The ABCs of Love (6 page)

J

jacuzzi

I have always liked the idea of meeting someone in a Jacuzzi. Of falling in love surrounded by shiny bubbles. Plus, when you’ve just swum yourself into a trance, you leave the rest of the world behind you. Relaxing after this is when I think you’d be able to talk about anything.

At our local swimming pool, they turn the overhead lights off after nine o’clock at night and start playing country music through the loudspeakers. All the kids have gone home and there’re only adults left, plowing up and down the lengths, listening to words of love all around them and lit up from below the water so they look like gods.

See also Imposter Syndrome; Mistaken Identity

jealousy

Why does Sally have to be given so much in life?

It doesn’t really help her. She takes so much for granted. She complains about things as if she really doesn’t care about them. She says she wants to live on her own and doesn’t want to be beholden to anyone. She wants no possessions, no ties, no responsibilities. She says this is her ambition. But you can really leave things behind only if you have them in the first place—a family, a relationship, opinions. Otherwise, you’re not even running away. You’re merely existing somewhere, anywhere, else.

Still, the good thing is that I am not at all jealous of Sally. We each bring our own attributes to the relationship that are mutually beneficial. I am completely happy with my own life. I wish Sally well in hers.

Sally and I are friends. No, no, no. I am not jealous of Sally. I am especially not jealous of Sally’s relationship with Colin.

See also Zzzz

john

I can’t wait to tell Sally.

The most amazing thing has happened.

I have fallen in love. I feel glowing. I feel fantastic. I have just walked down the street, and everybody smiled at me. Men whistled at me. I feel like a goddess. I look down at my arms, and my skin looks as if it has been sprinkled with diamond dust.

Everybody is so much nicer, funnier, prettier. And so am I.

His name is John.

K

kate

John has a wife. Sally told me first. Well, she didn’t know exactly, but what she said was: “If he e-mails you from work, he is married. If it is always him who has to call you, he has children. If he doesn’t have any hobbies, it is because he has a family life, not no life.”

I asked John about it but he was going to tell me anyway. Right after we talked about it, he asked me to tell him a joke, so I believe him when he says being married isn’t a problem.

“Two parrots were on a perch,” I said. “One said to the other ‘Can you smell fish?’ ”

Sally told me this joke. It makes everyone laugh, but I don’t really understand it. I think it might be surrealist. When I asked John if this was so, he told me that I was funny and that he loved me. He couldn’t tell me why that should surprise him so.

John’s wife’s name is Kate. I don’t like the way they’re next to each other in the alphabet. My name is Verity, so I’m right at the end, out of the way.

He doesn’t love her. He never has. They are together just for the sake of the children.

See also Women’s Laughter

kindness

I want to go round the world carrying out random acts of kindness. I want to buy extravagant foods and leave them on pensioners’ doorsteps. I want to get up on a snowy day and wipe the windshields of every car in the street. I want to entertain small children so their mothers can sleep. I want to take every homeless person to the Ritz for a night. I want to hire the Bolshoi Ballet and put on performances in Trafalgar Square so commuters can be inspired on their way to work. I want to stand on street corners and wait for blind men to come along so I can lead them across the street. I want to tape the wings of injured birds with lollipops and Band-Aids. I want to distribute food to orphans, take guns off soldiers, rid the world of nuclear threats.

I want everyone to feel as happy as I do. I am so fucking happy, I think I’m going to explode.

See also Grief; Imposter Syndrome; Nostrils

kisses

I’ve taught John to do that twiddly thing with his tongue that the Australian did. He should be in one of those kissing booths at village fetes. I am sure there are many, many people who would pay to be kissed like that.

The funny thing is, I sold my first kisses for money. My mother would slip me cash for kissing my grandmother whenever we went to visit her. I would have done it for free, but I pretended I didn’t like touching her prickly, hairy, old-lady cheeks because it seemed to give my mother pleasure. In fact, I wanted to rub my skin against my grandmother’s forever. She smelled of lavender and dried rosebuds and those thin tubes of Parma Violet sweets. Very different from my mother, who had a tinny, chemical smell that stung you when you got too close.

When my grandmother was small, she won a book for good attendance at her Sunday school. She kept it very carefully on a small pine shelf with the few books she had, and I was never allowed to look at any of them. For some reason, this shelf was in her bathroom.

One day when I was staying with her, I crept up to the bathroom and read it. It was called
Freddy’s Little Sister
and was all about a boy who was forced to beg on the streets because his parents had died. He needed food to look after his little sister, who was all he had in the world, but no one gave him any money and everyone was horrible. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, Freddy’s little sister died. Then the book ended. I cried and cried and cried, and I wouldn’t talk to my grandmother all evening. Eventually, she hit me because she realized I had read her special book.

If I had a brother like Freddy, my grandmother wouldn’t have done that. I told John about it, and he held me so close.

See also Baked Beans; Breasts; Endings; Zest

kitchen equipment

John and I met through work. This is just one of the reasons we have to keep things quiet. In one of our newsletters, we ran a competition to find the top chambermaid for our client, who supplied cleaning materials to hotel chains. Third prize was a full range of nonstick saucepans. Because it wasn’t very important, Brian let me organize the photograph of the girl receiving her prize, and John came along to hand the pans over as a representative of the kitchen equipment company.

It was a bit embarrassing because Maureen wasn’t as pleased with her prize as I thought she should be. She even complained about how she was going to get all the pans back home on the train with her to Leicester, which I have to admit was something we hadn’t thought of. Eventually, I got her a taxi to the station, and when we found she’d left the nine-inch frying pan behind, John said I could keep it, which was nicer than he should have been given the circumstances. I think it was his kindness I fell in love with first.

When John rang me up at work the next week, he sounded nervous, as if I wouldn’t remember who he was. But I did. We arranged to go out for a drink that evening, and he said that if I’d forgotten what he looked like, I wasn’t to worry because he always went everywhere with a full set of saucepans and this was a fairly good distinguishing mark. I was a bit puzzled until I realized this was his sense of humor. What John didn’t know was that I’d asked the photographer to print out an extra copy of the pan presentation photograph and pinned it above my desk. Brian still thinks it’s because it’s the first job I’ve done by myself. He tells me he finds my enthusiasm refreshing.

See also John; Liqueur Chocolates; Objects; Vacuuming

L

lesbians

Poor John. He has to put up with so much. He told me in strict secrecy that he thinks his wife might be a lesbian.

Apparently, she and her women friends touch a lot, even in front of John. They call one another things like “doll” and “poppet” and “petal,” and they are always sending secret e-mails. When John comes in, Kate hides what she’s writing, so he knows it is probably about him. He has to pretend not to mind; otherwise, she’ll tease him.

He said the worst thing is how these women are always laughing when they are together. John told me he hardly laughs anymore. It’s all work and duty as far as he’s concerned. That’s why he loves being with me. He can feel appreciated.

He said Kate and her friends seem to care only about having fun. He honestly thinks that if it came down to it, she would choose her friends over him.

“It’s not like you and Sally,” he said. “You’re like blokes. You can pick up and drop your friendship when there’s nothing better to do.”

I tried to talk about this with Sally, but she said that Colin lives in hope of walking in and finding Sally and me in a delicate situation together. It is his deepest fantasy. I’m so grateful John understands friendship for what it is and is not always trying to turn it to his advantage. This is so typical of Colin, and also of Sally not to mind.

See also Codes; Rude; Voyeur; Women’s Laughter

letters

Dear Kate,

I think you should know that . . .

Dear Mrs. Hutchinson,

Your husband and I have been . . .

To Whom It May Concern,

John Hutchinson is in love with . . .

Dear Kate,

I hope you will forgive me for remaining anonymous, but I am a well-wisher who . . .

Dear Kate Hutchinson,

I have thought long and hard before writing this letter but . . .

Dear Wife of John,

I . . .

Dear.

Oh, dear.

See also Codes; Endings; Utopia

liqueur chocolates

John sometimes finds it difficult to use the L word. We have used up the apricot liquid I won at the sex party, but the other day, he broke open liqueur chocolates on my bare skin and made a joke of it. “I l-l-l-l-l you,” he said, sticking out his tongue and licking the spilled liqueur off instead of saying
love
. It was fun at the time, but I was disappointed afterward. And sticky.

Sally says the thing to do is not to nag. They get enough of that at home. “What has he bought you?” she asked. “These men just love buying us presents, don’t they?”

I couldn’t show her the frying pan, the set of matching cookie tins, or even the tea towel with illustrations of all the different species of fish. Even though John and I chose it together from the local fish-and-chips shop, it doesn’t match Colin’s presents. Not in cash terms, anyhow. I use the tea towel to wrap up the empty chocolate boxes. John says we’ve got a habit.

See also Glenda G-spot; Tornadoes

love calculators

There is a Web page on the Internet that lets you type in your name and the name of the person you love, and it works out whether you are a good match or not. John and I are 67 percent compatible. Dr. Love says that we need to work at our relationship. Sally and Colin have distinct possibilities at 78 percent, but on the other hand, Colin and I are 99 percent right for each other. A match made in heaven.

When I was at school, we didn’t go on computers so much, so we used pen and paper instead for these little love calculations. We’d cross out all the letters that appeared in both names and then work our way through the remainder chanting out
love
and
hate
alternately. When I tried this with John’s name, we only had two letters in common, although the ones we do share spell
it
, which has to be significant. However, when I do the chant, it comes out
hate
. I don’t know John’s middle name, though. Maybe if I used our full names, it would come out with a more correct answer.

See also Mistaken Identity

lust

When my father was lying in his hospital bed, I tried hard to concentrate on things he’d like to talk about. It was difficult, though, because what I couldn’t say was that I felt like I was wading through an erotic fever. The sicker he got, the more I wanted to make love to healthy men. My need was shaming. John was the first person I told about how I really felt. The men I knew at the time were too grateful to speak much. When John told me lots of people felt the same, I was so relieved. This is what I like about John—not the fact that being with him is exciting, just the opposite. John makes me feel normal.

See also Grief; Illness; Teaching; Why?