“I was twenty-six years old when I met Maude and there wasn’t any part of me that was looking for either a girlfriend or a wife. I’d been down that road before and the whole thing had proved insufferable. You probably don’t know this, Cyril, but I was married when I was only twenty-two and widowed a couple of years later. Oh, you did know? Well, there are all sorts of rumors going around about how Emily died but let me make one thing very clear: I did not murder her. And no charges were ever brought to suggest that I did, despite the best efforts of a certain Sergeant Henry O’Flynn of Pearse Street Garda Station. There was never a shred of evidence to suggest anything untoward took place but the engines that power Dublin are lubricated by exactly this kind of irresponsible tittle-tattle and a man’s reputation can be destroyed overnight if you’re not willing to fight back. The truth is, Emily was a lovely girl, very personable if you like that sort of thing, but she was also my first girlfriend, the girl to whom I lost my virginity, and no man with any sense should marry the girl to whom he loses his virginity. It’s like learning to drive in some clapped-out old banger and then holding on to it for the rest of your life when you’ve developed the skill to handle a BMW in rush-hour traffic on a busy Autobahn. A few months after the wedding, I realized that I couldn’t possibly be satisfied with one woman for the rest of my life and started to cast my net a little wider. Look at me, Cyril; I’m a ridiculously good-looking man now, so you can only imagine what I looked like in my twenties. Women fell over themselves to get to me. And I was generous enough to let them approach. But Emily caught wind of my extra-marital shenanigans and completely overreacted, threatening to call the parish priest in, as if that was something that would concern me, and I said, Darling, take a lover if you want, it makes no difference to me. If you need cock, there’s plenty of it out there. Big ones, small ones, perfectly formed ones, misshapen ones. Bent ones, curved ones, straight ones. Young men are basically walking erections and any one of them would be happy to stick it in someone as beautiful as you. Try a teenager if you like. They’d be only too delighted and you know they could go five or six times a night without even stopping to take a breath. I meant this as a compliment but, for whatever reason, that’s not how she took it and she fell into a spiral of recrimination and depression. Maybe she had always suffered some sort of psychological affliction, so many women do, but within months she was taking medication to stop her going completely doolally. And then one day she swallowed a few too many pills just before she took a bath and down she went under the water, bubble bubble, goodnight and good luck to all. And, yes, it’s true that I inherited a lot of money from her, which is why all that gossip began in the first place, but I assure you that I had nothing to do with what happened that day and her death saddened me a great deal. I didn’t have sex for almost two weeks afterward out of respect for her memory. You see, here’s the thing, Cyril, and if I’d had a real son I would have ensured that he understood this: monogamy is simply not the natural state for man, and when I say man I mean man or woman. It just doesn’t make sense to manacle yourself sexually to the same person for fifty or sixty years when your relationship with that person can be so much happier if you give each other the freedom to enter and be entered by people of the opposite sex whom you find attractive. A marriage should be about friendship and companionship, not about sex. I mean what man in his right mind wants to have sex with his own wife? However, despite all that, when I laid eyes on your adoptive mother for the first time I knew immediately that I wanted her to be the second Mrs. Avery. She was standing in the lingerie section of Switzer’s department store when I saw her, running her hand along a railing of bras and panties, a cigarette hanging perilously close to the silk, and I walked up to her and asked her whether she needed any help choosing the right pair. My God, that woman had perfect tits! She still does. Have you ever taken a good look at your adoptive mother’s tits, Cyril? No? Don’t look so embarrassed; it’s the most natural thing in the world. We suckle them as babies and long to suckle them as adults. She slapped my face when I said that but that slap remains one of the most erotic moments of my life. I grabbed her hand and kissed the underside of her wrist. It smelled of Chanel No. 5 and Marie-Rose sauce. I suppose she’d just come from lunch and as you know she’s always been partial to a prawn cocktail. I told her that if she didn’t come to the Gresham Hotel with me that afternoon for a glass of champagne I would throw myself into the Liffey and she said, Drown for all I care and that she had no intention of spending a Wednesday afternoon getting drunk in a hotel bar with a strange man. And yet somehow I talked her around and we ended up taking a taxi to O’Connell Street and drinking not one but six bottles of champagne over the course of not one but six hours. Can you believe it? We were practically paralytic by the time we were finished. But not so paralytic that we couldn’t take a room in the hotel and make love for forty-eight hours with scarcely a break. My God, that woman did things to me that no woman before or since has ever done. Until you’ve been fellated by your adoptive mother, Cyril, you will not know what a quality blowjob really is. We were married within months. But once again time took its toll. Maude became more obsessed with her writing and I with my career. I grew bored of her body and I daresay she grew bored of mine. But whereas I sought comfort elsewhere it seemed that she had no interest in taking a lover and because of that she’s remained celibate for years now, which probably accounts for her moods. It’s true, we’re not the ideal couple but I loved her once and she loved me and somewhere inside us both lingers the shadow of two twenty-something sexual beings drinking Veuve Clicquot in the Gresham, laughing our backsides off and wondering whether we could ask the receptionist for a bedroom key or whether the police or the Archbishop of Dublin might be called if we did.”
Maude:
“I really can’t remember. It might have been a Wednesday, if that’s any use to you. Or possibly a Thursday.”
When My Enemies Pursue Me