APPLE TREE YARD

By Louise Doughty

Excerpt

[...]Sex with you is like being eaten by a wolf.[...]

Dear X,

It is three o’clock in the morning, my husband is asleep downstairs, and I am in the attic room writing a letter to you—a man I have met only once and will almost certainly never meet again. I appreciate that it is a little strange to be writing a letter that will never be read, but the only person I will ever be able to talk to about you, is you.

X. It pleases me that it’s actually a genetic reversal—the X chromosome, as I’m sure you know, is what denotes the female. The Y is what gives you increased hair growth around the ears as you age and you may also have a tendency toward red-green color blindness as many men do. There’s something in that that is pleasing too, considering where we were earlier today. Tonight, right now, synergy is everywhere. Everything pleases me.

My field is protein sequencing, which is a habit hard to break. It spreads through the rest of your life—science is close to religion in that respect. When I began my postdoc, I saw chromosomes everywhere, in the streaks of rain down a window, paired and drifting in the disintegrating vapor trails behind an airplane.

X has so many uses, my dear X—from a triple X film to the most innocent of kisses, the mark a child makes on a birthday card. When my son was six or so, he would cover cards with X’s for me, making them smaller and smaller toward the edge of the card, to squeeze them on, as if to show there could never be enough X’s on a card to represent how many X’s there were in the world.

You don’t know my name and I have no plans to tell you, but it begins with a Y—which is another reason why I like denoting you X. I can’t help feeling it would be disappointing to discover your name. Graham, perhaps? Kevin? Jim? X is better. That way, we can do anything.

At this point in the letter, I decided I needed the loo, so I stopped, left the room, returned two minutes later.

I had to break off there. I thought I heard something downstairs. My husband often gets up to use the toilet in the night—what man in his fifties doesn’t? But my caution was unnecessary. If he woke and found me missing, it would not surprise him to discover me up here, at the computer. I have always been a poor sleeper. It is how I have managed to achieve so much. Some of my best papers were written at three in the morning.

He is a kindly man, my husband, large, balding. Our son and daughter are both in their late twenties. Our daughter lives in Leeds and is a scientist too, although not in my field, her speciality is hematology. My son lives in Manchester at the moment, for the music scene, he says. He writes his own songs. I think he’s quite gifted—of course, I’m his mother—but he hasn’t quite found his métier yet, perhaps. It’s possibly a little difficult for him having a very academic sister—she’s younger than him, although not by much. I managed to conceive her when he was only six months old.

But I suspect you are not interested in my domestic life, any more than I am interested in yours. I noticed the thick gold wedding ring on your finger, of course, and you noticed me noticing, and at that point we exchanged a brief look in which the rules of what we were about to do were understood. I imagine you in a comfortable suburban home like mine, your wife one of those slender, attractive women who look younger than their age, neat and efficient, probably blond. Three children, at a guess, two boys and one girl, the apple of your eye? It’s all speculation, but I’m a scientist, as I’ve explained, it’s my job to speculate. From my empirical knowledge of you I know one thing and one thing only. Sex with you is like being eaten by a wolf. "