She told me about her love life. She said she first had sex with a man when she was fifteen. He was twice her age. She said she loved all the attention her body got in her school uniform. How was she supposed to know that he was a married man? She said she was lucky that her father found out and called her a slut and took her out of school and sold his car and borrowed another car to take her to a boarding school in the north of the country where she would be out of danger and it was too cold and damp to think about men. She said you could see your breath when you went to sleep. And there was nothing to think about only the Virgin Mary and other girls.
This is not word for word. This is more like a reconstruction, the back pages, she called it, made up of some of the things she said about love and sex and happiness, not all of it in Berlin. She loved sex. Especially on Dublin afternoons, she said, with the sound of buses going by and squeaking brakes. She loved the sound of people’s feet walking past the basement window while the word fuck was flying out of her mouth.
Fuck was not a word she used that often.
She said love and sex were a bit like writing a novel, it had everything to do with fabrication. That’s what I think she said. She said the best lover was the best storyteller, something like that. The problem with a lot of books, she said, was the writer trying to tell you what to feel. Writers getting the better of their readers, forcing themselves on their characters. Like one man she was with who told her that she was mistaken and that what happened between them was consensual, only that she was too young at the time to know the difference. She didn’t like being told what to feel.
She had a boyfriend in London once who said she could not make love but she had to sit up in bed with a book afterwards. He hated me reading, she said, the way other people sat up in bed and smoked a cigarette. Which she did also, but with a book. He thought it was the biggest insult to a man. The book. He said she made sex look like doing the dishes and she couldn’t wait to get back to her book, so he took out all the light bulbs. Every one of them, she said, just to make sure she stayed in the room and didn’t escape with the book. But even in the dark I withdrew into my imagination, she said, like my mother did with my father. Even with no light in the room and no book to read I still crept away into a childhood corner of myself alone, rocking myself to sleep.
She said it was a great adventure, her love life. Sometimes she came across moments that were unforgettable, like seeing something from a moving train that you wanted to bring with you only it was already gone by and all you could do was try and write it down. She said it was delicious. Sex was delicious. I know it’s an old word now, but it’s an honest word, she told me, and I have no reason to doubt her. The meaning of delicious may not have changed all that much and sex may not have changed all that much either, it was all discovered in her time.
Delicious, she said.
She lived with a man for a long while who was a great reader and they went to lots of places together in Europe. He used to read aloud to her after breakfast, books that she had never heard of before. Things in books that she would never have noticed without talking about them and pointing them out to each other, like they were still learning to read. She said it was the only secure relationship she ever had and they could have got married but that would have put an end to all the travelling, wouldn’t it? She said she didn’t know what made her so afraid of getting married, only the fear of becoming her own mother. The wedding was called off and people were left holding their wedding gifts.
Because she always had the need to be alone again. She had to be herself. It was her greatest fear, not being herself, being restrained by the people she loved. Afraid of being in love because you might not be free. She could remember standing in the street listening to him telling her not to walk away, please, and all she could think of was keeping one foot on the pavement and the other foot off the pavement, everything swirling in her head, waiting for him to stop talking so she could walk away. Swirling was another word she used a lot and maybe that doesn’t change much, it’s still in the same place as before, like the word please, and the word finished and the word over. She used to sit alone in her room drinking wine like her mother. She would let the phone ring and not answer it, as if there was nobody in her life only the characters in the books she was reading. She thought there was something noble about being alone. She thought your family was where you trained how to be alone. She thought every person you loved would leave and you had to leave every person you loved. She had to be herself and being alone was the purest form of being yourself.
She said New York was a great place to be alone. She got to know a lot of people there and a lot of people knew her. In fact, people more often knew her when she didn’t know them, people nodding to her as if she should remember them from somewhere. And then she would realise how much she needed people more than ever. Being alone was like denying the weather, something you could not avoid being in and out of, like having a mother and father, like having brothers and sisters, like religion, like being brought up in a Catholic school and needing to get away, being a writer.
She said she spent her life searching for men who were like her father. And one time late in her life she met an Irish truck driver who was like a real father. The trucker knew how to make up a story. The trucker with the false teeth, she said.
Love with false teeth.
Love without teeth, she said, so he could suck on my breasts.
I told her it was wrong to put all that into her book about the trucker. I wouldn’t like those kind of details made public, if I had false teeth.
Jesus, I hope his wife didn’t read it, she said.
His wife probably recognized the false teeth, I said.
Don’t laugh about it, she said. That trucker was full of love and travelling. One night he came to me and he was unable to have sex, she said, he wasn’t up to it. Too much on the road. So we just left it and went to sleep. And during the night I woke up to find him stroking my back. We didn’t speak. He was sitting up in bed, gently stroking my back and I imagined him travelling across Europe, she said, off to England, across to France and Germany and down through Austria, all that mileage and all those road signs in different languages, all the faces of people he must have seen and spoken to, picking up his consignment of Italian tiles and bringing them all the way back along the big European roads, back on the ferry to Dublin. He travelled in his sleep, in silence, stroking my back, she said. Then he had to go home to his wife. He left me asleep and awake. He made himself a cup of tea. He didn’t give himself time to drink it. He left the cup on the table. He walked out the door and continued on travelling.
I couldn’t keep him, she said. I kept his letters. Beautiful letters, I kept them all. I brought them with me wherever I went travelling, a bundle of them in my suitcase all over the world. I kept them and read them from time to time, but I couldn’t keep him. I couldn’t keep anyone. The only way I had of keeping anything in my life was in my book.