The Marriage Diaries Page 3

  Of course, most of the stuff on there was of somewhat specialist interest. Worryingly, I found no pictures of naked girls but much information about submarine warfare, Jacobean tragedy, and batting averages, which is all downright kinky.

  I also found the artfully disguised SEANJOURNALONE.DOC, in a folder labeled “Sean's Journal.” No doubt SEANJOURNALTWO.DOC would follow.

  But I don't want you to think that this was all quite as easy as I've made it sound. I am aware of the moral dilemma. Is it right to read someone's diary? No, it probably isn't right. So it was lucky this isn't a diary, just his silly scribbles, and no dates. And anyway, if he didn't want me to read it, why did he put it where I was bound to find it? The first time, I mean, it was just there on the screen, practically pleading with me to read it. I thought that rather left me, if not exactly in the clear morality-wise, then at least in the middle of an exploitable gray area. Another anyway was that Sean was always the great advocate of the “Totally Integrated Relationship”—which, on his part, mainly seemed to take the form of using the lavatory while I was having a bath, back in the bad old days when both functions had to take place in the same room. Yuck. And what is the point of a Totally Integrated Relationship if there are secrets?

  But still, as I said, it was a gray area. And what was the point of Raymond if not to help me with my gray areas? Raymond de Calvery doesn't like to call himself an analyst. When I told Sean about him, he said he sounded like Counselor Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation. I'm not sure if that was meant to be illuminating or an amusing piece of self-parody Either way, it didn't help much.

  I began going to Raymond because of the sex thing. The not wanting to, hardly ever. It's been six months now, since our first talk, and it hasn't worked so far, but it's quite nice having someone there to talk at, and besides, it annoys Sean, who thinks it's all “unfalsifiable pseudo-scientific bullshit.”

  When I told Raymond about the journal at our last session, he seemed very interested. He thought it was okay to read it, and to carry on reading it as long as I discussed its contents with him, because then it could come under the heading of “therapy,” and therapy made everything okay. There was something else to do with asserting my personhood, but I wasn't really listening, which is silly given how much he costs.

  But there it was. Reading Sean's journal was all part of my treatment, and given that Sean would be the main beneficiary should the treatment succeed, then reading it became entirely the right thing to do.

  It was Raymond's bright idea that I keep what he called a counter-journal, recording my responses to what Sean had written as well as setting out my own more general impressions and ideas. Raymond was particularly keen that I put down sexual fantasies and erotic dreams. Chance would be a fine thing.

  My own password is “pradapradapradapradagucci.” Let him crack that one!

  SEANJOURNALTWO.DOC

  THE GHOST OF A FLEA

  It all goes back to Max, and whoever it was who dropped out of his lunch party, leaving a gap for someone who could be guaranteed to have nothing better to do and not mind the fact that the lunch was today, in half an hour's time. A gap shaped exactly like me.

  “Look, Sean, old chap”—and, yes, he really did, and does, say things like “old chap” and “jolly good” and “pull yourself together, man,” but for some reason, you don't want to spit in his face or pelt him with rocks for it—“there's going to be a surfeit of girls, and there's the best part of an ox on the fire.”

  “Ox, eh? You know I'm technically a vegetarian? But I suppose, as the beast is already slaughtered, there can't be any harm …”

  Max didn't have to do the spiel. My alternative was to sit on the corroded foam of the couch in Carol's living room, eating cornflakes out of the packet and watching the fleas jump on and off my bare legs. The fleas, and therefore the bare legs, were Carol's fault. Aided by Clare and Cathy (the other girls in the house), and chided but not actively resisted by me, Carol had lured in some stray cat with choice tidbits, and it had brought, in the way of strays, a cargo of arthropodic freebooters. It had also brought along its bad gums and scattergun digestive tract, but they have less direct bearing on my story. The girls called it Tracy, which had a certain plangent inaptness.

  Over the years, I'd made passes, generally unsuccessful, at all of the girls. Except Tracy. Not with those gums.

  The bare-legs thing was part of my campaign to keep at least my bedroom and clothes flea-free: the little fuckers, horribly exposed on the white killing fields of my thigh and calf, could be picked off and popped with comparative ease. It wasn't my first brush with ectoparasitism. The subject of what was then my only published work had actually been a solitary pubic louse I found cramponed forlornly to my undercarriage. The poem had appeared on the number 19 bus, running from Euston to Stoke Newington, as part of an ill-starred attempt by London Transport to widen the Poems on the Underground concept. Part of the deal was that I had my e-mail address printed underneath the text, to “facilitate the breaking down of barriers between the artist and the audience.” Dialogues were envisaged, in which the writer would explain the use of imagery and rhythm, passing on tips about caesuras and metonymy. But my only missive was from a woman called Mandy, a close friend of Jesus, who recommended a toxic scrub for the genital region and close study of the Bible for the rest of me.

  Max was living in a little house farther up the Bakerloo line. I hadn't spoken to him for about a year. We'd known each other since our Manchester University days, when he lived in the same house as my then girlfriend. He stood out even more back then. It was in the mid-eighties, and the student body were engaged in a life-and-death struggle to bring down Margaret Thatcher—and with her, capitalism, apartheid, and the price of beer. I was briefly lured into the Militant Tendency group, by Sarah Benn, who never washed but just put on a new layer of makeup and perfume every morning, and who had tiny ears and enormous breasts, and who let me sleep with her on our first date, making me think that I had entered a glorious new world full of adventure and sexual fulfillment, before dumping me on the grounds that I “wasn't really a political person” and “had crap clothes.”

  There was one Tory, a heavy-metal fan, who was more the object of wonder than violence. In the three years he was around, I never once saw him speak to another person.

  Max was far from being the only Liberal, but he may well have been the only heterosexual one. He polished his shoes, his hair was neatly trimmed, and he sometimes wore ties. He spoke clearly rather than in the surly mumble that most of the rest of us adopted, and he told anecdotes about his dad, probably the finest orchestra conductor in the country. And he laughed at your jokes with a huge, braying bellow, which made you think that perhaps you were, after all, quite funny. But for all that, he wasn't like me, and so our friendship was never intimate, and the year or so in between our post-university carouses suited us both fine.

  So, a surfeit of girls.

  I had to make some important decisions. I hadn't washed my hair for a couple of days, so it looked a bit greasy, but at least that meant it would stay roughly in the right place. If I washed it, it might stage a revolution and overturn the established order (my hair had never abandoned the political commitment of my youth). It could go bouffant or cubist or choose some new way of making me look like an idiot. No, best stick with slick. Then, what to wear? Do you put on a suit to a posh Sunday lunch? I only had one, a light summer affair made from asbestos and llama, in a fetching shade of gravy. It had been rained on a month previously and had shrunk and stretched in random directions, and to wear it, I had to hunch and twist, and raise one leg off the ground at all times. So maybe not the suit. Jeans and a shirt then. Inspiration! I'd bought a white silk shirt at a sale a year before and never worn it. Surely that was the thing, both sedate (it was white!) and flamboyant (it was silk!).

  No time to get to the liquor store, but I had half a bottle of whiskey, saved for emergencies. Might look quite bohemian, that, I thought.
Or like a drunken stumblebum, it occurred to me as Max welcomed me in and all eyes in the dining room moved first to the half-empty bottle and then to my face and then back to the bottle again.

  I can't remember much about what followed immediately, as I was temporarily blinded by a supernova of blond hair and white teeth. The room seemed to be full of light, and nothing would come clearly into focus. The next thing I knew, we were at the table. There were three very pretty girls, Max, me, and a slab of meat, which looked as though Phil Spector's famous wall of sound had taken on bovine form and fallen dead before us. The conversation— which was about City things, business, PR, stocks, and shares— seemed to have been chosen with particular care to avoid those areas in which I could operate comfortably. But soon the wine did what wine does, and everyone was happy.

  I studied the Three Graces more carefully. Two were not, in fact, that beautiful. Just tall and blond and posh. One had slightly coarse skin; the other, a sharp nose with a curious tip that vibrated as she spoke. And both had that faint edge of hysteria, a leaning-too-far-forward-as-they-spoke, laughing-too-loudly-at-the-wrong-places feeling about them. Not that they weren't good company or, for all their minor failings, easy on the eye.

  But then there was Celeste. She was different in those days: less sculptured than she is now, less poised, less polished, less scary, less elegant, less cynical. And, as I'll discuss anon, with larger breasts. So, so beautiful. It was not her beauty, however, that captured me: it was her intellectual dazzle, the way she could engage each of us at the same time on a different point, like a chess master playing several simultaneous games, and never lose her thread, never miss a point.

  Max was his usual agreeable self, fussing over the condiments, ensuring glasses were kept full. He brought up the fact that I was doing a Ph.D., and I think I managed to make my work sound interesting and comprehensible, which always involved some ingenuity.

  There was only one moment when things looked as though they might take a wrong turn. I'd made a joke about the Young Hegelians’ not being a song by David Bowie but a proto-Marxist philosophical movement. No? You had to be there. Except that that obviously didn't help either, because I was trying to explain, “No, you see, ‘Young Americans’ is the song by Bowie, but that sounds a bit like Young Hegelians, which isn't—” when a flea jumped from out of my hair onto the table, making a tiny, but distinctly audible, “tock” as it landed on the polished wood. Everything stopped.

  “What the hell was that?” said Max. He seemed to reach around behind him, as if searching for an elephant gun.

  I thought fast. “Bloody fly in my hair,” I said accusingly, as if there'd been a failure of hospitality on his part. “Damn nuisance!”

  I put my finger on the little black scab, which looked like it was about to make a play for one of the girls. There was an open window behind me, and I flicked it out, saying cheerfully, “Out you go, little fellow, back from whence ye came.” I looked at Celeste, and she looked back at me and smiled.

  It was all over far too soon. Of course, I was too scared to make any kind of move. Max gave me back the bottle of whiskey as I left.

  It was months before another chance encounter brought us together again. In the meantime, Max, whose motives were highly dishonorable, had warned her off me, as a “dangerous character, famous lady-killer. Avoid like the plague.”

  It was the best PR I'd ever had. Who could resist it? Although I hadn't called, and we hadn't spoken at all, when she turned up with Max for a party at our house, sometime in the dead zone between Christmas and New Year's, I think we both knew that everything in our lives from now on was going to be different.

  Why had she come? Was it just a chance or some whim? Or something more considered and calculating? I could ask her, but she'd never remember. Women are too sensible to waste energy on nostalgia. She'd say something like “Party? And you did what? And I let you? Didn't I have any Mace?”

  We didn't even talk much during the evening, but I knew where she was every second. In the early hours, the party had dwindled to half a dozen half slumbering in my bare room. One by one, they drifted off, until just Celeste and I remained. She was lying back across the foot of the bed, her eyes closed, her hair arrayed around her, like dead Ophelia floating.

  For the first time, I touched her, reaching down to stroke her hair. She didn't smile or move, but I sensed that her flesh, her nerves, the tendons snaking through her body, her veins and arteries, the electrical and chemical dance of neurons, all spoke a silent yes, and I felt like leaping naked through the sleeping house yelling my delight.

  We didn't even kiss that night. The first took place sometime during the following week, and it was that that sealed my fate. It's all to do with what industrial confectioners call mouthfeel. What the scrofulous consumers of Snickers candy bars and the other quasi-toxic products that the English eat instead of vegetables most like, according to market research, is an initial resistance from a firm outer coating, followed by a melting interior. What they don't like is a sticky outside leading on to a tough core. Or sticky giving way to more sticky. Or hard followed by more hard. No, it has to be firm, then soft. The engineers and industrial chemists manufacture this with hydrogenated palm oil, glucose syrup, malt extract, and xanthar gum. (No coincidence, surely, that “xanthar” is an anagram of “anthrax”?)

  But I was talking about kissing. Kissing Celeste. I've had girlfriends who got things the wrong way round—sloppy, drooly lips first, then all clashing teeth, as well as one or two all drool or all teeth. But Celeste got her mouthfeel exactly right. Hard and then soft, hard and then soft. My God but she was a wonderful kisser. After the first kiss, I knew that I didn't want to kiss anyone else ever again and that I still wanted to be kissing this mouth in forty years’ time.

  Seven years ago, that kiss. Or eight. She was twenty-two years old, and I was twenty-six.

  But that was in another country, and besides …

  PRADAPRADAPRADAPRADAGUCCI 3

  But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead. Ha bloody ha. If I thought it meant anything beyond a vague determination to let us all know he's read his T. S. Eliot, I'd make him regret that. I was hoping that this diary-reading business was going to be funny and cute. I now rather fear that annoyance will predominate. Still, the allure of SEANJOURNALTWO.DOC has proved too much for me.

  Of course, I remember the party in his grubby old house in Fins-bury Park. I remember the batty, hopeless girls, and Tracy, with her gums. I also remember rather more about Max's lunch than Sean seems to. I remember his arrival with that determinedly bohemian bottle of whiskey. I remember his white shirt, a nasty thing of cheap lining silk, thin enough to show the dark circles of his nipples.

  And I remember well the little flutter that ran through the girls.

  But then two of us were single and one unhappily engaged, and so a reasonably well endowed Mormon missionary would have had us perspiring with lust.

  He was on form that day. I was used to two sorts of company: fashion people, who tend to know about how to look nice but little else, and my old friends, most of whom I'd known since school days, cozy as an old cardigan, reassuring, lovable, but not exciting, challenging, inspiring. If I craved novelty, then here it was. Sean, it seemed, knew everything. Or perhaps one should say that he had an opinion about everything, which, given enough self-confidence, is often indistinguishable from the real thing. He could switch from high to low culture and back again in a sentence, dangling Derrida and doughnuts, Foucault and fish cum, before us, and always moving too quickly for anyone to scrutinize the sense, or senselessness. He carved glittering ice sculptures, which dazzled the eye, and then seduced us on to new delights before we noticed how quickly they melted.

  I really ought to explain the fish cum.

  “What do you think taramosalata's actually made of?” he said, as we were dunking our strips of pita.

  “Fish roe, I thought?”

  “Fish eggs, isn't it?”
/>
  “Oh no. No no no no no.” He was smiling broadly, using that lovely roller coaster smile of his. “Roe yes, eggs no. You see, there are two different types of fish roe: hard roe, which is the fish eggs, the female gametes, and soft roe …”

  It was about then that I realized what was, well, coming.

  “… soft roe is the male gametes,” he continued.

  “You mean … ?”

  There was the little pocking sound of pitas being dropped.

  “That's it: spunk.”

  Needless to say, the taramosalata stayed mainly in the dish that lunchtime. And yet before our nausea had the chance to settle in, Sean had whisked us away to the realms of Greek myth and the story of Aphrodite, born of the foaming semen spilling from the severed testicles of poor old Uranus or Saturn or whoever it was (this is a long time ago, and a lot of fish spunk has passed under the bridge). From there, we found ourselves in a discussion of the differences between ancient Greek and modern forms of homosexuality, which would have involved a simulation of the preferred method of intercourse among the Greeks (face-to-face, standing up, between the thighs, apparently) had Max not, very sensibly, declined, and then we were back to Foucault, who'd written a book all about it.

  After lunch (I couldn't eat a thing, but I didn't want to come across as having, you know, issues about it, so I endlessly forked food halfway toward my mouth or moved it around the plate in geometric patterns), we settled into the living room. I made sure I sat next to Sean, and every time our thighs touched, I felt a surge of energy like nettle rash. His hair was long then, and the overall impression was definitely Byronic, although with a kind of edge that said, “I know that you think I'm trying to look Byronic, but I'm actually just playing with the image, so this is in fact ironic Byronic.” He wore little round John Lennon glasses, too, in those days, which added to the general air of doomed Romanticism.