Authors: Carol Mason
I meet him in the eyes. ‘I’m sorry… I’m not sure I’m ready to compare baggage, Roger.’ I don’t have the heart to have divorce laid beside widowhood as though they’re somehow equal, because they’re not. If you get divorced you can at least tell yourself,
well he obviously wasn’t the right one
;
better fish in the sea...
A picture of Jonathan arrives in my mind’s eye. One of my favourites: that devilishly good-humoured, slightly teasing expression that would appear whenever something I’d said had just amused him and reaffirmed why it was that he loved me. I don’t think there’ll ever be any other fish. No matter how many oceans I might swim. And that’s when it hits me that I’m not ready for this.
‘You’re right,’ he says. ‘And the very last thing I want to talk about on a first date is my ex-marriage.’ His eyes drop to my pizza lying almost untouched. ‘You’ve a tiny appetite.’
‘Not really… Anyway, what’s wrong with that?’ I don’t intend to sound slightly annoyed but I can tell that’s how he reads me. The chip on the shoulder that came with sudden widowhood. I lost over a stone when Jonathan died. Lost my curves. My boobs went from a C-cup to a smallish B. No matter how I’ve tried, the weight has not gone back on. I don’t feel womanly any more. Padded bras make me feel a bit like I’ve been given false teeth after a lifetime of having a good set of real ones.
He blanches. Something in his unflappably nice face falters for a moment. ‘I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m sorry. It was actually some pathetic attempt at a compliment.’ His fingers go to the base of his glass again, too quickly, and he spills some wine.
‘Sorry,’ I tell him. ‘I’m not very good with compliments.’ I watch him mop away at the cloth with his napkin feeling slightly sorry for him and helpless to remedy this. How could I possibly go out with someone called Roger anyway? It’s a geezer’s name. The thing is, I’ve just quickly asked myself if I could kiss him, and the answer is yes. My scalp suddenly feels sore in my ponytail. I tug on the elastic band, wishing I could pull it out, set my hair free, and rake my fingers through it.
‘Doesn’t it feel weird to you? Being set up?’ I throw this at him recognising that I’m saying something that’s possibly inflammatory again, but unable to stop myself. Why am I doing this? My eyes dart around the room, looking for a means of escape.
He rests his chin on his upturned hand again. ‘Weird? No. Not at all. I kind of like it. I’m actually quite curious about this person that a good friend of mine thinks I have a lot in common with. After a year of going on dates only to find I never want to see the women again in my life, I quite welcome a bit of divine intervention from a friend.’ He studies me closely. ‘How about you? How do you feel?’
I tug on the end of my ponytail like a belligerent teenager. ‘Socially challenged. Can’t find a man myself so I need the help of others who are better at it than I am.’
He smiles. He’s not rising to my bait. Perhaps I have to try harder to put him off. Maybe if I pick my nose, or hawk up phlegm. No. I have a feeling he’d still look at me with this face that tells me he’s ripe for taking on a head-case girlfriend like me.
Girlfriend.
Why is he interested in a thirty-two-year-old widow anyway? What’s wrong with him?
‘My problem is,’ he says, his eyes swiftly dropping to his wine glass that he twiddles with again. ‘I’m not very good with dating. I never was at twenty-two and I’m not much better at forty-two. Small talk… tiptoeing around things. I get impatient for something substantial. It’s a failing of mine.’ Then, of all the things, he reaches in his pocket, pulls out a small comb and runs it through his dishevelled salt and pepper hair.
There. See. He’s completely off his rails.
Plus, he’s too old.
Does he think I should be grateful that he likes me? His eyes, and the way he looks at me, his entire comfortable-with-me, understanding being—maybe he thinks it’s all more than any girl in my shoes could hope for. Only I don’t do grateful very well. I certainly never did with Jonathan.
Jonathan.
He visits me again with a sharp, bleak smack to my senses.
I grab a pint glass of water and gulp it down. In the background, romantic Italian music plays underneath the din of voices in this packed-out pizzeria. ‘Tell me about your children,’ I say, grabbing a passing, safe question in my head.
‘I can’t. I don’t have any.’ A twinkle of humour returns to his eyes.
‘Oh.’ I lay the back of my hand quickly on my hot cheek. There’s a fire-exit beside the toilets. I could make on I’m going to the loo and flee.
‘Do you have any pets?’ he asks me, and reads my blank expression. ‘Dogs? Cats? Parakeets? In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m trying to get the small-talk over with fast.’
A sped-up film track flashes across my mind now. Goodnight kisses. Hands roving over bodies for the first time. First time having to do a number two in their bathroom. First person you call when you have something good to tell, or something bad. There are potential-to-be-the-man-who-ends-up-replacing-the-only-man-I-have-ever-loved moments coming out of this, and I am scared shitless. Sweat pours out of my hands, down my back, the soles of my feet. I know what this is. A panic attack. I thought I’d stopped having them. I thought I had turned a corner.
‘Have you ever thought that maybe some people aren’t meant to try so hard to find somebody to love them, Roger? Maybe they’re just meant to be alone.’ Like me. Alone sounds damned fine.
He just studies me for a moment or two, as though he is analysing me, then he holds up his hands. ‘That’s a pretty negative way of looking at things, Angela. I like to believe that there’s somebody totally right for us out there. And that we eventually find them, even if we don’t find them the first time.’
It suddenly reminds me of something Jonathan once said. Strange how I’m remembering it now… We were larking around, talking about death in the way you do when you assume you’re going to live to a ripe old age. We were in bed. We had made love. Satisfying and warm, and often extremely horny, as was our style. Particularly after we’d fought, which we did, often. He was explosive. I am. Or was, when I had someone to press my buttons.
‘If I died, I would want you to marry again,’ he said to me, his finger absently massaging those two dimples at the base of my spine.
‘I’d never marry again if you died,’ I told him, still feeling a white heat for him. The thought of kissing someone else was actually quite yucky.
He ran his hand, appreciatively, over the curve of my well-exercised rear. ‘You would, you know. I’d see to it that you did.’
I propped both elbows on his chest and looked at him, his dark, sharp eyes, the slightly receding hairline that he hated you to make fun of. ‘Oh? And how would you do that then Mr. Hotshot Lawyer Who Thinks He Knows Everything?’
He ran a finger along my collarbones, looking deep and distracted—lawyerly: the look that was very Jonathan. That look that I very often only had to catch sight of to want to screw him really badly. ‘I’d send somebody for you,’ he said.
I thought about this for a moment. ‘Send someone? What, like a lover or a second great love? A carbon copy of you, right? Because you think you’re so damned perfect for me, don’t you?’ I couldn’t take him seriously because I couldn’t ever see either of our lives ending.
He scowled. ‘God no. Nobody like me. I’m thinking Elephant Man with a big heart.’
I play-punched him. ‘Would he at least be good in bed?’
‘Terrible.’ He kissed the hollow of my throat, flicked the tip of his tongue across the indentation there. ‘Completely hopeless, with the tiniest dick you’ve ever seen.’
‘Thanks. He sounds like a real treat.’
‘No, seriously, I’d send you somebody… somebody totally right for you. Somebody better for you than I’ve been Ange. Honestly, once I got up there, I’d make it my entire reason for being. That is, if you can have a reason for being once you’re dead.’
That was Jonathan: my high-achieving husband. Even in the afterlife he’d have to have a mission, some accomplishment to strive for. ‘You think I’m joking but I’m really quite serious.’
Insane as it sounded, I could tell he was. ‘I’ll hold you to it,’ I told him, and then he flipped me onto my back and rolled on top of me.
‘But don’t think I’m going anywhere any time soon, Angela Chapman,’ he sank his fingers into my bum cheeks. ‘I’m not planning on leaving you just yet.’
But you did, Jonathan, didn’t you
?
~ * * * ~
The din of music and voices and chinking dishes comes back to me now, and the memory slips away, leaving a dull feeling in me, as though Jonathan has just been here and has left me, but left me temporarily. Maybe just to step aside and watch me now with this Roger, and to say,
What are you doing here Ange? With him? When you’ve got me?
Roger is studying me. ‘Can I ask you what you’re thinking?’ he asks.
I open my mouth to say something, but the words won’t come. I’m like a dyslexic trying to read for an audience.
‘Help me out, Angela. I’m trying here.’ When I don’t reply, he says, ‘Shit. This has taken a bad turn, hasn’t it/ I’ve got a feeling I’m going the same way the dwarf guy went.’
I give him a look that says, sorry, I think you might be right.
He studies me with that affectionate kindness again. ‘All I was doing—or trying to do—badly, obviously—was to find out about you. I’m interested in you and I like you. I want to know all the little things that make you the person who a very good man fell in love with.’
A pain builds in the bridge of my nose, along with the distant urge to vomit. ‘How do you know he was a very good man?’ My voice breaks toward the end.
‘Well, I’ve a feeling there’s a reason why he’s being so very hard to forget.’
He scours my face. His tone is different now, serious. I have to lower my eyes as they flood with tears. ‘You know, Angela, a friend of a friend of mine was married to a man who died in the World Trade Centre. All these years later she still hasn’t moved on. She still keeps his toothbrush in the bathroom. She still leaves the alarm clock set for five-thirty every morning. She still says she regularly walks into the house convinced she’s going to find him there, that he somehow got buried deep in a long tunnel where he was disconnected from the world, but he dug through, he fought his way back to her—’
The scraping noise of my chair along the floor feels like fingernails on a blackboard. I am moving without realising why I am doing it—without thinking at all. When I get my foot caught in the strap of my handbag, and trip, and practically lurch into the bowl of spaghetti on the next table, and other heads turn and look at me, it’s his gaze I want to strip myself of. I feel it clinging to my back like a fever, as I hurtle towards the door.
He doesn’t follow.
Not that a girl could exactly blame him for that.
When I get outside, it feels remarkably like I’ve had my head held under water but somehow I’ve managed to fight my way up for air, and the air feels fantastic, and I will never let myself come so close to drowning again.
‘Do you think it’s weird that a hunky Australian sheep shearer from Perth invites you over to his house to watch
Brokeback Mountain
, which he tells you he’s seen seven times, then he wants to have anal sex with you?’
I light up when I hear my friend Sherrie’s voice on the phone. I take one more look at myself in the bathroom mirror—my pale face, and longish, lank, blonde hair with about two inches of dark roots showing, making it look permanently in need of a wash.
‘Weird?’ I switch the bathroom light off. ‘Well, if he’s from Perth, yes. I mean, if you’d said Canberra or Sydney that’d be different.’
There’s a silence where I feel she’s smiling. My four-feet eleven, carrot-haired Jewish friend is a cotton trader. She spends eighty-percent of the year travelling to the middle of nowhere in China, Egypt, India, or West Africa, to buy or sell the bales of cotton that become yarn, that become fabrics, that become our clothes—racking up peculiar sexual conquests in the process.
‘What time is it there, anyway?’ I ask her, wishing she were here, then we might go out. I’m not starved of friends, but Sherrie’s my first pick every time.
‘The exact opposite of whatever time it is there I guess. We’re upside down, remember. In case you hadn’t noticed I’m currently standing on your head. Urgh, but then you’d see right up my skirt... Not a pretty sight, especially after—’