Anniversary – Alec Hutchinson

Alec Hutchinson is the author of three indie novels: The Bell, The Last Resort (under pseudonym Josh Caverton), and The Vectors of Herbert Fish, as well as a collection of short stories, Asynchronous Ferox. Originally from Auckland, New Zealand, he currently lives in South London, UK, where he toils happily as a teacher.

‘Which is more representative, your first impression of someone, or your lasting impression?’

It was something Philip had been rolling over in his mind for a while, a question he was only half conscious of, but now it had taken shape and here he was, rather unusually, asking his wife.

It took Jane a moment to turn back to her husband. Since they’d arrived she had been thoroughly occupied, first with her phone, then with trying to figure out whether it was in fact Samantha and Henry on the far side of the restaurant. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to see them so soon after the coke faux pas; on the other hand, it might have given her credibility. These things are difficult to judge. But it didn’t matter anyway because she was slowly coming to the conclusion that it wasn’t them, although she was still staring in their direction when Philip had mumbled his query. ‘What was that, dear?’

He looked at her awhile before he spoke, the thin features, neck pulled high and tight. Her voice had the champagne ring of certain London dinner parties. This wasn’t something he was noticing now, just a point to acknowledge; he too had affected the accent. Maybe that was what he was grasping. You have to adapt to fit in, after all; quirks and domineering individual flair are best left to teenagers. ‘I was just thinking–’

‘Dangerous.’

He pushed on, unfazed. ‘Do you think the first impression you get of someone, when you first meet them, is that who people really are? Or is it the lasting impression, the one they’ve built over time with you?’

He looked like he had more to say, with his earnestly scrunched brow and nervy-looking face, but she cut him off. Better not to indulge this sort of pseudo-intellectual nonsense and spoil what was going to be a perfectly good meal. ‘What on earth are you talking about, Philip?’ The question was defiantly rhetorical. ‘Eat your squid. Have a drink.’

So Philip did as he was told, dipping the battered coils into what was probably mayonnaise and chewing pensively at the rubbery texture. He sipped his wine and looked out at the other patrons while his wife returned to her mobile, having, as she typically did, refused to order an appetiser. The question, however, would not go away. It seemed important. He ruminated further, picking up another piece of squid and treating it like a problem, grinding it between his molars until it had become more of a fluid. Sixteen years, he thought. The number seemed abnormally large. The kind of number you notice.

‘Jesus!’ Jane was sneering at her phone.

‘What is it?’

She had to look up to register him. ‘What?’

‘What’s the problem?’

‘With what?’ She stared back blankly. For a woman of forty-four, she was remarkably wrinkle-free. Lots of creams and scrubs. A careful regime of stoicism. A little Botox—but not a lot.

‘Something on your phone,’ he said, nodding his head and tilting his fork toward her, as if poking it over a tiny wall.

‘Oh, no, don’t worry about it.’

With this he dropped the fork on the plate and sighed and sat back, a trifecta of movements that he hoped would signal that he was tired of being ignored. And yet some part of him also worried that he’d overdone it, that she would turn on him, punish him for his breach of decorum, and so he tried to smile. The effect of all of this at once, to any observer, would have seemed rather sad. But no one was watching. Jane was still fixated by her screen, immersed in a shared story about local scandal involving no one she knew beyond reputation. Philip gazed around the restaurant again: other couples, no families. Mostly the men were much younger than he was, muscles still firm, hair still dark. The din of voices and oriental mood music made it impossible to tell what they were saying to their partners, but the leaning postures — all reciprocated — connoted interest, youth and passion.

He wondered how long ago he Jane had last had sex? Fishing through recollections for an image or a colour, he struggled to place anything.

Philip mulled this tired crease as he finished his final piece of squid, ticking all the old excuses: children and work, the natural settling of age. He’d passed the stage of writing odes to his lover’s eyebrow sometime back. Which stage was he meant to be in now? He could never recall more than half the monologue before skipping to the final lines about oblivion and missing teeth… He remembered Jane skimming an article about sexless couples in Japan and commenting on it while he was in the kitchen — how long ago was that? — bringing it up in passing and in such a way as to preclude any reply. Very advanced culture, she’d said, before leaving the room like a breeze through a window.

The memory stirred an odd sense of injustice, and with his appetiser gone (had he been cowering behind it?) he felt the need to speak. ‘This is hardly the way I wanted to spend the evening.’

Jane had heard her husband — it seemed she’d ignored him long enough to agitate him—but she knew from experience that he could be soothed quickly. He didn’t require much, frankly less and less as the marriage matured. Instead of snapping at him and sending him back inside that shell of his, she slowly put the phone away, making sure it was evident that she was doing it of her own accord — finishing the last sentence of the article — and smiling back up at him in a fluid motion, a smile she knew would work. It was the same smile that had sold her in the first place. ‘And how would you like to spend it, my dear?’

‘Talking, I guess. You know, the way everyone else is.’

‘And what would we have to say to each other?’ She’d meant to pitch this line playfully, as if teasing him in a friendly fashion, but she was out of practice and it came out with the wrong inflection, altogether too close to the way she actually felt. He ignored the nuance though, simply pleased he had engagement.

‘Well, I asked a question. Indulge me.’

She held the sigh and committed herself. It was about holding up her end of the bargain, after all. Philip had done his part: he’d been professionally successful, well-respected in his field, mostly tolerant of her parenting decisions. Yes, there had been hiccups. He wasn’t pleased with her diktat that Julian and Celia were to be raised as pescetarians, for example, but she’d overruled him. And that had become the way it was with most things, Philip taking a hands-off, conflict-free approach to their family and social obligations and free to dodder in the background of his own life — a man fifteen years his wife’s senior whose pockets were deep enough to fund trips to the Galapagos and keep her in Bollinger through weekday afternoons. The Galapagos really had been nice — sea turtles and marine iguanas. She was glad she’d arranged it.

‘Okay then,’ she said. ‘What was the question again?’

Without any sense of fatigue, Philip repeated it: ‘What do you think is more truthful, a first impression, or an impression built over a long time?’

‘How do you mean?’ She placed her index finger on her lower lip and her thumb under her chin in a way she felt might give the impression of consideration. Philip seemed fooled.

‘Let’s say you meet Frank and the first thing you feel is that he’s, I don’t know, lecherous.’

‘I like him already. Is he tanned?’

‘But then let’s say you get to know Frank and it turns out he’s only lecherous because he’s desperately lonely and he can’t really get close to women, and so he’s — what’s the word? — overcompensating.’

‘Well that’s just far less attractive.’

‘So there’s the situation: who’s the real Frank — the sleazy one or the lonely one?’

The conversation was very quickly boring Jane, but she tried not to let him see it. ‘I think it’s possible to be both. Can’t he be both?’ Just then the lights and siren of an ambulance sped by on the street outside the restaurant, its syncopated whining receding into the night. She turned her head as it passed. Philip kept his eyes on the space between them, investigating, it seemed, the intricacies of the tablecloth.

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But which is the more authentic one? Which one is more objectively the way it is?’

‘Honestly, Philip, that’s a matter of perspective.’ She finished her glass of wine and started helping herself to another.

‘Well, how about me?’ He was feeling emboldened now; he had something close to a conversation going and it didn’t involve her planning the children’s future or telling him when she’d be home.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Your first impression of me.’

‘But you know that story, Philip.’

‘No.’ He shook his head, his grey hair wriggling as he did so. ‘I mean: is your impression of me now different to when you first met me, and which one, according to you, is the most accurate one…?’

She’d been listening, but she had lost her patience. She knew he was sometimes slow on social cues, but she’d never taken him for logically stupid. ‘That’s obvious, Philip. Of course I know you better now. I’ve spent sixteen years with you. I have lots of evidence from which to draw my conclusion, and so my opinion now is the accurate one. It’s the one closest to the truth.’

‘Well what did you think of me back then?’

She lied, as she always did. She’d lied so often about this over the years, using the same words and the same lilt to her voice that she believed it had become quite blatantly a falsehood to both of them — a section of the narrative for the outside, a tailored piece of public relations that wouldn’t bear the weight of close scrutiny, so why scrutinise it?

‘I thought you were dashing, successful. You hurtled into my life like James Bond.’

Surely he knew this wasn’t true, that it was just part of what he’d purchased at the time, that she’d been simply an excellent saleswoman — and, frankly, an excellent product.

‘And how do you see me now?’ He was fixated.

She took a breath and prepared herself to peddle the spin once again, but something held her back… He was supposed to know this stuff; it was for when other people were in earshot. Here, right now — she didn’t see the point. She found herself stalling. Was he testing her to make sure she had their story straight? It was time to meet his gaze. ‘Why are you asking this?’

‘Do you want to know what my first impression of you was?’

‘Not really, Philip.’

‘Dazzling. Utterly dazzling.’ He smiled at her and paused, losing himself momentarily in the corridors of memory. An art gallery event, something he didn’t particularly understand or enjoy, and there she was, floating across the room — floating up to him — as bubbly as the champagne. He remembered the vivid rouge of her lipstick, short blond hair that hinted at yachts off the coast of France. The reminiscence folded in on itself. She was in front of him, at the table, fingers clasping her glass.

‘It’s just, I’ve been thinking,’ he said. ‘At least, I think I’ve been thinking. Let’s say one’s a good judge of character in general and they meet someone for the first time, all the impressions are raw. They’re fresh. So one can really sense them. Have them fully soak in, if you know what I mean.’

‘Yes, Philip.’

‘But to get to know someone over time, well — I think it’s possible to end up knowing someone less. Your view of them becomes less clear.’ He was imagining foggy windshields and steamed-up shower mirrors, a woman’s outline lost somewhere behind them. ‘Because although they’ll reveal more of themselves to you over time — evidence, as you suggested — you’re also changing. You might have a stake in that person, so your judgement gets cloudy, tainted. You become a victim of your own prejudices when you’re making your observations, and so you can’t really see them as true. So your lasting impression of someone could well be the least accurate…’

Jane had been paying more attention as Philip jabbered on. She was getting it now, and maybe for the first time in their marriage she was gathering a full understanding of how little her husband understood what he had bought, or about the terms of the contract. She settled her wine on the table and spoke in a calm, measured tone: ‘How do you see me now, Philip?’

Her husband was looking at the salt and pepper, at his hands around the empty squid dish. He glanced up at her briefly, but he couldn’t seem to articulate what he wanted to say. ‘I… It’s…’

‘I’ll help you,’ she said. Her pulse had not raised, her hands remained calm; this was something she simply had to do, a form that needed filling out—an animal that should have been euthanized long ago. ‘You think I’m cold. You think I’m distant. You think I don’t find you interesting or attractive.’ Her voice retained the same level stillness, like a pond.

‘Jane…’ He could feel a whirring in his ears and found it difficult to move his jaw; it was like he’d been caught in the middle of something indecent, his crime projected for everyone to see, his need to deny it coming not from that fact it was untrue, but from having unclean feelings exposed. She seemed to sense this, though.

‘It’s fine, Philip. You’re right. It doesn’t have to be a nagging suspicion anymore. Your impression over time, well, it’s spot on, old chap…’ The whirring in his ears became hot and loud. The rouge images of the art gallery, her laughter, the turning of her head — they were breaking into shards. Across the restaurant he could hear someone laughing. ‘I’m just sorry you didn’t understand the terms sooner; if I’d known, I would have made it clear.’

‘What do you mean…?’ He was unused to the forward rush of emotional honesty; the abruptness of it all scared him and made it difficult to sort. She was a teacher explaining the lesson too quickly. ‘You don’t love me?’

‘Jesus, Philip!’ She’d raised her voice, squishing him with it. ‘This is what love is!’

Philip’s eyes had become glassy. Behind them, sixteen years of stock memories were shuttering and clicking, twining and looping — whole reels of life being watched again and reviewed, watched again and burnt. ‘This isn’t what I wanted,’ he stammered.

‘Sure it is.’ The poor guy seemed to have sprung a leak or blown a gasket. He was just sitting there, upright, his hands at his sides—the way someone might after being flung from the wreckage. Best to tear the bottom right out and start again. She was already thinking what a great anecdote this would make. It was time to press it home.

‘This was the arrangement: you get the wife on the arm, you get some progeny.’ Philip’s eyes remained wide, mute, almost (dare she think it) contrite. Jane continued. ‘You renege on it, it’ll cost you half and probably custody, so you might as well see it through.’ She stopped to take a sip of her pinot.

‘Jane…’ He couldn’t think. It was all rather hard to process. Somehow, he felt the need to apologise… But for what?

She planted her glass and went on. ‘If you didn’t want this, then you should have known better. It’s your fault for being hapless in the first place. The terms are the terms and that’s the way it is.’

He was breathing heavily when the main course arrived. Again, someone across the restaurant laughed. The pan-oriental music continued providing ambience as the waiter refilled Jane’s wine.

They ate in silence.

One of them thoroughly enjoyed the meal.