by Jo Baker
“Language!” Tim guffawed again.
I’d never played, but I’d seen it played. And for a moment I entertained the thought of a closeness and warmth with Nicholas as he taught me how. The lean of our bodies against each other. And then I told myself to grow up, get real; wasn’t this what I had insisted on myself? No getting tangled up again. It wasn’t Nicholas’s fault if he felt the same way.
She said, “I’m not playing.”
“Why not?”
“I’m just no good at that kind of thing. And I don’t do anything I’m not good at.”
“Is that true?”
She held Nicholas’s gaze and smiled. “Yep. Don’t let that stop you, though; you go on ahead.”
“Truth or Dare then,” Nicholas said.
Mostly people say yes to Nicholas. You might hold out for a while, but people tend to fall into line.
“So, Meryl,” he asked me. “What’ll it be. Truth or Dare?”
And this was the moment, the communication that was just for me. I melted at it, in spite of myself, in spite of all the disappointments of the evening. It was an intimate question, because of what we were to each other, what we knew that nobody else knew.
I said, “Dare.”
He was still looking at me, half smiling, and I blinked and looked away. Everything about him seemed heightened, overblown, projected. “So what’ll we dare young Merry here then?” he asked.
I ended up having to extemporize a blues song about writing my novel.
I wonder now if he did it deliberately to embarrass me; it did embarrass me, but I did my best to pull it off. Woke up this morning, my computer done crashed. Hard drive’s corrupted, massive data loss. I’m calling China, I’m calling half a world away….They laughed themselves silly, because they were drunk, and being sober in the company of drunks is like having a superpower.
When it was her turn, she opted for a truth. I imagine she expected it to be more dignified than a dare. I’m always hungry for something useful: I would’ve asked about the realities of getting her book published, about getting an agent. The kind of stuff we haven’t touched on in the master’s at all, and is, frankly, almost equally as important as the writing itself, because it’s no good having a fantastic piece of writing if you don’t know what to do with it when it’s finished. Not that I was writing, at the time; I was cutting.
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask her, but then Nicholas spoke before I could spit it out.
“So, your boyfriend?” Nicholas asked.
“My husband,” she corrected.
“Husband, even better. What’s the deal there?”
“There’s no deal.”
“So why’s he not around?”
“He’s around quite a lot, actually,” she said. “But he works in London, and I work up here, so.”
“That’s one hell of a commute.”
She inclined her head. Her throat was coming out in big pink blotches. “It’s not that unusual. London being what it is. And work being what it is. These days.”
“But you must find it difficult, all by yourself out here.”
“I’m not all by myself. I’ve got Sammy.”
“Oh yes, of course. How old is he now?”
“Three.”
I glanced from her to Nicholas and from Nicholas to her. The way that they were looking at each other. Her cheeks angry-red, eyes fierce; his expression cool and composed. He looked cool and composed, but I felt a stab of concern for him. Whatever else he was, he was vulnerable. That’s one thing nobody understands about him: his vulnerability.
Richard announced that he had drunk as many beers as he could reasonably drink and still drive back, and so he and Steven would now make tracks.
“Maybe we should all hit the road,” I said.
“Ah no, you have to see the lake,” Nicholas said.
“You have a lake?” she asked. “You have a swimming pool and a lake?”
“Yeah?”
She just laughed and shook her head.
We slung on raincoats and took umbrellas from the stand; we walked down wet lawns, flashlights skimming across the grass. Trees stood out against the sky; the pond—it was a pond, not really a lake—not a lake by American standards anyway—was in a hollow at the foot of the lawns. There was a pale mound on the central island, which Nicholas said was a pair of swans. I felt that this was, more than ever before, really and deeply England, and that I would never be at home here, and that my heart was breaking.
The jetty was slippery underfoot. I picked my way down it in my heels, my arm hooked through Nicholas’s. He handed over the umbrella stem and got out his cigarettes. He offered them around and we all shook our heads, except for her. She paused and then said, “Better not.” She wrapped her arms around herself, looked out across the lake and shivered. She yawned deeply.
“Tired?” Nicholas asked.
She nodded through the last of her yawn, and then said “Always.” She looked at her watch.
“The night is young,” Nicholas said, with a gesture to the rain, the dark, the dimpled pool ahead of us.
“But I am not,” she said.
“Ah now,” said Karen, slightly slurred. “Don’t you start that. You’re just a slip of a thing.”
“Who right now really needs her bed,” she said. “I’d best be off.”
If she left now, I thought, then maybe I’d get Nicholas back. I couldn’t blame him for wanting to charm our professor, or even for being a little fixated on her. But with her gone, we could curl up in front of the fire, just the two of us, and watch the flames. If it wasn’t for Karen and Tim; I couldn’t exactly curl up on the couch with Nicholas while Karen and Tim were still around, knocking back drinks and yammering. Maybe one of them could drive the other home, but they were each as drunk as the other…Whichever way I played it I couldn’t quite make it work out so that Nicholas and I were alone together for the night and it was good.
Then Nicholas said—and remember, this was to his professor—quite casually, “I’ll see you home.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “I know the way.”
“It’s dark,” he said.
“I’ll be fine. I brought a torch.”
“I’ll give you a ride,” I offered. “It’s no trouble.”
“Ah, fresh air, though, to clear the head. That’s what’s in order,” Nicholas said.
They argued it back and forth between them, but he won. He always does. But then, she didn’t try that hard.
I watched them crunch down the drive under a big shared sports umbrella, setting the dogs off barking again. The ground turned to Jell-O underneath my feet.
“We’d best be off too,” Karen slurred, a hand to the door frame.
“We’ll wait until Nicholas gets back.”
She pulled a face. “Really?”
“Really.”
She sighed, and went inside.
The kitchen was cold; the light buzzed. Karen filled the kettle clumsily and looked in cabinets. I chewed my nails. I wasn’t supposed to feel jealous. Jealousy wasn’t supposed to come into this.
Karen leaned into the refrigerator; the light made her face glow white.
I said, “Is that all right, to do that in somebody else’s home?”
“I don’t think this is really anybody’s home.”
“What do you mean?”
She just shrugged.
“You don’t think Nicholas really lives here?” I asked. “You think he broke in and all this, it’s, what, a lie?”
“I think he lives here and it’s all a lie.”
“You’re not making sense.”
“Just look around you. All the horrible expensive furniture. This horrible expensive kitc
hen. There’s a great big fuck-off Aga there, but it’s not on, I bet it’s never on; there’s no warmth to it. There’s no warmth to this house at all. I’ll grant you it’s a house—a very expensive house—but it isn’t really a home.”
She gave a little shudder, and rubbed at the back of her neck, and said that was all she had to say about it. She made us hot tea, and we went back into the living room and found Tim there asleep in an armchair. She put more wood on the fire, but it must have been damp because it didn’t burn too well. We sipped our tea and watched the fire smoke and listened to the rain. She seemed significantly more sober. She yawned.
“You know, I think I’m probably okay to drive.”
“What’s keeping them so long?” I wondered.
“It always seems longer when you’re the one waiting.”
She rested her head against the wing of the chair and when I glanced at her again she’d dozed off. The rain was churning in the guttering and tumbling down the downpipes. I dozed off too, my head pillowed on my folded arms.
I woke to the dogs barking. I heard a door slam, and the sound of him moving around the kitchen. The fire had died out, the new wood unburned, but the lamp was still on. I peered at my watch; it was almost two a.m. I felt cold and nauseous. I got up and smoothed my hair. I nudged Karen with a toe; she blinked awake.
He came into the room. I remember his expression. The composure. The lid firmly on the box. “Still here?”
Tim stirred and woke and wiped his face. “Hey, dude.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked Nicholas.
“What do you mean, what’s wrong?”
The way he said it, it was like the shard of ice in the boy’s heart.
“Where’ve you been?”
“Just saw her home.”
“It took forever.”
“It took as long as it took.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t drink so much.”
“Is that what you think?”
“You’re not a pleasant drunk.”
“You’re not so pleasant sober right now.”
Karen got to her feet. “Gimme back the keys, hon,” she said. “Let’s be off.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll drive.”
And so I drove us back to campus in a storm of misery, crunching gears and taking curves too fast and there was one moment when we rounded a curve and headlights glared straight at us and Karen squealed and I swerved and the oncoming car blared its horn at us.
“Christ on a bike, Meryl!”
“Sorry.”
But I wasn’t sorry; the oncoming headlights had drawn me towards them and I had wanted that crunch, the smash, the annihilation. If it hadn’t been for the people in that oncoming car, and Karen sitting next to me in the passenger seat, and Tim in the back, swaying and cursing and swallowing spit, I might have just closed my eyes and held on to the steering wheel and let the worst happen. Then I would have joined her, his dead girl, and been perfect too.
But I was more careful for the rest of the trip, though Karen still clutched at her seat and hissed and winced, and would say from time to time, gently: “I’m sure I’m safe by now,” or “Pull over, if you want? I can drive.”
And I’d shake my head and crunch the stick shift around. I was determined to do it. I would master this stupid, strange, needlessly complicated thing, that you’re just expected to understand without anyone ever really explaining it to you. I wasn’t going to let it beat me.
And so we got back in one piece though my hands were shaking and my heart was pounding. We dropped Tim off at his dorm and I drove on a little further to mine, and pulled over. Karen sat there in the passenger seat, a hand on her heart. She gave me such a look.
“Are you going to be okay, love?”
“Yeah, sure, why not?”
She had that befuddled look that people have when they’ve been drinking, but she also looked so concerned for me, and that made me blink back tears. I felt bad for nearly killing us.
“For what it’s worth,” she said.
“What?”
“Forget about him. Before it gets too messy. He was never going to make you happy.”
“He did make me happy.”
“Maybe, for a little bit. But not in the long run. And maybe it was you making you happy. Bouncing your own happiness off him. Not him doing it himself.”
“Bullshit.”
“Take my word for it, love, you’re better off without. In ten years’ time, you’ll struggle to remember his name.”
“Oh fuck you, Karen.”
I slammed out of the car and ran; I tumbled up the stairs and into bed in a fit of tears. I woke up in the morning chilled to the bone and still wearing last night’s dress, last night’s makeup smeared with tears onto my pillow.
I didn’t have an ounce of doubt that the two of them were together, and that night was the night that it really happened, that things changed between them. I didn’t blame him; it wasn’t his fault, and it wasn’t, strictly speaking, a betrayal. We had never said what could and couldn’t happen with other people; we’d never said that we would be exclusive, but then I’d never thought there would be a need to lay it out so explicitly.
I had no trouble understanding what she saw in him—his looks, his youth, his talent—I can understand the temptation. What I could not understand was what he saw in her. Presumably he decided to hitch his wagon to her star, at more or less the same moment I realized her star was really just space junk falling back to earth. He didn’t have the courage, he didn’t have the faith to see what we could have done together, me and him. What we both had was potential. And the thing about potential is that it has a use-by date. And that, I think, was his failure, more than anything else. That was the betrayal, that he didn’t see what we could have been. I blame him for his lack of faith, but I don’t really blame him for anything else. I blame her.
I was drunk. Suddenly, really quite drunk.
And I didn’t drink that much that evening. Just a couple of glasses of wine. Maybe three. I don’t know how I ended up so blurred and slurry.
He wouldn’t let me walk home alone. I didn’t want his company, didn’t want any company at all. But he kept insisting, and I went along with it. It seemed quicker, easier to give up, to stop saying no.
He brought a good torch—a hefty Maglite, a different beast entirely from my faint pocket-sized thing—and a decent umbrella, and so I was better equipped on the way home than I had been on the way down.
He held the umbrella and offered his arm to me, and I took it, because it seemed easier than bumping along side by side unlinked. I held the torch. We walked up the main street and past the shop and school and pub and up the hill following its beam. The rain flickered through the light, drummed on the umbrella skin and soaked through my boots. The fresh air was cool on my face.
He talked. I remember a stream of words, a hallucinatory dream-logic coherence while the water pounded on nylon and hissed on the tarmac. I remember the trees laced overhead and my wet feet and the drag of his arm and his voice beside me, just above me, telling me how he was sent off to boarding school when he was seven, how he couldn’t even tie his own shoelaces, how you learned to cry quietly and soon learned not to cry. It was like my heart was cut right out of me. Desperately lonely but never alone, except in his own head. And when he did come home it wasn’t home, everything was now parched, arid; everything was separate as statues in a desert and the air was full of unsaid things, things like grit, like stones in the air; hard and jagged and stinging. There was Gideon before him and there always would be Gideon before him, an older brother who sailed over every obstacle and made money casually, heaps of it, mountains, and was getting married, was accumulating things, was perfectly content and got on with filling the air with more rocks and grit and things.
Understand me, he was saying. Know this about me. This is what I need you to know before I can be understood.
I listened and nodded and thought that it was important to try to understand.
He told me about local kids playing rounders on the village green, the long dusk; him lingering on the bench with a cigarette, then waved into the game. The look of her, the way she swung for a ball, so focussed and fierce, and the thwack of connection. It was instinct and accident: he caught her out, stood there with the ball stinging his palm and she shook her head and laughed. Ask him before that moment and he’d have said he didn’t believe in love at all, thought it was a lie people told each other and themselves, that it was a lie that calcified into just more grit, more stones in the air between them. Ask him after that evening on the village green, and he knew differently. That September she started at the local college and in October he was due to leave for Oxford, but they had an understanding. He left for Oxford but he didn’t leave her, he’d have never left her. He doesn’t know what his parents said or did or what her family said or did, but after that it all went to shit. He blames them. He blames himself. He blames her. She should have trusted him. Even if nobody else did. She knew better.
He looks back on that time, the aftermath of her death, and it is like looking into a pit. He considers the person he was then, and that person is a stranger. He was not himself. The only thing that kept him going was the anger.
Anger pulled him back together, got him through it. Anger helps.
And all that he can do now, is write. He has no illusions. The writing doesn’t matter, it changes nothing, but he has to do it anyway.
It was so sad, I thought. I was sorry for him; I thought I understood.
Our pace was slowing; we passed through the farmyard and the dog growled from her barrel but stayed put, green eyes reflecting torchlight back at us. I felt as though I was a step away from myself, as if this was all happening to someone else. Maybe that was the wine.
The security light flashed on, and we stood floodlit under the shared umbrella. The babysitter’s little silver car gleamed beside us in the rain. He’d talked himself out, now; he stood there beside me, breathing quietly. He said, “Thank you.”