14
2013
Bronte, Sydney
Dani
‘Lachy thinks I cursed it.’
‘The baby?’ Dani was dangling her legs in Liss’s pool on an oppressively hot Saturday afternoon, as Tia and Lyra splashed in the shallow water in their rings and wings and float vests.
‘Every month, when I get my period.’ Liss was sitting next to her. ‘He says I cursed it by being so sad after Tia was born, that my body’s fighting feeling that again. He says he’s joking.’ Liss pulled her knees up to her chest. ‘He’s not joking.’
‘That seems uncharacteristically superstitious of him.’ Dani was talking to her but both their eyes were fixed on the three-year-olds.
‘He says he googled it, and that it’s not uncommon for a woman who had postnatal depression to suffer a sort of wilful miscarriage.’
‘Lachy should leave the magical thinking to the experts.’ Dani reached down and spun Lyra like a top, sending up a shower of shrieking giggles. ‘You have plenty of time.’
‘Is that what you and Seb are telling each other?’
‘I have no idea what to say to him most days.’ Dani brushed drops of water from her thighs. ‘Since the New York thing, we barely speak.’
It was true. Seb had two suitcases open on their bedroom floor, the same metallic wheelies he’d brought here a little over three years ago, following his pregnant wife home. Dani watched what was going into them. Neatly folded sweaters he barely wore here. Books he hadn’t got around to reading in their real, busy life. A picture of Lyra in a frame Dani had bought him to hold the first ultrasound of their little girl, back when she was just an idea.
She stepped around the open cases, and counted down the days.
‘I keep imagining he’ll change his mind about the job,’ she said. ‘He says if I was pregnant, he wouldn’t go.’
‘That seems cruel.’
Dani shrugged. ‘I think he’s just unhappy.’
Lachy and Seb would soon be back from a mandated mission to source lunch and more pool toys. Dani could not imagine what they were talking about in the front seats of Lachy’s BMW.
She knew that Seb found Lachy brash and thoughtless. She was certain Lachy thought Seb was pretentious and strange. What common ground they had was populated by their wives and their daughters, and Dani couldn’t really picture either of them engaging in small talk.
Dani’s work and the growing girls had changed the rhythm of her time with Liss, but they had held on tight to their friendship. Liss picked Lyra up from preschool two afternoons a week and brought her back to Bronte. Dani arrived to collect her around six in a frazzled haze, and there would be a cup of tea or a glass of wine – depending on the scale of the frazzle – while the girls ate Liss’s home-cooked dinner. Often, Dani would stay for bathtime, and strap a sweet-smelling, damp-haired, pyjama-clad Lyra into the car to take home to Seb.
Weekends always involved a park outing, or a group date at some horrendous indoor play place or, sometimes, a gathering at Liss’s. Always Liss’s, since she had all of the space and Dani and Seb had graduated from the tiny Randwick flat to a slightly less tiny Randwick townhouse.
There was a part of Dani that envied Liss – sometimes, when she was in an interminable project meeting after a night of scarce sleep, she imagined her friend drifting around this beautiful home, creating thoughtful snacks and craft projects for Tia and her other little friends whose mummies didn’t work. Sometimes, when she was feeling the pressure of earning the bigger salary, when she was stuck dealing with Seb’s dissatisfaction and resentment, she envied Liss’s apparently simpler life. But only for a moment. She knew too much to be completely seduced by the fantasy.
Dani knew Liss thought Seb hadn’t tried hard enough to find his dream job here in Sydney before giving up and taking on a contract back in New York. She was probably right.
And Dani knew Liss thought that Dani was trying hard to get pregnant to keep him here. She was wrong about that.
‘I think he’s pretending to be really torn about going,’ she said. ‘I think his baby fever is a bit of a front.’
Tia was turning in circles in the pool, giggling as she kicked up splashes of silvery drops. Lyra was swishing her hands back and forth, back and forth, watching the wash.
‘Do you think they’re off talking about our menstrual cycles?’ Liss asked. ‘Swapping tips about conception sex?’
‘Seb would rather die.’
There was a crunch and a clang and the men appeared at the garden’s side gate, brandishing fluoro pool noodles and two big oil-speckled brown bags.
‘We return, family,’ Lachy called. ‘With sustenance and inflatables.’
‘We got a roast chicken, salad and bread.’ Seb raised a bag.
‘A roast chook,’ corrected Lachy. ‘And chips. And garlic sauce.’
‘Chipppppies!’ yelled Tia from the pool, splashing wildly.
‘Absolutely not,’ replied Liss, shaking her head at Lachy.
Lachy shrugged, poked out his tongue, put the bag of food on the glass-topped outdoor dining table and lobbed the pool noodles over the fence into the water.
‘The daddies are coming in, kids,’ he yelled, and Dani watched Seb wince. ‘It’s about to get fun!’
‘I didn’t bring swimming shorts,’ Seb said, his eyes finding hers.
‘Well, that was dumb on a day like today.’ Lachy mimed horror at the little girls in the pool, who were watching the dads with interest.
‘Don’t worry about it, you can borrow some of mine,’ Lachy looked over at Seb, ‘if they fit your skinny arse.’ Lachy was already wearing board shorts that looked nothing like board shorts, and was peeling off his weekend polo shirt.
Dani knew Seb would not wear another man’s swimmers. She held his gaze, the one that was begging her to find an excuse for him to not have to wear Lachy Short’s shorts or swim in his pool. And she said, ‘That would be lovely, Lachy, thank you. I’m sure they’ll fit just fine.’
They may have met in the city that spawned a hundred romantic comedies, but Dani thought her and Seb’s meet-cute lacked something. Particularly after she’d heard Liss and Lachy’s.
She had been in New York for a year and was absolutely not dating. The Dani who’d aimed for the New York office of the mega-bank she’d worked for since graduation was all business. She thought that her sacrifice and work ethic were her most original and defining characteristics. She was wrong.
She’d hit the target, scored the move to New York City, a place that had always represented success, ambition and the perfect amount of distance from where she didn’t want to be – in Concord, living with her parents, grandfather, sister and all their judgements. But everyone else at the bank in New York was just like her. Driven, hard-working, and waving around their own MBAs.
‘Why are you here tonight?’ the Frenchman at the bar had asked her.
That night Dani had drunk two glasses of wine. Uncharacteristic. She was at the bar because the new marketing boss wanted to shout the team a round of expensive top-shelf drinks, a visible, if token, reward for something-something that the hungry team had won or nailed or aced. Dani didn’t remember the details, but she remembered the pride, and the uncomfortably urgent need she had for the boss to know it was her hard work, her project leadership, her MBA, dammit, that had yielded the win. She didn’t need his free drinks, she needed him to remember her name.
But the CMO didn’t show. Instead, his assistant had turned up at 7 pm with his credit card in her faux Prada clutch and told them all he’d said to drink up.
Dani would have left right then if it wasn’t for the latest key tenet she was trying to work on in her self-optimisation program: to be more likeable. Popular co-workers got more opportunities. And popular people didn’t shy away from drinking with their colleagues, even if she knew everyone was doing the same mental calculation of the most lucrative path the evening might take from here.
So she didn’t usually drink, and she didn’t usually talk to men in bars. That was not what the New York chapter of her life was going to be about. It was about promotion and progress in the most competitive arena. And then getting sent to London, or Singapore, where the really big guns were, and then one day back to Australia, where she would buy a great big house about five suburbs away from Concord, to the east, near the ocean.
Dani was pretty certain she was thinking about that plan when the Frenchman had approached.
‘The person you are waiting for, he didn’t come?’
‘My boss, no.’
‘What were you hoping for, when you came here tonight?’
It was such a ridiculous question for a Wednesday night, Dani decided to leave.
Her small room in her small, clean apartment in Soho was fine for studying, working, sleeping. Her room-mate Nan would probably be home, and there would be mint tea, and frozen yoghurt, and a warm radiator, and The Simple Life on their TiVo. All those things were more appealing than this man with the accent trying to pick her up. Dani was not one for being picked up.
Nan, of course, could never understand why. ‘You’re thousands of miles from your Catholic parents. You’ll be thirty any minute. If this isn’t the time to sleep around, I don’t know when is.’
But Dani knew. Never. And anyway, there were still three years to thirty.
‘Don’t leave,’ the Frenchman had said. ‘Really, it’s extremely cold out there.’ His accent was almost comically seductive, his language oddly formal.
‘That’s not a reason to stay. In fact, it will be colder the longer I stay here.’
‘Okay, then, don’t go because it’s boring to leave.’
Dani didn’t understand men like this. Why did they try so hard? What made him think that, even if Dani decided yes, he was coming back to Soho with her, that any imagined sex would be fun? She would be much too nervous and self-conscious to writhe and moan like she was doing inside his head.
‘I have no problem being boring,’ Dani told the Frenchman.
He had shrugged, turned back to the bar and raised his hand, like people in American bars did in American movies.
Dani slid off her stool and looked around for her ridiculously large coat.
‘Got to go, early spin tomorrow,’ she’d called in the general direction of her remaining colleagues, gathered around a small table, heads together.
Only one of them turned their head and raised a hand. ‘See you, Daniella.’
There was something about the dismissive wave that hit Dani hard. In a flash she saw the sterile walls of her apartment, no pictures hanging, no comforting clutter. Once she walked out of this bar, wrapped in a padded bubble of a coat, and started towards the subway – one tiny person in a city of millions – she realised that if she disappeared into the thin, cold air of this night, all the people who would care were thirty-six hours away.
I am alone, she thought. I wanted to be, and now I am.
Dani turned back and saw the Frenchman smiling at her, raising his glass. He wasn’t bad looking, and his eyes were kind. His suit wasn’t sharp and shiny, like the sharky men who cruised the corridors of her bank, but loose and linen, like it wasn’t five below outside. And his shoes were actually ankle boots, with a thick tread. He looked like a safe harbour.
She walked back up to the bar, feeling that at least one of her colleagues at the little round table was watching her.
‘If I give you my number, will you call me?’ she’d asked him, standing a few footsteps away, leaning at the waist to push the words over the music and into his ear.
‘Of course,’ he said, too fast. He was surprised, and it was charming.
‘But will you?’ she asked. ‘Or will you just say you will?’
‘I will call you,’ he said. ‘If you tell me your name.’
‘Even though I’m boring?’
‘I doubt that you are actually boring.’ He put down his drink and held out his hand. ‘I’m Sebastian,’ he said. ‘Seb, in America.’
Dani shook his hand and then turned hers over, an outstretched palm. ‘Give me your phone.’
She took his grey Nokia and tapped in her name and number and she added the name of the bar to the ‘business’ note, to help him remember who Dani was. ‘I’m going now,’ she said, pulling her coat around her. ‘Don’t be boring.’
Seb nodded, and turned back to the bar in a way that made her nervous. As she walked out into the cold and the washed-out black of a city that was never truly dark, she felt faintly nauseous. She’d done something she didn’t ever do in a bid to muffle a truth that, until tonight, she hadn’t even allowed to be voiced. This was why, she understood, there was the rush and push to swap numbers, to bump bodies together, to have someone call you. To have somewhere to go on Saturday afternoon, other than back to the gym. Why had she thought she was immune to that?
Six years later, beside the infinity pool carved into Liss’s sandstone deck, everything twinkled and Seb excused himself. Dani watched him walk towards the open double doors into the kitchen.
‘There’ll be some boardies in the laundry, to the left,’ Lachy yelled after him. Then he looked over at Dani, a smug grin forming. Liss punched him in the arm as she got up to get a towel for the girls. ‘You’re an idiot.’
They all knew Seb wasn’t going to get the shorts.
If their first meeting was tainted for Dani by the sharp realisation of her own desperation, the few months that followed it had been genuinely happy. Whatever instinct had turned her around at the door of that bar had been solid. Their date turned into a romance, which was something, Nan had always assured her, that never happened in New York City.
It had knocked her completely off balance, the way she had allowed herself to fall into Seb.
He thought she was likeable.
In fact, he thought she was wonderful, and told her, all the time.
It brought her a freedom she’d never associated with love, and she’d dived into it.
Now she had two things in her life: work and Seb.
It wasn’t in her five-year plan, but the thrill of being loved had wrapped itself around Dani in an unexpected way.
None of her family flew out to New York for their wedding a year later. It was an act of protest, Dani knew, a physical marker of their strong disapproval.
‘You should be getting married here at home,’ was the only thing her mother had said, ‘so all your people can be there.’ Those words conjured a picture in Dani’s head, a blurry line of aunties and uncles and cousins from a mash-up of identical eighteenths and twenty-firsts and christenings and engagement parties, weddings and Easters and Christmases. So many backyards with long trestle tables and so many air-conditioned function rooms with grey-speckled ceiling tiles at clubs within a five-kilometre radius of her parents’ home. She’d feel their eyes on her, what she chose to wear, who she’d chosen to stand next to.
‘This is where we live, Mum, it’s our home. We’d love to show it to you.’
Her mother never mentioned it again. When Dani offered to pay for tickets for her parents and Bianca, her mother had just clucked her tongue and changed the subject.
On the wedding day Dani found herself dizzy with relief, knowing the exact set of her mother’s mouth at the sight of the calf-length lace dress she’d chosen, at the flower tucked behind her ear.
At her bare ankles and flat shoes.
It was at City Hall, like in the movies, and then dinner at a restaurant.
A wedding was a good idea for visa purposes, because Sebastian’s mother was from Louisiana, and his accent was hiding the fact that he was an American citizen.
And it was a good idea for love purposes, because she had never felt so wanted.
The way Seb looked at her made her feel like she’d done something right.
He liked that she was energetic and organised and ambitious.
He liked that she was always thinking of what was next.
He liked that she took care of him but didn’t need him. He liked that she tried so hard, at everything. He didn’t cluck his tongue and tell her to slow down, calm down, or climb down from that ladder.
Dani Grasso became Dani Martin at the same moment she broke away from the ranks of the marketing team to become an analyst. It was a good year.
‘I’d better go talk to him,’ Dani said back at the pool to Liss. She gestured to Lyra and Tia, still bobbing about in the water, urging Lachy to jump in. ‘Can you watch Lyra?’ The food was still sitting in the bags on the table. ‘I’ll get some plates. Be right back.’
She’d walked into Liss’s beautiful kitchen and out into the hallway. The front door was open. Surely Seb hadn’t just left? No. He was sitting on the front step of the ironwork veranda. She could tell, from the way his shoulders sat up near the place where a dark curl kissed his ear, that he was angry.
‘Seb,’ she said, and watched the shoulders twitch. ‘It’s just Lachy. It’s just swimmers. Seriously.’
‘He says you and Liss have an agreement.’ He still didn’t turn around. Dani glanced back down the hallway then went to sit beside him.
‘What?’
‘That you want to get pregnant at the same time, together, that she’s waiting for you to be ready.’
She leaned forward to look into his face. ‘You mean Lachy said that Liss isn’t really trying to have a baby?’
He nodded. Dani’s first reaction was to laugh. The idea that her friend Liss, who wanted nothing more than another baby, might make some childish pact like that was unthinkable. Did Lachy not know his own wife?
‘That’s ridiculous. Liss has been in tears every day for a year about this.’
‘And you?’ As he turned she saw, as she had for months now, that the face that had always been so open to her was closed, tight, hard. Other. ‘Are you in tears about it too?’ Clearly, Seb did know his own wife.
‘Seb.’ She reached around for words that weren’t a lie but weren’t quite true. ‘You’re leaving. In three days.’
‘Not for ever.’ It was his turn to reach. ‘And you wanted me to go.’
‘Only because you’re so fucking unhappy,’ she said. ‘It’s just not the time to . . .’ She pictured Lachy spinning a giggling Lyra around in the pool. ‘Grow our unhappy family.’
‘You are punishing me,’ he said. He had said it before. ‘You have a plan, and I am not going along with all that you want.’ He gestured around, as if what she wanted was to be sitting in Liss’s front garden, staring at a manicured hedge the height of a truck, stomach lurching, eyes stinging. ‘You are punishing me.’
‘I don’t know what you want me to do,’ she said, rubbing her forehead.
It wasn’t really true. She knew what he wanted. He wanted Sydney to be a place they visited, not the place they lived. He wanted her to have another baby. He wanted her to see his sadness and fix it. He wanted her to put her needs aside for his.
His misery was infectious, his dissatisfaction tangible, and Dani felt drained every time she walked into the house she’d finally convinced him they deserved to rent.
The problem was, out in the world, she felt like she was in exactly the right place. At work she was finally being offered the projects she’d watched previously pass her by. She could taste the life she’d dreamt of when she’d finished studying. The problem was, by marrying Seb and having a child, she’d complicated her permission to have it. Because it was her dream, and not his. And couples, apparently, are meant to have shared dreams.
So, after years of doing work he didn’t like for people he didn’t respect, when Seb had been offered a contract back in New York, it was true she’d urged him to take it. And then he’d asked her to come too.
‘You’ll walk back into the Manhattan office,’ he’d said. ‘And I’ll be earning good money again, and we’ll be . . .’
Who we were, she knew he wanted to say. But it wasn’t true.
‘I don’t understand why you won’t just try it. We can come back.’
When they met she’d told him she wanted to work all over the world. They’d dreamed of a future where they weren’t tied to one place, one home, one job. Then she’d changed the script when she had decided she wanted to have her baby in Australia. And then stay.
She was bad at explaining why it was impossible for her to uproot herself again, to walk away from the life she’d created here. She knew that if they were in New York and he was back working in his dream job, she would be the one trying to find the good babysitter, the good preschool, to hustle Lyra’s way into kindergarten and elementary, to try to get them into a good building. She knew what it would take to build Lyra a life there that offered anything like their life here.
They’d been arguing about it for Lyra’s entire life. And then they’d stopped arguing. And he’d started speaking to Lyra only in French.
It was an idea she’d always loved, but now it felt like their home was divided into two clear camps, and one of them was talking about the other behind their back.
Seb stood up. ‘I’m going home.’
‘But Lyra’s in the pool. She’s having a ball.’
‘Just bring her home when you’re ready. I’ll finish packing.’
‘It’s not true,’ Dani called, as he walked to the gate. ‘About Liss and me and babies. That’s just Lachy fishing.’
‘He knows more about you than I do, it seems.’ Seb shrugged, then kept walking.
Dani kept watching long after he’d gone.
Fuck.
When she walked back out to the pool deck, no plates in her hands, she stepped right into the end of a conversation between Liss and Lachy.
‘How can you be too French to want to swim with your kids on a hot afternoon?’ Lachy was saying.
‘He’s not –’
‘He’s a miserable bastard, Liss, you know it. And if you can’t be happy here,’ he tipped backwards, floating in the bright ice-blue for a moment, arms outstretched, ‘then fuck off back to France.’
‘New York,’ said Dani. ‘He’s fucking off back to New York.’
Lachy straightened up in the pool but then shrugged. ‘You know it’s for the best.’
‘She does?’ Liss was looking at her, eyebrows raised.
It was true that Lachy understood some parts of Dani’s life better than Seb. Her sisterhood with Liss. Her career drive. It had only been a matter of time, she knew, before their paths had crossed at work.
They had first run into each other at a farewell dinner for an old partner who was leaving Dani’s bank. Dani was nervous to be invited, sensing it was a sign of progression but unsure how to act at this level. Of course it turned out that old Frank Altmann had been a mentor to Lachy early in his career, and Lachy had taken her under his wing at that party, introducing her to other useful old bastards as ‘the woman my wife loves more than me’.
He’d been kinder than she’d expected him to be. More generous. Since then, she had asked his advice once or twice on breaking into some inner sanctum, or for an introduction to someone she had no business calling. And Lachy had flattered her for it. ‘You surprise me,’ he’d said, at the end of that first-night dinner. ‘You get it.’
‘She’s too smart for him,’ Lachy said now, giving the girls another twirl. ‘Let the man go and ruin his life.’
‘We are not breaking up,’ Dani said, a little too loudly, because Lyra, who was surely still too small to make sense of those words, spun around in the water and stared up at her mother.
Liss stood, grabbed Dani’s hand and the food bags and headed for the house. ‘Get the girls dried off,’ she called to Lachy over her shoulder. ‘We’ll sort lunch.’
In the sun-dappled kitchen, at the giant, newly marble bench, Liss opened cupboards and drawers as Dani stood, feeling dazed, sort of loose-limbed and useless. It felt unbelievable that all these feelings she had, these resentments, and this stubbornness whose source she couldn’t locate, might have led her to the edge of an actual marriage collapse, not just a professional break.
Liss was looking at her, she could see, as she moved around the kitchen, pulling out hefty plates for the kids and linen napkins for the grown-ups.
‘The chips will be cold,’ Dani said, dumbly.
‘Good.’ Liss opened one of the greasy brown bags and plucked out the fries. ‘We’ll chuck them.’
Dani watched her friend pull open her kitchen bin and drop them in, considering what most of the people she knew would think about throwing away perfectly good hot chips.
‘Where did Seb go?’ Liss’s eyes were on her again.
‘He’s gone.’
‘Why?’
Dani shook herself a little, looked up, tried a smile. ‘He’s just so grumpy, I want Lyra to have a lovely afternoon. I want us to have a lovely afternoon, he’s just . . .’
‘Was it Lachy?’
Dani looked out through the doors to where Lachy was lifting Lyra out of the pool.
‘He says Lachy told him we have a pact about not getting pregnant.’
‘What?’
‘Weird thing to say, right?’
‘It’s crazy.’ Liss also looked at her husband talking to the girls as he handed them towels and made a show of drying himself off. She looked hurt. ‘Sometimes I have no idea why he says the things he says. He knows what I’m going through.’
‘I think Lachy thinks it’s fun.’ Dani moved to the island, to the food bags, and started unpacking the remaining food. ‘To fuck with people a bit.’
If this was a shocking thing to say about her friend’s husband, Liss didn’t show it. ‘I’m sorry, Dani. I’m sure that didn’t help.’
Dani lifted out the plastic carton of thick, white garlic sauce that only Lachy would eat. ‘The thing is, Liss, for me, it’s true. I’m not trying to get pregnant. I’m still on the pill.’
‘You’re still on the pill. But . . .’ Liss was looking at her in exactly the way Dani expected. A way she never wanted her friend to look at her. ‘What are you talking about, we . . .’
‘I couldn’t tell you, not after everything.’ Why was she telling Liss this now? She didn’t need to know.
‘But, Dani, you’ve been . . .’ Dani could see Liss was mentally trawling through their interactions for blatant lies. Every month, for months and months, Liss had shared disappointment and shame at her body not doing what she thought it was here for. Dani had made all the right noises, but she hadn’t outright lied, had she?
‘He’s right, I’m not upset that I’m not pregnant. Because I don’t think Seb and I should be having another baby right now.’ Dani put the cartons on the counter and stepped to Liss. ‘But I really, really want you to have your baby, my friend. I promise I’m not pretending about that.’
‘You lied to me?’ Liss looked outside again. ‘Does Lachy know that?’
Dani shook her head. ‘Of course not. He’s just fishing.’
‘Did you tell Seb?’
‘Nope. He thinks we’ve been trying.’
The two women stood there for a moment as shade began to touch the edges of the room, and the girls’ voices cooed and laughed at Lachy in the garden.
‘I promise to tell you the truth, Liss, you really are my lifesaver here.’
‘And I thought you were mine.’ Liss’s hands were shaking as she folded them over her stomach.
‘I am. I promise you. Every single thing I said to you about what you’ve been going through, I meant.’
There was a moment before Liss dropped her hands and picked up the plates. ‘Well, okay,’ she said.
Dani accepted her friend’s signal that this part of the conversation was over. She ripped the foil-lined bag of chicken and lifted the dripping bird onto one of Liss’s tasteful platters.
‘I think he’s going to leave me for good,’ she said as she licked her fingers. ‘So, maybe I should stop taking the pill.’
Liss picked up the plate with her free hand and turned to walk out to the garden and her troublemaking husband and those beautiful little girls.
‘Don’t you fucking dare,’ she said.