Dancing in the Dark (18 page)

“Are you sick or something? You look pale.” He’d put down his fork, his diagonal slice of buttered toast, his cup of coffee. He was just looking at me. What did he see? I felt my fingers around my throat, hiding lines. I would have put my hands over my face.

“No, I’m fine.”

“Christ, Edna, if it’s just your birthday, it’s not a tragedy, you know. You don’t have to look as if it’s the end of the world. I’m older than you and look at me, am I over the hill?”

Yes, as it happens.

“Of course not. I’m just being silly. It’s hit me funny, that’s all. Remember your fortieth birthday, it bothered you too,
you know.” And it had. I’d baked a cake and given him my gift at dinner, an incredibly expensive pair of gold cuff links engraved with his initials, but he was so quiet. He drank steadily, almost sullenly, through the evening and went to bed drunk. “Thank you for the cuff links,” he said. “They’re nice.” He hardly ever got drunk.

“Shit, it’s nothing. You don’t look anything like forty.” And there it was again. What would he say, then, when I did?

“Listen,” and he grabbed my hands across the table. My hands that were not so soft or unused any more. “Tell you what. Grab a cab down to the office at five and we’ll go out for drinks and dinner. You should be celebrating, not feeling bad. We’ll have a great meal and a few bottles of wine and you can spend the day treating yourself and getting ready. Just lie around in the tub with some really whiffy bath oil. Doll yourself up, look good tonight. And I’ll show you how much fun being forty can be.” He leered, and we laughed. Maybe it was not so terrible. Maybe small pleasures were small miracles, and not just small.

“Okay. You’re right. That’ll be nice.” But did he think a few words and a grin, a long bath and an expensive dinner would lift wrinkles, flesh, time?

A day off might lead to other days: to anarchy. I worked through the morning, as I always did. This was hard and heavy work, not so little. But grim today; I could not quite make out salvation in the unsmudged glass of mirrors.

In the afternoon I had the long hot bath with the expensive oil, lay in the tub with my cigarettes and magazines, then did my hair. I would wear my blue silk suit, elegant and lean. How would a woman of forty dress? I looked at my clothes and most of them seemed ageless; but one would have to study what was suitable.

I was well turned out when I left, if not beautiful. But this was following his instructions; not a treat, as he’d intended, but another small thing that must be done.

I was impatient at my unfairness and lack of gratitude. What did I want, anyway? Just to be told it was important, maybe.

In his office, before we left, he handed me a yellow rose, clipped the stem, and hooked it into the buttonhole of my suit, stepped back, head cocked, surveying. “You look great,” he said, and kissed my cheek. (And this, I remember, in front of her. Had he no shame, for either of us?

(Surely I was real to them. Surely I was not so invisible that they didn’t notice me; that he might even have sent her out to buy the rose? Would that be part of her job? The possibilities of these little things, tiny wounds, are almost as painful and betraying as the great one.)

I said to him once, “I think a single rose is better than a dozen big ones. Anybody can give a bunch of flowers, but just one is special.” I was touched that he remembered.

“Happy birthday, Edna,” he said in the restaurant, lifting his glass of white wine to me. “To you, my perfect wife.”

Extravagant? Oh yes, Harry was extravagant in his speech as well as in other ways. What did he mean by perfect? That I was deaf and dumb and blind and stupid?

A smile, a rose—these should be good returns on my investment.

“So,” he said, “are you feeling better? Did you do what I said and pamper yourself today?”

See, questions. An evening of questions. But he was interested. He wasn’t talking about himself. It was my fault that I couldn’t think what to tell him, or what to ask.

Years of listening, droplets of facts plinking into the well of my mind, opinions splashing down. But always he said
something just to me: asked about my day, or what I was doing or planning to do, what I was reading, and what I felt like seeing on television. He always gave me a chance to take a turn, so it must have been my fault when I didn’t. Maybe he only talked to fill my gaps? But no, that’s going too far. He talked because he wanted to tell me things; or to hear himself telling me things.

“Yes, I’m feeling better.” My fingers kept going to the rose, to see if it was enough. “It was just this morning, it struck me strange. To think of being in my forties, you know. As if everything’s been—so short.” I may have meant so small. How was he to know?

“Well,” and he grinned at me, “you’re not dying, you know.”

But of course that’s part of it. Forty says precisely that you’re dying, you can almost glimpse it, that this is going to end and you will lie at that end on a great heap of very small pieces of this and that.

“Is it because you feel you’ve missed things? Are there things you wanted to do and couldn’t?”

He knew better than that. We went over all that before we were even married. He knew perfectly well I had no ambitions.

“Of course not. It’s just something to get used to.” I shrugged. “It’s not a big deal, it’s just silliness, I told you.”

We were eating, but he kept glancing at me, peering as if he wanted to see past my skin. My skin that didn’t look forty yet.

“All I ever wanted was to make a good home.”

“And you’ve done that right enough,” he said, lifting his glass again to me and drinking. Did he wonder at my ambition? Did he feel worthy of it, or ashamed?

“Don’t you think that’s enough?” In a moment I would cry, and wouldn’t quite know why.

“Of course it is, if that’s what you want. All I was asking was if there was anything else you wanted and didn’t get.”

Somehow there was an edge in both our voices. What edge were we close to? Should we have stepped over instead of back?

“Harry, it’s just realizing I’m not seventeen, I’m forty, and this is what I’m doing, this is it. Do you see?”

And blessedly he did see, here was the step away from the brink. “Yeah, actually I think I do. You wonder how it happened, what happened, it goes so fast.”

“Exactly.” I beamed and thought, “We are close.”

“Well, of course I wanted a child, maybe. For a while.” To bring this up, that is how close I thought we were right then. Was that so rare then? So it would seem; it would seem almost as if our minds must have run for years on parallels, quite separate, and would have done so to infinity.

“Do you think about it much?”

“No, hardly ever any more. Just that when you asked if there was anything I wanted and didn’t get, well, that’s what you’d think of too, isn’t it?”

“I guess. It would have been different, wouldn’t it?”

“Hard to imagine now.”

Now I could feel the evening draining. Difficult and tiring to keep up with abrupt shiftings, from the undercurrent of hostility to the closeness, from his questions to my uneasy confusion, and now to a kind of minor gloom for our lost lives, lost children, whatever we might have mourned if we’d been people who mourned for things that were impossible. Which we weren’t, at the time.

What if I’d turned his questions back? If I’d said, “What
about you? What do you feel you’ve missed? Have you done what you wanted? Are you satisfied? With me? And everything else? What more do you want?”

Who knows what he might have told me, with a candle on the table and wine in our glasses and a rose in the buttonhole of my blue silk suit? He might have said he was unhappy and dissatisfied, that he was worried, or frail, or that he wanted a great deal more. He might have said the truth, whatever that was. We might both have said the truth.

But what then? Might I not have reached out and plunged my steak knife publicly into our little tragedy?

A little tragedy, yes. Nothing unique, no headlines, I’m sure. I wonder if it was even in the papers? Just a simple, ordinary, domestic failure.

But he was grinning, and just like at breakfast reached across the table for my hands, held them, covered them. “That’s enough of that sad shit. We’re supposed to be celebrating. You’ve earned forty years, you should be proud. You’ve got forty years under your belt.”

But when would they start to sag?

“You’re just halfway, really. Come on, let’s drink to our eightieth birthdays and our sixtieth anniversary.”

And of course I laughed with him. His laughter was still infectious; and besides, it was a funny vision, the two of us old and lined and bent and still—always—together. It was not the old that was discouraging but the years it took to get there.

“To us,” he said. “May you be as beautiful and I be as handsome then as we are today.”

But I was not beautiful. He was handsome, but I was not beautiful. What did he see?

“Do you think my hair’s getting too grey? Should I start touching it up?”

“Hell no. It suits you, it’s kind of warm and soft like you. Besides, there isn’t much. And anyway, it’s like being forty, it’s something you’ve earned. You should be proud.”

I don’t think he really believed that. He was just trying to cheer me up, which was kind. But what did I do to earn forty years and grey hairs? I don’t think I’m vain; just frightened. Or is it the same thing?

“Why fight it? Why hide what you are?”

Habit, I guess. Necessity.

“It’s a waste of time to get upset about things you can’t do anything about.”

I hope he meant that. I hope he really believed it, and was not upset in the end by what he could not prevent.

“But listen, apart from today and having a birthday, are you happy? Are you okay?”

Okay, certainly. Apart from today and a birthday. Happy? It’s funny. When you’re young, maybe you think about being happy. I used to hope for that, and if somebody’d asked me, “What do you want to be?” I might have said, “Happy,” and I would have thought that meant just one thing.

But you forget. If you’re like me and get what you thought was going to make you happy, the idea of it kind of fades. I supposed I should be happy. I supposed I was. But it didn’t seem quite the word.

What would the word be? Content, by and large? Satisfied? But both implied a sitting back, a relaxing, a serenity, and that was not much like my days in which so much had to be accomplished.

“I’m busy,” I said slowly. I could tell by his face, a bit startled, disappointed, that that was neither right nor enough. “I’m happy, naturally. How couldn’t I be?”

“I don’t know. You never say. You never say how you feel.”

“Well, there’s no need, is there? I feel fine. My life is just the way I wanted it to be.” My God, there was a desolation in that sentence I didn’t intend at all.

“Look, Edna,” and he was looking at me so firmly, as if I were some recalcitrant employee, and he sounded almost angry; what did he want from me? “Look, you were upset this morning about being forty. I understand that, it can hit anybody that way. But I worry about you sometimes. I don’t know what your days are like and how you feel about them and what you think about. The house is great, and of course you’ve made it a place to be proud of.” (But it hadn’t been pride I was hoping for; it was refuge.) “But what else?”

What did he mean, what else? “What are you worried about?”

“Your days. How you spend them.”

“Harry, you know what my days are like. For heaven’s sake!”

“No, I don’t. I can see what you do, if that’s what you mean, but I still don’t know how they feel.”

I shrugged. “They feel busy. I don’t understand what you want, Harry.”

“I want to know,” and he looked so fierce and harsh I could almost have been frightened, “if it’s really enough for you to look after a house and me.” But he softened. “I just want to know if you’re okay. Because you’ve been doing it all for twenty years, and sometimes I think you must get bored. Don’t you? Don’t you sometimes want to try different things?”

Bored sometimes, yes. But that is surely to be expected; part of the trade for a life.

“Well, different days feel different, they’re not the same. Sometimes I get tired and sometimes I enjoy it. It’s like anybody else, I expect. Don’t you ever get down at work, or tired of it? After all, Harry, I don’t know how it feels to be you
doing what you do all day any more than you know about me and my days.”

“Well, you should,” and he was smiling again, thank God. “I tell you enough about it. Sometimes I wonder how you can listen to so much of it.”

So should I have told him that sometimes it was difficult and dull to listen and that I could never feel it had anything much to do with me?

“No, I like to hear about your days.”

Who am I to call him a liar?

What did they talk about? Did they discuss everything, did she speak easily, and then did he miss the same kind of thing with me? Did they talk about me? That night in the restaurant in this strange tense conversation on my birthday, how much was he comparing us?

Oh, I could kill him.

Maybe what I lack is a better sense of humour.

“Look, Harry, let’s just drink the wine and enjoy the evening. I’m forty, okay? I’m fine.”

Usually I couldn’t drink so much wine. Usually it made me sleepy. But tonight it seemed I could have gone on drinking it forever and it would have soaked right into my body and not left a trace, no wobbling or slurring or sleepiness or even having to go to the bathroom. I seemed to be working it off, like sweat, in talk and uneasiness.

“But don’t you get lonesome, Edna? I mean there you are in that house and a lot of times I don’t get home for dinner now. Don’t you want to get out sometimes and see other people? Don’t you get mad?”

“Well, I see neighbours. We have coffee sometimes. But I don’t get lonely. I like being by myself, I always have. I get a lot of work done, and I like to read. I like to make the house
clean, it’s peaceful in a way, making things shine. And I like sitting in the kitchen at four o’clock having a coffee and thinking about you coming home.”

“But what about when I’m not coming home? What if I’m going to be late or not make it at all?”