Turn Us Again (34 page)

Jenny's father also rises from his seat. “Young man, if you don't stop shouting I will have to ask you to leave.”

I look at the bent, embarrassed face of the mother. “You're all emotional eunuchs,” I hiss at them, furious that they are judging me, wanting to judge them back.

Then I leave the table and race up to our room, where I pound the pillow in absolute hatred of the world and the destroyed evening, which I had wanted to be nice. And of course everybody thinks it's my fault. Another proof that I have a screw loose. But I'm just a human being, doing the best I can with what has been allotted to me. Perhaps my allotment contains stronger emotions than theirs, and they cannot understand me. I despise them for their pride in a control which takes no effort, because there are no real feelings to challenge it.

A hand on my shoulder snaps me out of my reverie, and I sit bolt upright, jerking my body to dislodge the hand. Jenny falls off the bed, where she must have been perching with extreme precariousness. She comes up hissing (God forbid she should scream for her parents to hear) “You need help! Talk to a psychiatrist or something and learn some control. I'm wasting my time with you.”

“GET OUT OF THIS ROOM!” I yell. It is all so fucking outrageous. I don't even understand how it happened. It was all so quick. What did I do that justifies my partner suggesting that I am a nut?

As a result, of course, I behave like a nut.

I look at my father, who removes his gaze, though he had been looking at me. I nod, trusting that he can see me from his peripheral vision. I understand that he doesn't want to justify his behaviour, because obviously it is terrible to hit your wife. He just wants me to understand his perspective. There are always two perspectives. Even with murder, there are things called extenuating circumstances.

While he's sleeping I pop out to Marks and Sparks and buy a fish pie for our dinner. Most of our meals come ready-made and frozen, but familiarity does not yield weariness.

If I had known it was the last meal I was to eat with my father I might have bought something a bit fancier.

After dinner we sit opposite each other on either side of the electric fire. I think my father looks a little anxious.

“This is the ending,” I say to him.

“It's not the ending,” he replies. “I've already told you, the manuscript is incomplete — it just stops.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

S
am's foreboding, morose presence seemed to cast a pall over the house. Madelyn brooded over the incident on the beach. His violence must have had something to do with her remarks in the car, but she could no longer recall why she had said it. She had never thought, or cared, about where Jewish allegiance lay. As to the comment about Jewish men preferring their mothers, perhaps it was a silly comment. So what? Other people made silly comments without incurring physical punishment.

He had never hit her in public before. He must have been in a towering rage. She wished that someone on the beach had leapt to her defence and beat Sam to a pulp.

The depression shuffled on for months, with rainy, miserable winter weather doing little to relieve it. Quarrels flared sporadically, followed by long, indifferent silences.

Madelyn had difficulty remembering the particulars of any one argument. They blended into an interminable season of unhappiness. She picked up her diary for the first time in months to record the details of specific fights, in case an avoidable pattern should emerge.

Sam and I have quarrelled. I thought it trivial enough, but he seems to be welling in bitterness and digging up all the wrongs I have ever done him, as usual. I feel like a straw doll. Whenever there is hostility between us life seems unendurable, or perhaps I create the hostility when life is unendurable.

We have both been tired all week. Last night we went out to the ‘faculty club.' Despite his initial reaction, Sam has taken my advice and is trying to be chummier with his colleagues. In any event, he has arranged a weekly meeting at the club with those who hate him least. We might enjoy it, if he didn't get in such a state about it.

We have to be in the Ladies (Ladies!) beverage room every Friday evening on the exact dot of 8:00, even though nobody else arrives till at least 9:00. We settle ourselves and wait for anyone else who might turn up. Often one or two couples come, but one time there was quite a crowd, and ever since then Sam has been anxious about seating space. The following Friday he rushed off to find a waiter to see if we were allowed to put two tables together. It being agreed upon, Sam rushed through the tavern, proceeding to scrape chairs and tables, yakking about ‘his club.' We were the object of a great deal of observation, from one end of the place to the other. So we sat at our two large tables, watching the door and feeling foolish. At 9:30 the others started to arrive.

The following Friday the same performance, except I believe this was the Friday one of the waiters rushed up to prevent us moving tables, thus providing further entertainment. I felt certain that few people would show up, for some reason, and no doubt I made a few foolish and neurotic remarks about the agony of waiting for the others, and the fuss we always have to make. I was trying to prevent the embarrassment of sitting alone at an enlarged table (the place is always full). Foolish, vain feelings, these may be, but they are real enough so why should they be the object of Sam's sneers? (He told me to ‘go and get some more pills.') We sat in black and complete silence for another forty-five minutes. Then Ruth and Mark appeared, making some irritating remark on our solitude. Sam launched into a heated account of the throng of new faces we had met last week, finishing with an unexpected attack on me, and how I was trying to sabotage the faculty club by insisting nobody would show up, and then sitting in aggrieved silence when they did.

Mark of course was uncomfortable, as strangers always are when married couples attack each other publicly. (I have never known anyone indulge in this activity apart from us, although I often feel hostility and scorn between married couples.) Things got a little better when the Smiths arrived, until Sam and Mrs. Smith got into a scarcely amiable battle about the merits of Liberals versus Conservatives in the Canadian government. Sam managed to get in two parting shots as we left, while the Smiths sat gaping like fish.

I made a few nasty comments about Sam's childishness on the way out, causing him to shout all the way to the car,

‘You fucking idiot — shit — fucking…' etc etc.

Very English gentleman!

All the way home he bellowed, ‘And who likes me the most (talking of the Smiths), not only likes, but respects me the most! You don't have any friends but me' and so on and so forth
.

Madelyn decided to go away for twenty-four hours, making arrangements for a babysitter to come while Sam was lecturing. Sam often talked of the recuperative effects of isolation. Perhaps a night in a nice hotel might jerk her out of this ongoing hopelessness.

She left a detailed list of instructions regarding Gabriel and watched the purple hue of stress and anxiety mounting in Sam's cheek as he read it. Still, he accepted her request because he understood it.

The hotel was wonderful. It boasted an indoor pool and she swam for hours, back and forth, admiring her shimmering pale skin underneath the surface. She took great delight in the passage of her smooth body through the water and imagined that the other occupants of the pool were watching her as well. How long had it been since she had revelled in her own body like that? Not for years. Not since Gabriel.

The food in the restaurant was first class, and she sipped an expensive glass of white wine with her salmon and profiteroles. Eating alone was a strange sensation, and she felt self-conscious, in case other people thought she had nobody to eat with.

There was a band playing in the adjoining pub, and Madelyn kept looking in that direction, wishing she had the courage to walk in alone.

“Have you finished, Ma'am?” the waiter asked, one hand hovering over her empty plate.

“Yes, thank you.”

“That's great music. Why don't you go in and listen to them for a while?”

Madelyn looked up, startled. Brown eyes held hers, crinkly laugh lines, grey lacing his goatee.

“It is hard to go into places like that alone,” she said, surprised at her own frankness.

“I'm getting off soon. I'd be happy to go in with you.”

Madelyn hesitated, then thought she would not have hesitated before her marriage.

“Thank you. I will wait.”

She took his arm like a shy school girl, but when he steered her towards a table she pulled in the opposite direction. “Let's dance.”

And Madelyn danced. Her feet flew over the dance floor just like they used to, and everyone watched her, and the waiter swelled like a proud turkey and tried to dance closer but she whirled away, laughing like a mad woman.

In the end he captured her, and leant too close as he pulled her to the table. “I'm not fit enough for this. Can I get you a drink?”

While he was away another man approached. “You're some dancer.” Then he hesitated, so Madelyn prompted him. “Shall we?”

And she let him press up against her in the slow part. “What's your name?”

“My name is Anne.”

And the waiter waited, and Madelyn danced, and bestowed a few kind words as she knocked back the drink he'd bought her before pointing to the handsomest of a group of womenless men. “You! Know how to dance?”

And when she got back the waiter wasn't waiting but it didn't matter because The Handsomest had a drink in his hand. “You are so beautiful. Why haven't I seen you here before?”

“Maybe because I'm an old married woman,” Madelyn said, and roared with laughter. And by the fifth gin and tonic he put his hand on her thigh when he told her she was beautiful, and by the seventh he put his hand on her breast. And she flicked it off like a spider, overcome with an overwhelming urge to leave. She stood up. “Thank you for a lovely evening.”

“That's it? Stay for one more.”

“Another time.”

“When? When will you be here again?”

“Same time next week,” she lied and lurched out of the pub.

It was pleasant to escape to the sanctuary of her room, away from all those eyes. She ordered coffee and soaked in the bath. Luxury.

The tension in the house was palpable when she got home the next evening. Sam was drunk, crouched over the kitchen table like a huge black bear. Gabriel ran out of his room to greet her with a kiss and then disappeared again. Madelyn realized he had got into the habit of disappearing whenever the atmosphere was unpleasant.

Sam looked at her with a vile expression. “I was awake most of the night. Gabriel had nightmare after nightmare.”

“I hope you were patient and sympathetic. Did you take him into bed with you?”

“I did. He started rolling back and forth like something demented.”

“Yes, his nights are very exhausting. I don't know what's going on inside his head, but the doctor said he'd grow out of it.”

“I did not sleep, and I had to teach classes today as usual.”

“Well, it's only one day. I'm tired every day.” Madelyn wondered at herself even as the words slipped out of her mouth. She knew Sam suffered from stress and could visualize him lying beside the restless, sweating young body, incapacitated by anxiety and tension all night long. Wondering if he could cope, wondering if Gabriel would come to harm at his hands.

Still, the fuss he made about everything in life, when normal people just coped. He had obviously been brooding and drinking for hours.

“It's such a drag to come home to this stifling environment after such a lovely night away.”

Sam said, “I'm going to make you see my point of view.”

“I don't care about your point of view.”

“I'll make you see.”

Madelyn ran towards the bathroom but she couldn't shut the door in time. He blocked it with his foot and wrenched it open, aiming punches anywhere they landed until she dropped to her knees, crouching in a protective position over her face and body. Then he punched her on the back of her head, again and again as hard as he could.

At some point he staggered back and her hand snaked out and slammed the door shut.

“I'll make you see!” he shouted from the other side.

Madelyn stayed in the bathroom for a long time.

Later, maybe hours later, there was a timid knock on the door.

“Mummy?”

“I'm here.”

“It's my bedtime, Mummy.”

“I'm coming.”

Her body unfolded as though it had been tied in an uncomfortable position.

She walked laboriously, like an old, old woman. Still, she smiled to show Gabriel that everything was fine. Helped him to brush his teeth, read him a story as usual. Lay in bed and tried to sleep.

Sam came in at two or three in the morning. He sat on the side of the bed and looked at her.

“Are you all right?”

She did not open her eyes. “Yes.”

The incident was never mentioned again.

The next day Sam gathered all his home brew and emptied the bottles down the sink, hundreds of dollars worth. He stopped drinking for several months, even at the club when people slapped him on the back and urged him to have a little nip, since he was such a morose bugger when sober. Madelyn looked on smiling.

For a time, Sam's guilt and unhappiness were so powerful she almost felt sorry for him, although it did not prevent her from calculating ways and means to exploit his docility. Without referring to what had happened, she suggested he see a psychiatrist. He agreed like a lamb, and on the psychiatrist's recommendation they went together for the first session. This turned out to be a good thing, because Madelyn might have been suspicious if Sam had refused to go again on the basis that the psychiatrist was an idiot. As it was, his idiocy was clear to both of them, as soon as he held up a picture of a horse wrapped in barbed wire.

“What do you see when you look at this picture?” he asked Sam.

“I see barbed wire and a horse.”

“How does that make you feel?”

“Are you working according to some formula? If I say ‘It makes me feel good,' does it indicate an urgent need for hospitalization?”

“No, of course not. I'm just trying to get you talking.”

“Well, I'm not a child. You don't have to show me unrealistic pictures. Just ask questions.”

Instead, the doctor held up a picture of a burning house. “And how does this make you feel?”

“Oh, for God's sake.” Sam half-rose to his feet, then glanced at Madelyn. She gave a little nod, and they left. That was the end of that.

When Sam's guilt became a little less crushing, he started to cast investigative tendrils to see if forgiveness was forthcoming.

“I've been a naughty boy,” he said, and stood back to gauge Madelyn's reaction.

At first she did not even look at him. The absurd inadequacy of his apology — if that was what it was supposed to be — offended her.

After that he repeated his refrain frequently, gazing into her face as she leaned over him to place his dinner on the table, whispering into her ear as he tried to curl spoon-like around her unresponsive body in bed.