by Nick Hornby
“Why are you so committed to the swear box?”
“We’re here to talk about you.”
“But don’t you ever watch TV? People say . . . that word all the time.”
“I watch television. I just don’t watch those programs. People don’t seem to feel the need to swear on Antiques Roadshow.”
“You see, Malcolm, that’s exactly the sort of remark that makes me think we’re not right for each other.”
“What? Me saying that people don’t swear on the programs I watch?”
“But you have such a prissy way of saying it.”
“I’m sorry. I’m trying to learn to be less prissy.”
He said it quietly, and humbly, and with a perceptibly self-flagellating tone. Annie felt terrible, as she often did when talking to Malcolm about nothing much. This was why she eventually ended up giving in, telling him the sorts of things she was supposed to share with a therapist, stuff about her parents and her hapless love life: it took them away from the depressing, awkward small talk.
“Humiliated,” she said, suddenly.
“Sorry?”
“You were asking me to do better in my description of how I’m feeling. I feel humiliated.”
“Of course you do.”
“Angry with myself, as well as him.”
“Because?”
“Because this was always going to happen. He was going to meet someone, or I was going to meet someone, and that would be it. So I should have got out ages ago. It was just inertia. And now I’ve been sh . . . dumped on.”
Malcolm went quiet. Annie knew that this was a technique analysts were supposed to use: if they waited long enough, then the person undergoing analysis would eventually shout out “I slept with my father!” and everyone could go home. She also knew that, with Malcolm, the reverse was true. If Annie waited for long enough, he would fill his own silences by saying something stupid, and they would argue. Sometimes they spent the entire fifty minutes arguing, which at least made the time go quickly. Malcolm’s interjections carried with them no disadvantage that Annie could see, as long as she succeeded in sloughing off the irritation of their inanity.
“It’s funny, you know, with your generation.” It was all Annie could do to stop herself from licking her lips in anticipation of the fuddy-duddy provocation that was almost bound to follow an introduction like that.
“What is, Malcolm?”
“Well, lots of people I know have an unhappy or frustrating marriage. Or a boring one.”
“And?”
“You see, they’re quite content, really.”
“They’re happy in their misery.”
“They put up with it, yes.”
Never before had Malcolm so neatly summarized the absurd paradox of his ambition, Annie felt. He was an Englishman of a certain age and class, from a certain part of the country, and Englishmen like him believed that there was almost nothing too grim to be endured. To complain was to show weakness, so things got worse and worse, and people became more and more stoical. And yet counseling was nothing without complaint. That was the basis of it, really, airing dissatisfactions and hurts in the hope that something could be done about them. Annie started to laugh.
“What have I said now?” said Malcolm wearily.
Annie could hear her mother’s voice in there somewhere. It was the tone she used when Annie had taken her to task for saying that the IRA killed people, or that children needed their fathers—actually, Annie could see now, relatively unobjectionable banalities that in the exotic political climate of the early eighties, had come to sound like incendiary fascist slogans.
“Do you really think you’re in the right job?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Well, the reason I come to you at all is because I don’t want to be quite content with my unhappy, boring, frustrating marriage. I want more. And you think I’m a bit of a crybaby. You’ll probably end up thinking that anyone who sits in this chair is a bit of a crybaby, really.”
Malcolm stared hard at the carpet, which was presumably where this conundrum had ended up somehow.
“Well,” he said. “I’m not sure that’s it.”
“So what is it? If it’s not that?”
“You said you don’t want to be quite content.”
“Yes. With. A. Rubbish. Life.” She said it as if he were deaf, which of course he might well have been. She became momentarily distracted while she tried to decide whether deafness might have played a part in the unsatisfactory nature of their sessions. When Malcolm didn’t seem to hear what she was saying, was it because he wasn’t able to?
“The context is important.”
“But people who are quite content don’t have a rubbish life,” he said.
Annie opened her mouth, ready to fire off the dismissive one-liner that always came to her whenever Malcolm offered any kind of observation, but to her surprise, there was nothing there. Her mouth was empty. Could he be right? Did the contentment count more than the life? It was the first time she’d thought about anything Malcolm had ever said to her.
She had never told Duncan that she went to talk about her problems on Saturday mornings. He was under the impression that she went to the gym, or shopping. He wouldn’t have been unhappy about it, if he’d found out. He’d have worn it as a badge of honor, even though he hadn’t been directly involved in the therapeutic battlefield: for him it would have been yet another example of the kind of thing that separated them from, raised them above, the rest of Gooleness. So that was one reason she kept it a secret. The other was that she didn’t really have any problems, apart from Duncan. That he wouldn’t have wanted to know, not at first—and then he would have wanted to know everything, and it would have been impossible. So she took her swimming things out with her, or came back with a secondhand book from the thrift shop, or a pair of cheap shoes, or a bagful of groceries, and Malcolm stayed a secret. When she left Malcolm’s house up near the elementary school and started to walk back into town, she realized that she didn’t need to buy anything to prove to Duncan that she hadn’t been telling a complete stranger how much he disappointed her. It felt strange, walking home empty-handed. Strange, a little risky, and, yes, of course, a little sad. It was lies like those that reminded her that she had someone to go home to. But when she got back to her newly empty house, Duncan was sitting in it, waiting for her.
“I’ve made us some coffee,” he said. “In a pot.”
The pot was significant, otherwise he wouldn’t have mentioned it. Duncan thought that real coffee was a bit of a fuss, what with all the waiting and the plunging, and claimed to be happy with instant. This morning’s gesture was presumably intended as some kind of penance for his infidelity.
“Gee, thanks.”
“Don’t be like that.”
“Why would I care what coffee you drink?”
“If I hadn’t slept with someone else you’d be pleased.”
“If you hadn’t slept with someone else you’d be drinking instant.”
Duncan conceded the point by saying nothing and taking a sip from his mug.
“You’re right, though. It’s much nicer.”
Annie wondered how many similar concessions Duncan would have to make before they’d have a relationship that might conceivably last them for the rest of their lives. A thousand? And after that, he could begin to work on the things that really bothered her.
“Why are you here?”
“Well. I mean, I still live here, don’t I?”
“You tell me.”
“I don’t think you can just tell someone whether you’re living with them or not. It’s more a consensual thing,” said Duncan.
“Do you want to live here?”
“I don’t know. I’ve got myself into a bit of a mess, haven’t I?”
“You have, yes. I should warn, you, Duncan: I’m not going to fight for you. The whole point of you is that you’re not the sort of person anyone fights over. You’re my easy life opti
on. The moment you stop being that, you’re no option at all.”
“Right. Well. That’s telling me straight. Thank you.”
Annie shrugged, an it-was-nothing gesture that capped what she felt had been a flawless couple of minutes.
“Would you say there’s any way back for me? If that’s what I wanted?”
“Not when you phrase it like that, no.”
One thing was clear: the rest of Duncan’s Friday night hadn’t gone well. Annie was tempted to press him for details, but even in her anger she could recognize that the impulse was not a healthy one. It was easy to imagine, though, that this other woman would have been extremely disconcerted by Duncan’s appearance on her doorstep, if that’s where he’d gone. He’d never been equipped with a great deal of diplomacy, intuition or charm, even when they’d first started seeing each other, and the little he did possess would have been eroded by fifteen years of underuse. Clearly, this poor woman was lonely—it was almost impossible to arrive in Gooleness from somewhere else without leaving a trail of unhappiness and failure behind—but anyone desperate enough to usher Duncan straight into her life at eleven o’clock on a Friday night would be unemployable, possibly even under medical supervision. Annie’s guess was that he’d spent a sleepless night on a couch.
“So what should I do?” It wasn’t a rhetorical question. He was looking to Annie for some firm advice.
“You need to find somewhere to stay, preferably this morning. And after that, we’ll just have to see.”
“But what about my . . .”
“You should have thought about that before.”
“I’ll just go upstairs and . . .”
“You do what you have to do. I’ll go out for a couple of hours.”
Later, she wondered how he would have finished the question. What about his what? If she’d been marched down to a bookmaker’s at gunpoint and asked to place a bet on what it was Duncan felt he couldn’t live without for a couple of days, she’d have put her money on Tucker Crowe bootlegs.
While Duncan was packing, she went to work. She told herself—literally, with words muttered under her breath—that she had loads of e-mail to catch up on, but even Malcolm might have deduced, given all the relevant information, that she wanted to see if she’d heard from Tucker. This was her workplace affair, with a man on another continent that she’d never met, and wasn’t ever likely to meet.
The museum didn’t open until two on Saturdays, so there was nobody else around; she killed the first few minutes of the promised two-hour absence by wandering around what was officially and grandly known as “the permanent collection.” It had been ages since she’d really looked at what they asked people to pay to see, and she wasn’t as embarrassed as she thought she might be. Most museums in seaside towns had bathing machines, the peculiar Victorian beach huts on wheels that allowed ladies to go into the sea without exposing themselves to onlookers, but not everybody had a nineteenth-century Punch-and-Judy stall, complete with grotesque puppets. Gooleness, typically, was the last town in the UK to employ dippers and bathers; dippers dunked ladies into the sea, and bathers immersed the gentlemen, and it was a calling that had mostly vanished by the 1850s. Gooleness, however, had been so far behind the times that the museum had late nineteenth-century photographic evidence of both teams. And to her surprise, she could now see that their photograph collection was really pretty good. She stopped before her favorite, a picture of a sand castle competition that must have been held at the turn of the last century. There were very few children visible—one little girl in the foreground, wearing a knee-length dress and a sun hat that might have been made out of newspaper—and the competition seemed to have drawn a crowd of thousands. (Would Ros tell her that this, too, was the best day in some poor coal miner’s life, the day he had a front-row view of the Gooleness sand castle competition in 1908?) But Annie’s eye was always drawn to a woman over on the right, kneeling on the ground, working on a church steeple, in what looked like a full-length overcoat and a peasant sun hat that made her seem as sad and as destitute as an old peasant in the Vietnam War. You’re dead now, Annie always thought when she saw her. Do you wish you hadn’t wasted your time doing that? Do you wish you’d thought, Fuck the lot of them, and taken your coat off so you could have felt the sun on your back? We’re here for such a short amount of time. Why do we spend any of it building sand castles? She would waste the next two hours, because she had to, and then she would never waste another second of however much time she had left to her. Unless somehow she ended up living with Duncan again, or doing this job for the rest of her working life, or watching EastEnders on a wet Sunday, or reading anything that wasn’t King Lear, or painting her toenails, or taking more than a minute to choose something from a restaurant menu, or . . . It was hopeless, life, really. It was set up all wrong.
Duncan wouldn’t have believed it was possible to feel more miserable than he’d felt in the Indian restaurant, telling Annie that he’d been unfaithful and then watching her walk out. But actually, packing his suitcase was, if anything, slightly more uncomfortable. True, the infidelity conversation had involved the most excruciating eye contact he’d ever had to put himself through; it would be a while before he forgot the hurt and the anger he’d had to look at in Annie’s eyes, and, if he hadn’t known her better, he might have come to the conclusion that there’d been hatred there, too, and possibly some contempt. But now, putting his clothes into a suitcase, he felt physically sick. This was his life, right here, and however many things he put into a bag, he couldn’t take it with him. Even if he could take everything he owned, he’d still be leaving it behind.
He’d spent the previous night with Gina, in Gina’s bed. She hadn’t, as far as he could tell, been surprised to see him; on the contrary, she talked as if she’d been expecting him somehow. Duncan had tried to explain that he would prefer to look on her as a friend with a sofa for the time being, but Gina didn’t seem to understand the distinction, possibly because he hadn’t explained that he was homeless, nor the circumstances surrounding his homelessness.
“I don’t know why you’d want to have sex with me one night and sleep on the sofa the next,” she said.
“Well, of course, they weren’t consecutive nights,” he said, and he could almost hear Annie’s eyeballs rolling in their sockets.
“No, but nothing much has happened in between, has it? Unless you’ve come round here to finish with me. In which case you’re not even sleeping on the sofa. You’re out.” Gina laughed, so Duncan laughed, too.
“No, no. But . . .”
“Good. That settles it.”
“It’s just that . . .”
Gina put her arms around his neck and kissed him on the lips.
“You smell beery.”
“I had . . . I was drinking lager when . . .” He was trying to remember if he’d ever even mentioned Annie. He’d certainly been conscious of saying “We I” a lot in the two or three conversations he’d had with Gina, as in, “We I can never stop after one episode of The Wire,” or “We I went on a little tour of the U.S. in the summer,” although Gina had never shown any curiosity in the derivation of this peculiar new pronoun. And then, when he’d trained himself to exclude the existence of Annie, he’d had to reintro duce her, anonymously, because he felt it was beginning to sound as though he’d spent the previous fifteen years going to the cinema and listening to music on his own. So he’d said things like, “Yes, I saw that. With the woman I was, you know, seeing. At the time.”
“I’ve had a rather difficult evening, actually.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yes. I can’t remember if I ever mentioned . . . Anyway, I had something to sort out tonight. Because of you.”
“Do you mean . . . romantically?”
He was tempted to qualify Gina’s adverb, and explain that he wasn’t really involved with Annie romantically, that it was more a question of jigsaw pieces. But he could see that might not have been terribly helpful.
<
br /> “I suppose so, yes.”
“A long-term thing?”
Duncan paused. He knew the answer to this question, really. Fifteen years was a long-term thing, unambiguously, so it would be disingenuous to say something like “What do you mean?” or “Define your terms.”
“What counts as a long-term thing, for you?”
“A year?”
“Ummm . . .” He made a face that suggested mute calculation. He was more or less counting on his fingers, in his head. “Yes.”
“Oh. Oh dear. And was it bloody?”
“It was a bit, yes.”
“Is that why you raised the subject of the sofa?”
“I suppose it might have been, yes.”
“And are you with her now?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
And that was all there was to say about his previous relationship, as far as Gina was concerned. Duncan felt homesick the entire night and slept poorly. Gina, however, seemed inappropriately cheerful about everything. Duncan was forced to conclude that she just didn’t get the magnitude of his breakup with Annie, possibly because she was shallow and lacking in empathy. Only later did he realize that she was unlikely to get the magnitude of it, because he’d willfully and possibly even deceitfully shrunk it. He’d knocked fourteen years off it and then asked her to acknowledge that she was a home-wrecker. He’d told her it was just a scratch and got cross when she hadn’t offered morphine.
Returning home didn’t help with his homesickness, inevitably. It simply made it worse. He wanted to linger, maybe even watch a DVD and pretend that it was a normal Saturday morning, but he doubted whether that would help him much. He finished packing his bag—enough for a week or so, no more—and left. Duncan didn’t know too much about the vicissitudes of Tucker Crowe’s love life—nobody did, really, although there had been much speculation on the web—but he imagined it to have been tumultuous. How did he stand it? How many times had Tucker had to pack his bag like this, say good-bye to a home? Not for the first time, Duncan wished that he knew Tucker personally. He would very much like to ask him what he took with him when he moved out of one life and into another. Was underwear the key? For some reason he imagined Tucker would have a tip for him, something like, “Don’t worry about T-shirts,” or “Never leave your favorite picture behind.” Duncan’s favorite picture was an original Dr. No poster that he and Annie had found, incredibly, in a junk shop in Gooleness. He was pretty sure he was the one who’d paid for it, so he’d be entitled to remove it. On the other hand, it was quite big, and covered a large damp patch on the bedroom wall. If he left the damp patch exposed, there’d be trouble. He settled for his second-favorite, an eighteen-by-twelve shot of Tucker he’d bought on eBay. It was taken in the late seventies, perhaps at the Bottom Line in New York, and Crowe looked good, young and confident and happy. He’d had it framed, but Annie never wanted it up in the sitting room or the bedroom, so it was propped up against the wall in the office. She wouldn’t mind that he’d taken it—indeed, she’d probably mind if he didn’t—and it seemed appropriate, seeing as it was Tucker’s advice in the first place. Imaginary advice, anyway. It was somewhat embarrassing, perhaps, walking into Gina’s flat with a small duffel bag and a large picture, but Gina loved it, or said she did. Gina was enthusiastic about a lot of things.