Tremble (41 page)

I have a string of pearls. Robert gave them to me recently for our sixteenth wedding anniversary. An uncharacteristically beautiful choice for him. I suspect someone else helped him. No, not her. She wouldn’t have the taste or the class.

Oh, I know. I’ve known from the beginning. From the moment he came back into this house with a lovebite on his neck. I’ve seen her from a distance, through the office windows, walking back and forth, sitting at her desk. A silly young creature with absolutely no physical grace whatsoever. I know why he chose her. There are two distinct reasons: she is the exact opposite of me and she will never challenge him on anything. The very same reasons he will never leave me for her.

I saw it at the laundromat pinned to one of those community boards—you know, one of those eclectic collections of diverse cards from
Vegan lesbian seeks like-minded soul mate
to Christian Help groups. I’d got bored waiting for the machine to stop spinning and I was scanning for possible band names—noticeboards are good for that—when this pink card with what looked like Russian lettering at the top caught my eye. In English underneath ran the phrase:
Old Wise Woman can spin something from nothing—knitwear is God
. I think “God” was probably meant to read “Good” but there was something about the lettering that made me stare at it for a full five minutes. I didn’t bother writing down the number, I just pulled the card off the wall and slipped it into my handbag.

Later at work I had a big fight with Robert over our latest act, Play 306, a teen boy band put together by an advertising company for Pepsi. I talked Robert into taking them on. Originally he’d been against it, calling the whole thing an exercise in crass commercialism and saying there was no way he was going to promote a bunch of wannabe talentless male fashion models. But when their first song became a hit—thanks to one of them impregnating a soap star and ending up on the front page of the
Daily Telegraph
under the immortal headline:
UNDERAGE BOY TOY GETS OUR STACY UP THE DUFF
—Robert suddenly lost his principles, and the next thing I know I’m at a photography shoot trying to talk the boys into dropping their undies and posing entirely naked except for fluffy toy rabbits covering their crotches. Robert’s idea. He wants their new album to be titled
Bunny
. Over my dead body. I reckon we’ll lose the grungier straight male demographic by being too teenage girly and fluffy. I want
Rabbit
or better still
Hare-Gives-Lip
, which has a sexier edge, right? Whatever.

We fought for an hour over it, in front of the whole office, including the new intern who’s way too attractive for my liking. It was really humiliating. In the end Robert pulled rank and that was when I rushed to the toilets. I was crying in one of the cubicles when the card with the Russian writing fell out of my pocket. It lay there staring up at me as if to say call me, call me.

The address was in one of those housing commission blocks—you know, the grimy sixties, a brick block with a few struggling trees
bending exhausted over a concrete excuse for a playground. One windswept child on a swing screamed as she swung higher and higher in the sky. That was me once, I thought as I walked past.

The elevator smelled of piss and marijuana while the corridor was an international but nauseating smorgasbord of curry, stew, and frying fish.

The door was painted bright orange with a miniature Russian flag pinned above the knocker. I rapped tentatively. Immediately it was flung open by a woman not more than five foot tall, well over the age of eighty, and dressed in a leather miniskirt and ill-fitting blond wig.

“Vhat do you vant?” she asked in a heavy Russian accent. In lieu of a reply I held out the shopping bag full of Robert’s hair. She peered in, sniffed, then sneezed.

“Your man? Or maybe he belong to somevon else?” she muttered as she led me into the crowded lounge room.

Next to a garishly ornate three-piece suite covered in embroidered brocade stood a spinning wheel. It looked as if it had been teleported from another time. A state-of-the-art home movie unit with a seven-foot screen filled one wall. Perched on top of the screen were a dozen or so statuettes of various deities, from Buddha to Jesus to a lurid papiermâché rendering of the goddess Kali.

“I am Madame Blonski, I am spinner. Vhat is your design?” Madame Blonski clutched at my arm.

Inwardly cursing myself for being such a gullible idiot, I reached into my handbag. The woman was obviously a fraud and the sight of a crystal ball sitting on top of the microwave beside a samovar did not increase my confidence.

“It’s Ralph Lauren, you know, the Polo label. I think there’s enough hair there,” I ventured, tentatively holding out the photo of a woollen shirt I’d torn out of a
GQ
magazine.

Madame Blonski glanced at it then peered dubiously at the hair. I waited nervously. Suddenly it seemed incredibly important that she confirmed there was enough there to knit the shirt to destroy the house that Robert built. With the nursery rhyme jangling around my head the three minutes she took to decide stretched into an eternity in which Robert left me, my publicity campaign failed entirely, and I was without lover and job by the end of the month. Finally she put me out of my misery.

“Okay. I can make this. For you, fifty dollar.”

I nodded my head, incredulous at the instant relief that flooded my body. The old woman took the bag of hair and stuffed it unceremoniously under the couch; there were about a dozen other bags already shoved under there. Grabbing my arm she marched me back to the front door. She was so fragile she made me feel like a giantess, awkward in my suddenly massive ugh boots.

“Come back in a veek, Madeleine. Oh and I only take cash,” she announced.

She slammed the front door and left me standing on the doorstep wondering whether I’d imagined it all. It was only when I was in the elevator that I realized she’d used my name without me telling her what it was.

I was halfway through my boxing session, my gloved fists pounding into the leather-clad palms of my long-suffering trainer, when I realized in an epiphany of guilt whose face was dancing in front of my eyes. Madeleine. That smug look that glinted in her eyes as she said, “
Market forces
.” Whack! “
The noughties generation
.” Thud! “
Retro-Seventies
.” Smack! How dare she? Who the fuck does she think she is challenging my judgment in front of my whole staff? We might be lovers but that doesn’t mean we’re equals!

Does she realize she’s undermined my authority; worse still, made me look like some old fart in front of kids I’m old enough to have fathered, kids whose opinions actually matter, opinions that can seep through the walls of Pear and infiltrate the industry like a fatal rising damp? Does she know how many people want to see me fail? For fuck’s sake, Play 360 are limited, they’re this season’s fourteen-year-old suburban chick’s band, tomorrow’s history. That’s their market: short but truly profitable if milked in the right way—which is not to a bunch of inner-city, pot-smoking, neo-grunge male hippies who collectively amount to about a hundred sales and about two hundred illegally burned CDs.
Hare-Gives-Lip
. Fuck that. Hasn’t she taken in anything I’ve taught her?

I slam away until my T-shirt is soaked, the internal soliloquy stops drumming against my temples, and my knuckles begin to bruise under my leather gloves. It’s only walking back from the gym enveloped in that delicious vacant sensation one gets from strenuous exercise, watching bats engrave their way across the dusk, that I realize why I
was so bloody furious. This is the first time she’s ever disagreed with me. My Madeleine. After all, I created her, shaped her in the way I like, the perfect partner: amicable, mellow, a pillowy body of adoration I can sink my battle-weary cock into. A highly crafted counterbalance to the constant barrage of criticism I go home to every night. And now my invention, my Eve, is rebelling. It’s enough to make a man weep. The best I can hope for is that it’s a temporary aberration—you know, one of those incomprehensible hormonal mists women often disappear into—and that my Madeleine will reemerge like a freshly scrubbed car, glistening with unconditional admiration. She’d better fucking do.

I reach my beautiful house, with my beautiful wife framed by my beautiful pristine Federation shutters, and a wave of claustrophobia, the sense that this is my defined future forever and ever, sweeps over me and almost knocks me to the dog-turd pavement. Because, as I’m sure a few of you habitually unfaithful husbands will understand, marriage is a delicate business. Like an intricate piece of machinery, it requires a sensitive balancing system. Real time with wife equals downtime with mistress, the mathematical equation of which is something like four hours with the wife can be eradicated by half an hour with the mistress. I read that somewhere—was it Einstein? Like I said, marriage is a fragile equilibrium not to be recommended for the fainthearted. And so, with that balance totally thrown, I pick myself up off the pavement and enter the house with unresolved fury buzzing around me like a swarm of irritated bush flies.

Women can be scary at the best of times, but they’re most frightening when through some unfathomable alchemy they’ve somehow managed to work out what’s going on. Personally I subscribe to the theory of alien abduction, only I think it was alien abandonment and women were introduced onto the planet as an extraterrestrial colonizing species whose sole quest is to infect us all.

So there’s my wife at the door, looking sexier than I’ve seen her in a long time, and my first thought is, shit, what anniversary have I forgotten? While I’m busy panicking she leads me to the dining room where she’s actually laid the table and very nicely, thank you very much. Our best silverware, cloth napkins, even candles. Then she serves me my favorite—duck à l’orange with steamed snow peas and wild rice. Still suspicious I begin to eat, steeling myself for the moment she’s going to ask me for something, like a holiday or some ridiculous new gadget
we need like a hole in the head, but instead she says, “Darling, how was work? Is everything okay?”

It’s the sweetest voice I’ve heard out of her since we last had sex, which has got to be at least four months ago and, by coincidence, occurred on the night she asked me for a Mercedes SUV. So, gagging with suspicion and the parson’s nose, I think, fuck it, I’ll try the Play 360 dilemma on her, leaving the names out of course. And guess what? She agrees with me. She actually says she thinks my strategy, although short-term, is good. I swear I harden up just hearing her say the words, “Darling, your commerical nose is always right. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

Pathetic, I know, but you’ve got to understand—this is beyond the Bay of Pigs, beyond Tehran, beyond East Timor. Our marriage is one of those entrenched guerrilla wars that drags on with each surprise attack from the undergrowth. This is Vietnam, and, guys, she’s the Viet Cong. So I’m still waiting for the innocent-looking veiled woman sitting in the corner to blow up when, smiling mysteriously, Georgina takes my hand and leads me upstairs.