The Year's Best Horror Stories XXII

TURNING THIRTY by Lisa Tuttle

I walked into the pub off the Gray’s Inn Road and saw him slouching at the bar, and it was as if no time had passed.

The pub was one where we’d often met, and which I’d not visited since. I went in there today because I wanted a drink. It wasn’t nostalgia or anything; to tell the truth, I’d hardly taken in where I was. The pub just happened to be the one I was passing at the moment I realized I really could not face the tube just then without a little lubricant.

With the end of our affair, we’d ceased to see each other. It wasn’t something that had to be arranged: we have never moved in the same circles, and our one mutual acquaintance had moved to America soon after she’d introduced us. About two years after the last good-bye I had seen Nick in Holborn Underground station: I was on the down escalator and he was ascending; I don’t think he saw me. The sight of him sent me into such a spin that I actually forgot where I was going.

Now at the sight, so familiar five years ago but not since, of my one and only adulterous lover, I came unanchored in time. I felt a little jolt, as if I’d seen a ghost, and then I shivered as that old sado-masochistic cocktail of lust and anger and loneliness began to spread throughout my system, and I went up to him with a sort of casual, sort of wicked grin, the way I used to, as if we’d planned this meeting and I was pretending we hadn’t.

He was exactly the same. Those might have been the same pair of jeans, the same denim jacket, the same Doc Martens he’d been wearing the evening I’d first put my hand on his thigh under the table in the Cafe Pacifico. It was maybe not quite the same haircut, but definitely the same wire-framed glasses, the same blue eyes, and the same slightly crooked front teeth that showed when he grinned the same loopy grin.

Which he did, hugely, at the sight of me, and I realized he was honestly pleased to see me. He’d never been one to disguise his feelings, unlike every other man I’d ever been with.

“You look wonderful,” he said.

“You look like a refugee from the seventies. Still. And I’ll bet they’re not even Levi’s—Marks and Sparks’ own brand, am I right?”

“I was never a slave to designer labels, and, as you can see, success hasn’t changed me.”

“You’re successful.”

“Meet my backer.” He introduced me to the man he’d been drinking with; despite my hopeful first impression, he wasn’t alone. I was about to make my excuses, but the man in the suit beat me to it: cordial smile and nods all around, and he was off. Nick ordered me a whiskey and dry ginger and I didn’t stop him, although I didn’t like the mixture. It was what I’d always drunk with him, and that he still remembered pleased me.

We gave each other cautious, curious looks.

“Well,” he said.

“Your backer?”

“I’m making a film. Didn’t you know? There was a piece about me in the Face. In April.”

“I must have missed that issue.”

“I did a film for Channel Four. Part of the four-minute film series. Ratphobia. Did you see it?”

“No. Sorry. I didn’t know. The TV Times is another one of those must-reads that I just don’t… You should have sent me a card.”

“I would have. But you told me once a long time ago never to darken your door again and that included your office mail.”

I didn’t know what to say to that because it was true, and he sounded hurt. I was always saying things to hurt and then feeling abashed by my success. An awkward silence fell, for about twenty-three seconds, and then my drink arrived.

“Cheers.”

“Confusion to your enemies.”

I would have to stay at least until I’d finished my drink, and all at once that seemed too long. We had nothing to say to each other; we never had. Back in the days when we were seeing each other, if we weren’t making love we were either flirting or fighting; there was nothing else for us, no comfortable middle ground, none of the common interests on which friendships are built. He hadn’t the least understanding of, or interest in, my work, and as for him, well, at the time when I knew him his film-making aspirations had progressed no further than production work on a couple of pop videos. He spent a lot of time talking himself up to various people who might help his career, and when he talked to me, too often the same well-practiced, self-aggrandizing phrases came rolling out. I hated it. Not only because I mistrusted people who tried to impress me, but because I felt he wasn’t talking to me at those times, but performing for an imaginary audience. So I would not admire; I refused to be impressed. And I did my best (in a phrase of my grandmother’s), to cut him down to size.

Sometimes I didn’t even have to try. How could the names he dropped impress me if I’d never heard them before? I know he found my ignorance of famous film directors and musical megastars difficult to credit. But although he was only four years younger than me, we belonged to different generations, culturally speaking. I’d stopped paying attention to pop music in about 1978, whereas Nick still bought singles and read things like the Face and NME.

“You still working in the same place?” he asked suddenly.

“And still doing the same thing.” I wondered if he remembered what it was.

“That’s good,” he said. “I guess you’re happy?”

“Well, I need the money. It’s easier working than finding a backer.”

“You’re not kidding! But really, it’s a great project. I’ve got a script by—d’you remember that book that came out a few years ago, the one everyone was talking about, a big novel about—”

I gulped at my drink and felt an unexpected pleasure at the warm, bubbly kick of it.

Then Nick was excusing himself, ordering another round before he left and before I could stop him. It occurred to me that I could slip away while he was in the loo. On the other hand, I wasn’t ready to go home, and I didn’t particularly want to go somewhere else and drink alone. The first drink had mellowed me, but I wanted more.

As I put my empty glass on the bar I looked up and saw Nick walking toward me, a sight from the past I never thought I’d see again. Maybe because we were both married and always met in the center of London, well away from both our homes, my most common image of Nick is of suddenly picking out his figure against a background of strangers in some public place, coming toward me along the Tottenham Court Road, weaving among the tables in a large restaurant, or between the other drinkers in this very pub.

He had one of those long, awkward bodies you often see on adolescents. Even now, past thirty, he looked as if he hadn’t quite grown into it. Totally unathletic, of course, with a stooping, hip-slung stance. Watching this once so familiar body come toward me, I was seized with lust.

Lust is, for me, a particularly intense variety of memory. I can’t imagine feeling it for a stranger. For someone I’ve just met I might feel interest or attraction, but not lust—no more lust than love. Nick was the first man for whom I ever felt lust without loving, and even with him it was hardly lust at first sight. I thought him attractive in a kind of young, funky, nonthreatening way. My reasons for contemplating sex with him had more to do with my feelings for my husband than for Nick. I was furiously angry with Peter, desperate to right the balance of our dying marriage by taking a lover. When Nick made it obvious he was attracted to me, I felt a resurgence of a female power which Peter had all but destroyed in me.

What started out of curiosity, anger, loneliness, and revenge became something else after the first kiss. Sex, when we got to it, was explosive, quite unlike anything I’d expected, or experienced, before. It was wonderful and terrible. I’d never had orgasms so violent. Afterward I hated him for making me feel so intensely, hated him because I wanted him so fiercely and specifically.

Now I began to remember, in a pornographic, filmic rush. Positions we had used in our fierce and frantic couplings those few times we had the opportunity—on the floor, against the wall, in the bath, as well as in the beds. Even more powerful, because I’d always been left wanting more, were memories of our more public embraces, on the street, under bridges or in doorways, when we had no time, or nowhere to go, yet were desperate with desire.

It was just then, in my unusually vulnerable state, that the music began. It came from the jukebox: a plaintive love song first popular about twelve years ago. The summer I fell in love with Peter that song was to be heard on every radio, at every party, from every jukebox in the land. It was no longer in the charts, of course, hadn’t been for a long time, but it had remained popular enough for unlucky coincidence to strike, years later: it was the song Nick had chosen as a background to his seduction of me, in this pub, five years ago. He couldn’t have failed to notice the effect it had on me, and as I never told him that I associated it with falling in love with someone else, it became from that night “our song.”

And there it was again. No wonder I forgot what year it was. I realized Nick hadn’t gone to the loo at all—he’d been remembering old times and he wanted to see if “our song” had lasted the years. I hated him and loved him for it. I could no more fight the effects of that song than I could have resisted a massive shot of muscle relaxant. Already weakened by whiskey and lust I hadn’t a prayer against the power of a sentimental song.

He saw me slumping and put his arm around me. I burst into tears.

“I’ve missed you, too,” he said.

When I stopped shaking he walked me over to the table in the corner farthest from the bar where, in the old days, we’d often spent hours drinking and driving each other crazy. He had seemed determined either to undress me or to get inside my clothes with me, and I had fought him off like a reluctant virgin, my occasional delicious lapses into surrender always broken by the fear of public indecency.

It was like old times. He was just as I’d remembered—I was just as I’d remembered, roused to a pitch of desire I’d nearly forgotten. It was as if we had spent only weeks apart, not years, just as in those days the weeks apart had felt like years.

“Don’t.”

“But you like it.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t like it, just don’t.”

“But why?”

“Someone might see.”

“So?”

I struggled without success to trap his hands. “I’m no exhibitionist. Anyway, you’re the movie buff. Didn’t you see The Accused?”

He gave a soundless laugh. “This isn’t that kind of bar.”

“And I’m not that kind of girl. Can we talk?”

“We’ll only end up fighting.”

“I need another drink; so do you.”

He looked at our empty glasses and sighed. When he got up to go to the bar, I followed.

We drank; we flirted; we fought. And all of a sudden the barman was calling time. That couldn’t be right. But the clock on the wall said it was, and I looked around and realized we were the only customers left.

We walked all the way down to Holborn tube station, hand in hand, like innocent lovers. The hour and the darkness gave us that freedom. Just before we reached the station he pulled me into a recessed doorway, one that had been overlooked by the homeless sleeping in others. As he kissed me, he slipped his cold hands into my layers of clothing, seeking flesh. I felt a reckless pleasure and did nothing as he eventually managed to bare one breast. I’d barely had time to feel the cold before his hot mouth left mine and closed around the nipple.

Then the heady sensation stopped. “You’re driving me crazy,” he said, low-voiced. “This is no good. I want to make love to you. Come back with me.”

“To Kent? Your wife won’t mind?”

“I’m on expenses. We can get a hotel room. I said I might have to stay overnight… In fact, I do; I’ve missed the last train.”

All our lovemaking had been in dark corners or in cheap hotels. We’d only spent the whole night together twice. I’d planned and chosen nights Peter was away, but Nick had had to call home, once from a pay phone in a station, once from the hotel room. I remembered how much I had hated those phone calls, which I’d tried not to hear. Did he say “I love you” before he said good-bye? Afterward, when he’d said it to me, I’d hit him. That had been the next to last time we’d seen each other.

All those old feelings were still there, as volatile and immediate as the touch of his lips. I wanted sex with him, violent and annihilating, but I couldn’t deal with the emotions of before and after.

“I can’t,” I said abruptly, pushing him off, fixing my clothes. “I haven’t missed my train and I’m not going to.” I began walking toward the station.

“I’m sorry,” he said humbly. Although we’d both been married, both, therefore, equally guilty, I’d reserved the role of the innocent. Of course, the husband I betrayed had already betrayed me, but I didn’t tell Nick that. From his readiness to shoulder all the guilt I guessed that I was not the first woman his wife might have cause to hate. This, of course, added to the anger I felt at him and at faithless men everywhere.

“If you knew how much I’ve missed you—how much you still mean to me—can I see you again?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Nothing’s changed. Has it?”

He looked very sad. “I guess not.”

I had a ticket, he didn’t, so I pushed through the turnstile and left him without looking back.

In my mind, though, I never stopped looking back. I had plenty of time to think, for it’s a long journey from Holborn to South Harrow, with a long, cold wait on the platform at Acton Town making it even longer at that time of night. Yet with all the time I had to think, I really didn’t think at all. I was moving on automatic pilot, going through motions learned a long time ago, while in my head, playing again and again like some cheap, sentimental, incredibly powerful song, was the memory of Nick: the rasp of his whiskers on my face, the taste of whisky on his tongue, the strength of his arms around me, the light in his eyes, his voice whispering in my ear, his face.

Tears came to my eyes and then dried up. Older recollections—highly-charged sexual moments—mingled with the memories of a few hours before. Things he’d said to me, things we’d done. Even more powerfully: all the things we hadn’t done.

I was fairly drunk. Feeling no pain, as they say—except in my heart. As I walked up the hill from South Harrow station, I cursed myself for not having gone with him, for not having seized a precious few hours of joy. Why did I always worry about what came next, why was I so desperate never to be caught out, always to behave correctly? What was the big deal about faithfulness and propriety, and getting home before dawn? It had never made me happy.

All too soon I was standing on the doorstep, trying to dig out my key from the clutter in the bottom of my handbag. I couldn’t find it, but that didn’t mean a choice between dumping everything out on the ground or ringing the bell—long ago, and without telling Peter, I had hidden a spare as insurance. The brick was still loose and the key was still there. It was a bit stiff turning in the lock, but it let me in.

The house was dark and silent. He hadn’t even left a light on for me. I felt annoyed and yet relieved that I wouldn’t have to hide my guilt and lie. With luck, I wouldn’t wake him. I switched on the light in the corridor and opened the bedroom door and then I stared in horror feeling everything, my own sense of identity, swirling madly.

The bedroom furniture had changed. The bed was in a different position. And in the bed, sleeping beside Peter, was a woman. Peter’s wife.

Not me—I wasn’t Peter’s wife any longer. I wasn’t anything to Peter. Not since our divorce had become final, more than two years ago. And for two years before that we had ceased to live as man and wife.

I stared and stared as if seeing a ghost, but the only ghost in that house was me, the ghost of myself as I had been five years ago, when I was turning thirty. Meeting Nick tonight had brought that troubled young woman back to life, made her more real than the woman I thought I was now, thirty-five and single, living in a shared flat in Kilburn, with a room and a life of her own. What sort of a life was it that could vanish so completely after a brief meeting with an old lover?

The ghost I had become stared and stared, unable to move, unable to think of how I could explain my presence when they woke, as they would at any moment, and found me here, more than four years out of my rightful place.