Six
O f course I realize immediately that I have made A Mistake. I don’t need him to look at me with the kind of horror usually reserved for killer clowns to know that. But he does it anyway, the second the words fall out of my mouth. His eyes suddenly widen to the point where I can see the whites all the way around the chocolate-brown middles; his entire body starts vibrating minutely.
And he stays that way, all through me making small talk with the douche.
Even though the small talk is the most tedious load of drivel I’ve ever had to endure. He tells me that he’s dating a Victoria’s Secret model. And has a Tesla. And that nobody is as good at picking winners as him. Only by winners, he means books . He means authors. That’s how he views his role as an editor: it’s just whoever scores the highest. Like this is all just some sweaty game in that high school gym I’m sure he used to run.
In fact, at one point, he tells me that he regularly beats Beck on who has the most bestselling authors. And in a way that implies he definitely thinks he deserved the job Beck got, when Beck was shipped in to replace the guy who fled. It makes Beck go even weirder than he already is. He kind of stiffens all over, in a way that makes me want to kill this asshole.
But I settle for getting Beck out of there. I clamp my mouth shut around the words I really shouldn’t say and grab hold of his arm, and start to manoeuvre him out into the car park. Despite how much effort manoeuvring him takes. It’s like shifting a really massive frozen mannequin. When I let him go he actually stops dead, as if he has ceased being able to move under his own power.
Though things get no better when he comes back to life.
Now he stands between a Ford Cortina and a BMW, looking down at me like I have gone completely round the twist. And the first words out of his mouth aren’t good ones. ‘Oh my good golly, why would you do such a thing?’ he gasps out.
So now I have to somehow answer him.
Even though I barely know why I did it myself. Because sure, I can tell myself I just hate douchebags. Or that I didn’t like the idea of anyone getting one up on a guy I suspect might really be as nice as he constantly seems. But truthfully, I know that can’t completely cover it. There was something else in there, something that just seemed to build inside my chest when he started talking about the life he longs to have.
Like a second heart I didn’t know I had.
That beats all heavy and hard and slow.
And it made me jump in with both feet before I thought anything through.
Though of course I can’t tell him that. I can’t tell him any of these things. All I’ve got is bluster and bullshit, so I commit to that as hard as I can. ‘Oh, come on. You can’t tell me you didn’t like seeing him with egg on his face,’ I say, and I laugh as I do. In fact, he laughs, too, in response.
Only his laugh is verging on hysteria.
And he puts his hands so deep in his hair that when he gets them back out again, his hair stays exactly where he just shoved it. He looks like he put his fingers into an electric socket. So I know his answer is going to be bad when it finally comes.
I’m just not prepared for how bad.
‘You know I would have, I truly would have. But how, by goodness, can I be when you just told someone as crafty and conniving as him that someone as impossible as you is inexplicably married to a man like me?’ he asks. Because of course his main concern is how unsuitable as a phony wife I am. Of course it is. He wants a woman who is kind and gentle and decent. A woman who doesn’t do hotheaded, impulsive things because some douche was rude. A woman who is comfortable being smart and nerdy, and hasn’t just spent years trying to undo the idea that it makes her unattractive.
I don’t make any sense for someone like him.
I’m a mess. He’s tidy. I’m all sharp edges and brittle bits.
He’s soft and warm and joyful. In fact, he’s so soft and warm and joyful that I can barely comprehend it. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to access that level of sincere happiness in my entire life. I’m not even sure if I’ve ever had space to create it. My mum used to roll her eyes if I so much as got excited about a birthday party – and I know that jadedness has infected me. I can feel it always seething beneath the surface, waiting to put a dampener on things.
I just could never be what someone like him needs.
Though honestly, it’s not as if I want to be. Or can be churlish about something like that. I mean, I just got him into this massive pickle. Bare minimum, I should be focusing on fixing it. But somehow, instead, I find myself rolling my eyes.
‘Okay, I’m sorry I made your mortal enemy think your pretend wife isn’t the probable soft, sweet, completely together genius of your dreams,’ I say, in a way I kind of hate myself for.
But he doesn’t even hate me for it, too.
He just looks even more baffled than he did before.
‘I don’t even know what any of that means .’
‘It means that you want a better fake spouse than me.’
‘Oh my gosh, you can’t possibly believe that is the problem here.’
‘Well, if it isn’t, then what is?’
He throws up his hands. But throwing up his hands isn’t even enough. He has to use them to implore the heavens for help. They stay up there for ages – all the way through him trying to explain to me. ‘The opposite of what you just said, Connie. The absolute complete and total opposite. Because there is absolutely no way I can convincingly be the husband of a woman like you. Look at how enormous and glossy and half-pink your hair currently is. You look like a picture on the wall of a super-nice hair salon. Your eyeliner wings are completely symmetrical, your purse matches your frankly awesome shoes, and your dress changes colours when you move. I can’t live up to any of that on my best day. And doubly so while in the same suit I wore to prom,’ he cries, then just for good measure he gestures at said suit.
So now I can’t even process the barrage of compliments.
Or the fact that a man said them at all, instead of attempting to neg me.
No – I have to focus on that unhinged last fact. ‘There’s no way that was the right size when you were in high school,’ I say in a dazed-sounding voice. But he can’t even give me that. He just adds more impossible things to the pile, while I stand there marvelling over the ruffles and the colour and how big he would have had to have been. Surely, I think, he couldn’t have been that big.
‘I was six-five and two hundred and fifty pounds in eighth grade, Connie. The other kids called me Frankenstein. One time I taught a whole class because I was mistaken for the teacher and too embarrassed to admit I wasn’t,’ he says, and I want to laugh, I do. But he just sounds so earnest about it, is the thing. Somehow it just fills my head with exactly what kind of teacher he would be.
The stickers he would give you, for being a good girl.
All the gel pens he would probably let you borrow, without a word.
It makes me blurt out gushing nonsense instead of scornful amusement.
‘Yeah, but I bet you did it awesomely ,’ I say.
But he doesn’t even seem to notice that’s weird.
‘Whether I did or not is beside the point.’
‘Then what is the point?’
‘That you have put me in a dilly of a pickle.’
And okay, he’s got me there. Even though he used the word dilly and the word pickle in a sentence said in the twenty-first century, he has a point. But it’s fine, it’s totally okay, because the pickle and the dilly are nowhere near as bad as he seems to be thinking. ‘Yeah, but only for right now. After this party you can just avoid him, wait a little while, then say we got divorced and hey, presto. All your problems are solved. He’s off your back, and you don’t have to panic very unreasonably that I don’t seem like your wife,’ I tell him.
Confidently, too.
It’s just that he doesn’t look confident in response.
He looks like the teacher he said he was once forced to be, trying to explain that he’s just a student. He even briefly pinches the bridge of his nose before he answers me. ‘And that would all be true. If we could avoid him.’
‘But of course we can,’ I say. ‘It’s just an office. And I’m not even in it.’
‘You not being in it doesn’t matter in this case. It’s not going to matter.’
‘How does it not matter when it means he never has to see me again?’
‘Connie, he’s going to see you again very soon. For two whole weeks.’
He says the words calmly, gently. And that seems fine, that seems reasonable – until I process what he’s just told me. Until I realize what it means. After which, I don’t know how he’s being calm and gentle at all.
He should probably be murdering me, all things considered.
I mean, I want to murder me, and I’m the one who did this.
‘Okay, so he’s going to be at the writing retreat,’ I say, and it takes everything I have to not sound like I’m dying of a fatal disease as I do. Be positive and come up with solutions , I order myself, and to be fair to me, I manage. ‘Right. Well, that’s fine. That’s cool. Because you know what? I’m great at pretending stuff.’
‘Yeah, but you know who isn’t? This guy,’ he says.
Then he actually jabs his two thumbs at himself.
You know, just to underline exactly how dire our situation is. Even though I would rather the opposite of underlining happen here. I want the words to have nothing around them. They need to blend right into the paragraph they’re in the middle of. In fact, if they could do less than blend, that would be great.
Let them be barely printed.
Have them look faint, in a font that makes everyone’s eyes glaze over.
But by the time I beg the universe for this, it’s already sunk in.
‘Oh my god. So you’re also going to be there,’ I groan, despairingly.
As if that’s the very worst possible thing about all of this.
When of course it isn’t. He has more for me, so much more.
‘Connie, I’m the one who made it happen. I am running the thing.’
‘Wow. Wow, okay. So you absolutely have to go on it.’
He shakes his head. ‘There is literally no way around it.’
‘Okay, but maybe there is. Maybe I won’t go.’
‘And how will that help me pretend to be your husband? Because of course I will still very much have to do that. Constantly, for fourteen days. While also explaining why my wife, who is suddenly in London with me, didn’t come on the retreat I said she would be on if she weren’t stuck in the US,’ he says, then just as my panic is starting to reach a crescendo, he adds one last kicker. ‘And you know even if none of that was true, I would never want you to miss something you’ve obviously been super longing for.’
At which point I almost lose it. And not just because he just added another Jenga block to our already toppling tower. No, there’s also just the plain shock of him knowing something like that. Followed by the furious understanding of how he does. ‘Mabel should just shut up,’ I burst out. Because really, who else could have told him? I haven’t said anything like it to another soul. She and Berinder are the only two people I’ve ever shared anything real about myself with, and even they weren’t given it at first. They’d just eased it all out of me, with their patient love and care.
And now here’s my reward: Mabel telling this guy that I get giddy at the thought of writing something probably rubbish and ridiculous.
Or so I think.
‘Aha. So it’s true enough that you think someone told me,’ he says, like the goddamn smarty-trousers he is.
‘Okay, all right, calm down, Hercule.’
‘As in Poirot? Frankly I’m going to take that as a compliment.’
‘Of course you are. Of course you are, holy shit. Because that is what you’re like. You are the sort of person who sees the beauty in a kind, intelligent, weird television detective, and thinks more of me not getting to go on a retreat than anything else, and now I’ve ruined your entire life,’ I say, all in a rush of emotion I don’t even know I feel until it’s there. Until it makes me say all of those things, and then put my face in my hands.
God, I have made a mess here.
And even by my speak-before-I-think, straight-to-fury-at-some-injustice-without-thinking-about-the-consequences standards, it’s a big one. Bigger than when I started fighting all those football fan trolls going after Mabel, bigger than when I punched Dawn Henderson in high school for hiding Jenny Tate’s lunch, bigger than all the times I’ve been fired for talking back at work.
I know it is.
It’s just that Beck doesn’t seem to think so.
‘All right, whoa, Nelly, I think ruined my entire life is a little steep,’ he says, after a moment of what I’m assuming is him looking at me, all probably worried and distressed by my sudden descent into despair.
And sure enough, when I drop my hands, there it is. His big, lovely face, all soft with concern. As if I am the one who deserves concern here. Instead of, like, jail. For my crimes against good sense.
‘Yeah, but only because you’re so nice. I mean, come on, how haven’t I? Even if I stay at home now he’s just gonna constantly be there with you, asking you questions about why I’m not there and why you never said I was supposed to be going and how come eighteen million other things that I didn’t think about, oh god, why didn’t I think about them? I just blundered in like always, and now everything is a fucking mess,’ I say, mind racing for a solution that just will not come.
And now he’s trying to wave it away.
He makes a noise like pfffffttt .
As if it’s nothing. No big deal.
‘Everything is not a fudging mess,’ he says, and honestly I think I start crying inside over the fact that he didn’t want to repeat my swear word. And doubly so when he continues. ‘It’s just one tiny brief humiliation. I’ve had millions of them over my life. And some of them were way more horrible than a work colleague finding out I made up a wife. Like the time Becky Thwaite said she wanted to make out with me in the cleaning closet, and I went in there but it was really dark and, well, the picture they got of me kissing the elderly janitor became pretty infamous. Mainly because they blew it up and stuck it on the only billboard in town.’
‘That cannot be a real thing that happened to you,’ I say.
Furiously, while my hands make fists of their own accord.
But all he does is shrug.
‘It’s not even the most unreal thing I can think of, to be honest.’
‘So there’s something worse in your bag of horrible experiences than snogging your high school janitor and having it advertised to your friends and neighbours like some kind of incredibly strange brand of cereal?’
‘I mean, that wasn’t even the top of that category.’
‘You have a category of date fake-outs?’
‘When you hit double digits, you kind of have to.’
He laughs on the end of that. Shakes his head, like it’s just so silly.
Instead of being pretty much one of the most awful things I’ve ever heard.
It’s honestly all I can do not to hunt down the women who’ve done this to him, vigilante-style. Like a rom-com version of John Wick , getting revenge for someone killing this man-shaped puppy at the start. Only instead of using guns, I’m going to fix this. I am going to fix it. I don’t care what it takes, I am doing it.
And I even have an idea how to. No matter how mad that idea might be.
‘Okay, look. Here is what is going to happen. We are both going to merrily go on this retreat. And when we do, we are going to pretend that we are husband and wife for the entire duration. End of discussion,’ I say.
But the best part is – he doesn’t even get to argue.
Because Mabel and Berinder are coming toward us.
They’re wanting to know what we’re talking about, and telling me it’s time to go. So he can’t protest, he can’t poke holes. He just has to accept that my plan is perfect, and everything is going to work out okay.
It’s totally going to work out okay.
Oh god, I think, as I get into our Uber.
I hope this is going to work out okay.