Tracy catches a heel between cobbles in the driveway, almost falls over. “Oops,” she giggles. Gabriel walks five paces behind me, scuffing his shoes. I’m thinking about squirrels and teeth. I’m thinking about how teeth are removed not from the heads of young people, but from the heads of old people, and I am trying to reconcile this with the fact that, at thirty-seven, my wife is hardly old. Or is she? In ancient times thirty-seven would have been a fine lifespan. If you hadn’t composed your first symphony by twelve or conquered Asia Minor by twenty-three, chances were you wouldn’t live long enough to do it. And here, in a tooth, was empirical evidence that the decay had begun – no, it began long ago and now was simply manifesting: today a splintered piece of enamel and old fillings and infected nerve-endings, tomorrow arthritis, frigidity, impotence, gallstones, strokes, incontinence, cancer, dementia, and the sneering looks of the young who cannot conceive how very soon it will all come to them. And squirrels; I have squirrels. Squirrels living in the roof, bent on destruction. Young people do not have squirrels, and if they do it’s somebody else’s problem – the parents’, the landlord’s.
Squirrels are an old person’s problem.
Chris and Sylvia
I put Schultz out, though his brown eyes implore me not to. Schultz now tolerated rather than adored, all greying chops and gas and bad breath. I make sure the windows and doors are secured, switching off lights behind Tracy and Gabriel as I go, turning on the alarm before I squeak-thunk my way up the stairs. Gabriel has retired to his crepuscular, doorless lair without saying good night. Tracy is in our bathroom, naked, rubbing vitamin oil onto the scars that run like fine white cords under each breast. She’s been doing this every evening for six months since the implants; I don’t have the heart to tell her that if the scars haven’t gone by now, they never will. I pee – one leg, one crutch, one dick – hoping that this simple act will purge my body of the evening’s excesses of beer and tequila, yet knowing that it won’t and that I’ll remember them well enough in the throbbing light of day.
I get into bed, lie there with a forearm over my eyes. Tracy emerges from the bathroom. I start making gentle sleeping noises and shift my arm a fraction so that I can spy on her from beneath it. Tracy has white stuff on her face, a bare Pierrot clown halfway through its make-up session. Her body has hardened over the years and is now gym-stringy and ungenerous, if not actually undernourished. Ribs join the sternum like the bones of a skiff above the too-large breasts, asymmetrical abs appear and disappear across her midriff as she breathes. She has taken to Brazilians; the welcoming, fluffy nest that she once shared so generously is now mean and tight-lipped, prickly to the touch, its cropped exclamation mark of hair contradictorily and disturbingly pubescent. She walks over to the mirror, checks out the flatness of her stomach from the side, runs her forefingers along the blades of her hip bones, turns to look at herself over her shoulder, cups her bum-cheeks in her hands and lifts them up slightly. The cheeks each produce a folded overhang of skin – flaccid rather than fat – against the top of her thighs when she lets them go. It won’t be long before she raises the subject of a bum-lift with me. But she won’t be doing so tonight. She is frowning, turns the frown on me.
“You were weird this evening,” she says.
“I’m sleeping, Trace,” I lie.
“You were thinking of Dalia.”
“Oh my fuck,” I say, more surprised that I actually hadn’t been thinking of Dalia at all than at the accusation.
“Of course you were. You always think of Dalia on New Year’s Eve.”
“Well, this year was different. She never entered my mind.”
“You were weird, especially at first. You only chilled after a few beers.”
I hear Gabriel’s voice in my head: Don’t say “chilled”, Mom.
“You know how I am with new people.”
“You’re thirty-nine, Chris. You’ve been meeting new people since you were two.”
“Well before that, actually. And I’ve always been exactly the same with all of them.”
“Only on New Year’s Eve.”
I don’t feel like an argument. The bed is sucking me in, wrapping me in its seduction, unconditionally promising me the sweetness of sleep. Tracy finds some skin-firming unguent or other and turns back to the mirror to rub the stuff onto her buttocks.
“Whatever,” I say.
Gabe: Don’t say “whatever”, Dad.
“So you were thinking about her?”
I lift myself up on my elbows even though I don’t want to. “Tracy, I was not thinking about her. I was chatting and laughing with the best of them. I had fun. And so did you, by the look of things.”
Tracy snorts quietly, puts on an old T-shirt of mine, gets into bed, switches off the light, turns her back to me. I automatically put my hand on her hip. She shakes her butt like a wet dog and wriggles to the far edge of the bed, out of reach. This strange woman, my once-wife, this lodger who shares my bed, who won’t share herself. I am furious with her, not because she is rejecting my advance – which in the first place wasn’t an advance, and in the second is used to being rejected – but because I hadn’t thought of Dalia until Tracy mentioned her name, and now I will probably be thinking about her all night.
“Thanks for doing that thing of yours,” I say, to show her that I am a bigger person than she might suspect.
There’s a silence. But then she can’t help herself.
“What thing?”
“That thing you do to distract people from trying not to look at my leg.”
“I didn’t know I did a thing like that.”
Sometimes an old person’s problems become a young person’s again.
New Year’s Day for the last five years has brought with it the ritual of going to visit my mother. Not that I don’t visit her during the year, which I do, as often as I can bear it, but the day used to carry with it the promise of new hope, and that’s why I started doing it.
I suppose professionals with couches and notepads would call it denial, but originally my hope was that it wasn’t Alzheimer’s, that her dilliness, once so endearing, was temporarily magnified by my father’s death, that everything would be okay again once she had mourned and accepted his passing.
And then, of course, there’s the guilt.
My mother – or Sylvia, as I now think of her, because she is no longer the mother who raised me, and because to her I am now a sometime nurse, a sometime doctor, her husband, the ghost of her own father or brother – Sylvia lived with us for almost a year after my father died. Towards the end of that time, Tracy and I began referring to her as The Poltergeist: taps left running, the fridge standing open, laundry in the garbage, dentures in the cutlery drawer, the gas cooker turned up high to heat an invisible pot. Then, one evening, The Poltergeist was replaced by a demon at once sublimely innocent and chillingly dangerous.
Tracy