Cake or Death (9 page)

I think a British writer named Neil did say it once, possibly in a book or just an ill-considered magazine article, but all I remember is the newspaper article he wrote ten years later saying he never got another freelance writing gig again, he was reduced to writing about stock car racing in Dagenham and his wife left him and took the kids and he had to pay her child support even though he never saw them and women had ruined his life because he said they were crap.

I felt sorry for him, while despising him for being such a whinger, but really, he should have just grovelled and let women peel his tongue and whittle away his typing fingers. The thing that really astounded me was that he had a girlfriend. She lived with him. There is nothing a man can do that will make him a total writeoff to women. Even most serial killers have the love of a good woman.

It hardly seems fair. My father-in-law Harry fought in Burma and came home after the war to meet his son (my husband), conceived five years before, just before he sailed to the Far East. S. shook his father’s hand at the train station and didn’t like the strange man at all. Of course, S. wasn’t my husband then, he was a five-year-old boy with a bad attitude. But Harry just got on with it, which is what people did then.

That is what we are told, but then you get those memoirs about fathers who spent their lives at the pub and came home every night to beat the family senseless. They weren’t getting on with it, were they? They were whingers.

And I don’t like that in a man. No one does. It’s not fair to men, but it’s a fact. Men take up so much space in the world that whingeing takes them over that yellow line.

Don’t worry, I also expend quite a bit of energy loathing and despising women who write books attacking women. But it’s hard to work up a head of steam when the books keep coming and they’re all patently written to make money by outraging other women. One tires. One has the sneaking feeling that the only reason women as a gender are constantly attacked is that only women are interesting enough to
invite
attack. Men are boring. They may run the world, and very badly too, but they do so in a dull way, without brio.

For example,
The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
, that documentary in which he explains how he has been committing war crimes since he were a lad, is a fascinating film. He’s just some geezer in a trench coat, but by virtue of having been born in the correct year and attending the right schools, he managed to burn one hundred thousand civilians to death in the Tokyo firestorm of the Second World War and then murder and poison millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians in the sixties. McNamara then went on to ruin, oh, a billion lives with his mismanagement of the World Bank but the film doesn’t even have time to get into that, nor the continuing effects of Agent Orange with children still being born pointy-headed and eyeless in Southeast Asia.

It’s not even a conversation, it’s a monologue, Me and My War Crimes, and they still can’t fit everything in.

But here’s the weird bit. McNamara himself is not an interesting man. Neither was Albert Speer. They had interesting jobs but nothing beyond that. This is common, this state of males as place-holders, digits that fill a space but don’t advance things.

Men are boring. Women are interesting.

Women’s lives are pretty miserable compared to men’s, but we are simultaneously damnably interesting. If we were like men, you wouldn’t be able to get thousands of books out of attacking us. They’d be accurate, dull books, and publishers don’t go for those. There’s no market. There is, however, a market for fanciful misogyny.

The odd thing is that even though I am alleged to be part of that market, and supposedly the kind of person who buys chick lit, or novels with “Girl” in the title and covers that match female genitals, i.e. all pink, I am almost male in the blankness of my understanding of the current male-female landscape and all that entails.

For I am married. I can never remember how long I have been married, partly because we were already living together when we got married and partly because I think marriage is inherently pointless. Love matters. I swear, it truly does. (Scurries off to do the math.) When you have been married for at least sixteen years and living together for longer than that, life inevitably has its low points. It’s then that the question “How much do I love you?” is answered. And the answer—unspoken, naturally—is often “At this moment, very little indeed.”
(Psst
. Don’t ask. It’s not a good time.)

My problem is that I love my husband more and more
with each passing year. And often I have these weird racing sensations when all the love intensifies like a sponge being squeezed and I find I love him more each passing day. He can also be profoundly annoying and a real clot about American movies. But we are at the point, particularly since he is seventeen years older than me, where we know we are going to be together until the end, like it or not. Sometimes we like it, sometimes not.

But ’tis done.

And so I haven’t really understood anything anyone has said about men and women for decades. I am in love. Done and dusted. The idea of actually reading an article about “dating”—and what a cheap, nasty word that is—is abhorrent, much less writing one for pay.

I’m a child of the seventies. What’s to say? You sleep with some guy and then you decide if you like him or not, I guess, is about as far as I would go with advice of a socio-sexual nature.

I’m not saying that I am good at being married, just that I am good at being a seventies person who doesn’t really care either way. Two years after we went through an actual marriage ceremony (I wince at the photos. There’s me in a purple Alfred Sung suit and a Bernie Taupin haircut caused by my hairdresser going into false labour just before we went to City Hall.
False
labour. I’m still bitter about that flat-top head), my husband sat me down and explained the rules of marriage to me.

I hadn’t realized there were rules, but I listened, game to learn, as this man on his third marriage explained the deal to me. I’d been hauled to the altar because my two
little stepdaughters seemed to think it was important that I become respectable. The youngest soon thereafter stopped referring to her father as “the man who sleeps beside you,” so I assume it worked for her.

First, he said, both people have to agree upon any large financial expenditures. We were so broke. We weren’t house-rich and cash-poor, we were house-poor and cash-poor. We had renovated his house partly to make it habitable for humans of hygiene and taste (my suggestion) and partly to give me the impression that I was not living in the house he had shared with his second wife, although I was. I thought that was weird. I wanted to buy a new house. We can do that, he said, brightly. We could buy a house without a driveway.

We live in an odd little neighbourhood built in a time when people got around without cars although I have no idea where they parked their horses. But I was so dumb that I hadn’t realized that it was a big deal to have a driveway where we lived, and the thought of fighting for parking near your house so you could bring the groceries in …

Look, my husband was playing on my naïveté and my familiarity with small towns. Where I grew up we had a three-car garage and parking for four more.

Anyway, we were sitting on the stairs and he was explaining to me that I couldn’t buy a new blazer without consulting him. This struck me as unreal, especially since he had volunteered to pay his ex-wife’s credit card bill for that Christmas because he thought that was fair to her. (And it
was
fair. This nice woman, mother of his children, wasn’t having her best Christmas ever, was she?)
I didn’t care about that, though. All I could hear was that I was going to spend the rest of my life asking some guy if I could buy garmentation. Anyway, I caved.

Eventually we had enough money that I didn’t ask his advice on anything financial, not just because I didn’t care to, but because I ran the finances. To this day, the man does not know how to get cash from a bank machine. He gets his cash from a special book where I put it for him. (It’s called
The Oxford Book of Villains
, editor John Mortimer, and it’s on his side of the bed where he can’t miss it.) Recently I was bedridden and asked him to go to the bank to get a certified cheque for his daughter’s school fees.

Our bank is the blue one, he said hesitantly.

It’s unreal. Yes, it is indeed the blue one, I said, but it occurred to me that there was another bank that was a different shade of blue. This might confuse a financial innocent.

I have a brightly labelled set of files so that he can cope if I die suddenly (I no longer use the jocular phrase “hit by a bus” as I have a girlfriend whose sister was hit and killed by a bus as she walked her dog in the early morning light), but I’ve told him to go to the turquoise bank and ask a lady for help.

The second rule of marriage, he explained, is that you can’t sleep with anyone else. I should state here that I didn’t want to sleep with anyone else, but being a seventies person had just assumed that should the matter come up, it was fine. No, he said. You can’t do that.

Never?

No, never.

I adjusted. But years into the marriage, I felt obliged to point out that I loved him so much that even if he slept with someone else I would still love him. Seventies people say things like this.

It then occurred to me that it wasn’t wise to say this to a man. So I said that that would give me the same right. I would therefore sleep with the first man I saw, even though I didn’t want to and it could be someone evil but I would still do it.

So things are quite simple for me, although according to TV shows like that show that now seems so elderly,
Sex and the City
, things are terribly complicated for everyone else. Women really do feel anguish at the idea of being single. I liked being single, I tell them. Then they have fits at the thought of not bearing children. Adopt, I say. Or find a guy with kids. That worked for me.

But women have a fixed idea of happiness and it makes them crazy. Perhaps men do too, but all they do is grunt when you ask them about it, and that’s very very dull, isn’t it?

Oh, you men are boring. Ask them how lunch went. Lunch with a friend. Fine, they say. Ask them about their first wives. Can’t remember, they answer. Why did you have children? Dunno. Why does it take you three years to not put up trellis on the garden shed, by which time I have hired someone to do it, and then another three years to fail to take it down? The time wasn’t right, they say.

But ask my husband why
Ulverton
, which I know to be one of the greatest novels of English life ever written, is in his opinion total bollocks and you can’t shut him up.
Etymology’s all wrong for starters … and it goes from there, and it doesn’t matter when I say that the
London Review of Books
didn’t say that and they’re mad for punctilious etymology, because they are wrong and he is right. He thinks German racer Michael Schumacher should be charged with attempted murder (“That’s not aggressive driving, that’s homicide”) and neocons were just boys who couldn’t do sports at school, but ask him why—not if, but why—he loves me and he has nothing to say.

Do you have any faults? I ask. I could discourse for days on my faults. He thinks for a moment, just to be tactful I suspect, but has no answer. George W. Bush had no answer either, I say. No, he was asked if he had made any mistakes in the first part of his administration. That’s different. Okay, but do you have any faults? He shrugs.

He has never had anything to say about work, because he doesn’t see other people as objects of contemplation. It’s just work. Whereas for a woman, the workplace is a cauldron of pus and tears, and I could speak on it forever.

My husband is the only man I’ve ever met who is cleverer than me. And yet, like all men, he sees life as a simple thing. I see choppy seas, he sees a calm sail.

This is boring. I’m sorry but it is.

I don’t even understand how men can write novels. They don’t write them well, do they, even if their novels get the attention and women have to set up an Orange Prize just to win something. Male novelists, when you meet them, are often quite dull, and you realize that any fire they had all went into the making of the book. There’s nothing left over.

My women friends, on the other hand, are fascinating. My aesthetician is fascinating. Witchy music comes out of the speakers in a darkened room as I lie naked and she spreads seaweed paste on my face. But that’s not the neat part. It’s the stories she tells. Everything is of interest to her. She can see that climate change is happening, she says, because the increase in officially measured Bad Air Days corresponds to the fact that the material taken from her clients’ facial microdermabrasions is darker now. That’s practically a news story.

My stepdaughters bought their father a facial and a pedicure for his birthday. He has yet to use the gift card. Why? I say. Actually I say, Why why why why why, for God’s sake why not just use the fucking thing just go and get your hooves scraped why not why not why not? And he doesn’t know why not but it’s like the trellis on the shed. The time isn’t right.

I hate to use my husband as an example but I want to show that a man can have the finest mind extant and be the best and bravest person I will ever know and yet here’s the difference. I can meet a female politician and form instant common ground with her by asking if her husband understands the concept of a kitchen sink plug. She shrieks and says, You know, he’ll see the sink plug filled with little bits of stuff and then he’ll turn it over and empty it into the sink. And I say, Why do we have it if you’re not going to put the stuff in the garbage? And I say, Does he rearrange your dish placement in the dishwasher too? And we’re off.

I see men as monoliths, some kind of simple mute oblong thing. Whereas women are a light show, the northern
lights flashing wildly all over the night sky. They can’t be painted, can’t be pinned down. The director Joseph Mankiewicz, who made
All About Eve
, said men, in comparison with women, were as complicated as alphabet blocks.