Joanna Walsh: Vertigo

Nevertheless I think I couldn’t kill the anesthesiologist, who looked like a baker in his white tie-cap. Nor do I think I could kill the surgeon, who looked like a banker without his suit. When he went under they said, did I want to kiss him? Or, not did I, but did mum. I looked around for her but she wasn’t there. I touched his leg because I couldn’t reach his arm. There were wires. I didn’t want them to think me heartless after all, but did they imagine that was contact?

They’d already taken him out of his body. Sensible of him to get away too. I have no idea if he is still in there. Couldn’t they see he had already gone.

I cannot make a body meet another body, not even to kill in thought. Try another story.

When this person leaves my kitchen and arrives, armed with my fantasies, at the very door of my room, which of my children would I save first: the vulnerable youngest or the one able to run? A friend who worked a summer as a lifeguard told me how they do it: identify those most likely to survive and save them first; let the baby sink to the bottom. They are told, he said, to be “pragmatic.” We tell stories in which lifeguards heroically save the most hopeless people when all hope has gone. It seems that, all the time, we should have been telling a different story. I didn’t tell my friend at the time, but this seemed wrong. It would not do for my story. His story would be a bad story, whether about a lifeguard, or about the person downstairs.

Can either of my children be saved? Could I, as saver, make a heroic decision that results in a positive outcome, or could I make a decision that results in a negative outcome but which remains heroic nonetheless? Or could I make a pragmatic decision that results in a positive but unheroic outcome, or a pragmatic decision that results in an optimum outcome and also makes a heroic story? What if the pragmatic decision turned out worse?

In another story I walk along the hospital corridor of the children’s ward in which portholes wink at adult-eye level. The woman with the baby is in the parents’ room, where tea and instant coffee are “supplied by local freemasons.” The baby is not with her. She is crying or at least tears are coming out of her eyes but she is silent and also turning the pages of a gossip mag. I eat Rice Krispies from a plastic bowl with a cow on it, with a plastic spoon. I ask her if I can make her tea. She says no. One distress parallels the other. Or, no, how could it, or if it does, it is only for a moment, before each returns to the specifics of her own misery. I look out of the window, while the kettle takes its foreign time to boil, onto a central courtyard whose walls are white, and all down every wall are brown frames that answer only each other. At the bottom of this pit is a white roof. The tea I make tastes of soap.

Back in the ward, the baby is there. It beeps. The woman has returned. She is watching television. She watches baby programs. It is too loud. Her baby is too small surely.

I sit on the couch beside the bed. My legs dangle. Above the bed dangle a machine’s legs, waiting. The doors of the bedside cabinet look like saloon doors, but they do not swing open. Perhaps a troop of mice will come out, perhaps a miniature marching band. And I have stopped breathing neither on the in nor the out breath, either of which would have been a bit showy, but in the middle of a breath so nobody would notice, just to see if time might stop and the people in the room might stop too in the middle of their activities, and I didn’t even know I was doing it until I was about halfway to empty.

Then Charlotte comes, and all across her apron kittens kiss.

My husband met some women online and I found out.

His women were young, witty, and charming, and they had good jobs — at least I ignored the women he had met online who were not young, witty, and charming, and who did not have good jobs — and so I fell more in love with my husband, reflected as he was, in the words of these universally young, witty, and charming women.

I had neglected my husband.

Now I wanted him back.

So I tried to be as witty and charming as the women my husband had met online.

I tried to take an interest.

At breakfast, I said to him, “How is your breakfast?”

He said to me, “Fine, thanks.”

I said to him, “What do you like for breakfast?”

(Having lived with him for a number of years, I already know what my husband likes for breakfast, and this is where the women online have the advantage of me: they do not yet know what my husband likes for breakfast and so they can ask him what he likes for breakfast and, in that way, begin a conversation.)

He did not answer my question.

So I tried to take an interest in what my husband was doing. I asked him, “What are you going to do today?”

He said, “I will strip old paint from the shed.”

(I already knew he planned to do this. But, again, that is where the women online have the advantage.)

I said, “That’s nice. Have a good strip.”

He did not respond to my jokey sexual innuendo.

Instead, my husband went outside to strip paint from the shed.

When he had gone I thought:

His women are the sum of all their qualities, not several but complete, massive, many-breasted, many-legged, multifaceted, and I participate in these women. Some of his women have been chosen because they are a bit like me, some because they are unlike. He likes them. And he likes me. He likes me for being both unlike but like them. He likes them for being both like and unlike me. If I met them, I know I would like them, most of them, as we are all a little alike. Or at least I would not dislike them for being like, but unlike, me, and for him liking them not better but — although, and because, they are different — exactly the same amount as he likes me. We are all trapped behind the same glass. He can make us spin for his amusement and turn us to view any side. He is greater than the sum of our parts, though each part of them competes with me: their qualifications, and their legs, and their hairdos, and their cup sizes. And I compete with them, and some of my parts even outshine some of theirs, which are occasionally mediocre. But I cannot outshine them when they are added together.

After some time I went outside into the garden where my husband was stripping paint from the shed, and said,

“Why didn’t you tell me about the women online?” And he said, “I did, when you asked me,” and I said, “Why did you lie about how long you’d been talking to them?” and he said, “I didn’t.” And I said, “I saw your emails and it’s been going on for months. And I don’t care what you’ve done,” I said, “I just don’t want you to lie to me about it,” and he said, “I can’t take this from you again. You have to let it go. You fucked someone. All I did was send a few messages. You have to let it go.”

And I said, “I didn’t lie about that. You lied about it. Just tell me you lied about it and I’ll let it go.”

And he said,

“No.”

In the evenings, my husband listens to old vinyl. My husband says to his women, “I like old vinyl,” and so they listen to some old vinyl for him.

“You remind me of Debbie Harry,” he tells one of his women, “and you look like Belinda Carlisle. You make me think of Debbi Peterson (from The Bangles), and you look like Dale Bozzio.” My husband has a line and he follows it.

The line is flat. It is a line of enclosed screaming women. They are stretched into an eternity of dental floss you could wrap round the world a thousand times. It’s not their breasts I can’t cope with, nor their qualifications. It’s not their Debbie Harry legs, their Dale Bozzio voices, it’s the way they multiply, each by each other, exponentially: it’s the digits.