by J. M. Gregson
Triangles, eternal or otherwise, are not the stuff of comedy. That is one of the established facts of life. If anything strikes you as amusing, you bite your lip and keep it serious. I tried hard to do that. It’s not my fault I failed: The odds against me were overwhelming.
It wasn’t just that the man talked in cliches: After all, he was an American, and Americans are allowed to do that. To change that would be a task more formidable than any of the labors of Hercules. So when he said with a broad smile, “I like you Brits. You’re kinda quaint,” I gritted my teeth and smiled a weak acceptance.
He was colossal—far too large for the small rooms and low ceilings of my friend Debbie’s tiny modern house. He was six feet six, broad shouldered and blue eyed. Moreover, he moved with a heavy, uncoordinated gait, which made him seem even larger than that. He proceeded ponderously from cramped room to cramped room, then perched his huge buttocks and his two hundred and sixty pounds carefully first on the edge of Debbie’s sofas and then onto one of her dining chairs. He handled her cutlery like a gorilla fascinated by bright trinkets and made her whole residence look what he called “kinda freaky.”
I left as quickly as I could. I haven’t reached the age of forty-one without recognizing when two people have eyes only for each other. Debbie had been my friend since we were at university together. She was slim and willowy, whereas I have always been what she called buxom. As I drove home, I calculated that our combined weight was considerably less than half that of this new Colossus. I knew that Debbie had not been able to find room for a king- or queen-sized bed in even the larger of her bedrooms. Despite stern efforts at my natural decorum, I could not shut out images of the two coupling hazardously on a wholly inadequate surface. Not any kind of quaint.
It was not until two days later that I appreciated the full comic horror of the situation. Debbie Murray was having coffee in my flat. It isn’t huge, but as it is part of the wing of an early Victorian house, it has spacious and elegant rooms. “He’d like this,” said Debbie suddenly, looking round as if she was seeing the familiar sitting room for the first time. There was no doubting who “he” was: The besotted woman had talked of nothing and no one else in the twenty minutes since she had arrived. I realized with horror that she was angling for an invitation, that she wanted that ambling automaton to endanger the delicately turned legs of my antique furniture.
I had no doubt that he would think this building deeply historic. I plunged in and asked the question I knew I had to put to her. “What’s his name, Debbie?”
She looked deeply shocked, even suspicious. “But you know it. I introduced you to him on Tuesday.”
“I know you did, but I’m afraid I didn’t catch the name. You know what happens, in the excitement of meeting someone new. When he took my small paw between his two great big ones and looked down at me with those vast blue eyes, I missed his name.” I was immediately ashamed of myself for such hypocrisy, but I was desperate.
Debbie nodded happily at this evocation of my moment of meeting with her Adonis. “It’s Boo.”
“Boo?”
“Boo Daley.”
“That’s a newspaper, not a man.” The words were out before I could stop them; I’ve always had that sort of tongue.
Her giggle slid into a trill of happiness, which froze my marrow. “You are a one, Ellie Johnson! You seek out humor in the strangest places. Even in the most sacred places! Apparently Boo was a great fan of Yogi Bear and Boo Boo when he was a child. So his parents called him Boo and the name stuck. Kinda cute, don’tcha think?”
She was taking on his language. A woman who had narrowly missed a first in English Literature was adopting the linguistic decadence of the man she had already described as her beau. I said dully, “Boo isn’t a name at all, Debbie. It’s a way of expressing derision.”
“Boo went to Harvard.” She spoke as if she hadn’t heard me. “He graduated in Business Studies. And he’s kept up with developments since.” It sounded like material for an obituary.
“You sure he went there?” I felt I owed it to Harvard to ask the question.
“Boo liked you,” Debbie insisted. “He said one of the greatest charms of our little country is its cultivation of unworldly intellectuals.” She pronounced each word carefully; it was clearly very important to her that she relayed this gem with all its original glitter.
“I run an employment agency which supplies offices with at least twenty temps a week. We provide work for women who need it and the trained staff that companies need to keep them running efficiently. That is hardly unworldly.”
“It’s not like you to be so prickly, Ellie. You must come to dinner on Saturday.”
Debbie whispered to me when I arrived that they were now engaged, that they were planning to endow each other with all their worldly goods. I hissed urgently that she must not do that, but she didn’t appear to hear me.
At the meal, Boo Daley was everything I’d anticipated and worse. “I want to get round and see all the sights of your great little land. I want to see that cute little village where your Miss Marple operates. Saint Margaret Maud.”
“Saint Mary Meade. Miss Marple isn’t real, you know. She was a fictional character and there was never any such village. Places like that disappeared in the nineteen thirties, if they ever existed,” I said severely. I found Daley brought out the schoolmarm I had never thought to discover within me.
“Gee, is that so? I shall need to spread that information widely in literary circles in the States, but I guess a lot of people there aren’t going to believe me.” Boo spoke like one humoring the rambling elderly, though I now knew that he was four years older than I was.
Debbie said nervously, “We could go to see Anne Hathaway’s cottage in Stratford. That’s thatched, and it has the sort of garden you might have found in Saint Mary Meade.”
I thrust away an unwelcome image of Boo Daley mounting her upon the Bard’s second-best bed. He weighed the possibilities of Debbie’s suggestion, then pronounced magisterially, “Stratford Upon Avon. The home of your great English playwright, William Shakespeare.” He appeared to think he was offering us enlightenment. “We Americans think quite a lot of your William Shakespeare. Some of us think he’s one of the great writers.”
“That’s consoling,” I said, with as much acid as I could insert.
“Aw gee, yes. He may be kinda dated, but we think Willy Shakespeare still has things to offer, if you look for them.”
“That’s quite a thought, Boo. Things to offer, even to the most advanced democracy in the world.”
“Even to us, yeah. Even now. If you look for them.”
Irony was clearly wasted on the impenetrable Mr. Daley. I tried a more direct attempt to remove him from my world. “You could visit Rabbie Burns’s cottage in Ayr. You’d be able to see how many people managed to exist in a cottage of that size.” I pictured Daley trundling clumsily through the house, perhaps getting himself wedged in a low doorway, like a character who had drunk from the wrong bottle in Alice in Wonderland.
I was not allowed to dwell upon this appealing image. “Gee, yes, that would be kinda nice. One of the great plus points of England being a tiny country is that one can zoom around it and see all kinds of funky things.”
“Ayr is in Scotland. Burns was a Scotsman.”
“Not parta England, eh? Jeez, some of your old customs take a lot of getting used to, Ellie-Belly.”
I made sure that my wince at this new pet name was very visible. “Yes. Your president apparently thought that Wales was an English county.”
“Little old Boo’s in good company, then, eh?”
“I’m not sure about that. In England, as well as in Scotland and Wales, we tend to think George Bush is a—”
“More wine, Ellie?” Debbie hastily filled my glass.
Boo Daley reached across, took the bottle, and turned it between his hamlike fists. “Chateau La Fitte,” he read, his French accent like sandpaper in my ears. “Nice little wine, this. Nearly up to the standard of some of our Californian reds, I’d say.”
I checked his face and decided he wasn’t making a joke. Boo Daley probably didn’t do jokes: He was offering Debbie’s most expensive vintage what he considered a compliment. I sipped my wine furiously to prevent me from speaking, then held my glass out for a refill. No use wasting this stuff on a man who was so patently unworthy of it.
I followed Debbie into the kitchen when she went to make the coffee. “I shan’t be able to stay long,” I announced with determination.
I might as well not have spoken. “Boo’s very amusing, isn’t he? Different from men we’ve known before.”
“Quite different. Bizarre.”
“He’s a wonderful lover, I don’t mind telling you.”
“I wish you did mind. Debbie, I really think I’d rather not—”
“Considerate but vigorous, Ellie. My, how vigorous! Do you know, just before you came, he—”
“No, and I don’t want to know. Please. I’ll take the tray and the cups into the sitting room. You won’t be long with the coffee, will you?”
In the sitting room, the leviathan made ponderous attempts to be chivalrous. “Ain’t you some pretty little thing, Miss Ellie? Why, if I wasn’t heavily committed to li’l Debbie S. Murray, I’d be steering my ship in your direction, believe me, pretty lady! Sure would, Ellie-Belly!”
He moved a little nearer to me on the sofa, so that I was subjected to the overwhelming aroma of his aftershave. I felt his great hand and his broad fingers on the back of the sofa, moving ponderously against my shoulders. I pulled my stomach in and slid my hips cautiously away from him, movements that he appeared to interpret as provocative. I said firmly, “Debbie’s very fond of you, Boo. I hope you’re planning to act responsibly.” The schoolmarm role seemed much the safest one to adopt, especially as it fell upon me so naturally in this transatlantic presence.
It was four days before I saw them again. Debbie insisted on bringing her fiance round to see my place. I had to admit that his huge presence seemed a little more natural in the spacious sitting room of my Victorian flat than in the boxy little rooms of what I had previously thought of as Debbie’s attractive modern mews house. Boo Daley cruised around the place like a battleship looking for a berth. I hastily installed him in my dad’s big armchair, the only one that I was confident would bear his great weight. He stretched his treelike legs and conceded that the States didn’t have medieval buildings like this, which were such a feature of our little country. I told him tartly that this place was scarcely more than a hundred and fifty years old and quite new by our standards.
He expressed considerable surprise, and I thought for a moment that he was going to assure me that I was mistaken. Then he said, “I ain’t going to Sir Robert Burn’s place, after all. Take too long. You ain’t good at transportation in this country.”
“On the contrary, we invented it. We sent thousands of convicts to Australia.” I was so pleased by his look of bewilderment that I added waspishly, “One of our other colonies.”
He looked even more blank. I took pity and said, “Forget it, Boo. Just think of us as two nations divided by a common language.”
There was a long pause before he said, “That’s kinda clever.”
“It’s not original.”
“You’re some intellectual lady as well as a cute chick, Ellie-Belly.” He nodded slowly several times, like some giant ruminant. Then he seemed to me to fasten his large blue eyes upon my stomach, but I may have been oversensitive—a sensation which Boo Daley can surely never have experienced.
It was whilst Debbie was in my bathroom that Boo Daley settled himself carefully beside me like a liner coming to its moorings. “You ever been skiing, Ellie-Belly?”
I had been to the slopes in Austria a couple of times, but I told him haughtily that skiing was not my thing. “Sure is a pity, that. I can just see your cute little ass in ski pants.” He nodded appreciatively, gazing into the middle distance to assist the picture, returning his attention to me abruptly as he registered me pulling down the hem of my skirt. “Debbie and little old Boo are thinking of a trip to Switzerland next month. I fancy giving her a few lessons.”
“Ooh, you’ve done that already, Boo Daley!” said Debbie, reentering the room like a carry-on heroine.
“He was talking about skiing,” I said coldly to my old friend.
“I know that, you fool! I was just paying a tribute to the bedroom prowess of the stars and stripes. Boo tells me he can ski as well.” Her shrill laughter grated in my ears, whilst Daley stretched his legs and bathed me in a smile which was at once provocative and condescending, an effect which only he could have managed. I wondered how a sensible and well-read woman of forty-one like Debbie could have been reduced so rapidly to teenage bawdry.
I retreated into monosyllables, whilst a plan began to suggest itself to my admittedly desperate mind.
The man-mountain must be boasting about his skiing ability, as he boasted about so many other things. Those massive and ill-coordinated limbs surely did not have the smoothness needed to for proficiency on the ski runs. He had suggested Montreux, and I encouraged the notion. I knew it had plenty of nursery slopes, but he was talking about the major routes and even about venturing off-piste. “I’m sure you’d find the area well suited to your abilities,” I said woodenly.
With any luck, he would break one of those trunklike legs on one of the runs. At the very least, Debbie’s infatuated eyes might be opened by the comic incapability of this titan. Her obsession would surely be shattered by the spectacle of Boo Daley floundering upon the snow. I took care not to catch her eye, but I need not have worried about that: Her attention was wholly and fawningly upon the odious Daley, as he enlarged upon his skiing skills and the inability of Europe’s gentle slopes to test them.
I scarcely saw Debbie Murray in the three weeks before they left for Switzerland. I felt that I owed it to our friendship to express my full disapproval of man-mountain Boo Daley, and once I had done that a coldness descended between us that had never existed before.
Because of this, I was pleased to receive a card from Switzerland, dispatched on the second day of their stay. Apparently I was wrong about Daley, at least as far as skiing went. According to Debbie, he was magnificent on the slopes, the envy of his fellows, and in constant search of greater challenges. I reread the card twice, but was forced to a melancholy conclusion: Even allowing for the exaggerations stemming from her adulation, it seemed that I had misjudged Daley’s abilities on the piste.
The agency was busy and I thought no more about the pair for the next few days. That was what made the news even more of a shock when it came.
An English woman had been killed whilst skiing off-piste in Montreux. First reports said that she had hit a tree at speed and died almost immediately. She was little more than a novice, and it was not clear at this stage why she had ventured into such difficult territory. Her companion was understood to be an experienced and able skier, but he was too upset to comment at this point.
The name of the deceased was withheld until the next day, so that the next of kin could be informed, but long before the announcement came I knew that it was Debbie Murray.
I heard no more details in the following days and I did not want to. I was too stunned by the news to feel any sensible reaction. Then, after five days, there came an announcement at the end of the television news that the remains of Debbie Murray had been cremated in a quiet family ceremony in her hometown of Dundee. In a small group of mourners, a massive figure in black stood out, towering over the bowed heads of family and friends like a pillar of coal.
I was still in shock when the bell of my flat rang insistently three days later.
The sky darkened above me as I opened the door. Boo Daley said dolefully, “You heard the sad news?”
“I saw pictures of you at the funeral.”
“It was no sweat of a journey in your charming little country.”
“The funeral was in Scotland,” I said dully. “What do you want?”
“I want to come in, little lady, to start with.” He smiled that smile which was a celebration of American dentistry, put two massive palms upon my shoulders, turned me around, and projected me back into my sitting room. I found myself totally unable to resist him; my limbs seemed to have lost the power of independent movement. I knew that I needed to sit down, but I stubbornly refused to subside before him.
He pressed my shoulders and turned me effortlessly to face him. “Debbie was your friend.”
“My best friend. Before you turned up.” I was trying to let my huge resentment burst out, but the words came in a monotone which did not even sound like me.
“I know she’d have wanted me to turn to you. And you must have known that I’d want to do just that.”
As the full implications of what he was saying turned my veins to ice, he threw a trunklike arm around my shoulders and held my small frame against his huge one. Then he let his gross sausage fingers run slowly down my trembling spine, until they reached the division at the top of what I vividly remembered him calling my “cute little ass.”
From somewhere above my head, his hateful baritone voice said, “I’m all yours, now, Ellie-Belly.”