Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. (38 page)

14 BEAUTIFUL FORTRESS

2007

In every dream home a heartache.

Roxy Music

I go to my doctor, Dr Shah, for a check-up. He says he saw my husband in the surgery last week about a minor complaint. ‘He doesn’t love you, you know,’ he says matter-of-factly. ‘He doesn’t care about you. I’ve seen it many times, when the weaker of the two becomes dominant and tries to undermine the stronger one.’ What an extraordinary thing for a doctor to say. I should be shocked and worried, but I’m not. I know my husband loves me. We’re going through a rough patch, that’s all.

How does anyone make it through marriage and children and remain a whole person? Perhaps it is unavoidable that the individual has to be sacrificed for the unit. Rachel Cusk describes marriage and family as ‘institutionalised dishonesty’, ‘a cult of sentimentality and surfaces’. Robin Wright Penn called it ‘a beautiful fortress’. And Virginia Woolf, never one to hold back: ‘I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me.’ All I know is I wasn’t brought up for this. I was brought up a feminist, a rebel, a creative person. Not a cleaner, cook, pacifier and compromiser. I think I could cope with a bit of each, but not just the domestic side on its own.

Looking back, I don’t think I could have been a full-time wife and mother without the illness but I had no choice, I wasn’t well enough to work, I did the best I could in the circumstances and I was happy to do it. But even though I’ve willingly put my whole heart into my home life, it’s been difficult. I’ve earned my own money since I was seventeen years old, motherhood is a huge shift in freedom and status. No one ever says,
You’re good at this, well done
. No one pays you. If you fuck up and drop the baby, then you’ll get some attention, but if you keep your head down and do a ‘good enough’ job, you’re ignored.

One day during an argument Husband says to me, ‘I own you.’ And it dawns on me:
It’s just like the fifties. If you are a full-time mother without a private income, you’re a chattel, a dependant. It’s 2007 and nothing’s changed
. Husband wants me to stop dyeing my roots and having my legs waxed, to save money for the school fees – to turn me into a greying, frazzle-haired yeti. But I still have to function in the world, I still have to present myself to people every day, to hold my head up. This is a sacrifice too far for me: ‘If we can’t afford to pay for a couple of leg waxes a year, then we can’t afford to send our daughter to private school,’ I say and I mean it. I’m not going to martyr myself, it’s not healthy. I’ve already started down that road, it’s time to stop or there’ll be no turning back.

I never look out of the window and appreciate the sea any more. I don’t even glance at it on my way to the kitchen with an empty cup. There it is, spread out across the whole back of the house, undulating like a jewelled cloth forever being shaken out for my delight – and I ignore it. And that’s how my husband and I are becoming: we don’t notice each other enough, we don’t touch each other enough. If you can take something as majestic as the sea for granted, because it’s there every day, what chance does a mere mortal have? The balance between us, the ecological system that was our relationship, has shifted: he used to be my rock, but after having Baby and surviving cancer I’ve become a rock myself. We either have to shuffle about and rebalance together on the raft that is our marriage, or we’re going to topple over the edge and drown. We need to renegotiate our roles – I think you need to keep doing that throughout a marriage. There’s a fine line between a rock and a dead weight.
A thin line between love and hate
.

At this point we decide to rebuild our house. Want to know if you’re really suited to someone? Move to the middle of nowhere together, where you don’t know anyone, and then proceed to build a house. That’ll sort it out. There are five Polish builders here all day, starting at eight o’clock in the morning, and Husband is still working from home. He’s doing this to save money, so we can afford to pay the builders, but it’s taking a toll on our marriage. We have one large open-plan living area and one loft-style bedroom. ‘You must have a very strong marriage,’ say the other mothers doubtfully when they hear how Husband works in the middle of our home every day. He constantly comments on the state of the house: what’s (not) in the fridge, crumbs left on the bread board, washing up not done, the sheets, the bathroom, where I’ve been, who I’m emailing, what I’ve bought, why am I making another appointment for a leg wax, ‘Again? Didn’t you have your legs waxed last month?’ ‘Any chance of a coffee? What’s for lunch?’ Now he doesn’t go to London to work at his studio any more, home is his only domain, and he’s becoming obsessed with it. I recognise that feeling only too well from my Year on the Sofa, and of course it will never come up to scratch, it can never be perfect. He has the disgruntled air of someone who’s saddled with an incompetent employee and thinks they’ve made a big mistake hiring them. I get the feeling he wishes he could sack me,
would
sack me if he didn’t have to pay me off.

I often sit in the car outside our house and cry. I don’t want to go in because I have no space, nowhere to go once I’m in there, there’s no kitchen, no living room – that’s become the office – Husband, Baby and me all sleep in the upstairs bedroom, which, because of the works, we reach by a ladder. The contractor is inept, so time and again the building work is delayed. I sit in the car after doing the shopping or dropping our daughter at school to put off going inside for as long as possible. It doesn’t feel like a home any more. I watch as the slow and painful rebuilding of the house slowly and painfully demolishes our marriage.

15 THE LETTER

2007

Every human encounter is an adventure.

Tony Bennett (not
that
Tony Bennett;
my ceramics tutor at Hastings Art School)

I lie on our white king-sized bed, in our minimal white bedroom, inside our gleaming modernist glass box beach house, and look up through the skylight at the clouds drifting by. I can hear seagulls shriek and scuffle on the roof as they take off to dive over the Channel, and sheep bleating outside in the fields. Dozing here on the cool cotton bedcover like Lady Muck, whilst a young, fit local fireman called Dan is down in the garden building a fence made from reclaimed railway sleepers, I think,
Things aren’t so bad. We’ve made it through the hard times.
Dan’s stripped to the waist, tanned and sweating, with a little brown cheroot dangling from the corner of his mouth. He’s hot, but he doesn’t interest me. I hum quietly to myself, challenging the gods:

Nothing you can say can tear me away from my guy.

Nothing you can do could make me untrue to my guy …

He may not be a movie star …

Husband and I have been married for sixteen years, we’ve had some extremely testing times, and things aren’t too good at the moment, but even so, no fit fireman, no handsome young guy from the village, no millionaire, nope, not even a film star, could turn my head or my heart away from the life we’ve created together.

Two days later, I’m struggling up the winding shingle path, weighed down with orange plastic Sainsbury’s bags. My back’s killing me. I’m hot, stressed and late. I need to get in, unpack the shopping and get back out as quickly as possible to pick up our daughter, whose school is fifteen miles away. On my way up the path an exotic pointy plant stabs me in the eye. Husband watches me from the wooden decking. Why the hell doesn’t he get his arse down here and help? And why is he flapping a piece of paper in the air?

‘You’ve got a letter from Vincent Gallo!’ he shouts across the tops of the agaves and the yuccas.

‘Who?’

‘Vincent Gallo. That guy in films.’

What on earth is he on about? I give him a withering look as I push past him and dump the bags on the kitchen counter. My fingers are swollen and sausagey from the handles cutting off the blood flow. He dangles the envelope in front of my face. I snatch the bloody thing. I work on instinct. I work on details. I’m suspicious, like a detective. A slightly defective detective. I scan the envelope. My name and address are handwritten in black ink in a mixture of lower case and capital letters. The writing isn’t joined up, it’s spiky and seems out of control, shooting off in different directions. There are grooves dug into the paper from the pressure of the pen. I make a guess that this person is not formally educated and probably quite volatile. My first name is written in full – ‘Viviane’. This is unusual: any handwritten mail I get is usually addressed to ‘Viv’. It makes me suspicious. It’s too considered.
What’s he after?
The return address in the top left-hand corner is Sunset Boulevard, LA.
Oh yeah, right. Like that’s his real address. It’s probably there for effect
. This deconstruction of the envelope takes a couple of seconds. Husband is peering over my shoulder.

‘You know the guy,’ he says. ‘Not very nice. He was in that film,
Buffalo ’66
.’

‘Where he plays an independent movie director?’

‘No. That was Steve Buscemi. You know, he got his cock out in a film, the one with the blow job.’

Doesn’t sound like my kind of thing.

I open the envelope whilst Husband trots off to his computer to pull up a picture to jog my memory. He calls me over. I hover behind him but I can’t concentrate, I keep looking across the room to the clock flashing on our Bosch oven. I haven’t got time for this.

Then an image pops up on the computer screen of – well, what is it? I lean in for a closer look – is it a prosthetic? Nope, definitely never seen him before. I would have remembered that. I pull the letter out of the envelope. Just a couple of typed lines saying as little as possible. Can he email or call me about something? Kind regards. Formal. I like formal. Most people contacting me think they have to sound cool. It’s also mysterious. I don’t like mystery, I like clarity. Then that spiky black scrawl again. ‘Vincent Gallo’.

Either he wants money, thinks I’m still in the film business and wants to hassle me about work or, at best, wants to use the Slits’ music in a film. Like I said, defective detective. I pick up the car keys and head to the door. I look back at my husband, who’s still sitting at the computer scrolling through images. ‘Whatever this guy wants, I haven’t got it,’ I say, stuffing the letter into the cutlery drawer on my way out. Then I run down to the Audi to get the rest of the shopping.

I’ve received letters like Vincent Gallo’s before, although not for about ten years. Some really interesting guys too. I never answer them. It’s the whole ‘punk’ ethos of ‘nobody’s better than anyone else’ – we didn’t encourage fandom and that’s still with me – also I’m a very private person. But mostly, it’s that I don’t think I’ve got anything to give. It’s not like I’m going to meet them and shag them, and I haven’t got anything interesting to say: I will only disappoint. So best if, in the unlikely event that Vincent Gallo is a fan, he thinks of me as the wild and rebellious blonde guitarist I used to be, not the dull Hastings housewife I’ve become. Anyway, it’s nice to have a letter from a handsome American bad boy in my cutlery drawer. If I don’t answer it, maybe that nice feeling will last forever.

‘I really think you should find out what Vincent Gallo wants,’ Husband badgers later. He’s more excited about the bloke than I am. He goes on about it a couple more times that day.

Walking along Rye Harbour Nature Reserve the next morning with my friend Gina, I ask, ‘Anything interesting happened to you this week?’

She tells me about her knitting business and an argument with her colleague about which pieces should go in the shop window. ‘What about you?’ she says.

‘Nothing much. I got a letter from a guy called Vincent Gallo.’

She stops in her tracks. Her mouth drops open, her eyes grow bigger and rounder. ‘You let me prattle on about knitting, when you’ve had a letter from
Vincent Gallo
?’

‘You know who he is then?’

After a few more enquiries, it seems a lot of women know who Vincent Gallo is. And they think he’s delicious. I’m surprised, and enjoy the status his attention has conferred upon me. I email him and ask what he wants. He responds immediately that he wants to talk to me about something. After waiting a couple of weeks, during which he sends the same email to me a couple more times, I reply and get another immediate response: can he call me or I call him? He sends me two phone numbers.

I can’t call him! I don’t know how to talk to a man of the world. What will I say? I put off answering the email, but my husband is intrigued. He wants me to write back. He must think there’s absolutely no risk at all in opening up a dialogue between me and a handsome, talented girl-magnet. Even if he does live across the Atlantic, would you really want your wife emailing such a person? I wouldn’t.

I write back and say again that I’d rather he writes than calls to tell me what he wants. I’m stalling. I’m so green, so out of practice, feel so boring and bland that I don’t think I can handle a conversation, I won’t be able to think fast enough. This goes on for a while, us emailing backwards and forwards, him coaxing, me resisting.

I remember from my BBC days that you must do research on a person before you speak to them. I decide not to Google him – I like to get to know people in real time – but I rent his films
Buffalo ’66
and
The Brown Bunny
, and watch them with a girlfriend, tucked up on the sofa, giggling away together. They are funny and sad. I have a twisted knot of discomfort in the pit of my stomach all the way through them, especially
The Brown Bunny
– just how I like to feel when watching a film. I love movies about broken men, and this is one of the most honest I’ve seen.