The Wig My Father Wore. Anne Enright
the flag.
Daddy-Long-Legs
‘What’s all this about the television anyway?’ I say when he comes upstairs.
‘I want to get into it.’
‘Don’t do it,’ I say. ‘They tell you to make shite and work you to the bone. Besides, that’s no place for an angel.’
‘It’s a good place for a dead man.’
I told him that he wasn’t as dead as all that. So many of the men you meet are dead. Prick at the front, wallet at the back. So what if it makes them easy to seduce? It also makes them dangerous. They give you their white blindness. So we ended up shooting the breeze, chewing the cud, talking at the ceiling into the wee small hours. I told him about one man or another, the guy who wore two condoms, the guy with twine in his pocket, the one whose underarms smelt like barbed wire. I told him about looking back. How you lose what you look at. How you turn to salt.
It is so sweet to understand at four in the morning, the hour when the world turns over, with the bed floating away into the darkness. So I was in love again and Stephen was sad again. He was saying ‘I do want to die. Just one more time. Just once for real’, and I listened to him and I held him in my arms to warm him up and soothe him down. He was light and buoyant, like a soft balloon.
‘My blow-up man,’ I said, because nothing felt stupid in the dark, ‘My wonderful inflatable angel’, and Stephen was mildly, even humanly amused.
I told him that I was in love with him and that having sex was the only way to get rid of it. He disagreed, but the nostalgia for his body became so fierce that he told me about himself, before the bridge.
He met a girl in Regina when it was still a question of wearing white gloves and doing it in the hedges, because there was nowhere else to go. Not that there were a lot of hedges in Regina. So she was wearing white gloves and the sky was flat and the land was flat. They walked along the horizon because it was all horizon and where they walked the land and the sky peeled back from one another like a zip.
Stephen said that she was only a child, that the white gloves and the smell of her summer dress were like a dirty front parlour where her aunt sat knitting. The load in his trousers was as heavy and wrong as a turd on the way home from school. He felt like he was carrying a bag of something that he couldn’t put down or open and when they sat under the hedge he did not know where to put his hands, never mind the rest of him, as she sat and talked about her aunt and smoothed the white of her gloves, up and down, over and over.
He wanted to marry her. He felt that she was pure and good and soiled by life. He wanted to peel and discard her, peel and discard her. He could feel her growing in the sun, there at his side. If it weren’t for the gloves, she might split at the seams. Her name was Lynn.
She was talking about justice. She was saying that her life was not fair. He stretched himself out in the sun and said ‘Well what did you expect?’
‘Oh just the usual things,’ she said and he began to despise her. Her voice was whining and small. She was swelling like a plant. He could not kiss her.
He felt the flat of his back against the ground and remembered a waltz from the week before. He looked at her white gloves, that were loose on her hands like a bad skin. They made her fingers look squat and small.
‘You’re too good for me,’ he said — and meant it.
‘What’s too good? I’m not good,’ she said.
She was pretty. He rolled on to his front and laid his head in her lap. She let the cloth of her white gloves stroke his hair. He said ‘I’m going to go north in a while, make a lot of money.’ There would be a cottage with roses at the door.
He twisted around to face the sun. The sky was hot and flat and very near. There was a piece of her dress, a bright mountain, in the corner of his eye. She lifted her arm and caught a Daddy-Long-Legs in the white bandage of her gloved hand. Raising it between his face and the sky she picked off two of its legs and then she let it go.
He remembered what his cock was for, and his mouth. He remembered that they were two people sitting under a hedge. And while they were making love, she pulled his buttocks apart with two white-gloved hands.
This was how Stephen lost his virginity, he says, not because it was his first time, but because it was a lie. She was not pretty. There would be no cottage and no roses.
I said men are so squeamish when it comes to matters of the heart. They worry about sincerity. They think Sincerity is the last little town on the railroad track, with a freshly painted sign.
There was nothing for it but to fall asleep. I dreamed that Stephen was hovering as usual over the bed and that his tears were penetrating me, in the way of dreamlike penetrations, and that it was rape in the way that rape is not a shock but an erosion, in the way that it makes you feel older than the mountains and worn down, or so a woman told me once.
In the morning I find his tears of celestial sadness have left a spattering of faint brown marks on the sheet. I said ‘What has happened to your tears Stephen? They used to be better than Ariel. They used to be liquid light.’
Love
It seems to be a cause for celebration. We have done one hundred and fifty of the fuckers and are obliged to eat dinner and consume wine, which isn’t so bad now that we are grown up. We have a dispensation from the LoveWagon to like each other, without her paranoia getting in the way. Apart from which she knows her limits, drinks herself into silence and not into speeches about how we couldn’t have done it without Gary in Sound.
I sit beside Jo who has an instinct for order, and across from Marcus and Frank because you need a good fight when things start to get sentimental.
Frank says we’ve never had a virgin on the show, that he can smell one from five hundred paces.
‘What about Marie from Donnycarney,’ I say with one eye checking Marcus, ‘convent bred, the flower of Irish womanhood?’
‘Not a chance,’ says Frank. ‘Convent girls go like bunnies.’
Frank likes little girls, but he is too sophisticated to like virgins. Frank wants a little girl that knows all the tricks. He’s like most men I know, except he’s not afraid to admit it.
‘I never was a virgin,’ I say. Which Frank ignores because he is perfectly sane. Frank has worked for his sanity. He has a wife and a house and he talks too much. He used to tell me how Sheilagh won’t have sex at home anymore but drags him into the bathroom by the belt every time they have dinner with friends. Now he is talking about younger ass. I don’t want to know. Married people should not tell tales. Being miserable in silence is the price they pay for being happy. They bought it. I did not. I am stuck with a couple of one-night-stands and an angel in the kitchen who breaks my appliances and won’t put out. I understand the difference between sex and love, between love and the rest of your life. So don’t let any married man tell me that he has problems with his dick. And keep their wives away from me too, at parties.
‘An angel?’ says Jo.
‘Never mind,’ I say.
‘Hang on,’ says Marcus. ‘We were all virgins. Even you had a childhood and lost it. Or maybe you’re born with a diaphragm installed, here in Dublin 4’, and a little trail of insult crosses behind his eyes, like beads on a miserable string.
* *
My mother thinks that the loss of my virginity caused my father’s stroke and so do I. Never mind the facts. The first fact, fuck it, is that I never was a virgin, never had a hymen, never knew the difference between loss and gain.
The other fact is that I stayed out all night, the night my father’s brain sprung a leak, and that rage kept my mother awake and in the kitchen while my father lost half of his bladder and half of his bowels into his half of the bed.
Never