Lipstick on the Host

The title story in Aidan Carl Mathews 1993 collection, Lipstick on the Host, is a tour de force of character development. The story is told by the protagonist, a saucy 41-year-old Irish schoolteacher named Meggie who has a brief, sad affair with a gynecologist, Antony (without an “h”).

Mathews captures the liquid movements of her mind, her desperate hopes, her sensual experiences of sex and after-sex. She teaches Animal Farm and Dickens and Shakespeare to teenagers, and complains that the film version of Orwell’s allegory ruins the story. Meeting a former student as a supermarket checkout girl, Meggie knows what year the girl graduated because, after noticing that her single teacher is buying male cologne and shaving equipment,  she quotes Duncan’s “There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face,” and Meggie hasn’t taught Macbeth for years. Preparing to entertain Antony, she gets some music: “I bought a Beatles compilation, because it had ‘Here Comes the Sun’, and Dvorak’s New World Symphony, which everybody has been buying because of the toilet cleanser commercial.” Anyone who has tried to keep up with the mental leaps of a witty, sharp-minded, sharp-tongued woman will recognize Meggie.

I ended up reading Mathews as I read Marilynne Robinson, to discover the treasures strewn on the next page. Passages like this: “When I looked up, and around me, and through the window under the short blind, it was as if I had been digging for roots in a wasteland, digging out some soft, spoiled onion like an eye, and then looking up, looking around, and finding that I was master gardener in the middle of a vast, landscaped garden, a loveliness that went in every direction. The bell sounded, and the blinds went up, and the daylight was still clinging on to the things of this world. I realised that I was in the same place at the same time; I realised that the landscape and the wasteland were the two diminutives of the one name, a name we can never call, or call out, or call upon, because we remember it only when the mouth has had its fill of eating and speaking, of corned beef and adjectives. Then, as it springs to mind, as it sweeps to the tip of our tongue, as our lips part, we are joined at the mouth in a kiss.”

Toward the end of the story, she philosophizes in her Meggie way: “Prostitutes in Florence had to wear their clothes inside out. That was the law. They’d put their coats on first, and then their dresses over their coats; and, after that, they’d put their slips on, if they wore slips, I suppose, slips and whatnot; and, finally, they’d wear their underwear, whatever that was like, because this was long ago, in an age when the churches and the chapels were being decorated by all the geniuses, and the whole of Europe was Catholic to a man. Nothing has changed. In one way or another, we’re all Florentine prostitutes.”

And lines like this: “His ear curved like a question-mark.”Meggie defends herself mentally for using cliches with: “It was the usual stuff, I know. But so are the readings at mass; so are they.” Or this, which captures the story’s liturgical eroticism as well as anything: “At the weekends, I met God; always at his place, never at mine. We had an arrangement. Only at the weekends.”

Mathews isn’t always in control. Sometimes he pushes a step too far and metaphor goes maudlin. But there are treats on every page, high caloric treats that slow the reader down to savor them.