Memento Vitae

Lionel reminds Naomi of her father: silent, warm, elusive. That is partly why she loves him; she knows that. He is tall and grey and heavy, good to hug, solid as a tree. He smiles down at her when she hugs him and kisses the top of her head. He looks as if he cares about her then, but she wouldn’t presume he does. She has never heard him use the word love and she has been careful not to use it herself. But their bodies seem to understand each other.

When they have arranged to meet for lunch she watches from the balcony to see him arrive. The waiting is part of the pleasure. Earlier in the day she has been out to buy smoked salmon and chicken tikka, raspberries and cream. She has never found shopping so erotic before. She is drunk with the knowledge that she is doing all this for him and presently he will be climbing the stairs to her flat and she will be able to touch him. She smiles at strangers as she walks round the shop, gathering up all his favourite things and feeling her body making itself ready for his arrival. It is only just possible to contain such happiness: a few drops more, she feels, and it might spill over into madness.

She hopes he will be late and he often is, giving her more time to look forward to her treat. If he is going to be very late, he telephones. This is an extra pleasure, to hear his voice again, casual and apologetic, as if he were an ordinary person and they had a relationship with a future. Sometimes, rarely, he has to cancel, and even that has its merits, as he then has to rebook, prolonging her time of anticipation. Some friends tell her this is unhealthy and masochistic, but she thinks it’s sensible, making the most of everything she is given. Other friends envy her for having a high which must, she thinks, be very similar to one induced by drugs. A hit or a fix. She isn’t sure of her terminology; she is a bit out of date. But she knows about love. That doesn’t seem to change. Only now there are books written about how to cure it, groups formed to support you while you learn to love moderately, without risk, making sure you get loved back in equal measure before you hazard yourself.

He arrives frowning, with some remark about the traffic or the weather. He is an angry person. She can feel the enormity of her smile splitting her face: she is smiling hugely, like an idiot. She is smiling for both of them. She is so joyful, her smile is out of control. What does he make of such a smile?

He walks in, past her. He doesn’t kiss her or touch her. If she waits long enough he will, but often she can’t wait and she goes to him and puts her arms round him, needing to touch him; she puts her head against his chest, opens his shirt, kisses his fur and breathes in that special scent of him. Pheromones. She has read about them. Sheer animal attraction, primitive, atavistic, the chemistry that makes for instant mating.

He returns the hug. He looks down at her and smiles at last and they say hullo. The back of his shirt is wet with sweat. Occasionally, he has an erection then and there, and they go straight to bed. But usually he doesn’t: he is tired and irritable and wants a drink, lunch, time to unwind and dump his hospital morning. She has to let go of him by sheer willpower before he pulls away from her. She never gets enough of him but he, she fears, gets far too much of her. An unequal bargain. She feels like a puppy wagging its tail at an indifferent master, jumping up, licking his hand. She hates feeling like that but she doesn’t know how to stop.

He talks about patients and administration while she pours him wine and prepares the food. He tells her he has fucked up his life: he has had too many children and he pays too much maintenance. It is always a shock when he says something important: usually he uses words to conceal rather than reveal. Over two years he has only told her a few things that really matter. She longs to talk to him, to listen to him, but feels an enormous pressure against it, blocking her best endeavours. He has a prickly self-protective casing around him. She is embracing a hedgehog. He is a crab, an armadillo: he won’t let her touch his soft centre but keeps her outside, banging helplessly on his hard shell with her small useless fists.

He fills her eyes. The pleasure of having him in her space, of being able to look at him and touch him sometimes makes her deaf so that she has difficulty hearing what he says, although she longs to hear it. She tells him this, but he doesn’t respond. Sometimes he seems so joyless she wonders why he is with her at all. ‘I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t like it,’ he says. Whatever that means. His idea of a compliment perhaps. In bed she presses her hands very flat against his furry body so that she can touch as much of him as possible while he sleeps. She knows she is obsessed but that knowledge doesn’t make the obsession go away.

In restaurants, on the rare occasions when they go out and are therefore unable to make love, she can’t stop herself touching him, stroking him, yet she worries that all this physical adulation may be cloying and oppressive. ‘D’you like me touching you or do you think, Oh God, not again?’ she asks him, genuinely wanting to know.

‘I like it,’ he says without emotion.

Once he comes round to see her and they sit for an hour talking of hotels in America while he holds her hand actively, fingers moving, clasping and reclasping, their hands making love while their words say nothing at all. Then he leaves for his next appointment. On another occasion she asks him if he would have liked to make love that day. ‘I wouldn’t have minded,’ he says, ‘but I was conscious of the time.’

When they met he told her his wife was going to leave him but she hasn’t and this is never mentioned now. He has had three wives and seven children. He earns a lot of money but he is always in debt. He doesn’t like her to sympathise with him: he prefers to blame himself for everything.

At the beginning he made love to her totally, with hands and tongue and cock, making her come over and over again, seeming to care about her coming. Now he gets into bed and pulls the duvet over his head; she gets in beside him and he puts his arm round her and sleeps. She lies there listening to his heavy breathing and watching their time together tick away. Talking time, if they could ever talk. Lovemaking time. He is so tired. He is exhausted. He needs sleep more than he needs her. He needs oblivion.

No matter how much she loves him, she can’t make him love her. It doesn’t work that way. She understands that: there have been people in the past who loved her, whom she could not love. She knows too that the person who loves gains more than the person who is loved. So she feels more sorry for him than for herself. She is richer; she can afford to be generous.

When he wakes he denies being asleep. He says, ‘Make me hard,’ and she takes his cock in her mouth. She loves it so much, this part of him, hard or soft. Usually her tongue and his hand and a little fantasy talk work the magic and it rises from the ashes. But sometimes it won’t obey. She feels his shame and anger acutely: it is far worse than her own disappointment. And there is the extra burden of having to pretend it does not matter. He apologises; she is embarrassed. They both want him to be powerful. ‘I’m sorry. My cock’s not behaving itself,’ he says.

She thinks it a miracle it ever does when they have so little time, trying to eat, drink, sleep, talk and make love in less than three hours once a fortnight. At his best he is the greatest lover she has ever had and she has told him so in the past, but this does not help them now.

‘Well,’ she says, ‘you’re not a machine.’

His reply amazes her so much she forgets to ask him what he means. ‘Yes I am,’ he says, ‘and so are you.’

Sometimes he comes in her mouth and she swallows it. The warm spray flowering on her tongue like sparklers on the hand, soft and piercing, gentle and sharp. Before, with other people, lesser loves, she has always spat it out. But usually he comes inside her, needing to enter her as she needs to have him inside. ‘I’m past my prime,’ he says.

‘What a good thing I didn’t meet you any sooner,’ she says, half meaning it, although in her heart she wants all his life. He would have been too much for her. If she finds him intoxicating now, what must he have been like when his cock always obeyed him, when the dark hair that covers his body also covered his head, before it started greying, thinning, before he put on weight, before he had responsibilities? Did he like himself any better when he was young, she wonders?

Sometimes he won’t even kiss her. ‘Don’t I taste nice?’ she asks fearfully.

‘I’m not feeling very kissy at the moment,’ he says. ‘Nothing to do with you.’

She wonders if anything is to do with her. Sometimes she feels she is just servicing him. Often they make love without him even stroking her. She can do it for herself, which he likes, or do without. Then she feels lonely, angry, that he is destroying the only thing they have. He says he is lazy, she thinks he is nearly dead. Her compassion is greater than her anger. He has very little left to give, but she wants it, whatever it is. Everything could be resolved if they had more time, she thinks. She sucks him, strokes him; they work together on the magic mushroom, and then they fuck for a long time. Often she comes gloriously but sometimes she is too tense and anxious, too worried for him. Advice from sex manuals whirls through her head: relax, squeeze, fantasise, enjoy. Above all, don’t let this powerful, fragile creature feel inadequate. Hearing his cries at the end and feeling the waves of his semen inside her, she feels privileged, set apart from ordinary mortals, joined to a god. She holds him while he sleeps and imagines a life where they could live together, knowing it will never happen. Each time he leaves she feels exhausted and bereaved.

She takes out insurance: she finds herself another lover, Paul. She doesn’t believe in fidelity to a married man any more, no matter how much she loves him. It makes no sense; she had learned the hard way. In her experience they eventually give her up for a new woman or for their old wife. They get bored by familiarity or scared of intensity and they run away: it is only a matter of time. Paul is married too, but more happily than Lionel: it shows in his face. ‘I don’t want to be unfaithful to my wife emotionally or financially,’ he says at the beginning, very clear, ‘just sexually.’ She understands: he means he will bring cheap bottles of wine and discourage her from phoning him at the office. His wife’s name is Christine and he often mentions her casually as if to remind Naomi of her existence, or as if she were someone they both knew, as if it reassured him to bring her into the conversation.

‘That’s all right,’ she says. ‘I’m in love,’ and she tells him about her beloved. He listens sympathetically, a rare gift, they have good sex together, and she thinks of him as a friend. She likes the perfect balance of it, the fearful symmetry: him with his wife and her with her lover. She hopes he will make her feel more relaxed, less desperate for Lionel, better able to survive the intervals between meetings. He is short and wiry, smooth-skinned, cheerful and energetic, and he makes love generously, doing everything she wants. He is content with his life and therefore he has more to give. ‘Tell me what you want,’ he says, as if offering her a menu. The luxury of it. She feels safe with him: there is no danger of her loving him. Each time she is pleased to see him arrive, smiling, kissing and hugging her as soon as they meet; each time she watches him leave with a light heart, feeling replenished.

Lionel would like her to find another man to join them, so she doesn’t tell him about Paul, who would also be delighted at the idea. It is her way of punishing them both for not giving her enough time, for not loving her. Her small rebellion. She won’t allow them such a treat and they will never know that she could. She wants Lionel alone. And she doesn’t want to find out if they could both easily make space in their crowded diaries for such an event when their time with her is so limited.

Her therapy group want to know why she keeps choosing married men. She is baffled by the idea of choice; she can’t remember when last she met anyone single. She is forty. In her age group most people are married. But they insist it means she is afraid of commitment. Maybe she is, and after two divorces it seems like a sensible fear.

She works by night, in a casino. Every night she watches men lose (or, much less often, win) in an evening more than she earns in a year. Who would want to go out with a man like that, even if they were not forbidden to fraternise with the punters? But it is only money, whereas she is gambling with her heart. Everyone else who works with her is married or much too young. Besides, married men are house-trained: they carry used glasses back into the kitchen and leave the lavatory seat down. And it is touching, the way they speak lovingly of their children.

With Lionel she explores the mutual pleasures of violence and the tenderness that follows. Sometimes the marks take a week or ten days to fade and when he telephones he asks if she would like some more. She always says yes.

She doesn’t tell her therapy group about this: she doesn’t think they could handle it. But she does try to explain to them that sex is magic, that she needs the reassurance of touch, penetration, ejaculation, to take her out of her head, to keep her in touch with life. They say they understand but she doesn’t see understanding in their faces. Some of them are married, some celibate. One of them is both. They think she needs to have her consciousness raised. They think she doesn’t value herself. They ask her to talk about her dead father.

She tries to explain what it’s like out there in the jungle at her age. ‘It’s a seller’s market,’ she says. ‘And I’m buying.’ They have all got flats or houses, so surely they will understand that. They still insist she could find somebody single, somebody with time for her, somebody who would put her first. They don’t tell her where this miraculous person may be found, or why, since he is so wonderful, he is not already attached to someone else. She knows he doesn’t exist. Single men of her age are a little dusty and unkempt; rusted through lack of use; obsessed with the past. She has eaten enough dinners while listening to their bitter tales of what went wrong. Occasionally she has been asked to analyse their lost wives. ‘What do you think is the matter with Wendy? Why did she behave like that?’ Sometimes they say after a few hours of this that they shouldn’t be talking about the past when they’re with her; then they go on doing it. They are often quite surprised when she doesn’t want to take her clothes off at the end of an evening, her head still full of Wendy’s problems so that she feels like a nanny or a shrink. Undressing in these circumstances would surely be gross professional misconduct.

The AIDS horror goes public during her affair with Lionel but he is unperturbed. ‘It’s too late,’ he says, ‘we’ve already mingled our juices. Besides, I’ve got a very strong immune system.’ She wants to believe him. It would be unbearable to have nothing of him left behind in her body. But it is something extra to worry about. He is an old sixties swinger, if he is to be believed, with a legacy of lovers, threesomes, foursomes, orgies. It would be ironic, she thinks, if this love affair should turn out to be not merely heart-breaking but also lethal.

Paul prefers to use sheaths, out of respect for his wife. He is adept with them, so that they are hardly noticeable, but she thinks how sad it is to be back to such primitive technology after all the years of freedom. Once, at Christmas, he doesn’t bother, and it is like a gift.

Then without warning Lionel leaves her. He says on the phone, ‘I suppose I’ve been putting off ringing you because I seem to have got involved with someone.’

She isn’t surprised but she’s stunned. ‘My God, what a shock,’ she says.

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘it was for me too.’

The pain in her heart grows till she feels it will choke her: it was on the phone too that she heard of the death of her father. ‘How long have you known her?’ she asks.

‘Three weeks,’ he says.

‘Are you trying to say goodbye?’ she asks, very brave now, with nothing more to lose.

‘I think I’m saying you may find I’m going to be a bit preoccupied for a while,’ he says.

She digests that in silence: it is like swallowing a stone. She wonders if the new woman is preferred because she is married and shares the pressures of family life or because she is willing to enact all his fantasies or simply because she is new and her very newness can revitalise him. She doesn’t ask: she doesn’t want to know.

‘I do actually love you,’ she says for the first time, free to say it now it can’t threaten him. ‘Can we keep in touch?’

‘I don’t see why not,’ he says, ‘but you may not want to.’

‘This is almost the first real conversation we’ve had,’ she says.

‘Oh,’ he says, ‘that’s not quite fair.’ And then: ‘Well, I must go, I’ve got people waiting to see me.’

‘Keep in touch,’ she says again, heavy with loss. Touch was all they had.

‘I’ll give you a buzz,’ he says, an expression she hates. She puts down the phone and picks up the pain, a huge burden of emptiness inside her.

Her therapy group, when she narrates this conversation, stare at her incredulously and ask how she feels. ‘Sad,’ she says.

‘And how do we want her to feel?’ the leader asks.

‘Angry,’ they chorus, almost shouting.

But she can’t find the anger. It is not as if he has broken any promise.

The next time Paul makes love to her she weeps after she comes. She has done this before but out of pleasure not grief. She can’t tell him Lionel has gone because he has always said it would be a burden to have anyone wholly dependent on him. Anyone except his wife, presumably. But he is warm and affectionate with her as usual. After he has gone she notices that instead of throwing away the used condom in a tissue, he has left it on the floor, its neck knotted like a tiny balloon, so the precious contents can’t escape. She stares at it, this magic elixir, these few pale drops that there is so much fuss about. There must be some spell she could cast, if she were a witch and knew what to do. But she is only human and so she sleeps with it under her pillow to comfort herself, like a child with a teddy bear, and it soothes her, taking the edge off the pain, her little souvenir of life.