2000 - The Feng-Shui Junkie (22 page)

A waitress approaches with a dessert menu. Ronan shuns it and orders two coffees instead. She disappears.

I suddenly grab his hand on the table and hold it down.

“Ronan, I know there’s something on your mind. I know there is. I know it’s bothering you. Look at me, I’m talking to you. You know I love you, I knew from the first second I laid my eyes on you that we’d be together. We’re so good together, everything is going so well: our careers, our home, we have fun…we’ve got so much ahead of us. I just, I just…”

He eyes me as if I am unclean. “I haven’t an idea what you’re talking about.”

I am imploring him. Beseeching him. Appealing to every nerve fibre in his being that flickers in response to vulnerability, pity and humiliation. But he’s frozen up like an igloo.

“Please, Ronan, tell me what’s on your mind.”

“There’s nothing on my mind, for God’s sake.”

“Don’t do this to me,” I plead.

“Well, I mean, if I had a notion what all this was about.”

He’s testing me.

But I can’t tell him. I can’t. I cannot beg him to be honest. I cannot beg him to be loyal. I will not beg him to be faithful, to be true. I will not beg him to love me. If he doesn’t want to love me the way I deserve to be loved, I will not force him. It must come from him.

“Ronan, whatever you’ve done it means nothing any more. There’s just the two of us now.”

“You think I’m having an affair, don’t you?”

“Ronan, please don’t lie to me. That’s all I ask you. Don’t lie to me. Because if you do, everything will change. And there will be no going back. I mean it.”

“You think I’m having an affair.” He laughs, like I’m a fool.

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do. You actually think I’m seeing someone.” He’s incredulous, contemptuous.

I can’t believe he’s doing this to me. I just can’t believe it. “I didn’t say that.”

“You implied it.”

“Well, is it true?”

“There you go again.”

“Well, is it?”

He shrugs and says in a bored voice: “It’s just your female insecurity.”

It’s unbearable.

“Please!”

“Julie…”

“Please, Ronan…”

“You’re pestering me.”

Dead silence.

He rearranges his napkin on his lap. The girl brings our coffees. Before she’s even put mine down in front of me, I stand up and walk out through the restaurant.

He doesn’t try to follow. At the doorway, when I look back, he is calmly sipping his coffee.

Once outside, I call Sylvana to instruct her to make up a spare bed.

T
he name Mr Ronan Fitzgerald BA BDent SC is written in gold lettering on a plaque (good word, for a dentist), next to an assortment of less elegant-looking plaques for general practitioners and a chiropodist. His surgery is straight through at the bottom rear of the building, an extension built out into the garden to accommodate four rooms: the main surgery, the office, the kitchen and the bathroom, which is equipped with a built-in shower.

Using a key he gave me a long time ago, I let myself in through the main door and into Ronan’s rooms. The smell hits me as I knew it would. That dentist’s disinfectant odour. That minty Listerine scent you get from guys in the Law Library who figure that if they wash their gullets with the stuff they stand a better chance of a free screw.

I lock the door behind me.

Dentists. They’ve brought me such pain in life. They’ve burst my gums, picked my teeth, drilled and ravaged my nerves, pliered out my molars and snurgled my saliva. I’ve never liked them.

It’s a miracle I married one.

In here is where we had our third date ever. He clearly wanted to impress me by professionally penetrating the putridest recesses of my teeth. I don’t know why I agreed to the privilege of a free consultation. I must have imagined he’d look sexy in his white coat.

He showed me into this acid-smelling torture chamber and made it all so very accessible, explaining to me the function of each little device in a relaxed though impersonal manner, me standing here the whole time dying to ride him on the chaise longue. But instead, he sat me on the chaise and flipped on this white face mask like he was afraid of catching something. Then, eyes poking like brown bulbs over his mask, he stuck into my mouth these cold metal implements which made these percussive sounds against my teeth. With his spatula he prodded me, frowning and silent, in the most barren, unromantic places imaginable.

Basically, I was forgotten.

Making me hold the saliva Hoover in my mouth, he syringed my interior cheek and filled my fourth left molar. He was silent until the end of the procedure when he told me to spit, which cascaded me into a whirlpool of anaesthetized, dribbling giggles. Not once did he smile: he was the total professional.

I figured he needed to be loosened up a little. So before we left the building for a light lunch, I pinned him to the door, tore off his shirt, undid his belt, trousers – everything. And I practically raped him.

He’s been filling my cavities ever since.

I’m in his office now, staring at his pine desk, checking to see if there are any marks from Friday lunchtime. Buckle scratches, or ring scrapes, or bracelet marks, or suchlike. Nothing. It might never have happened. Things look so normal: his blotting pad, his phone and fax machine, his new computer and printer, his filing cabinet.

I turn to Nicole’s painting on the wall. I’ve just noticed something I didn’t see before. On the bottom right-hand side, marked in tiny letters, is the title of the painting.

Chi
.

Ignoring this minor disturbance for the moment, I rifle through the three drawers of his desk. In the top drawer are contained recent receipts, acknowledgements, invoices in respect of goods delivered, dispatched, ordered.

In the second drawer are brochures from the Dental Health Association advertising upcoming conferences, exchanges, lectures. As well as brochures and leaflets containing information on new products, new technologies, new medications, new manuals.

For such an aesthete, all this garbage must kill him.

In the third drawer, alongside cards from patients of his, invitations and newspaper clippings concerning a local dentistry malpractice suit, I find a photo of Nicole. She is smiling appealingly straight at the camera, head tilted, wearing a thick white woollen polo-neck with a long yellow scarf draped round her neck and hanging down by her side.

I want to take the photo and smudge it in dogshit.

But no. It gets carefully replaced.

Turning to the filing cabinet, I pull out the second drawer and separate the files at ‘M’. I finger through the ‘M’s meticulously. Immediately I find what I’m looking for. I pull out a letter, signed ‘Lucien Morel’, Ronan’s former aesthetics lecturer at the Sorbonne. Careless boy.

It is dated 5 June. It is addressed to this surgery. It is in English. Crap English, but English none the less.

Galerie Richelieu

47 rue des Ecoles

75005 Paris

Dear Ronan, 5 June

It is with profound delight that I take this opportunity to inform you that Georges (Lafayette) has arranged an exhibition of the work of the delightful Mademoiselle Summers. It will be for the beginning of September next and it will be in respect of her highly original oeuvre entitled
Chi.
Your photographic representations of her three oeuvres entitled
Foetus, Umbilical Rope
and
Discarded Clothes
elicited some interest, but it is
Chi
which has caused a burst of lightning to emit from the sky
.

Georges is keen to arrange a further meeting with the artist some time in the coming weeks, in order to view these three aforementioned works with a view to possible inclusion in the September exhibition. There will be naturally exhibition charges and my own lesser commission, but I feel that there may be in this country considerable interest in Mademoiselle Summers’s work and that the Lafayette Galleries are the perfect platform on which to launch her career in the direction of every success
.

If you on behalf of Mademoiselle Summers are agreeable to considering the possibility of sale of
Chi,
then this is something which I believe might be a fruitful theme for discussion
.

I beg you to contact me at your convenience at the above number in the Sorbonne where I can be mostly found in order that we might arrange a date in June when you might both be able to travel here with the ultimate objective of organizing a programme of exhibitions for your client’s oeuvre. So far, Tuesday, 21 June would be a convenient date for me, so if this is appropriate for you also, please let me know as soon as possible
.

Please accept my most affectionate and distinguished respects
,

Lucien Morel

I replace the letter, close the filing cabinet and sink into the chair beneath his desk.

Tuesday, 21 June. Mid-summer.

I just sit here in perfect silence for a long, long time, listening to the rumble of passing cars outside, tyres slashing and splashing, and splicing through the wetness of today’s roads.

Raising my eyes, I stare for a long time at Nicole’s colourful goldfish painting. Ronan’s passport into the art world. The picture that has the capacity to transform his life. Nicole’s life.

My life.

I, on the other hand, have the capacity to transform its life.

I lift the painting from its nail and carry it into the kitchen, dropping it flat on the table.

Not having eaten yet today, I open the fridge.

It’s full of food. Either his secretary or Nicole herself was shopping. There’s everything a starving human could ask for: cheese slices, butter, eggs, apple tart, bread, yoghurt, a pecan pie. I slice open a carton of diet peach yoghurt and pour its cold dairyness down my throat.

This gives me instant relief.

With the bread-knife I cut myself a slice of pecan pie.

Five gobfuls later and it’s gone.

Jesus, I’m ravenous.

The bread. The cheese. The butter.

I’m thinking: I’d kill for cheese on toast.

I take two slices of bread from the pack, make two slices of toast, cover them in swimming butter, hack off two chunks of orange cheddar and implant them on the toast. Finally, I place them under the grill and switch on the mains, then turn up the knob.

Under the sink I discover an unopened six-pack of Budweiser. I tear one off and snap the ring and start drinking. I sit down at the table on a cold wooden chair and finish off the can. I contemplate
Chi
, lying in front of me. I have to admit that it makes me furiously angry and jealous that the people who count regard Nicole’s ‘work’ as ‘highly original’.

The sharp smell of grilling cheddar is making me salivate.

I guzzle some more beer.

Chi
.

I hold up the painting, at the end of outstretched arms to see what all the fuss was about.

No. I just can’t see it. Either I’m a philistine or I’m blind.

Or else it’s truly crap.

Try holding it upside down.

Ah, that looks better already.

I drop the painting and grab the grill before my cheese on toast catches fire. The black edges are fuming with thick smoke. But the golden centres are saved. I shake them on to a plate and start munching into the rubbery cheddar, melting into my teeth. I spring open a third can of Budweiser.

Before the can rehits the table I get this blinding flash of light in my brain. I stand up.

Using a tape-measure I spotted in the cutlery drawer, I measure the painting along its shortest edge. Fifteen inches across. Fine.

Now I’m holding the tape-measure across the mouth of the grill.

Seventeen inches.

I shove it in and turn up the heat.

Sitting back down again, hands behind my head, I calmly observe the industrious toasting process of Ronan’s grill going full speed ahead. There is inside my digestive tract a thickening, sickening sensation fraught with excitement and dread.

I could have done far worse. There’s a lot of expensive equipment in this surgery: the dental chair, made in Hong Kong, the cost of a second-hand MG to replace; the white robot-limb light fixed to the ceiling, the cost of a holiday for two in Barbados; the X-ray apparatus, the cost of a holiday time-share for a decade; the lotions and potions and mirrors and instruments and glass cabinets; the ornate spit fountain.

With the sledgehammer lying lazily under the sink? Ronan is a lucky man. I am doing him an enormous favour by in effect burning an extra-large slice of toast on the grill.

I am also saving his marriage.

A loud siren blasts off in my ear. The smoke alarm. I jump up and rip it off the wall, shove it on the table and banjax it several times with the lump hammer until it behaves itself. Then I beat my way through black smoke and caustic stench, and pull the painting from the grill and dump it on the draining board beside it.

A terrible beauty is born
.

I carry the blackened remains through the surgery, leaving a trail of black smoke hanging in its wake. In his office I attach it once more to the wall, ensuring it’s hung crooked.

I stand back to survey my richly allusive reinterpretation of Nicole’s masterpiece.

I could feel guilty, but I don’t.

You see, it’s not enough metaphorically to kick my bastard husband in the teeth. I’ve been doing this for at least sixty hours, but like a stubborn mule he has failed to respond to the suggestive power inherent in the act. Hence, he’s deprived me of the immense satisfaction you normally get from kicking bastard husbands in the teeth.

No: I have been driven to redefining radically that which lies closest to his heart.

Chi
is no more.

Before I leave, I survey the state of the kitchen. A plate with crumbs and melted butter, three cans of Budweiser and the yoghurt carton. There’s no point in clearing it away. Ronan will never associate the food with me. He will simply assume that Harry built up an appetite watching
Chi
smoulder.