Sorrow and Bliss(18)
His apartment was on a high floor of an aggressively conceptual glass tower in Southwark that had been the subject of vigorous community opposition in the planning stages. Every feature of its interior was concealed, recessed, disguised or cleverly obscured by something put there on purpose to draw the eye towards something else. Before I learned where everything was, I slid back a lot of panels and found something I wasn’t looking for, something I wasn’t supposed to see or nothing at all.
I was living at home when I met Jonathan because the salary of a chair describer was in the lowest possible five figures and still was at the time of the dinner because, although he had asked me to move in with him almost immediately, being so high up, in an apartment banked on all sides by vast, hermetic windows, made me feel like there wasn’t any air. I could not last for more than a few hours inside without having to take the silently plummeting lift to the ground floor and stand for some time on the footpath, breathing in and out in a way that was too fast to qualify as mindful. And so, I arrived that night with my parents and introduced them to Jonathan in the apartment’s low-lit vestibule. He was wearing a navy suit with an open shirt and looked like a prestige estate agent, compared to my father who was wearing brown trousers and a brown jumper and looked, conversely, like he drove a mobile library.
They were equally aware of the contrast but Jonathan stepped forward, grasped my father’s hand and said, ‘The poet!’ in a way that was rescuing for both of them and desperately enamouring for me. Next he turned to my mother, swept her over and said, ‘Darling, what have you come as?’ She had come as a sculptor. Jonathan said he needed a moment so he could deconstruct her outfit, and although he was mocking her, my mother let herself be twirled.
The others arrived while we were still there and Jonathan repeated their names after me as though he was learning key words of a foreign language, while shaking their hands for what seemed like a second too long.
I introduced Patrick last and Jonathan said, ‘Right, right, the school friend,’ then went off to shepherd everyone into the apartment’s vast entertaining area, leaving us by ourselves.
He looked well – I looked well. We had not established a topic beyond that before Jonathan jogged back in and said, ‘You two, Patrick, come, come.’
*
Although she had not just commented on it, Jonathan explained to my sister during their only conversation that evening that people assumed he was naturally incredible with names, but in fact it was because whenever he met somebody for the first time he would make up a clever mnemonic that linked some aspect of their physical appearance to their name before he let go of their hand. That is why, for a long time, she called him Jonathan Fucking Annoying Face.
Ingrid hated Jonathan, theoretically before she met him and viscerally afterwards. She was the only person his powers didn’t work on and later she told me that seeing us fall in love had been like watching two opposing vehicles sliding towards the median strip and not being able to do anything except wait for the moment of impact and – that night – start a list on the back of a receipt called ‘Reasons Jonathan is a Total Weapon’.
*
I did not know that Jonathan was going to ask me to marry him at the dinner or that his doing so would come as the crescendo to a slideshow of photos charting our relationship to that point. By and large, they were individual shots, mine of him, his of me, taken with his amazing camera.
It was shown on a screen that descended from an invisible recess in the ceiling, and as it silently ascended again, Jonathan beckoned for me to come and stand next to him.
In the slowed-down moment of getting up, I looked at my weakly smiling father whose desire to help me had always exceeded his ability, at Ingrid who was still in the stage of sitting on Hamish’s lap, presently with her arms draped around his neck. I looked at my uncle and aunt and cousins in intimate conversation at the other end of the table, past Patrick who was only a place along but seemed on his own, to my mother who was splashing champagne into and nearly into her glass with her eyes fixed too adoringly on Jonathan who was, by then, standing with his arms out like he was about to take possession of a large object. I wanted to become someone else. I wanted to belong to anyone else. I wanted everything to be different. Before he actually asked me and so he wouldn’t get down on one knee in front of my family, I said yes.
There was a second of intense quiet before my father started clapping like a recent convert to classical music who is not sure if you are meant to between movements. The others began to join in except Ingrid who just glared back and forth between me and Jonathan, until my mother – beside her – shouted, ‘Whoop de doo, Martha’s pregnant’ over the gathering applause. Ingrid turned to her sharply and said, ‘What? No she isn’t,’ and then to me, ‘You’re not, are you?’
I said no and Ingrid reached for the neck of the bottle my mother was trying to open and wrested it from her. She made Hamish take it as she got off his lap, coming up to where Jonathan and I were standing and somehow compelling him to move so she could hug me without also acknowledging him.
Seeing us like that, everyone seated would have assumed it to be a congratulatory embrace between two sisters. Not the effort of one to comfort the other, speaking quietly into her ear, saying, ‘Don’t worry, she’s drunk, she’s an idiot,’ the effort of the other to stay where she was and not run out of the room because her humiliation was so profound. But the source of it was not my mother. There was no way to tell Ingrid just then that it was Jonathan who had responded to my mother’s pronouncement with mock horror then turned to my father and said, ‘She better not be!’ through gritted teeth. When my father didn’t laugh, Jonathan repeated himself to Rowland who did, and from there it spread along the table.