Rosie O'Dell (49 page)

“Good,” I said. “What did he think, you’d be down here with your life in
neutral, pining for him?”

“He said it was all over between himself and his wife, anyway, whether I go
back with him or not, because he could not keep his mind off me. Kind of
flattering in a stupid way, isn’t it? And besides, he said, if his moving out
was to mean anything to me, it had to be done on its own, with no strings
attached, rather than being contingent on my positive answer. The bugger seems
to be thinking straight for a change, I’ll say that.”

I snuggled closer. “I hope all that hasn’t upset you too much to enjoy yourself
tonight.” I tried to free my hands again, but she kept hers clamped around
them.

“Oh yes, having two adorable men balmy about me is really upsetting.” She tried
to kiss my lips, but she laughed in the middle of it. Then she turned serious
again. “Tom, I loved Gareth very much before I met you, and I’d be lying if I
said I didn’t still have strong feelings for him. But I have very strong
feelings for you too. I don’t know what to do. I need your guidance.”

My first impulse was to say, “Tell him you have a new man and he should get the
hell back to Cardiff and stop pestering everyone.” But my pride was a little
hurt by her ambivalence over myself and the Welsh guy, so I fished for a
compliment with a show of selflessness. “Well, to be honest, and thinking only
of your best interests and ignoring mine, I’d say go back to him.”

“But your best interests enter into it too. Don’t you think it would be a shame
to give up what you and I have together?” She took her hands off mine and moved
them down over my stomach and made a new grip. The next twenty minutes seemed to
firm up Sian’s decision. She said after a quiet spell of recovery, “I wouldn’t
dream of giving you up, Tom, I love you too much. We are going to stay together
forever and ever. Fate was telling us something when my former love came from
Wales to see me, and your former love called you from overseas all on the very
same day. That’s far too full of meaning to be just a coincidence.”

Where had all the oxygen in the goddamned room gone? I felt stifled to the
point of suffocation. The selflessness I’d expressed before making love had felt
disingenuous then, but it was right on target now. “You have to think of
yourself, Sian. I’m a student with years to go before I finish. I have an
undergraduate degree to get—I may even be leaving London in a few
months to finish that in Canada—then post-graduate, probably law school.
Christ, I have eons of studies ahead of me yet. As I said, if you do still feel
anything for him, you should go back with him.”

“I’m a student too. Together we can decide to go anywhere and do anything we
want. Our whole life is ahead of us and we have all the time in the
world.”

I stayed silent. I wanted nothing more from
my
whole life at this moment
than to get cracking on that comparative analysis of the gross domestic products
of West Germany and East Germany that had lain dormant on my desk for two weeks
but was now itching,
screaming
, for completion.

“Tom?”

“Yes?”

“Do you love me?”

“Sian, I don’t want to answer that, because I think you should do what I
advised you to do earlier.”

“Tom.” She was up on her elbow and looking at me hard. “Do you or do you not
fucking love me?”

“No.”

“No, because the only one you love is your silly little Rosie O’Dell,
conveniently on the other side of the ocean, where she can’t see you humping
your scrawny arse off.”

I got up and pulled on my clothes. An intense anger at myself, hollow and
hopeless, prevented me from speaking. As I walked to her door, she said, “Or is
it that you just like dunking your dick in anyone stupid enough to oblige you?
You don’t need to love someone for that, do you, you little cock with feet? Any
old cunt will do for that.”

That was twice now that someone had accused me of being a walking phallus. What
kind of an impression at all was I leaving everywhere I went? I turned around.
My anger at myself turned to pity for her. “I wish this were a few years later,
Sian. You are one of the most beautiful persons, in every respect, that I have
ever met. Go back to him and love him. I think it will be great for you both.
You will have a man who will be forever aware of how lucky he is.”

“Oh, piss off, you fucked-up little shit.”

The next afternoon Sian knocked on my door. She was sorry for calling me dirty
names, she said, and wanted to tell me to make other arrangements for the second
berth in my cabin on the Nile cruise. She was going back to Cardiff next week to
stay.

“Aren’t you finishing your year here?”

“No, I’m transferring to university there and moving in with Gareth. I’m glad
you were so honest last night. You probably spared me and you a good deal of
grief. Come over and say hello to him and have a cuppa. I haven’t mentioned
anything, by the way. You and I are just student acquaintances.”

Gareth was about ten years older than Sian, with a gentle, sensitive face. I
imagined, as the three of us made small talk, what Gareth and his poor wife must
have gone through before Sian had left Cardiff for London, and what his poor
wife was going through now. Love. Jesus Christ Almighty. Between the pain and
pleasure love caused, which was the greater? Sian passed me my tea with a little
lopsided ironic grin, gave Gareth his, and sat on the arm of Gareth’s chair, her
hand on his shoulder. Gareth looked up at her with burning eyes of adoration.
Pain. Yes, pain, by far. My brain filled with an image of Rosie. I drove it out
and soon excused myself. I went upstairs looking for the company of
Morton.

I CALLED MY PARENTS
to confirm that I would be
travelling to Egypt over Christmas. Mom started to say, “Oh, that’s why Rosie
looked so—” but she stopped.

“Pardon, Mom,” I said.

“I was just wondering if you and Rosie were still…”

“Mom, Rosie and I are broken up.”

“I was wondering about that. I hadn’t seen her for a week or so, and then I saw
her at Nina’s a few days ago.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. But I wanted to have all my plans in place
before I called. What was she saying?”

“She didn’t say anything about that. I was there because Nina wanted me to be a
trustee of Rothesay’s estate until Rosie reaches the age of majority, and that’s
what we talked about mainly.”

“Are you going to do that? I thought you couldn’t stand being around Nina these
days.”

“I can’t. In fact, as I told Rosie, I’d cheerfully murder her for what she
didn’t know was happening around her own house. But I want to make sure of
Rosie’s education. There’s enough there, with Nina’s disability pension, for
them to live modestly and for Rosie to get all the way through university, with
some part-time work and an assist from scholarships. So yes, I’m going to do it
until Rosie can legally take over. Your father is going to help me.”

Dad now came in on the other extension. “Your trip up the Nile,
since you’re already over on that side, is a way better idea than coming home.
You’ll be home a long time.” He spoke as if he was talking about being dead.
“Anyway, on to more pleasant topics, thanks for the picture of Sian. Undeniable
proof that she’s a girl. How are the two of you making out?”

“She’s not here anymore, Dad. She’s gone back to Cardiff with an old
boyfriend.”

“What? Jesus Christ, those theatre tickets I arranged cost three hundred bucks.
Don’t tell me that’s down the drain.”

“Oh, Joe,” said Mom.

“I believe I got your money’s worth, Dad, while it lasted.”

“Oh, Tom,” said Mom. “You two.”

“Are you going to Egypt with anyone in particular?”

“Morton.”

“The chap in the picture… I see.”

“Bye, Dad. Bye, Mom. Love you both.” I hung up the phone and stood by it in the
hall, immobilized. If my mother had been immediately able to see something in
Rosie’s demeanour during the visit—Rosie, who’d been able to keep an unreadable,
stoic face on for years, except for that period… A pain came into my chest of a
needle piercing my heart. Perhaps I should call her and…

But I didn’t. That night I theorized to Morton that I loved all women in
general so much I could never truly love an individual woman again. And I meant
to put the theory into practice on the boat up the Nile. Morton was dubious.
He’d already told his Angela in Manchester that we’d had to cancel one of the
cabins while there was still time and that he was going to share mine, and she
had not liked it. Indeed, she advised him to crawl into King Tut’s hole while he
was at it and stay bloody there. Which had caused Morton some anxiety: “Tom,
this sexual promiscuity you’re planning for me—I’m warning you—it had better be
good.”

His anxiety proved groundless. During the eight-day cruise, Morton and I spent
only the first night in our own cabin together. For the next week, our nocturnal
to-ing and fro-ing, and the consequential displacement of cabin mates, helped
create a domino effect of geometric proportions throughout the ship. By
mid-trip, the opening and closing of cabin doors all night had so unnerved a
prof from Oxford that he screeched at the tour organizer over breakfast, “No
students ought to be allowed on these student tours.” And this guy was a
professor of logic.

Back in London, although my memory of momentous sights seen
through sleepy daytime eyes was hazy, my auditory recall of nighttime banters in
bunks was clear.

The girl with the Irish accent, a student at Cambridge, the night after the
boat’s visit to maybe Luxor, in the afterglow of lovemaking: “Not bad, Yankee
boy.”

“I’m Canadian.”

“Canadian? Oh. Then that was outstanding.”

The thirty-seven-year-old wife of a Norfolk schoolteacher putting her clothes
back on three o’clock in the morning, probably off Aswan High Dam: “This
holiday, the first one without my husband, is supposed to put some zing back in
our marriage.”

“And will it, do you think?”

She bent over and kissed my lips and then moved her mouth down over my chest
and stomach and kissed the top of my subdued, damp penis. It stirred upright
again, and she stripped off her knickers and climbed back on with a murmur of
great fervour: “
I don’t think so
!”

The student at Oxford stimulating me to erection the night of perhaps the
Valley of the Kings: “Not unimpressive. Zero to a hundred in seven seconds.” Her
father had been a race car driver. I thought of Rosie. She had said something
similar early in our lovemaking. Starting to go slack, I pushed her out of my
mind.

“A hundred miles an hour that quick?” I said. “I’m impressed myself.”

“
Kilometres
, not miles. You blokes are always more impressed with
yourselves than you ought to be.” She was pretty fast herself. Minutes later I
was wondering what that professor of logic must be thinking to hear her squeal
at one-thirty in the morning, “Gentlemen, start your motors!”

Over cocktails on deck in the late afternoon sun on the last day, I asked
Morton whether we shouldn’t feel a bit guilty over having missed most of the
recommended sights by being up all night and in bed after breakfast till
mid-afternoon every day.

“No,” Morton responded. “My theory of Egyptology is, if you’ve seen one
colossus, you’ve seen them all. The more pertinent question is, should this have
been so enjoyable, our flitting from flower to flower like a bee on speed? Isn’t
that what we should be feeling guilt over?”

“No,” I responded, “it’s the highest example of success in the whole theory of
evolution—the male who spurts his genes into the greatest possible number of
females.”

“But isn’t the success rather pointless, since I invariably
wear a condom?”

“Yeah, but your genes won’t know that till it’s too late.” I told him that the
only guilt I felt was over throwing away opportunities last summer like the one
I’d described to him with the Norwegian beauty, Siggy. We laughed with the
arrogant cynicism of late adolescent males.

IN THE LATE AFTERNOON
of the fifteenth of February, alone in my
room off the Kingsway, I sat reading for diversion
Grave’s Mythology
. I’d
told Annie, a student of Classics at London University, I was interested in the
ancient Greeks, and she had brought the book along as a Valentine’s Day gift
yesterday when she’d come to spend the night. I was reading about Theseus’s
abandonment of Ariadne on the island of Naxos. As I read, my mind flitted to the
news earlier this afternoon from home: my former nemesis, Cory the Moose Mercer,
had been found behind an abandoned building in downtown St. John’s, dead of
alcohol poisoning and hypothermia. Looking back a few years later, I would not
be able to believe that every time in London that I thought about the poor
wretch’s death, a surge of joy had hit my heart.

I glanced across the room at the Valentine card with its cartoon heart and
mushy verse that Annie had placed on the table with a laugh and a kiss last
night. A wave of self-disgust that had been lurking within me for three months,
but which I hadn’t admitted to myself, now broke through the surface and swept
over me. For the first time in those months I saw what I had been acting like:
not like a person who was fully human, but like someone possessing the arrogance
of the divine. I had been acting like a demigod hero, forever exploiting the
humanity of women, their human needs, their love, to screw them and drop them.
Yeats got it right: “… before the indifferent beak could let her drop”—the swan
with the god within
indifferent
after ravishing the girl Leda. Just as
Theseus or any other hero with the god within would be off to another conquest
in
battle or sex with another woman without a thought,
without a twinge of conscience, without a backward look, instantly forgetful,
absolutely neglectful,
indifferent.
And that, I reflected, was precisely
what I myself was doing. A self-absorbed hero as indifferent as if I contained
within me something divine.

Suzy Martin’s bitter words to me when I’d been alone with her in the witness
waiting room during Rothesay’s trial now sounded in my ears. I had wondered to
her about the effect of Rothesay’s refined and cultivated handsomeness on the
jury, causing Suzy to mutter, “Yes, you’d never say it to look at that elegant
Adonis in there that he fucks little girls. He
fucks
them and he
fucks
them and he
fucks
them and then he
drops
them in
the
crapper
.” The sound of Suzy’s now unbearably hard words in my head
forced me to stand up. Suddenly I understood myself. I had been acting like an
arrogant semi-divine hero, yes, but I had been acting against my true nature. I
was not like that at all. I was, in fact, the exact opposite of a godlike
psychopath like Rothesay. I myself had nothing of the semi-divine hero in me.
And I’d been wrong to be carrying on as if I had. As I saw that truth, the love
in my heart, suppressed by my three months of preoccupying lust, began to soar.
What a blunder I’d made thinking a paradise of lust was better than the hell of
love I’d been through with Rosie.

I paced and sat and thought and analyzed and found my feeling to be absolutely
firm. I’d never stopped loving Rosie. I’d been sidetracked from the true path of
my life. I had to get back on it right now. It wasn’t too late. It couldn’t be
too late. I’d go out and telephone her and tell her directly that I loved her,
always had and always would. I had been wrong, I’d tell her. Pathetically off
the beam. She had to forgive me.

My mother had told me after Christmas that Nina and Rosie had sold the big
house in St. John’s and bought a smaller one into which they had taken two
student lodgers. I called from memory their old telephone number, hoping they
had kept it. Rosie herself answered on the first ring. My heart leaped. A
propitious start. “Hello, Rosie, it’s Tom. I hope I’m not calling too late in
the night.”

“Who?
Tom
! Oh, sorry, Tom, I was expecting a call from someone else.
Where are you?”

“Still in London. How are you?”

“I’m fine. Why are you calling? Because poor Moose Mercer is dead and your
courage has come back?”

“No. Just to have a little chat if you’ve got a
minute.”

“I don’t, really. Do you mind freeing up the line so my call can get through?
Thanks. Bye bye.”

“I’ll call back,” I said, but she had hung up.

I returned to my room to muse on this. She was just showing her anger with me
in unmistakable terms. Naturally, I needed to work on winning back her
friendship and trust. What did I think—she’d be waiting for me there with open
arms? Maybe she was seeing someone else. I’d check that out so that I knew what
I had to overcome.

“Not that I’m aware of,” my mother replied on the phone. “Nina hasn’t mentioned
that she’s involved with anyone. But Nina mightn’t know. Rosie doesn’t tell her
much. She spends a lot of time with Suzy. Why do you want to know?”

“Just a friendly interest.”

Okay. This wasn’t going to be as hard as I’d thought. I wouldn’t play any
games. I would tell her the simple truth and she would see everything clearly. I
sat down and wrote that I had said things during our telephone conversation last
fall I didn’t mean. I loved nobody but her. I had thought I wanted to be free to
do as I pleased but found I did not want that. I wanted only to be committed to
her again. I had discovered afresh what I’d already known but had been in denial
about, that my love for her was so great it transcended every other
consideration in my life. I begged her to forgive me on the grounds that I had
undergone an emotional breakdown or upheaval following my terrible trauma in St.
John’s. I had now passed through all that and had come out the other side of it
healthy, seeing the light and loving her stronger than ever. She was to write me
as soon as possible. Even if she felt she could not forgive me right now, would
she please write anyway? I had to hear from her. I loved her more than life
itself.

Letter mailed, I told Annie when she came to spend the night that I didn’t want
to see her anymore. At the door she asked, “Who do you think you are, playing
fast and loose with my emotions and my life, some big macho hero having a little
fling?”

“No, I think I am a pathetic arsehole.”

“No argument here, except with the adjective. I would have said despicable
arsehole.” She closed the door behind her.

I resisted so stubbornly all further opportunities to demonstrate the
evolutionary success of my sperms that Morton said I should have my en
tire genetic structure examined in a lab for defects. But I
was waiting for Rosie’s reply. After three weeks, when none had come, I woke to
my first serious fear that none was ever going to come. But how could that be? I
had abandoned her for intimacy with another woman, yes, but so had she abandoned
me in the same way when we were sweethearts at eleven. Therefore, we were even.
The absurdity of that comparison made me realize I was starting to panic. I had
to act. I grabbed a handful of coins from my gas heater hoard and went to the
phone to catch her before she left for the morning. The unknown female who
answered said she was out. I asked her to tell Rosie I’d call back. The next
three nights she was out or unable to come to the phone, and I left a message
that I would be at my London number all day and night on Sunday and would be
grateful if Rosie could please return my call that day at her convenience.
Sunday, from seven in the morning till twelve midnight, I left my door ajar to
be sure to hear the phone ringing in the hall even if I was in the bathroom.
Seven calls came, including two for Morton and one from a behind-the-times male
for Sian, but none for me.

I decided to take a harder line. At one o’clock in the morning, still early in
the night in Newfoundland, I dialled Rosie’s number. A young woman, in the tone
of someone disturbed at the dinner table by an insurance salesman, told me she
was out of town for the weekend. I said in an authoritative voice that I assumed
something like that had kept her from calling, but in case I was wrong, would
she kindly tell Rosie to either call me back or convey a message to me that she
was not going to call? There. No more pussyfooting. That night Rosie
called.

The student occupying Sian’s old rooms knocked on my door at three in the
morning. “It just rang and rang,” he said. “Long distance from Canada. I hope
it’s nothing serious at this hour.”

Hope in my heart, I went out.

“Look, Tom,” said Rosie by way of greeting, “I know it’s late there, but I just
got back in town and it bothers me that I have been so engaged in my own
concerns that I haven’t dealt with this nuisance. We have nothing to talk about.
Please stop calling me.”

“Rosie.”

“Tom. Listen. This is not a request. This is a statement. I’m not asking you,
I’m telling you. Do not call me anymore.”

That night I phoned Suzy Martin at home. She sounded glad to hear from me, and
we chatted cordially for a minute. Then I said, “I’ve made a
big mistake, Suzy. I must have gone crazy or something. But last fall Rosie
and I broke up.”

“I am aware of that. That was really dumb. You two were made for each
other.”

“I need your help to get her back.”

“What? This is bizarre.”

“I know it is. But I love her more than anything in this world. I know that
now. I always knew it, but I was stupid enough to let it slip out of my mind for
a few weeks. Will you please help me get her back?”

“Tom, I can’t do that.”

“But I need your help. She told me not to call her again.”

“No, I mean it’s not possible for me to do anything even if I wanted to, even
if I put my whole heart and soul into it.”

“But why not, Suzy? I know what I did was stupid. But isn’t her attitude an
overreaction? Can’t you get her to talk to me? Even if she hates me, she can
talk to me and at least hear my side of the story.”

“She doesn’t hate you, Tom. She just wants to have nothing to do with you. You
are not part of her life. You had an absolute right to do what you did last
fall. And she has an absolute right to do what she is doing now. She has wiped
you out of her life. That’s all there is to it.”

“But, Suzy, I’ll do anything to make it up to her. Will you tell her that,
please?”

“Tom. After all you and she were involved in together, you were capable of
casting off her love and her trust as insensitively as if you were brushing off
a fly. You acted just like—well, you know fucking who. For God’s sake, what do
you think you could ever do to make that up to her? Bravely decide to come back
home, now that the guy who made you run away is dead?”

“You know it’s got nothing to do with that, Suzy. That is just silly, and it’s
wrong. This is not the way Rosie is. It is not possible. I love her and I
believe she still loves me. She must still love me. It’s only been a few months.
She can’t just decide to unlove me and have nothing to do with me just like
that. She must have another boyfriend, does she?”

“Whether she has another boyfriend or not is totally irrelevant to all
this.”

“Well, if she does, I’ll take him on and win her back.”

“Oh, Tom, can you really be saying that you truly, truly loved her when you
broke—when you did what you did to her last fall?”

“Yes, Suzy, yes, I really truly am. I don’t know what came
over me. I’ve always loved her, more than anyone or anything in the
world.”

“Then that is very sad. That is tragic. Because, you poor bastard, she is
gone
. She is gone from you forever.”

WHEN I CAME HOME
in June, Rosie was away, living with a family
in Quebec City to top up her fluency in French, and not expected back till just
before university was to start here in the fall. Suzy, after a visit with her
father in Gander, was joining Rosie in Quebec. I decided to bide my time. Come
September, when she returned, I’d make my move. Nothing was as final as Suzy had
said. There’d been too much love between us and we’d been through too much
together. I couldn’t ascertain from my mother or Suzy if Rosie was involved with
someone else, but even if she was, I would win her back. Indeed, I hoped she did
have a boyfriend so that we both could feel I’d been deservedly punished and had
to earn her love again. I had a couple of speeches well-rehearsed in my head
involving the immaturity that had caused my mistake and the proof of my great
love being how I had stood by her through all her terrible revelations and
subsequent legal ordeal—Good Lord, I was willing to end lives for her!—and would
continue to stand by her through the rest of our lives. I’d already made those
points obliquely, and more, in letters, of course, but perhaps she’d thrown them
away unread. If she had ever loved me as strongly as she had said she did, she
would not be able to resist resuming that love when I offered it to her again
face to face.

With some difficulty because of the lateness, I enrolled for the next academic
year at Memorial University in St. John’s. I’d be here all year with Rosie so
that I could fix what I had so badly damaged.

I hadn’t realized what piteous signals I must have been sending out around the
house until one afternoon in late August when my mother came home from Nina’s
house and walked straight up to my room and stood in my door, gazing down at me.
I glanced up from my book. Her face looked extremely sad. “Rosie,” she said,
just above a whisper, “was back.”