The Brutal Language of Love (7 page)

“Maybe we could hang out while my friend talks to your roommate,” Hazel suggested.

“Sure.”

“I don't really want to bowl,” she said.

“That's okay.”

“I could watch you bowl.”

“Oh.”

“I was watching you before so I could just keep watching you.”

“I see,” Brigitte said.

Hazel laughed a little. “I was spying on you,” she said.

Brigitte laughed, too. “Well,” she said. “Hmm.”

Hazel set her beer down on the scoring table. She said, “Your bra strap is showing,” and stepped up onto the bowling floor to fix it. Though Brigitte kept her eyes open this time, she remembered Hazel better from the soft pads of her fingertips, the smell of almonds and cherries that came off her face.

They all ended up back at Brigitte and Raoul's
place. Almost immediately Raoul and Mary Louise, Hazel's friend, disappeared inside the tin shed in the backyard. After hearing that this was where Raoul kept his weights, Mary Louise—whose biceps were minute but bulgy—had insisted she be given the opportunity to prove she could bench-press a hundred pounds.

That left Brigitte and Hazel in the living room, a square space with a wooden floor, a futon, and two red director's chairs. “Matching chairs,” Hazel commented as she settled herself into the one bearing Brigitte's name. “How romantic.”

Brigitte took a seat on the futon. “They're old,” she said. “We've had them for, like, three years.”

Hazel nodded.

“We paid for them ourselves. They weren't gifts to each other or anything.”

“I like the color,” Hazel said.

“If we ever actually used them on a student shoot people would probably laugh at us.”

Hazel looked blankly at Brigitte, who was desperately trying to stop talking about the chairs. “Here,” Brigitte said suddenly, hopping up from the futon. She walked over to the TV and popped in a videocassette of
36C.
“Here's something,” she said.

They watched the movie in silence. Brigitte failed to return to her seat, instead standing next to the TV for the duration of the film, ready to shut it off should Hazel experience any discomfort.

But she seemed to like it, clapping and saying “Bravo” when it was over.

“Really?” Brigitte asked her. She hit rewind on the VCR.

Hazel nodded. “I'm flattered.”

Brigitte ejected the tape and carried it back to the futon with her. “Wow,” she said.

“Assuming that's me, of course. I mean, us.”

Brigitte nodded. “Raoul shot it.”

“Raoul seems interesting,” Hazel said, which Brigitte took to mean she didn't like him, a fairly common occurrence among thinking women.

“He's French,” Brigitte said.

“You mentioned that.”

“I was wondering,” Brigitte said, “do you think I'm gay?”

Hazel laughed. “I hope so,” she said.

“Are you?” Brigitte asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Who was that guy who kissed you in the department store?”

Hazel sighed. “My ex-boyfriend. He's having a hard time making the transition.”

“Hmm,” Brigitte said.

“I'm not,” Hazel assured her.

“Oh,” Brigitte said. “That's good.”

Hazel smiled. She looked out the window at the tin shed, whose silver sides were reflecting moonlight. “Is Mary Louise safe with him?” she asked.

“Absolutely,” Brigitte said.

“You know him from the film program?”

Brigitte nodded. “He introduced me to Shirley Mayer.”

“Who's she?” Hazel asked, and Brigitte told her about how Shirley Mayer wore jackets instead of bras, how she had been persecuted and would now get to keep her job forever.

“But she shouldn't have done that,” Hazel said.

“Done what?” Brigitte asked.

“Shown you her breasts.”

“Why not?”

Hazel shrugged. She said, “I shouldn't have touched your shoulders that day in the department store, either.”

“Oh,” Brigitte said, gravely disappointed.

“Or maybe I should have,” Hazel said. “I don't know.”

“It seemed fine to me,” Brigitte said.

“You're supposed to feel safe in a dressing room.”

“I did feel safe.”

“You kept closing your eyes.”

“I was safe,” Brigitte insisted.

“It's just that you seem sort of impressionable.”

“I'm thirty, for godssakes,” Brigitte told her. “I'm a nontraditional student.”

Hazel nodded. “I'm sorry.”

“Shirley Mayer taught me who I am.”

“So you're in love with her?”

“I want to take care of her,” Brigitte corrected.

“I see,” Hazel said. She stood up then and stretched her arms.

Brigitte stood up, too. “Don't leave yet,” she said.

Hazel laughed. She moved toward Brigitte, tugged on the waistband of her jeans, and asked for a tour of the house.

In the bedroom they kissed for a long time, first softly, politely—as if they were related—then more invasively. They were still standing after twenty minutes or so when Hazel complained of the heat and took off Brigitte's shirt. Underneath was the plain white bra she had sold Brigitte a couple of months earlier, which she quickly pushed up instead of removing, pleasing Brigitte with her urgency.

“Do you like it like this?” Hazel asked, taking off her own shirt now. “Without the dressing room?” She wore one of the violet lace bras from the department store, the kind that lifted little breasts. She took that off, too, and reached down to unbutton her jeans. “Do you like it without Shirley Mayer?” she whispered.

“Yes,” Brigitte said. She moved closer to Hazel now—much, much closer—and suddenly found herself possessed of a profound appreciation for moisture and fragrance, a refined sense of geography as it applied to those areas of the body women shared. And she felt, from Hazel's reactions, that she had a knack for this sort of thing. For the first time in her life the generosity aspect of sex had ceased to feel like work to her. She thought she might go on forever.

When at last Hazel insisted it was her turn to be generous, Brigitte lay back tentatively, but then asked Hazel to stop. It wasn't because what Hazel was doing felt like nothing, she tried to explain, but rather, it was too much of something. The right thing. That which would have to be worked slowly into her system so as to trick her into thinking it had been there all along, as opposed to overwhelming her with the torrid fact of its long, unwarranted absence.

In the morning Brigitte and Hazel were sitting at the
kitchen table, drinking coffee and occasionally reaching inside each other's shirts, when Raoul wandered in from the backyard. “Where's Mary Louise?” Hazel asked him. He wore no shoes and was opening and closing kitchen cupboards in search of something.

“In the shack, man,” he said. Then he added, “Shit, Brigitte, where's my aloe vera?”

Brigitte got up from the table and helped him look. “What do you need aloe vera for?” Hazel said. “Is Mary Louise okay?”

Raoul laughed. “Mary Louise is fine. She cut me with her nails, man. You want to see my back?”

“No thanks,” Hazel said.

“Here,” Brigitte said, handing Raoul the tube of salve. “It was in the junk drawer.”

Raoul nodded. “Thanks, man,” he said. Then he kissed her on both cheeks, as he had done every morning of their life together.

Hazel looked away and, seeing this, Raoul shrugged. “Hey, man,” he said to her. “I'm French.”

“Man?” Hazel said.

“Okay,” Raoul said, “I'm French,
'A-zel.
This is how we say 'ello, good morning, whatever.”

“Kiss Hazel,” Brigitte said.

“I think she doesn't want me to,” Raoul protested, shoving his hands in his pockets.

“As long as Mary Louise is all right, it would be okay,” Hazel said.

Raoul was momentarily still, then took his hands out of his pockets and leaned down to kiss Hazel's cheeks. As he did, his shirt pulled up a bit at the back, and Brigitte could see some of the red welts Mary Louise's nails had left on his skin. Not scratches or scrapes, but bitter little half-moons outlined in dried blood. Imprints. At first Brigitte was appalled at Mary Louise, then fleetingly jealous of her, then, oddly, gratified. She must have been as strong as she had claimed, Brigitte decided at last. Raoul should have believed her.

It was a cold march night and they sat across the
bar from each other, smiling over the fact that they both kept ordering Guinness. Silently they competed, in an attempt to drink each other under a table they didn't share. “You won,” he told her later, on his way back from the toilet. He said his name was Carl and apologized immediately for being so fat. She told him it wasn't that bad, and really it wasn't. He expressed surprise that an American should have such a taste for the brown stuff, and Shayna said why shouldn't she, it tasted good.

Carl described himself as being no different from any other Irishman in London, working an office job he never would have found in Dublin and wishing he could go home, particularly when the natives got restless and it was Paddy this and Paddy that on the train platforms, at the kiosks, in the queues for sausage and chips. Shayna explained that she was on a work permit through her American university, earning high pay for her excessive typing skills. When Carl asked her how it was that he had gotten so lucky as to meet her, she neglected to tell him that she frequently drank alone, and tonight was no different.

As the evening wore on, Shayna noted many fine qualities in Carl: generosity, humor, sportsmanship, the fine accent, the gray eyes. Quite simply, he meant her no malice and she appreciated the gesture. When the pub closed they shook hands as a show of restraint.

Carl had told her who his father was, and Shayna had been careful not to mention her inability to get through the man's books. She decided the blame must lie with her since she was American and it was her heritage not to be able to pay attention. The next day she bought one of Niall Meara's novels, thinking the outlay of cash might make his writing more interesting. It didn't, but she spent some time manhandling the volume and dog-earing pages, in anticipation of a visit from the son.

Carl stayed at Shayna's place on their second
date, the two of them having just seen a French film. It was a tiny room in North London, big enough for a twin bed, a dresser, and a freestanding wardrobe. The landlord had provided a synthetic pink bedspread, and as Shayna and Carl lay naked beneath it, he again regretted his size. “This weight,” he said. “It's like when I came over on the boat, I never set my luggage down.”

Shayna sucked in her stomach to help create an illusion of space. She and Carl lay facing each other, and now he studied her, concerned. “Breathe,” he commanded after a moment, and she let her stomach escape her, nestling itself lightly against his own. “Try this,” he said, turning away from her to lie on his side. “See if you have more room this way.”

She curled up behind him and smelled his back, which was not at all dank or sweaty. Carl saw his father's book then, lying on the floor where Shayna had so carefully positioned it, and said, “You read this shite?”

Later he turned around and asked her to do the same, so that he faced her back. She did, and now he was smelling her skin, kissing it, gently separating her thighs. Throughout the night he awakened her, pressing up against her and asking quietly if she felt ready again. He said he had never known it could be like this, the woman facing away and enjoying herself, and Shayna was pleased. She had practiced for several years, training herself to like the things men looked at in pictures, and now she liked them. She thought men had it right, keeping things vaguely anonymous the way they did.

For their third date they decided on a German film.
Shayna took the tube to Hampstead, a quaint area featuring ivy and pouring rain, and waited outside the theater until Carl never showed.

She bought a ticket anyway and watched the film from the back of the auditorium, standing there until her legs cramped and people began running into her on their way out to the rest rooms. When she finally took a seat, blocking people's views and irritating them with the inescapable cellophane of her candy bar, she couldn't seem to stop turning around. “Carl?” she called, as someone opened the auditorium doors, spreading light across the aisles, and a voice from behind her bellowed, “Forget it, love! He's not coming!” Others laughed and still others told them to hush. Later, walking the night streets beneath her dripping umbrella, all Shayna could remember of the movie was a sheet of filmy paper drifting listlessly through the air, a sickly man entranced by the spectacle of it.

She took the train to north London, not bothering to put her umbrella up on the walk from the tube station to her flat. The smell of clove cigarettes enticed her to stop in at the neighborhood pub, where another Irishman bought her drinks, and used his bar napkin to dry her hair and face. Normally she could be had this easily, but not tonight, not until she squared things with Carl.

The Irishman asked to walk Shayna home and graciously accepted her decline, though he proceeded to follow her at a short distance. She liked the sound of his boot steps quickening and then slowing with hers, and imagined he thought she was oblivious. This type of thing had happened to her before, and Shayna regretted not having the sense to feel worse about it, the instinct to protect herself.

But as she turned into her gate, he slowed, then walked on past the house. He had seen Carl before she did, waiting for her on the front steps, hands tucked inside his bomber jacket. “Shayna,” he said, “I'm so sorry I was late tonight. But I was there, I swear.” From his pocket he produced a torn ticket stub, candy wrappers, a scribbled summary of the film. Had Shayna stayed until the lights came up, she would have found him in an aisle seat not far from her own.

They hugged. Shayna sank into Carl's largeness and noticed that, like her, he had been drinking; like her, he was grateful for their reunion. And yet in the end, she believed he was better than she. She believed his father made him better, and that she would be made better, too, by an involvement with either one of them. Because there were things wrong with her: the way she brought home strangers, her drinking maybe, how she couldn't concentrate on books.

Carl and Shayna were married in June by the borough
of Islington registrar. Carl refused to invite his father, citing an early novel disparaging of a fat son as evidence of the man's unworthiness. “What about your mother?” Shayna asked, and he dismissed her out of hand as a co-conspirator. He had an older sister, Sheila, but she was in America of all places, getting what Carl described as her touchy-feely degree, which was really a doctorate in psychology.

Shayna invited her own mother, who wanted to come but was afraid of crossing the Atlantic in a plane, and her father, who, as Paris bureau chief of an American newspaper, was relatively close by. However, he declined, feeling awkward at events requiring physical contact, such as graduations or confirmations. Still, he was compelled by his profession to congratulate her on marrying into a literary family, and offered to wire money were she to name a reasonable sum.

After the ceremony, Carl and Shayna left their jobs and used her father's money to take an extended honeymoon on the west coast of Ireland. “Meara?” the spindly proprietress of their bed-and-breakfast asked when they gave their last name. “You wouldn't be related to himself now, would you?” Carl surprised Shayna by answering that they would. It was a small village, and once word got out that Niall Meara's son was there on his honeymoon, people stopped charging them for things. Not only did they get their bed-and-breakfast from Mrs. Riordan, but lunch and dinner as well. Drinks at the pub were on the house (though the barman fretted over Carl's in-take affecting his “performance”), and a nearby shearer sent over a scratchy tartan blanket with many happy returns. The local paper took a photo of the newlyweds and wrote a small piece to accompany it, and they were generally assured by all that this was the least the village could do, Niall Meara having brought them so much pleasure over the years.

In the days that followed they froze themselves walking barefoot through the surf, then climbed any number of seaside cliffs to get their circulation back, Carl hauling the blanket over his shoulder. In the tall, fragrant weeds at the top they laid it down, then wrapped themselves tightly inside. The trick, Carl whispered, curved around her back and clearing any unnecessary clothing from between them, was to look like they were just resting, like they had nothing to hide. She wore dresses to make things easier for him and, as they lay connected, listened to the hidden rustles of the children who followed them at a distance.

A phone call came as the honeymoon neared its close, and it was with great pride that, upon their return from the cliffs one evening, Mrs. Riordan announced she'd had the privilege of speaking with Niall Meara himself, all the way from Dublin. Carl thanked her for the message, then turned to go upstairs. “Are you not going to ring him back?” she called after him, standing beside the telephone table in the foyer, but he ignored her.

In the bedroom, Carl tossed the tartan blanket onto an antique chair and sat down at the edge of their wood-frame bed. He was always a little flushed from their afternoons together, but today it seemed this was more agitation than love. “What should I do?” he asked Shayna, but she couldn't say. She only knew what she hoped he would do, and that might not have been the right answer. “You ring him,” Carl said finally.

“Me?” Shayna said.

“Ring him and tell him you're my wife and you're beautiful and you could have had any bloke you wanted and you picked me.”

“But I can't do that,” she said.

“Well,” he said, and he laughed in a choked way she had never heard before. “I guess you were bound to tell me no sometime.”

Shayna was instantly stricken, and reached out a hand to steady herself on the bureau. It was a terrible error to have refused him, a miscalculation. “You've got to learn to say no,” her housemates had told her back in college, but they were talking about all the strangers whose voices they heard through her bedroom door, not Carl, who was slowly making her feel like she could love a man who knew her.

He was on his feet now, taking her elbow and inching her toward the bed. He spent the night apologizing for various perceived infractions, wondering if she was pregnant, and making love to her from the front. In the morning Mrs. Riordan brought them a breakfast tray filled with black-and-white pudding, eggs sunny-side up, and tomatoes silken with grease from the frying pan. At the center of the tray—propped against two mugs of steaming tea—was a telegram, something Shayna had never before seen. A smile escaped Carl as his eyes passed over it:
READ OF YOUR WEDDING STOP WANT TO THROTTLE YOU FOR NOT TELLING US STOP WANT TO APOLOGIZE FOR BOOK STOP WANT TO KISS YOUR LOVELY BRIDE
.

It was decided that now that he was a married man,
Carl would learn to drive. Mother, as Mrs. Meara instructed Shayna to call her when they hugged at Dublin airport, would have to do the teaching. “I don't have my license,” Niall explained as he drove them all home in a taupe Peugeot, and there was no laughter from the others to indicate that this wasn't true.

Shayna sat beside Carl in the back seat of the car, staring at the back of her father-in-law's head. There was a bald spot at the center of it, and a crown of soft brown hair decorating the rim. Because Niall was tall, he drove with his head tilted slightly downward so as to avoid bumping the vinyl ceiling. Over the course of the ride Shayna met his eyes twice in the rearview mirror, each time catching the beginnings of his smile before she quickly turned away.

Mother was heavy and raven-haired like Carl. She wore a silky tank top revealing beautiful, poreless skin at the nape of her neck, and perspired discreetly under her arms. She too was losing her hair, but remained stylishly coiffed that afternoon with the help of ornamental combs and a light spray. “What's your hurry?” she demanded repeatedly of Niall, and he answered her with polite deceleration.

The Mearas lived in south Dublin, in a large brick row house across from the sea. It was a wealthy area, with many of the homes boasting the colorful Georgian doors Shayna had seen on postcards at the airport, and good-sized gardens both in front and at the back. The driveway Niall pulled into already held a Mercedes, and he didn't seem bothered by the light tap he gave its bumper before turning off the Peugeot. “We won't stay long,” Carl suddenly warned his parents.

Once inside the house they separated, embarrassed. Mother headed for the kitchen, which smelled of roasting meat, and Niall for the living room directly off the foyer. Neither of them seemed to want to watch Carl and Shayna ascend the stairs together, Carl's hand resting purposefully on Shayna's bottom.

They stayed in his old bedroom, located directly above the living room and with a full ocean view. Carl got behind the chiffon drapes and opened the tall windows, then swore bitterly at the twin beds his mother had made up. The walls were decorated with various paintings of Niall—some abstract, some realistic—and carefully Carl took all of these down, leaning them against the wall facing inward.

He unzipped himself then and sat down on an overstuffed chair in the corner, asking Shayna to come sit with him. She found him juvenile, romantic. She appreciated both his initiative and the regularity of his advances. It was becoming addictive, the gentle claim he had laid to her, not having to work so hard to belong to someone else.