The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs (39 page)

“Thanks. It means a lot for you to say that.”

We smiled at one another.

“That is so sweet,” said Becky as she scrawled another thing on her dossier.

•   
M and J to find five things to say thank you to each other for at the end of each day.

“Five?” I exclaimed. “Every day?”

•   
M can get back to working directly on productions, which will sometimes mean a five-day week and J will have to take holiday or work from home to cover missing days.

“Really?” said Joel. “You want to work as a producer again?”

“Producer-director, ideally,” I replied. “I didn’t tell you because we weren’t really speaking, but I came up with a pitch idea recently and they love it and there’s a really good chance that we’ll get a proper commission. I don’t want anyone else working on it, it’s mine.”

“Mary, that’s fantastic!” Joel hugged me. “I want to hear all about it, you should have told me. You are so clever, nobody’s getting anything commissioned at the moment. Bloody hell, you should come and work for me. What’s it about? I can’t believe it, you are a dark horse, my gorgeous clever girl.”

I couldn’t wait to show him all my ideas. There’s no one whose
opinion or enthusiasm I value more. The whole time I’d been struggling with the format on my own, when all the while I had my own personal sounding board. “It will be difficult, Joel, me working full-time, and you’re going to have to step up at home, but there’s no point in me working if I’m not going to be doing what I find most interesting, and being this production admin slop-cleaner is not it. Gabe’s going to start nursery full-time, so it seems like a good time to give it a go. If it doesn’t work, then we’ll have a rethink and train to become a teacher or psychotherapist or whatever, but I want to give it a try. And I can, with your help.”

“Well done, Mary. Brings us neatly onto money,” said Becky. “Presumably, you earn less.”

“At the moment, yes, I do, but when we met I earned more and when I can work—”

“All money earned to be pooled for household use, buying things for children, paying child minder, etc., and each of you to draw a ‘salary’ from this pool which is yours to use as you will.” She wrote quickly.

“And he needs to do his expenses. Every week, doesn’t he?”

“Yes, that sounds valid.”

“Every week…”

“And every month, you will be allowed to revise and rethink the whole of this list. In a calm and rational way with some ground rules. No discussion of it in front of the kids or others. No tutting or eye-rolling. No shouting or sulking.” She looked from me to Joel as she said that. “And if you can’t manage to do what I ask alone, then I will schedule a once-monthly meeting with me to bang your heads together to make sure that you do.”

“We will,” Joel and I said with one voice.

“And no revising the list between times, and when you do revise it, there’s to be no distractions, no listening to the radio or watching TV.”

“Or checking your BlackBerry,” I added. “Which reminds me…” I think about sex and how we don’t have time for it, what with the kids and all, but do have time to check our emails and our storage solution catalogs.

“What?” asked Becky.

“Nothing.” I blushed.

Housework took the longest. My initial list had over a hundred suggestions, including some obscure blinders.

“Taking out the rubbish,” posited Joel. “Taking special care to make sure all recyclable items are in the green box.”

“De-fluffing the tumble-dryer drum,” I countered.

“I see your de-fluff thingie and raise you a…” he paused. “A trip to the supermarket.”

“Disinfecting the powder-dispenser drawer in the washing machine.”

“Oh, for god’s sake,” said Joel. “You are making these up.”

“I’m with Joel on this one,” said Becky. “I don’t believe anybody disinfects their drawers.”

“They do. And a monthly boil wash with vinegar. Wait a minute.” I go to the washing machine and pull out the drawer, which is gratifyingly treacly.

“It’s like some sort of primordial slime,” said Joel. “I feel sick.”

“What is that stuff? Does everyone have it?” asked Becky.

“I don’t know where it comes from, either. There must be landfill sites crammed with dust and hairballs and the fluff from between people’s toes and that brown limescaley stuff in the toilets…”

“Make it stop.” Joel was clasping his ears.

And so it went on. And on. I found myself enjoying it as a validation of all that I had been trying to prove to Joel since the day
Rufus was born. Maybe it was the presence of Becky, but he was receptive in a way that he had never been before.

“It can’t just be one way,” he said, once we’d thrashed out yet another point. “If I’m to raise my standards, then Mary’s got to lower hers, too. We should be meeting halfway, right?”

“Not quite halfway,” said Becky. “Sixty-forty, I think. But you’re right, one way of feeling more satisfied with your house is to care less.”

“Quentin Crisp and all that,” said Joel.

“You what?”

“He said that after a few years, the dust didn’t get any worse.”

“You are revolting. Dust is made of human skin.”

“If it’s yours, it makes me love it even more, my sweet.”

Becky was scribbling another point on the list.

•   
M to learn to care less about the state of her house and to be more tolerant of occasional drops in standards.

In the manner of an aging woman changing the lightbulbs in her bathroom to 40 watts, I thought, but they had a point. If I stopped seeing my house through the prism of others’ eyes then maybe I could just step over the mess. Perhaps it could even be argued that not tidying was a form of time management and efficiency. If I wiped surfaces down at the end of a weekend instead of after every meal, I’d be saving myself half an hour of superfluous cleaning.

When I say I want to stop seeing my life through the eyes of others, I mean the eyes of Mitzi. For years it was as if I’d been wearing a wristband with the legend “WWMD”: what would Mitzi do? And now I know: Mitzi would perform humiliating acts of perversion for her husband alongside consequence-free infidelity with another woman’s girlfriend.

*     *     *

It had been there, lurking, all the while, but I was hoping we’d manage to avoid talking about it.

“I’m an idiot,” said Becky. “There are four areas of this relationship. Earning, childcare, housework and… can anyone tell me what the fourth is?”

“Watching TV?” I suggested.

“Anyone? Joel? Nobody? It’s you, you idiots.”

“Me?” I said.

“No, you plural: you two. Your relationship. How often do you have sex?”

“You can’t ask that. You most certainly can’t put it on the list for everyone to see.”

“Not often enough,” said Joel. He has no embarrassment about sex. He can talk about it like an agony aunt in a women’s magazine, full of gynecological detail mixed with revolting phrases like “making love.” Early on, I remember we were eating a takeaway when he said, “You know, you taste different when you’ve eaten a curry.” I offered to brush my teeth. “I don’t think that’s going to make much of a difference,” he said, before putting down his fork to test the theory.

“You can’t schedule sex,” I protested to Becky.

“I’m not going to say you have to do it on Saturday nights.”

“Thanks.”

“But you do have to do it once a week. Without fail.” I had a vision of Becky popping up between us in bed, pointing at her watch and reminding us that six days had passed.

“Joel, you were the one who said this was all becoming too business-like.”

“If Becky says we’ve got to do it, then we’ve got to do it.”

“What happens if I’m not in the mood? We’re not in the mood.”

“You get yourself in the mood,” said Becky. I gave her a skeptical look. “Don’t ask me, not exactly my area. I don’t know,
you give each other a massage, do it outdoors, on the kitchen table…”

“Get drunk.”

She ignored me and continued, “Have phone sex during the day, role play, a bit of S & M, wear some sexy underwear.”

“If I can get rid of all my vinyl,” said Joel, “you can chuck out your nursing bras and get some new ones designed for the non-lactating woman.”

“I didn’t know you noticed.”

“I didn’t think the little poppers to let down the cups were for my benefit,” he said.

“And you’ll need to do more things together as a couple. Without your offspring.”

“What, like a weekly date night?” I said.

“You know what Ursula would say to that?” asked Joel, and we said in unison, “Horrid Americanism.”

“Us sitting in a restaurant trying to talk about things other than the children and giving up and sitting in silence?” I said. “Sounds like it’s really going to help our marriage.”

“It won’t be that bad,” said Joel. “We could do other stuff, go to the cinema, watch a band. We never go to exhibitions anymore.”

I remembered the time, before we got married, when we saw an exhibition about representations of the nude throughout history and Joel whispered filth in my ear throughout until I could bear it no longer and we slipped into the toilet reserved for those with wheelchairs or babies needing changing for some brisk but highly satisfying sex. I never used to be able to recall that incident without feeling guilty about anybody who might have had more pressing need of the facilities. But then, after Becky’s exhortations about weekly sex, I found myself remembering it with a rippling in my groin and a first surge of optimism. This might work, I thought, this might actually work.

“We could have a book club,” I said.

“I’m not going to your loopy book club.”

“No, just the two of us. I loved how we used to share books, before we had children. How you used to read out loud to me.” We’d lie curled around each other for hours and he’d read out the latest literary hit in his deliciously deep voice, like my own personal audiobook. Then we’d talk or argue about its merits and meanings. I never read anymore.

“Good work, team,” said Becky, looking at her watch and making a “T” shape with her hands. “Right, guys, time out.”

“Did they teach that at mediation school?” asked Joel.

“Yes, they did, thanks. Ten minutes for tea and reflection, let us adjourn to the kitchen.”

Joel started flicking through the color magazines that had come with the weekend papers. He stopped at a spread and started making a two-fingers-down-his-throat gagging gesture.

“What is it?” I asked.

“This,” he said, pointing at its pages. “If you’re fond of sand dunes and salty air,” he read out loud, “you’ll love Mitzi Markham’s Norfolk retreat, which proves that reclaimed can also be refined.”

“Oh my god, is that the article they were doing when we were there? Are there any photos of us?”

“I think we’ve been edited out.”

“Not eco-chic enough, even though she made the boys wear that scratchy organic cotton.”

He turned the page. “They’re here. It’s just you and I that don’t cut it.”

“Look at them.” Our sons had mud streaked across their faces like an old-fashioned game of Cowboys and Indians. “Becky, are they not the most gorgeous children on these pages?”

“Definitely. Mind you, that’s not hard. There’s something of
the Midwich Cuckoos about Mitzi’s kids.” The four of them stood together in one of the photographs, their white-blonde hair blending into the sand dunes behind them.

“Just listen to this crap,” said Joel, as he read from the article. “Visitors to the vast family room are rewarded with panoramic views of the Norfolk skies and a wealth of Mitzi’s quirky finds. Blah, blah, blah. The glass atop the coffee table was salvaged from a derelict church that Mitzi stumbled upon while holidaying in the Île de Ré. ‘The kids love crawling underneath it and seeing how the glass distorts their faces,’ she laughs, relaxed about the wear and tear of life with four boisterous children.” Joel rolled his eyes before continuing: “And my husband and I find it perfect for our filthy sex games. Michael just won’t shit on glass that doesn’t have a charming back story.”

“It doesn’t say that!” said Becky.

“No, of course not. But it should do.”

“What do you mean?”

“You never told her?” said Joel. “Becky, Becky, Becky, prepare to be amazed—this is the best story ever.”

And so we told her, with Joel taking the part of both Mitzi with her rubber gloves and Michael, using our kids’ table from Ikea to crouch over in a tribute to the event. I did a running commentary, with additional dialogue from Joel. We laughed so much that our stomachs ached and tears ran down our faces. Every time we tried to compose ourselves, Joel would make his Michael “strainy face” and we would collapse once more. I laughed like I was young again.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at them,” said Becky, finally.

“I don’t suppose you’ll have to,” I said. “I’m not going to see her anymore so I don’t see why you will.” I had seen her only once since I had made my discovery about who the plumber and
the gardener were. It was at book club and all was the same—the fawning attendants, the stylish edibles, her choice conversational nuggets—but I was different. Funnily enough, I had had no problem looking her in the eye after the weekend in Norfolk, and I even managed to forgive her for trying it on with Joel nine years ago, but I couldn’t unknow what I had learned about her and Cara. I tried to listen to her business plans about her environmental products or her pride at her children’s myriad achievements, but I couldn’t, not any longer. She alluded once again to her marital sex life and paid tribute to Michael’s glories as a husband. Her life is a lie, but I knew one thing to be true: she would never leave him, whatever happened.

“What?” asked Joel. “You’re never going to see her? Not at all?”

I shook my head. I glanced at Becky and chose my words carefully. “She’s not a very nice person.”

“Finally,” said Joel. “What have I been telling you all these years?”

“I never much liked her,” said Becky. You don’t even know the half of it, I thought, and I’m not going to tell you.

“She is actually very insecure.”

Joel snorted. “They said that about Hitler.”