The Weekend, page 12
She always thought of Michael and Catherine as belonging to a previous generation, though her brother was only five years older, and Catherine was the same age as Jude herself. What was it? The friends had discussed this, when Sylvie was alive, how oddly some people seemed more part of your parents’ generation than your own. Sylvie said it was the obsession with doctors. For a while they agreed: all four women despised doctors, and only went when absolutely necessary. They refused prescribed pharmaceuticals—at least they told each other they did—and scorned people they knew who’d turned their ailments into a hobby, who lived their lives in waiting rooms, were competitive about their specialists, having test after test after test. Adele and Jude and Wendy and Sylvie despised those women, whose idea of conversation had shrunk to recitations of their blood lipid levels or bone density counts.
But Michael and Catherine were not so much like this; it wasn’t to do with the body. It wasn’t even the conservatism, though that was part of it.
It was Wendy who diagnosed the difference: ‘The problem is the inner life,’ she declared. ‘Your brother has none. Nor does his wife.’
Jude pointed out that Michael subscribed to the symphony, and had season tickets to the theatre, that they hobbled along (that was cruel, but Catherine’s back was beginning to curve with compression fractures and osteoporosis; Jude had no sympathy) to openings at the art gallery and bookish events. They were patrons of this and that charity and research facility and festival.
‘Doesn’t matter if you still don’t know how to think,’ Wendy had said.
After that Jude listened more carefully to Catherine and Michael’s descriptions of what they heard and saw. They listed events and venues and who was playing the lead, directing, conducting, speaking. If you asked them what they thought of it they couldn’t say, beyond ‘Oh, marvellous,’ if Sonia Dreyfus or Elsa Blake were in it, or ‘Very impressive,’ if the actor was a man they knew from television. Catherine’s book club worked doggedly through the Booker shortlist, coming down on the side of the winner if they knew the author already, against if they didn’t.
Occasionally, Jude prodded Catherine or Michael on something specific, some detail about the production or the novel—she’d heard the lighting was distracting, or the script fell away in the middle, or the prose was overblown. They answered in vague, uncomfortable terms, and then looked at her suspiciously, as if she were trying to catch them out. Which she was.
This was the sort of moment when Catherine would begin to talk about something practical, something that provoked no dangerous opinions. Holidays, perhaps, or gardening. She might ask, with a little acid in her voice, ‘Back at the what’sit-called—ashram—for Christmas again this year, Jude?’ and they would go through the usual charade. Catherine wasn’t stupid, inner life or no inner life. When Michael sensed this bristle of friction between the two women he retreated into a distracted silence with a strange half-smile stuck on his face.
Was this what getting old was made of? Routines and evasions, boring yourself to death with your own rigid judgements? Visiting her brother and his wife in their cavernous house in the leafy suburb pulled Jude a little closer, each time, to death. She could feel it.
On evenings like these with the stifling air of their lush green garden pressing into her lungs, she would kiss them goodbye a little earlier than usual—she felt her brother’s dry, pecking dart at her face, the relief visible in his shoulders as he waved from the step—and she would be sure to walk with a straight back to her car, pretending her body moved as fluidly as it had done in her youth, without the stiffness, without the familiar licks of pain flickering up her spine. She wanted them to see how very unlike them she was, to feel the contrast of her French linen pants and fine silk cardigan against Catherine’s ironed pink t-shirts and navy skirts.
Jude knew she had cruelty in her, but she didn’t care. She would reverse swiftly, a little recklessly, down their long driveway, swivel out onto the wide silent street, and turn her sleek black Audi for the bridge, the city, home.
Now she looked up from the menu and found that wineglasses and a bottle of adequate riesling had appeared, and so had Wendy, and Adele was settling back into her seat.
‘I charmed them.’ Adele winked.
How had she missed this? Sometimes it shocked her a little, that things could go by, could happen on the physical plane in which her body sat, but she did not perceive them taking place.
Once Wendy had said, carefully not looking in her direction, ‘Of course, some people have too much inner life. You still have to live in the world, in your body …’ Their eyes had met, and then Wendy looked away, noncommittally. ‘That’s what I think, anyway.’
That’s what Sylvie thought, too. It was why she showed up at Wendy’s with the puppy, to force her outside, into the world. There were other reasons too, but Sylvie had been right about Finn. He did force Wendy to wake, eat, move. It may have saved her life.
Wendy had the dog, but Jude had nothing. Except she had the thing nobody else would ever understand. It had come to Jude a long time ago that the only time she felt fully present in the world—when the membrane between her and living was actually permeable, and that nourishment of every kind could pass through, that she could be contributing worth to the world as well as drawing from it—was when she was with Daniel.
At first it was a shock to understand this. But soon it made sense of everything, of the way she lived her life. She went about the world, in the times Daniel was not with her, in what she thought of now as the pre-expressive or aggregation phase. Gathering experience, formulating opinions, developing ideas, trying out recipes and restaurants. Getting things out of the way: shopping, household chores. Absorbing things—events and politics and aesthetics, reading and observing and analysing and then folding into herself these things she had read and seen and thought. And then, when Daniel presented himself at her door—once a week, or once a month—she would feel both a bodily and an intellectual relaxation, when all the complexity of what she had seen and done and thought about in the preceding weeks would move through her, and she was ready to integrate these things into her character, rejecting this, selecting that. It was as though Daniel was a kind of trigger mineral, his presence essential for the absorption of all the other spiritual and intellectual and physical nutrients gathered, but unintegrated, inside her.
Of course they had broken up. Of course she had tried with other men, would have at times accepted a lesser person. But after several listless attempts—it never worked—she gave up. She would rather be alone with the gathering force of all this inside her, never to be released, than be forced up against the sheer, dull block of not-Daniel.
Now she looked up at her friends and saw that in the dusky light coming through the window, and the glimmering candle on the table between them, they were beautiful. This surprise, too, she would fold away and save for Daniel. Two more days.
‘Was that true, Adele? What you said to Gillespie?’ asked Wendy, once the bread basket arrived and they’d begun a second glass of wine.
Adele smiled, tipping back her wine.
Jude snorted on her behalf: ‘Of course not! But he’s never going to cast her. Why give them the satisfaction of thinking she wants it?’
They looked to Adele for confirmation. She held the wine in her mouth a moment, nodded, swallowed. She supposed this was right; Jude usually was. But also, something had happened on the footpath there in the sunset with Finn staring so plainly at the street and the bay. She looked past the women now through the window, and they leaned as well, to see Finn sitting by the pole on the path, front paws neatly together. He did not look around for Wendy, but gazed quietly into the air before him. It was this Adele had seen. His simple creatureliness.
She didn’t understand it herself.
She waved the subject away and said, ‘Do you ever hear from Sylvie?’
Their sceptical gazes—first Jude’s, then Wendy’s—settled upon her.
‘I do,’ she said happily. This would annoy them, but it was true, like on the train today when Sylvie had spoken firmly to her. Jude would call this frontal lobe damage. She called all mysterious things frontal lobe damage.
Surprisingly, Jude did not roll her eyes. She looked hesitant, as if she might say something, but changed her mind. ‘Frontal lobe damage,’ she said, and looked down at the menu.
‘You order,’ said Adele placidly. She actually fancied the fish and chips, but this would displease Jude, who would order them something restrained and healthy—like ceviche of king-fish, or a green papaya salad, and Adele would be hungry later, and it would still be more expensive than the fish and chips. But this was how it was. Restaurants were Jude’s world, and you did not argue.
Adele looked at her across the table now in her fine black linen, sitting straight in her seat, alert and handsome. Now and then she leaned forwards ever so slightly, watching you as you spoke. It had only dawned on Adele recently that Jude’s hearing was going, but she would never lower herself to ask you to repeat something. Adele thought that these days Jude was lip-reading as much as hearing. She could not imagine her deigning to get a hearing aid. She realised, with surprise, that she felt sorry for Jude. Jude! Who had always been strongest, who could hurt you the most.
She could have been an actor, Adele knew. A fine one. A great one, perhaps, certainly better than Adele. Jude knew it too, though it had never been spoken. The knowledge lay between them, always had done, from the first time Jude went to a performance by Adele. Early on, she would give Adele tight little compliments, praising some small, highly specific detail of her performance, but never the whole. As time went on, they would meet in the foyer afterwards for a drink, and Jude felt entitled to dissect the production, smiling as she demolished the various elements—lighting, stagecraft, score, her fellow actors—as if these had nothing to do with Adele, as if the two women were in obvious agreement. And never flattering Adele herself, who mostly left those evenings swallowing down tears, because Jude was like a reverse Midas, walking through your life pointing at the things you cherished, one, two, three, and at her touch each one turned to shit.
But when she praised you—well, it meant something, to have Jude’s good opinion.
Ray used to say Jude didn’t have friends, she had subordinates. Which was true, perhaps, when they were young. But all that had broken away, at some point. When? It was hard to remember.
People thought Adele was indestructible, superficial. But sometimes, when she looked back, her entire life appeared to her as a river of hurt, rushing and rushing. Torrents of painful things: slights, rejections, curt words, reviews, smiling insults, failed auditions, glances across tables.
The professional hurts slowly faded, but the intimate ones, inflicted by her friends, lingered on. All the times Wendy and Jude and Sylvie had dinners together without her, and phoned each other for the long and intimate chats she knew they had, or the times they met up in New York or Nice or Rome for their holidays while Adele was too broke to go anywhere, miserably waiting for the next gig.
But then somehow the part of you that was the sandbank, your edges eroding from resisting all this hurt, that part just broke away and was swept down, and all of life was the river. And you went with it.
That’s what Adele thought now, looking at Jude with her little skullcap of fine dark hair and her crooked crimson mouth, her long nose with its delicate carved nostrils flaring when she was displeased, like now, about the bread. Soon she would call the waitress over in her deep, throaty voice. Jude had presence, which was the thing everyone said about her back in her restaurant days, when she was the power people’s darling, when getting a table at Pellini’s or the Boardroom or the Waterside while Jude was in control turned into a personal achievement. When she took command of a room with a slow turn of her head, the charge of that gaze.
The bread seemed perfectly fine to Adele and Wendy, who chewed stolidly, but not to Jude. ‘It’s stale,’ she said to them, as if they were both fools. She turned in her seat to beckon the waitress.
What were all those hurts, back then? Adele couldn’t remember, though there was a time when she would keep track of every one. She would store them up and ponder them in her heart. Was that the expression? Something biblical. Whenever she was lonely or miserable, back then, she would take them out and count them: all the times she had been slighted or patronised, the times she sat in the toilet crying while her dearest friends laughed together and talked, so avid, so brave, and Adele was an ugly little mouse hiding in the toilet weeping. It gave her a sort of comfort, back then, to feel she’d been wronged. There was something exhilarating, life-giving almost, in the depth of that feeling. There were fights and phone calls, vengeful letters, condemnations and accusations. It was all so exhausting, when you looked back. However did they have the energy? They were all mad!
It was the drinking, the children, the drugs, the affairs, she supposed. It was the ambition and the failure. The teetering marriages, the envy, the cycles of paucity and wealth. It was the times. Then the departures and returns, the cautious reunions, the never-quite-complete forgiveness. And now it was all so long in the past that Adele could never remember what any of it had ever been about, except that they were simply too young, even when middle-aged, and much too full of feeling.
She took up her glass and swigged a gulp of wine, and watched Jude, who had stuck up for her against Sonia and Gillespie. Jude wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire was another thing Ray used to say, but that wasn’t true. And look how he turned out; Jude had had his number from the start.
‘Did you see a doctor was charged with murdering his mother this morning?’ Jude said then. ‘She was eighty-eight. He’s sixty-one.’
They looked at Wendy, and Adele joked that she’d better watch out.
‘Nobody cares enough to want to murder us,’ Adele said to Jude. They clinked their wineglasses in childless solidarity. In fact, for a time in her thirties Adele had wanted a baby very badly. Her friends had been through the miscarriages with her, again and again. Wendy was by far the kindest.
The waitress appeared, a little breathless, a flopping Santa hat pinned to her hair. She wore tiny white shorts and her legs were long, golden, glorious. Adele wanted to reach out and run a hand down that luscious thigh. The girl smiled down at them, the sequins of her red tank top glinting. ‘What can I do for you ladies?’ She laid a hand lightly on Jude’s upper arm as she spoke, which was a mistake.
Jude pointed at the bread. ‘This is stale. Can you bring us some fresh bread, please?’
The girl cocked her head and her smile grew kinder. Oh no, Adele wanted to tell her. Don’t do what you are going to do. There was a subtle, dangerous shift in Jude’s posture as the young woman poked a strand of long golden hair behind her ear and bent down, resting her hands on her knees as you might do when speaking to a preschooler. She beamed and said sweetly to Jude, just a little too loudly, ‘Oh, I know what you mean, but this is sourdough bread? It’s just a kind of a different texture to what you might be used to?’
Jude reclined, ever so slightly, and met the girl’s eyes with her cold, neutral gaze. Wendy and Adele looked at each other, then the table, and Wendy swallowed down a big lump of bread as Jude said in a low voice, ‘I know what sourdough bread is.’ She picked up the basket and held it out to the girl, and said slowly, again—this time subtly parodying the girl’s patronising tone: ‘But this bread is stale?’
The restaurant noise swelled around them, and the waitress’s smile turned to bewilderment. She caught Adele and Wendy’s expressions then, and under Jude’s stare she blushed, looked suddenly as if she might cry. She snatched up the basket and whirled away into the clatter of cutlery and the peals of other people’s laughter.
Wendy watched the girl twisting and pushing away through the tables, bread basket held high, and thought about what could have happened to provoke a sixty-one-year-old son into murdering his mother. She thought about all that suffering; thought about what she had not thought about in years.
It was alright to take part in the delusions of children but not adults, and you were not supposed to tell a person he was crazy. So when Jamie was five and said he was a train driver that was good, but when he was nineteen and said he was the prime minister, locked in his car, locked in the psych ward, you couldn’t say that’s ridiculous, you had to say your thoughts seem a little disordered. You had to ask gentle probing questions like where is your office, who are your staff, how did you become the prime minister since last week when you were a student driving a delivery van, and you were supposed to be glad to see the confusion, to see every speck of confidence draining out of his beautiful young face. And then he wrote down some song lyrics on a piece of paper torn from Wendy’s notebook and he cried softly while he was doing it, and then he stopped crying and said he was the prime minister again.
He’d looked at Wendy in the hospital garden—they called it a garden—sucking and sucking on cigarettes, and he said, ‘You’ve tried, but you’ve made a lot of mistakes.’ He shook his head in resignation, an old-timer lamenting a newcomer’s lack of basic skills, but he was talking about Wendy being a mother. He exhaled her failure in one long plume of smoke. ‘A lotta mistakes.’ A pale young man had drifted peacefully past them in the garden and Jamie said don’t look at him he’s a fucking psycho, did you bring me more cigarettes?
Jamie was fine now, that was only a brief and horrifying period in his twenties and then he finished university and moved to London and got a boyfriend and then moved to Stuttgart and became a technician in a laser eye clinic and two years ago he married his boyfriend (there was no wedding, he told Wendy, there was nothing to be invited to) and then they moved to Prague. And they were happy and Jamie never went mad again. How did that happen? Jamie would be fifty next year. How did that happen?
