Forty-Four
Strange, I think, as I carefully ink between the pre-ordained lines on her birthday card. When four becomes forty it loses the U, a fact that has eluded me until today. I have learnt to spell the sibilant numbers of Italian, the rock-hewn stumps of Latin, the French monstrosities, but still make such errors in my native tongue, despite living what could be seen as a life amongst letters. Today my wife has forty-four years and I have thirty-nine.
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We owe everything to our shared birthday. A small pub in a University town mistakenly booked by two groups at once; I arrived at my nineteenth birthday party to find half of its attendees entirely unbeknownst to me. Yet one was a woman of such distinction that it seemed the ley lines of fate converged upon her. Cotton span itself to clothe her; forests felled themselves for the floorboards which fell at her feet.
Both parties forgiving a thoroughly embarrassed barman and agreeing to an impromptu shared celebration. We were rewarded with a night free at the taps, but in truth we were rewarded with far more than that. Of course, five years is a much greater difference at nineteen than it is at thirty-nine. Eyebrows were raised in more than one quarter, but then, all relationships are destined for scandal. Some are born scandalous, some achieve it, and some have scandal thrust upon them.
Our third outing, a picnic in the corner of a maysummer field. Rolling across the blankets with little thought for the ramblers passing by. We walked through to the village and stopped, dumbstruck, outside a timbered cottage drenched in purple wysteria, snaking around its time-weathered frames. She said she wanted it more than anything she had ever wanted before. I felt a cool shade of certainty as I said, I will buy you that house.
Those initial months of bliss overshadowed by her mother, sole remaining parent, dying, a corticobasal clusterfuck shedding nerve cells from her spine until she was little more than an unknowing husk, waiting for the day she would choke.
Years of University passed without effort, our coupling impossibly easy, as if a new form of human connection shorn of all tension, a vacuum in which the slimed tendrils of other bodies withered and retreated. I could be anything with her; no hideous deformity of body or mind could prise apart our certainty that I was hers and she was mine.Torn by an offer to study further in California: the chance too good to miss, the thought of separation too much to bear. Late in a night of seething desperation she came to me, mascara streaked on yesterday’s top. Of course I’ll come with you. All you had to do is ask.
Japan followed America; Peru followed Japan; South Africa stumbled after and New Zealand found us settled. Finding herself thirty, with her mother’s health failing, she did not need to ask me to return. I reminded her that I would grow rich, and I would buy her the wysteria house.
Her mother’s death a relief in the end, a foundation of grief on which to build a charity dedicated to funding research. Lost in my rewrites and revisions, I never asked about her philanthropy enough, so that I cannot say how many families are whole, their neurocompromised mothers and sons present at the dinner table, breathing softly through cruel twilit hours of the night.
Then, bestowed with sheer dumb fortune, a University dean found me a publisher for the first of my mysteries. A small advance, a trifling sum, but an irremovable iron rung on the bottom of a gilded ladder. One hailstoned Christmas we sat by the fire all day as she read through my second novel, her trademark pen gliding across me, editing, refining, perfecting. She told me it would be loved, and as if from mists we watched the outlines of the wysteria house emerge, the day I carried her into it inevitable as our birthday. She corrected me: I would not buy her the house — we would buy it, for us. She did not care for convention, and proved it, the following summer, as she knelt in the sand of a deserted beach and told me that I would marry her.
The night before our wedding day, shaken awake by her screams and tears, kneeling in November mud of the front garden. Running to her, wrenching her from the flowerbeds, asking her what on earth could be the matter, hearing her tell me that I have to know, that I have to know. And as ever in those moments in which one awaits bad news it feels that the bad news itself cannot possibly be as painful as the waiting, as the knife twists in the gut and the constellation of horrors folds outwards in countless dimensions; just tell me, darling, just say. This time was the exception to that rule. Her mother’s disease, she told me. Hereditary.
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I finish decorating the card, and fold it neatly in half. Good quality paper.
As I lean back in the chair I feel the subtle throb of my elbow, smacked on a Peruvian peak decades ago, persisting. This pain will stay with me until my death, I reflect. There will never be a time in which my elbow is whole again, from now onwards nothing but entropy. But what else is age? Age is only the knowledge that you will never again be as whole as you were before.
I have tried to feel afraid for myself, but the future is numb and unfeeling. Fear of age subsides once disease has struck: I find it difficult to fear the future when there is so much to fear in the present.
I walk outside, to the patio where she sits, and give her the card. She takes it, but instead of watching her I can only look at my flawed words. When four becomes forty it loses its U, but we all lose things with age. Her birthday card is misspelt, but my wife does not know the difference. Her still-young hands trace the foreign symbols, her lips murmuring unknown words from misfired synapses. Good quality paper, it stands unstirred by the winds which shake the violet blooms of the wysteria.
