Intimacy (2 page)

She talks of how her work colleagues have let her down.

‘They are not good enough‚’ she says.

‘Is that right?’

It has been difficult for her since the publishing house was taken over. But she is a woman of strong feelings anyway, of either dislike or enthusiasm. Generally they are of dislike. Others, including me, infuriate and frustrate her. It is disturbing, the way I am compelled to share her feelings, though I don’t know the people. As she talks I see why I leave the bathroom door open. I can’t be in a room with her for too long without feeling that there is something I must do to stop her being so angry. But I never know what I should do, and soon I feel as if she is shoving me against the wall and battering me.

The boys’ bath water drains away slowly, as their toys impede the plughole. They won’t move until the water is gone, and then they sit there making moustaches and hats with the remaining bubbles. Eventually I lift the younger one out. Susan takes the other.

We wrap them in thick hooded towels. With damp hair and beads of water on their necks, and being so tired and all, the boys look like diminutive boxers after a match. They argue about what pyjamas they want to wear. The younger one will only wear a Batman T-shirt. They seem to have become self-conscious
at an early age. They must have got it from us.

Susan gives the younger boy a bottle, which he holds up to his mouth two-handedly, like a trumpeter. I watch her caressing his hair, kissing his dimpled fingers and rubbing his stomach. He giggles and squirms. What a quality of innocence people have when they don’t expect to be harmed. Who could violate it without damaging himself? At school – I must have been eight or nine – there sat next to me a smelly boy from a poor family. One day, when we all stood, his leg slipped down behind the bench. Deliberately I jerked it up, trapping his leg. The look on his face of inexplicable and unexpected pain has stayed with me. You can choose whether to do others good or harm.

We take the children downstairs, where they lie on cushions, nonchalantly sucking their dummies, watching
The
Wizard
of
Oz
with their eyes half open. They look like a couple of swells smoking cigars in a field on a hot day. They demand ginger biscuits, as if I am a butler. I fetch them from the kitchen without Susan noticing me. The boys extend their greedy fingers but don’t look away from the TV. As the film runs they not only murmur the dialogue but echo the sound effects too. After a while, I pick up the crumbs
and, having considered what to do with them, fling them in a corner.

Susan works in the kitchen, listening to the radio and looking out at the garden. She enjoys that. Her own family life, like mine, has mostly been unpleasant. Now she goes to a lot of trouble to shop well and make good meals. Even if we’re having a takeaway, she won’t let us eat in a slew of newspapers, children’s books and correspondence. She puts out napkins, lights candles and opens the wine, insisting we have a proper family meal, including nervy silences and severe arguments.

She likes auctions, where she buys unusual pictures, prints and furniture, often with worn velvet attached to some part of them. We have a lot of lamps, cushions and curtains, some of which hang across the middle of the room, as if a play is about to start, and from which I try to stop the boys swinging. There are deep armchairs, televisions, telephones, pianos, music systems and the latest magazines and newest books in every room. Most people don’t have comfort, plenty and ease like this.

At home I don’t feel at home. In the morning I will let go of it. Definitely. Bye-bye.

I sit on the floor near the boys, releasing the buckle of my belt when I locate it finally in the loose folds of my belly. For a change I neither pick up the newspaper nor follow the film, but examine my sons, their feet, ears, eyes. This evening, when I am both here and not here – almost a ghost, already – I will not drink, get stoned, or argue. I have to be aware of everything. I want to develop a mental picture I can carry around and refer to when I am at Victor’s place. It will be the first of the few things I must, tonight, choose to take with me.

Suddenly I feel as if I might vomit, and I slap my hand over my mouth. The feeling passes. But now I could howl! I feel as if I am in a plunging aeroplane. I will see the children as often as I can, but I will miss things here. The disorder of family life: the children’s voices as they sing their scatological version of ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’; watching them watch television through their new binoculars; the three of us dancing to the Rolling Stones, the older one balanced perilously on the coffee table, the other plunging through the sofa; seeing them on their bikes, as they speed away from me, yelling; them walking down the street in the sunshine, umbrellas up, crooning ‘Singin’ in
the Rain’. Once, when the older boy was a baby, he threw up in one of my shoes, and I didn’t notice until I was in the taxi on my way to the airport.

If I come home and the children aren’t here, even if there’s plenty to do, I can wander from room to room waiting for their faces to come through the door, and for the world to be re-animated by their chaotic energy.

What could be more important? Lost in the middle of my life and no way home, what kind of experience do I imagine I am forfeiting this for? I have had a surplus of emotional experience with men, women, colleagues, parents, acquaintances. I have read, thought and talked for years. Tonight, how will any of it guide me? Perhaps I should be impressed by the fact that I haven’t attached myself to things, that I am loose and free enough to walk away in the morning. But what am I free for? Surely the ultimate freedom is to choose, to dispense with freedom for the obligations that tie one to life – to get involved.

This confusion isn’t going to leave me alone. But by the morning my mind had better be made up about certain things. I must not descend into self-pity, at least not for longer than necessary. I have found that
it is not my moods that frustrate me but the depth and indeterminacy of their duration. If I feel a bit low, I fear a year-long depression. If my once-girlfriend Nina became distant or sharp, I was convinced she was permanently detaching herself from me.

Tonight my predominant emotion is fear of the future. At least, one might say, it is better to fear things than be bored by them, and life without love is a long boredom. I may be afraid but I am not cynical. I am trying to be resolute. Tonight, don’t worry, I will set the record crooked.

I should, too, consider what it is I love about life and other people. Otherwise I will turn the future into a wasteland, eliminating possibility before anything can develop. It is easy to kill oneself off without dying. Unfortunately, to get to the future one has to live through the present.

While considering these things, I have thought of several people who seem to have been depressed for most of their lives, and have accepted a condition of relative unhappiness as if it is their due. How much time have my numerous depressions wasted over all? Three years, at least. Longer than all my sexual pleasure put together, I should imagine.

I encourage myself to think of the pleasures of being a single man in London, of what there might be to look forward to. My sons look up as I giggle to myself. The other night Victor goes to a bar, meets a woman with a stud through her tongue and is invited to her loft in the East End. She likes to be tied up; she has the equipment. The stud roams his scrotum, like, as he says, a slug with a ball bearing in its head. They joke about misplacing the keys. His bottom smarts.

He calls at an unrespectable hour the next day and insists we meet for breakfast so I can hear about it. I inform him that the nanny, as nannies do, has lost the will to live and that it is difficult to get a baby-sitter first thing in the morning. But at last I arrive at the café, happy to be out and to have someone bring me breakfast, rather than running about, as I normally do, with slices of toast with jam which inevitably end up face-down on the floor.

Victor doesn’t omit a moment.

‘And what were you doing?’ he enquires politely, at last.

I sigh. Wearing an old tracksuit and drinking beer in bed, coughing, smoking and listening to a late
Beethoven quartet on my headphones.

He and the woman never meet again. Most nights Victor watches TV alone, a plate of saveloy and chips on his lap, a pickled onion or two on the side.

Another friend: a plump, middle-aged alcoholic who is an accountant. I envied his enthusiasm as he talked of the life that marriage, for the moment, was keeping him from. He had worked too hard to enjoy sufficiently his teenage freedom the first time. He leaves his wife, buys underwear, aftershave, cufflinks, a bracelet and hair-dye. He presents himself to me.

My eyes and mouth widen.

At last I say, ‘You’ve never looked better.’

‘As always, you’re very encouraging,’ he says. ‘Thank you, thank you.’

We shake hands and off he sets for singles clubs and bars for divorcees. He meets a woman, but she will only have him in her marital bed, to provoke her husband. He meets another. You remind me of someone, she says; an undertaker, as it turns out. My furious friend replies that it isn’t
her
body he has come for. He soon learns that at his age he cares far more than formerly whom he spends his time with. What
he wanted then he doesn’t want now. He notices also that people become eccentric as they get older, and that there is a lot of them to take in.

‘Shall I go back to my wife?’ he asks.

‘Try it,’ I say, the expert speaking.

But she regards him suspiciously, wondering why his hair has turned aubergine and whether he has had his name engraved on a bracelet to make him identifiable after an accident. She has realized that life is possible without him.

The boys have fallen asleep. I carry them upstairs, one by one. They lie side by side under vivid duvets. I am about to kiss them when I notice their eyes are open. I dread a second wind. I am a liberal parent, afraid of my occasional rages. I always regret any superfluous restraint. I wouldn’t want them to fear me; I wouldn’t want them to fear anyone. I don’t want to break or discourage anything in them. Occasionally, though, I do want them to believe I am in charge. Soon they are leaping from bed to bed. When they make for the door, since I am too tired to grab them, I am forced to put on my ‘cross’ voice. Their reluctance to go to sleep I don’t understand. For
months the highlight of my day has been the anticipation of unconsciousness. At least they regret the passing of each day, as do I, in a different way. Tonight we want the same thing, my boys and I: more life.

‘If you lie still I will read to you,’ I say.

They regard me suspiciously, but I find a book, and make a place between them. They stretch out across me, occasionally kicking one another.

It is a cruel story, as most children’s stories are, and it involves a woodcutter, as most children’s stories do. But inevitably it concerns a conventional family from which the father has not fled. The boys know the story so well they can tell when I skip a bit or attempt to make something up. When they stop asking questions I put the book down, creep out of the room and switch off the light. Then I return to find their faces in the covers, and kiss them. Outside I listen for their breathing. If only I could stand here all night. Then I hear them whispering to one another and giggling.

Old wives; old story.

From the beginning, starting with the girls at school, and the teachers in particular, I have looked at women in shops, on the street, in the bus, at parties,
and wondered what it would be like to be with them, and what pleasures we might kindle. At school I would toss my pencil under the teacher's desk in order to crawl underneath and examine her legs. The desultory nature of the education system enabled me to develop an enthusiastic interest in girls' skirts – in the material and texture, and in whether they were billowy, loose or tight, and in which places. Skirts, like theatre curtains later, quickened my curiosity. I wanted to know what was under them. There was waiting, but there was possibility. The skirt was a transitional object; both a thing in itself and a means of getting somewhere else. This became my paradigm of important knowledge. The world is a skirt I want to lift up.

Later, I imagined that with each woman I could start afresh. There was no past. I could be a different person, if not a new one, for a time. Also I used women to protect me from other people. Wherever I might be, if I were huddled up with a whispering woman who wanted me, I could keep the world outside my skin. I could stop wanting other women. At the same time I liked to keep my options open; desiring other women kept me from the exposure and susceptibility
of loving just the one. There are perils in deep knowledge.

Unsurprisingly, Susan is the one woman, apart from Mother, with whom I can do practically nothing. But now, when I am certain that I am able to speak to women without being afraid of wanting them, I am not sure that I can touch someone as I used to – frivolously. After a certain age sex can never be casual. I couldn't ask for so little. To lay your hand on another's body, or to put your mouth against another's – what a commitment that is! To choose someone is to uncover a whole life. And it is to invite them to uncover you!

Maybe that is what happened with Nina. One day a girl walks past and you want her. I've examined the moment a score of times. She and I would go over it repeatedly, in joy and in puzzlement. I can remember how tall and slim she was; and then there was the jolt, the violent jolt, when we met, and met. Something about her changed everything. But I had wanted people before, and I knew nothing about her. She was from another world. After a certain age you don't want things to be so haphazard. You want to believe that you know what it is you are doing. Perhaps that explains what I did.