Yesterday's Weather (8 page)

That is what woke me up.

H
ERE’S TO
L
OVE

I am thirty-nine. My friends tell me that their wives are not happy. My male friends, that is – old boyfriends, some of them. I meet them when I go back home, or they look me up when they come through Paris. It is that time of our lives: they ring, ‘Hello, stranger,’ and we meet for coffee and we catch up on old gossip and new babies and jobs and, late in the conversation, or the next evening when we meet for a quick drink, they tell me that their wives are not happy.

I don’t know what I am supposed to do about it.

I ask how they are and they say that they’re fine, and they might say it in a melancholy sort of way, but mostly I believe them – that they are content, or trying to be content. They work, and love their children, and they are interested in something like hiking or a new house – a second house: they like having this house and being in it at weekends.

‘And how is Maria?’ I say or Annie, or Joyce.

‘Oh. She’s up and down.’

This from my friend Shay, who I hadn’t seen in seven years, and love so much, and not just him, but a little show-off called Peter, whose wife deserves to be miserable, and a guy called Tommy – this odd, impossible boyfriend I had once, who ended up in God knows what sort of nuptial bliss with four ‘fantastic’ kids: even Tommy at the mention of his wife’s name looks vague, as though he can’t remember exactly what she is supposed to be doing with her life just now.

I do feel burdened by it, a little; by the great unhappiness of my male friends’ wives. Even Shay’s wife, Marie, who I never really liked at the time. I do feel burdened by the heigh-ho sadness of his love for her. And I wonder, in a way, why he wants to tell me.

It is easier to say these things to someone you don’t see every day, of course. And I never had children, which makes me a kind of throwback – I am still ‘fun’. I am still the way we used to be.

Well, yes. Though sometimes I also feel my life closing down. My husband is old, and that makes me feel old too, from time to time. He is not rich. He did not leave his wife – his wife died, some years ago. My husband survived terrible historical events, and then he found me.

‘So how are you?’ says Shay. ‘How the hell are you?’ looking me up and down – looking mostly at my breasts, bless him.

‘Good, thanks. Really good.’

Actually, they are usually men I have slept with, these guys from home, the ones with the sad wives. If the truth be told. But that isn’t the important thing about them. I never did get very fussed about sex. It was all the other stuff that did my head in.

‘You’re looking well,’ he says, by which he means I haven’t got fat, or distracted. I am still poised, or I try to be, as I sit at the little table, and engage the waiter in a lot of chat about whether and when we will eat.

Shay looks at me while I do this. He likes it in a way that I find disturbing and nice. He is proud of my expertise. And he heaves a nostalgic sigh when I light a cigarette – the Irish don’t smoke any more – I see his fingertips itch towards the pack.

‘
Sláinte
.’

‘Cheers.’

It doesn’t matter to my husband, this social self; he doesn’t care that I am Irish in an old-fashioned way, with a new lick of French. My Agnès B cardigan, and my vaguely hick Hermès scarf: these are certainly not the things that make me beautiful to him. Sometimes I would like to be understood by him, in a venal sort of way, but mostly I am content. I do not know why my husband chose to love me, but I know that, for both of us, it is a great romance.

‘Good to see you.’

‘So good to see you!’

‘So how are you?’ says Shay. ‘What gives?’

It is lovely to see Shay. We went to the same college in Dublin, but I know him mostly from working together in London. We had this great expat thing going for a while, drinking huge amounts on Friday evenings – probably to stop us ending up in bed together. Not that it worked every time. It all feels like another life now, but there he is, just as big as himself.

‘Oh, you know, nothing much.’

What can I say? My husband is sixty-three. He has no job. He is from Saigon. I know exactly what he is thinking when I look into his eyes. He never repeats himself. He told me once what he had witnessed – he told me over the course of one long night, in my old apartment in the Marais, and even now I think of that night as you might think of a dream.

He has a young mouth. I could say that.

My husband’s mouth is tight and soft as an opening bud. He is careful in his sexual pleasures. He likes to look at me as I walk around the room. His touch is always specific, and chosen, and light. When he makes love to me, there is very little hesitation. And though we do not make love as much as we used to, it is always ‘successful’ as these things go.

This is what I would like to tell Shay, because I feel accused – of course I do – of making some deal with desire; some compromise. But my life took an unexpected turn and now I think unexpected thoughts. I think, for example, that many couples are happy in bed – strange, mismatched couples that you see on the metro; ugly ones too. What a great secret! And I wonder if sexual unease – this modern malaise – I wonder if this is not the big lie. I would say that it is the big capitalist lie, but these words make my husband close his eyes, and fail to open them for a long time.

The man with his eyes closed is called Le Quang Hoa.

There are marks on his body. Sometimes he flinches away from things – dogs, of course, and sudden shadows, but also things that I cannot understand: the sound of ice in his glass of water will cause him to flicker, and, for the smallest moment, shut down. I am alert to these signs. I do not look for
them, or fear them, but I do recognise them, and I get up and take the glass out of his hand. That is all. He does not need me to do this. He lived alone in Paris for many years, before he met me.

But I take the glass away and I set it down. I wonder what that clinking sound does to his head. And when we make love, I am rarely inventive: I do not exult, or cause pain. I do not take the ice out of the bedside glass, for example, and run it down his spine.

This is what happens when love intersects with history. This is the distance you keep. Or it is the distance the Vietnamese keep. Or old men. Or it is the way my husband and I think about distance and tenderness – it is just the way we are. Who knows? We will have no children. We are very happy. Or, no. We are not happy, exactly. But we love each other very much, and this charges our lives with shape and light.

For the last few years we have lived off the rue Mouffetard. Every morning, when I go to work, my husband walks around to the municipal pool with his towel rolled under his arm. I think of him in the modern, blue water, swimming without a splash. He is like the old ladies you see on the French coast, who paddle out in their sunglasses and hairdos, and paddle back again, gossiping, like so many bodiless heads.

Shay gives in and lunges for the packet of Marlboro Lights. He fusses one to his mouth, and groans, long and deep. Then, when he has fully repented, he lights the match.

‘Tastes fucking awful,’ he says.

‘Well, don’t.’

But he doesn’t stop. And now that the evening is unleashed, I ask him about his wife.

‘How’s Maria?’

‘Oh. She’s up and down,’ he says.

‘Right.’

Because ‘up and down’ is Irish for anything at all – from crying into the dishes to full-blown psychosis. Though, now that I think about it, a psychotic is more usually ‘not quite herself’.

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘The moving around doesn’t help. We went up to Epsom, to head office, and they talked about – well, they talked about me going to Germany actually, but I didn’t think she’d be able for it. It was a tough one to turn down. Of course, the kids were just getting settled too, in their schools.’

I roll the ash off the top of my cigarette and keep nodding. I do love Shay. He has always had a large, and broken, heart. He is the kind of guy who would turn his pockets out in the street, to show he had nothing left to give. And here he is again, flinging his poor soul on to a café table for me; throwing it down – this old rag – because it is all he has.

‘I know it’s my fault. Or it’s the job’s fault. But I still love her, you know.’

‘Well of course you do.’

‘She wants to get back to her singing.’

‘Oh? Right.’

‘Well, that’s what she was doing before.’

Was it? I remember Maria – a tiny, pretty woman – we met once and she hated me, on sight. She was very keen to tell me how she trained as a gymnast, as I recall, but I don’t remember any singing. I’m sure Shay is right. I am sure she is a singer. I am sure she is a famous singer disguised as a wife, and that it is all Shay’s fault for thwarting her, and shrinking her life. I remember their wedding – her compact little waist under his baggy hand. I think about her doing back flips at the age of nine.

‘She’s really good,’ he says. ‘She’s brilliant. But it’s not something you can just –’

And he lets the sentence drop.

It is five minutes to six. Back in the apartment, my husband has cooked, and decanted, and cooked up again, a beef broth for noodle soup. He won’t wait for me to come home. He will pour it, quite soon, and slurp it down. After which, if I am still not back, he will switch on the TV. He likes science fiction: he is especially fond of
Xena: Warrior Princess
. If there is none of this stuff to watch, he will sit and read from a selection of medical books he has, also quack medical books;
pausing occasionally to push at a spot on his abdomen, or to flex and examine his toes.

Five streets away, I touch the back of Shay’s big hand and say, ‘It’s what happens.’

Shay looks at my fingertips, lying there. Then he lifts his large head and looks at me, like, What would I know about it? What would I know about ‘what happens’?

‘That feeling that you’re running out of road. It just hits women quicker. I mean, when they have kids, it hits them. That’s all. When they have kids.’

‘The thing I like about you,’ says Shay, ‘is you tell it like it is. “You get old, you get fat, it all turns to shit, you die.”’

‘Yeah well.’

So now it is my fault – the fact that Shay’s wife will never get on the radio, to croon her bedsit jazz. I am the one who is standing in her way.

‘It’s a very particular thing,’ he says. ‘Someone else’s dreams. It’s not something you can control.’

My husband was born in 1943. In the course of his lifetime, he survived invasion by the Japanese, the French and the American armies. At a guess, his family not only survived these occupations, they did quite well out of them. Hoa taught at the French
lycée
in Saigon. He was married during what we call the Vietnam War, and he had two sons. One of his sons lives over the border in Laos, and the other does not want to see his father again. When he was a young man, Hoa thought that Paris was the centre of the universe. After three years in a government re-education camp, he had no thoughts about Paris at all.

‘I got married,’ I say, suddenly. ‘Did I tell you?’

‘Christ!’ says Shay. ‘No, you did not tell me. You certainly did not tell me.’

He looks at me with great excitement. Then something drains from the back of his eyes.

The thing Shay actually likes about me – the thing they all liked about me – is that I didn’t want to marry them. I didn’t even want to fall in love. As far as I was concerned, you slept with someone or you didn’t. It was quite simple. Men really
like that; or they think they do. But the only person who understood it – and perfectly – is my husband, who took me by the hand, one ordinary evening, and led me into the next room.

‘We only did it for the visa.’

This is a terrible betrayal. It is not even true.

‘So tell us,’ says Shay. But I have already told him too much. So I make a little story out of it: about my work with refugees, and how we met over a table spread with photographs and chopped-up text and sticks of glue. I could say that the photographs on the table were of this or that victim, but that there was nothing of the victim about Hoa, though I could feel, as I stood beside him, the fact of his pain and the way he transcended his pain. But I don’t say this, because Shay will think I am some kind of pervert. And perhaps I am.

He is looking at me now, smiling with a slight and social disgust. He doesn’t quite know what to say. Then he comes over all Irish and asks what they think of it ‘back home’. Well, I think it is none of their business, actually. My mother died when I was six years old, which means that we are a more than usually fucked-up family; more than usually restrained.

‘I haven’t told them,’ I say.

‘No?’

‘No.’

‘Fair enough,’ says my friend Shay, who loves a sad little gymnast and gets her to load his dishwasher for him, every night of the week.

I wonder about my husband’s wife; if she too was disappointed by the smallness of her life, before it suddenly got very small indeed. I don’t know. I know that I am jealous of her, sometimes; a woman who was born twenty-five years before I was, and who is now long dead. I think that he must have loved her more than he loved me. I say this to him one morning when I wake up and find him sitting by the window in the dawn light. He looks out at the sky for a few moments.

‘She was very nice,’ he agrees, and thinks about her for a while.

‘I don’t remember her so well,’ he says finally, in his careful sing-song.
‘Je ne me rappele bien d’elle.’

I realise that I have no idea what it was to love a woman – or just to marry her – in Saigon, in the middle of the war. I have scarcely any idea what it is to love the man that I love now.

‘So tell us,’ says Shay. ‘What brought him over here?’

‘What brought him here?’

I start to laugh. Then I stop.

My husband sleeps in the afternoon. When he wakes, he folds the duvet at the bottom of the bed. He is a creature of routine. But he does not shout or cry if the duvet gets messed up again. He does not sit, as Shay’s wife might sit – weeping, at the state of the house and the destruction of all her dreams.