Smile

Smile


Her hands felt tiny, like a child’s hands. In the darkness, it was the first time he’d noticed how small her hands were. Her touch was almost reticent, sometimes intrusive, as if guessing; and then open, welcoming. Her breath on his face was almost irritating but then he remembered that those lips were the framing grace of her smile, that smile that had unsettled his self-containment.

Now it was this close, this smile, as real on his mouth as it was vivid in his mind’s eye. When he had first noticed her, he had been hopelessly distracted by its coquettish simplicity and stirred to action moments later, by the pained thought of seeing it directed at another. While her body negotiated with his for synchronicity, her smile was this close; he could almost make out its contours on her face in the darkness, as shifting and elusive as her scent, an intoxicating blur of lemon and chestnut.

He felt her open palms become a clutch as he took his initiative, a sweet little clutch and the soft but firm ratchetting of her fingertips and nails.

Moments later, he found himself unwilling to relinquish his embrace of her, hugging her tightly; as if to freeze-frame her clinging to him. In the dark, she gave a little mocking gasp of strangulation through laughter, yet his tingling sesitivity forbade him to relent.

Her only escape was to tickle herself loose, which she did: usually worked, she found. The ecstasy of her touch was at first unconquerable, then unendurable and, as she gazed down at him, taking her initiative, he gave into irrational, unstoppable childlike laughter, treading water hopelessly and grasping for the bank in the whirlpool of her smile.


*


When she had arrived at his apartment, she’d brought one simple suitcase.

‘I’m a dancer.’ she said, ‘Ready to travel.’

He found himself smiling incredulously both at the innocence of her remark together with the sparsity of her luggage, and she smiled at him smiling at it.

‘What?’ she giggled.

‘Move?’ he said, ‘you’re not thinking of going already?’

‘Only if,’ she hesitated, ‘we both do.’

He could feel his head nodding as if of it’s own free will.



He came to know every item of clothing in that suitcase; every top, the few dresses, one skirt, the pair of jeans. And he knew her underwear by heart; nothing fancy or expensive. She had the gift of elevating simplicity to sweet perfection.

They never spoke about marriage: they didn’t have to. She met his family, and Andy, his business partner, whom he had known since his snooker playing days at Uni and with whom he now ran a profitable Graphic Design enterprise.

‘She’s gorgeous.’ Andy had said to him the next day before addressing a tricky middle-pocket shot on the black and then repeating, as he habitually did, with parenthetical emphasis, ‘absolutely frolicking gorgeous.’ But these days Andy suspected their game might become a mere distraction, as his partner left the office with a certain boyish urgency these days.



And his new daily life became a lavishly orchestrated wonderland of anxious frivolity. Morning tea when she made it was a mug of tea which, when she placed it before him seemed to say; ‘ravish me’: each meal, which he barely even tasted, a stroking of his cheek. Quite often food remained unfinished, video programmes left to continue unwatched, showers left to run and, much as he loved his job with Andy, he couldn’t wait to get home to the tussling, the half-naked promenading, the shared baths; the intimate laughter and sometimes the foolish tears.


He was Wally, she was Lamb Chop. She had a love of Chablis and Fry’s Turkish Delight straight from the fridge [she loved the way the chocolate crackled]. He always made sure he had a secret supply of both.

The copies of Jackie Collins and Jilly Cooper around the house often amused him.

He’d always liked Springsteen’s Nebraska, Dylan, Radiohead. Now, here was George Michael, The Lightning Seeds [Oh, Lucky You was their first kiss music] but he could already sense that the CDs would, not before too long, become strictly his and hers.

Sleeping in the nude was something he had had to get used to. It was pretty conclusive, he found. unmysteriously conclusive.

‘I wouldn’t mind, you know,’ she once said, ‘if you wanted to have a game with Andy after work. Or bring him back for a drink...’

‘Oh, Andy doesn’t play much anymore; has his own life, you know. Besides, he sees me all day at the office’ came his almost too hasty reply.

There was content in the gentle nod of her head and he was pretty sure he’d have nothing to fear, not from Andy. Andy was married. They were business partners. All the same, he couldn’t bear to see that smile directed at another. That it should have the same effect on others that it had on him was a risk his emotions would not allow him to take.




As the weeks turned into almost two months, he couldn’t help but try to rationalise his enslavement to her smile - he had a natural tendency to rationalise, to deconstruct - and although it had lost none of its penetrating radiance, he began to be afraid that she was smiling less often, and not at him in particular. He loved her for her smile: he wondered, at darker moments, what he might have for her to love as much.

Though their lovemaking was regular and never routinous, it seemed to him as if her smile was no longer the necessary means by which she might be granted admittance to his temple of sensation: these days, she could pretty much let herself in. Her hands were sure, now; they could negotiate their own way to his pleasure; almost, he felt, before he could.

She loved him deftly, and while this should have required nothing more than ultimate abandon on his part, it occasionally led to tension. It was as if his pleasure was not complete without a concurrent intellectual assessment of the experience. If he was in a certain mood he would stiffen in a way that was not appropriate.

That her smile, her whole embracable being should belong to him was salutary: that he should, in turn, belong to her made for an uneasy quid pro quo. She was a dancer: her body was her professional weapon of choice; his mind was his. On one occasion, she could feel him resist her; not once, but repeatedly. In the darkness, she simply placed her head on his chest, mouthed his name and whispered with resonating disappointment;

‘Oh, why? Why?’

Then came the first row. Not really a row: he’d snapped at her. That afternoon at the office, Andy had, almost but not quite to the point of ridicule, systematically deconstructed an idea for a project that had come to him in a flash of inspiration and his hauteur had gnawed away at him all day. When he came home, he saw her drinking a cup of soup from one of his special mugs, a mug so special, in fact, that he never used it and kept it right at the back of the cupboard, spotlessly washed but gathering inevitable dust. There she was, cradling it in both palms and sipping contentedly as she watched TV: she drank from it as if it were her own.

He had bridled. (‘Who said you could use that?) She, defenceless in the face of an angry glare apologised, rose falteringly and went to touch his cheek. He flinched and made a remark, calculated to injure, something about something left the bathroom that morning. Unable to sustain itself through stuttered sobbing, her smile splintered into tears. He knew now he could do that if he wanted to. There had been a brief haiatus, and then passionate, heartfelt apologies - through tears, he confessed he had never expected her to say ‘yes’ when he originally asked her for a date - followed by fully committed peacemaking.




*


Whenever he’d seen pregnant women, he felt uncomfortable; there was something confrontational about pregnancy, something sobering; what Andy called ‘The Guilty Proof’. But with her, she just looked like her usual self with a bulging belly. He loved her belly, it sent him into hormonal overdrive and here it was stretched to it’s limit with the manifestation of their love.

Her smile still beguiled him although, at some points during the middle stages, it took on a look of slight, often weary, strain. Chunky choc ices were added to her list of dietary caprices. And capers.

He was at a weekend conference with Andy the day she went into labour. Andy, a father of four himself and brooking no dispute, ordered him back home immediately. He arrived at her bedside to be confronted with a baby daughter; her mother, holding her, gazing at him with her newly returned, and possibly even enhanced smile.

Leah. She had her father’s eyes and her mother’s mouth. Andy studied the photographs at the office.

‘A little pot of gold’ he said, then repeating, as if to underline the point in day-glow highlighter, ‘A Little Pot of Gold.’

A few days later, he popped his head around Andy’s office door and asked him whether or not women go off sex after childbirth. Andy gave a look of exaggerated surprise, turned his gaze affectedly to a photograph of his orotund Benghali wife Govinda with their four girls, then slowly back to his business partner with a lugubrious gawp.



He needn’t have worried but she often teased him about the divided attention between Leah and himself. When mutual desire took a hold of them he still held her tightly afterwards but she’d occasionally pause mid-wriggle wondering whether or not she’d heard Leah murmour.

He would pout playfully; ‘You don’t love me anymore.’ She would kiss his lower lip slowly and loudly as she pulled away saying; ‘Of course I love you anymore.’ He wondered where she had learned to kiss so noisily.


She loved him anymore. He knew she did. He knew that she was too devoted to little Leah ever to leave him. And he figured, too, that if she ever did leave him, she would never leave without Leah. Leaving him, now he came to think of it, after the obligatory period of grieving, would leave him, sort of, alone. Well, on his own anyway.


By the time Leah was seven, the company was doing well. It had narrowed it’s client list down to just two companies; a chain of bookshops and a leading high street sportswear manufacturer.

Although they had been given work space in both company’s headquarters they kept their Soho office. They both employed secretaries (he called Andy ‘Andrew’, now, in front of employees) as well as an exuberant Californian receptionist called Pixilee Bobbs whom Andrew’s children loved. Their favourite game was to walk up to her desk, say her name and then bend quickly at the knees before running away giggling. She, with irrepressible Californian charm, played along and chased them, threatening playful punishments far more gigglesome. But, strangely enough, he was unsettled by her: Pixie-Lee Bobbs cut straight to the chase.


Both men had moved into larger family properties. He and she now lived close to Clapham Common, she taught aerobics in her spare time since the dancing auditions were drying up. Childcare permitting, she made an active figure in the maternity groups in the area, School parents’ days, Starbucks afternoons with other mums. He liked the new Clapham ‘boulevards’ and often spent too long idling in The Café-Bistro, pretending to read the newspapers.

She said to him once at breakfast; ‘Do you and Andy really need an office? If you rented meeting rooms ‘as and when’, sell your office and make a profit you could work from home. You know, with the internet and everything ...’

He was unexpectedly stirred to thought. He looked at her seriously, mumbling finally;

‘Too many distractions. Leah for one thing. Phone. Visitors...’

Her smile shone brightly as ever: ‘A bit like my days, eh?’ she paused, ‘Wally?’

He knew, now, that he didn’t have to, as Andy might say ‘sweat the smile’ anymore. She knew how - and more importantly - when to love him. Yet whenever she talked about them being ‘surprising’ with one another, he took pedantic delight in pointing out the oxymoron of pre-meditated surprise. Although he didn’t like to think of being without her smile equally he felt a little compromised at the thought of being required to put a little effort into keeping it, and he became adept at quickly quashing any small furtive request that might have been an unecessary ‘demand’ in disguise.


At thirty five she was every bit as attractive as she had been when he met her and they should, he felt, be grateful for such small mercies now that they were older with a growing daughter. Romantic meals at the local restaurant were enjoyable, but they lacked the urgency of ardour, courtship’s tentative devilment: and the waiters were too attentive to ‘madame’. She smiled at them.

The lemon and chestnut aura was the hair shampoo she used, enhanced by her favourite fragrance. He knew what it was, where to buy it and how much it cost. He had recognised it on others in the street, at the office.

He appreciated with disinterest the new clothes she bought, secretly hoping that they wouldn’t displace the clothes he had long grown used to.

She may have felt reinvigorated by a new dress, but he felt a sense of nostalgic betrayal. What was wrong with the cheesecloth summer number, the white blouse that was just a little bit too small? What she seemed to think might be exciting new underwear was a departure from the carefree simplicity of what she always used to wear. The thong, per se, was a shade confrontational; the silk lingérie too tasteful to be arousing. He didn’t buy her new underwear much anymore simply because he couldn’t find a shop that sold what she had always worn and he had always liked. Flirtation, he felt, seemed a little hypocritical in that it now lacked the quintessential ulterior motive.

Over the months, there followed the tentative conversational gambits. Was he happy? Was there anything wrong? Then the pre-planned nights or weekends of passion. Gran and Grandad could look after Leah while they took a break to be Wally and Lamb Chop again.

But he longed for spontanaeity in her touch, fingers which - part by chance, part by calculated risk - could rev the hesitant engine. Her sweet breath could be overly-intoxicating, the loose stands of her hair itchy and irritating on his cheek and forehead.

Her smile was still the same, but it seemed not to fill her face with energy as it did before, it simply hung there on her lips surrounded by sad eyes and slightly hollower cheeks.


Of an evening, he began to indulge in tales of his schooldays; pranks, fights and conquests: what he’d loved about his first girlfriends. And the hilarious adventures; well, you had to be there really but, of course, you weren’t... which left him free to embellish emptily. He’d switch off the television and, filling her wineglass generously, invite her to the quaint depravity of his teenage record collection which he was systematically updating to compact disc. He discovered Friends Re-united, vintage clips on Youtube.


And then, where once there had lain pulps by Ruth Rendell and Daphne du Maurier, there appeared novels by Flaubert, Jean Giono, The Brontes. He noted her sudden interest in Post-Impressionism, in French and Italian Landscapes. In Côtes du Rhone.

She and a friend from Aerobics - Joey - had discovered a shared obsession for musical theatre and he could often hear the muffled strains of what he later came to identify as Stephen Sondhiem music as he approached the front door: songs about middle-aged Americans having nervous breakdowns which Joey had lent her. Whatever Joey’s favourite musicals were, most of them she’d either been a chorus girl in or auditioned for. joey was fine but he drew the line at Somewhere Over The Rainbow.

He thought he noticed her attention drift when he talked; smiling but not listening. She had acquired a habit of cutting his sentences off short. He’d bought her some turkish delight; it had lain unopened in the fridge for months; the chocolate would certainly crackle now. He tried to remember the last time she called him Wally.


When he walked to work along leafy Charlotte Street these days, his pace lacked the urgency of the 1990’s Noho professional. He ambled these days, not averse to trying to catch the eye of passing women, his face twitching furtively, if they glanced at him, before ever committing to a smile.

After work, he could spend the best part of an hour in one of two bookshops in Museum Street, not so much browsing as watching unaccompanied others browsing, keeping a discreet distance and indiscriminately taking books from the shelves himself, often hoping for nothing more than the random exchange of a smile, willing to engage in conversation though never instigating one.



The Directors Club in Greek Street had a snooker table. He suggested to Andy that it might be an idea to take it up again. He’d sort of missed it, somehow. Andy, having potted a red ball by spectacular fluke one night, had asked after his partner’s gorgeous wife. He had replied that she had gone out that evening with her personal trainer. At Andy’s raised eyebrow, he had added,

‘No, no. His name’s Joey. He’s gay.’

‘Green.’ said Andy, before settling down to his next shot.

‘No, really. He’s taken her and Leah to see Wicked.’

‘Oh, lucky you’ said Andy having missed his shot, ‘You’ve a little pot of gold at home, a frolicking gorgeous wife who loves you and that red hanging over the middle pocket.

‘She does that alright.’ he said quietly, chalking his cue with unecessary concentration. Yes. Joey was gay.

‘It’s there on a plate for you’ Andy observed, surveying the table, ‘All you have to do is mess it up.’

*

On the day that she left for the long planned, mutually discussed and agreed-upon Mediterranean landscape painting holiday with Joey and his boyfriend, he and Andy were enjoying a long, celebratory business lunch on blossom lined Charlotte Street. Even though the bookstore chain had gone to the wall, the sports company had gone global and bought themselves out of their contract leaving both men with a more than enviable amount in both their business and personal accounts.

They had decided that rather than chase what was left of the big companies who hadn’t gone under, their energies might be better spent giving smaller, growing companies the benefit of their experience with no need to charge exhorbitant consultancy fees.

‘We were always better when we were hungry.’ Andy had commented, negotiating an overly sinewy mouthful of Porterhouse.

Everyone seemed to be going away. Mum being away in Italy, Leah was staying with Grandad and Grandma in Bath, Andy was off on the family canal barge for a fortnight and even adventure-seeking Pixilee Bobbs had quit to go travelling in The Far East. Andy’s children had been inconsolable.

Why they had bothered to call it a business lunch
at all was the fact that they had to make a decision as to Pixie-Lee Bobbs’ successor.

‘I don’t care as long as she’s good with children. said Andy, dabbing his mouth, ‘or my kids will never forgive me.’

As he sipped at his third glass of almost perfectly chilled Chablis, he was surprised by a familiar piece of music from a passing car’s window; a sudden sweet sting of melancholy, a memory of tickling laughter, an emotional dislocation somewhere between lemon and chestnut, those first uncertain moments, of hope, of anxious silliness.

‘Y’know, Andy, I don’t think I can do the long lunches anymore.’

‘Well, we can call it a day if you like. All we have to do is ... ‘ Andy drew in his breath so as imbue his rejoinder with headline font, ‘... choose our new happy welcome face at reception. Pixielee Bobbs - the sequel.’

Andy stroked up a chequerboard of eager-to-please thumbnails on his iPad and swivelled it around for his partner’s perusal; faces bristling with digital resilience for his benign disinterest along with their contact details. It didn’t take him long.

‘Who’s she? Her. She has a smile like a... like a little beautifully cut slice of melon.’

‘Funnily enough that’s her name;’ Andy drained his Chablis, ‘I interviewed her yesterday. Nice girl. Loves children.’

‘Melon-y it is.’

‘Sure?’

‘Sure.’

‘You look a bit unsettled.’

‘No, no. I’m sure.’

Coolio’, said Andy, ‘Melanie shall be the new smile. I’ll ring her when I get back to the office.’

‘Actually,’ he said, holding up his mobile, ‘Let’s order another white skittle. Why don’t I call her now...’




* * *




©David Shaw-Parker 28.11.2015 All rights reserved by the author.