Vertigo (8 page)

The river is at a high point now though the weather is finally hot.

D took me walking by the river. There are women it is dangerous to talk to. D is one. You try to tell them something and they start telling you a story about yourself. Before you know it you are pinned, can’t move. I wanted to tell D everything, including about him, but I didn’t. Feeling the wet air suspended all around me, I closed myself down like windows before a storm. Afterwards, I’m glad I did.

I heard he was having a party. He arranged to meet me twice but cancelled both times. When he sent a message saying he could not meet me, his tense slipped. He said he’d really wanted to see me again. I’d feared it was too true. There’d been a point at which he’d wanted to see me, but it wasn’t now.

He has invited my friend to his party, but not me, the friend of whom I said that I wondered that he didn’t like her, not me: she is prettier. And he said,
oh the British and their blondes.

He is not British. He is from elsewhere. His party is for a holiday from elsewhere. I thought he was not the sort to celebrate, but it seems he is. I haven’t heard from him for a week, haven’t seen him for almost a month now. My blonde friend, who is not British, will ask whether he will see me at the weekend. I will find out what is happening—perhaps. And maybe we will meet next week.

He is having another party. This time he has asked me. I’m wary. It was a general invite sent out to friends. The email came only an hour ago: there has been an age of strategy since then. How to reply?

I don’t. But I go.

On my way to the party I expose myself to the point between work and social in which nothing can happen. The libraries have closed; the cafés have closed. The bars are open, but I don’t feel like drinking; the restaurants are open but I don’t feel like eating—and I don’t want to spend the money. Should I have a cocktail before the party, for courage? Or would I arrive with too much of its evidence on my lips, in my cheeks? Should I walk the streets (if it is not raining)? Could I read, write, in the corner of one of the big café-like bars, inconspicuously enough? Could I shift time from this moment to add to other times, times spent—speculatively—with him? With all the time I have, I could learn a language, I could read a book, I could write a book.

In the end I walk nowhere and the wind gets up and the rain starts and it is still too early to go to his party. It is colder than I thought it would be. I didn’t know it could be so cold on a warm day.

I get drunk at the party. He doesn’t talk to me. I go into the bedroom and his clothes explode from the wardrobe, violent with dry-cleaning bags. He’ll be elsewhere soon. I know he doesn’t mean to stay. Already, he’s been gone a while.

Oh, there were nice times that summer, but they were attached to the wrong people: dashing through the rain with B, with whom I didn’t want a relationship, although he did. He took my bracelet and said he could smell my perfume there, a medieval love token. I thought this over-elaborate but the sun shone and the rain at the same time and there were puddles that looked deep and reflected the sunwashed sky.

But that was in July when it rained. Now it’s hot enough to stand outside pubs at night and although there are not enough people in town to eat all the fruit in the supermarkets, there are sometimes still parties.

It never hurts to ask (that’s what he said to me). That’s not true. Sometimes it hurts to ask.

The difficulty is working out the right point in time. As he still hasn’t answered my emails I have waited for him in various places hoping he might turn up.

Finally I saw him last night at a party and he ignored me until at last he took me aside and said he was
sort of seeing someone else,
and I said,
s’okay
and he shrugged and said,
that’s how it goes,
and I shrugged and said,
that’s how it goes.
And when he said it he was quite close to me and he was wearing the jacket he’d worn when we met with the mend at the elbow, and suddenly I felt I could reach out and grab the mend and pull him toward me and kiss him but that wasn’t possible any more, even though I’d come to the party hoping he would be there and hoping it might have been. And I was wearing the jacket I had on when we met, and when we met it had been draped around my shoulders and every time you kissed me it had fallen off one shoulder and you’d reached your arm around me to pull it back on.

For tonight’s party, I’d put a temporary tattoo of a spider on my wrist because I’d thought it would be fun.

Over by the windows, L was talking with his work junior, M, and he said,
you’re my Dalston homegirl
, and she snarled,
yeah man
, because she wasn’t: she was just younger than him and a woman and not white.

Then L said,
make me a rollie, M
.

And she rolled one for him, thin and black.

It was not a fun party.

We don’t talk now but sometimes I still like to see whether you are online. I can see when you’re there because next to your name on my screen there’s the little green light. I have the same green light. It says,
available
.

At least I didn’t create a fuss, make a scene. At least I didn’t leave inelegantly.

Elegance is a function of failure. The elegant always know what it is to have failed. There is no need for elegance in success: success itself is enough. But elegance in failure is essential.

I left quietly and walked over the bridge to the station and it was not raining and nobody knew I had gone.

New Year’s Day on the sofa. I folded my life in on itself, seven times. The last few folds it only bent. I was surprised it was so bulky.

Last night I went to a New Year’s Party where I met an Indian. I mean that’s how he described himself—“I am an Indian.” I talked to him for a long time. He seemed neither more nor less interesting than anyone else at the party, where I knew no one well and most people not at all. He told me he had once taught business studies but had now gone back to running a business.

Everyone at the party was so lovely. Everyone was so happy. Everyone’s websites were now in color with hand-drawn lettering. Everyone liked cooking and eating. Everyone didn’t see why they shouldn’t like—shoes! Everyone had taken pictures of themselves or had pictures of themselves taken in thrift-store clothing. Everyone agreed they should take time out for themselves. Everyone knew the difference between need and desire. Everyone made surprisingly snarky jokes. But then everyone laughed. Everyone smoked, or used to smoke, but everyone also, or instead, did—yoga. Everyone was younger than me, even those who were older. Or maybe it was the other way round. Everyone knew how to take their time. Everyone knew the value of real success, though everyone once worked for a flashy magazine or somesuch. Everyone knew how to say fuck. Everyone knew when to say, fuck it. Everyone wasn’t hurting anyone. Everyone knew how to keep some distance. Everyone knew when to let it go. Everyone knew when to say enough is enough. Everyone enjoyed cake. Everyone had a secret tattoo. Anyone who didn’t was keeping it secret. Everyone was surprised at some things. Other things were no surprise to anyone. Everyone knew there’s a time and a place, though not for everything. Everyone knew what it was like to be in a bad place, which was not here, or now. Everyone liked looking at things that were pretty. I can still make things that are pretty, but I don’t now, and, as for the things I made in the past, I don’t even like to look at them anymore.

You made yourself small on top of me, and I held myself still while you told me about the lovers you’d had while we were together. I held myself carefully because if I showed any reaction you would stop telling me. And then I would know no more than before.

I know you will buy me a drink.

I know you will take me out to dinner.

I do not know if you will tell me the truth again.

I can’t exchange this trinket for any of the others.

Because you are practical, you will put me away into some part of your memory that is folded. You will put me into the past tense. You will not be concerned to resolve your thoughts about me. You will not want to know what I think of you. Your skin has many folds. You can put many memories away in them, one for each woman. You will live with me there all your life: a little canker that does no real harm, folded into your skin. You have even not put me away yet, as, here I am, back beside you. You snore and it sounds like a shower of change dropped on the pavement. Your snore interrupted my dream in which I had unsatisfactory sex with S’s wife. It made her spill coins from her pockets, and then it woke me.

I am sitting here on the bus when I begin to wonder how it is my clothes have grown neater than my daughter’s.

We are sitting at the front of the bus. My daughter did not want to, but I wanted to see out. The bus is driving toward the sunset. The driver pulls down a black plastic sunshade across the whole front window in which there is an open frame. The road ahead passes like a movie.

My pose is informal, legs folded under me on the seat, but I remain neat. However I try to shake this neatness, I cannot. I realize it is the neatness of my mother, who we are traveling to see.

My daughter, who has just become a teenager, sleeps on my shoulder. What I had she has now. Maybe.

I wear tight clothes, but tight clothes make me neater. If I wear loose clothes, my body flows out and pushes against them.

My daughter wears tight clothes too, but they do not contain her. She has not learned yet how they can. Does she already feel the discomfort of her thighs spreading in her sausage jeans? Doesn’t she already know it’s wrong to have legs that look like this?

I lift mine and cross them.

They look better. But, still, I look neat.

Among other middle-aged women I don’t look too neat, and this pleases me.

I am dressed for, what? For anything that might happen to me: keep it coming! I’ve learned that it does. I am dressed for things that are not. I am not too sexy, not too casual, not too unassumingly unassuming. I do not look like I have made an effort, but I do look like I might have made an effort to look like I have not made an effort, which is only polite. And I will not fall over if required to run in my shoes.