Show Them a Good Time

by Nicole Flattery

  *

  Summer returned and I stood, naked, in front of my air conditioner, feeling expert bursts of air all over my body. I got the air conditioner for free from a guy on the forum who left a rambling message about how he was leaving the city. When I collected it, I pretended to be a regular woman with no connections to the comedian. Whenever I walked into an apartment – no matter the size or shape – I felt sad for all my losses, for everything I couldn’t do.

  He had a new girlfriend on the show. It had been a dull season and he needed someone to rub off. I watched her daily, peeking out warily from my place in the cupboard, drool pooling around my mouth, as if all the water wanted to leave my body. They tried to make her wholesome, a fellow professor, but she had certain aspects that couldn’t be contained – her breasts, her lips. I figured she was from Miami or LA or one of those places, had seen a lot of ceilings. I wanted friends so I could imitate her, call her ‘Candy’. Make myself feel good.

  One afternoon, I came home and heard them having sex. It wasn’t a secret. I was supposed to hear. I stood in the hallway and tried to guess the position. Afterwards, we went out. All three of us got dressed up and went out. In the cab, he told her she was the first person he’d played the track for. I went into the restaurant bathroom to throw up but found I couldn’t. On the bathroom floor, I felt my whole body shrink, like it could fit in a suitcase, be placed on a baggage carousel.

  At dinner I was seated beside an older, stately woman my boyfriend called his agent. He handed me over to her. She ran her eyes over Candy and me, said it was just beautiful to see girls who could carry themselves correctly. I wanted Candy to do something that confirmed my low expectations of her – flash teeth, simper – but she looked towards the door. I withdrew my hundred imaginary phone calls to my hundred imaginary friends.

  The agent reminded me of the psychic. In a way I couldn’t explain she was the psychic, completely her, so when she took my hand and said she would help me, I trusted her. She made me want to be a baby again, tiny and clean.

  ‘Now,’ she said, ‘I bet you would like a part on the show?’

  A week later, I stood on set, in the vast maze of the fake university, feeling the weight of a mop in my hand. On a hanger beside me was a maid costume wrapped in plastic. The costume was like a question to which I had no answer. I wondered how I would put it on. In the normal fashion, I presumed. I would put it over my head. Then my neck. But what would happen after that?

  I stopped a woman who was having trouble with her headset. ‘May I use the bathroom?’ I asked quietly.

  She nodded. But I didn’t go to the bathroom.

  I walked outside as if I was going home. But I didn’t go to the apartment either. I kept walking, a lone figure crossing a city desert. I thought about all of the things I had forgotten about myself and I tried to remember. Soon I was on the subway and an older woman, with brown-spotted, delicate ankles appearing from under her skirt, like feelings I couldn’t describe, smiled at me. I thought about my mother’s face then and I tried to picture it. Then off the subway and into the light. And I thought I would like weather – thunder, lightning, snow. I thought I would like weather and snow came from the sky.

  Parrot

  When she thought about the second woman – and she had distantly when she’d been younger; how her life could potentially be upended by someone she didn’t know – it was always with a sort of black amusement. And when she said things that were improper – lines about her current situation that were just slightly off, the dry delivery of which was the reason why her friends were her friends – she had to admit, if only to herself, that she never imagined she would be the second woman.

  That afternoon, still within their first six months in Paris, she went to an art exhibition. Exhibitions were something she was trying out, attempting to adjust to their sophistication, their unique shush. She moved up and down the staircase, cheapening the place with the cut of her clothes, searching for her soul at a frantic pace that suggested she was rummaging through a demolition site for the remains of her belongings rather than spending a pleasant few hours in a museum. She was not alone. The boy was with her, suspended from school for the day, a fact to which he was largely indifferent. At only nine years old he had learned to handle disappointment and failure with the sort of grace that, in her early thirties, still escaped her. He set the tone for the afternoon, ignoring her under the pretence of looking at paintings of nondescript benches. In a corner of the exhibition, there was a cage with two stuffed parrots. The woman spent an unnatural amount of time staring at them. They seemed as if they had been there forever, loving and admiring each other. How could they leave? They were behind bars. Nobody knew what happened in the tiny parameters of their cage.

  Recently, at a dinner party, with her husband’s new colleagues she had – seized by the closeness of the couple, the sudden tininess of their Parisian apartment – explained that at home, in the Irish countryside, all of the houses were built far apart, with long driveways, so you could easily get away from your family. She did the smooth, fluid motion of a driveway with her hands.

  ‘They are legally obliged to be that way,’ she said.

  Afterwards, she felt stupid, like she had revealed more than she intended. The woman half of the couple, wearing heavy, intimidating jewellery that implied intellectual heft, suggested that perhaps that was only in her family. Perhaps, she agreed. Therapy, she considered, as she flipped through the art books in the gift shop – their pages full of unnerving, confusing beauty – was also something new she could try.

  As they walked back through the city streets, the October cold not wholly unpleasant, the boy sloped two steps behind her, but in her eyeline, always in her eyeline. As they strolled, history announcing itself at every corner, she answered a call from her mother. Since they had moved, her mother rang a lot and spoke in her usual steady stream, like she was being held hostage and needed to get all the information out before her throat was slit. The woman understood this way of speaking only after she became a mother herself. She would barely be recovered from one of these conversations when another would happen. Her mother was retired and bored. What was she supposed to do now? What was she supposed to do in that house? Just thinking about it made her want to get another job.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ the woman said, ‘start going to exhibitions. I’ve just been to one.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t like art.’

  ‘I don’t like artists. There’s a difference.’

  When she let herself and the boy into the apartment they were renting, all the apartments built discreetly into the architecture of the city as if to obscure the fact that families lived in them at all, there was a notice on the front door. It was a picture, not unlike those in the exhibition, but less celebrated, of two cockroaches, one on the left, one on the right, with X’s running vertically through their bodies. There were some words promising there had been cockroaches and now they were gone, or there was an ongoing effort to get rid of the cockroaches. She wasn’t sure. She didn’t read or speak French. Later, in bed, with her husband, under crisp, ironed sheets, she tried to sleep off the possibility of cockroaches.

  ‘I love you,’ he whispered.

  She blinked anxiously in the dark, as if trying to identify something. ‘Go easy on that stuff,’ she advised him.

  *

  Maybe the problem was that she was tired. She had been a bit tired when she entered art college, but dropping out had exhausted her. She remembered the final meeting, her prepared speech about why she was leaving, the made-up family reasons; then interrupting herself; then, finally, silence.

  ‘You should leave if you’re unhappy,’ they said.

  ‘I’m unhappy because I don’t think I belong here.’

  Nobody begged her. It was cute that she had tried in the first place. She put the sculptures she had made in her first year in her parents’ garage and her mother used them to hang up wet clothes.

  This was
a serious decision but she didn’t know it until a few years later. She stayed in Dublin to work, sharing shabby rooms with a series of men. Through these relationships she wanted to prove something, prove that she was still complicated and interesting without a degree, but there was no time. She was too busy picking up after her boyfriends, making disappointed faces, listening to them complain about the inconsequences of their actions. She felt like a mother forcefully pushed on stage in a farce, with only an apron and a spatula. Why wouldn’t they let her commit the delinquency she knew she was capable of? Why was she always standing next to the delinquents, apologetically shaking her head?

  All these relationships ended the exact same way, with circuitous conversations and dully rational arguments, as if both participants were politicians lobbying for their own happiness. Denied even heartbreak and animosity, the modern emphasis was on the demonstration of respect, however insincere. In her last relationship, before she met her husband, he respected her so much he let her pay for everything. ‘This is respectful,’ she thought as she paid their rent, as her credit card hit the illuminated screen again and again. When he ended it, she felt like she had been mugged – robbed of money, but also of time.

  ‘I still respect you,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t care if you do or you don’t.’

  ‘But I do,’ he said earnestly, ‘I really do.’

  She was so tired.

  He moved his stuff out and she continued doing the scrambling necessary to staying alive; working two jobs in the city, her personality dissolving into small talk. The cost of travel, the cost of lunch, the cost of being young.

  She met her husband in an office where she was a temp, the irony not lost on her, irony never lost on her. She treated these temp jobs like cocktail parties, draping her sparkling self across surfaces, trying to dazzle in a limited amount of time. He devastated her with the ease that he saw through her. He filed away her exaggerations, her evasions, the playfulness that was beginning to curdle into meanness so he could eventually embarrass her – a child in an adult place. When, one lunchtime, through a mouthful of sandwich, she laughed at a man in the office, because every office must have someone sad to laugh at, he frowned at her.

  ‘That man is depressed.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ she asked.

  ‘How do you not?’

  She drafted an email where she declared it was up to her what she decided was funny. Instead, she offered to buy him a drink. She hadn’t meant what she said. She explained, in careful email language, that she was beginning to suspect she might be a bad person. She had dropped out of college and there had been a number of other severe and deranged fuck-ups. Several weeks later, nudging, overly friendly correspondence passing between them daily, he kissed her for the first time, his hands touching the back of her neck.

  They always went to the same B&B, the same room, fringed lamps and light curtains. It was like an affair made on an assembly line, everyone playing their part, following a strict pattern. No poetry, no sunlight on the bedsheets. The only surprise was when she found, unbelievably, like discovering a hidden room in a house, that she was in love with him.

  They only had one discussion about his wife, and it barely qualified as a discussion. She was ill and had been for a long time. Her illness would never be over. He had done everything he could. She believed him, not because he was a man who could ever be accused of heartlessness, but because he looked like someone who had begged and cried and tried to reassemble and done everything he could.

  *

  The winter in Paris, two days before Halloween, grew harsh and the woman’s lips cracked what felt like audibly. She was concerned strangers on the Metro could hear, as if her mouth were a strip of velcro to be peeled open and closed. She knew she should be worried about presentation, in a city that demanded presentation, but she sloughed the dead skin off, forced her teeth into the supple, comforting grooves. Smiling was the only communication available to her and, overnight, it had turned ugly. Still, she continued smiling, amiably, like a tourist, like a secretary, like a combination of both – a tourist’s secretary.

  She was called to the boy’s school, English-speaking, private, already more than they could afford, at least once a week. She went because she wasn’t working and for other, more defiant reasons. The school was a monstrous structure on a street of other dutiful buildings, including a police station, their insides deep and hidden. The boy had behavioural problems, concentration issues, the whole catalogue. She had humorous lines prepared about how they were more alike than they knew, how she might be his mother after all, but the teacher never gave her a single opportunity.

  Every Monday or Friday, the woman sat in a child’s chair and struggled for a position that lent her some dignity. She could offer nothing concrete – that his behaviour would improve or that she would insist it improve. Her presence there only promised she would be at the next meeting and the meeting after that, all the way to graduation and beyond. And although it made both her and the teacher uneasy in a way they couldn’t articulate, she had to come in to prove her worth, her plans to stay.

  He had been caught stealing from another boy’s pockets.

  ‘Maybe he was just curious about what was in the pockets. Curious,’ she repeated, hopefully.

  The teacher gave her a stern look, violently shrinking, and the woman wondered who educated these people, schooled them in disapproval. ‘That wasn’t it,’ the teacher said. She was from London and had a soundless way of communicating disappointment. Their relationship never moved beyond professional; they never hinted at their personal lives, as if any friendliness might cause embarrassment the next time they saw each other, and there would be a next time.

  The woman pulled a face that was also learned, perfected from years of bad relationships – let down but doubtful of change.

  ‘I will speak to him,’ she said, finally.

  On the Metro, hurtling home through black tunnels, he sat beside her, always content in her company. He kept up a steady chatter about school as if constant talk could distract from his misdemeanour. She was familiar with this trick. If she ever tried to grab his hand, he shook her off. He never allowed her to touch him.

  When she watched the other mothers exit through the school gates – in their discreet, mother uniforms; this city believed in uniforms – pushing their sons’ hair back from their eyes, casually shepherding them, her mind raced with thoughts of self-improvement. She should try to be gentler, less agitated, learn to make small talk in another language, or even her own language. Become someone a boy might want to touch. It seemed as if her whole life, from the age of thirteen onwards, had been geared towards that rotten desire and now the world had come up with a genius way of punishing her.

  She tried to tempt him into a pastry shop, bribe him into confessing with sugar. It was gloomy. It was also possibly criminal.

  ‘No, thanks,’ he said, massaging his abdomen, his body so tiny that it was hard to believe that it contained the correct amount of organs. ‘Sports.’

  ‘Sports.’

  ‘Sports,’ he repeated and raced ahead of her.

  She considered, not for the first time, becoming one of those mothers who carries fruit with them everywhere, pulling it out of the insides of their handbags like a magic trick, eternally resourceful. On the front door, beside the cockroaches, although she tried not to look, tried not to be confronted with her own ignorance of the French language too often, was a notice with a photo of a rat, no X running through it, free to do what he pleased. It was a vicious rat, his tiny teeth bared. He looked motivated.

  When the boy went to the bathroom, she flicked through his phone, the one concession they allowed him. There was never anything of concern, just a sadness attached to it, a lonely phone gasping for contact. She watched the clips he had recorded from the police station across the road from the school, his newest fascination. Blue-uniformed boys wandered blurrily back and forth, groups of two or three, trying
to look busy or brave, or both. They were armed in a traumatised city, their hands resting on their guns as if the gesture alone could reassure what happened before would never happen again. There were only five clips, shaky and accompanied by the raucous playground laughter of boys, but she watched them to the end.

  *

  The first time his wife called the police the woman went to the station with her own mother. They drove in silence. In the reception, they sat side by side and her mother advised her to just be herself, as if that – the whole process of being herself – wasn’t exactly why she was here in the first place. They waited in the exact same way, patiently, showing no hint of irritation, both betraying their own telltale signs of anxiety – her mother rummaged constantly in her handbag, the woman ran her fingers over greasy patches of her skin. A policewoman smiled gently at them, before beckoning the woman into a room. The woman remembered how she and her mother used to go to the bogs, weekend rebellions, the two of them running wild, comfortable in the dirt. Once, she slipped into a trench and had only managed to wade through the deep muck with her mother’s careful encouragement. The walk from one side of the station to the other was like that.

  In the small, airless room she was told they had received a phone call from his wife. Her car had allegedly been stolen and the woman was the prime suspect, the only suspect. The doubt was in the allegedly. She knew that a policewoman was being used for her sensitivity, and she wondered how many sensitive cases she had to handle a week, and how much sensitivity she had left.

  The policewoman’s shirt was untucked, her eyes heavily ringed, her shoulders drooped; all those crime-free hours spent at pedestrian crossings, waiting in cars, weighing on her, transforming her waistline. The woman thought she looked ridiculous. When the policewoman placed a hand over hers and declared it a domestic situation, her dislike didn’t alleviate. There was no decency in the movement, only the desire to dominate.