Under My Skin (29 page)

The bull talks about his father. He chooses small words to fill up his empty space.

‘It was bad,’ he says. ‘He left,’ and then he shrugs.

When
Eclaircie
moves she is quiet and respectful. We pass
quiet streets and sleeping houses and if someone is up as early as us, we always wave. We leave the city and towns and villages behind and move from canals to rivers and quite suddenly there is just sky and a blue horizon ahead. He does not speak at all and suddenly we move in silence out into an open lake. The wind lifts and he is calling out orders and pulling down ropes. I can feel myself panicking already as we move into the centre and further away from the safety of the riverbanks and the shore. Then he kills the engine and pulls a rope and
Eclaircie
, dull Dutch woman that she is, becomes something completely different as she sets sail.

‘I didn’t know,’ I tell him, breathless, and the wind is blowing out every other thought.

‘She’s full of surprises,’ he says and he is glowing with pride and we are moving along at a fair speed.

‘And you ask why I want to live like this?’ he says. When we anchor, he stands on the deck in shorts and dives in and I wait and am silently praying that he will come back up.

He dries off on an old red towel. He rubs it over his hair until it stands on end.

‘Tell me,’ he says simply and we drink tea on the deck and the story of Daniel comes out. Three sentences. That is how quickly I can tell it now. His face is still damp from the water, his lips cold when he leans in and kisses my mouth. And then the clouds turn dark and the only sound is the wind in the fallen sails, and the noise the rain makes on the lake.

We walk downstairs where we are safe in our watery cave. He turns on a light and the room is warm and yellow now. I want to touch his skin and make him warm because he is cold. I want to pull him inside me because I know nothing about him except that he is almost always alone. I know what we promised, there will be no holding and keeping, but we need
to mark each other somehow until we know where we both belong. And
Eclaircie
holds us and each footstep is steady as we walk across her worn sea-grass floor, and each little creak like music, as we move towards his bed.

Outside the rain spills down on to the roof and the sky is lower, pressing down on us now, and there is a roll of thunder and still
Eclaircie
has folded her sails and is discreet and matronly now.

‘Music?’ he asks and I shake my head.

We stand and face each other and my bare legs are touching his bed. He rests his hands on my shoulders and then tugs my t-shirt so it falls and he kisses my cheekbone and my lips and then my collarbones. His sheets are fresh, the bed neatly made. Everything tidy and in its place in his man’s world. He pulls the sheets up over us and we stay there together under the white light. He makes love to me and I make love to him and those feelings crash together somewhere in between. And afterwards we lie in silence and he can never know what I am thinking now.

We promised. We promised we would give it all and then give the other person back.

We eat straight from the omelette pan and he opens a bottle of wine. We have left the ordinary world now and will not talk about ordinary things. He never mentions his work and I never mention mine. Instead we talk about the tides, the boat and the sunset outside.

He tells me that he loves nature, that he believes in living moving trees, the green of the leaves, the sounds the wind makes, and that water for him has always created a special magical place.

After we make love again he sits and watches me, cross-legged at the end of the bed. When I pull the sheets up, he says, ‘No’ and ‘Please’ in a very gentle voice.

‘Don’t move,’ he says. ‘Please… just stay as you are, as you were, because after you’ve gone I will want to remember this.’

‘What happens after I’ve gone?’

‘We go on,’ he says, ‘like we said, free and on our separate ways.’

‘What if it’s different?’ I ask

‘Of course it will be different,’ he answers. ‘What did you think? – That we would collide like two stars and then just forget?’

I turn on my side and he draws a line with his finger from my shoulder to my hipbone to my knee.

We don’t speak for a long time. The little windows are misting and there is a soft orange spot from the sinking sun. I curl up with the sheets around me and listen then as he begins to speak.

‘After you’ve gone, I will still have
Eclaircie
. I will have the clouds and I will have the sun. But everything will be just slightly different. The trees will be another lighter shade of green. The water will be quieter to me and it might move in a slightly different way. And the sun will be different and at night-time, when I’m not able to sleep, because I won’t be able to now, I might not be able to find the usual full moon. So maybe you don’t believe that I love you. But you see, in my own odd way, I probably do.’

And when I go to him he pulls me on to his knees and holds me tightly there.

‘It’s only September tenth,’ he says and he is grinning at me. ‘We still have nineteen days.’

‘A lifetime,’ I tell him.

‘Our life,’ he says.

And then something happens in my stomach and then in my heart and I’m suddenly frightened in a way I was one September a long time ago.

In the middle of the night I wake and in the second after waking I think, really believe, that I am back in the flat with Larry – and outside Doreen is rattling in the kitchen as another new day begins. Beside me is the man who can’t say ‘I love you’. The bull who reluctantly gave me one month of his life – and somewhere in the world is Larry, who is somehow still my husband and I am somehow still his wife.

The bed creaks a little when I sit up and then I creep across the floor on tiptoe. He stirs in his sleep and turns over and I watch him and he doesn’t wake. I close his bedroom door quietly and begin putting my clothes into a bag. There is a red lipstick in the pouch pocket, my favourite red shade, one that Matilda recommended called ‘Rage’. It writes easily on his shining bathroom mirror and will probably be difficult to wash off.

‘I want you to stay with me.’ That was the last thing he said before he drifted off to sleep – and now – while carrying my shoes in one hand, I give him my best answer.

‘I’m sorry,’ I whisper into the mirror and then I write the words

I can’t
.

‘On days like this,’ Frankie says, ‘you go home and hug someone you love.’ He is standing on the street outside the agency and there are real tears in his eyes. His briefcase is held like a shield across his chest and at three in the afternoon he says he needs to see his wife and his boys. Beside us a girl with
blonde hair flies past on rollerblades. She laughs when she sees us and calls, ‘Watch out!’

It is a hot day in September and the news from America is breaking through.

When I pass Jonathan’s office everyone is inside, lining the walls, and sitting in silence like Indians on the floor. The TV is on and everyone is watching. I can see through the wooden blinds, the half-open door and past the sea of faces to a small TV screen… and then I watch, with everyone else, as the first tower comes down. I can feel it fall, I can almost hear it – and with it, a soft ripple of goose bumps moves across my skin.

Our receptionist sits on the floor at Jonathan’s feet and the telephones don’t ring.

I don’t wait to see the rest. It feels like a new kind of world to me – a new world that has just begun – and so I go down to my office and work quietly until it is time to go home.

At home Doreen sits beside me and we watch, terrified, from the couch.

‘This will be like the day they shot JFK,’ Mr Costello says. ‘We will ask each other, years from now, over and over… where were you and what were you doing… the day the towers came down?’

The next morning our doorbell rings and the man on the steps is like a bookmark from my old life. He is wearing a wig and polished brown brogues and there is a notebook and pencil in his hand.

Larry’s dad.

‘Mr Forbes,’ I say and he nods and bows slightly and then walks through the door.

He refuses tea.

He refuses food.

He has been driving since early light.

Then he writes down a simple question in his notebook and he hands me the page. When I read it my hand begins to shake and all the fear I have in me is beginning to scream out loud.

‘
Do you know where Larry is?
’

I shake my head and then, ‘He wanted some time… the diner is closed…’

He looks at me and wonders how someone like me could be a wife. He writes quickly, it takes about two seconds to send my world falling, and my stomach turns inside out.

‘
New York
.’

Glassman did not know what to pack the day he decided to run away. He stood in his apartment in the warm afternoon sunlight and waited for something to call his name. He waited for the solid tick from the clock in the dining room, or the pale green flowers on the wallpaper in his bedroom to move, or for each well-thumbed book to flap a memory towards him. But his apartment and all its contents seemed frozen and outside the street was quieter than usual and as he waited the only sound was his own breath, in and out. And the closet door did not swing open as he had hoped and it did not offer any practical advice.

‘It’s cold on the Cape’ – that was his first real thought and somewhere was the idea of folding his burgundy sweater and his hands pulling a suitcase down from the closet in the hall.

On the saddest day in New York City, Glassman knew he had found his chance to leave. In a few days he would be able to walk through SoHo again and hire a car in Midtown and begin his drive to the Cape. There was no electricity. The telephone lines were down. The streets were blocked off. No one could get in and out of Downtown Manhattan and somewhere on the Upper West Side Matilda did not know if he was alive or dead. He knew that he had seen his last dying face – and that he was no longer a prisoner and that he could in some strange way rejoice and be free. He went to his physician’s house in the Village and he told him to go. He said if ever he had a chance for recovery it was in fresh air and near the sea.