He remembered his mother’s words just before her dramatic collapse: Did your father and I not set a good example to you? Of a good marriage?
He’d never considered his parents’ marriage something that could be rated. In his mind it didn’t exist relative to anything else. It just was. He guessed that he had an unconscious, childish belief that his parents were not really two individuals but one unit. They had been together for half a century, after all, and they worked together, played tennis together. He rarely saw them apart. Had they set a good example of a good marriage? For the first time he truly considered the question.
He liked the way his parents teased each other. It was like watching them play a game, and when he and his siblings were little they hadn’t understood the rules but they’d known it was a fun game. He obviously preferred to know nothing about their sex life but he liked that they’d always touched and hugged and kissed: more than other people’s parents. His father was so large and his mother so small, he could lift her up under her armpits and put her down somewhere else when he chose, and even as a child Logan could tell his mother liked it when he did that, even when she pretended to resist, which was part of the game.
Logan would never attempt to do that to Indira. She was violently ticklish. She would probably have head-butted him if he ever tried to pick her up. She also believed herself to be too heavy for him to lift. She had issues with her body. He loved her body but he had to be meticulously careful about what he said. Indira preferred to pretend she didn’t have a body at all. In the beginning he used to compliment her, and she’d turn on him: You’re lying, you’re just saying that, how could you say that, I know you don’t mean that, my legs are revolting, my arms are disgusting. Suddenly he would find himself in the position of defending her body against a cruel attacker, and he didn’t know how long or how vigorously he was meant to fight back when she was the attacker, so eventually he surrendered. He stopped saying anything at all. Every relationship has its quixotic rules. You just had to follow them. Only his hands could talk, and he tried to let his hands say everything he wasn’t allowed to say out loud. Theirs was a relationship with a lot of touching, not just in the bedroom: they held hands in the street, they lay side by side on this couch when they watched TV. He’d thought all that touching meant that everything that needed to be said was being said.
If he’d thought about it, and now he was thinking about it, he might have realised that growing up he hadn’t liked certain aspects of his parents’ marriage. He’d hated it when his mother made faces behind his father’s back and muttered bitter remarks, so low that only her children could hear: Well, I TOLD him that was going to happen and did he listen? No, he did not listen.
He hadn’t liked it when his father used to get the final word in an argument not by yelling, but by leaving.
I hated it when my father left.
He felt a rush of memory as if he’d smelled a long-forgotten scent from his childhood. There was a dropping-away sensation in his stomach like tripping in a dream. He hadn’t thought about that in years. Maybe he’d never really thought about it. At some point his father had stopped doing it, and the memory had vanished, the way old clothes vanished and you forgot they had ever existed until an old photo reminded you: I loved that t-shirt.
One day his father came back and never did it again, and years and years piled on top of those particular memories, obliterating them from view. His mother no longer pulled faces or made bitter asides and his father no longer left.
His phone rang and he jumped. He picked it up, saw it was Indira. He studied her name, considered putting his thumb on ‘Decline’。
Indira was determined to ‘stay friends’。 She had this new way of talking to him now, without a trace of emotion. She sounded like a friendly customer service representative. She was a nearly perfect clone of his Indira, except that something essential and beautiful was missing.
He muted the television, answered.
‘Hi, Logan,’ she said in her friendly telemarketer voice. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m well, Indira. How are you?’ He didn’t quite imitate her tone, but close.
She paused and in a slightly less friendly but more normal tone said, ‘I thought I’d just call to check if your mum has been discharged from hospital.’
She could have texted: How’s your mum? That’s what he would have done. Or she could have just disappeared from his life like other ex-girlfriends, but she was staying in touch, remaining dutifully apprised of family news. He wanted to tell her this wasn’t necessary. If he wasn’t getting her warm body next to him in bed, he didn’t want her cold friendly voice in his ear.