Roz is crying again. What she’s mourning is her own good will. She tried so hard, she tried so hard to be kind and nurturing, to do the best thing. But Tony and the twins were right: no matter what you do, somebody always gets boiled.
XL
The story of Roz and Zenia began on a lovely day in May, in 1983, when the sun was shining and the birds were singing and Roz was feeling terrific.
‘Well, not quite terrific. Baggy, to tell the truth: under the eyes, under the arms. But better than she’d felt when she’d turned forty. Forty had been truly depressing, she had despaired, she’d dyed her hair black, a tragic mistake. But she’d come to terms with herself since then, and her hair was back to auburn.
Also: the story of Roz and Zenia had actually begun some time before, inside Zenia’s head, but Roz had no idea.
Not quite that, either. She had an idea, but it was the wrong idea. It was hardly even an idea, just a white idea balloon with no writing inside it. She had an idea that something was up. She thought she knew what, but she didn’t know who. She told herself she didn’t much care: she was past that. As long as it didn’t disrupt, as long as it didn’t interfere, as long as she could come out of it with not very many ribs broken. Some men needed their little escapades. It kept them toned up. As an addiction it was preferable to alcohol or golf, and Mitch’s things—things, she called them, to distinguish them from people—never lasted long.
It was a lovely May day, though. That much was true.
Roz wakes up at first light. She often does this: wakes up, and sits up stealthily, and watches Mitch when he’s still sleeping. It’s one of the few chances she gets to look at him when he can’t catch her doing it and interpose his opaque blue stare. He doesn’t like being examined: it’s too close to an evaluation, which is too close to a judgment. If there are judgments going around he wants to be making them himself.
He sleeps on his back, legs flung wide, arms spread out as if to possess as much of the space as possible. The Royal Posture, Roz saw it called once, in a magazine. One of those psychocon articles that claim to tell all on the basis of how you tie your shoelaces. His Roman nose juts up, his slight double chin and the heaviness around.his jaw disappear in this position. There are white lines around his eyes, wrinkles where he isn’t tanned; some of the blunt hairs poking through his morning chin are grey.
Distinguished, thinks Roz. Distinguished as heck. Maybe she,,; should’ve married someone ugly. Some ugly toad of a man who’d never be able to believe his good luck, who’d appreciate her sterling qualities of character, who’d worship her baby finger. Instead she had to go for distinguished. Mitch should have married a cold blonde with homicidal eyes and a double string of real pearls grafted onto her neck, and a built-in pocket behind the left breast, for the bankbook. Such a woman would’ve been up to him. She would not have taken the kind of crap Roz takes.
She goes back to sleep, dreams about her father standing on a black mountain, a mountain of coal or of something burnt, hears Mitch’s alarm go off, hears it go off again, wakes finally. The space beside her is empty. She climbs out of bed, out of the king-sized bed with the brass bedstead in a curving art nouveau design and the raspberry-coloured sheets and duvet cover, onto the aubergine carpet, in the bedroom with its salmon walls and the priceless twenties dresser and mirror, faux Egyptian, and slips into her cream satin robe and pads barefoot into the bathroom. She loves this bathroom! It has everything: shower cubicle, jacuzzi, bidet, a heated towel rack, His and Hers sinks so the hairs from Roz’s head won’t get mixed up with the stubble from Mitch’s chin. She could live in this bathroom! So could several Southeast Asian families, come to that, she reflects morosely. Guilt sets in.
Mitch is already in here, taking a shower. His pink silhouette looms dimly through the steam and the pebble glass. Years ago—how many?—Roz would have scampered playfully into the shower, too; she would have soaped him all over, rubbed herself against his slippery body, pulled him down onto the tiled bathroom floor; back in the days when his skin fit him exactly, no sags, no bulges, and hers did too, and when he tasted like hazelnuts, a delicious roasted smell; but she doesn’t do such things now, now that she has become more reluctant to be viewed by daylight.
Anyway, if what she suspects is true, this is the wrong time to be putting herself on display. In Mitch’s cosmology Roz’s body represents possessions, solidity, the domestic virtues, hearth and home, long usage. Mother-of-his-children. The den. Whereas whatever other body may currently be occupying his field of vision will have other nouns attached to it: adventure, youth, freedom, the unknown, sex without strings. When the pendulum swings back—when that other body starts representing complications, decisions, demands, sulkiness, and weepy scenes—then it will be Roz’s turn again. This has been the pattern.
Intuition is not one of Roz’s strong suits, but she has intuitions about the onset of Mitch’s attacks. She thinks of them as attacks, as in attacks of malaria; or else as attacks of a different nature, for isn’t Mitch a predator, doesn’t he take advantage of these poor women, who are surely becoming younger and younger as Mitch gets older and older, isn’t it really more like a bear attack, a shark attack, aren’t these women savaged by him? Judging from some of the tearful phone calls Roz has fielded, some of the shoulders she’s patted in her hypocritical, maternal, there-there-ing way, they are.
It’s amazing the way Mitch can just write these women off. Sink his teeth into them, spit them out, and Roz is expected to clean up the mess. Fire off his loins and then wipe, like a blackboard, and after that he can barely remember their names.
Roz is the one who remembers. Their names, and everything else about them.
The beginnings of Mitch’s flings are never obvious. He never says blatant things such as “I’m working late at the office”; when he says that, he really is working late at the office. Instead, his habits undergo a subtle change. The numbers of conferences he goes to, the numbers of showers he takes, the amount he whistles in them, the quantity and kind of aftershave he uses and the places where he splashes it—the groin is a sure giveaway—such things are minutely observed by Roz, looking pleasantly out of her indulgent eyes, bristling like a bottlebrush within. He stands up straighter, pulls in his stomach more; she catches him glaring at himself, at his profile, in hall mirrors, in store windows, his eyes narrowing as if for a leonine pounce.
He’s more considerate of her, more attentive; he’s alert to her, watching her to see if she’s watching. He gives her little kisses on the back of her neck, on her fingertips—little homage kisses, little forgive-me kisses, but nothing that might be construed as foreplay, because in bed he becomes inert, he turns his back, he pleads minor illnesses, he takes up the jackknife position, oystering himself against her stroking fingers. His prick is a serial monogamist; a sure sign of a dyed-in-the-wool romantic, in Roz’s books. No cynical polygamy for it! One more, it wants, just one more woman, because a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, and Mitch is afraid of dying, and if he were ever to pause, to see himself as a man married to Roz, married only to Roz, married to Roz forever, in that instant his hair would fall out, his face would wrinkle up like a thousandyear-old mummy’s, his heart would stop. Or that is how Roz explains him, to herself.
She asks him if he’s seeing someone.
He says no. He says he’s just tired. He’s under a lot of pressure; he says, a lot of stress, and to prove it he gets up in the middle of the night and goes into his study, where he shuts the door and works until dawn. Sometimes there is the murmur of his voice: dictating letters, or so he claims, offering unasked-for explanations at breakfast.