thank-you notes

I wrote thank-you notes as a child. A thick HB3 pencil in my chubby mit. The pencil sharpener on the teacher’s desk, head height, was a big thing then. Whir. Whir. Whir. Almost like work. Our teacher Mrs Boyle had to make sure we didn’t shave the life out of ourselves. Pencils had point enough. Scratchy hands, between the lines. Tongues needling out in concentration.  We were so anxious to get on, and grow up, we didn’t care what we did with unchewed wood. I wanted to write a thank-you note to the floozy that took my husband, but I didn’t have a pen sharp enough.

He wasn’t really mine to lose. But the term floozy worried me in the way a working dog, a terrier, would fling a rat.  My husband thought of himself as a poet. One that had one more good poem in him. That would be his first. I never told him this, of course.  I kept my face neutral as Switzerland. Words came at me in enfilades. Rushed on with bayonets of boredom attatched.  Dug themselves in. Branched off. Stumbled on, waiting for support, bunched up. In the barbed-wire of staying or going blind with Alexandrine verse and rhyme that had no reason, I bought it. I’d no allies. Nobody to call for support. Out of immediate danger I’d have done things differently, of course.

‘Wonderful Geoff,’ I’d said. ‘You’ve done it again. Simply wonderful.’

‘You think so?’ he said.

Like any other married couple we had our routines.

‘Yes, or course.’ I’d pass him back his latest bon mots.  ‘Wonderful. You’ve got a very clear sense of space,’ was my rejoinder. Usually I was at my desk, marking papers.  Practical, with no jiggle of sympathy in my voice, I guess that was a way of calling a truce.

Began slicking back what hair he had with what seemed like a jar of Brylcream that stunk to high heaven or hell, depending on where you where , or indeed who you were. Intense emphasis.  I guess if there was a before and after that was the start of the affair.   Ears sticking further and further out.  Big knuckled hands that he didn’t know what to do with. I guess the floozy found a use for them.  His clothes had a familiar shine and familiar smell; cleaning fluid on his blue serge trousers; he was a poet by association. Goatee beard his membership to an exclusive club.

Attention to detail. The floozy wore more makeup than a Geisha girl, but carried more than a bit of a cliché with her formulaic perfumes by the gallon. Neither big, nor too small. Average. C minus. A tendency to spill her guts over the kitchen table at a moment’s notice. A cross-section of faults in which there were no tick boxes of right or wrong answers, but a Socratic dialogue—at  first, moderately entertaining.  If she had a rational mind she never showed it. She had issues. Boning up on morality, with Barbie’s sense of shame.

Time.  Vamp- menstrual blood and orange lippy served at midday. Her sense was well developed. She anticipated a future in which I didn’t exist. The immediate past scarred with the furies of now.

Place. In my carefully arranged bedroom with matching furniture, not too garish or cheap, she jerked the head off him and splattered him all over the wall. I should have read the runes. Steaming and glistening. Fragments of self, draped on the curtains. Her back side like an ink drawing, going up and down.  Grubby minded little men could look in, if they had a mind to.  A runaway. That’s what she said. And we fell for it. He fell for it. Rubbing himself up against her. Longing and belonging together. He scrubbed his face in her and licked the past away, feeding on the new, the young, and the vaguely in vogue. There was something dirty about it.   

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

That’s poetry. No sophistry. Overall coherence, good. Small, sharp turn. No falsifying dreams. Shows some empathy. A good starting point, if not a finishing point. He does not mention me by name, but I’m there, implied, if not despised.

I wasn’t sorry. Only I was. Anxious to get on and get out with some of my life still intact, before I was fully erased, in the past tense. I’ve a bear trap of a memory. I’ll not forget. I’m waiting.