Alabaster Conjugal (Part 2)

I pressed the buttons to deactivate the alarm and entered the house, putting my bag down, removing my coat and shoes.

I went into the kitchen, half-hoping to see Marnie drinking wine and texting a so-called friend. “How was your day?” I said to her, reaching passed her into the fridge for a bottle of fizzy water.

She was made of stone and couldn’t answer.

I drank the water and studied how she had changed. I wasn’t sure what type of stone she had transformed into. It wasn’t white like the statue of David in Florence, or black like the Burghers of Calais in Westminster Gardens, or thin and metallic grey like the painful, anonymous pipe figures of Giacometti. I touched her arm and felt the surface, seeing how she was an auburn colour. I wondered if she was made of alabaster.

I sniffed her frozen waves of hair and the crest of her neckline, checking for the whiff of decay in her new flesh.

“I wish you hadn’t tried to eat my scotch egg.”

I sat on a chair by the kitchen table.

“I was furious when you ate my second to last nut bar. I’ve told you that I buy the food for lunches specially.”

Marnie had no respect for my pack lunches. She told me that they made her question my masculinity, or words to that effect. It was remarkable how she had woken up, ignored everything I had told her the evening before about not touching my food, and then greedily tried to gobble down my last scotch egg.

I guess her behaviour revealed heaps about the state of our relationship.

Fact Number Two: Marnie wanted a divorce. I did not.

I think I am doing it again. Presenting one fact when really it’s two. Marnie had told me on our holiday to Spain that she wanted to end our marriage. We had gone for a meal in a restaurant by the harbour and barely exchanged a word. The two of us sat at an outdoors table and there was noise all around us. A family of six talking loudly. The lilting rhythms of a woman sitting on the seawall, playing a Spanish guitar. A young couple looking at photographs on a phone and giggling. The buzz of life vanished in the space between me and Marnie on that tiny round table. I realised we were in deep trouble and that our trip abroad was not going to solve the difficulties we had been having. There was a silence that you can share as a couple that was comfortable and intimate, a peacefulness that was impossible to experience with anybody else, and then there was the exact opposite. An inability to talk because everything had been said before, all the words were used up, stale and full of creases, hanging shapelessly like a wardrobe of musty old clothes that belong to someone who has died.

I couldn’t bear the lack of conversation, so I said, “What’s the matter?”

“I’m alright.”

“Something’s the matter.”

“What are you saying that for?”

“You seem off.”

“Off how?”

“Even when I ordered my food, you seemed to pull a face.”

She sipped her wine and lit a cigarette. She hadn’t smoked in years. When I asked her about what made her buy the pack of twenty, she told me she was on holiday and wanted to ‘let her hair down’.

“Are you going to reply or are you ignoring me?” I said.

“It’s embarrassing.”

“What is?”

“What you ordered.”

I looked at my plate. “Lasagne?”

She gestured for a waiter to come over. “Another glass,” she said, watching him place a plastic ashtray for her on the table. She nodded at him and I noticed how she eyed his bum in his tight black trousers as he walked back into the restaurant.

The holiday was supposed to bring us closer together. We need to get away from it all.

“What’s wrong with lasagne?”

“It’s what you have at home.”

“I like it.”

“Why don’t you try something else?”

I looked at her paella and wondered why she thought that it was exotic and ‘out there’.

“I don’t understand why my ordering lasagne has put you in a mood.”

“I’m not in mood.”

“Not many.”

“You’re doing your best to put me in one, I know that much.”

I sipped my water. I had this giddy feeling similar to vertigo. I went to raise a forkful of mince and cheese to my mouth and then lowered it to the plate. My appetite was gone. When the waiter asked if we wanted desserts, Marnie smirked. I can still see that expression of disgust – like eating a tiramisu with me was some form of torture.

“No thank you,” I said.                                   

“Was everything okay?” the waiter asked, tactfully referring to my half-eaten lasagne.

“Very good,” I said, patting my belly. “I’m very full.”

We exchanged phoney smiles. I paid the bill and gave a generous tip. I watched Marnie stand and put her cigarettes in her handbag and wrap a patterned silk scarf round her neck she had bought earlier in the day at a market. It didn’t suit her.

We walked along the promenade, heading towards the hotel. The sound of the Spanish guitar faded. I looked out to sea and watched the sun sinking downwards, casting golden syrupy rays across the calm expanse of water. Lights winked on in a yacht that was close to the shore. A figure moved on the deck and then disappeared back inside.

The promenade was packed with the bodies of holidaymakers and people trying to flog the touristy tat of trinkets, tea towels, hats, fridge magnets and tie-dye clothes.

“Did you want to stop for a cocktail?” I said.

“I’m tired.”

“It’s early.”

“No it’s not.”

We walked onwards, passing a taxi rank where the drivers stood in a huddle, chatting and making animated gestures. I wondered if Marnie was having an affair. She was far more successful than me. She had a career in media and kept getting promoted. From the start of us going out together, I had this nagging sense that she would outgrow me and find a man that she respected.

We stopped at a crossing, waiting for the lights to change. The smell of sewage wafted up from a drain, mixing with the odour of sugary donuts from a stand on the corner. In the distance, fireworks arced into the velvet blue sky and exploded. I wondered why they hadn’t waited twenty minutes to shoot the fireworks when it would be dark enough to see the colours properly.

Halfway across the road, Marnie said, “I don’t think I can do this anymore.”

“Do what?”

“This. I can’t do it.”

“I don’t know what ‘this’ is?”

“For heaven’s sake – us. This marriage.”

By the time we reached the other side of the road, it was over.

Fact Number 3: I sobbed on the boulevard. This made her angry and she walked off. I called out to her, asking her not to leave me.

She kept walking.

I’m doing it again. The synapses of my brain are misfiring. They’re out of synch.

This I am sure of – Fact Number 4: Only death is everlasting.

 

***

My wife’s skin is the colour of a Spanish sunset.

I kiss her sangria lips and stroke her shoulders, smooth as a shoreline.

Songs of a Wayfarer plays from the speakers.

I fill her glass to the rim. Just how she likes it. I realise that she is sorry for what happened.

I take off my shirt and show her the tramp stamp of a sun I got across my whole back.

I tell her it’s okay. I forgive her. Life wasn’t easy.  

***

 

The rumour was that claims administrators, especially ones with substandard people skills like myself, were going to be made redundant as the tasks we performed on a daily basis could be automated.

So, I made the executive decision to never go into work again.

What was the point?  

I was chilling in the kitchen, talking to Marnie about us moving to Berlin, when the phone rang. I saw it was her mother, Bridget, and I must have momentarily lost my mind as I decided to answer. The thing was, I didn’t realise she was video-calling me.

“Finally,” she said, “that’s such a relief. I’ve been trying to reach Marnie. I can’t get through and have been calling you. Haven’t you seen my missed calls and messages?”

“I’ve been busy. We both have.”

“I’m worried sick. Is everything okay?”

I laughed. “Yes, we’re fine.”

“Marnie’s phone keeps going to voicemail.”

“Does it?”

Bridget gasped and said, “What’s that behind you?”

I realised that Marnie was in view over my shoulder. I tilted the screen and did my best to act relaxed. “How are you doing? We should arrange a visit.”

“What was that?”

“It was nothing.”

There was an urgency to Bridget’s voice. “Can you put my daughter on, please?”

“We should go down to the seaside for the day.”

“I’d like to speak with Marnie.”

“One second,” I said and I called out to Marnie and then fake nodded, pretending to hear a reply.  “Bridget, she’s going to call you back ASAP. She’s right in the middle of something.”

Bridget was breathing heavily. She never believed a word I said, which was partly understandable as I often found myself lying to her. She seemed to see right through me. I remember the wedding day and overhearing her talk to one of her haughty friends, saying that she thought I was beneath Marnie and that the marriage would fail. ‘What can you do?’ she said, tipsy on prosecco. ‘One of the hardest parts of being a parent is standing back and allowing your children to make mistakes.’

“It’s nice to hear from you, Bridget. We really do have to meet up soon and go to the seaside.”

***

 

Fact Number 5: In this country, it’s against the law to engage in conjugal relations with an alabaster wife.

Go figure.

I’m improving my ability to relay a singular fact. Sticking to the nub of the matter. The nitty-gritty. After speaking with Bridget, it dawned on me that there was a fundamental issue with my marriage and that I couldn’t pretend otherwise. I was falling into the trap of thinking that a change of location, like moving to Berlin, would reinvigorate us as a couple, that we would rediscover our younger bohemian selves, drinking in basement bars, waltzing together to the rowdy cheers and cries of sozzled phantom soldiers from the heady days of the Weimar Republic.

At passport control, I would say, ‘This is my wife, Marnie – she is made of alabaster, similar in tone and texture to the statue of Jacob and the Angel by Jacob Epstein.’

And they would spread their arms and say, ‘Welcome to Berlin.’

Living in a foreign city would lift our spirits, being around more carefree, open-minded types. We’d be known as the ‘Epstein couple’ and would be invited to underground soirees in the cooler, East side of the city.  

I had enough grey hairs to know that the novelty factor of living in a new location would eventually wear off. As the months went by, we would come back to the underlying and serious problem that Marnie was stone and I was flesh and, whether we lived in Berlin, Paris or New York, the two of us were incompatible living partners in the eyes of the vast majority of people who abided by the bland norms and values of a modern consumerist society.

It was too late for doctors to reanimate her organs and get the blood circulating through her system, like my mother-in-law probably wanted.

I was forced to conclude that the only solution was for me to exist outside of time. I had to turn myself into stone like Marnie. We would merge into one single hulk of alabaster, bound in a silent union that went beyond earthbound marriage vows. This was a future I could understand, where we held each other for eternity, a place where the traffic lights were forever green, and our immaculate love was synchronised.

I embraced Marnie, kissing my angelic wife fully on the mouth, ready for Utopia.

I then sat at the kitchen table, looking at an orange. Marnie used to moan at me for not eating the oranges I took to work for my pack lunch. I liked to have at least one with me when I sat in the graveyard during my lunch break, weather permitting. She didn’t know that I was secretly paying homage to the prophet William Blake, who was a fan of oranges.  

I was the only person to notice that in Blake’s masterpiece, Ghost of a Flea, there are faint traces of citrus juice from the oranges his devoted wife used to hand to him to eat when he was painting.

Satie’s the Gnossiennes played from the speakers.

Fact Number Six: Museums are where the greatest statues go to die.

I wonder which one will house Marnie and I when we are laid to rest.