“I’ll show you now,” she promised. “But you’re not to make any noise.”
She went over to the intercom and switched it on and started to say things into it in a croony, singsongy type of voice. “Anna,” she crooned,
“oooooohhhhhh, Aaaaaaannnaaaaaa.”
I stared in fascination. “What on earth are you doing?” I asked.
“Shut up,” she hissed as she turned the intercom off. “I’m giving Anna a psychic experience, d’you see?”
Still the rain bucketed down. The canal burst its banks. Roads were impass-able. Cars were abandoned in flooded lanes. I heard about all these things from other people, as I never left the house.
I thought about James all the time. I would dream about him. Lovely dreams where we were still together. And when I woke up I would forget, for a few minutes, where I was and what had happened. I would be bathed in a gorgeous warm fuzzy happy feeling. And then I would remember. It was like being kicked in the stomach.
I had heard nothing from him. Absolutely nothing. I really had thought that after a week or so he would contact me. Just to see how I was or at least how Kate was. I couldn’t believe that he had no interest at all in Kate, regardless of me.
The saddest thing of all was that he didn’t even know her name was Kate.
I rang Judy when I’d been back in Dublin about five days. I asked her if James knew where I was and held my breath. Hoping and hoping that she would say that, no, he didn’t know. That would at least explain why he hadn’t contacted me. But she said, sadly, that James did know. Then, though it tore me apart to do so, I asked her if James was still with Denise. Once again, she said yes.
I felt, not that I was crying inside, but that I was bleeding inside. Bleeding to death.
I thanked Judy, and hung up the phone. My hands shook, my forehead sweated, I felt sick at heart.
There were times when I felt that James really would come back, sooner or later. That he had loved me so much that he just couldn’t stop loving me overnight. That it was just a matter of time before he appeared on the doorstep, distraught with remorse, beside himself with guilt, wondering if it was too late to reclaim his wife and child. And, in that case, that it might be an idea to get out of bed and wash my hair and put on some makeup and wear some decent clothes in honor of his imminent arrival.
But then I remembered what a contrary bastard Fate is. The more hideous I looked, the higher were the chances that James would arrive out of the blue.
So I stayed in the nightgown, the golfing sweater and the hiking socks.
I wouldn’t have known what lipstick was if it jumped up and bit me.
I often felt like calling him. But it always happened in the middle of the night. I would be gripped by terrible panic at the enormity of my loss. But I had no idea how to contact him. I hadn’t been able to humble myself sufficiently to ask Judy for the phone number of the apartment he was sharing with Denise. I could have called him at work during the day, but the anxiety and the desire to talk to him never really came upon me in the daytime. I was really very glad about this. What good would calling him do? What could I say to him?
“Do you still not love me? Do you still love Denise?” To which he would reply, “No to the first question, yes to the second. Thank you for asking.
Goodbye.”
Time passed. Slowly, very slowly, my feelings started to change. The landscape of the desert changes very gradually as little breezes lift grains of sand and move them, sometimes a few feet, sometimes miles and miles, so that at the end of the day, when the sun sets, the face of the desert is completely different from the landscape it had in the morning when the sun rose on it. In the same way, tiny little changes happened in me.
But they were nearly too small for me to notice them as they were happening.
It wasn’t so much that the lead weight of hopelessness had left. But something else had arrived. Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together and give a warm welcome to Humiliation.
Yes, I started to feel humiliated.
What took you so long? I can hear you saying.
Well, sorry, chaps, but I had a major backlog of Loss and Abandonment in my in-box.
A little twinge of humiliation at first. An odd little feeling one day when I wondered how long Judy had known about James and Denise. That feeling expanded like a balloon until humiliation was nearly all I felt. I smarted with it. I was raw with it. My soul blushed with it.
Who had known that James was having an affair? I wondered.
Had all my friends known about it and talked about it among themselves and agonized about telling me?
Did they say things like “Oh, we can’t tell her now, not when she’s pregnant.”
Did they look at me with pity?
Did they thank God that at least they could trust their husbands or boyfriends?
Did they say to themselves, “The one thing Dave/Frank/William would never do is have an affair. He mightn’t do any housework/give me enough money/ever discuss a problem, but at least he wouldn’t be unfaithful.”
Did they look at me and sigh huge sighs of relief and say, even while feeling guilty, “I’m so glad it’s her and not me.”
I was so angry. I wanted to shout at the world, “You’re wrong! I thought I could trust my husband! I thought he was too goddamn lazy to have an affair. But he did have one. And so could Dave/Frank/William.”
When I thought about Denise I cringed. When I thought about herself and myself exchanging pleasantries about the weather and me complimenting her on how well she was looking and telling her how my pregnancy was going and thinking that she was so sweet and nice, when all the time she was having sex with my husband and making him fall in love with her, I wanted to travel back in time and grab myself by the scruff of the neck and drag myself, protesting, away from the conversation with Denise and admonish myself, like a mother to a naughty child, “Don’t speak to that horrible woman.”
And then I wanted to get Denise and beat the living daylights out of her.
Then I started to feel extremely angry at James.
The humiliation arrived gradually. It sidled its way in and one day I turned around and it was there, grinning at me. “Hi there,” it said, as though we were old friends. “Remember me? And I’m sure my friend Jealousy needs no introduction.”
I was with my mother one afternoon when she put a video on. Some film that was supposed to be a romance, but it was really an excuse for porno-graphy. She was engrossed in it, and “tut-tutted” energetically. I tried to pay attention to it and feed Kate at the same time. I kept losing track of the plot. “Who’s that he’s having sex with now? Is that the woman from the elevator?”
“No, silly,” said Mum. “It’s the woman from the elevator’s daughter.”
“But I thought he was found in bed with the woman from the elevator,”
I said, confused.
“Yes, he was,” explained Mum kindly. “But he’s being unfaithful to her now, with her daughter.”
“The poor woman from the elevator,” I said sorrowfully.
Mum gave me a sharp glance. Oh God, no. I could feel her thinking in alarm. Was I going to start crying? I bet she was sorry that she hadn’t gotten something innocuous like The Amityville Horror or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
I watched the two people on the screen, having sex, enjoying themselves at the cost of the woman in the elevator’s happiness. I suddenly thought of James and Denise in bed.
They do this, you know, a voice in my head told me.
They go to bed together. They have sex. They lose themselves in their passion for each other. She touches him. She sleeps with his beautiful body and his delicious skin and his silky black hair. She can wake up and watch him sleeping, his spiky black eyelashes throwing little shadows on his face. What are they like together? I found myself wondering. What way does he treat her? What’s he like when he’s with her?
Does he gentl
y scrape his stubbly jaw across her face in the morning, the way he used to do to me and then laugh at my shout of outrage, his even teeth showing very white in his handsome face?
Does she go to sleep with her head on his muscular chest, her arm thrown across his stomach, his manly arm around her neck, smelling the faint scent of Tuscany from his lightly tanned skin, the way I used to?
Does he wake her in the morning by trailing his hands along her thighs, the way he used to with me, and instantly turn her on, the way he used to with me?
Does he pin her down in bed, his hands holding her arms above her head, his legs locking hers, grinning down at her, leaving her deliciously helpless as he moves slowly against her, driving her mad with desire, the way he used to with me?
Does he kiss her with an ice cube in his mouth, turning her mouth cold and her body hot with desire, the way he used to with me?
Does he gently bite the curve of her neck and shoulder and send shivers of lust through her whole body, the way he used to with me?
When she wakes up in the morning is her first thought, “Jesus, he’s beautiful and he’s in bed with me”? Because mine always was.
I was insane with jealousy.
Or do they do it differently? I wondered. Is she different from me in bed?
Is she better? What’s her body like? Has she a smaller butt, bigger tits, flatter stomach, longer legs? Is she really adventurous and does she drive him crazy with passion?
I wondered all this, even though I knew Denise and could have answered most of those questions myself. (Smaller butt? No. Bigger tits? Yes. Flatter stomach? Unlikely. Longer legs? Hard to tell. We’re probably neck and neck.)
She didn’t act or behave like a sex kitten. She had always seemed so nice and well… ordinary, I suppose, but now in my head she was Helen of Troy or Sharon Stone or Madonna.
I was being torn apart by jealousy. It was like having a burning spiky ball in my chest that was sending out green poisonous rays all over my body, choking me so that I could barely breathe. My head was filled with pictures of what I imagined they were like together in bed.
I just couldn’t bear the idea of his desiring her. It filled me with powerful and impotent rage. And fury. I felt like killing them both. I felt like sobbing hysterically. I felt ugly with jealousy. Disfigured with it. I felt my face was twisted and green with it.
It’s such an ugly emotion. And it’s so utterly pointless. And it has nowhere to go.
If you lose someone or something, you feel a loss, then after a while you fill in the hole in your life and the loss gradually gets smaller and smaller and eventually goes away. There’s a point to the pain. There’s a reason and a direction.
But there was nothing to be gained by feeling jealous. And I wouldn’t have minded but the jealousy was caused entirely by myself. It was my own imagination that was causing me the pain.
And I was feeling the pain, not because something had happened to me but because something hadn’t happened to me. Why did something that was going on between two other people and didn’t involve me in any way hurt me so much?
Well, I was damned if I knew.
I just knew that it did.
seven
The time that followed is still referred to in our house as the Great Terror.
Helen alludes to it even now by saying something like “Do you remember the time when you started behaving like Adolf Hitler and we all hated you and wished that you would go back to London?”
The change in me was terrible.
It was as though someone had flicked a switch.
I went from feeling sad and lonely and miserable to explosive rage and jealousy and desire for revenge on Denise and James. I fantasized about terrible disasters befalling them.
I was like a madman on a rampage. I had so much anger and hatred in me, and the person who should have been receiving the brunt of it—i.e., James—wasn’t there. So my family, who were innocent bystanders, who, in fact, were trying to help me, ended up being shouted at and having their doors slammed instead of him.
When I first returned from London there had been a dignity to my suffering. I felt a bit like a Victorian heroine who had been disappointed in love and had no choice but to turn her face to the wall and die, albeit beautifully, surrounded by smelling salts, from her grief. Like Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Liaisons.
Now I was more like Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter. Psychotic.
Crazed. A danger to myself and others. Walking around the house with a mad look in my eyes. Rooms full of conversation falling silent when I entered them. Mum and Dad watching me fearfully. Anna and Helen leaving rooms when I arrived.
I wasn’t wearing battle camouflage and didn’t have a belt of bullets slung across my chest and wasn’t carrying some kind of fearsome-looking automatic weapon and didn’t have a grenade in my pocket. My face wasn’t smeared with dirt (although on reflection it might have been; the baths went by the wayside completely during this terrible time). But I felt as powerful as if I had all those weapons, and I was treated with as much fear as if I did have them.
The Great Terror started the day I watched that video with Mum. (I won’t go into the details of what happened there. I’m too ashamed of myself.
And anyway the video shop agreed to drop the charges. It was totally true what the assistant said. They only stock the videos. It was no reflection on their personal opinions or morals. I was just a little bit overwrought at the time.)
The Great Terror continued for several war-torn days. Anything could trigger a tantrum in me, but especially romantic scenes on the television.
My head constantly played a video of James and Denise in bed together.
When I saw other loving couples on television I was pushed to overload.
Luckily I saw no loving couples in real life or I might not have been responsible for my actions. Mum and Dad certainly didn’t behave like a loving couple. And Helen had a steady stream of young suitors through the house but she made cruel, teasing fun of them and their puppylike devotion. Which pleased me in a grim, cold kind of way. As for Anna—well, that’s another story, to be told another day.
I cried an awful lot during this time. And swore. And threw things.
As I said, television usually upset me. I’d see a man lean over and kiss a woman and immediately the green fire of jealousy would rush through me, excruciating energy would fill me. I would think of James. And I would think of my James with another woman. For a second it would just be a thought in the abstract, as if he was still with me and I was being silly and imagining “worst possible” scenarios. And then I would remember that it had happened and that he was with another woman. The realization hurt just as much each time. The tenth time it happened it was as awful and as shocking and as sick-making as the first time.
So I might throw a book at the television, or some shoes at the wall, or Kate’s bottle at the window. Or really anything handy or close by at all would be thrown at a nearby surface. Then I would swear like a fishwife and stomp from the room, slamming the door so hard that slates probably fell off the roof. It got so bad that when I thumped into the sitting room and the television was on, Anna or Helen, or whoever was there, would flick the remote control and quickly change the channel from whatever they were watching to something inoffensive like the Open University program on applied physics or a documentary about how fridges work or a game show in which all the contestants had obviously had lobotomies.
“What’s on?” I would growl at them.
“Oh, err…just this,” they would reply nervously, indicating the television with a flutter of their hands.
We would all sit there in silence, pretending to watch whatever program the remote control had found for us, me giving off palpably frightening vibes, Anna or Helen or Mum or Dad sitting stiffly, afraid to talk, afraid to suggest changing channels and waiting for a decent interval to elapse so they could leave and continue watching their program on
the small television in Mum’s room.
And when they would get up and start sidling to the door, I’d pounce on them. “Where are you going?” I’d demand. “You can’t even bear to be in the same room as me, can you? It’s bad enough that my husband has to leave me but imagine my own family treating me like this.”
The poor victim would stand there awkwardly, feeling shamed into not leaving but definitely not wanting to stay.
And hating me for it.
“Well, go on then,” I’d tell them viciously. “Go.”
Because I was so terrifying no one, not even Helen, had the courage to tell me that I was being incredibly selfish and, in the vernacular, a right little bitch. I held the whole family at ransom with my wild tempers and unpredictable mood swings.
Kate was the only one I treated with any respect. And even that only happened occasionally. Once when she started crying I shouted sharply at her, “Shut up, Kate!”
Quite unbelievably, she stopped immediately. The silence that followed sounded almost stunned. Try as I might I haven’t been able to reproduce that tone of voice since. I’ve practiced with all kinds of different inflections, like “Shut up, Kate,” or “Shut up, Kate,” or “Shut up, Kate,” but it makes no difference. She blithely continues to bellow, no doubt thinking, “Ha!
You might have frightened me once, for about a nanosecond, but you can be damn sure it won’t happen again.”
I had so much energy. My body wasn’t big enough to contain all the energy that flowed through me. I went from having no energy to having far too much of it. I had no idea what to do with it. I felt as if I was going to explode with it. Or go crazy with it. I was torn because I didn’t want to leave the house but I felt as if I could run a hundred miles. That I would go crazy if I didn’t. I had the strength of ten men. During those awful couple of weeks I could have won gold medals in the Olympic games in any sport you care to mention.
I felt that I could run faster, jump higher, throw farther, lift heavier, punch harder than anyone alive.
That first night that the jealousy kicked in, I drank half a bottle of vodka.