COLM
Last night I’m sitting there having dinner with my wife. And we’re not speaking. Not in a bad way. Not in a ‘I’ve got nothing to say to you, pass the salt’ sort of way but in a loving silence, a warm silence. So I’m sitting there having dinner with my wife in a warm silence. I think it was lamb. And I said ‘Is this lamb?’ and she said ‘Yes. It’s lamb. Don’t you like it?’ and I said ‘Yes. I think I like it.’ And she said ‘Think? You think you like it?’ and I said ‘Yes. I think I like it’ and she said ‘Shall I tell Angelina to make you something else?’ and I said ‘Why would you do that when I think I like it? Isn’t that a positive?’ and she said ‘No, that’s not a positive. Not if you think you like something. It’s only a positive if you like something.’ And I said ‘Well what about us? I think I like you, yet we’ve been married for twenty-five years.’ And there was a…catch, in her being, a microsecond of shock. And I thought ‘Oh Christ, I’ve done it now’ and I didn’t mean to, Castile, I really didn’t, I just thought this was a given, but she’s always had remarkable powers of recovery and we just carried on, we just carried on talking.
And we carry on eating. And there are silences, yes. But comfortable silences. The silences of deep understanding. And we’re chatting, and she’s telling me about her brother and there’s no hint of what was said, so much so that I’m beginning to think that it never really happened and then, then in the middle of a sentence, she looks up at me and says ‘What do you mean “think”? What does “think” mean?’
Beat.
And I looked at her. And I saw in her face that one word from me, and she would collapse behind that smile. And I thought ‘God, don’t say the wrong thing’ but I found myself saying ‘Well, on the way home I almost asked Mario to drop me off at a brothel so I could pay a prostitute to let me fuck her in the mouth.’
…
And she looked…so surprised. And I said, ‘Look, I’m saying this because I want to be honest, don’t you want to be honest? I think I love you, I think I’ve loved you for twenty five years, isn’t that enough? Please don’t tell me that that isn’t enough.’
And for a second, for a fraction of a second I thought ‘Here we go. Here it comes, the eruption, she’s going to explode…’
And she looked at me and opened her mouth and said ‘You’re in a funny mood tonight.’ And then went back to the lamb.
Beat.
‘You’re in a funny mood tonight.’
And suddenly it occurred to me, Castile, that we had in fact been sitting in a ‘pass the salt’ sort of silence. That we had been sitting in that sort of silence for twenty five years. And I cried. I cried my lungs out. Inside. I cried my lungs out inside. Outside I just carried on eating the lamb.