The Marriage Diaries Page 17

  And then splat.

  Me, not him.

  I'd hit something soft. There was a yell and a gulp and a splutter.

  “God, sorry, so sorry.”

  Immediately I recognized the semisubmerged body.

  It was Uma Thursday.

  Her arms had flailed around me; our bodies had touched along the entire length of our torsos. Had I really felt her contours as distinctly as I now imagined: her small, high breasts, the swelling between her legs? Probably not, but it didn't stop my imagining. She came up for air. She had on a Speedo costume that was obviously trying to be sexy as well as sporty, and it was cut fairly low at the front. I mean low in a good way, from an ogling point of view. Her hair was long and tangled, like a mermaid fallen into bad ways. I put out a hand to steady her.

  “Fucking idiot,” she said, in a really quite friendly way. “What is this—aqua-stalking?”

  I noticed that, yet again, people were staring. It was only a matter of time before someone called for an attendant or an armed guard or a Mossad SWAT team.

  “I was, er, it was Harry.” I pointed wanly.

  “He made you do it? For God's sake, man, take responsibility for your own actions.”

  Harry, where was he? Not where I'd pointed. No, there. Safe. He was sitting amid the python coils of a length of hose.

  “Where's yours?” I asked.

  “Babysitter. I'm getting out now before somebody else tries to mount me in the pool. See you in the bar?”

  She performed a smooth exit maneuver, jumping up onto her bum and then rising quickly to her feet. But she'd thrown herself forward a little too much, and one of her breasts fell neatly from its proper place.

  She looked straight at me and said, with no sign of embarrassment: “Well, that shouldn't happen.”

  Then she walked away, dripping, leaving the image of her pinky brown nipple behind her like a parking ticket.

  Harry, of course, then decided that he liked the swimming pool. We played water kangaroos for a while and then back to the running-around-the-poolside game, although this time with me tagging along on dry land. I must have looked like some fairy-tale ogre, chasing a child through the forest. Harry, in extreme contradistinction to his dad, looked incredibly cute in his swim trunks. They were the special baby kind, with padding to absorb catastrophes and a picture of a fish in a diving helmet. The fish annoyed me. What does a fish need a diving helmet for? The absorbency had never, as far as I was aware, been tested in combat, so when Harry said “potty,” I acted quickly.

  “You can wee-wee in the showers,” I said, carrying him back into the changing rooms. He was shivering and made a plaintive “eeeeeeeeeeeeeee” noise.

  There was a free shower stall. I put him down between my legs, turned on the water, and took off his trunks.

  “Eyes, eyes,” he squealed. I turned him away from the flow.

  “Do wee now, like Daddy does.”

  He looked up at me with his startling blue gaze.

  “Don't want wee.”

  “Well don't wee, then.”

  I squeezed some soap from the dispenser and lathered it up in my hair. I scooped two handfuls of suds and reached down to clean him. I saw that he was wearing his thousand-yard stare, that look of oddly unfocused intent; here were great thoughts, new discoveries, worlds beyond imagining.

  “Doing a poo,” he said.

  “Fuck. Wait, we'll go to the toilet. Can't poo here.”

  “Doing a poo now.”

  And so he was. Three hard balls fell onto the floor, followed by a few soupspoons of watery broth, splashed and mixed with the shower spray.

  “Oh, Harry.”

  It was sharper than it should have been. He looked up at me and mingled his silent tears with the falling water. I picked him up, and he sobbed into my shoulder.

  “Mommy mommy mommy mommy.”

  But I could only give him a fraction of my attention. The rest was directed to the floor of the shower. A couple of quick, skillful flicks sent the Harry shit balls over the plughole. Yet more urgent was the need to dam the flow of brown water now heading, in a series of small vortices and coiling eddies, toward the gap under the partition with the next shower. The next shower, which was occupied, I'd noticed, by the hairy Greek.

  Fuck, no stopping it. My dam was breached. The shitty water was under the partition, flowing around the feet of the man next door. I gave up on the loose stuff and tried to stamp the poo balls down the drain. Seemed to work okay. Then I held Harry's bum up to the spout and cleaned him off. He accepted it meekly.

  We were out of the changing rooms in record time, which meant we both reached the bar area with wet hair and in some general disarray. My socks were inside, out and I'd put his underpants on back to front, and although he couldn't put his finger on the problem, he knew that not all was as it should be in the pant department. Uma was there, reading a newspaper, drinking orange juice. She was wearing jeans and a crisp white shirt, which would have looked schoolgirlish if it were not buttoned so low, thereby bringing an instant reprise of the nipple memory. Her hair was still wet from the swim. I've always been a sucker for girls with wet hair.

  I sent Harry away to play: there were always kids around, and there was a little room off the bar area with a few crap toys and some rubber cushions they could bounce on.

  “I'm sorry about the, er, assault.”

  “You said. But you looked like you enjoyed it.”

  Surely to God I hadn't had a stiffy, had I? No, she was being flippant. Or had I? No, no. I hadn't had a spontaneous public erection since the fifth form. Perhaps this was flirting, like the no-panties. Quick, flirt back. What had I thought when I came in?

  She was wearing clothes, and, yes, that's it, “You look nice.”

  “I'm in my gym clothes. I look like shit.”

  “Funny you should say that, because …” And before I could stop myself, I'd told all about the incident in the shower. The courtly grace of the Elizabethan sonneteer strikes again. She showed neither disgust nor amusement. I sat down at the bar with her and ordered a beer. I actually ordered two beers, but I drank the first bottle in two great gulps.

  “Thirsty boy,” she said.

  Everything Uma said fell into one of two camps: the disdainfully dismissive and the grindingly sexual. She didn't have a neutral. And it wasn't the words. The “thirsty boy” thing could have been dismissive, but something about it suggested that what I was thirsty for was hot sex and that she had a quenching bucketful at the ready. It was something she did with her face when she spoke, a slight movement with her lips, not a pout but poutlike.

  “Nice seeing you at that party thing the other night.”

  “Oh, yeah. The swans. Your wife's very beautiful.”

  I've never known how to respond when people praise Celeste. I couldn't decide whether to be proud or bashful, modest or exultant. I wasn't usually embarrassed, but I was now. And I knew I didn't really want to talk about Celeste with Uma.

  “How's it all working out with your new job, the celebrity stuff, and entertainment and all that?”

  “It's better than selling trash, but it's not exactly presenting the network news.”

  “But at least you're on television. Isn't that what everyone wants these days?”

  “You'd need pretty low expectations to be content with what I have. Just being there isn't enough.”

  “But it's a start.”

  “Don't patronize me,” she said. “I'm not a shy teenager in need of encouragement. Not from you, anyway.”

  “Okay, fuck off, then. I was just trying to be nice.”

  “By saying things you don't mean?”

  “I say things I don't mean all the time. That's what being nice is. You should try it sometime.”

  “I always say exactly what I mean.”

  “Because you can't be bothered trying to please.”

  “Trying to please! What are you talking about? I hate that ‘trying to please’ line. You mean saying
someone looks nice when they look terrible or telling them you love them when you don't?”

  Uma was talking with her usual listless energy, but I saw for the first time that there was something brittle, something vulnerable about her. Things had happened to her to make her act like this. And so, when I replied, my voice was softer.

  “Yeah, that's what I mean, I guess. And why not? I'd rather carry the burden than scatter pain around when there's no need. There's a moral obligation to try to make people happy, even if it means gilding the odd dandelion.”

  “Don't you prefer to be told the truth?”

  “Truth's a slippery concept.”

  “Only to slippery people.”

  “Cheap.”

  “Look, we all have to make decisions about our lives, and to make decisions, you need accurate knowledge, and if people lie to you, then you don't have accurate knowledge, and so you make the wrong decisions. Nice equals nasty in the end.”

  “All I'm saying is that sometimes you should sugar the pill a bit.”

  “Do you always lapse into cliché when you're losing an argument?”

  “Usually. Anyway, I like clichés—they make me feel secure.”

  “If you were funny, you'd have used a cliché there and made a joke about it.”

  “Yes, I know that's what I should have done, and I tried, but I couldn't think of any. Rare as hen's teeth at the moment, good clichés.”

  “Sayings don't count as clichés. Why don't we have another drink?”

  “Good idea. You can lead a horse to water, but a pencil must be led.”

  “That's not funny either.”

  “I know, but it's an old friend, and I feel like I could use a few right now.”

  I don't remember what we talked about then. Her, probably. Eventually we got round to why she was a single parent. Oscar's dad was an executive at the station. She'd screwed herself into the job, and then later, when she was pregnant, he ditched her.

  “Didn't you think about a, you know, abortion?”

  “Of course, I thought about ‘a, you know, abortion.’ But I couldn't.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, first, I thought he was going to marry me, and then it was too late, without its being really icky. But I'm glad I didn't.”

  “Because of Oscar?”

  “Yes, because of Oscar. And because of God.”

  “What?”

  “Don't look so surprised, there's plenty of us about.”

  “Yes, but not many like you.”

  I was thinking about her underwear, or rather the lack of it.

  “It started because I wanted to get Oscar into the right school, so I had to go. And, like, years in advance. And then I started listening to the readings and the service, and I found that I liked it, that it moved me. What about you?”

  “I'm a Catholic, so it's all different for us. A bit like being a Jew. It doesn't matter if you believe any of it, you're still one, like it or not.”

  “Yeah, that's what you people say, but do you believe any of it— God, for example?”

  “Well, I've got what I always thought was an interesting line on it.”

  “That is so typical,” she said, laughing that beautiful laugh of hers. “You don't have beliefs, just an ‘interesting line’ on something.”

  “I'm going to tell you my interesting line anyway. There's this fairly common modern view that atheism and belief are equally irrational and that what we should all be is agnostics, perhaps tinged either with a bit of faith or a bit of doubt, as your nature dictates. But agnosticism is just as irrational. It suggests that, first, you've looked at, and weighed up, all the evidence and, second, that the scales are exactly balanced, that the pros and cons completely cancel each other out. And that's simply unbelievable. Oh, and atheists get on my nerves, too, because they're so smug, but I've never met an atheist who's read any of the proofs for God's existence.”

  “But aren't they all crap?”

  “Have you read them?”

  “No.”

  “Well, actually, most of them are. But that's not the point. The ontological argument's quite good.”

  I did a quick check. She was a young, attractive woman, who sometimes wore short skirts with no panties, so what was the chance that she would be remotely interested in the ontological argument? If she'd been a bucktoothed nerd, then maybe. But wait, no, Uma Thursday was paying attention. She wasn't mocking or scornful, or thinking I was a jerk. She was listening. I wasn't used to this.

  Then she had to ask the awkward question.

  “What is the ontological argument?”

  “Ah, it's quite tricky to explain, and I always seem to get muddled halfway through.”

  “Try.”

  I hadn't run through this since university, and even then, the knowledge was tenuous. Still, to the brave the spoils.

  “God is defined—I mean, could be defined—as the most perfect being. Agree?”

  “I don't know. But let's pretend I do.”

  “And you could rephrase that by saying that God is the thing nothing more perfect than which could be conceived.”

  “That's saying the same thing, sure, but in an ugly way.”

  “And even an atheist must accept what we've said so far, because we're just talking about definitions. Now—and this is the bit where I sometimes lose the plot. Hang on. Yeah—now consider two beings. One is a perfect being who exists, and the other is an otherwise perfect being who doesn't exist. Which is the more perfect?”

  “I sense a trap for the unwary. I suppose it must be the perfect being who exists.”

  “Spot-on. And bingo. God exists.”

  “What?”

  “You've just accepted that, by definition, God is the thing greater than which nothing could be conceived, and you've accepted that a God who exists is greater than a God who doesn't exist. Therefore, God must exist. I think.”

  It was an important moment. Would she, as she ought to do, unfurl a sneer or a savage laugh? Throw her drink in my face? Stab me?

  “I need to think about it. There's something wrong there, but I don't know what it is. It can't work, can it, because otherwise, everyone would believe in God, like they believe in gravity?”

  “There is something wrong with it.”

  “Oh, what?”

  “I can't remember. Something to do with existence not being a predicate.”

  “What's a predicate?”

  “I can't remember that either. It was a long time ago. I think it's something you can say about something.”

  “That narrows it down. You've got company.”

  Harry had appeared at my feet. He was holding hands with a curly-haired girl a few months younger than him.

  “Sheikh. Take little girl?”

  “No, we have to leave the little girl for her mommy.”

  “Why?”

  Otherwise, her mommy will be sad.”

  “Okay,” he said, and let go of the girl's hand.

  “I liked that talk. It was … stimulating. I didn't realize you had it in you.” Again the smile, to take the sting out of her words, or perhaps to put it in. “Why don't we go out one evening and talk some more?”

  “Okay,” I said, unconsciously chiming with Harry.

  “When are you free?”

  “Well, I suppose things are easier, freedomwise, while we're at Celeste's parents’. I mean, I don't have to be home to look after her.”

  “I'm sure she doesn't need you for that.”

  “Yes. No. I mean, she's with her parents. I don't have to worry.”

  “You should stop worrying, it's boring. What about next week?”

  Harry was waiting patiently. Uma wasn't. Decisive action was called for.

  “I er … Next week? Yes. I'll have to check my—”

  “Just let me know,” Uma said, and left with a toss of her damp red hair.

  “Do you like that lady?” I asked Harry on the way up the escalators to the second floor of the mall, the
one with Ed's Diner and the sushi bar and twelve other ways to take on calories quickly and efficiently.

  “Who lady?”

  “Oscar's mommy.”

  “I like milk shake.”

  “What flavor do you want today? Cheese and onion?”

  “No!”

  “Monkey brain?”

  “No! Silly Daddy.”

  “What, then?”

  “Verlinner.”

  “Okay, then, verlinner it is.”

  We found a booth at the diner, and over the milk shake, I thought about the weirdness of things. Who'd have thought that the good old ontological argument would have got me this much closer to adultery, that God should so intervene to carry me into sin?

  Oh, well.

  PRADAPRADAPRADAPRADAGUCCI 15

  Ludo phoned on Monday morning. I was in a meeting and said I'd get back, but I didn't. He called again in the afternoon. I was alone in my office.

  “Sorry about earlier,” I said.

  “No, don't be sorry. I wanted to phone so you didn't think that all I was after was a one-night stand.”

  “How do you know that's not what I want?”

  “Is it?”

  “I don't know. It might be.”

  “That wasn't the impression I got on Saturday night.”

  “Saturday night was different.”

  “Saturday night was wonderful. I've never known anything like it.”

  We made love twice more on the bloody sheets, tenderly. More blood flowed, but neither of us cried out again in anguish or lust. Ludo was hugely gentle, and although I didn't come again, it was special.

  “Yes, it was wonderful, but I don't think I can do it again.”

  “Why not?”

  His tone was unreadable. I had no idea if he was sad or relieved or furious.

  “Because I haven't got the space in my life for an affair. It's impossible.”

  “Then why did you start it?”

  Now there was no mistaking it: Ludo was angry.

  I thought about Saturday night. All through the long Sunday of packing and shifting and organizing, I'd shoved it to the back of my mind, where it lurked like a tumor. Sean was cheerful all day, even after bringing Harry back from his treat. In the evening, I drove over to Mom and Dad's, with Sean and Harry playing “Give me some sweets or I'll cry” all the way.