The Night Following (2 page)

So the day began small. It was a Thursday in late April and set to be the same day again, the one I lived over and over, small and ordinary as I liked all days to be, though this one was to have one of those small and ordinary variations. We were switching cars. Jeremy was taking mine to be serviced and leaving me his so that I should not be inconvenienced. He would leave my Renault at the garage in Salisbury, walk to the hospital, and pick the car up at the end of the day. Small and ordinary arrangements had been made. Small, ordinary, and half-joking warnings not to scratch his precious Saab convertible were given and taken, after which we exchanged a small and ordinary good-bye.

No, that’s not it, either. Too innocuous a beginning—my car being due its service—to be truly a beginning. Nor is a Thursday in April very much to the point, although it was, as would be said later, a proper spring day: sharp and blustery, one of those boisterous, unpredictable mornings randomly bright and dark when cold sweeps of cloud pass and clear across the sun, a day when your eyes water in the wind and you wish the weather neither warmer nor cooler, just less sudden.

I drove to the supermarket. I knew Jeremy’s gym bag and rackets would be in the trunk so I didn’t bother to open it; it was too small to be much use even empty. I unloaded as fast as I could and filled the floor on the passenger side with bags. I wanted to get on; often I ran into someone I knew and I didn’t especially want to, out of slight embarrassment, perhaps. The Saab was bright yellow. Without telling me, Jeremy had sold the Volvo and cashed some bonds and bought it on his fifty-fifth birthday. I hadn’t said anything at the time. I considered my not taking much notice of what Jeremy did to be one of my virtues and anyway, smug people often are naturally indulgent. He said he’d always been bored by station wagons and I would still have my little Renault if that was the issue. A sign.

I placed the last bag with the fragile things in it on the passenger seat, walked around to the other side, and got in. I had started the engine and put the car in gear before I noticed a dark liquid pooling in a corner of the bag and a shocking red ooze escaping from it onto the seat. I snatched the bag up and at once the split in the bottom of it yawned open. The raspberries and a box of eggs already disintegrating in raspberry juice dropped out and broke into the puddle that was forming in the hollow of the dove gray suede upholstery. The raspberry carton, minus the lid, tumbled out along with more juice. The bag was still swinging from my hand. Then the second carton of raspberries and the lid of the first flipped through the shreds of plastic and landed on top. That’s why I was looking for a tissue.

Still in living room
9th May
Settee, 4.15 am
Dear Ruth
A few came to the house afterward. What’s-her-name Marsden from across the road and your group got it organized. Sandwiches, etc. It passed off all right. I stuck leftovers in freezer. Do egg sandwiches freeze?
Arthur
PS Funny to think you don’t know Carole, you know everyone.

I fished in the glove compartment for something to mop up the eggs and raspberries. No tissue. My fingers landed on the empty little foil wrapper torn halfway across the letters DU and REX.

I don’t like surprises, but my natural propensity is always to avoid making a scene. So I didn’t burst into tears or sink my head onto the steering wheel or even swear. I wasn’t angry. What happened was not the result of anger. Nor was I quite shocked. I was overwhelmed, if anything, by detachment. As if caught in a freak rush of air, I felt all at once swept off my feet and placed somewhere cooler, elevated, and separate. Of course I hadn’t really moved and I sat there for maybe only two or three minutes, but I felt my breathing ease and my heart lighten with every beat. As time ticked by, I watched my life, or my idea of it at least, shift and re-form; I saw the old encumbered sense of who I was and all the ponderous certainties of the piled-up, married years lift and blow away from me. Maybe they never had been so certain after all, or of much use. I gave them one last audit as they flew past, disintegrating as they went: engaged at twenty to Jeremy (ten years older, anesthetist, dependable). No children, history of miscarriages, cause unclear. No career worth mentioning, some dabbling once as agent for a catalog selling artists’supplies, a little voluntary work in galleries. Inclined to be fanciful, if not highly strung. These days she paints, in watercolors of course and with enthusiastic mediocrity, the same butterflies and flowers and landscapes painted by all unconvincing, wishy-washy women; she sets great store on capturing the curve of wings and petals, the gleam of weak skies and pools of shallow water.

All the traditional wisdoms about fidelity, security, even happiness, came loose, too, and went flapping after them. They grew shimmery and fell away to nothing, and when they had gone I marveled that I had ever thought them real.

This new lightness both exhilarated and relaxed me. I switched off the ignition. I sat with the condom wrapper in my hand and saw what must have gone on like a sequence of illustrations from a story I’d been carrying around in my head, untold, for more than half my life. Look, here are Jeremy and his wife, married all these years. Jeremy is an anesthetist; his wife is artistic. He rescues human beings from pain, she notices the reflections of clouds in puddles. Here is their tasteful house in Beaulieu Gardens, a leafy cul-de-sac. They do not look unhappy, and why should they? They acquired long ago a lightness on the subject of childlessness and they have no troublesome friends or worries about money. They have everything from a double garage to a self-cleaning espresso machine. But if they are happy they are not ecstatically so. Ecstasy is not in the picture. What’s on the next page?

Ah! Here is Jeremy again, tipped back in the gray suede driving seat of his prized yellow Saab convertible. He is not alone. A woman who is not his wife is stroking a condom over Jeremy’s erect penis, in accordance with the instructions on the packaging, which almost certainly call it that, although this woman is using other words for it. Indeed, she is dallying, taking Jeremy’s aforementioned between her lips, whispering playful threats and promises of what’s going to happen. See here? Jeremy again. His eyes, shiny with joy, are fixed unseeing on the roof of the car. Yes, here it is, here’s the ecstasy now. She’s across him like a crab, claws waving, impaled. And here is Jeremy’s wife, is it days, weeks, months, or even years further along in her married, leafy, cream-carpeted, cul-de-sac life, sitting in the yellow car alone, holding the condom wrapper that Jeremy left in the glove compartment. What does she make of this?

The parade of images faded. I pulled down the sunshield and looked at myself in the mirror, wondering if the calm I felt inside couldn’t be what I was feeling at all and my face might reveal actual distress. Perhaps I wanted to watch myself deciding what to feel. But my face bore no more than a shadow of preoccupation. Should I not feel at least mild consternation? I was surprised. I hadn’t expected it of Jeremy, or rather, of
a
Jeremy; from a Jerry, from a man of my mother’s type, with many rings and a leather coat, gray hair over the collar, maybe. But this seemed an implausible story for any Jeremy to have got himself into, let alone an anesthetist Jeremy of fifty-eight suffering from problematic nasal hair and occasional tinnitus, a Jeremy with meaty, antiseptic hands and a quasi-surgical attitude to sex. (Not clinical, exactly, but with a fastidious emphasis on equipment, technique, and procedure: always in bed, straight to the relevant sites, and nothing said—he working reliably, I respectful of his concentration—until afterward, when he would express satisfaction not so much at passion spent or even appetite sated but at a job done. It’s surprising, really, he didn’t talk about outcomes.) At least that was how he was with me, and with diminishing frequency. Was it possible that he had discovered, squashed up with this woman in the yellow Saab, that sex—that he, Jeremy—could be grand and wild and dirty and magnificent?

How much younger than me was she? I ruled out her being a prostitute—Jeremy would never have compromised the dove gray suede on the backside of a common tart—so what made it necessary for them to do it in the car? Simple unstoppable urgency?

I turned the wrapper over and over in my hand and felt traces of the lubricant from the silvered inside soften the pads of my fingers. Did they wrest the condom from it with hands intertwined and fumbling? I checked its torn foil edges for teeth marks. Did he hiss at the sight of her long nails, groan as she eased it on, instruct her, take over? Did they cry out at the ludicrous little pulsating moment of crisis as they came, and afterward, capsized and contorted across the upholstery by the frantic passing squall in their groins; did they smile? Joke about where her knickers had got to? Or did he talk—really talk—to her?

I rubbed my fingertip and thumb together to feel that strange, clingy slip, neither oil nor powder, between them. I dipped my hand in the pool of bright cold slime on the passenger seat and rubbed that between my fingers, too, squashing a handful of raspberries and egg together, letting clear slippery albumen and creamy orange and grainy rags of fruit run down and stain my arm. With the engine switched off the car was already warm, and now the air filled with a new smell that quite overwhelmed the silicone tang of Jeremy’s dashboard cleaner. It was raw, and tight with sweetness, fat with yolk and seed and juice. I thought of heat, of skin licked bare of perfumes and smelling only of itself, salty and animal, and I thought of teeth and saliva and damp hair. I thought of the shoving and sighing, the sucking and shuddering, of sweat and come. And I thought, thanks to her husband, here is the anesthetist’s artistic wife pausing in the car park after the supermarket shop, thinking so intensely about fucking of a kind she’s never experienced that it is making her wet.

And I felt grateful, if a little envious and excluded. I did not even take any avenging pleasure in the Technicolor ruin of the passenger seat. Normally the raspberry and egg disaster would have upset me to the point of nausea but it aroused no feelings I could put a name to. All I could do was study the colors. I sat and watched them seep into one another for a while. Here is Jeremy’s wife contemplating a major spillage. Jeremy’s wife considers that these marks will never come out.

But then came a realization, and with it a flood of pleasure as pure as anything sexual. The realization was that my calm did not require justification. Quietly and naturally I accepted that I did not mind about Jeremy’s infidelity and so need not pretend to. Quietly and naturally I understood that my discovery severed a redundant bond, not because I cared where Jeremy’s penis had been but, very particularly, because I didn’t. I need not pretend that anybody’s safety or happiness was at stake; nothing at all, finally, depended upon the continuation of our marriage to each other, and this was not a calamity. Rather it should be celebrated; here is proof of a union’s unlooked-for but unmistakable meaninglessness, its sudden, clear freedom from having to go on appearing to have a point. This seemed so simple and unambiguous I did not feel it was something I had concluded for myself. It felt like a truth nesting within our marriage all this time like a late and overprotected egg. Now at last it was hatched, and emerging from it was something perhaps ungainly, but unmistakably itself.

I could not wait to tell Jeremy. I was sure it would be such a relief to him, too, to be let off any more of this. My desire to share it with him was, I think, wholly generous. I was sure that when I saw him and explained it all I would, albeit a little bitterly, thank him. I would go straight to the hospital. I could wait and perhaps catch him between the day’s-ectomies: splen-or hyster-or append-, whatever bits of offal came out on Thursdays, I had no idea. We didn’t talk about his lists anymore.

27 Cardigan Avenue
bed
still 9th May
day after
Dear Ruth
Today is taking much longer than usual. After all the recent coming and going it’s very quiet. They’ve all told me I “must be exhausted.”They’ve all told me I have a right to be angry. They are, they say.
I can just hear what you’d have to say to all this.
Arthur
PS Actually I can’t. Not a word. It is very quiet.

Maybe I was a little upset and distracted by the mess on the seat beside me. As the car moved, the colors wobbled and pulsed like blood flooding the corner of my eye. I began to feel almost afraid of it, this wet heap beside me. I didn’t dare stop noticing it, as if I could keep it from getting bigger by concentration alone, as if, should my awareness falter, it would bulge and swell and fill all available space, leaving nowhere that was not lurid with color.

I had taken one of the winding back routes to Salisbury, not specifically to avoid the main road, but for something like privacy. I wanted a little time to get used to myself as a wronged wife—as the phrase applicable to me, rather than the fact—because I was bemused at the clichéof it. I wasn’t driving faster than usual. Between villages, the road rose and fell between fields and hedges, and here and there narrowed to a single lane. As always, it was almost deserted.

Up a hill on the left side was an orchard bordered by a low wall. I drove toward an overhanging line of trees in blossom whose ornamental acid pink was pressing hard into the blue of the sky. Set back from the road before the trees stood a pair of modern pebbledash cottages, each with a carport and a satellite dish. In the garden of the first one stood a caravan; in the other the sun was glancing off the glassy, dead surface of an artificial pond. Unremarkable as the houses were, I noticed them particularly, as if I knew I should later be unable to forget any detail of the moments just before. I passed by them and up toward the trees whose moving shadows cut like slate across the tarmac. The road was rising toward a bend beyond the trees and an even higher stretch of ground between garish spring fields. The green of these fields in the distance stung my eyes with almost chemical sharpness, the fresh bitterness of sap in new leaf, new grass. Green can be too green.