Recipes for a Perfect Marriage (19 page)

We spent an hour clearing the ground. He told me how he was sick of screwing models. He made a very convincing case (even though it takes very little to convince a slightly drunk woman in her late thirties that men prefer “real women”), and when he talked about having screwed up by not pursuing me more assertively, there was genuine resignation in his voice.

“So you’re married, Tressa.”

“Yeah,” I said, beaming at all this adulation, “I’m really happy.”

As soon as I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. I wasn’t really happy with Dan. If I was, I wouldn’t be sitting here. Ronan looked deep into my eyes in a way that only he could and said, “I’ve thought about you a lot.”

He faltered over the words as if he had more to say, but couldn’t. We were both holding back. Ronan because it was too crazy for him to say out loud, and me because I was afraid it was too late.

I wasn’t just afraid it was too late. It actually
was
too late. I was married. I had Dan.

I had to linger in the moment because it felt too good to let go, and so I allowed the inevitable to happen.

We leaned, we kissed.

It was soft and slow and perfect. I was instantly sobered with the shock of how right it felt. With Angelo, the emotion had been strong, but it had felt wrong.

I thought I had been safe with Dan, but that was before I knew
what sure
felt like.

Now I knew. I can’t describe it except that there was a deep, deep knowing.

They say there is one man for every woman, and mine, I felt more certain than I had ever felt anything in my life before now, was Ronan Robertson.

And I had married somebody else.

It was tragic.

So I ordered another shot, drank it down, and realized the bar we were in was part of a hotel. I called to the bartender and said, a little too loudly, “We want a room.”

“No, no. No way!” Ronan was up off the stool. “This is too much, Tressa, you’re married and...”

I could see the longing in his eyes. We were playing out a scene from our own movie.

“...and what?”

I could feel that my face was flushed, and vaguely wondered if I looked as beautiful as I felt. He certainly seemed to think so, as his face collapsed in defeat.

“And I want you,” he said. And that was it.

The room we entered was small, orange, irrelevant except for one detail.

We attacked each other in a passionate frenzy, separating briefly for Ronan to tear his shirt off and as he did, I caught sight of myself in a wall mirror I hadn’t previously noticed.

My face was devoid of makeup and slanted with drink. Briefly, I didn’t recognize myself and thought I was looking through a window into another room. It gave me a jolt.

This
wasn’t
me, in a hotel room about to commit adultery. Immediately, I tried to turn it around. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, just following my heart. Passions this strong cannot be ignored. Movies, love songs—irresistible, certain, destined love at first sight. It must mean something that I felt this way. Dan would understand, wouldn’t he?

And in the millisecond that my husband’s smiling honest face flashed through my mind, my uncontrollable ardor disappeared. I had to do the right thing. I’d resisted Angelo, though now I was behaving as badly as he had. This wouldn’t be a “no commitment” fuck. It may have felt right—but I knew it
was
wrong.

“I have to go.”

I buttoned my blouse and grabbed my bag.

“I’ll pay for the room on my way out.”

“Tressa. You can’t go. You can’t leave me like this.”

I let my eyes flick across him with a brief apology. I was afraid to look at him properly, in case I changed my mind.

“This isn’t right, Ronan.”

“I don’t have your number. Please, not like this... I’m begging you...”

As I was waiting for the elevator, I gave in to the impulse to go back and leave my number with him. When I reached the room I held my ear to the door and listened. Ronan was talking on the phone to somebody.

I took a business card out of my purse and quietly slipped it under the door.

When big things in our life start changing, we rely more heavily on small certainties to make us feel secure.

My body changed early. In my late forties, it began to act against me like a rebellious teenager. I started to heat up like a furnace at irregular, unpredictable times. My palms became sweaty, my skin erupted in blotches and spots, it felt like there was some energy anxious to escape through the ends of my fingers and toes, so that I would sew and knit and run around frantically all day, then collapse in the midafternoon, exhausted. Often, I felt like weeping for no reason, and that was possibly the hardest thing of all. I was never given to easy displays of emotion. When I cried, it meant that there was something powerful and terrible going on. I considered the misty-eyed sentiment of older women to be a weakness. Now, here I was leaking emotion against my will and I did not like it. It made me bad-tempered.

So I flung myself into the certainty of my own proficiency as a housekeeper.

My house was already being run with great efficiency, so I sought out new ways to express myself as an exemplary homemaker. I took every tired or unworn piece of knitwear in the house—from old hats to holed socks and threadbare sweaters— and unpicked and reknitted them into a dreadful hodgepodge of multicolored sweaters and cardigans, which my husband wore without demur.

I crocheted antimacassars and doilies until every surface of the house was covered in lace, and then invented new things to cheer the place up. Among the more ludicrous of them was a mono-grammed linen wallet for James’s daily newspaper and several decorative sacks to hold his gloves, hat, and shooting scarf.

I made tea cozies, drawer tidies. I took every unused item in the house and turned it into something else; old mackintoshes into gardening aprons, felt hats into kettle holders. On one frustrated afternoon, I attacked the baby clothes that I had lovingly kept, and cut them up into tiny triangles for cushion stuffing. When I saw the decimated pile, I wept with sentimental longing to have them back.

It was around then that I developed the habit of using a different cloth to polish every surface in the house. In latter years, Ni-amh called it my “rag habit,” as I never was able to let go of it fully. Cotton for cleaning, silk and nylon for polishing. Each rag then developed a special purpose in the house: this one for washing cups and everyday crockery, this one for china only, and another again for wiping and another for drying. This one reserved for saucepans and this one for floors. If you should use the wrong rag on the wrong surface, I would have to go back and start again.

This neurosis developed in tandem with the disintegration of my aging body. As I watched my childbearing years vanish behind me, I tried to fill the barren void with pointless fripperies. I had no purpose in life and was frantically searching for a new one.

In another age, I might have studied for a university degree. As it was, my legacy from that period was drawers full of doilies and a kitchen full of rags.

It was a terrible time. Just when you start to look forward to the wisdom of your maturing years, nature suddenly turns the clock back on your common sense and forward on your body.

It’s unsettling and makes you do things that you would never normally do.

Like insult a bishop.

*

As chairman of the board of management in James’s school, the local priest was James’s boss. And the bishop was
his
boss.

You had to kowtow to priests, that was a given. A bishop expected any manner of response, but only as long as it came within certain boundaries. These ranged from the standard respectful kissing of his out-stretched hand to barely contained, simpering groveling. Basically, unless you were higher up in the pecking order, like a cardinal—or the pope—you were barely worthy to breathe the same air as a bishop. For most of us, the local bishop was the closest we’d get to God without actually dying.

James thought their pomp and the petty rules ridiculous, because he was too political and too educated to believe otherwise. But his school was run, like every school in Ireland, by the Catholic Church, so he had no choice but to go along with it all.

Monthly, the priest stood up and roll called the parishioners’ exact contribution to the parish funds. Top of the list was some wealthy trading family with “a generous ten shillings”; bottom always some poverty-stricken unfortunate who could barely feed his family, the priest’s eyes raging with the disgraceful insult of their “half a penny.” It was a barbaric practice, and I had watched James’s cheeks blaze with shame and fury each month. But I never brought the subject up. To do so would have been to question his integrity, and I knew that his first priority was the education of the children of our area and the security of his own wife and child.

In all of the forty years he worked for them, James never derided the church or its hierarchy and we never discussed our feelings about his bosses and their treatment of him as being just or unjust. James did not grovel because he did not have to. His education, reputation, and standing in the community evened the ground between himself and the high-ranking religious. He treated the clergy with a quiet respect. No more or less than that which this gentleman showed to the dogs on the road, but it was respect nonetheless.

Needless to say, I was expected to do the same.

Every year, Bishop Dunne honored Kilkelly with his presence when he came to confirm the young people of our parish into the Catholic Church. As a local schoolteacher’s wife, I tagged along with my husband and contributed refreshments to a reception afterwards in the parish hall.

This particular year, I decided to pull out all of the stops and make the confirmation reception a special event, for no other reason than to make extra work to occupy myself. The trestle tables were laid with linen tablecloths, some of my own crockery was added to the humble parish stock, and I prepared a veritable banquet.

I went into a cleaning frenzy, scrubbing and polishing the rough wooden floors of the parish hall and running a knife along the edges of the Formica table trimmings, scraping out years’ worth of crumbs and gunk. I scrubbed the toilets and polished the taps and swept the front steps, so that the place was, truly, fit for a bishop.

I barely slept the night before. James was confused as to why I was going to all this trouble, but he said nothing. Which was just as well because I did not know myself. Secretly, I feared I might be losing my mind. And so, in the way that madness perpetuates itself, I woke on the morning of the confirmation and dressed myself as if I were going to meet the Queen. I rarely wore makeup, excepting a little lipstick on a Sunday, but on this day for reasons I am still at a loss to explain, I applied rouge to my cheeks and some blue eye shadow (which was still new in its box). I agonized over what to wear—so much that I ended up in a purple two-piece which was slightly too small for me, and I had to wear the jacket open.

When I arrived at the hall to finish the preparations, I thought the other women working were looking at me strangely. When I went to check that the bathroom was as I had left it the night before, I saw in the mirror that rivers of sweat had run down my cheeks and made stripes of my rouge, which is what they would have been staring at. I wanted to weep, but girded myself instead with a terrible determination.

I was so angry that afternoon. Angry at having gone to all of this trouble, angry at the way I imagined the other ladies were excluding me from their talk. Angry at my runny rouge, my incurable symptoms, and my uncontrollable, incontinent emotions.

But mostly I was angry with the bishop. Every year he swanned in here in full dress regalia like some shrunken, aged bride. Not bothering to talk to the parents or to thank the fawning ladies of the parish for all their hard work. When he arrived, nervous children were swept aside in the triangular magnificence of his train, while he glided up to the refreshments table and gave me a haughty nod of the head to indicate he was ready for his tea and cake.

Odious man. I cut him a slice of my rich fruit cake. The recipe I normally keep in reserve for Christmas. It was always my speciality and he didn’t deserve it, but I handed it over anyway.

Well. He looked me up and down with the disdain that seemed to be his permanent expression, then picked a corner of the cake and shoved it into his mouth.

“Eugh,” he said, “this cake is dry.”

Bishop Dunne was famed for these rude, thoughtless outbursts. He had great trouble keeping a housekeeper for that reason. But I wasn’t his housekeeper. I wasn’t his servant any more than this ignorant, greedy gremlin of a man was God’s. And my cake was
not
dry.

“Perhaps it’s
your
mouth that’s dry, Father.”

Your Lordship was flummoxed with horror. At the implication that he was a dry-mouthed old bastard, but most of all at my not using his proper title. Bishop Dunne put down the plate and, in a silent but incandescent rage, he walked out of the parish hall.

In the second he turned his back I felt an absolute terror wash over me as I realized what I had done. But as the last of his skirt disappeared out the door, the relief in the room was palpable. There was a sense that a round of applause might start up. Bridie Malone actually came up behind me and said, “He’s had that coming for years—well done, Bernadine!” In that moment I felt proud, and a smile was about to break on my lips when I saw James standing in the kitchen doorway.

There was a look of angry disapproval on his face.

“Dan, there’s something I need to tell you.”

If he felt even a tenth of the dread in hearing that statement as I did in saying it, that was bad enough.

“You’re leaving me.”

I was taken aback. Did he know?

“No, I’m not leaving you.”

“Then phew for that…” he said, laughing at his own joke. “Gotcha! Say, what time is it, baby? Gerry said he’d be here round about two to help me fix up the bike.”