Banishing Verona (31 page)

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Authors: Margot Livesey

BOOK: Banishing Verona
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Zeke was struck again by the unknowable nature of other people. Other things, when you got close, revealed themselves—clocks, doorbells, trains, wallpaper steamers—but humans only grew more puzzling with proximity. Look at Phil, who for ten years he had believed hated untidiness and who was now thriving amid disorder. Had Zeke been wrong about him? Or had Phil been wrong about himself? Once again he recalled the story of Verona's grandparents. He imagined the two of them, having lunch together that damp March day, talking about the plumber and the war. And afterward Jigger sitting reading the paper, until Irene shouted from the kitchen, “I've taken poison, Jigger. I've taken poison.”
Throughout a decade of marriage, she had concealed from her husband the most important facts about herself: her living parents, her dead lovers, her despair. Now his own parents, after more than quarter of a century, were growing increasingly estranged. His conviction that he and Verona knew each other in some special way was mere vanity; by his best reckoning they had spent seventeen hours in each other's company. If she had been waiting in America and they had gone on to live together, he would have had to endure the knowledge that at any hour, of any day, she might set fire to the house, come home with twenty dogs, sail naked down the Thames.
In the shadowy darkness there was nothing tangible to count. I'll count forms, he thought. He pictured the three kinds of triangles: scalene, isosceles, equilateral; then a pyramid, a circle, a
sphere, a square, a cube, a rectangle, a parallelogram, a trapezoid, a spiral. Arnold, the counselor who had taught him the
hmm
sound, claimed that was how he should visualize his return to health. I don't feel better, Zeke had been insisting. After all these months I'm still afraid I might suddenly be unable to leave the house or that the paving stones will swallow me up. Arnold made that sucking sound which, Zeke had learned, indicated exasperation. You don't feel better, he said, but take my word for it, you are. This isn't like taking the train from London to Brighton, a few delays but basically a straight journey in one direction. You'll feel better, then worse, then better, but the better periods will get longer, and eventually you'll be sure that they'll return. No one feels good all the time. Not even you, said Zeke. Not even me, said Arnold firmly.
 
 
By the next morning, the cold wind of the previous day had brought rain. As Zeke drove through the choked streets toward the shop, he wondered if maybe he could avoid the answering machine forever. Move to another flat, buy whatever he needed at the Oxfam shop, change his name. Or perhaps he could give away the machine and change his phone number. She'd call for a few days, a week at most. What she was suffering from, he guessed, was not love but guilt: the feeling you had when you'd done something irreversible and wished you hadn't. But soon he would disappear from her brain as surely as the Chinese mushroom had disappeared from his flatmate's. When Astrid returned after the Christmas holidays, he had been braced to explain how he'd been doing his best to protect it, but his father had thrown it out before he could stop him. She had never once inquired about the former occupant of their fridge.
As he pulled up at the rear of the shop, he saw a white rectangle hanging limply from a nail in the middle of the back door. For a nanosecond he thought that Verona had made her way here, through rain and wind, to leave him another letter, but as soon as
he was close enough to read his own name—
Zeek
—he guessed that Kevin was making his excuses for the day. Which was fine by him. He didn't care for his mother's swaggering shop boy with his endless chat about football and nightclubs.
Despite the rain the shop was busy, and for once Zeke was grateful for the events that normally rattled him: greeting the customers, watching them pinch and pummel the produce, answering questions about whether he would have pineapples or mangoes or star fruit anytime soon, fussing with bags and change. At six-thirty, while he was offering Ray, from the fishmonger's next door, half price on a bunch of spinach and a pound of tomatoes, the door swung open and his father was suddenly in the middle of the shop.
“She's going to be okay. It was benign. There's nothing to worry about. She's fine. Fine!”
Zeke understood instantly. His mother might be hit by a car tomorrow, but for today she was saved. While his father reeled around the shop, embracing first Ray and then him, making a clumsy attempt to juggle three lemons, he felt the muscles of his face forcing his eyes open, pulling at the corners of his mouth. Like his father, he was beaming uncontrollably.
“Come and have a drink,” Don said. “We're celebrating.”
“Dad, I have to close the shop. Why don't you and Ray go? I'll come round as soon as I'm done.”
“Close the shop,” said his father, “or leave it wide open. Let everyone help themselves. Not often you get two lucky breaks in the same family. I know this sounds like one of your daft ideas”—he hefted a cabbage like a bowling ball and looked over at Zeke—“but I kept worrying that Gwen was going to pay for my good fortune.”
Gently Zeke set down Ray's spinach and tomatoes. Why, he thought, was he so absurdly slow to comprehend even the most obvious things? Of course you didn't get good fortune for nothing. And if Don didn't pay and Gwen didn't pay, then the account was still due and, in his small family, that left him. No wonder
Verona kept abandoning him. In the cosmic economy she had had no choice but to punish him. And now, he surmised, he was punishing her, to settle her brother's account.
 
 
So many things were different that in the pub, when his father asked what he was having, Zeke said a pint of bitter. Then—sev—eral neighbors and friends had gathered and people kept jumping up to buy rounds—he had two more. He had a lengthy conversation about foxhunting with Ray and, more plausibly, he discussed new bus routes with his aunt. As he walked home through the lingering drizzle, he finally understood why people drank. Nothing had changed, but he didn't mind as much. Inside his flat, he wasn't even tempted to go into the living room. He brushed his teeth, drank a glass of water, and climbed into bed. He was about to fall asleep when it occurred to him—he'd listened to people talk about drinking for years—that he should set the alarm clock. He sat up, pressed the buttons, and let sleep roll over him.
The next morning as he drove toward Emmanuel's house, he experienced a new respect for his old friend. If this was how he felt most days, it was astonishing that he even got out of bed, let alone came to work and wielded paintbrushes and power tools. The mysterious word
hangover
now made perfect sense. Someone seemed to have walked through his brain and hung heavy dark curtains across doorways and windows. He turned into Emmanuel's street and there was his friend, leaning against the wall in front of the house, smoking a cigarette. For nearly three years, morning after morning, Zeke had double-parked, jumped out to ring the doorbell, and sat behind the wheel, hoping that the flashing of his indicator conveyed his apologies to other motorists as they squeezed past.
“Where have you been?” Emmanuel said, as he clambered in. “I thought you must have had an accident.”
“I didn't think you'd worry. You're often late.”
“But you're always on time. Your being ten minutes late is like me being ten hours late. How was America?”
Zeke moved his shoulders up and down. No sentence, not even many of them piled together, would convey what he had been through since Emmanuel bade him farewell at Heathrow. On the phone when he had called to make arrangements about their new job—painting an empty flat for a letting agent—Emmanuel had asked the same question and he'd changed the subject.
“What do you mean?” Out of the corner of his eye he saw Emmanuel wriggling his shoulders in imitation. “Did you like Boston? What happened with Verona?”
“It was cold. Nothing happened.”
“Nothing? How could nothing happen when you were in a hotel together?”
Bleakly Zeke sketched the main events of his journey. “Can we talk about something else? I got drunk last night.”
As he had hoped, that distracted Emmanuel. Then there was buying the paint and having breakfast. By nine o‘clock, drop cloths spread, radio playing, they were filling the walls and masking the woodwork. The flat was a soulless, modern conversion. No wonder, Zeke thought, that the future tenant had requested tangerine paint for one wall in the living room and a mixture of blues and greens for the kitchen and bathroom. He got through the day by counting cups of tea, glasses of water, aspirin, how often the radio played certain songs, how often Emmanuel went outside to smoke, but no amount of counting could stave off five o'clock. As they made their way downstairs, Emmanuel suggested they wait out rush hour at the pub.
“I can't,” said Zeke. “It made me feel—”
“I don't care what you drink, lemonade, water, but we need to talk.”
He was still stammering out objections when Emmanuel seized his arm, as his father had done a couple of days before, and led him down the street. At the main road there were two pubs on opposite corners. They chose the one named after a British prime minister.
“So let me get this straight,” said Emmanuel, when they were
settled at a corner table with a pint of beer and a glass of water. “Verona went to Boston because of some kind of crisis with her brother. She asked you to join her. At the hotel there was a letter saying she'd gone to New York, again because of the brother, but would be back soon. Then you got a phone call saying she was flying back to London.”
“Yes.”
“Weird.” He shook his head. “I've known chicks to do some crazy things, but this wins the prize. Especially when she's big as a house. Although maybe that has something to do with it. You know, hormones.” He sat back in his chair and stared across the table. Zeke did his best not to look away. There was something in the middle of Emmanuel's forehead, in the place where Indian women wore their bindi; presently he recognized it as a smudge of tangerine paint.
“With anyone else,” said Emmanuel, “I'd say run while the going is good. Who needs this level of aggravation? But I've known you for three years, and I've never seen you interested in anyone before. I don't get why Verona clicks with you, but maybe you should try to find out what's going on. Give her a chance to explain.”
“I don't believe in explanations.” It was something one of his doctors had said.
“Oh, crap. Who told you that? Some effing doctor.”
For nearly an hour they wrangled back and forth, Emmanuel stubbornly insisting that Zeke should give Verona a second chance. “It wouldn't be the second,” said Zeke. “It would be the third, the tenth.” He was surprised to hear his own voice sounding so firm and definite.
“Who's counting? When you were in a bad way people gave you a hundred chances.”
But Zeke continued to cling to the few facts he could articulate. He had done whatever she asked, deserted his parents, turned his world upside down, and in exchange she had given him nothing but loneliness, expense, boredom, heartache. “I didn't decide not
to talk to her,” he told Emmanuel, “any more than I decided to fall for her. Every time I go to phone her I can't make myself do it. My feelings have changed.”
“So,” Emmanuel said, getting to his feet, “they can change back. The course of true love never did run smooth.”
He headed for the Gents, leaving Zeke to ponder this claim. Was it true that his feelings could change, again and again: that one day he would drink his coffee white, one sugar, the next prefer it black with three? How could he navigate the world if everything, including himself, was in flux? Maybe other people—his parents, Emmanuel—could manage these twists and turns, but he couldn't. When I get home, he vowed, I'll listen to the answering machine and erase her messages and that will be that. He was about to explain all this to Emmanuel, but his friend was hurrying toward the table, brow furrowed, shoulders stiff.
“I forgot I promised Gina to buy the groceries,” he said, reaching for his jacket. “Can you give me a lift to the tube?”
 
 
He listened to her messages, one by one by one, trying not to hear the words—the pleading, the requests, the explanations and supplications—trying to simply let her voice wash over him. He had heard of people who turned sound into color. Now he lay down on the floor, closed his eyes, and tried to let the colors of her voice wash over him. He caught flashes of scarlet and gold and a deep earthy brown he had seen in a tapestry at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It had belonged to some queen—Anne? Victoria? Mary?—he couldn't recall. But at times, when her voice broke or strained, he glimpsed something else, a timorous yellow, a fearful mauve, the faintest edge of violent blue. Sometimes she sounded like Cecily at her most desperate, like the other women who had pursued him with such unnerving disregard for his inclinations.
He didn't know how long he lay there listening, pressing REPEAT over and over. His clocks chimed quarter hours, half hours, and finally twelve distinct strokes. Midnight, he thought, the
witching hour. He listened to her words one more time and pressed ERASE. Then silence. Did silence have a color? He stood up and restored the machine to its position on the table. If only there were a button he could press in himself. He had asked one of his doctors about this, the one who had compared greeting people to ringing a doorbell, why certain thoughts came up over and over again, even when he didn't want them to. That's a very interesting question, the doctor had said. Everyone experiences this to some degree. The only thing I can suggest, as soon as you notice it happening, is try to interrupt. Music can help. Some people find a powerful smell—mint, lavender—works for them. Or a brisk walk. In your case it's especially important to break the cycle before it takes over.

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