2000 - The Feng-Shui Junkie (28 page)

He repeats the question, using the same word pattern.

“What was all what about, Ronan?”

I can hear him pacing up and down behind me.

“What was all that bullshit, Julie?” he shoots.

“I thought it was fish mousseline.”

“Cut the crap. You’re still hung up on that affair business, aren’t you? You’re the lawyer; you present evidence when you make a charge. So where’s your evidence?”

Does he really expect me to tell him what I know? Does he truly want me to put his mind at ease? To put him on notice of the evidence against him, to concede him the advantage, to carte blanche my auto-erasure?

Not a chance.

“I’m not hung up on your affair at all,” says I into the fish tank.

“What’s your problem, then?”

“You want to know what the problem is?”

He waits.

I turn round. “Okay, Ronan. I’ll come clean.”

Standing in the middle of the room with his hands in his pockets, he stares at the floor. He’s listening. For once in his life.

“Those colours just don’t go,” I tell him, striding towards the french windows.

“What?”

“You know very well that mustard and wine don’t match. They make you look like a circus clown, Ronan…”

I swear I just heard muffled laughter from the kitchen.

“…and I will not be married to a circus clown.”

“This is pathetic.”

“Oh, lighten up, Ronan. Debung your arse. We were just having a bit of fun with you over that pathetic video. That’s all.”

“The two of you were behaving like a couple of witches over a bubbling cauldron.”

I laugh out loud at the pinpoint accuracy of his metaphor. Stuff like this puts you in good spirits. I can’t wait for him to learn about
Chi
later on tonight when I return from his surgery.

He goes over to the aquarium and leans against it, flushed with annoyance. He stands there for a while. Uh-oh. He seems to have noticed something. Something tells me he’s going to begin a discussion about entities, which unbeknown to him are presently digesting in his upper to middle intestines.

He scratches the underside of his chin and straightens himself. “Julie.”

“What?”

“Where are the fish?”

“In the aquarium.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, Ronan, I don’t know what you mean. The fish are in the fish tank. I can see them with my own eyes.”

“I’m talking about the fish I bought last Friday.”

“You bought fish on a Friday?” I eye him aghast. “You do realize, Ronan, that it’s against Canon Law to buy fish on a Friday? Or should that be meat…”

“Julie,” he says in the voice of a terminally patient schoolteacher. “What did you do with them?”

“They went missing,” I shoot back.

“Where?”

“I don’t…really think you want to know.”

“Did you return them to the aquarist?”

“All but three of them.”

“All but three of them.”

“Yes.”

When he recovers from this he starts feeling his neck. “What about those three? Where are they?”

“I flushed them down the toilet.”

He starts pacing again. He’s stroking his chin. He’s mulling this over as he walks. “You flushed them…down the toilet?”

“Pre-cise-ly.”

“Makes sense,” he replies, as if I’ve just discovered a highly practical method of deblocking the sewage pipes.

“They don’t mind,” I assure him. “They’ll have enjoyed their swim.”

“In the excrement?”

“They’ll find some clear spaces.”

He nods, then bows his head. He looks like he’s biting the knuckle of his index finger, concentrating. “It sounds like PMT.”

Now he’s pacing around like a Hollywood impression of a courtroom lawyer.

“Come on, Ronan, fish don’t suffer from PMT.”

“You, Julie.
You
. You’ve gone completely…hormonal.”

Me? Hormonal? Hardly! What I did was gory, perhaps, but not hormonal. Sociopathic maybe, but certainly not hormonal.

It’s time to defend what sanity I have left. “You know as well as I do that adding those extra fish last Friday threatened the existing ones.”

“Did you really flush them down the toilet, Julie?”

“Yes.”

“I quite liked them, you know.”

“You enjoyed them, did you?”

“As a matter of fact I did.”

“It gives me great pleasure to hear that, Ronan.”

“You killed off aesthetic objects, Julie. Just like that.”

“They weren’t objects, you idiot. They were alive.”

“They were beautiful.”

Amazing. He bought them three days ago and already he’s nostalgic.

“But of course, when it comes to aesthetic appreciation, you clearly have none.”

I think about this for a few seconds. “I agree.”

It’s game, set and match to Ronan. He is absolutely right. On the scale of aesthetic appreciation I lay claim to pure zero. One only has to remember the art book I bought him and what I did with it.

His arms are straight as buttresses against the aquarium as he peers inside at all the free space. Suddenly I notice something expose itself underneath the edge of his jacket sleeve. I get a huge shock when I realize what it is. It’s that gold Raymond Weil watch, the one that managed to cost nearly one grand.

I dart over to him and pull up the sleeve. “Ronan, where did you get that watch?”

He freezes. He glances at his new Raymond Weil. Gold. Simple face.

“I bought it.”

“Did you really?”

“Yes. It’s second-hand. Not that expensive.”

I survey my husband with disgust.

I am staring into the eyes of the man who only two years ago asked me to marry him, who told me he loved me, led me up the aisle, promised to be faithful, found and furnished a wonderful apartment for us to begin our new life together.

I am staring into the rotten soul of the man who recently told Nicole that he loved her, that I nag and pester him, that our marriage is dead. The man who scooped her off her feet in order to market her paintings in Paris.

I am staring into the heart of the man whom I am supposed to trust above all others. But what does he do? He attempts to tangle me in riddles of lies.

And now?

I find him wearing her expensive watch before my very eyes.

He’s flaunted Nicole in front of me – that was bad enough. He’s slept with her in our spousal bed. That’s worse, although I wasn’t at home at the time.

But this?

It’s almost as if he’s laughing at me right to my face.

How much am I supposed to take?

I storm into the kitchen, grab Sylvana by the arm, haul her out of the apartment, shove her in my MG and drive her straight to Ronan’s surgery.

Standing in witness to
Chi
, Sylvana is suitably impressed.

So impressed, in fact, that she makes an immediate offer for the painting. However, I politely decline her offer as being derisorily low, reminding her that the value of an artwork lies in proportion to its archetypal, underived uniqueness. And I calmly point out to her that this
Chi
masterpiece hanging incinerated on the wall is unrivalled as an artistic experience because it is telling us something important about nihilism in the late postmodern era.

Sylvana strokes her chin as if she’s beginning to be duly impressed by my reasoning.

“Where would we hang it?” I giggle.

Sylvana suggests my cloakroom.

I suggest her toilet for thematic reasons.

When it comes to art, Sylvana and I are notoriously incompatible. She seems to appreciate clashing colours and of course she has an aversion to subtle meanings. For example, if a painting has red in it and the room has red in it then in her book it’s okay to hang the painting in the room. Now I’m not saying that Sylvana has to be a culture fruitie like Ronan, but on her theory you’d easily end up with, say, Caravaggio’s
Last Supper
hanging over your bed because it matches the curtains, while you’re not very reverently munching your partner underneath the sheets.

We exit the surgery and say goodbye, Sylvana ordering me to call her after I’ve broken the gospel to Ronan.

When I get back home he’s not there. I assume he’s defuming himself on the moonlit pier, as husbands are wont to do; you know, furiously walking off their frustration at being wrong.

When I walk into the kitchen there’s a letter on the table with my name written on the envelope. The fun evaporates like a ghost. I tear it open.

Julie, I’ve changed my mind about Paris. I’m going tonight instead. Perhaps in the meantime you’ll manage to work out your frustrations. R
.

I dash to the phone in the hall and call him. He’s powered off. I call Nicole. She too is powered off.

Furious, I race back down to my car. Sylvana will know what to do. She will tell me to dump him for ever.

And you know, maybe this time I might just listen.

S
ylvana and I, flattened out on our sunloungers on the roof of my new penthouse apartment under a cerulean blue sky.

We’re all but naked-assed, besmirched in Ambre Solaire gunk, slotted with waspish black UV-protected shades to negate the sun God sent us this day in a blinding blaze of glory, beating down upon us like a deafening cymbal roll.

There’s not a cloud in sight, it’s a smelting, sweltering, glorious, almost vindictive mid-summer heat.

That doesn’t mean I don’t feel suicidal: let’s just get that clear.

On the other hand, nor do I have any immediate plans to descend the spiral staircase of my new apartment and slash my wrists in the bathtub. I want a halfway-decent suntan first.

“Have some more champagne,” she suggests, holding out the bottle for me.

“No thanks, Sylv,” I reply. “I’ll stick to the banana milkshake: it’s cooler.”

Another reason I decline the champagne is that in this heat it tastes like radiator water in mid-winter, with bubbles.

Talk about a house-warming. It’s a penthouse meltdown.

Champagne.

She bought it specially for me. It’s her present to celebrate my new-found freedom. She thinks I have irrevocably decided to dump Ronan from my life. Why else, she reasons, would I go to the trouble of renting a new apartment using funds from the sale of my husband’s Porsche? She simply cannot understand why any wife, having pulled off such an outrageous feat, might subsequently decide to return home.

She did inquire at one point whether this apartment was merely a ploy to win Ronan back. Of course I denied it vehemently. Returning reluctantly to her
House and Home
, she announced she was relieved that I had decided henceforth to debar myself from future marital enslavement.

With my straw, I suck my banana shake in a most ignorant and gross fashion. I must try to forget Ronan. I must simply soak up the sun and Sylvana’s company, and try to pretend I’ve never met him. Here, there are no reminders.

“Ladies,” Sylvana drawls, “don’t suck milkshakes.”

“You needn’t lecture
me
about sucking things, Sylv.”

Unfortunately, in my hour of woe, Sylvana takes this as a cue to initiate one of her favourite conversations. “Did you know, Julie, that Polynesian women are prohibited from eating bananas for certain clearly denned cultural reasons?”

I think about this for a sec.

“Sylvana, what am I supposed to do with that interesting piece of information?”

“What I’m trying to say, Julie, is that now you will no longer have him to service you, you may wish to turn your attention to something more, well, mechanical.”

“What could be more mechanical than a man?”

“You know what I mean.”

Truth is, Sylvana is obsessed by those plastic bedtime bananas with mobile heads and batteried bodies. She’s always telling me she’ll lend me her buzzing implement whenever I get lonely. I generally reply that I am perfectly fulfilled by my electric toothbrush.

“The little mechanic without overalls that you speak of, Sylvana, has a few serious flaws.”

“Go on. Annoy me.”

“It is constitutionally incapable of buying you flowers, or calling you on your birthday, or bringing you on trips, or telling you I love you.”

“The one I purchased in New Orleans last year told me he was crazy about me.”

“Yes, but that’s why you purchased it.”

“Well, I figured it might have other things going for it as well. Considering the box’s assurance that it vibrated at a frequency of five hundred megaherz.”

“Surely, Sylvana, if men are an irrelevancy, then their substitute is doubly so?”

I yawn lazily under the absurd heat.

“Listen, honey,” she says, raising her shades from her nose. “We’re talking here of a man without a brain, without sweaty armpits, germs, smells. Without balls. Writhing helplessly, so to speak, in the palm of your hand.”

“You should go into tele-sales.”

“Thank you.”

Her shades slot back on to her nose and she collapses again on her chaise. Just to annoy her, I continue rudely to suck my banana shake.

“Julie, I appreciate that your banana milkshake is phallus in glacier form, but could you perhaps lower the distortion level?”

I grab the bottle of factor twenty Ambre Solaire, photostable, hypoallergenic, anti Uva-Uvb, anti cell-ageing, water-resistant, active moisturizing, Laboratoires Gamier, Paris – talk about overkill – splurge a pool of white puree into my palm and start rubbing it on my left arm.

“Julie?”

“What?”

“I never thought you’d do it.”

“Do what?”

“Move place.”

“
I
never thought I’d do it.”

“Permanently.”

“Quite.”

I splurge the cream on to my right arm now, then my neck and chest, belly, face, legs, feet, toes. In four minutes flat I’m waxed yet again up to the eyeballs like a globule of succulent tar. When I’m finished, Sylvana takes the bottle from me and starts smearing it on to her own arms and shoulders. I sit back, close my eyes and try again to forget.

Now you can hear her sunlounger creaking under the weight as she stretches over to the fruit bowl containing an assortment of fresh cherries, grapes, sundried tomatoes and Belgian chocolates, which when I last checked were bleeding on their black paper trays into dark molten puddles. Now you can hear the sounds of Sylvana munching something.