Nope.
“Well … I’m really happy with mine, and I’m glad you’re happy with yours.”
I didn’t say I was happy with my life. I said that I was fine, as in no colds, no recent traffic accidents, no suspended prison sentences, but never mind.
“Have you got, you know, kids and stuff, like everybody else?”
“No. I could have had them if I’d wanted them, of course, but I didn’t want them. I’m too young, and they’re too … ”
“Young?”
“Well, yes, young, obviously,” she laughs nervously, as if I’m an idiot, which maybe I am, but not in the way she thinks—“but too … I don’t know, time-consuming, I guess is the expression I’m looking for.”
I’m not making any of this up. This is how she talks, as if nobody has ever had a conversation about this in the entire history of the world.
“Oh, right. I see what you mean.”
I justtook the piss out of Charlie. Charlie! Charlie Nicholson! This is weird. Most days, for the last dozen or so years, I have thought about Charlie and attributed to her, or at least to our breakup, most things that have gone wrong for me. Like: I wouldn’t have packed in college; I wouldn’t have gone to work in Record and Tape; I wouldn’t be saddled with this shop; I wouldn’t have had an unsatisfactory personal life. This is the woman who broke my heart, ruined my life, this woman is single-handedly responsible for my poverty and directionlessness and failure, the woman I dreamed about regularly for a good five years, and I’m sending her up. I’ve got to admire myself, really. I’ve got to take my own hat off and say to myself, “Rob, you’re one cool character.”
“Anyway, are you in or out, Rob?”
“I’m sorry?” It is comforting to hear that she still says things that only she can understand. I used to like it, and to envy it; I could never think of anything to say that sounded remotely strange.
“No, I’m sorry. It’s just … I find these long-lost boyfriend calls rather unnerving. There’s been a spate of them, recently. Do you remember that guy Marco I went out with after you?”
“Um … Yeah, I think so.” I know what’s coming, and I don’t believe it. All that painful fantasy, the marriage and the kids, years and years of it, and she probably ended up packing him in six months after I last saw her.
“Well, he called a few months back, and I didn’t really know what to say to him. I think he was going through, you know, some kind of what-does-it-all-mean thing, and he wanted to see me, and talk about stuff, and what have you, and I wasn’t really up for it. Do all men go through this?”
“I haven’t heard of it before.”
“It’s just the ones I pick, then. I didn’t mean … ”
“No, no, that’s OK. It must seem a bit funny, me ringing up out of the blue. I just thought, you know … ” I don’t know, so I don’t see why she should. “But what does ‘Are you in or out’ mean?”
“It means, I don’t know, are we pals or aren’t we? Because if we are, fine, and if we’re not, I don’t see the point of messing about on the phone. Do you want to come to dinner Saturday? I’m having some friends over and I need a spare man. Are you a spare man?”
“I … ” What’s the point? “Yes, at the moment.”
“So are you in or out?”
“I’m in.”
“Good. My friend Clara is coming, and she hasn’t got a chap, and she’s right up your street. Eight o’clockish?”
And that’s it. Now I can put my finger on what’s wrong: Charlie is awful. She didn’t use to be awful, but something bad has happened to her, and she says terrible, stupid things and has no apparent sense of humor whatsoever. What would Bruce Springsteen make of Charlie?
I tell Liz about Ian phoning me up, and she says it’s outrageous, and that Laura will be appalled, which cheers me up no end. And I tell her about Alison and Penny and Sarah and Jackie, and about the stupid little flashlight-pen thing, and about Charlie and how she’d just come back from the States on business, and Liz says that she’s just about to go to the States on business, and I’m amusingly satirical at her expense, but she doesn’t laugh.
“How come you hate women who have better jobs than you, Rob?”
She’s like this sometimes, Liz. She’s OK, but, you know, she’s one of those paranoid feminists who see evil in everything you say.
“What are you on about now?”
“You hate this woman who took a little flashlight-pen into the cinema, which seems a perfectly reasonable thing to do if you want to write in the dark. And you hate the fact that … Charlie? … Charlie went to the States—I mean, maybe she didn’t want to go to the States. I know I don’t. And you didn’t like Laura wearing clothes that she had no choice about wearing when she changed jobs, and now I’m beneath contempt because I’ve got to fly to Chicago, talk to some men in a hotel conference room for eight hours, and then fly home again … ”
“Well, I’m sexist, aren’t I? Is that the right answer?”
You just have to smile and take it, otherwise it would drive you mad.
Twenty-one
When Charlie opens the door, my heart sinks: she looks beautiful. She still has the short, blond hair, but the cut is a lot more expensive now, and she’s aging in a really elegant way—around her eyes there are faint, friendly, sexy crow’s-feet which make her look like Sylvia Sims, and she’s wearing a self-consciously grown-up black cocktail dress (although it probably only seems self-conscious to me because as far as I’m concerned she’s only just stepped out of a pair of baggy jeans and a Television T-shirt). Straightaway I start to worry that I’m going to fall for her again, and I’ll make a fool of myself, and it’s all going to end in pain, humiliation, and self-loathing, just as it did before. She kisses me, hugs me, tells me I don’t look any different and that it’s great to see me, and then she points me to a room where I can leave my jacket. It’s her bedroom (arty, of course, with a huge abstract painting on one wall and what looks like a rug on another); I have a sudden panic when I’m in there. The other coats on the bed are expensive, and for a moment I entertain the idea of going through the pockets and then doing a runner.
But I want to see Clara, Charlie’s friend, who’s right up my street. I want to see her because I don’t know where my street is; I don’t even know which part of town it’s in, which city, which country, so maybe she’ll enable me to get my bearings. And it’ll be interesting, too, to see what street Charlie thinks I live on, whether it’s the Old Kent Road or Park Lane. (Five women who don’t live on my street, as far as I know, but would be very welcome if they ever decided to move into the area: the Holly Hunter of Broadcast News; the Meg Ryan of Sleepless in Seattle; a woman doctor I saw on the telly once, who had lots of long frizzy hair and carved up a Tory MP in a debate about embryos, although I don’t know her name and I’ve never been able to find a pinup of her; Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story; Valerie Harper in the TV series Roda. These are women who talk back, women with a mind of their own, women with snap and crackle and pop … but they are also women who seem to need the love of a good man. I could rescue them. I could redeem them. They could make me laugh, and I could make them laugh, maybe, on a good day, and we could stay in and watch one of their films or TV programs or embryo debates on video and adopt disadvantaged children together and the whole family could play soccer in Central Park.)
When I walk into the sitting room, I can see immediately that I’m doomed to die a long, slow, suffocating death. There’s a man wearing a sort of brick red jacket and another man in a carefully rumpled linen suit and Charlie in her cocktail dress and another woman wearing fluorescent leggings and a dazzling white silk blouse and another woman wearing those trousers that look like a dress but which aren’t. Isn’t. Whatever. And the moment I see them I want to cry, not only through terror, but through sheer envy: Why isn’t my life like this?