If it is your life (8 page)

Jennifer stood with her head craned, enjoying it. In fact I had forgotten the name of the painting, had actually forgotten its name, this most famous work of the Christian epoch.

Oh well, it was not my fault, how can we be blamed for our memory. For our lack of a memory. We do not blame a child for being born with one leg shorter than the other. Although this was slightly different; ageing bodily parts. I said, I’m thirty-six; the big three zero is history for me. The four zero next.

I held the door open for her, waiting; when she finished looking up and walked through I whispered to her: Jenny can I ask you something? What am I to you nowadays? What do I mean to you? Am I a sexless object? In all sincerity, is that how you see me?

She didnt reply. Yet I had spoken honestly. My only motivation was to discover the truth. That was it. Truth is what it was about. My only goal. What was its nature! A man might ask these things. It is an aid to self-discovery. Maybe we have been making mistakes. If so and someone informs us – e.g. erstwhile partners – then we can change, we can change and become better people, better citizens, better lovers, better patriots. People want to be better, I said, even me, I want to be better, not only a better patriot but a better human being.

Ssh.

Ssh?

She shook her head and was quiet.

What is it? I said.

Just be careful Mike.

Am I talking out of turn?

Yes.

Was I being sarcastic?

When? she said, and shook her head again; this time she closed her eyes! Dont let us talk about it now, she said but smiled. Get yourself a beer.

Yeh, I shall get myself a beer, and I shall drink myself a beer.

And I ordered an orange juice for her. The bartender was big. He was one of those guys with seventeen chins and seventeen bellies, each of which took it in turn to quiver. He was wary of me and didnt like my accent. So what? He poured the pint and I waited. He ducked below the counter for the orange juice. I wanted to ask if I could choose the oranges but he would have tossed me out the bar for insubordination. Instead I whistled a wee tune to myself.

I had been drinking in this bar for seven years! He made me feel like it was five minutes.

Never mind and relax, relax.

Whh whh whh, whh whh whh

[me whistling under my breath]

Jennifer had gone to a table at the side of the bar where I usually went. She didnt like standing at bars with me. I got the equivalent of road-rage.

At last I received the booze. She had taken off her coat when I arrived with the glasses. I noticed the yellow cardigan she was wearing. It was good quality. I nearly said classy. Or ‘classic’. Jennifer was both classy and
classic, a classy lassie. Some dame altogether. At one time she wore only grey and dark colours, navy blues and blacks. I like your cardigan, I said, it is nice.

Cardigan? She shook her head.

Is that not what it is? a cardigan?

She said nothing to that but for some reason appeared suspicious. Of me? How come! Now she looked away.

What the heck was wrong with ‘cardigan’? My mum’s description. And I think my sister used it too. Or was that the same thing!

I lifted my beer but didnt sip it, too predictable. She appeared not to be watching me but everything I did she noticed, I knew she noticed. Life was so damn complicated.

She was away looking at something else. I followed her gaze and who should it be but Mr and Mrs Duponzer, an older couple who lived farther down my street and, like myself, preferred to walk the miles to here rather than find somewhere more local.

Occasionally they trapped me into conversation. I got the feeling they were ‘saving me from myself’. No doubt they mulled over my situation within the safety of their own fireside, whatever that might mean. People had long since stopped having firesides. City ordinances decreed otherwise.

City ordinances decreed. What kind of mumbo jumbo is that? My brains were sozzled. Not as an effect of alcohol but my years. In this culture thirty-six was Methuselah’s nephew.

I could remember when I was nineteen. In those far-off days it was summer fifty-two weeks of the year. People did not speak of boyfriends and girlfriends, not back then, it was fiancés and marriage partners. People spent their life together. It was taken for granted. Working-class people, blue-collar communities. None of these invisible bourgeois bloodsuckers. Real people. That was Mr and Mrs Duponzer. They could not be separated. Even to imagine them separate, I could not do it. This was the kind of couple they were, this was their relationship.

So they still come in? she said.

I beg your pardon?

She smiled and shook her head like this was the real reason I had brought her here: to see an old married couple who still loved one another. My life amused her. I was glad. Yes well there they are, I said, there they are.

Bar meal?

That is correct, I said, what is wrong with a bar meal? I thought you would have approved. They do it a lot, the Duponzers. Other couples do it too. They come out together and do enjoyable togetherly things.

Oh Mike you are so defensive.

Am I?

Really.

Sorry about that.

Jennifer stared at me a moment, then smiled. You are.

Okay.

But you are. She chuckled. So defensive!

I’m not saying a word. I’m only glad I make you smile.

You do make me smile.

Yeh well I am pleased about that. I’m pleased.

I see that.

Look what does it matter whether I’m defensive or not? What does it matter? Mr and Mrs Duponzer enjoy their bar meals together. They do not do it everyday. Not as far as I know. Maybe if they’ve been out shopping together or taking in an early movie.

Do you mean an early morning screening?

Pardon? Do you want me to ask them?

If you like … Jennifer was smiling again. Sarcasm is contagious

They go out together, I said, and they do things together. Then they come in here on their way home. Together. It is a natural thing.

Is it?

Sure. They do it a lot.

Excuse me? Jennifer was looking at me in that curious way, but it was me that was curious, a sort of ‘curiosity’. That was how she saw me: a curiosity.

And where was the dignity in that? But probably I was a curiosity. Curiosity. The word wasnt even in my vocabulary. I would never have described a person as ‘curious’. Especially not an ex-partner with whom one had been intimate. Only strangers are curious. Unless a behaviour had become so.

So that was it. My behaviour had
become
curious.

The behaviour of long-time intimates might change, might become ‘curious’. I was an eccentric as far as she
was concerned. Why not call a spade a spade, you think I’m an eccentric?

She smiled again. Her hand was to her mouth. There was a word for this. What the goddam hell was the word!

She reminded me of a salesman who thinks he has you cornered. What will he have you buy! You will buy something. But what? It is his choice. You have no escape. Not until he has finished enjoying himself at your expense.

This is the mistake salesmen make. They dangle you on their fishing rod and wont reel you in, like a cat with a mouse and to hell with metaphors. Once he toys with you your chance arrives.

They always become arrogant. Salesmen amuse me. They really do. I had been dealing with them for years. Their major psychological error is the search for applause, whether from you as customer-victim or one of their colleague-perpetrators. You see them grinning; cats at the cream jug.

We have all been salesmen at one time but generally we are not, generally we are the fish trapped in the net, preparing to be served on a plate. Now here was Jennifer. My God but it surprised me that she too, she too …

What is it? she said.

I didnt think you would remember the old Duponzers.

Are you serious! I’m not likely to forget them. She shook her head. She blinked at me. Why did she blink
at me? Now she frowned. Frowned! They provided half our conversation, she said.

Oh well that’s not fair, I said, that really is not fair.

She shrugged.

It isnt. I stared at her. I found her incredible. Each gesture she made, no matter how minuscule, was a question. Excluding words her language contained the widest vocabulary of anyone I ever met, including my father who was a scholar if not a gentleman. He was too, mean old bastard. But he never tired of learning; even on his deathbed. Bring me my Thesaurus! His favourite book. He had three of them. That was my legacy. Two were different editions of the same thing but the third was a wee old edition of Roget’s Everyman, volume 1, 2 or 3.

Jennifer had a wider vocabulary than my father and it all stemmed from the body. Words had nothing to do with it. Every last move was a comment, each part of her body, everything, from fingers to toes, every indice a sentence, a statement. If she wiggled an ear I was obliged to answer: What am I to do? What do you ask of me? What is it you want!

Which is what I had never discovered.

But what did I want of her? She said I was the most suspicious man she ever had known. She meant ‘slept with’. She always slept with her boyfriends. From girl-hood upwards. She experimented. She told me herself. I hated it. I wish she hadnt but she had. Oral sex too. I hated it, hated it. Not the act but just, my God, why did she tell me? I did not want to hear about it, none of that stuff, I didnt want to know about those guys.
I imagined them laughing. Macho shits, drooling over their beer.

Jennifer went her own way. She always did. That was that. That was indeed that. If she had been male she would have been into science; something I was never into myself.

I pointed at the Duponzers and then to the big sign at the corner of the bar. See that, I said, they go shopping together and they eat bar meals together. They do meal-deals if you havent noticed, they give you membership cards, you buy three beers and they give you a bowl of chips and a slice of pizza; another beer and you get these onion things in batter. There is nothing wrong in that. I dont think so anyway. Maybe other people do. If other people think so, well then, they are entitled to their opinion, whatever it is. Even sex, why do we think things about older people?

Ssh.

But it is true.

Yeh but be quieter.

Okay but if they perform sex acts together. Why not? If they are older, so what?

Ssh.

Okay, I whispered, but surely you would not deny it to the elderly?

Dont be ridiculous.

It isnt to do with ridiculous, it is natural, human nature. It is a normal need, an everyday part of our life. Even homely, if we think of it in this sense, sex is homely.

Jennifer grinned.

This caught me off guard. What I said was stupid. At the same time, you find it funny, I said, but it’s true. Sex is an ordinary everyday experience, every bit as natural as eating or drinking so this is why I said what I did because to me it is homely. Sorry but that is what I think and I am not going to retract it. You are two years younger than me, ergo thirty-four.

Thirty-three.

Thirty-three? Yeh …

She smiled.

It’s your birthday next month.

Dont remind me.

Imagine forgetting your birthday!

Oh Mike.

I’m being serious.

Dont be silly. Anyway, you didnt, you just said it.

Right … But I had forgotten. I lifted my beer and sipped at it – for only the second time since our arrival. She put me on guard, praise the Lord.

There was something in her smile that complemented the yellow cardigan. Since the split she had transformed into another being. I thought it unfair. There was a lack of justice in the world that rendered major questions meaningless. ‘Transform’ was not the word, and not ‘transmogrified’ either.

Blossom! She had blossomed! She had blossomed into a sort of

What! A flower? What a total and absolute half-baker of a cliché. I felt like roaring in laughter. A flower! Oh
pretty little petal. Imagine I said it to her, pretty little petal! My leetle chickadee! I was a wreck. Maybe I was having a breakdown. Not emotional but mental. Intellectual. I had failed to recognize it. Because it was happening to me and not someone else. She would recognize it. She knew me. She was the very person that could tell if I was really me, rather than a mad variation! Am I a mad variation of myself?

What are you smiling about? she said.

Pardon?

You were smiling.

Was I?

You were.

Only being with you I suppose, it is so damn difficult.

Huh?

It is. You dont think of that.

Yes I do.

You dont.

Oh of course I do.

If you did you would have stopped visiting me. You would have stopped visiting me months ago.

She was smiling. I smiled back at her. I had to. Because what else.

And why was she smiling. Because I was predictable. Because she did not believe me. She did not believe I thought what I thought. Now she shook her head. But at the table; not at me, she did not shake her head at me. That would have been playful and she was not being playful. The playful days had gone. Now she
avoided looking at me. I was going mad. I had this sensation I had spoken aloud. Did I speak aloud? I must have spoken aloud. Otherwise

From the moment we sat down at this table. I saw it now. She was avoiding eye-contact.

Because eye-contact was the very breath, the very breath. She took pleasure in such contact, even in exaggerated forms such as staring people down. It was a game she and her daughter played, and mummy always won.

So she would not look at me. After what we had endured. Which was sad, that surely was sad. Oh but I wished, I wished …

She was smiling.

Why are you smiling?

I thought you were going to ask if I wanted a drink.

Pardon?

The way you looked at me, I thought you were about to ask if I wanted a drink.

But I bought you a drink.

Yes I know.

I pointed to her orange juice which was untouched. Would you like a gin or something?