Anne Enright - Yesterday's Weather

‘All the same, I could have spent the rest of my life with him, having bad sex. Honestly. He made love like I was a walrus, something huge and strange. Spent half an hour kind of paddling his hand on my left buttock which must be the least interesting, the most mistaken part of my body. Then sort of dodged in, like I was an alley on the way to school. I didn’t know whether he had come, or a picture had slipped on the wall … True love.’

He stayed the next day and she didn’t go into class. She opened a bottle of good wine to educate him and they forgot to eat. They lifted the sash of the bedroom window and were surprised by the taste of the air. He was so thin it hurt her and his laugh was huge.

‘We came across this swimming pool, in the woods, in the middle of nowhere. It was empty, with blue tiles and weeds growing out through the cracks. There was a metal ladder just going nowhere in the corner. So we climbed down and it was like being underwater somehow. Like we swam through the air. Then this crazy guy, he stood on the edge and he said he was going to dive in. My God was I freaked. I could just see his head splitting on the tiles. I screamed until I fell over. Men always think I’m neurotic and I suppose it’s true.’

‘Are you?’

‘I suppose.’

He was grateful for it, whatever it was. Compared to her body, her mind was easy to understand. There were wine stains on the sheets which he wrapped around him like Caesar. He sang, and paced the room, and looked at his naked feet, which weren’t ugly anymore. The razor in her bathroom confused him and he asked about other men. So she made love to him at the sink and he looked at his face in the mirror, as if it was blind.

He wasn’t so amazed by sex as by people, who did this all the time and never told. Never did anything but laugh in the wrong way. ‘They do this night and day,’ he said, ‘and it doesn’t show. Walking down the street and you think they’d look different. You think they’d recognise and smile at each other, like “I know and you know”. It’s like the secret everyone was in on, except me.’

The light deepened. ‘What is it like for a woman?’ he asked.

‘How should I know?’ she said. ‘What is it like for a man? Sometimes, after a while, it’s like your whole body is crying, like your liver even, is sad. It’s more sweet than sore. In here. And here.’

‘Where?’

Her touch saturated him to the bone and he had to pull away from her, in case something untold might happen. Which it did.

The next day he rang up the matinée man whose astonishment was audible from the other side of the room. He asked for clothes from his flat and looked at her and laughed as the questions kept pouring out of the phone.

The matinée man’s name was Jim and he entered her place with a comic air of apology. Kevin poked his head around the jamb of the open doorframe and asked for his clothes. ‘You bollocks.’ They all went out for a drink.

What she noticed in the pub were his eyelids, that disappeared when he looked at her, and made him look cruel. She couldn’t understand most of what they were saying and they laughed all the time. He was wearing a nylon-mix jumper, cheap denim and bad shoes.

‘I thought the friend was the kind of Oh-so-interesting bastard,’ said the letter, ‘with that glint in his eye that cuts me right up. You know capital P. Primitive, the kind that want to see the blood on the sheet or the bride is a slut. What I mean is … Attractive to the Masochistic, which, as we all know, is the street I’ve been living on even though the rent is so high. What I need is a romantic Irish farmer who is sweet AND a bastard at the same time. So he’s looking at us anyway like we’ve been Sinning or something equally Catholic and I just started to fight him, all the way. He says “Did you have a good time then?” and I said that “Kevin was the best fuck this side of the Atlantic.” DUMB! I KNOW THAT! and Kevin laughed and so that was … fine. And then I said “Maybe that surprises you?” “Not at all,” he says. “That’s what they are all saying down Leeson Street,” which is their kind of Fuck Alley. And I laughed and said “Hardly,” I said, “seeing as he’s never done it before …” and there was this silence.’

She went to the toilet, and when she came back, his friend was gone.

‘Why did you pick me, if it doesn’t mean anything? That’s what you are saying, isn’t it? You’re saying I shouldn’t have stayed.’

‘Don’t worry, you’re great. You’ll make some woman a great lover.’

‘You should have fucked Jim. He understands these things. You both understood each other like I was an eejit.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

He was no longer polite. He walked her back to the flat when he should have gone home.

‘So. Welcome to aggressive sex,’ she said. ‘I enjoyed that.’ He had broken her like a match.

‘You’re all talk.’

After a while he turned to her and felt her body from her shoulders to her hips, passing his hands slowly and with meaning over the skin. She felt herself drifting off the bed through the black space where the door should have been. It seemed to grow in the dark and swallow the room.

‘When I was a kid, there was a monumental sculptors in the local graveyard and the polishing shed was covered in marble dust. The table was white, the floor was white, the coke can in the corner was white. There was an old wardrobe up against the wall with the door hanging off, all still and silent like they were made out of stone. And outside was this rock with “Monumental Enquiries” carved into it like a joke. Which just goes to show.’

After he left, she saw the shadow of flour on the carpet, where his clothes had lain, like the outline of a corpse, when the clues are still fresh.

1.

So. I wouldn’t wash the sheets after you left, like some tawdry El Paso love affair. No one is unhappy in El Paso. There is lithium in the water supply. So it all still smells of you and at four in the morning that’s a stink and at five it’s a desert hum, with cicadas blooming all over the ceiling. Because you are on the road.

I am not hysterical. We have mice — just to go with all this heat and poverty and lust business, two flatmates with grownup salaries and lives to run after. Actually, it is hot, which I hate. If I want weather I pay for it, besides, the sun only came out for you. Actually, also, there is something in the water supply.

I have prehensile toes because you made my feet grip like a baby’s fist. That’s not something you forget so easily.

You, on the other hand, do forget — easily and all the time. This is something I admire. You don’t make up little stories to remember by. Which means that I am burdened with all the years that you passed through and neglected. I can handle them, of course, with my excellent synapses that feel no pain.

There is something about you that reminds me of the century. You talk like it was Before as well as After and you travel just to help you think — as if we were all still living in nine-teen-hundred-and-sixty-five. There’s nothing special about you, Sunshine, except how gentle you are. And you talk like it was nineteen-hundred-and-seventy-four. ‘Live a quiet life, be true, try to be honest. Work, don’t hurt people.’ You said all this while putting on your socks, which were bottlegreen, very slowly.

Sleeping with you is like watching a man in a wet suit cleaning the aquarium glass, in with the otters on the other side.

All I want to say, before you disappear into that decade of yours, all I want to say is how things became relevant, how the sugar-bowl sits well on the table, how the wood seems to agree.