Chapter 5
FIVE
I am cycling the beach path towards the Venice Pier. Or at least, I’m trying to. The very best thing about the apartment I’m renting off Airbnb was when the owner texted me and said there were two bikes locked up in the parking garage, and she told me where to find the keys. Up to that point, I hadn’t cycled in probably twenty years. But those early morning rides along the Marvin Braude trail from Santa Monica to Will Rogers Beach, or the sunset ones in the opposite direction towards Venice, have become the one somewhat effective way for me to burn off my anger and pain, the one thing that injects a tiny rush of optimism in my veins when I’ve plumbed the depths of despair. I love it. I love the ocean air, and the rhythmic pedalling, and that sense that everything is overcome-able if you just keep on moving and you don’t stand still with your soul-destroying thoughts.
This evening I’ve got my psychotherapist friend, Nat, in my basket, propped between my handbag and a rolled-up sweatshirt. She keeps toppling over. Not the most effective way to FaceTime. It’s imperative I get there in the next fifteen minutes so that when I turn around and cycle back towards Santa Monica, I’m going to be pedalling into the setting sun. If my timing is off, the whole plan falls apart. Normally this would not be of cataclysmic importance but tonight every minor derailment in life is sending me one step closer to the edge.
‘Er… Moira, darling…’ I hear her say. ‘I’m turning a little motion sick here.’
‘Hang on!’ I take a bend and swerve to avoid a young couple ambling along with their pit bull, oblivious. I give them a telling-off for being on the bike path then blow by them before they’ve time to set the dog on me.
‘Wow,’ Nat says. ‘You’ve only lived there two minutes and you’re already laying the law down with the locals. I’m impressed.’
I suddenly feel awful. She’s right; I’ve become a Karen. I almost don’t recognise my overstrung self. I decide that if I give up my goal of getting to the Venice Pier and just settle for making it as far as the skateboard park, I can pull over, sit on the sand, and have a proper conversation with my friend that won’t turn her nauseous. This is what I do.
‘So, I’m not having a very good day,’ I tell her.
‘Seriously?’ she says. ‘You look like the most chilled-out soul in the world to me.’
I struggle out a smile. She’s lying in bed, propped up with pillows, with a pair of reading glasses on her nose and another on top of her head – her partner Tara is a TV-addicted night owl and has probably nodded off downstairs – and very soon she’s probably going to tell me that she’s got two pairs of reading glasses and can’t find either of them. But instead she says, ‘How are you? As in, how are you really ? I don’t feel like I know any more.’
I always find it funny how you can be fine until someone asks how you are, and then it all goes to hell in a handbasket. ‘I’m a mess,’ I say, just relieved to finally be able to say it. ‘One minute I think I’m okay then the next it just hits me that the man I trusted for twenty years has cheated on me.’
I focus on a sailboat so far off in the distance that it appears not to be moving. I must hold it together, be steady just like that boat. ‘I still can’t really process it, to be honest. Any of it. I go to think about it, about what I’m to do, but all I feel is this weird numbness.’ Like it’s all sitting there, waiting for me to come to it, to deal with it, but I can’t come to it; I can’t get there. Every time I try to take steps towards it, it’s like I no longer have feeling in my legs.
‘Sorry,’ my voice wobbles a bit. ‘I think I only get in touch with you when I’m about to jump off a bridge, and that’s not fair of me.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she says. ‘It was me who FaceTimed you, remember? I was starting to worry you’d fallen off the face of the earth. I don’t like it when you go silent on me.’
I tell her I’m sorry again. Back home, Nat and I talk several times a week. We met over a decade ago. I’d just moved from the Royal Berkshire Hospital where I’d worked since Harriet was little, to the Royal London Hospital, where I’d exchanged a job that I could do with my eyes shut – but that allowed plenty of work/life balance – for a more senior role in management that required a two-hour commute each day. Nat was an Occupational Psychologist who taught Compassion Training across the NHS, but had a side gig as a marriage counsellor, which she was enjoying more. She became my first proper friend there, and that friendship saw us through her leaving some weeks later and striking out in her own practice, at the same time as walking away from her long-time marriage to Darius to pursue a romantic relationship with a woman – a friend from childhood whom she’d lost touch with for many years; the friend with whom she’d shared something once, something which told her she was different from other girls. A fact she tried to deny by marrying ‘the laziest, most advantage-taking man on the planet’ as she once described him (and then she added: ‘If you need an excuse to leave your husband, just make him the most domestically inept male in the world; no one will ever blame you for it.’). I remember being fascinated that she’d drummed up the courage to walk away from a marriage that was solid, even though she routinely put out the wheelie bin way more times than he did, because deep down she was living someone else’s idea of exactly what solid was. I could not get enough of her dilemma, and the almost nonchalant way she made it not one any more.
‘Have you talked to him recently?’ she asks.
I shake my head.
‘You can’t keep avoiding him forever.’
‘Can’t I? I think I can.’
‘It’s been six weeks.’
‘Seven, actually. And why do I need to talk to him when he’s just going to say the same thing, isn’t he? The same BS. That nothing happened.’ I stare out across the skateboard park. I like this spot of Venice Beach. It’s youthful and buzzing and a little bit edgy and a little bit dangerous. Problems abound here, and for the time I’m passing through, mine feel microscopic compared to all this.
‘But you’re coming home soon. You’ll have no choice but to face him then.’
‘ If I come home.’
She frowns. ‘You’ve got to come home, Moy. Aside from the fact that you have your entire life here, isn’t there the logistics of your visa?’
‘The ESTA’s valid for two years. I can stay here for up to ninety days at a time, but then I can leave and come right back.’ I coincidentally signed a contract with the Airbnb for three months, without even realising this.
‘Wow. You really are contemplating never coming home.’
I tell her that, frankly, I have no idea what I’m contemplating; I’m just surviving, wading through all this confusion one step at a time. I just keep picturing Rupert and me arguing on the beach outside his hotel the morning after we arrived in LA. We’d booked a suite at Loews Hotel for all of us, but after what happened, there was no way I was going to stay in such close proximity to him, so Harriet and I checked in to the Viceroy across the road. I’d truly thought by this point that he’d come clean and admit it. Yet still he was insisting the reason why this Dagmara had said ‘I really need to fuck you’ is because they hadn’t . That she was just someone at work who had a crush on him. He hadn’t realised how serious it was. He was as shocked by the text as I was.
‘I feel I’m being gaslit by his continual denial,’ I say. ‘If he’d just admit he did it, I might be able to understand it and maybe forgive him.’
As I say it, I’m not even sure I mean it, or if it just sounds sensible. I’ve spent my life trying to be sensible and to see the glass as always half-full, without ever stopping to ask myself, ‘Ah, but what’s it actually half-full of ?’
‘It’s bad enough that the man I’ve shared a bed with, a life with, might have been intimate with someone else, without knowing he’s got so little respect for me that he’s trying to actively mislead me.’ I pinch the bridge of my nose to make the building pressure go away.
‘Cheating’s not necessarily about lack of respect,’ she says. ‘People lie about adultery because their ego won’t let them identify themselves as being a cheat. But sometimes they lie to protect the people they love.’
It’s one o’clock in the morning in England for her, and I’m sitting on a sand dune in the middle of Venice Beach’s crack central; now is not the time for this heavy-duty conversation. ‘How are the girls?’ I change the subject. ‘Have you seen them lately?’
‘Girls are fine!’ she says, breezily. ‘We got together last week. We missed you.’
A few years ago, I joined her lesbian book club, and acquired a wonderful group of supportive friends in the process. ‘You didn’t talk about me behind my back, did you?’
‘Only for about three hours. Then we moved on to some other poor sod whose personal life is far more of a train wreck than yours.’
‘Well, I miss you guys, too,’ I tell her, forcing out a smile, though my face feels like it’s cracking. The weekend after Rupert flew home alone because I told him I needed time on my own, so I was going to stay on in Santa Monica and rent a little Airbnb, Nat rallied all the girls together and threw me a pity party via FaceTime. There was copious alcohol, and similar quantities of outrage and moral support. But since thinking through the fact that my husband may have been a cliché – and in being so, might have made one of me too – I have reeled it in a bit as far as crying on shoulders goes, given them less access to my pain and drama, out of fear they are sitting in a circle across the world drinking wine and talking about me: a pity party I didn’t get invited to.
‘You’re a good friend,’ I say. ‘I don’t say it often enough and I certainly haven’t said it lately. But I appreciate that you’ve been there for me. More than I could ever say.’
‘You really sound like you’re about to top yourself. Maybe you weren’t joking.’
To get us off this topic, I tell her about Harriet and the trip to Malibu.
‘Wow!’ She gawks at me. I think she’s going to say it’s insane that she can be even contemplating a future with a guy she’s only just met, but instead she says, ‘He wrote Love for Lara ? Is this for real?’
I frown. ‘It is. But he’s a dick.’
‘He wrote the most iconic romance of our generation; he’s allowed to be.’
‘Is he? We differ on that.’ I tell her how he virtually ignored me, ate like a pig, how he’s so smug and full of his own importance.
‘And you fancy him like mad.’
‘What? Are you serious? Frank?’ I cough up his name like it’s a furball.
‘Is he attractive? I bet he is.’
‘Yuck, no! He walks around with these huge, ugly, bare feet. He’s a human yeti.’
I can see she’s tinkering with her phone. I try to work out what she’s doing. And then a dirty big grin erupts over her face. ‘Oh, he is!’ She holds up the phone so I can see that picture of him in Central Park, in his striped scarf, with his hair flying away. His appealing smile.
‘That was a million years ago. And those years have been unkind.’ I waft a hand in front of my suddenly burning hot face. ‘Besides, the point of this story was not to talk about that gonk. What am I going to do about Harriet? I think she’s serious. I think she really believes this guy is the one .’
‘For someone who doesn’t want to talk about him, you certainly had plenty to say about him.’ She’s cocking her head and giving me that look she gives – the one that says that so much about my very existence is a contradiction in terms. Then she adds, ‘It’s perfect.’
‘What is?’
‘Revenge sex.’
‘Huh?’
‘A fling for a fling. You and Rupert have been together for so long, no wonder you’re chomping at the bit to bonk someone else. So do it if you think it’ll make you feel better. Get even, then move on with your marriage. Or not, as the case may be.’
‘Revenge sex?’ I almost flinch. ‘Does anybody actually do that?’
‘Some. I counselled three of them last month.’
‘So it clearly works, then. If they’ve still got to come and see you.’
She chuckles.
‘You’re wrong though,’ I tell her. ‘My marriage may not have been perfect, but I was never hankering after sex with someone else.’ Then I add, ‘Not then and not now. In fact, the very thought of getting down and dirty with someone new is horrifying. Stripping naked for new eyes. Navigating someone else’s nether regions…’
She holds up the palm of her hand. ‘Got the picture!’ She shakes her head in affectionate despair. ‘So do you really think Harriet’s serious about wanting to marry this kid?’ she asks, once she can stop grinning.
I shake my head. ‘I don’t know how serious she is about the marriage part. I think she’s serious about the being in love part. You should see them. They’re so enviably goo-goo over each other.’ I hang my head. And I don’t even know what I’m more sad about. That Harriet is in love, and I feel like I’m going to lose her. Or because my husband is off cheating, and no one feels goo-goo over me.
‘You’re going to get through this,’ she says, tenderly, reading me like a book. Or like a good friend. ‘Remember it’s not the journey but the destination.’
I huff. ‘Yeah, but this isn’t really a destination I foresaw, is it? My daughter hooking up with a guy across the world and maybe making a commitment that no nineteen-year-old knows herself well enough to make.’ I certainly didn’t know what I was doing when I was just a little bit older than Harriet and signing on for life with someone. ‘Me possibly finding myself single at forty-two.’
I tell her I had this crazy, disturbing vision. Us all gathered around the wedding arch that’s decked out in bright pink hibiscus while Rupert and I watch our daughter become family with someone else. Rupert’s hand around Dag’s broad back (not that I know she has one; I just picture anyone called Dagmara as being formidable about the trunk). Aiden’s hand around my daughter’s tiny waist. And me standing there with no one’s hand around me, a piece of driftwood washed up on the shores of middle age.
She rolls her eyes. ‘Oh for freak’s sake! You’re forty-two. You just started the marriage and baby thing really young, so you just feel old, but it’s not that you actually are old. But as you well know, not wanting to be divorced isn’t the right reason to stay married. You know what Gandhi said.’
‘Can we have one conversation that doesn’t involve Gandhi, please?’
‘Okay then. I’ll keep Gandhi’s wisdom to myself. Trust me, you’re going to come crawling back and eating out of my hand for a bit of Gandhi.’
I smile, despite very little about this being funny.
‘Moira,’ she says, in her best pep-talk tone. ‘I think you’ve got enough to focus on with your own problems. I wouldn’t get too hung up on the idea that Harriet is going to rush headlong into a future with this guy. That first flush of love is great, and we’ve all been there; it’s a bit like being on mind-altering chemicals. But it doesn’t always go the distance. I’d let it ride if I were you. Don’t worry about losing her when she hasn’t even gone yet.’
‘You’re probably right,’ I say.
‘Do you feel better now, pumpkin?’
I nod, over-enthusiastically.
‘Good,’ she yawns, ‘because I’m knackered. I think I need to try to sleep before it’s time to get up.’
We sign off and promise to FaceTime again soon and I get back on my way. The Santa Monica beach path never normally fails to put some perspective back in the frame. I always love this phase of the day. Warm enough to wear a T-shirt, but not sunny enough to have to slap on sunscreen. People seem so happy to be alive. I watch dog walkers, and groups doing spin classes on the sand. Another group participating in a boot camp. Teenagers tossing a ball around. Lovers kissing on a wall. But I suddenly feel almost eerily empty, almost bereft, now that my best mate has hung up and is drifting off to sleep on the opposite side of the Atlantic, and I am alone again with my troubling thoughts. I feel so lonely that it almost makes me gulp air. The same inner monologue is back to plague me.
You have to try to believe him for the sake of twenty years of marriage. You’ve never known him to lie before. He sounded sincere when he said nothing happened.
You totally do not believe the lying sack of shit. Of course he sounded believable. Who wouldn’t when faced with having to give up fifty per cent of their net worth?
And just because you’ve never known him to lie before, doesn’t mean he hasn’t.
The sun is making its descent. That point where the world is golden, where the palm trees are becoming silhouettes. And then from the bowels of my backpack I hear Ping! I’m thinking it’s Nat again with something she forgot to tell me, so I pull over, excited to have my lifeline back. But it’s a number I don’t recognise. A California area code.
Got your # from H via A. I don ’ t know what your feelings are about all this but let me tell you mine: this business of them being in love and wanting to marry is bullshit. There ’ s no way I ’ m standing by and watching my son make the biggest mistake of his life.
I read it again in case there’s any chance it could mean something other than what it says.
Oh my God, I need a cocktail!
Fortunately, there’s a bar a short way down the beach path, so I pedal like the clappers for a few minutes, spot a bike rack, throw my lock around my wheel.
‘He doesn’t want to watch his son make a mistake? What about my daughter? Ugh! Can you believe this man?’ I realise I’ve just said it out loud to the girl showing me to my table, and she’s giving me a very strange look indeed. I put my order in for a Moscow Mule before I’ve even sat down. By the time the gingery, boozy fizz hits my lips I’ve already banged out my reply.
Hi Frank. It ’ s official. You ’ re an asshole. Thank you for having us for that obscenely wasteful brunch today in your spectacular home which you clearly don ’ t deserve. Please be assured, you and I are very much of the same mind. There are a lot of amazing young women in this world, but unfortunately for all the guys out there, there ’ s only one Harriet – and she deserves so much better than anything you sired.
Oh, and by the way, I ’ ve read all your books. Love for Lara was okay, but the rest of them stink. Have a nice life. Moira.
Sent.
Goodbye.
Die!