2000 - The Feng-Shui Junkie (43 page)

But sometimes one is afraid to state the obvious. One is afraid that if one repeats the self-evident, the heavens will suddenly open and a swarm of frenzied forked-tongued demons will break out in a chorus of deafening cackles, deriding one for one’s asinine stupidity in missing the insanely obvious. It’s an old school thing. Perfectly understandable.

Finally, Ronan sniggers. “Congratulations!” he says. “Julianne and Imelda! I especially like the Imelda part. Very suitable.”

Nicole frowns: “Do you, like…
know
one another?”

“You could say that,” I reply.

“What’s going on, Julianne? Has this to do with Helmut?”

“No. It’s nothing to do with Helmut.”

“Helmut!” Ronan sniggers.

“You people are freaking me out! What is going on here?”

We sit down. Sylvana and I on two stools opposite Nicole and Ronan. He takes another drag of his Gitane and smiles, shaking his head, sitting back in his seat. Then he takes a further sip of his creme de menthe, cigarette-end brushing against the glass. And he replaces the glass on the table.

Now he takes a second cigarette from his box, perches it on his lips, strikes a match disdainfully against a Cafe de Flore booklet and exhales deeply, spreading white smoke up into the ceiling. He relaxes his weight back against the banquette. His old confidence and superiority are returning. He has got the measure of the situation.

“You’re cleverer than I thought,
Julianne
.”

He says this while staring into the distance.

Sylvana: “It’s just that you’re stupider than we thought.”

Nicole, by now, is a monument to the totally bewildered. She is desperate for somebody to clarify the situation. But we are all sitting caged in deadly silence, all the deadlier for occurring bang centre of probably the noisiest, busiest café in Paris.

I turn to Nicole and address her in my most elegant voice: “Nicole, there’s something you ought to know.”

“What?”

“Shall I tell her, Ronan?”

“Be my guest.”

“Thank you.”

I draw in a breath. “Nicole, the slice of whaleshit to your left happens to be my husband.”

I can’t even begin to explain to you the sense of utter, profound satisfaction and exuberance I am presently feeling, having finally got this little matter off my chest. It’s been excruciating, bottling it up for so long.

“Would that be a fair analysis, Sylvana?”

“Which part? The husband part or the whaleshit part?”

“Both.”

Sylvana (trying not to grin): “Yes, I think that would be fair.”

I feel totally liberated.

You want to see Nicole’s reaction. It’s straight out of a horror movie: the flesh on her face has turned practically
green
, though not from jealousy. No. It’s the visage of someone who’s just discovered, for instance, baby roaches in her yoghurt. She is a tremoring, shaking mass of flesh, palpably on the verge of emotional collapse.

Hands against her cheeks, she turns to her dear love, distraught. “Is this true?” she stammers.

“Their little ploy won’t succeed,” he says in her direction. “Yes, I went through a marriage ceremony with this woman two years ago.”

“He thinks it was a tedious, forgettable experience,” I tell Sylvana, who’s got this great expression on her face.

“I know,” she replies.

“I wouldn’t quite put it that way,” he counters eloquently.

Nicole: “I don’t believe this is happening.”

Me: “I’ve been meaning to tell you for some time.”

“The deception is despicable,” Ronan says calmly.

Sylvana: “That’s laughable, coming from
you
.”

Nicole: “I don’t believe this is happening. I…”

Her mouth is trembling. Her mascara and make-up are running together in black and white streaks down her cheeks.

“…I trusted you, Julianne!”

“I trusted my husband, you bitch!”

“There’s no need to upset Nicole,” says Ronan in a natural voice.

“Oh, please excuse me for upsetting you, Nicole. Please excuse me for being cheated on. Please excuse me for coming home one day and finding both your clothes all over the kitchen floor and our double bed slept in by you. An appalling indiscretion on my part. Please excuse me for informing Harry and thus getting you beaten up. Please excuse me, let me see…oh yes, please excuse me for smashing up your living-room…”

I’d give anything for you to see their faces now.

“…although I have to say there was something about that festive experience which was particularly fulfilling – especially the tropical marine aquarium.”

While Nicole is gaping at me like a frightened tropical fish, Ronan is examining me objectively. Suddenly I remember the cat. I’m dead scared they’re going to bring up Max.

“And lest you think I have one ounce of decency in me, Nicole, I want to state categorically that I think that your
Feng Shui
obsession is a lump of codswallop for the mentally undernourished.”

“Don’t forget the Porsche, Julie,” remarks Ronan.

Sylvana: “Try some Viagra to- compensate.”

Ronan again: “Or your highly original fish recipe, a most civilized way for people to behave.”

Sylvana, raising her eyes, mutters: “You deserved it, you prat.”

Ronan: “And Nicole’s painting, which you…”

“
Chi?
”

“Yes.
Chi
.”

“Please don’t call it a painting, Ronan. It was a muck transplant. Nicole, I have something to tell you about your ‘art’. Please read my lips:
you are one crap painter
. I saw the stuff in your attic. It was laughable. And as for the
Chi
replica you did on my balcony, that was ludicrous. I’m sure Ronan agrees, though he’s probably too polite to tell you straight.”

Ronan: “Somehow, the Parisian art world manages to think differently. Let’s go, Nicole. I have no intention of going back home with her.”

“You think I came here just to haul you back home?”

Pause.

I want to grab the nearest wine bottle by the neck and smash it against his skull to see which breaks first.

“Then why did you come?” he wonders, at the edge of his seat.

Sylvana: “She wanted to alert poor Nicole here that you’re as big a scumbag asshole as I always suspected.”

“Who asked you?” says Ronan calmly.

“One doesn’t require an asshole’s permission to state obvious facts.”

But there’s barely a flicker from him.

“Then why did you come here, Julie?” he inquires.

“You think I came here to bring you back.”

He shrugs arrogantly. “Then why?”

I look at Sylvana and she looks at me.

“Ronan, you are mean and vindictive and deceptive, and even now you seem to enjoy hurting me. I only hope Nicole doesn’t have to go through what you’ve put me through, because in a funny way I think she’s not a bad person. Even though she has done me a terrible wrong.”

She is staring mournfully at me now, upset, eyes coated in a film of water. Every few seconds her body shudders minutely.

Ronan: “All the way here – just to tell us that Nicole is not a bad person?”

Something inside me snaps.

Coolly, I tell him that our marriage is over.

“That’s fine,” he says, draining his glass.

I stand up now. Sylvana follows suit.

Something occurs to me just before I turn to leave. “Oh – and Ronan, congratulations.”

“For what?”

“I believe you’ve achieved one of your central ambitions in life.”

“What?”

“To be a father.”

I sense that somehow I’ve said the wrong thing. Ronan’s reaction is stony. He turns to Nicole, but she just lowers her eyes.

I turn on my heel and Sylvana follows me past several table-loads of people who have been tuning in to the drama.

We exit the café and walk down the crowded, lit pavement towards the corner. Passing the Deux Magots café on our left, I suddenly stop. It’s bright inside. I need something strong. Dumping your husband out of your life is not an everyday occurrence and it should be appropriately celebrated. Cognac, since we’re in France.

Besides, to abstain for another minute would be sheer hell.

We go inside and sit down at a table close to the window, and Sylvana orders two cognacs. We sit wordless, staring through the glass at the clientele outside who are seated at round tables under the red awning, chatting.

After a few minutes we spot Nicole passing by in her grass-green chemise. The two of them are walking quickly past the café, Ronan slightly in front, his head down. They don’t see us. They’re having an argument but Ronan doesn’t want to know. You can just make out the streaked mascara on her cheeks. I feel a sudden surge of pity for her as she pleads animatedly with him.

They proceed to the pedestrian lights at the corner and stop. She grabs him but he pulls away scratching his neck, sliding his hand through his hair.

Now they disappear round the corner.

I stare through the window for a long time.

When I look down, there’s a glass of cognac sitting on the table in front of me.

W
hen we arrive back in Dublin airport, guess who’s waiting for us at the arrival gates, smiling from ear to ear?

She’s already heard of my marital tragedy: I told her by phone from Paris this morning. I told her that what I suspected would happen is now a reality: my life henceforth will be a Ronan-free zone. She was delighted by the news.

She asked me what time my flight was due back in Dublin. I told her it wasn’t necessary for her to meet me at the airport. She said it would be nice for me to be met, so I told her that I was going straight back to my new apartment, where I needed to be alone for some time, and that therefore meeting me at the airport would be illogical. She started arguing, saying she loved airports. I told her I’d take her to the airport next weekend, and we could sit in the bar together and lick ice creams together and watch planes landing and taking off, and she said no, she loved airports
today
. I replied that I wanted to be alone and she inquired what was I doing with Sylvana.

I commanded her not to be at the airport to meet me.

And what does she do? She comes to the airport sporting a smile the width of a runway.

The reason she’s happy, I suspect, is because now that Ronan is gone, she imagines that she will be able to retire permanently to my apartment.

After hugging me and informing me that I am coming home with her because she is tired of cooking for herself, she hugs Sylvana who is a good bit taller than her, practically having to climb on top of her to get a proper grip.

“It’s nice to see you again, Gertrude,” Sylvana cackles over her shoulder, rubbing her on the back.

They are both thrilled I have permanently spewed Ronan out of my life. I, however, do not share their delight. All I want to do is go back to my new place and weep.

I suggest as much to Mother.

Not a bit of it! She’s not leaving the airport without a snack in the cafeteria, she announces. Plus, she hints, the best close-up relationship post-mortem she’s likely to get this side of hell.

Up the escalators we go.

While the two of them queue, I sit down and keep a table.

Ten minutes later Sylvana strides back complaining about the inefficiency of the management system of this café. She is bearing aloft a tray laden with coffees and cakes and Coke for three. Mother in her smallness is leading the way, still smiling, handbag swinging.

One huge slice of redcurrant-custard tart is shoved in front of me and I apply the usual protests. Mother advises me not to be silly, that I am very thin and I need to eat up. And that it’s not healthy to starve oneself like my forefathers.

As if chastened by this thought, she digs immediately into her Black Forest gateau. Sylvana dives into her own chocolate fudge cake. For several minutes they chomp in silence, watching and listening to the moving plethora of life all around us, the voices, the announcements.

Not one inquiry about how I’m coping in my newly separated state. No: “Will you be okay on your own from now on?” No: “How will you cope, Julie?” No: “Is there anything you need?” Not even: “Is there anybody you’re particularly interested in having murdered?”

Nothing. Just munching and gentle slurps.

Mother, in brief, appears indifferent to my suffering. Which is strange, considering she was all over me before I left for Paris. She’s like that. When I appear to be coping she ignores me. But when she sees me crapped with woe she turns into this bathtub of Southern Comfort.

“Well, Julie,” she says, but not before she’s finished her final forkful. “You’ve hardly told me anything about this Nicole person.”

So I give it to her on a plate. The whole turkey, skin and bones and teeth and ears and…earrings. I fill in all the missing gaps in her mind: Nicole’s background, Harry, her painting, her
Feng Shui
, how Ronan met her, his plans to represent her in Paris as an original new artist, what I really did to his car and to her place, what I didn’t do to his surgery although I was tempted.

Mother is fascinated. She’s most impressed by my arch deceptiveness. She is totally into the way I handled things, drawing things out to the very last before I finally confronted the situation. (Sylvana decides to nod her head at this point and agree, then she sips her Coke.) She also says I’ve been very thoughtful for not wanting to worry her. She says she understands why I didn’t tell her sooner about what was happening, especially about my new apartment – and she doesn’t hold it against me.

She thinks Nicole is ‘a bit dumb’ for not copping on to the fact that I was Ronan’s wife. But she says if she’s dumb, then Ronan is a real ‘thick’ for not copping on to the fact that the Julianne woman, about whom Nicole spoke so well, actually put a ring round his finger two years previously.

I, of course, find all this unsolicited support most comforting.

“One question, Mother. How did you find out Ronan was having an affair?”

“I found a half-burnt photograph – from your wedding collection. On the balcony.”