed his head again, as if his neck was sprung.

  ‘So what do you two think?’ Glover called across to Ruth and David, who were by the sash windows.

  Before either could answer, Kevin chipped in, grinning over the bar, ‘Mum and dad paying for it, are they?’

  Glover reacted ludicrously, laughing very loudly and then staring at Kevin with ill-disguised anger. Ruth simply smiled through it all, embarrassment and distress apparent in her eyes. David was surprised to pass for Glover’s father, even if the insult was offset by the suggestion that he and Ruth looked like the natural couple. For a few seconds he had to face the window to hide his expression. Poor Kevin. But it could only do them good to realize how the entire world saw them. When they got downstairs David suggested that they have Sunday lunch in the pub, but Glover said he wasn’t really hungry, and wanted to go home.

  If a wedding can be likened to a natural disaster, it’s the avalanche it has the most in common with. The answer to a question echoes, setting off a trickle that builds until a body struggles and flounders through billowing white. Ruth and David were in a wedding-dress shop, which is to say they had entered the heart of the avalanche. The walls were white, the curtains were white and all the gowns were part of that family: ivory, cream, parchment and ecru and pearl. They were not entirely serious about their presence here, and the sales assistant, Tonya, who in a show of recalcitrance wore a plain black cardigan, appeared to be aware of it.

  They’d passed the wedding-dress shop on the way back from the Tavern. David had never noticed it before and that was surprising, since the window display compelled attention: two mannequins stood in wedding outfits, each wearing Disney masks (Mickey Mouse groom, Goofy bride) and cutting what looked like a real cake. To David, the masks emphasized the prescriptive and oppressive elements of such a ceremony. They suggested the absurdity of funnelling the entire population into the same rigid sliver of tradition, of expecting everyone to wear for ever either one mask or the other. Bride or groom? But not everyone, David thought, is a spouse in waiting, as he perhaps was here to prove. Romantic love was over. It had lost its sweep and power, even as a symbol. We will have no more marriages. Still, the shop was open.

  David insisted that he and Ruth should just pop in, just to see the kind of thing they had, and Glover said he’d see them at the flat. The presence of Tonya, who’d stomped through from the back, embarrassed them, and they were suddenly polite and serious. She explained that they were lucky, as she was only in for two final fittings later on, sisters, marrying on Wednesday in a double ceremony. It was apparent that Tonya deeply disapproved of double ceremonies, though David and Ruth, she insisted, should feel free to look round.

  Ruth hovered near a rack of hanging dresses, too fazed or repelled to actually touch them, and David fingered a card from the stack on the table. Tonya Kazmierska, Wedding Dress Design and Hire. Tonya, back on her white sofa in the corner, was hemming down a cloud with pins.

  ‘I mean, I can’t wear white, obviously. That’d be farcical. But maybe a dress…You know, I’ve been married three times and I’ve never worn a dress of any kind. Isn’t that strange? But maybe I’m too old for it now. I’d just look…ridiculous.’ Something in her voice made David turn towards her and he saw that her eyes were wet.

  She pushed past him out of the shop and David followed. She was walking stiffly ahead and David said, ‘Hold on.’ She stopped but didn’t turn round. She was crying, and looked so raw and misused, so thin-boned and tender and broken. When she tried to speak, a sob cluttered her throat. David put a hand on her shoulder. It was his dramatic moment, and he filed frantically through his mind for the right thing to say.

  ‘Oh God, you shouldn’t be…You shouldn’t even be thinking about the wedding after everything that’s happened. It’s a charade. I can’t believe James is forcing you to go and look at places for a reception—’

  He tried to embrace her then but she gave herself a brisk wet-dog shake, casting off sadness, then looked up at him.

  ‘James isn’t forcing me into anything. Grow up, David. Can’t you grow up?’

  ‘Me grow up? I’m just trying to—’

  Ruth clasped both his hands suddenly. ‘I know you mean to help,’ she said, slowly, ‘but I’m just trying to explain to you: I’m a little upset—but it’s not apocalypse. It’s just been a tough week.’

  ‘That’s all I meant. I know it’s been tough.’

  ‘Okay. And I’m fine, really. It’s been good in a way. We discussed a lot of things we hadn’t, and which we needed to.’

  The tears were wiped away quickly and she was back; the quality of play-acting returned to her voice.

  ‘I guess it’s good to be humiliated once in a while, though I wish it would stop now.’

  But as they walked slowly to the flat, with David making Ruth laugh by doing impressions of Tonya’s accent, she asked suddenly, ‘You met her, didn’t you? The girl.’

  ‘The girl? Rosie?’

  ‘Yes. Are you going to make me ask what she was like or could you just tell me?’

  ‘Pretty, you know. Dull. I mean, she was young and blonde. Your typical whatever. Not my thing, but I can see how…I think she studied international relations. She had her belly button pierced. Am I describing her? Does it matter? To grown-ups like you?’

  The details he’d given would echo inside her when she stood at the mirror, when she’d lean in and examine her complexion, the creases at the corners of her mouth, at her eyes, when she’d stand back and appraise herself, naked, and turn to the side and hold and inhale, and think of the girl with the jewel in her navel. It would not be easy to deal with. David knew enough of jealousy; after its intro
duction, like some rapacious non-native species, it spreads out and destroys, transforming the landscape for ever.

  Menus

  Jess arrived with the spring. She was in London for the first truly warm week at the start of March, styling a shoot for Vanity Fair with a skeletal starlet Jess had heard was ‘a gold-plated five-alarm bitch’. David had emailed her some of his reviews, to see if it was the sort of thing that Ginny’s journal might be interested in, and he knew from her replies that she’d been having a hard time.

  She had got married in one of the first same-sex civil partnerships in America. Ruth had shown David a picture of Jess and Ginny in one of her scrapbook photo albums. Ginny was dressed in a bespoke tweed suit, trim and sensible, and a black cane buttressed her left leg. She peered out benignly from behind enormous dark-rimmed glasses, more like flying goggles than glasses, and she was smiling, though not looking anywhere near the camera. This would not have been particularly remarkable except that the twelve people flanking her were, and this image constituted the wedding photograph. One of the twelve, small and perfected in a black trouser suit with a French blue scarf knotted at her neck, was Ruth.

  At the end of January Ginny, taking the few steps from her cab to her doorway, had slipped on ice on the sidewalk and broken some ‘tiny but, you know, vital’ bone in her foot. After contracting pneumonia, she’d been kept unwillingly in hospital for ten days.

  Ruth’s assistant Karen arranged a dinner for Jess in a Japanese restaurant in Fitzrovia for the night she got into town. Browsing menus had become so familiar an activity to David that it had lost its thrill, and been replaced by despair that everything was so expensive. It didn’t matter if he chose the cheapest dish: some unwritten constitution decreed that all bills were borne equally.

  David had the feeling Ruth had invited them—Larry, Glover and him—because she feared that Jess was going to try to talk her out of the wedding. As it happened, Jess was too tired and glad to be out of New York to do much but smile bravely and drink sake. She’d taken the whole of February off to look after Ginny, and upon seeing her enter the restaurant, it was apparent she was unsuited to the role of nurse. Her hair pulled back tightly in a ponytail, she had applied dramatic eye make-up but left her face pale and drawn, to suggest perhaps the depths of her privation.

  When Ruth stood up to greet her and said something David couldn’t catch, Jess, after making a wet click in her throat, replied, ‘It’s been hellish.’

  Then they hugged for an age, with Jess’s houndstooth coat bunched up awkwardly round one shoulder.

  During the meal Ruth did her trick of singular focus, cooing and fussing over Jess as if the rest of the table had disappeared. Larry was his jovial self, managing to flirt with the waitress merely by lovingly stroking his left eyebrow when he was ordering. He had a gift for being amused and bored and politely lascivious all at the same time. Out of the blue he asked David whether he’d proofread some catalogue copy for him—his usual reader was having a baby—and David accepted immediately, then spent the rest of the meal wondering if he’d be paid anything more than Larry’s huge smile. David realized the way to be liked by Larry was not to be funny or clever or kind; it was to make yourself useful to Larry. Across the table Glover was trying very hard to stay in good form, but the only time his eyes relaxed was when he began explaining to David how the Son of Star Wars weapons system worked, utilizing the chopstick rests, the sake cups, the soy sauce and the pot of wasabi to represent targets, lasers and missiles.

  Afterwards, as they walked down to Larry’s club, Jess and David fell into step at the back of the group, and when the traffic lights changed on Charing Cross Road, they found themselves left behind.

  As they waited to cross, a group of elderly Japanese sightseers joined them; and under the baseball caps their faces were tense and dismayed at the sights they were seeing. David had read once that tourists from Japan sometimes experienced such enormous disappointment when they visited London that they actually collapsed in the street. It was a story to fill the gap and he told it, quietly, to Jess.

  ‘Their expectations are so wildly different—Dickens, the Queen, Sherlock Holmes—to what they actually encounter—overcrowding, rudeness, squalor—they can’t cope. Last year in the capital there were fifteen cases of hospitalization from it. Hospitalized with disappointment. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened to me.’

  Jess smiled emptily but David pressed on; he was going to write to the Mayor, proposing a new slogan to counteract the unrealistic hopes of visitors: London—Really Not That Great. Everyone was being forced to live their lives dissatisfied, in that fracture and rift between the advert and the reality, between the hard sell and the actual purchase, between the…Jess reached into her bag for a cigarette and he stopped talking. She murmured, ‘London’s got its problems.’

  It was obvious she wasn’t referring to the city, so David asked her, in a low-pitched tone, as if he’d patiently been waiting for this very opportunity, ‘But how are you doing? You’ve been through such a lot recently.’

  This did the trick. Jess slipped her gloved hand into his and squeezed it. The leather felt odd holding tight to his fingers, official, fascistic, thrilling.

  ‘Frazzled. It was tough enough when Ginny was actually in St Katherine’s, she looked so small and helpless, but afterwards was worse…When they let her home I’d wake and creep into the bedroom to check she was still breathing. It really got into her lungs and listening to her struggle for breath was just so awful…’

  ‘I can imagine,’ David said, which wasn’t true. The lights changed and the urban herds began to cross. They walked for a few metres without speaking, then David asked, ‘Did you ever get a chance to look at those articles I sent you? I mean, I suppose Ginny’s been too ill…’

  ‘I read a few of them, but to be honest I haven’t passed them on to her…Don’t you find it exhausting?’

  ‘Find what exhausting?’

  ‘Writing all those bad reviews. Detesting everything.’

  ‘I don’t detest everything. There’s lot of things I value—’

  ‘I guess…I found the tone a little wearing. A little depressing.’

  David managed to laugh, and said the truth took no prisoners and was a stranger to pity. He gave her his line about artists and imperfect knowledge. She said nothing and looked straight ahead, and he had an urge to punish her, to disgust her. They could have been Virgil and Dante, descending through landscapes of excess and pain. He pointed out fresh horrors: a pool of vomit by a lamppost; head sunk in his arms, a homeless man crouching on a doorstep; a middle-aged woman in a pink miniskirt waggling a broken stiletto, her leg bent up behind her like some farm-fed flamingo.

  To pass on his sense of injustice and anger, to direct it somewhere, he brought up the ‘whole incident with the girl’ as their new topic. Jess exhaled sharply. ‘He’s a child. Children shouldn’t marry.’

  ‘Well, exactly.’

  ‘He accuses her of going through his pockets and stealing this girl’s number? Is this the playground?’

  ‘Really? Did she steal the girl’s number?’

  Abruptly Jess turned to him. ‘She’s forty-seven years old, David. Of course she didn’t.’ Jess frowned at her cigarette and threw it aside. ‘She was upset enough to have Karen book her flight back.’

  ‘No!’

  How close he’d come. A hair’s breadth. And no one had told him.

  ‘It was difficult. James was crying, she was crying. He begged and begged. He loves her—that’s the pathetic part.’

  She sighed. There were moments when David wondered about the damage done to Jess. What was it? How early had it begun? She fixed her mustard scarf and then hugged herself as she walked.

  ‘I can’t pretend to understand…’ She spoke more slowly now, trying to follow her thoughts as best she could. ‘But I guess waiting for the perfect thing will leave you ninety or stone-dead by the time it comes, if it ever does. If you can’t love another pers
on you’ve got no right to be here.’

  Another set of lights delayed them. Trafalgar Square lay off to their right, floodlit in its depression, busy as a skating rink. David could smell a hotdog stand somewhere, close by, and wanted one immediately. The thought left him almost giddy. With ketchup. A white bun. He tried to ignore it and breathed through his mouth. On the pavement beside them, an Indonesian in an orange teacosy hat was selling roast chestnuts, waving his hand over them to waft away the smoke and reveal the little flashes of yellow pith where the papery charred skin had split. The others—Ruth and Glover and Larry—had long since vanished from sight.

  When she stopped and stepped into a doorway, drawing her cigarettes from her shoulder bag, David said, ‘And I suppose you and Ginny had a similar age gap to overcome.’

  She lit one, blew out smoke and then gave a little purr of demurral. ‘Twenty years. It’s different for women…’

  He lit his and although he couldn’t fit in the doorway with her, leant against the stone jamb. They were standing in St Martin’s Lane. A few doors up a play had finished and the theatre disgorged spectators onto the street. They stopped in groups of two or three, like them, and were lighting up, were talking earnestly and quickly. David had a sudden sense of a community responding, of group debate, and felt oddly resistant to following Jess as she started down the street. Then here was the alley, and here was the door in the wall where no door should be.

  When he got in that night a cheerful, flirty email from Singleton was waiting for him, along with an email at his Damp Review account from Tickertape Films. As part of their publicity drive for Kent Gray’s new movie they were sending out tickets to respected film bloggers, of which he, apparently, was one. They were invited to a press viewing in a multiplex in Leicester Square, and could bring a guest. He tried to make himself ponder whether his going would be immoral, and then told himself not to be ridiculous. He emailed Singleton to ask her whether she fancied seeing the movie, then lay on the duvet, his fingers intertwined over his stomach, and imagined what she might look like. She had revealed, in an email headed Full Disclosure, which sounded somehow Hollywood and sexy, that she was thirty-four and from Stockport, which didn’t. He kept thinking of Ruth at twenty-one, the blonde hair down past her waist, the cheekbones, the hips, the waist and breasts…He thought about Jess and what she’d said about falling stone-dead.