Thomas Maloney - Learning to Die

Such a crowded world: crowded ideas, crowded schedules, crowded airwaves. He feels hemmed in, corralled by both his literary antecedents and his own smug generation into a hopelessly narrow realm of expression. He can’t even find an original place to die. But he will carve out a territory: he’ll fight for it, whatever the cost.

What, you might ask, does Montaigne have to do with love? In more than a hundred essays, the navel-gazing, ruff-toting Frenchman didn’t think to give his wife more than a passing mention. But this patron saint of the self is, James has realised, his perfect guide through the landscape of the supposedly selfless emotion. Love is patient, love is kind, doesn’t boast, keeps no ledger, is always home by nine, washes behind its ears, et cetera. Alternatively, love is the flame life’s Fury slings . Either way, love is supposed to be a surrender of the self, but it isn’t: love is an emanation. James feels he’s glimpsed unexplored realms of possibility, and can tell his loved-out and lied-to readers — if he’s destined to have any — something new and surprising. Love-affirming and self-affirming, is what the critics will say.

He doesn’t reopen his laptop until late in the evening. That time of day — the sweet spot between blank, saturated daylight and the terrible desolation of the small hours, when everyone else is slumped in front of the telly or pissing away their wages in bars — has been a loyal friend to him. Take the fuckers by surprise.

He nervously reads through his opening gambit. Two memories from London have been bothering him: a tiny silhouette seated at a towering concert organ, ready to unleash the sublime; and a junkie tunelessly sucking and blowing a mouth organ with a paper cup between his feet. Which is he?

Dan pulls out a heavy box of unsorted papers, and begins to extract folders, loose papers and magazines that were saved for reasons now forgotten. Before chemistry (the calcium ions) and fluid mechanics (the water pressure) intervened, Natalie had ear-marked today for an early Christmas shopping sortie, unmoved by Dan’s annual suggestion to do it all online. A cinema visit was to follow. Now, unexpected Natlessness and the troubling memory of her shallow, painful breaths keep turning his thoughts back to her.

Natalie. People talk of chemistry in relationships — the mere exchange of electrons — which naturally leads a physicist to a metaphor for something deeper, more fundamental and more potent: Natalie has turned out to be the nuclear reaction of his life.

A stranger seeing her for the first time might not describe her as beautiful. This is mostly irrelevant, though Dan has never been able to entirely ignore the discrepancy between his adolescent ideal of womankind — lithe, grave, dark-haired and ivory-skinned — and the red-headed reality of his wife: small, freckly and sardonic with a button-nose. Does this mismatch imply anything about the world’s measure of his own worth? Perhaps they are both in the second or third tier of the selection game.

Yet outward beauty is mostly a cultural construct, whereas some of Natalie’s qualities may be absolute. There are her character strengths, of course — her honesty, courage and kindness being instinctive (most of the time), while Dan’s require a resolve that cannot always be relied upon — but there is something physical, too, something fascinating about the way her body is proportioned, and the way it moves, that doesn’t wear out but grows with familiarity. A glimpsed memory: Nat swimming her strong breaststroke in the pool at his aunt’s Spanish villa, fully submerged in that instant just after the kick, at once motionless and in surging motion. Yes, it is these subtler qualities that make her a desirable mate. Dan smiles at the idea that he had any choice in the matter: their courtship didn’t feel at all like the Darwinian process that, biologically speaking, it was.

He frowns and drops a pile of New Scientist magazines into the recycling bin with a thump. Is it normal for a husband to subject his sick wife to an evaluation, to write her a spousal report card? Is he a calculating monster? And hasn’t he overlooked the component of their relationship that cannot be rationalised: the mysterious ember at its core, dormant in the day-to-day but capable of sudden flares? He was, after all, not long ago, brought almost to tears by the sight of a mortal vein pulsing in the crook of her arm. He turns back to his labour with a resolve — yes, sadly it requires resolve — to be humbler, more generous and less questioning in his affection.

At the bottom of the box is an unmarked folder containing a thick bundle of letters, all written in the same hand, mostly on cheap lined paper and all in the same distinctive ink — fountain pen ink with a brownish hue. Dan has never seen them before.

Monday morning. Mike’s hotel sprawls nonchalantly along the prime real-estate beside Middlewich harbour, forty minutes’ limo ride up the coast from New York and one of the priciest districts in America. The mega-yachts have by now all migrated to warmer climes, leaving only a few snugly-tarpaulined lesser boats to support the hotel’s maritime pretensions. Inside, the decor is a muddle of mock Rococo and Provençal that Mike, to his initial surprise when he first stayed two years ago, finds rather charming.

Mike’s big pitch — what colleagues call his magic show — begins in two hours. He’ll poke his head into the regional office, slap a few backs, pick up his sales rep and then whizz back down the interstate to the prospective client’s offices in the city.

The hotel’s restaurant staff know his breakfast order: three poached eggs on brown toast (wheat toast, they call it here — what do Americans make white bread out of, then?) and half a pink grapefruit. The jazzy muzak has only just been awakened, and the remains of last night’s log fire are still in the grate. One other table is occupied, by two men talking shop — an informal job interview, perhaps, or ex-colleagues catching up for a willy-waving contest, or to test the hiring waters.

‘I can’t change my stripes,’ drawls one, a tanned walrus, shaking his head slowly, and Mike stops chewing to catch his words. ‘In my heart—’ the man lays a hand solemnly on his breast ‘—in my heart , I’m a portfolio manager.’

Mike finds himself coughing, a crumb tickling his throat. Is this a vision of his future? But then, after all, why not?

Whenever Dan Mock mentions that he goes to work by bike, most people assume he means a pedal bike: real bikes are out of fashion. Dan is not much of a biker — his 350cc machine is neither a muscle-bike nor a classic — but the thirty-minute blitz along the Thames Valley adds both pleasure and peril to his morning routine. He roars through the Goring Gap where the insistent Thames breaches the Chiltern hills, and then veers westward along the foot of the escarpment on the old London Road. Cornering on a bike is another glorious demonstration of mechanics: the terrible centrifugal heave that threatens to fling him into the hedgerow in either a slide, a spin or a roll depending on which mistake he makes, but that is — strictly speaking — only a consequence of his accelerating frame of reference, and the invisible, finely-tuned centripetal haul of his front tyre, imperceptibly rotated on the steering column, clawing against the indulgent road, dragging him round. The perfect corner is an exquisite joy.

Dan works his helmet gingerly over the dressing on his cheek, kicks back the stand, launches himself into the Reading rush hour and negotiates a few roundabouts and traffic lights. The open road beckons and his plucky twin-cylinder engine roars to greet it.