The evening started off slow. My grown-up girlfriends were talking contact numbers and exchanging business cards — I had to start the tequila slammers myself. Two hours later we were off on the Final Bash, the last night ever. I have some recollection of a couple of horse-drawn cabs. I also remember climbing in over the back wall of my new — that is to say, my future — husband’s house. It did not occur to us — to any of us — to use my key, or even knock at the front door. There was a light on in the kitchen: I remember that. We stripped a red-brick wall of ivy and wore it in our hair. I lost my knickers to some ritual in the flower beds. My oldest friend Cara took pictures, so this is how I know all this — two of the girls trying to get my shirt off, Breda ripping up the dahlias (saying, apparently, ‘Boring flowers. Boring flowers.’) and someone, it looks like Jackie, snogging Fintan up against a tree. In the photo, he is all throat. His head is bent back for the kiss, so the flash catches his Adam’s apple and the blue-white underskin of his neck.
I kissed him myself once. It was in my second year at college, before he went mad, or whatever. We sat on the win-dowsill at a party and pulled the curtains around us and talked for a while, with our heads tipped against the cold window-pane. I remember the silence outside, the curtains resting against us, and beyond them the fug and blather of the room. At some stage, I kissed him. And that was all. The skin of his mouth was terribly thin. Even then, Fintan dealt in moments. As though he moved through liquid while the rest of us made do with air.
So, I am married, whatever that means. I think it means that now I know.
Now I am living in that house with its boring flowers and ivy-covered walls, I know that I didn’t ‘nearly’ love Fintan — I loved him, full stop. And there is nothing I can do about it — about the fact that I loved him for years and did not know it. Nothing at all.
I sleep easy enough beside my husband, my greedy old man. Because he was right in a way — Fintan is always right, in a way. So many of the men that you meet are dead. Some of them are dead in a nice sort of way, some of them are just dead. It makes them easy to seduce. It makes them dangerous to seduce. They give you their white blindness.
So it is easy, under the sheets, to lie beside him and think about nothing much. My hairy old baby. Who would do anything for me. He spends money on me, it seems to give him pleasure — more pleasure than what he is buying at the day’s end, because dead men don’t know the difference between things that are alive (me, for example, or even My Cunt) and things that are dead, namely His Money, which is just so many dried-out turds and not worth living in the house of the dead for. And so I keep talking and he keeps dying, and giving me things that have already decayed (a ‘lovely’ silk scarf, a car that I might want to drive some place, two books that are quite like real books I might want to read). There is the conspiracy of the dead all around us and the head waiters still smirk, as head waiters do, while the food fucks on the tabletop in an encouraging sort of way.
I am sick now. This life does not suit me. His old wife has cyst problems, something horrible with her back, some disintegration. I hear her silence on the other end of the phone. I see the cheque-book with her name in it, printed under his. I am thinner now. My clothes are more expensive. Weekends he sees his daughters — always a little bit better at their maths, their smiles always sweeter, their ribbons that little bit straighter; their cheekbones beginning to break through the skin of their faces now, too early, beautiful and aghast.
I meet Fintan in the afternoons and we have sex sweet as rainwater. I need the sun more than anything and we undress in the light. I open the curtains and look towards the sea. He is madder now than he ever was. I think he is quite mad. He is barely there. Behind my back I hear the sound of threads snapping. I turn to him, curled up on the sheet in the afternoon light, the line of bones knuckling down his back, the sinews curving up behind his knees and — trembling on the pillow, casually strewn — the most beautiful pair of hands in the world.
I say to him, ‘I wish I had a name like yours. When I’m talking to you, you’re always “Fintan”. It’s always “Fintan this,” “Fintan that”. But you never say my name. Sometimes I think you don’t actually know it — that no one does. Except maybe him. I listen out for it, you know?’
TAKING PICTURES
Words spoil it. They make it sound silly.
When he showed me the ring I just laughed. I don’t know what it is to be in love, even less to be married. I thought, ‘What can I say?’ I wanted to bury his head in my coat. I wanted to wrap my coat around him and tuck him under my arm. Except that he is so big.
‘So what brought this on?’ said Sarah at work — the bitch.
‘Just,’ I said.
‘Just,’ she said. ‘You’re just getting married.’
‘Yes.’
‘But that’s wonderful.’
Later — drunk, of course — she leans back in her chair and says, ‘So he’s into pain then, is he?’
‘Well, obviously.’ But in my head later, for days later, I’m saying, ‘He is not even interested in pain, Sarah. He will not have it in the room.’
Some nights I stay at his place and some nights I stay back at mine. All this moving around makes us impatient, with the multiplying toothbrushes and a permanent pair of knickers, clean or worn, at the bottom of my bag. But I still don’t know what it is to be in love. I know it is different from being married. But just for now, married seems to me more. And less, of course. But mostly more.
Sarah at work, I can’t stop believing in Sarah at work, just because I am getting married, just because she is jealous. Here is a description of Sarah. She is a washed-out sort of strawberry blonde with fine bones and small features. She is fading to white. She is constantly insulted by men.
Back at his place, I bite my fiancé on the ear. Sometimes I come up behind him and chew at the muscles of his back. Or when he is sitting down I worry my teeth inside his thigh, along the seam of his jeans. If I hurt him, he reads the paper. If he laughs, we go to bed. Or more often do not go to bed, but rumble a while and then talk. He likes to spoon. He likes to go to bed after it is all over. Which is lovely. Which is always a little bit more.
So Sarah at work has a personality problem. Which is to say, her problem is that she does not like other people’s personalities.
My mother had a friend who was always too much, and very clever. I know these things can last a lifetime, so I am careful of Sarah, and careful of my man — too careful to use his name with her. Despite which I end up saying it all the time. ‘Oh, Frank,’ I say. ‘Frank says this,’ ‘Frank doesn’t like that.’
‘Really?’ says Sarah.
She is seeing a guy herself — sort of. He isn’t married, he isn’t with someone else, but there is a problem, I can tell — a sick mother, maybe, or even a child. The only thing Sarah will say is, ‘The fucker won’t do Saturdays’. Maybe he’s a bisexual. Sarah has no breasts, truth be told. And you can’t win with a bisexual, I say, because bisexuals can’t lose.
Of course, I don’t say it out loud. Sarah is the witty one. At the time, I just look at her skinny little chest, and think.
We are going over the wedding list for the fourteenth time. I pause over Sarah’s name, and Frank says, ‘Don’t invite her then, if you don’t like her. Just leave her out.’
And I say, ‘I can’t leave her out.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s Sarah,’ I say. ‘Because it just doesn’t work that way.’