Fine Lines, Chapter Two

Chapter Two | Chapter One

‘It needed to happen.’ Flavia said.
‘Did it?’ I said.
‘Yes! You’re so different, you two. There’s a big disconnection. You could have been going, going, going, like that for years.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like boring and no sparks with Mr Body. Until you just died. Imagine?’
‘He wasn’t that boring.’ I said.
‘He’s a narcissist. I’m surprised you lasted this long, I don’t even think you’re his type.’ She said.
‘Who even says that? I’m 45, we’ve been together twenty years! We’re way past ‘types.’
‘You thought, right?’
Flavia is never gentle with her truths. I’ve learned not to be bound by her blunt assessments, not to take them as corroborated facts. One of the first times I met her she told me that I was ‘strangely attractive.’ She said that it was curious because, individually my crooked nose and big mouth were not beautiful but as a complete picture, it somehow clicked. It was uncomfortable, the attention she drew to my face at a small summer BBQ, the opinions she fielded from the gathering of mostly strangers.
People don’t easily warm to Flavia. She’s more likely to drive them away than draw them in. Maybe it’s the masochist in me but I like feeling uncomfortable. I like people who are unedited in their opinions, who haven’t submitted to nuance and refined their social behaviour. Flavia interrogates, she doesn’t aim to offend but sometimes she does.
‘So what’s his type then?’ I asked her.
’15 years younger, no kids, loves her manicures and fresh roots, drives a Mini Cooper convertible, works hard, worships money.’
‘Wow. Where did that come from?’
‘We’re in the same gym, remember? I see him. He’s also the only man I know who shaves his arms and legs and still uses tanning beds. He doesn’t do imperfection.’
‘And I do?’
She laughed and swigged hard on a bottle of Peroni. Her garden in full summer bloom a haven from my strange new reality.

***

I didn’t sign up for this either. I’m done. I don’t know what I expected. A fight? I thought it might provoke something, bring things to a head. Or maybe even that it would be ignored.
‘I completely agree.’ He said, standing at the bedroom door, where I was still scrolling aimlessly on my phone.
‘You agree with what?’ I said.
‘I think you’ve changed, I think I’ve changed. I think we want different things.’
‘All this from just one angry text?’ I said.
‘It’s been gone a long time, whatever we had together.’ He said. ‘I think we sort of tried and we sort of didn’t. Like there’s no love but there’s also no hate. No big emotions at all, just a kind of sameness.’
I didn’t know then that he’d been seeing a therapist for six months already, that he’d been processing his ‘grief,’ as he later called it. I should have clocked it He never talked about emotions or his feelings; he had never articulated our situation before.
Relief. That’s what I smelled off him. And excitement, as if he’d been waiting a thousand years for an invisible curse to be lifted, as if he’d lived twenty lives waiting for someone to say I’m done. As if the old, rusty lamp he was trapped inside had had a vigorous rubbing.
‘I want to see other people.’ He said. A line I had only heard on TV or read in The New York Times sex diaries. A scenario I had never considered.
‘What, like an open relationship?’ I said, imagining myself at a sex camp in Leitrim with a seventy-year-old ball sack in my face.
‘No.’ He said. ‘More like a trial separation.’
‘No couples counselling? No talking it out? No attempt to fix eighteen years of marriage?’ I said.
‘I really don’t think there’s anything to fix here, Tara. I’m not in love with you anymore. I don’t think I have been for a very long time.’
Just like that. It spilled so easily out of his mouth he must have said it a hundred times before he said it to me. There was something off about it, his smugness and patronising tone, his yoga retreat smile. He pitied me.
I knew if I tried to talk that I would cry and I hated crying in front of people.
‘I don’t think we should tell the girls yet.’ He said. ‘I’ll sleep in the spare room until we figure out what to do. I’ll say I have a bit of insomnia or something.’
And that was that.

***

‘Trial’ was misleading. It was the word I fixated on for those first few days.
Trial implied that there was hope. I don’t know what I was hoping for. Maybe that nothing would change when everything already had. Trial excused the casual annihilation of our relationship.
It was quickly clear that M was way past pretending to care. He avoided being in the same room as me and texted if there was information pertaining to our shared living arrangement. Kitchen bin broken, ordered a new one, arrives 8 days.
M is what I call him, it’s not a name I’ve devised to protect his identity. His parents named him Matthew John Stafford, with the idea that they would call him M.J., which they did. It always got on my tits. I don’t know why, the South Dublin pretentiousness of it maybe? I know it isn’t right, halving someone’s name because the full version makes you gag.
Anyway, I’m still the only person who calls him M.
I stayed in bed. I could hear him bouncing up and down to the girls’ rooms, laughing, playing music, being Fun Dad, Best Dad, Actually Gets It Dad. I’d never had that lightness in me.
I avoided the girls. I told them that I had the flu and was just going to sleep it off. I hope it’s not COVID, Myrna texted.
They were as practical and unconcerned as I was when they were sick. There was a kind of poetic justice playing out and it all kept me awake.
I told no-one about our new situation. I spent all day on my phone, scrolling Instagram, bawling at personal vlogs on Youtube, teenagers bullied for their cystic acne, women kidnapped and tortured by their partners, puppies born with rare genetic disorders. I berated myself for not being able to knit or craft, for never baking cakes with the girls, for having no natural, maternal instinct. I’d screwed it all.

***

M.J.’s on Tinder, did you know? Flavia texted, five days in.
I had barely slept, my face puffed and swollen with self-pity. I couldn’t talk so I texted back with the fundamentals: We might be splitting up.
An hour later, Flavia and my Mum were sitting on the bed with me. The curtains had been thrown open, the window lowered.
‘Look, we don’t need to say anything today.’ Flavia said. ‘You don’t even need to talk. But for the next thirty days, every day we’re going to do an experiment. You and me and sometimes your Mum are going to do something new every single day, okay?’
‘No.’ I said. ‘That’s like those dumb Pump Up Your Life challenges. I’m not doing it.’ My head was turned sulkily towards the window, away from them.
‘Today.’ Flavia said. ‘We’re all going naked swimming, okay? Come on, put some clothes on. I have a towel for you.’
‘No way. I’m not doing it.’ I said.
They were both quiet for a moment and then Flavia spoke.
‘You know, Mrs H, before I was twenty-five, I had had way more pussy than dick, you know what I mean?’
‘Do you mean by way of sex, Flavia?’ Mum said.
‘Exactly.’
‘So you’re bisexual?’
‘I think we’re all bisexual, I think we’re all every sexuality and sometimes it just erupts out of us and we have to act on it. You know?’
‘I don’t know, unfortunately, I’ve never had any eruptions.’
‘When’s the last time you had sex, Mrs H?’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Flavia, let’s go for a naked swim then.’ I said.
Mum hadn’t been with anyone since Dad died in 1981.

***

We drove the half an hour to Vico Road in Dalkey. It felt strange being out in the world again.
I wasn’t a swimmer. I was realising that I wasn’t much of anything… It was a cold June day, fourteen degrees and overcast. We climbed down the cliff steps and found a spot on a flat piece of rock near the plunge point.
Flavia stripped off with the ease of someone who truly loves their body. Standing erect, hands on her hips, she surveyed the scattering of people changing behind us.
‘Ready?’ She said.
I was still fully dressed, already comforted by the sound of the lapping tide and gentle chatter. Mum was hiding under a huge towelling poncho.
‘Come on, darling.’ She said. ‘Day one.’
So I did. I jumped into the sea completely butt-out naked. We screamed with the cold, I thought I was having a heart attack. And then I swam. I could have taken both of them on my back and propelled us all to Wales with the bionic surge of energy I was possessed by. I could hear them shouting for me to come back.
A faded pink buoy was bobbing in the water not too far away. I kept swimming towards it but it wasn’t getting any closer. My super-humanness had worn off, my mouth and nose spluttering and snorting with the thrust of the Irish Sea.
A small girl was now sitting on the buoy. I blinked unsure of what I was seeing. She was holding up a broken tennis racket, the head mangled and unplayable.
‘Hold on!’ I said trying to swim out to her.
The sky darkened with a tsunami wave coming straight for us.
‘Hold on, don’t let go!’ I screamed, barely treading water.
And then she was gone and the sky was clear. A man in his 60’s swam up behind me and told me to float on my back. He slid his body under mine and rested my head in the crook of his arm, shunting both of us back to shore.
‘Are you naked?’ I said, sensing only skin between us.
‘I am.’ He said.
I had to crawl up the slimy steps from the sea on all fours as my legs were jellied. Mum threw a towel over me so as not to startle the bathers coming to shore behind me.
‘Jesus Christ.’ Flavia said. ‘Tomorrow, we’ll try a no-cook vegan recipe so you can’t nearly die on us.’

Rhona McAuliffe, June 2020.