Resistance, page 9
‘He was gay?’ Erin asked.
‘I believe so.’
‘You never found out? You didn’t keep in contact?’ She raised her eyebrows in a manner that seemed more accusing than concerned. I shrugged her question away.
‘Why do you think Paris came to mind for you just now?’ Erin asked in a neutral voice.
Family histories and tears, I said, lightly; that was the connection. Otherwise there was no specific reason I could think of. I reached again for the glass in front of me and drained it slowly, while around me the room closed in and the traffic growled at the window. It was time to take a break, I said. I’d talked enough. She could tell me about her husband now.
‘You shouldn’t give me such licence, you know,’ Erin said. She put aside her pen and paper and settled back into her chair.
Her husband went through a period, in his mid to late forties, of collecting blown glass ornaments, she began. For as long as she’d known him, since the time they were both aged twenty-three, he’d been a muscular, active sort of man, so this glass collecting came as a surprise to her. Her husband, however, saw it as entirely consistent with his identity. He told her then that sometimes, as a child, instead of walking straight home from school with his siblings, he’d take the bus to the local shopping centre just to look at the glass in the china shop there. These days we’d call it a homewares store, Erin said, and most of the contents would be from China, but this shop her husband remembered sold fine bone china from the kilns of England, crystal goblets from Ireland and, her husband’s favourite, Venetian hand-blown glass.
The shopping centre had first opened in the late 1960s, when her husband was nine years old. He remembered it as the epitome of modernity and sophistication, Erin said, a low-slung, clean-cornered building, just two storeys high. One entered through an automatic door into a large paved forecourt, where a copper fountain of minimalist design shot jets of water high into the air at unpredictable intervals, and a chain of veneered wooden discs, each the size of a bathtub—a giant version of the mobile that hung from her husband’s childhood bedroom ceiling—dangled from the highest rafter. What impressed him most on his very first visit, her husband told her, was the quality of the light. The building had a glass roof above the second storey and a large central void that stretched from roof to forecourt so that the whole interior was bathed in a muted natural light. Rather than being inside or outside, you felt you were somewhere in between, her husband said, a netherworld where life seemed to press less insistently upon you. Best of all were the sleek escalators, ascending and descending in constant humming motion.
The china shop was on the second floor, opposite the escalators, the first shopfront her husband would see as he climbed. During afternoons in winter, around the time that her husband arrived there from school, the angle of the setting sun was such that it shone through the roof and into the window of the china shop. He would stand in front of the window looking at the illuminated glass within: vases of every shape and colour, cats with long curling tails, delectable fruit in fluted bowls, figurines with intricate candy-striped waistcoats and tendrils of multicoloured hair. Being of a practical bent, he would think about the work involved in every detail—how the glass was pulled or blown to create a strawberry, a cat’s tail, the buttons on a waistcoat—and he would marvel at the ingenuity and precision and commitment of these glassmakers, who, he later learned, worked in a famous glass factory on an island called Murano. He rarely entered the shop—the disapproving face of the woman behind the counter tended to deter him—except on the occasions of his mother’s birthday, when he would select from the window whatever his savings would allow: a single green glass ramekin from a set of three, and, the following year when he had saved with more diligence, another two in red and burnt orange.
So, Erin said, she came to understand that her husband’s interest in hand-blown glass, which she first became aware of in his forties, was in fact decades long. It was the early days of online shopping, and her husband, a reluctant shopper in the real world, quickly embraced this new electronic commerce. Some evenings he would disappear into the study for an hour or two at a time. It’s like Ali Baba’s cave, he would say when he emerged. You won’t believe what’s out there. Occasionally he would call her into the study to show her something he’d found on eBay or 1stdibs: a nineteenth-century three-tiered chandelier sprinkled with pastel flowers, like the icing on a wedding cake; or a simple bird from the 1950s, no bigger than her fist, a fine wisp of a thing with upturned glass tailfeathers and a cheeky eye. Despite the hours he spent on the computer her husband rarely bought an item, and she came to realise that this activity was another version of the window shopping he had done as a child. He became interested in the individual glassmakers themselves, particularly those of the mid-twentieth-century Murano period, when the designs, so her husband said, were influenced by the painters of the time who worked with geometric shapes and blocks of colour; artists such as Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and Paul Klee. But, in the long run, buy he did, said Erin. Not a vase, as she had hoped, or a flouncy chandelier, as she had dreaded, but a pair of chickens. Or, to be more precise, a chicken and a rooster, made by his favourite mid-century Murano maker. When he called her in that particular evening to show her their image on the screen, she could tell how excited he was. To her they looked comical, cartoonish—their oversized splayed yellow chicken feet bordering on the grotesque—but her husband was in love, pointing out the artistry of their expression and pose, the wizardry involved in creating the zig-zagging stripes around their torsos. They were horrendously expensive, to her mind at least, but she kept silent on that score, knowing how little her husband spent on himself. He was, in fact, quite happy with the price, especially as he had managed to negotiate it down—not drastically, but enough to give him some added satisfaction.
The chickens arrived some ten days later, clothed, as one might expect, in multiple layers of bubble wrap and sticky tape, and packed snugly into two individual cardboard boxes inside a larger one. She watched as her husband tenderly unwrapped them and held them to the light, and saw in his pleasure and excitement the boy he had been, gazing through the shopping-centre window at the blown-glass ornaments he coveted but could never afford.
Now it was important to find the best place to display them. He wrote two identical notes to their cleaner; one he left on the hallway table and the other he taped to the living-room shelf on which his chickens stood: No need to dust the glass chickens, thanks Judy. They’re very brittle. In other words, Don’t touch! Visitors would invariably be given a viewing of his treasures, and he would tell them of their provenance with such enthusiasm that she wondered if, given his time again, her husband might have chosen the life of a Venetian glassblower, taking the traghetto across the laguna to Murano each day, there to work the molten glass in time-honoured tradition. Erin smiled into the distance, and I tried to imagine what she saw: perhaps the bent form of her husband, his forehead beaded with sweat from the foundry fire, coaxing the glass with his measured breath.
Not long after the arrival of the chickens, she went on, they did some minor renovations, knocking out their bedroom wardrobes and turning the adjacent room into an ensuite and walk-in robe. Her husband then transferred the chickens to the bedroom mantle, where they took up sole possession, their beaks bent to the flecked marble as if searching for grain, their fluted tails aloft. There, Erin said, in the newly spacious room, she finally saw them for what they were: the creation of an artist with a particular point of view.
It was around that time that her husband’s tiredness began. At first he battled on, drinking more coffee during the working week and napping on weekends, but these adjustments made little dent in his fatigue. Soon he was going to bed by nine-thirty, sometimes nine p.m., and turning out the light in the bedroom and hall, so that the front of the house lay in darkness for much of the evening. An hour or two later, Erin said, she’d slowly open the bedroom door, to be enfolded in the dense blackness as she undressed: they had very effective block-out blinds on the windows. She’d always found it difficult to orient herself in the dark, and increasingly she found herself stumbling into a chair where she thought the dresser would be, unable to tell from which direction she had come. ‘To be frank,’ Erin said with a frown, ‘I was put out by the way things had eventuated. Had I known just what my husband’s fatigue signalled, I would have responded quite differently, but at the time I put it down to a new routine, one that suited his current take on life while inconveniencing me. It seemed to me he was just playing at being old.’ On the advice of Dylan Thomas, Erin continued, she began to rage, in her own meek way, against the dying of the light, staying up later than ever before, watching TV and eating chocolate in the living room with the door closed, while down the silent hall, behind the bedroom door, her husband slept on.
Erin reached for a tissue from the box on the table. She was telling me all this defensively, she said, wiping her nose. Even now, years later, she was still building her case.
I asked if her case was against the chickens or her husband.
She laughed and dabbed at the corners of her eyes. ‘Neither,’ she said. ‘Both. To tell you the truth, I really don’t know.’
She didn’t have to continue, I told her. Whatever happened, I was sure it was unintentional on her part.
It was kind of me to say so, Erin said. ‘You’re a kind person, Nina, though I doubt you think of yourself that way.’ No, she said, she would quickly finish the story. She needed to be able to sit with the truth, no matter how painful. Erin exhaled and turned a penitent face to me. She’d been out with a friend for dinner, one evening, and had drunk several glasses of wine. She’d then driven home from the restaurant, despite knowing she probably shouldn’t. As she pulled into their driveway, and saw the house bathed in darkness, something surged within her and she slammed her palm down flat against the steering wheel, sounding the horn briefly. Guilt, relief, anger, an undercurrent of worry—it was all there, Erin said, in that small explosion of sound. ‘Of course the wine had loosened my self-control, but what I felt so viscerally that evening had been brewing for a while. It was as if the dark house negated me, as if it had closed its front door in my face and no longer welcomed me there.’ She fanned her face with her hand. ‘God, I’d really had too much to drink.’
In short, Erin said, she went inside, stumbled in the pitch-black bedroom, fell against the mantle and knocked one of the chickens onto the floor. Her husband barely stirred. She dropped to her hands and knees, knowing, as she patted the carpet for shards, that her reactions were blunted by drink, and that tomorrow she would be acutely upset by her husband’s distress at her blunder. She retrieved the ornament from the carpet and replaced it on the mantle. It seemed to be in one piece but, as she was aware she wasn’t in a position to competently judge its condition, she spent an awful night wondering what its true state might be. In the morning, as soon as her husband had left the room, she examined it with her glasses on. It seemed as whole as it had ever been. Not a single sliver of glass winked at her from the carpet. ‘Of course I couldn’t believe my luck,’ Erin said, ‘and in a way it was too good to be true. It was the unbelievable good fortune of this event that seemed to demarcate so clearly the time that came after. It was as if, in that single act of unblemished escape, our luck bled itself dry.’
I asked what happened to her husband. ‘Oh,’ she said softly, ‘he left me a year or so later.’
3.
I was in the tearoom, eating lunch, when Melita entered, her lunchbox tucked under one arm. In her other hand she carried three empty coffee mugs, her fingers hooked stiffly around the handles. The mugs clinked against each other as she walked.
She greeted me as she winged her arm away from her shoulder, freeing her plastic lunchbox from her hold and letting it clatter onto the tea-room table. At the dishwasher, she extricated the mugs from her fingers and stacked them on the rack. I watched as she bent low over the dishwasher contents, seeming to inspect them critically, as if the cups and plates might tell her something useful about the running of the place. Her back still stooped, she filled the tray with dishwashing powder, then firmly closed the machine. Why was it set to a two-hour cycle? she asked the room as she stood erect. We weren’t baking casseroles here. Thirty minutes would do, she said, pushing buttons.
She returned to the table and sat down. How had my morning been? she asked, opening her lunchbox with a puzzled look, as though unsure it was hers.
She’d just, this past hour, seen a new family, Melita said, pulling a felafel and a cherry tomato from her lunchbox and holding them aloft in each hand. Parents both in their forties, nice enough, she continued, thanking me as I went to the crockery cupboard and returned with a plate for her. Parents, she repeated, with fraternal twins, a boy and a girl, aged nine. ‘The questions they came out with!’ Melita exclaimed, reaching again into her lunchbox and seizing on a miniature bocconcino. She lined it up alongside the other delicacies on her plate, and I wondered if all the other elements of her lunch would also be spherical. ‘Did their daughter have anxiety? Was their son depressed?’ Melita continued. ‘All this in front of their children! I tried to normalise, of course, and to emphasise their strengths and resources. I tried to get them to lighten up, just a fraction, but the parents were fixated on diagnoses. Was I a trained psychologist? Could I do an ADHD assessment?’ Melita took a small tub of hummus from her lunchbox and prised open the lid. She dipped her felafel into it and took a delicate bite, her upper lip drawn away from her two strong front teeth. Had we, as a society, gone too far down the diagnostic route? she wondered. She was worried that, sometimes, a diagnostic label—anxiety, depression, ADHD—was like a hatstand placed in a hallway: something purpose-built to hang things on, even if those things weren’t always hats. ‘You know what I mean,’ she said, a carrot stick between her fingers. ‘If an adolescent boy sits in his room, gaming all night, do we put that down to his depression, or do we get the parents to disconnect the internet?’
What if, instead of having anxiety or depression, we just had a troubled relationship with time? She’d been thinking about this recently. ‘Bear with me,’ Melita said, ‘it’s a broad-brush theory at this stage, so I’m bound to exaggerate and over-generalise.’ There were fundamentally two types of people in this world, she posited: those who looked backwards, believing their best days had passed, and those who looked forwards with the highest hopes for their future. This binary was present in the youngest of children, she went on. The backward-looking children were those who clung to their dog-eared books and moth-eaten teddy bears, and refused to hand on their old toys to younger siblings in exchange for something new: how could older children’s playthings ever take the place of those they already loved? These were the children who, in secondary school, yearned for their primary-school days, then, as young adults, remembered their secondary-school years as the best of their life. They had clear memories of the smallest details of a past event—what was said, word by word; what was eaten; what was worn—and lost no opportunity to share these memories with like-minded people, sitting around the campfire of their past, gazing contentedly into the flames.
Forward-lookers, on the other hand, were those children who left their own toys in the rain and pleaded for the use of their older siblings’ possessions. Older children, in general, held them in thrall, and they dreamed of the day they would be just like them. They spent their school years happily enough but didn’t shed a single tear on graduation day: why waste their energy crying when a new phase was about to begin? Better to direct one’s energies into shaping tomorrow. They cared little for mementos of their past, and were forever trying to purge their houses of the very things that the backward-lookers cherished. Backward-lookers remembered and forward-lookers planned—but memories could be faulty and plans might never be realised. The depressives were the backward-lookers, peering regretfully through a closed and bolted window onto the tableau of their golden past, while worriers were forward-lookers, standing on the shaky ground of expectation, planning for every contingency. What we all needed to do, Melita said, was to throw off our natural tendencies, and live in the present.
What a struggle that was! But there were temporary solutions, Melita said, ways and means of trapping ourselves, at least for a while, in a bubble of the here and now. She’d found one such solution in Pilates. The first time she lay on a Pilates bed, put her feet through the cloth straps and began to draw sweeping circles in the air with her toes, she recognised—no, she felt, in a physical sense—the genius of that strange equipment that, with its ropes and springs and pulleys, resembled more an implement of torture—a rack came first to mind—than something designed to strengthen and soothe. The circular movement of her feet produced a back-and-forth movement of the bed along its runners; a somewhat counterintuitive movement, in that the bed glided backwards when her legs were low and in front of her torso, only to move forward as her legs arced outwards, her heels angled towards the back of the room. ‘I closed my eyes,’ Melita said, ‘and felt as a baby must when rocked in a cradle.’ It was the backward movement of the bed that was always particularly soothing. Perhaps, at least in part, the comfort was derived from novelty: it occurred to her, during that first Pilates session, that we rarely moved backwards in day-to-day life, so hell bent were we on moving forwards in every sense. She wondered, too, if comfort was to be had in the sense of a motion completed: backwards and forwards, action and reaction. It was an equation that followed the laws of physics, and therefore the natural world, rather than our human attempt to subvert nature by constantly pushing onwards. What destruction we’d wreaked on this earth in our tireless quest for what was in front of us.
