She is peeling potatoes when he starts.
She hears him before she sees him, the particular sequence of sounds that is Don coming home: the outer door, the lift, the key, the coat, the exhale that manages to communicate without a single word that the day has been a great deal harder than anyone could reasonably be expected to bear. She keeps her eyes on the sink.
"You cleaned the stove."
It is not a question. It is an accusation dressed in the clothes of an observation.
"It needed doing," she says, pleasantly enough.
"I said I was going to do it."
She turns the potato in her hands. Eyes it for blemishes.
"Don, you said that last Tuesday."
"I said I'd do it!" He raises his voice, somewhere between disappointment and indignation.
"It's been a week...," Lizzie insists, even though she already knows that this will only make things worse.
He makes a sound. It's not quite a sigh, not quite a laugh, the amalgamation of both that she has come to recognise as the overture to a particular kind of evening. He loosens his tie with one hand and leans against the kitchen doorframe, and she is aware, without looking directly at him, of the posture: arms slightly crossed, head tilted, the stance of a man assembling his grievances into something organised.
"I was going to do it tomorrow, Lizzie."
"You never mentioned tomorrow..."
"Because I didn't think I needed to file a formal notice. I thought we lived together. I thought there was a degree of..." he pauses, selecting the word with care, "... trust."
She sets the potato down. Picks up another one.
"I cleaned the stove," she says, keeping her voice very even. "I don't quite understand how that becomes a problem."
"The problem," he says, with the patience of someone explaining long division to a child, "is that you never give me the opportunity. You run around doing things and then what? I'm supposed to feel grateful? I'm supposed to feel useful in my own home? You make it impossible, Lizzie. You genuinely do."
She is nodding. She can feel herself nodding, the small automatic dip of her head that means yes, I hear you, please stop, the gesture her body produces independently now, without consulting her.
But her mind is somewhere else entirely.
Her mind is in Melbourne.
It has been there, more or less continuously, since half past one in the afternoon, with only brief excursions back to column G and the product codes and the cold cup of tea. She keeps returning to it the way you return, involuntarily, to a bruise... pressing it to confirm it is still real.
The way he had simply sat back down completely naked, in a beautiful way. The way the conversation had kept going, easy and unguarded, as though the removing of pretence in one direction had removed it in every direction. She had felt a door opening and once it was open the whole room changed. She had told him things she had not said aloud in years, had not even fully admitted to herself, and he had received each one without flinching, without turning it back on her.
And then, later... what had come after the talking...
She keeps approaching the memory of that wonderful penis... and how he stroke it so gently as if he was truly making love to her...
No. She shies from it, the way you might shy from a bright light. It is too much, too vivid, too at odds with the grey February kitchen and the potato in her hand and Don still talking behind her about trust and opportunity.
Maybe watching Michael was nothing different from the pornography Don occasionally left running on the laptop when she came into the room. Those ridiculous, mechanical productions with wide open legs and lots of screaming in which no-one seemed to be present in any meaningful sense. She had never understood what he found in those, had watched a few minutes once or twice at his insistence. He'd hoped it would turn her on so that he'd have a valid excuse for staring at other women's pussies. Instead, she felt nothing but a mild, impersonal sadness.
So maybe watching Michael had been just that. Watching porn and masturbating like Don had done so many times.
But she knows all too well it's all but the same.
Michael had looked at the camera. He had looked at her, even when she'd remained hidden under the cloak of anonymity. He'd had an attention for her so complete and so overwhelming that she had felt, for the first time in longer than she could accurately remember, genuinely present in her own body. Not observed. Not assessed. Wanted. And the wanting had been offered to her like something cupped in two hands, carefully, with full awareness of its weight.
She'd had a dream about intimacy, once, when she was young enough to still have dreams about things. A dream in which closeness between two people was also a form of conversation. It wasn't just about bodies and fucking but about souls, briefly, extraordinarily legible to one another. She had filed that dream away long ago under not how it works, not really, grow up.
This afternoon had retrieved it from the file.
"... are you even listening to me?"
"Yes," she says. "I'm listening."
---------
She lies awake from half midnight until somewhere past four.
Don sleeps beside her with the aggressive ease of someone who has never once in his life stared at a ceiling. She lies on her back in the dark and listens to him breathe and thinks about Pandora's box, which she'd done a project on in secondary school and which she now understands, for the first time, from the inside. The particular seduction of the closed lid. The fact that Pandora had known... she must have known... and opened it anyway.
Is it cheating?
She turns the question over. Examines it from different angles.
She hadn't shown herself to him. She had sat, fully clothed, in her own flat, and watched. That was all. And her hand slipping accidentally into her knickers. She had watched and she had felt things, but feeling things was not... surely feeling things was not in itself a transgression? Don watched pornography. He watched women he didn't know do things on a screen and he felt things. He wanked himself off. And she had never called that cheating. She had called it mildly depressing, privately, but not cheating.
She stares at the ceiling.
No. It doesn't hold. Not one bit. Because Don's women on the screen don't know his name. Don's women on the screen have not spent two and a half hours listening to him. Don's women on the screen could not, if they wanted to, send him an email.
And that's the thing, isn't it? The email address, written on the back of the Sainsbury's receipt, currently tucked under her keyboard like a small explosive device. That is where the argument collapses. Because what she is contemplating is not passive. It is not something that happened to her. It would be a choice, deliberate and clear-eyed, to reach across twelve thousand miles towards a man who is not her husband and say: I'm here. I want to keep talking to you.
And I'd love to watch you some more.
And she already knows that she will. She thinks she knew it the moment she wrote down the address.
Somewhere around half four in the morning she arrives at the most honest version of the thought and simply lies with it: what Michael and I had yesterday was more intimate than anything Don and I have had in years. Not just physically. In every way. And intimacy, real intimacy, is not something you can quarantine. You cannot have it and then fold it neatly away and go back to the stove argument and the spreadsheets and the shepherd's pie. It changes entire dimensions.
She turns onto her side, away from Don, and closes her eyes.
She thinks of Michael saying: I definitely felt you.
She doesn't sleep for a long time.
Don is up at seven, loud with purpose, the way he always is when he has somewhere to be that is not here. She hears him in the shower, in the kitchen, the particular aggressive optimism of a man pouring cereal. He appears in the bedroom doorway at half seven, jacket on, already wearing his going-out face.
"There's tea in the pot," he says, which is as close to tenderness as mornings ever get.
"Thanks," she says.
"Don't forget to do something about that bathroom cabinet. The hinge is still..."
"I know about the hinge."
"Just saying." He checks his phone. Something on it pleases him. "Don't wait up."
The outer door closes. The flat resettles into its silence.
Lizzie lies still for another few minutes, staring at the ceiling, and then she gets up and pours herself tea she doesn't really taste, and opens her laptop, and stares at the spreadsheet until the columns begin to mean nothing, which takes approximately four minutes.
She opens a new browser tab.
She opens her email.
She stares at the address field for a long time.
The thing about Pandora, she thinks, is that no-one ever talks about the moment before she opened the box. The moment when she was simply standing there, holding the lid, and the World was still intact, and she knew — she absolutely knew — that in ten seconds it wouldn't be anymore. That must have been something, that moment. The last instant of a particular kind of life.
She begins to type.
Subject: It's Lizzie
Dear Michael,
I've written this three times already and deleted it. Actually I don't even know why I'm doing this. So I'm going to try to just say it plainly and not think about it too hard or I'll delete this one too.
I wanted to thank you. Not just for yesterday, though I do want to thank you for the way you listened, for the things you said and for the fact that you were kind without wanting anything from me in return. I'm not sure you know quite how rare that is, or perhaps you do, which is why you're able to offer it.
I've been lying awake most of the night, which I suspect you might have anticipated, or perhaps I just want you to have anticipated it because it would mean that yesterday mattered to you in some proportion to how much it mattered to me. I realise that's a lot to put in an email to someone I've known for hardly a few hours. I'm sorry about that. You did say I write honestly.
I should tell you that I'm frightened. Of this. Of having written the address down and then found myself unable to throw it away. Of the fact that I keep thinking about you... and about what you said... about me deserving to be seen. And I can't put it back. It refuses to leave my terribly confused mind. Last night my husband argued with me for half an hour about the stove and I stood at the sink and nodded and I was twelve thousand miles away and I think that might be the most honest thing I've said in years.
I don't know what I'm asking for. I wouldn't even know what I want at this point. I think I just needed you to know that yesterday was... I don't have the right word. Revelatory is probably too large, except that it isn't.
I'm going to press send before I change my mind.
Lizzie
She leaves it there as a draft. No harm done. It's just a fantasy in her mind. A fantasy isn't cheating, or at least that's what she tells herself.
She goes back to the spreadsheet. Column G. She enters data for twenty minutes with the rigid concentration of someone trying very hard not to think about a particular tab open in a particular browser. Then she goes back and re-reads it. It's too much, she thinks. Too revealing. Too earnest. The last line is embarrassing. She deletes the last line. Then she puts it back, because it is the truest thing in the email and removing it is just another version of cropping the photograph.
She changes Dear Michael to just Michael, because dear is what you write to a solicitor. Then she changes it back, because without it the whole thing feels abrupt.
She reads it again.
The second paragraph is too long. The bit about her confused mind. She'd actually had a whole sentence about opening Pandora's box in the second draft and she'd taken it out. Luckily, she sighs. It sounded like I was a total imbecile. The third paragraph. I'm frightened. She almost deletes that. She leaves it.
She goes back to the spreadsheet. G871. G872.
She reads the email again.
Her mouse moves, without any clear instruction from her brain, to the send button.
She moves it away again.
G873. G874.
The flat ticks and breathes around her. Somewhere outside a car starts. The February light shifts slightly, almost imperceptibly, towards something that might, by afternoon, become pale winter sun.
She reads the email one final time.
Then... before the part of her that is still standing in the kitchen nodding at the stove argument can intervene... she clicks send.
The whoosh of it. Small and irrevocable.
She sits back in her chair.
What have I done?
The thought arrives cold and clear and immediate, and beneath it, beneath the fear and the guilt and the vertiginous sense of a lid that cannot be replaced, something else surfaces. She doesn't have a name for it. But it's something that feels, with terrifying accuracy, like relief. Like a person pressing their face into a bare shoulder in the dark and not saying a word and not needing to. Like a cry she has been holding in for years finally finding someone's chest to cry it into.
Help me... she thinks, which is not something she is in the habit of thinking, because there has never been anyone to think it towards.
She thinks it towards Melbourne.
Then she opens the spreadsheet and tries, once again, to work.
Comments
Post a Comment