Monologue

I told the girls that he asked me in the car. I don’t know why I didn’t want to talk about the restaurant, or how he asked me in it, or how he leant forward, the way the light fell on his glasses as he spoke: soft, in a cool sheen. It seemed too big, to tell them it happened like that, too full of implication. But that’s how it happened; how I remember it happening; and yes, the memories are big: turning round in my head, trapped there, taking up room.

Yes, it was better to tell the girls that he asked me in the car. That was small, that could be contained. He asked me in the car when we were on that work-trip, I told them. The work-trip was true enough. “I know it’s only been two months,” he said, leaning forward (I was driving). “I know it’s only been two months, but I just wanted to say...”

I watched the face of my eldest go stiff then slack. “I almost swerved,” I said to her, when he asked me.

I hadn’t swerved; I mean, I couldn’t have, being in the restaurant. I clutched my fork very tightly between my fingers. “I never met him,” he said, “but I know your husband was a very good man, very kind, as you always said ... and I think, you know, he would have wanted you to be happy, you know, happy and healthy and not ... lonely. He would have understood how loneliness is.” I was clutching my fork very tightly.

“How could he have asked like that,” said my youngest. “How could anyone just ask like that! Men are pigs.” Pigs are the most intelligent animal in the barnyard: I remember learning that in a children’s story I used to read to her at night.

And nights are the worst. Alone, all alone, in the tactful dark. You open the windows, as if you could draw noise to you: syphon the sound of someone else’s life into a kind of company. Eventually, each sound goes out: passes away from you like a little betrayal, under the silence: a little burial.

You know what I think? After a death, everything becomes reenactment. On Friday and Saturday nights — once the girls had gone to University or moved out — we’d sometimes dance on the landing before going to sleep. I was always the much better dancer. But he liked so many different types of music: I mean, what can I even listen to now without thinking of him? Two days after the funeral my youngest found me playing country music alone...country music! and I’ve never even been to America. I told her it was the only thing that didn’t remind me, that wasn’t reenactment. “Grief contaminates things,” I said.

“Maybe you should listen to those songs,” she said, “for dad.” How can I get out of my grief and into hers? That’s all she wanted: reenactment — to open that door in time. I couldn’t. It isn’t a door, it’s a window: with bars over it, to prevent it from becoming a door; and the bars are always constricting the image beyond it, growing selfishly over it, as if they owned it, curdling it with their reminder that you cannot go through: you can only look.

He looked like he was sleeping, when I found him on the landing. I was in bed and I heard a thud. His eyes were shut tight like windows with two shutters over them. I shook him because it really seemed like he was sleeping. I remember thinking, as I dialed 999, of a man running round and round a grey room with blank, shuttered windows: running from window to blind window, and unable to find a door.

“Sometimes, it’s almost like I just find him in the music. More than find him,” I said to my youngest. “The song starts, and then suddenly, he’s there in the middle of it: standing there, and I can’t keep listening, not when he jumps out at me like that.” I think she understood. I can’t cross that space, not the one between us: not with her, not with my eldest. I sit with them and the air gets stilted, as if there were forcefields, three indifferent forcefields, with their edges together between us: blunt, and mutual.

I can’t help them, to put it bluntly, can’t reach them. But they have their lives: a husband, a university: they have their people. They have those who can cross the border, who can step lightly up and put their shoulders under the load. I told them as much. “You can’t sustain a life without someone else to sustain it with you,” I said, “silence crushes. That’s what men are: loadbearers.”

I think my oldest understood. My youngest — well, you know how they are. Especially at that age. Fermenting with justice, so eager to undo. When I told her about the car, she brought it up, spat it out as if it had been lodged in her until now, and she had managed to spasm it out:

“Is that why you didn’t say no, then, when he asked to replace dad? Because men are “loadbearers”? Because you need them?”

“I couldn’t speak,” I said, “that’s why I didn’t say no. It’s not like I said yes.”

“You should have told him to get out of the car,” she said. I could see the muscles in her face working their way from confusion, to indignation. “Who asks a widow after two months?” she said, “after only two months! And you said yourself he was a creep.”

I had said that I could sometimes feel his eyes creeping across the office toward me, settling on me, then unsettling. I knew a long time ago, when I still had a husband: when we still danced sometimes on Saturday nights on the landing, that he felt something for me. You just know these things. And he was a nice man, with big glasses: not a pervert, never forceful, not sick-in-the-head. And sometimes, much later, when you are opening every window to draw in any sound that might conspire with you to fill the mouth of absence with some kind of life, something (anything) other, some different thought: you let a nervous bedraggled man in oversized glasses take you out to a restaurant on a work-trip you only agreed to go on in the first place to get out of that mouth, out of the house, from among the chairs, bed, the wardrobe that are its teeth. And when he asked, in the restaurant, leaning forward, with that soft light on the glasses, his eyes were so imploring, as if he were the one whose husband were dead.

“When it’s the right time,” he said. “When you think it’s the right time... I’m just saying I would love to...” It was not in the car it was in the restaurant. I held my fork so tightly. But I wasn’t lying when I told the girls I couldn’t speak.

It was good of work to put us up in a nice hotel. I let him walk me back to the room. “The meal was lovely,” I said. I said: “You know I loved him very much, more than even myself. I can only listen to country music now; everything else reminds me of him. Think: me, with country music!”

“I know,” he said, “I know.” I closed the door.

It was a spacious room, but the bed was too large, as if it had gnawed down all the space for itself. When I sat on the bed, I was stranded like a human island in white. When I stood up, I was closed-in between the bed and one of the walls. I knew I had to open the window, had to let the world, the room enlarge. I couldn’t be trapped here: with that big, useless, greedy bed, and the sad little uneaten space between it and the walls.

But the window wouldn’t open. There was a shutter down over it and the shutter wouldn’t open and I had to get through the shutter to access the window, to access the world, which was alive and well and knocking on the other side of the window, on an eye that won’t open, and the shutter wouldn’t lift, the eye wouldn’t open, and the world couldn’t reach me although it wanted to, to give me life, some air, and it was time, I was telling the window, the right time for that, for it to open, because I needed the world, because I couldn’t wake up.