The Bit on the Side

E-mail today from The Married Guy (guy being a euphemism for all the unprintable words I’ve been calling him), asking if I want to have dinner when he’s back in town later this week.

I’m so flummoxed I don’t know what to say. “I don’t think your wife would like that too much”?

The dignified thing to do would be not to respond at all. But I am nothing if not undignified. Last night, on the suggestion of a friend, I actually crawled out of bed (home sick in a flu haze) and checked weddingchannel.com so I could see exactly when he got married (aka just how much of a clueless prat I am) and just how tacky the linens they chose were.

No luck. He wasn’t listed.

* * *

Few things make me miss my mother more than being ill. She died in 2003, after a very long illness where she slowly disappeared before me. In the few years before she died, her attention span was so short that I would call her multiple times a day: from a London bus; when I ate something that wasn’t as good as she used to make it; when I had good news; when I saw something that she’d like, or that she’d laugh at.

The urge to call her has slowly disappeared, except when I’m sick – which for some reason is when I can hear her voice most clearly. Maybe it’s because I’ve blocked out a lot of the fragments of conversations I had with her as she was dying, and her voice in my head has become so faint, like a tape I’ve played over too many times.

With a father who was a critical care doctor, my sister and I chose to appeal to my mother for sympathy when we were sick and wanted to stay home from school. I remember tentatively knocking on the door at 6.30 a.m. and her voice – thick with sleep – would beckon me in.

“I don’t feel well,” I’d say.

“What don’t you feel?” she always replied.

It’s that “What don’t you feel?” I can hear her saying so clearly. Then she would feel my forehead with the back of her hand, remind me where the appropriate medicine was kept (she didn’t get out of bed at that hour unless my case was dire), and send me back to bed.