Is this desire? Part two

What happens when a married woman feels seen by another man.

10 September

In the morning it is raining hard. She is resentful from the moment she wakes. The usual resentment – of her being the one who must try and keep their early-waking son in bed, her being the round-the-clock carer. It has been nonstop for months. Thoughts like these do not start the day well. She doesn’t want to look her husband in the eye. She wants an apology for every small imbalance of labour. She wants not just thanks for all the hours and hours that she has taken care, so he can work and make. This morning she wants revenge. Her husband, this man, she does not feel close to him. But they are getting ready to drive across the country, to the museum where his opening will be held. Kaito is joining them.

He arrives through the drizzle. She brightens up. She has to. Their morning hustle of breakfast, dressing, tooth brushing and bag packing is a kind of performance for him, their friend. Just normal family life.

As they make for the car, the sky breaks. She curses as she steps through the splashing puddles, her suede shoes in the mud. They find their seats, her in the back beside her child, and set off. The windscreen is fogged, the rain pours down. On the highway it is unusually dark, the sky an ugly brown. Her husband drives.

“On the way back from the museum these last days, the clouds were incredible. I thought I should drop my sculpting and become a painter. But this is probably more my level – a roller, one colour.”

They all laugh. Then the two men in the front seats start a conversation and she feeds her son crackers and fruit and reads Dr Suess books aloud in a monotone, trying for an early nap. A necessary nap. She doesn’t know how her son will make it through the long day ahead.

‘The sun did not shine.

It was too wet to play.

So we sat in the house.

All that cold, cold, wet day.’

He doesn’t sleep. And later, after driving for hours, arriving early at the museum, then entertaining him endlessly, she is frazzled. She feels herself zinging and pinging. Her son is Thing One and Thing Two and she is Jack, or Susy, or whatever their names are, trying her best to keep up with the chaos. He is getting more and more frantic, running up and down the many staircases on his short legs, zipping in and out of the pristine rooms filled with fragile art. And she takes care. She follows and watches him. So that her husband can fix the last things, speak to the other artists, look at their work. And then the guests finally arrive and she feels her jaw tighten. There are no escape routes. The speeches begin. He starts to yell. She scoops him up and takes him outside to the parked car. Maybe if she drives around for half an hour he will sleep.

“I just need to go and get some milk at the shop,” she says.

“No, no, no, no!”

He refuses to sit in the seat. He grips his legs around her thigh as she tries to lever him into the car. They collapse onto the passenger seat and she tries to console him, and herself.

“I want to go to our house.”

“We’re not at our house, we’re at the museum.”

“I want to go to our museum house.”

He has snot running over his face and is gripping three slippery peppermints. He won’t let them go. She desperately wants someone to tap her out. She wants to shout HELP! to the man walking past. But instead, in the relative privacy of the parked car, she rests her face in her son’s sweaty T-shirt and takes a deep breath.

Back at the museum, her mother-in-law finds them in the Lego corner and does take over. So, she heads straight for the bar and a tray of white wine. She stands alone with her relief, staring at the condensation dripping down the stem of her glass. She wants to drink the wine in one long gulp, but how would that look – is that the wife of the artist, downing wine by herself? Does she really care? She takes long, rapid sips. A few minutes later she feels the freedom of the wine run under her skin, so she goes upstairs and mingles, trying to rid her brain and muscles of toddler snot and tension.

"she feels the freedom of the wine run under her skin, so she goes upstairs and mingles, trying to rid her brain and muscles of toddler snot and tension"

She finds Kaito in a room, looking at her husband’s installation. She stands close to him. They talk about the choreography of sound in the work: the sharp ticks and sudden whirrs produced by the switches and motors, and then the spectacular eruption of the teletype keys.

“When I was in Germany recently, there were so many electric cars. So quiet,” he says.

“You’re right,” she says. “These sounds are already obsolete and soon even the mechanical sounds around us now will be gone altogether."

It is a tiny revelation – they have composed it together. She can feel the warmth of his body next to hers. And they lean close as they talk, tilting their heads towards each other. To her it is conspiracy; to him, she doesn’t know.

They walk through the rooms together for a while, like friends. They are friends. But she is elated just to be near him. She wants to stay with him the whole day, sharing quiet observations, drinking wine, and then, somehow naturally slipping away together, to somewhere, anywhere. But soon other people get in the way and they each drift off in different directions. He has spent the last months travelling across Europe, from one exhibition to another. These movements are ordinary to him. To her, the slow circling and chatting is like grinding a speeding car down to first gear.

Later outside, where the smokers are smoking, she stands again with him. Then her friend Nora arrives. She is an obsessive character, her attention hot as a searchlight.

“Where are you from?” she asks.

“I am Japanese,” he says.

Her eyes switch on like lamps. “Oh, oh, I am a total Japanophile…”

And Nora is off! She tells him about her love of Japanese cooking and her Japanese friend at art school. The woman is shut out. Nora’s words don’t stop. She watches him listening attentively. Is it the same kind of attention that he gave her the day before, as they sat drinking tea in the quiet house, looking into each other’s open faces? Oh god, did she also exotify him, excited only by his Japaneseness, his body, his accent, his mysterious outsider life?

The jealousy is thick and flailing. She is drowning and no one hears her calls.

Her son comes running up, he has been collecting chestnuts with his grandfather. All of her husband’s family are here to celebrate him and his work. She follows her child for the next hour, making sure he doesn’t fall off the concrete steps, holding the soggy twigs he hands her, fetching him snacks. Kaito is still engrossed in the sycophantic, one-sided conversation. She watches them from a distance. He listens mostly, talks sometimes. Inside, the guests look at art and drink wine and eat canapes, her husband somewhere amongst them, it’s his moment.

She is invisible. She is a mother, a wife, wearing liquid eyeliner, a dark skirt and wet ankle boots. Her hair curls. When she sees her reflection in the glass of the museum facade it seems faint, faded, insubstantial. She used to flirt and dazzle. Now she is a ghost. She wanders at the back of the museum, dead flowers in her hand, warning her son not to throw rocks at the sculpture in the fountain: an enormous, fat, cherubic child, crudely cut from stone, its face tipped to the sky, bubbling water from its mouth. The fat stone child is laughing at her.

She stands limp, watching it, her heart trickling out into a puddle of self-pity. There won’t be another moment with Kaito. He isn’t interested in her. It was all fiction.

Her child skips up to her. He is damp, his soft hair finely spattered with fountain water, his T-shirt with sweat. His eyes are bright with discovery, and tiredness.

“You are beauty and I am the beast!”

She smiles and hands him a dead flower. At least to someone she has a title role.

In the evening, on the drive back home, he falls asleep in his car chair. He made it through the day. She drives this time. Her husband sits behind her, Kaito to her right. In the rear-view mirror, she sees her husband nod off. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Kaito beside her also nodding off. She realises she is stealing glances at him again: so, this is his profile, this is what it is like to sit next to him in the car. She imagines they are alone, driving into the unknown. Behind her, her son sleeps, mouth open, an exhausted cherub. His father’s eyes are closed. He too is exhausted. Months of work and worry are falling off his shoulders. In the rear-view mirror, she looks at his familiar face, the high forehead and beard, the handsome, strong face, now quiet and trusting. She feels a strange triangulation of care for these three men. And alone, for a moment, the only one awake in the closed room of the car, she drives them towards the clouds – billowing, white, purple and pink – lit by the drama of the setting sun.

Final instalment coming next week...