Somebody Loves Us All (4 page)

During these bouts she spoke with a tiny, dried-up voice, and she lifted her head off the pillow and pursed her lips for Paddy to apply lip-balm. It was this aspect that shocked him most deeply, the lips, the voice. Here evidently his professional sensitivities showed. Normally she spoke in flat, booming tones. She dealt with businessmen, she walked through cavernous spaces, empty office blocks she was trying to fill. She honked. Often she answered the phone carrying a calculator and announced numbers. There was not a trace of sales pitch in her voice. Perhaps this was connected with her success, the ability to remove hope, its ingratiating music, from her speech. To hear this unvarnished voice was to be persuaded of neutrality and the prospect of a good deal.

As she lay in bed, she sounded frighteningly girlish, beseeching and fearful and lost.

Just as quickly, she was better again. Her skin cleared up, the rashes were gone. She began again to carry her calculator. Her old voice came back. Shame clung to her for a short while. Contrition. Paddy felt this period was even worse than the bed-bound one. Her boldness, her strictness, her sweeping and unselfconscious power, even her paranoia, had been attractive to him once. He remembered how men like him thought they had to ask permission for everything. This proved to be a mighty misunderstanding. It was in retrospect a brief epoch of male grovelling, mourned surely by neither side. The first time they’d gone to bed, he’d tried to have sex without getting a full erection. Why? Was the penis a suspect tool? Well, he had one and she did not. These were the actual and not quaint terms of said epoch. A side-effect of feminism, late 70s early 80s local variety, was that nervous basically nice males, such as him, persuaded themselves their fears and insecurities were progressive. Quickly she put him right on all that. His courtesy was frankly problematic. If he were being a gentleman, gentlemen didn’t he understand were
part of the problem. She wasn’t about to be broken as if she were a vase. She said, What is this? She was weighing it in her hand. What are we supposed to do with
this
? He responded at once, on command almost. From that moment on, sexually, their relationship had been satisfactory with an arrow heading up, indeed the only area in which humour could play a part. In bed, they both became childish, which sounded like the wrong word. When he held her, she talked about his one-bar heater. Her period was known by them as ‘Mr Full Stop’. Her favourite position was on top, from where in week two, she asked him whether he’d thought of names for her breasts. Two names. He hadn’t. Instantly he said, Maude and Claude. He licked his thumb and touched them in turn, saying the names. Hello you two, she said. Outside the bedroom, perhaps wisely, perhaps not, they never attained anything like this sort of tone.

He sometimes thought Bridget was humourless, meaning she didn’t like his jokes, or the jokes he liked. She preferred Mr Bean to Preston Sturges. Everyone just shouted, she said. This was after
Sullivan’s Travels
. Periodically he brought things home—books, videos—which he wanted to put in her way. The Henry Higgins aspect she sniffed a mile off. Higgins of course was a professor of phonetics. They’d even watched the video of
My
Fair Lady
together. The first film in which an actor sang live though a wireless mic. Rex Harrison’s cravat concealed it. Rex didn’t think he’d be able to lip-sync because every time he did the songs it was different. Bridget hated this sort of information from him. I feel like I’m at your work. She never understood his work. On this they were even. What she actually did away from the house remained a dull mystery to him.

They were incompatible on a major scale, and this incompatibility turned out to be a kind of glue. From the outside they both saw the extent of the mismatch but they also sensed each other’s defiance of opinion. Here was their commonality: to prove others wrong. Yet that made it sound too small and sour. Attempting objectivity, he sometimes tried to see the tape afresh, and more positively. They’d had some decent and
interesting and harmonious trips overseas. Sexual satisfaction or plain availability went a long long way. Maude and Claude. And busy working lives. Theirs was decidedly not that couple whose fighting escalated to such a frenzied point that the only action left was, depending on the genre, murder or love-making. They had a gift for each other and they knew enough not to give it too often.

They knew each other’s secrets, or a number of them. He’d once cheated in a university exam. She’d been a rampant shoplifter for almost a year when she was sixteen, connected, they both agreed, to her father’s death.

She project-managed everything, including him. He thought of himself as one of life’s foot soldiers. This allowed him to take a back-seat role.

What else? He had a weakness for punning. Her planet had banned it.

Children were an issue, sort of.

Midwinter, he recalled, they stayed at a bach. He was still at the hospital then. She was thirty-four, a kind of accepted Significant Number. On the near-deserted beach they came across a boy using a broken-off car aerial to repeatedly hit a large piece of driftwood. He held up the driftwood and lashed it again and again. Paddy said, That’s something you wouldn’t see a girl do. Earlier they’d been passed by a team of riders, all girls, on horses, in their policeman-type hats, ponytails out the back, trotting along the sand. The horseshoe marks went along the tide-line. Hello, the girls said.

I would, said Bridget, looking at the boy. I’d do it.

The whole weekend they’d discussed having children, pros and cons. It was a working bee type of weekend to clear this up. They’d known couples who’d split up on the question, or who’d been saved by it. But for them the vexedness was quite mute, or characteristically bungled. If she fell pregnant, he said, he wouldn’t mind. And how was this going to happen exactly, she asked. Did he mean, she said, if the contraception failed? Or something more active, along the lines of not using any?

They’d had a bottle of wine at lunch, very unusual, and they were both in a good mood, teasing, gentle. The bach had a television fixed to a shelf so high it gave you a sore neck. The bed wore sacking. The poorness of the accommodation had made them relaxed. They’d both agreed on that walking in. They were both against its meanness, united. Their companionship had always flourished unpredictably though it tended to require a third-party target.

He said that if it happened, pregnancy, he’d be very happy. If what happened, she said. He found he was maintaining ‘pregnancy’ as key signifier as opposed to ‘our child’. Then, he said, what do you think? Shine the bulb in your eyes for a moment, what would you like to happen?

After a while she said, I’m thirty-four now. I’m not on the dark side yet.

And despite this being in direct contradiction to earlier conversations, he let it go.

Ah, moment deferred. Time for a walk. They both were deep in scarves and gloves. She had small blue gumboots for walking on sand. She held his arm. They’d been together for almost nine years, having met in a corporate indoor soccer team for which they’d both been ring-ins on a night the team recorded an apparently rare win. She was tall and strong and showed decidedly unatrophied skills in scoring several goals. He was far more anonymous. Afterwards the team had celebrated at a pub. As newbies they sat together. She had two-thirds of an MBA done. Among his group any sort of economic activity, even that phrase, was incomprehensible, Muldoon-associated. He spoke to her as to a visitor from outer space, a sporty businessy woman with a mean left foot; or he was the alien. When he spoke she stared at him as though he had something in his teeth. He went home. Three days later he received a gift in the mail: a tiny soccer ball. No note. He couldn’t think who would have sent it except the organiser of the team who’d called him in, some sort of thank you for that, which seemed excessive. A couple of days later, another gift: a
referee’s whistle. He rang his contact in the team, who denied it. Then he told Paddy that someone had asked for his address, the girl who’d played for them, Bridget.

The idea that he was being pursued produced conflicting emotions. Partly it was the Groucho Marx line about not wanting to belong to any club that would have me as a member. More strongly, the aphrodisiacal effect of flattery. Or simply that of curiosity. He wondered about her body. She was almost his height. Previously he’d observed the four-inch rule or whatever it was.

The boy thrashing away on the beach didn’t look their way even though they were the only people visible. The horses had evaporated. He worked that aerial.

There was a scene he thought of, from the pivotal hotel night duty period. It was the morning and Bridget was going to work just as he was coming home. They met in the kitchen where he was hesitating in front of the cereals. Paddy said that it was hard to know what to eat and this gave her an opportunity to renew the attack. But why say ‘attack’, these were reasonable questions. He was a parody of male inconstancy. Years later when his sister, Stephanie, was left by Paul Shawn, Paddy experienced a shudder of knowingness. He hated Paul and the situations weren’t the same at all and Paul’s behaviour was far worse than his own since it involved small children and boundless and ongoing deceptions, but he recognised himself somewhere in that mess. Paddy had a sense of the mechanism at work. Was he having a crisis? Bridget asked. Was he seeing someone else? Was he losing it? Was he taking Vitamin C? He looked pasty, she said. He looked dreadful. He smelled of hotel.

‘What does it smell like?’ he said. It seemed the only part of the conversation that he could enter safely.

‘Air,’ she said flatly, ‘air conditioned air. Tell me when you’ll quit. Give me a timeline for this crisis at least, so we can plan.’

The shift-work made Paddy even more sharply her opposite. States of mind that were interestingly dreamy then oddly particular had begun to affect him. Sometimes he felt on his head for a cap he wasn’t wearing. He had to repeat the action a few minutes later. He believed he was wearing glasses and reached to take them off. He said to Bridget, ‘Have you ever seen in movies from twenty, thirty years ago, how they walk along the corridor of a hotel at night and everyone’s put their shoes out?’

‘No,’ she said.

He could see his reverie was almost physically painful for her but he went on. He was sure they’d watched these movies together. Part of his
Pygmalion
phase perhaps. He’d rented the videos and sat on the sofa, her feet in his hands. She always had sore feet, his Eliza. ‘It was a common practice. Perhaps someone came and shined them in the night, it was a service offered. But there are those scenes in movies, showing neat pairs of shoes outside each door. Someone walks along, trying to figure out who’s behind each door from their shoes.’

‘What’s the relevance to you wasting your life? You’d like to shine shoes now?’

‘No but I find that a very powerful and moving image somehow. The empty shoes of those sleeping guests.’ He had other things he wanted to say but she cut him off.

‘I don’t know if you’re even awake right now.’ She peered into his eyes. ‘Why is your hair all grey? Where is your hair gone?’ She was studying him up close. ‘Patrick,’ she said, with a sudden and sincere curiosity, ‘why do you hate me so much?’

This was the cue for them both to burst into tears. Simultaneously they gave way to an unacknowledged grief, which was both surprising and obvious. Oh yes, this. This pain. Their marriage had become a question circling each of them in isolation. Paddy saw the question as a particularly vicious and persistent creature, bird-like but not a bird. It comes and sits on our heads, he thought. It investigates our skulls with its beak-like implement. First it’s my turn, now it’s her turn. You’re never
unaware of the other person’s torment but there are intervals of reprise in your own. You mistake this for contentment. For now you are okay. Don’t you realise that soon she will be watching you, equally paralysed, equally fearful, the creature, like something Peter Jackson could toss off in his lunchbreak, sitting, where else, on your skull. Obviously the ideal marriage would be something else, with fewer horned ghouls.

They stood together in the kitchen, not touching, shaking with sobs. He smelled his work-shirt: nothing. He felt gratitude to Bridget for finally putting some clarity into their lives, gratitude and loathing. Paddy didn’t go to work the next day. They sat down and Bridget produced a piece of paper on which she’d written an outline of arrangements for the separation. Paddy felt both excited and bored looking at this piece of paper, as if they were planning a holiday. Yes, he saw the need but he just wanted to be there. Of course they changed their minds the next day—they had to stay together and see this through. They had to. Why exactly? She suggested they both make lists of the reasons they had for continuing to be married.

His list was 1. All we’ve shared. 2. All we might share. He was stuck after that, unhappy. It read very sentimentally. He wanted to add further items such as, My penis fits you, which was drawn from her verbatim account one night. Compliments were nice. He had a number 3. It was, Love question mark. He’d written it out like that. At the last minute he decided against presenting such a hideous piece of equivocation. Also not entered: 4. My need not to disappoint my mother. A great heaving sense of dejection and failure went through his bones when he considered having to announce to Teresa the end. This was separate from and even counter to any actual evidence that his mother would regard the matter with a similarly heavy heart. Yet it was like walking home with a bad school report. You looked into the Hutt River and imagined being swept away. You saw and felt all this even though you were a grown man.

They went to compare lists, sitting across from each other at the kitchen table. Except Bridget had come to her senses again.
She’d not gone through with hers. His list was the sole list. The situation was horrific, perfect. She looked at his list and then he reached for it and screwed it up.

More than two years before they split up, when he told Lant about Bridget’s episodes of illness and the lack of any discoverable cause, Lant said at once, ‘I think it’s you, Card.’