Tim Dowling - How to Be a Husband

So we meet at this bar most evenings. We drink martinis and laugh and then go back to my basement apartment, which is dark and generally grubby, except for my room, which is squalid. I leave her there in the mornings to go to work, and at some point during the day she comes and drops off my keys. Occasionally, for a change of pace, we meet at a different bar. Sometimes we go out with English friends of hers. They like to drink – a lot – and they don’t seem very interested in eating.

One thing we have failed to do over the course of the fortnight is go on anything approaching a proper date. Finally, towards the end of her visit, we arrange dinner in a cosy and unhygienic restaurant in the Bowery. Our mutual friend Pat is our waiter. The hard living of the past two weeks, combined with full-time employment, has taken its toll on me. During the meal I begin to feel unwell. My stomach churns alarmingly and I break out in a cold sweat. I’m trying to be lively and charming, but I’m finding it hard to keep track of the conversation. I push the food around my plate. I manage a few glasses of wine, enough to realize what a terrible idea drinking is. Finally, the plates are cleared. I pay the bill. She offers to pay half, but I refuse. When I stand up from my chair, I feel something deep in my bowels give way with a lurch. I excuse myself and nip to the toilets, which are fortunately close at hand.

I do not wish to go into too much unpleasant detail. Suffice to say I needed to spend about ten minutes in the loo to deal with the matter at hand, and found it necessary to part with my underpants for ever. On lifting the lid of the wastebasket I discover that I am not the first customer to face that problem this evening. Even so, I decide to throw them out the window.

I come back to the table with all the nonchalance I can muster, but I know from looking in the toilet’s scarred mirror how pale I am.

‘Are you OK?’ she says. ‘You were in there for a very long time.’

‘Yeah, fine,’ I say. Our mutual friend approaches, no longer wearing his waiter’s apron.

‘Pat’s finished his shift,’ she says, ‘so we’d thought we’d all go next door for a drink.’

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘OK.’

I only need to drink two beers in a seedy bar to complete my charade of wellness, before our hugely successful first date comes to an end.

In the end the English girl flies back to London without me, but I have her phone number and her address. I write to her. I pick up a passport renewal application. Without telling anyone, I quietly lay plans to extricate myself from my own life.

How do I know the English girl is the one for me? I don’t. And I certainly don’t know if she thinks I am the one for her. Separated by an ocean, I begin to speculate about how I would feel if my holiday fling – an underwhelming American guy with a basement apartment and a dead-end job – kept ringing me to firm up what were supposed to be empty promises to visit. I would be distant and terse on the phone, I think – just like she is. I wonder if I am spoiling what we had by trying to prolong it.

Before I have even got my passport photo taken, she rings: she’s found a cheap flight, she tells me, and is thinking about coming back for the weekend. It takes me a moment to process this news, which is slightly incompatible with her general lack of enthusiasm for our long-distance love affair. I know she hates flying. I can only conclude that she must like me more than she’s been letting on. I’m a little stunned by the realization.

‘OK,’ I say.

‘Try not to sound too fucking thrilled,’ she says.

When I catch sight of her at the airport I feel my face go bright red. I’m suddenly embarrassed by how little we know each other. Two weeks in each other’s company, on and off, plus four phone calls and a letter apiece. We’ve had sex, like, eight times. We’ve been apart for a month. She doesn’t even quite look the way I’ve remembered her. That’s because I have no photo at home to consult.

There wasn’t much time to prepare for her visit, but I have done one thing: I’ve bought a new bed. My old one was small, borrowed and lumpy. The new one, delivered within twenty-four hours, touches three walls of my room. The bare mattress, silvery white, stands in sharp contrast to the grubby walls and the small, barred window that shows the ankles of passers-by. I’m twenty-six, it’s probably the most expensive thing I’ve ever bought, and I’m embarrassed by it. I had only wished to provide an acceptable standard of accommodation, but it looks as if I’ve hired a sex trampoline for the weekend.

The next day she is woozy with jet lag. We stay in bed for most of the morning. At some point I sit up and see something on the floor that makes my heart sink: an uncompleted work assignment – a mock-up of a new table of contents page. It’s been on my ‘Things to Freak Out about List’ for weeks, and I’ve promised to deliver it by Monday. I pick it up and look it over. I’ve done no work at all on it, and now, clearly, I wasn’t going to.

‘What’s that?’ she says.

‘Nothing. Something I’m supposed to have done.’

‘Let’s have a look,’ she says.

‘That’s all dummy copy,’ I say. ‘I’m meant to write the words, but I don’t know where to start. To be honest, it’s ruining my life.’

‘It can’t be that difficult,’ she says. ‘You just need a stupid pun for each heading, and then a pithy summary underneath.’

‘It’s a bit more complicated than that,’ I say.

‘No it isn’t,’ she says. ‘Give me a pen.’ She does the first one, scribbling the words in the margin.

‘That’s not bad,’ I say.

‘There you are,’ she says. ‘Only eleven more to go.’ She sits there with me, in my new bed, a fag hanging from her lips, treating my dreaded assignment like a crossword puzzle, and completing it in under an hour. Two thoughts flash through my head simultaneously: Amazing! She can solve all my problems for me! and, Holy shit! She’s smarter than I am!

Just before we finish my phone rings. It’s my mother, who unbeknownst to me has driven into New York with my aunt to see some Broadway show. They are heading for a restaurant downtown, near me, and want to know what I’m doing for lunch. My heart starts to pound. I’ve never told my mother anything about the English girl who is smoking in my bed. I doubt she even knows I’ve broken up with my old girlfriend; she certainly didn’t hear it from me. I sit in silence, phone to ear, for so long that the English girl raises an eyebrow.

‘Can I bring someone?’ I say finally.

It is the single most alarming dining experience I’ve ever endured, including the one that ended with me throwing my pants out a toilet window. We have about fifteen minutes to get dressed and get there, and there is no time to brief the English girl on what to expect. The occasion is more formal than I’d anticipated: the restaurant, which I’d never heard of, is a bit grand, and my mother and my aunt are all dressed up. They have no idea who this girl from London is, or quite why I’ve brought her to lunch instead of, say, my girlfriend. I don’t quite recognize the English girl myself: she has suddenly turned polite and circumspect, even a little demure. She doesn’t swear once during the meal. I was surprised she’d even agreed to come, but she’s making a better fist of the occasion than I am. My brain keeps leaving my body to watch from the ceiling.

There is no point in the proceedings when I can draw my mother aside and explain why I’ve turned up to lunch with a mysterious English woman. Whenever they look at me both my aunt and my mother have legible question marks furrowed into their brows, but they are afraid to ask too much, having no idea where the answers might take the conversation. And we have prepared no lies. This, I realize too late, is a huge oversight.