My Hundred Lovers (18 page)

I should have known the dissolute lover would make a pass at my sister at the same wedding. She would have responded, too, except that at the time she happened to be with a jealous, possessive millionaire named Carl. Carl the millionaire wanted to beat up the dissolute lover as well, so we left the wedding reception before the dissolute lover had the chance to secure Jane's telephone number and before he had any further opportunities to
épater le bourgeois
.

Nana Elsie said to me afterwards, ‘There's nothing like family, Debbie. Friends are all very well, but it's family who stand by you when the chips are down.'

She would never have acknowledged that families are frequently the reason that the chips are down.

FIFTY-EIGHT
My son

JUST BEFORE MY MOTHER DIED,
when she no longer wore turbans and had forgotten everything but for her tongue, which had not yet forgotten desire, the staff at the nursing home where she lived gave her a doll. It was a great ugly thing, a cloth body stuffed with wool, with plastic arms and legs sewn on. Its head was plastic too, with a face no baby had ever possessed, and in its plastic scalp was woven real golden hair.

As soon as she was given the doll, my mother's arms rose into that ancient female crook to cradle her baby. Somewhere inside that memoryless woman was an unbroken bodily memory of caring. My mother, my lover! Would that you could once again scratch my back with your red-painted fingernails!

In those first suckling months with my own baby son we dreamt and slept, awoke and dreamt again.

My body fell in love with his and his with mine. I was never more clearly the sum of my parts than in those first milky days.

FIFTY-NINE
The romantic lover

SUPER NAN'S MOTHER, ROSE, SAILED
to the other side of the world even though she was blind.

Super Nan loved to tell the story of how her parents met, how her father, Joseph, passed Rose in the street and fell in love with her on the spot. He could see that she was blind, and yet she looked straight into his eyes. This was years before they met each other in Australia. This was in Ireland, long before Joseph became the owner of the finest hotel in Orange.

Joseph, from Limerick, fell in love with Rose, from Ahascragh, near Galway, because of her penetrating blind eyes.

‘It's true,' Super Nan said. ‘Some people fall in love the minute they see someone and love them till the day they die.'

Is it any wonder I was a romantic?

‘Anyway,' said Super Nan, ‘the strange thing was that although Mother was what you would call legally blind, whenever anybody spoke to her she always turned her head towards them and looked straight into their eyes. People don't expect blind people to look at them. Or at least they expect them to turn their heads clumsily towards the speaker, to look at their forehead or their ears or their nose. They don't expect a blind person to look straight at them.'

Wanting to find out why Rose's beautiful cloudy-blue blind eyes looked so penetratingly into his own, Joseph followed her down a Galway street, into a shop and into his future. He was on an errand for his father, a poor farmer, who had sent his son all the way from Limerick to Galway to obtain the carriage promised to him free by the wealthy uncle of a neighbour. Joseph had never been to Galway and was lost.

Following Rose into the shop, Joseph learnt that a blind girl is a bible, a dictionary, a book of common prayer, that a blind girl is a memory box. She had memorised the world, the shape of its streets, the words of its songs and the number of steps to the grocery shop. She remembered the entire six verses of every hymn in church each Sunday and knew the number of steps in the paving stones in the path leading to the lemon tree in the back garden.

Joseph followed her round and round. Finally, she turned and looked him in the eye. ‘Will you please stop following me?' she said in a surprisingly loud voice.

Straight away Joseph left the shop.

He stood outside, waiting for her to emerge. He did not know what he was going to say to her, or indeed if she would answer him if he did. As he waited for the blind girl, nervously twisting his best handkerchief in his fingers, the brother of his neighbour from Limerick happened to pass. ‘Morning, Joseph,' he said, tipping his hat. ‘What brings you to these parts?'

By the time Joseph had explained his mission, the brother of his neighbour was dragging him away to his uncle. ‘What a very good piece of luck this is, Joseph!' he said. ‘You being lost and me finding you!'

Joseph turned back towards the shop only to glimpse the blind girl emerge, a basket over her arm, and hurry away.

He did not set eyes on her again till four years later, in Australia, on the other side of the earth, when she applied for a job as a scullery maid at the house where he was working.

Super Nan said her father had the Irish way with words. He spoke of Rose as keeping ‘the world in her head' and said that it wasn't long before he wished to be kept there too.

‘He was a bit of a poet, was Father,' Super Nan said proudly. ‘He could charm the birds from the trees if he had a mind to.'

But Super Nan's favourite part of the romantic story of her mother and father was not their meeting. It was the part her father told again and again, the part when Joseph asked Rose what she would choose to look at if by some miracle she was allowed to see for one day.

Rose turned her face towards him, looked with accuracy into his eyes, and replied, ‘I would look at you, Joseph. I would look at you.'

SIXTY
The bottom lover

I HAVE SOMETIMES IDLY WONDERED
if Joseph's desiring tongue ever sought Rose's bottom. Did anyone even have a bottom in those days?

I have a bottom, not large-buttocked and rolling, there-she-blows, like my darling Ro. A small bottom, mine, jaunty.

A bottom nonetheless sought by numerous tongues and lips, including those of the lover whose lips were long and wide, what I thought of as Scandinavian lips, a generous opening too large for his face.

He was blond, the lover with Scandinavian lips, with big, even white teeth which suited his mouth. When he kissed, the kiss spread across your face, from your lips to your cheeks to your hair.

I slept with him four times.

It is not my mouth that remembers.

He was an Australian actor who later became famous, so that if I tell you his name you will know it. These days he is seen only with beautiful actresses but every time I chance upon a picture of him and a famous actress in a celebrity magazine I wonder which part of her body his mouth seeks.

All he ever wanted from me was my bottom: for me to turn and raise my jaunty arse to his mouth.

At first I thought it was an act of bravado, that he might be the kind of man who performs cunnilingus on the first night, never to show his face there again. At first I thought his rolling me over and the migration of his tongue to that most private puckered place was a continuation of this bravado, a first-time performance designed to impress.

As it happens, I am oddly squeamish about my bottom, preferring it to go about its business with the minimum of attention. As it happens, when his tongue began to probe that most intimate of orifices, my body went into a kind of inner clench.

I began to worry about whether I had cleaned myself thoroughly (despite the fact that we had just shared a bath) or indeed whether one could ever clean a bottom sufficiently.

But the man with the Scandinavian lips could not get enough. His tongue felt hard and pointed and I imagined it to be forked like a snake's, so particularly and deftly did it dart in and out, around and around. I was wondering when he would stop, and whether this was a prelude to sodomy, which I happen not to enjoy. He went on and on, groaning with pleasure, while my fingers gripped the sheets.

At last his mouth slowly journeyed upwards, to my buttocks, to my back. When he reached the curve of my neck, he rolled me over again and began to kiss my face. I could smell myself, a faintly cloying, sweet smell, and when he reached my lips there was no mistaking the whiff of shit.

By now he was inside me, crazed with desire, and I turned my head from side to side in what he might have supposed was frenzied lust but which was in fact a bid to evade his soiled mouth.

When he came, he cried out. He collapsed on top of me and lay panting, still holding me fiercely. ‘Oh God,' he said. ‘You have no idea how magnificent that was.'

I slept with him four times, and every single time he sought my bottom.

‘Weirdo,' said Ro.

‘Perv,' said Steph.

I sometimes wondered if Ro and Steph knew more about me than any lover, lost or found, could ever know.

I was almost thirty, in transit, a property of the people even though I secretly considered bottoms to be privately owned.

SIXTY-ONE
The deflowerer, again

THE SUSPICIOUS WANDERER SOON ARRIVES
at that wistful, elegiac place where she begins to look back with longing.

Because her experience of having the first flower picked from her body was a joyful one, over the years the memory of it had grown more and more beautiful. She is starting to look back with a sigh.

One bright summer morning she chances upon her deflowerer, Jonathan Jamieson, in the street. Instantly the wretchedness dogging her falls away, the sorrow rooted in her since the dying days of the dissolute lover, since her abandonment of that lover oblivion, since the day when she sobbed for the absent fathers and discovered in her bed a lover she did not like or even care to know. Has Jonathan Jamieson come to save her?

Her deflowerer is to be married the following month. He is deeply in love with his wife-to-be, but he says that he has never stopped loving the Suspicious Wanderer.

It is ten years since they lay together.

They make love, weep, and the Suspicious Wanderer begs his forgiveness. All the sorrows of love, its pity and its failures, gather round.

‘You were so kind!' she says. ‘I'm so, so sorry!'