Elegance and Innocence: 2-Book Collection

I feel a totally unreasonable fury building inside me. I should let this go. I should allow it to pass unnoticed. But I don’t. ‘Pardon me … I seem to have forgotten exactly why Clive is so offensive.’

No response.

Come on, let it go. I pick up the Style section for a second time; then, for reasons beyond my control, put it down again.

‘Is it perhaps because he’s not the way you would like him to be? Because he has the balls to be openly ambitious?’

The paper stays in place; his voice resonates behind it. ‘You’re being ridiculous. I’m not having this conversation with you.’

‘Not having this conversation? Not having … you don’t get to choose which conversations we have or don’t have!’

The paper remains. ‘I don’t need to talk to you when you’re being unreasonable.’

I can feel myself flushing; my heart is pounding so loudly I almost scream the next words. ‘I’m not unreasonable!’

He snorts from behind the paper. ‘Listen to yourself.’

I lose it. Before I know it, I’m on the other side of the room, tearing at the paper that divides us. My husband stares at me with a mixture of horror and disbelief. When I speak, my voice is hoarse and I have a hard time catching my breath. ‘Don’t you ever ignore me again! Conversations are over when we are done talking. We!’

My hand is crumpling the paper, shredding it. He grabs my wrist. ‘Fuck off,’ he says, matter-of-factly. ‘Fuck off, Louise.’

I reel backward. He’s smoothing back the paper with his hand and I reach forward, grab the whole section and throw it across the room. He’s going to notice me now.

‘If you don’t want to talk to me, why did you marry me in the first place?’

He stares at me in disgust.

‘You call this talking? Is this what you call the art of conversation?’ He turns hyper-English. ‘I’m perfectly happy to talk to you in a calm, reasonable manner.’

‘No, you’re not! I just tried and all you said is, “I’m not having this conversation with you.” We are never having this conversation. We’ve not had more conversations than anyone I know! And why are you the arbiter of all that’s calm and reasonable? Why can’t we have an unreasonable conversation? Why can’t we say anything we want?’

He’s cold and calm, blinking at me with his pale blue eyes. ‘Like what?’

I start to feel foolish, awkward. And then it comes out – out of nowhere. ‘We never fuck.’

The world melts; goes all Salvador Dali. I’ve reached new heights of absurdity. He laughs at me in amazement. ‘What’s that got to do with Clive or his TV show?’

I’m crazy – I sound crazy. But what I’m saying is true. I say it again.

‘We never fuck.’

He stops laughing, quite suddenly, like Anthony Hopkins playing a psychopath. ‘So what. Plenty of people don’t have sex all the time.’

My breath is slowing and I’m calming down. I say another true thing. ‘You’re not attracted to me.’

He considers this. ‘You’re a very attractive woman, Louise, when you’re not behaving like a banshee.’ He shrugs his shoulders and employs his customer service voice; the one he uses to extract refunds from unwilling sales assistants. ‘I’m sorry that I disappoint you sexually. I obviously don’t have the same sex drive you have.’ The word ‘sex’ hisses with disdain.

I feel ashamed for being so base. Only, I’m tired of feeling ashamed.

I say one last true thing. ‘I don’t think my sex drive’s unusual.’

He stands, walks to the door and smiles graciously. ‘Then it’s me.’ He does a little half bow. ‘I am The Defective One.’

He rises above me and my brute animal sex drive. I am, after all, common – from Pittsburgh, where people fuck and fight and fart. The Three Fs.

‘Where are you going?’ I sound plaintive and hollow.

‘I’m going into the garden. Unless there’s anything else you’d like to say to me.’ He’s playing the end of a Noël Coward scene. ‘I so enjoy these Sunday morning conversations.’

Fuck Noël Coward.

‘I think we should see a marriage counsellor,’ I blurt out.

He looks me up and down. ‘Feel free.’

‘But we need to go together.’

‘Louise, you are the one with the problem. My marriage is fine.’

Once again, I find I’m alone in the barren wasteland of the living room. The torn paper is the only evidence of life.

The words, ‘If you are wise, then you will allow it to pass unnoticed’ swim around and around in my brain. I’m not wise. But I don’t know why.

I go into the bedroom and look out of the window; he’s pulling weeds in the back garden. How can he do that? How can he carry on with basic domestic tasks when everything between us is deteriorating? But he does.

I watch him rearranging the garbage bins at the back of the building in order of size and fullness. He does it carefully, earnestly. He needs to. He needs to believe it matters. That he’s protecting us from all sorts of chaos – the chaos of dusty surfaces, the violence of unevenly stacked books, the irreparable damage of a fruit bowl found to contain an onion next to an apple. He’s an errant knight, on a quest to save a lady who doesn’t want to be saved. Who doesn’t even want to be a lady and who’d rather sleep with the dragon than sleep with him.

And that’s when it hits me. I go back to the moment when he comments on my weight loss. I freeze-frame it in my mind’s eye. And there, there it is, clear as day. The truth is I don’t want him to notice me, to cuddle me, or touch me, or say how pretty I am. I just want him to leave me alone.

After all that, I don’t want to fuck him either.

We have both been blind.

I’m sitting on the edge of the biggest bed you can buy in the United Kingdom.

The zip has come undone, the beds are drifting and soon the walls of the bedroom will not be able to contain the sleeping figures that are floating apart.

In the weeks that follow, I become obsessed by Oliver Wendt, otherwise known as The Man Who Can See Me.

I spend inordinate amounts of time wandering around the theatre on the off chance that I’ll encounter him and then running away when I do. I find myself lurking, like a stalker, outside his favourite pub, standing across the street in the darkness, glued to the spot by desperate, confused lust. The weird thing is (and I don’t really get this at the time), is that the lust I feel is for myself – the self I see in his eyes. I don’t really want to talk to him, or know him; I just want to be seen by him.

‘Do those reports need to go downstairs? I’ll take them.’

‘But, Louise, you’ve only just come back from there. We can take them down later.’

‘Oh, it’s no trouble. No trouble at all.’

And I’m off, roaming around the building like a creature from a fairy tale, doomed by some evil curse to wander the earth forever in search of her own reflection.