Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

‘Hunter’s talked a lot about you,’ Candy said to me when I brought Leonora her coat, in a way that let me know he hadn’t. There was a — I don’t want to call it a smell, but it struck me like an odour — let’s call it an emanation coming off her. It oozed from her skin, and her boots and leather miniskirt and her silk scarf, and her impeccable hair. It was the aura of money. Ordinarily, that realisation would have been enough to set me fretting over my impoverishment and my life choices and pity my wife in her old dress, but the news about Jack Telauga shamed me out of all that. I felt profoundly grateful to be alive and to be taking my wife out to dinner.

I had booked a table at an expensive Japanese restaurant. They’d grudgingly altered my reservation when it became clear we were running late, but the place was only half full.

The dinner was a piece of financial recklessness made feasible by my decision to cash Hunter’s cheque. I’d given myself various rationales for my change of tack, but the true one, I think, is that I wanted to show off to Leonora. I wanted to reconnect with her, and this was the only way I could think of doing it. Lately, I’ve wondered if I was right. I think of the other things that I failed to give her, and it strikes me that slight financial embarrassment was the least of our worries.

Leonora gave me a look as we took our seats that was full of the triumphant and bitter I-told-you-so of a person who has come to relish the predictability of their partner’s disappointing oversights. Leonora is allergic to fish. A number of evenings have been spoiled because I failed to remember this simple fact, but I was confident that she’d find something else agreeable on the menu. ‘They have wagyu beef,’ I said.

‘I’m off red meat.’

‘Since when?’

‘Since Christmas.’

I examined the soy sauce bottle. ‘Chicken?’

‘Chicken it’ll have to be. Order for me.’ She headed for the Ladies.

I was philosophical about her sharpness. We had been doing the old dance for so long that she had lost her ear for anything but prickliness and sarcasm. But the gloomy news about Jack Telauga had crystallised something in me. I felt oppressed by my secret history with Hunter and the humbling misattribution of the fake letters, but more than that, the presence of Jack Telauga in my life, his isolation and strangeness, had begun to make me conscious of my riches. For the first time in a while, I felt lucky. I was lucky. And I resolved to tell Leonora as soon as she returned. I wanted to apologise to her, and share my secrets, and ask if we could turn over a new leaf.

It surprises me to learn in my fortieth year that underneath everything, I am an incorrigible optimist. Until my barrel reaches the lip of the falls — perhaps even in the giddy moments afterwards — I will continue to believe that everything will turn out for the best.

After a few minutes, Leonora reappeared. I watched her walk the length of the restaurant. Our eyes met, she smiled, and there was something so modest and contrite in her face that I was certain she felt as I did.

She took her seat and flapped her napkin out over her lap. I reached over to grab her hand. It lay inertly in my fingers.

‘I need to tell you something,’ she said.

‘You took the words out of my mouth,’ I said.

‘Please, Nicky. Be serious. Don’t make this harder than it is.’

Well, I knew then, of course. Of course.

*

It’s part of the job description of the cuckold that he’s always the last to know. To this day, I believe that Leonora was telling the truth after the Madame Bovary incident. She and Caspar had resolved to end things. But then, by coincidence, they had bumped into each other at a recital in Aldeburgh. God bless her, Leonora tried to spare my feelings as she explained what had happened, but there was a flame in her eyes when she recalled their meeting.

It was all arranged. I think this is in a woman’s nature. A man would have presented a dilemma, or a bargaining position, but Leonora came to me with the done deed. She was moving to a flat with Caspar and taking the children. Accommodation, new schools, packing their stuff: all taken care of. It was the revelation that Lucius and Sarah had been party to the arrangements that threw me into the abyss. I understood the guilty pity behind Lucius’s uncharacteristic recent willingness to accompany me to Homebase to buy a new lawnmower. I burst into tears and told Leonora that she and the children were my life.

‘That’s never been true, Nicky,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been able to understand what would make you happy.’

‘But I am happy! You make me happy!’

‘No, no, no. Happiness is much simpler than this … All this self-torture and angst over things. Barely touching each other. We’re like brother and sister.’

‘Not because of me!’

In all the startling discomfort of coming to my senses in a new carcass, I don’t recall a more agonising moment than this. All the shame and the pain and the pitying eyes of strangers. My awareness of myself as weak and hopeless. What made it harder was my perception that while I was broken and tearful, Leonora was speaking with a voice of reasoning tenderness. I was the one clinging to a fantasy about our marriage as insane as Roger N’s delusion that Mossad has implanted a radio transmitter in his brain.

It would have taken someone of more than saintlike forgiveness and tolerance to sit through the rest of the meal. I couldn’t bear to watch what happened next. Would Caspar come and get her from the restaurant? Were my children already installed in their new flat? Was Lucius playing his PSP in some Notting Hill duplex?

I left, angrily, and walked all the way home. Inevitably, because of the geography of the city, I was compelled to revisit scenes from my marriage from its inception to its apparent end: the lamplit rise of Kensington Palace Gardens where I used to cycle with Leonora on the crossbar of my bicycle. The hotel porch where I pleaded with her to stay with me. The bar at the Royal Court where she’d told me she was pregnant. The party shop on Wandsworth Bridge Road where I bought a tiny Batman costume for Sarah to wear to her first birthday party. Lucius’s orthodontist. The shop where we ordered our kitchen table together as I fought Leonora’s reluctance to move south of the river.

On Trinity Road, just after midnight, there were two boys in hoods loitering outside the garage. One approached me to ask me the time. It was all wearily predictable. But I looked him straight in the eye, and, seeing the rage and hopelessness of someone with even less to lose than him, he must have thought better of it.

It was almost one o’clock when I got home. I’ve returned after a burglary and this was similar: the hint of strange feet, something indefinably altered in the atmosphere. But all my possessions were intact. It was my family that had gone.

*

There’s no skirting the ugliness of what happened next. I had two or three grim telephone conversations with Leonora. She was adamantine in her resolution. We agreed not to involve lawyers if it could be helped. She hinted that Hilary was in an even worse state than I was, as though that would cheer me up.

At this stage there was no real acrimony between us; perhaps because the children were relatively adult and there was no money to fight over. With an attention to the minutiae of the split that, to my mind, bordered on the sociopathic, Leonora had found both Sarah and Lucius places at a private sixth-form college near their new home. I didn’t ask, but it was obvious that Caspar was paying.

I took Lucius and Sarah to lunch at a restaurant near Borough Market a week later. I seemed to have turned into a superfluous and pitiful character like someone in a William Trevor story, but it seemed right to go along with Leonora’s desire to maintain the fiction that the wish for the separation was mutual. ‘Mum says it’s what you want too,’ Lucius said. I didn’t disagree.