The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs (35 page)

He makes a puffing sound with his mouth in dismissal and then moves into a Southern drawl. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” He giggles nervously.

“It’s not funny, don’t put on a silly voice at me. Especially not a bad Bill Clinton impression. He was bloody lying. Is that what you’re telling me? That you didn’t have sex with her, but she gave you a blow job?”

“No!” He is outraged. Like I’m the one in the wrong.

“Enough of the semantics, just tell me what’s going on.”

“Nothing is going on.”

“You’re doing it again, you’re saying ‘is’ so as to avoid lying, but something did go on, didn’t it? Something
went
on.”

“Not really.” He slumps—all the fight’s gone out of him. The atmosphere has changed. I know now that the interrogation must end and the gentle prodding must begin. It pains me to repress my anger, but the longer I do so the more I’ll hear. “Tell me.”

“There’s a girl at work, one of the researchers.”

“Name?”

“Kitty.”

It would be, I think.

“She laughs at my jokes.”

It’s so hard to stop myself from mocking. “Right. And?”

“It’s not like I fancied her, particularly. It might sound strange to you, but physically I still fancy you the most. I’ve never been attracted to anyone the way I was, the way I am, to you.”

“She’s young, though, isn’t she?”

“I suppose. Yes, twenty-three or twenty-four, I think.”

I feel a pain in my stomach. “Go on.”

“She just made me feel like I was great. That I wasn’t just the most irritating man on the planet, but that I was funny and fun and clever. Almost everything she said started with the words ‘You’re so right.’ Or no talk, just laughter. Everything you say starts with ‘Can’t you just…?’ or ‘Why don’t you ever…?’ ”

“And?”

“It made coming home more bearable to have that to look forward to when I got to work the next day. Being made to feel like I had some worth. It was like swimming in a heated pool on a cold day—I dreaded getting out and having to face the freeze of being with you.”

It’s my fault, then, I stop myself from saying. “So what happened?”

“I found myself spending time with her. Going for lunch. Innocent.”

“Innocent,” I repeat.

“Nothing happened, Mary, not really.” He reaches for my hands.

I shake him off. “Something happened.”

“I would never jeopardize this house, this home, the boys. I would never do that.”

“But you did?”

“No, you did, Mary.”

“What do you mean?”

“I found your list thing, your catalog of my faults.”

“I know that. But how?”

“The night Gabe got ill; when you didn’t answer your phone, I thought I’d better look on the Net to see what I should be doing. I’d left my laptop at work so I used yours. You don’t usually leave it lying around, but you had. I clicked on the most recently opened document by mistake, and something called something like ‘May home work’ came up.”

“May Good Housekeeping.”

“That’s the one. I found this weird Excel document and I just saw something about wet towels, then I went to the health site to try to find out about rashes and forgot about the document, until later, when I saw you looking at me and then typing things. Next time you were out, I had a look at it.”

“About three weeks ago,” I say, thinking of his behavior and matching it to The List, the sudden flurry of positive points.

“Yes.”

“Would you read someone else’s diary if you found it hidden in a cupboard?”

“You could have password-protected it. On some level, you wanted me to see it.”

“On some level, I don’t know how to change the password on my computer. That document was buried about five layers back.”

“Well, I found it.”

“Just like I found the receipt of your little jaunt with Kathy, sorry, Kitty.”

“Bring it back to her.”

“Yes, I am bringing it back to her. We are talking about you and her first, then we’ll move on to The List.”

“But they’re connected, aren’t they? I worked out that it was a test for me, though I wasn’t quite sure of the scoring system or what was going to happen if I failed. What
was
going to happen if I failed?”

I shrug. “Don’t know.”

“Or if I passed? You were going to be nice to me again?”

“Back to the girl,” I say.

“Do you not know what was going to happen or are you not telling me?”

As he asks me, I realize that I don’t know, really. What would have happened had he passed was even more opaque than if he failed. I can’t tell him I thought about divorce because I don’t think I ever did. Not truly. “Look, let’s talk about the girl and then we can talk about The List.”

“OK. At first I tried to do all the good things on your list, like complimenting you and doing cooking and craft with the boys. And clearing up the mess afterward, obviously. And I’d go and check your spreadsheet and see if you’d noticed these things and most of the time, you had, you were adding them on. Or taking them away, whatever way you want to look at it.”

I nod. “It’s very fair, The List.”

“But I also noticed that it didn’t make much difference. Not in comparison to all the things I was doing wrong. But I noticed that the more I was trying to be nice, the more crimes I seemed to commit just by breathing. So I thought, fuck it, I might as well do them all anyway and then see what happens.”

“So that’s when you started pissing around doing the same misdemeanor over and over again. Making the tally go haywire.”

“Yes.”

“So that then you’d be allowed to get off with that girl, Carly.”

“Kitty.”

“Get off with Kitty in the meantime.”

“What do you mean?”

“Doing that old male trick of behaving so badly that your girlfriend dumps you and then acting all wounded and hurt when she does.”

“I didn’t want you to dump me. I don’t want you to dump me. The boys.”

“So did you sleep with Kitty?” I hiss her name.

“No, I didn’t sleep with her.”

“But you did get off with her?”

“Once. That night you’re talking about, the one with the champagne and the meze selection. It was very garlicky. And very small—you know what these posh hotels are like.”

“No, not really. Only then?” My head is trying to understand the chronology. “Was that before you found The List?”

“Twice, it happened twice. Yes, that’s right. I was determined that nothing should ever happen after that time, I felt so ashamed. But then, I went back after I read your list.”

“And did what? Kissed? Felt her up? Oral? What?”

“Kissed.”

“With tongues?”

“Yes, obviously with tongues.”

“Don’t you dare get stroppy with me.”

“I’m stroppy with you?” he says. “Mary, you spend your life in barely disguised fury with me.”

“Is it any wonder, with you spending your time snogging teenagers?”

“She’s twentysomething. And it was once.” I look at him. “OK, twice.”

“It doesn’t matter how many times you got off with her. It’s the fact that you wanted to. It’s the fact that you wanted to be with her and not with me. It’s the fact that I don’t find you funny
when I’m knackered. It’s the fact that you were glad when you saw my list because you thought it gave you permission to sleep with her, didn’t you? It absolved you of your guilt in snogging her and gave you the green light to shag her. And what stopped you?”

He shrugs.

“She did?” He shakes his head. “Was it just that you hadn’t gotten around to it? Were you just waiting for the right opportunity? God, Joel, I suppose I should be pleased that you’re always starting things you never get around to finishing. Or was it that if I hadn’t found the receipt it would have happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“So it would have happened eventually. And all because I wrote The List. You thought that meant you were allowed to do anything?”

“Doesn’t it?”

“No.”

“What did it mean, then? I don’t understand. Was this list a test of our marriage?”

“Less so than whether our marriage could survive you getting off with someone else.” I’m shouting now, I think, but I can’t really hear my own voice or his, it’s like I’ve lost the volume control.

“I know, I know. I’m sorry.” He starts to cry now, a currency that is debased since I saw him weeping while watching
Magnificent Obsession
at the weekend. “I don’t know what came over me. It’s just that all the things that were so great about us now seem so horrible. You’ve changed.”

“And you haven’t. That’s the problem, Joel. You’re still a people-pleasing child-man, who has to be loved all the time. And if I don’t have the energy then you’ll find it elsewhere. There will always be those women in the office.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. What are you going to do?”

“I asked you first.”

“I need to digest it.” Though I feel physically sick. “I can’t look at you right now.”

“I’ll go.”

“Where?”

“To my mother’s, I suppose.”

He’s leaving me? “If that’s what you want.”

“If it’s what you want.”

I shrug. I cannot speak for sadness.

“What will you tell the boys?” he says.

That Daddy’s left us? “You’ve gone away for work.”

I watch him pack, lightly with just a few pairs of pants and some clean T-shirts. He’s always kept a toothbrush at his mother’s and it’s been waiting for his return, as if this was always going to happen.

He looks at me. “Bye, then.”

“Yes, goodbye.”

I want to say something to make it all better, but I don’t know what or even if such words exist. The awkwardness is finally relieved when he turns away from me. I expect him to open the front door, but he goes back toward the bathroom. I follow him and watch him pick up his flattened yellow toothbrush and pop it into his pocket. My legs wobble and my mouth fills with a foul taste. Oh my god. The words are very clear and separate in my head, they run like a subtitle in bold letters. Oh. My. God. The yellow toothbrush is leaving its place beside a Spiderman electric one and a Disney first toothbrush, and instead will sit in a filthy mug at a chaotic twentysomething flatshare in an edgy part of town, where Kitty and other young girls wander around in their underwear and boys smoke weed and argue over the
Xbox, where nobody nags about stuff at the bottom of the stairs because there are no stairs and besides, nobody cares.

“Goodbye,” he says again.

I can’t speak. Please stay, one voice says. Just fuck off, says the other, furious that our discoveries have led to this permission of what he’s wanted to do with Kitty all along. This was not supposed to happen, this was never part of The List, he is going to get what he wanted from the start, chaos and sex, things that go together.

After he goes, I sit at my computer and stare at it. Out of habit, I type in an attempt to order my thoughts. I add his newest crime into the debit column in the hope that seeing it on the screen will mean that I understand its significance.

Has emotional affair with young woman at work and eventually kisses her, leaving me to deal with the domestic detritus in his absence, emotional and actual, while he escapes to her house for dirty sex in both senses of the word
.

I stare at it for a while but I don’t feel any nearer to knowing what it means or what I should do. I begin to type again, this time on the page of offsets.

Writes list of every annoying thing he does or says with aim of using it in evidence against him, while at the same time lusting after the ordered life and thighs of best friend’s girlfriend
.

I delete them both. I take the whole damned folder called “House admin” and drag it into the recycle bin. Then I drag it out again. I realize that I can’t delete the last six months, anymore than I can delete Kitty.

He’s left me, he’s actually left me. Of all the outcomes that I envisaged when I started The List, this was never one of them.

10

The List V
2.0

I don’t want to work and I don’t want to have lunch with Becky. I try ignoring her calls, but she is as insistent as a child tugging at my sleeve.

“I’m really busy, sorry. Frantic production, et cetera, you know, frantic,” I tell her on the phone.

“You still have to eat.”

“Sandwich at my desk.”

“I’d have thought you’d hate the way crumbs get into the keyboard.”

She’s not going to give in. “All right, but we have to be very quick.”

I put the phone down and see Matt hovering, no doubt waiting for the arrival of Lily so that they can giggle over funny videos sent over the Internet and cool additions to their Facebook pages.

“She’s not here yet.”

“It’s you I wanted to speak to.” He throws a document onto my desk. It’s my pitch about housework. “She love love loves it.”

“Who? The commissioner?”

“Yeah, Jane, obviously—says it’s exactly what she asked for. Says all women will love it, like it’s female Viagra or something.”

“That’s great.”

“Wants to have a meeting ASAP.” He pronounces it as one
word:
a-zap
. “Wants to thrash it out a bit more, but I reckon she is this close to commissioning it as a three-parter. This is exactly what we need at the moment. Genius.”

“Thank you.”

He looks at me to emphasize that he was using the word in its blokey, double thumbs-up way, rather than as an accurate description of me and my contribution to this triumph. “You can make?”

“Yes, sure. I’ll fit it in.”

“And you can work on it if—no, when—we nail this baby?”

“If you mean when we get the commission, yes, I’d love to. I have to. I’ve nurtured it. I suppose it is my baby.”

“Good. Though you might want to rethink your hours. You’re not the only parent around here, you know.”

Not even Matt can dim my excitement. I’d forgotten this feeling. I love my boys, obviously, and they are the mattress that my life lies upon, but a work high is like a silk eiderdown to wrap myself in. I am a genius. I had forgotten this, but I am really quite clever. I am better than other people at my job. I can do the interesting stuff as well as the boring bits of it. I want to ring someone to tell them. I realize that I want to ring Joel. My good mood evaporates. My eyes start to prickle only seconds after I’ve been smirking with professional triumph.