R. M. Cahillaine
Short Fiction
They book separate rooms at the same hotel. This is an expensive and unnecessary fiction; they travel from London to Brighton knowing what will happen. She drives there in a hire car. He takes the train, then walks down to the seafront hotel.
He has his room key by 6pm, showers, then waits in the hotel bar as arranged. He does not know if she has arrived before him and he checks his phone, the hotel entrance, his reflection in the mirror tiling behind the bar, all at regular intervals. He downs a beer quickly, then orders a bottle of Shiraz and two glasses.
At a quarter to seven his phone vibrates twice and he reads his wife’s text message. New York is fine, very hot, shopping great. He fumbles one back to her then turns the phone off. My conscience, he thinks, it responds to touch. He takes a sip of wine, leaves the bar, and stands outside on the hotel steps.
He smokes a cigarette. The Lanes are still busy, late September. He contemplates giving some things up and not starting at other things. Three young girls pass by, their legs all long and furniture brown, their youth almost foal-like and tossed around between them like something animal and unitary. He is caught looking but not looking and he hears these words called back at him: ‘Wandering eyes, you old perv!’, this phrase left on the whitish steps, at his feet, as they take their laughter along with them. It makes him feel a little more sordid; the shower and fresh clothes give no protection against age; for it is age that is the stain that won’t remove, and not – he realises – his decision to at last commit adultery. It is the timing of it: it is far too late, now, for an infidelity to have a core of joy – or any other positive value – beneath the smooth and inevitable layers of lust and shame and regret that he had previously imagined to be the covering over of it; the idea of an affair is no longer weightless, floating and out of reach of him, above his married life; now, it is edged and grounded and meaningless, and something that he is compelled to dig out, pick up and examine; it has taken on the qualities of an artefact, the age of which is completely known to him, its purpose unknown. Distantly, beyond the passing voices, bells start to toll around the town and he grinds the cigarette stub under his heel and he returns to the hotel bar, to his glass.
She, Nadine, comes down to the bar at seven thirty, creeps up on him, places her hand lightly on his neck and kisses him. It is their fourth meeting, and this will be the seventh bottle of wine that they will share, all white until now. She notices this immediately, considers that the change is intentional and wonders why, what it means, if anything.
“It’s an Australian Shiraz,” he tells her as they finish their embrace and sit. “Are you okay with red?”
“Absolutely.” She watches him pour and they clink glasses.
“How was the drive down?”
She laughs. She is laughing at herself, at how wrong she has him: this is in fact a man who actually hasn’t screwed around! Until now, of course. But now is apparently by no means certain. And red, she thinks, he’s like a fucking traffic light! What’s tripped her up is the speed of it: three weeks, three meetings, his graduation from a close-to-platonic closing-time kiss, to his tongue in her mouth, to his hand up her skirt. He’s been almost professional. And now he’s asking me about the drive down, like I’m his aunt!
“What’s so hilarious, Nadine?” He smiles at her, wanting in on it.
“I’m just a little bit nervous, Tom. You made me laugh, that’s all. Asking about the drive down, it’s funny.” She places a hand on his cheek, leans in and kisses him. “In the circumstances.”
Then, as usual, they discuss what brought them together: their concern about a mutual friend, him telling them both about his thoughts of suicide, their intervention. The bottle is emptied and Nadine orders some liveners, some vodka tonics. This is what is between them, the reason they sit touching in a hotel bar in Brighton below their separate rooms, drinking spirits. They were there for the friend, they really were, and it has been so stressful and there was this distant commonality of doing the right thing, but which has been lost to the notion that he is not grateful and is not real and is not listening to them and that, after all, they both deserve a break from it. Tom tells her that their friend is not the type to do it and she agrees that he is attention seeking and will not ever actually do it. But perhaps they don’t know exactly what they’re talking about. They pull their friend’s life apart again and leave it utterly compartmentalised and not fully understood. But they get as close to understanding as anyone is ever able; their intentions are honest and well-meant but have faded into a repetition, which they themselves hear out and hear out once more with every meeting. The truth is that they have become bored of him, bored enough to fuck each other rather than talk about him more.
The city clocks chime on half past eight and they leave the hotel, and they walk the Lanes, his arm around her shoulders. In the dusk and warm breeze he feels something in his heart; the beats are heavy and slow and individually felt, just like artillery, he thinks, mixing the word up with artery. He finds himself half-aroused. He smiles, thinks how his youth in not entirely defeated, how it has suddenly launched this surprise counter-offensive.
In the restaurant they spend a while on the menus, run out of things to say for now. A waitress comes by, another pretty girl in her twenties – where did they all just come from, Tom thinks – and asks them for a drinks order.
“Red or white, Tom? Or maybe rosé?” Nadine says, as if asking herself sarcastically.
Tom defers and Nadine, without hesitation, orders white, a bottle of Macon Villages.
The waitress returns with the bottle in an ice bucket and asks Nadine if she’d like to taste the wine before she pours. The waitress smiles at Tom, at his docility. He’s like a little boy, she thinks. She notices his wedding ring, how he’s fussing with it, fingering it, wanting to obscure it, yet drawing attention to it, maybe even seeking some sense of reassurance from it. The waitress sees this all the time, and sometimes, like now, she finds her adulterous diners completely hilarious, when they’re all skittish, like this one is: definitely, definitely he’s a first timer: he refused a table by the window and he glances over every time the door opens, wondering who he knows who might have moved to Brighton or who he knows who might be visiting Brighton. The waitress expects a generous tip: he will be relieved to get the meal over with, get the lady back to their hotel; the longer he stays here, in one place, he’ll be thinking, the greater the probability of someone happening along and exclaiming how small the world is, asking him where his wife is, how she’s doing, while glancing quizzically at his extremely attractive female companion; he has convinced himself that everyone who knows him is inevitably in town this weekend, and Brighton is relatively small and compact, the sort of place in which happenstance ensures that paths are always crossing. Look at how he hides his little face behind the menu! The waitress supresses a giggle and makes a mental note to try to write this scene out when her shift ends, once she’s back at home, a large glass of wine, a joint, her feet soothing in the foot spa.
Nadine says to the waitress, “No, darling, just pour it, thanks.” Then they order their main courses, and as they wait Tom begins a conversation and drives it relentlessly into tomorrow: where they’ll go, what they’ll do, what there is to see, around and around.
Nadine sits and listens and comments occasionally. Clearly, he’s nervous; clearly, he doesn’t know what he’s doing yet; clearly, he’s working up to it, working up to wanting what he wants. She resolves to be patient with him, watches his mouth work, half-hears the words it makes, admires his face, his manner, his sweetness.
When the food comes out, once they’re eating, he starts up at it again and she says:
“Tommy, darling, have you never been to Brighton in your life before?”
Tom swallows and says, “Yes, loads of times.”
“Me too.”
“How many times?”
“I’ve lived here. I’ve really done it to death.”
“So why are we in Brighton?” Tom puts his cutlery down and drinks at his wine.
“You tell me.”
“Because I suggested it and you agreed?”
“I agreed because it doesn’t really matter where we are, does it?” She smiles at him, her head cocked, this look that first nailed him. In this silence, her head still cocked, she considers asking if he and his wife were ever in Brighton, in a Brighton hotel bed. But she quickly disregards the thought of it, the question relating to the thought. She picks at her sea bass for a moment, then takes another line with him: “Tom, it’s not too late. Nothing has happened or needs to happen and I’m not about to go all crazy on you. We can, in fact, just enjoy the weekend if that’s what you want.” She pours out more wine. “But please don’t carry on doing what you’re doing.”
“What am I doing, Nadine?”
“Well for one, you’re checking out all the waitresses. And two, you’re waiting for me to start up on what we came here for. I’m not completely dumb.”
Nadine’s voice peaks, reaches out to nearby tables and Tom reddens. She has made him: the waitresses, his backing out, all his talk about tomorrow. He thinks of his wife out there in New York and wonders if it’s tomorrow there, or if it’s yesterday; this is something that he really should know, a basic matter connected with the world. He is embarrassed by himself. And also, he does not know precisely how far away she is, but probably far enough away, thousands of miles, an ocean between them, and very deep, but he does not know quite how deep it goes. There is a sense in his mind – a confusion of numberings – suggesting to him that what he wants to do, if he does it, when he does it, there is a sense that it will not happen to their marriage, that it will be negatived by an undiscoverable collision of distance and time-zone differentials, so far as his wife might ever be concerned. He is not in her reality, nor she in his, and it cannot affect them – and after all, she might well be fucking her boss right at this moment, whatever time it is, wherever she is – and these stupid thoughts embolden him, the drink kicking in, Nadine’s perfume, her lovely face across this small, white-clothed table: their isolation; this construct of his inspired design: his wife, in a different place, in a different time, in a different reality; therefore not his wife until she is again, until she touches down, crosses over out of air-side.
He definitely needs a cigarette but dare not mention it.
“I’m sorry,” he says to Nadine, and then apologises about the waitresses, tells her that she’s right, he’s being unfair, behaving like a child. He looks at her and she has the most beautiful eyes in candlelight, in any light.
“I don’t find passive men attractive, Tom.” She delivers this and watches for his reaction. A moment of confusion plays across his face like rain and then he laughs, and the dining room opens out again, as if in a movie, she thinks. Tom’s still laughing, on the change. There will be no more talk about tomorrow.
At 10:45 they find a dive-bar, the kind of place that is amber in all aspects. There is a warmth in their hearts that is kindled by laughter and forgetting, but which accelerates seconds and decimates hours; they are holding on to each other as if the floor might give way beneath them at any moment, or, less dramatically, as if the lights might suddenly and harshly come up: it is two a.m., far too late, now, for you to fall in love with you.
And time does accelerate, both backward and forward. But still, the aggregate is unstoppably onward: another drink, another kiss, another record, another trip to the unisex toilet, another cigarette, another compliment, another compliment, another realisation that Tom does not know what to say now to Nadine and the reverse of this. Around midnight they are both mute, exhausted and people watching.
But, inevitably in this very groovy place, they are shaken out of it when the dancing starts, when other people begin talking to other people, when Nadine and Tom become a slight curiosity for some, their forties just on them and right out of the demographic at this time of night, here. Surely they must be totally in love? Isn’t that so sweet?
It is bohemian and they play eclectic, mellow, get-down soul music. Oh yes, Nadine is gone right into it, dancing like a cat, with all these girls who are twenty, and all those boys who laugh shyly in their groups at first, at her, but then reabsorb and dissipate, doing their own thing with the girls who are twenty, who dance with Nadine.
Tom watches this, pretends not to. He is forty-fucking-two. This angers him, in this place. It is something done when it ought to have been done and was done so much better back then. He is rewinding to sobriety, feeling out of time and out of place. He gets more drinks, pints of beer and a couple of shots. She carries on dancing. He drinks both shots, goes for a cigarette outside on the street, up amid a carefree, twittering flock of youth, this counter-offensive of his now completely surrounding. Sirens pass on the breeze and he smokes another. He thinks of his wife, what time it is where she is, shakes his head and bites at his lip. And here am I; and there are you.
Tom stays out a while, until he realises that Nadine has not noticed him gone. He goes back in. The bouncers are matey with him, says he doesn’t look that old, fuck man, have a blast down there, geezer. He goes down there, where Nadine is still dancing, holding her own, looking fine. Tom sits back at their table, which is appreciated for what it is; it remains un-invaded, somehow VIP. Some people smile at him, give thumbs up; the whole place it seems, such as it is, has become terribly fond of them, mostly of her. Tom drinks his beer and starts in on hers. Nadine looks over at him a few times, waves him up, petitions at him. Yeah right, he thinks. Yeah right. This is precisely what I fucking came here for.
He’s nearly done with Nadine’s beer and is about to get more when there are hands on his shoulders pulling him up, two girls, two pieces he’d probably pay a thousand each for, their laughter, the skin on them. It is not something that he can resist, and so he allows them to push him into the dancing. They tell him, don’t be such a miserable old bastard and go dance with your woman. They laugh it at him, sing it at him, kiss it at him, so it seems.
He drifts over to her.
“I’m going back,” he says.
“Then I’ll see you tomorrow, Tom.”
“It is tomorrow.”
“Maybe for you it is.”
He leaves.
He comes back.
He dances.
He drinks more.
They sit and talk and go out again, back to the floor.
The lights come on harshly and they leave together.
There are no clocks or bells at two or two thirty, and time is absent. They go down to the water and watch the waves come in and go out, listen at nothing, all leaned-to, her head on his shoulder.
She feels very cold now but does not say so. In a while, she will stand, pick up her shoes and she will lead him back to their hotel, then up in the lift and into her room and there his hand will be between her legs again until she tells him to remove it.
She recalls that there is a half-bottle of red in the mini-bar, maybe two. She will open one up and ask him about his wife; where she is, what she’s doing there, if he loves her, and what she looks like. She will keep asking, keep talking until all her red is gone.
Then they will go down a floor to his room, and she will open his reds, one after the other, and she will talk about their friend, and they will talk about him and talk about him, and they will repeat to fade.
Tomorrow, on the pier, Nadine decides, there will be an argument and she will walk away from Tom. And if he follows her, then she’ll create the kind of scene that sometimes compels other men in crowds to intervene, to ask her if she’s alright, love, to walk her to her car.
R. M. Cahillaine used to be human rights lawyer in London, England, and now lives and writes in Kent. He’s currently working on a collection of short stories and novellas set in western Japan, while embarking on a new career in teaching.
Photo Credit: Gary Bloom grew up in Minneapolis and attended what is now Minnesota State University-Mankato, where he studied sociology. He has been a teaching assistant in a psychiatric hospital, a driving instructor for spinal cord injury patients, and a computer programmer. His articles, photography, and poetry have been published in newspapers, magazines and websites, including Literary Hatchet, Liquid Imagination, Milwaukee Magazine, The Buffalo News, The Grand Rapids Press, Art Times Journal, and Black Diaspora. He lives in Mississippi.
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