Chapter 1 #2
It was in September, however, after the publishing conglomerate Clemence had worked for her entire career went bust and she was laid off and started hanging around the house all day, that things started getting out of hand.
The weather was still warm, and she’d see Larry and Lisa having breakfast on their little back deck just over the railing from hers, kind as ever, their oiled skin like leather.
Soon they’d invited her to join them, have their coffees all together, for a soak in their hot tub, one thing leading to another, and Clemence had been so bored and desperate for something to happen, for any excuse not to keep travelling down the same road forever that she’d gone off course, veering straight into Larry and Lisa’s jungle.
Those months had been a strange, unreal time, and she’d felt as though she were someone else altogether, watching it all from outside of her body.
Like she was a character in a book, and she kept turning the pages to see what happened next, everything leading to the inevitable climax, to the day Toad would come home to find her in their bed with the neighbours, because there would be no going back after that.
But when it finally happened, there had been no relief, because Toad was so devastated, which she’d not anticipated.
And it was infuriating, too—that she’d had to go this far to move him, to actually get through to him.
He’d started crying, which knocked Larry and Lisa right off their game, though they’d quickly pulled it together, asking him to join them, but Toad had already collapsed into the fetal position—so not sexy.
They’d gathered their loincloths and tiptoed out around the heap of Toad in the bedroom doorway, still weeping.
Wailing that he hadn’t seen it coming, that this might possibly destroy him.
Though maybe, he supposed—he was moving through all the emotions, and here he’d found hope—they might be able to salvage things.
Toad paused to snort, and then suggested they go back to counselling, or take a holiday.
Maybe the whole throuple deal, he said, was something Clemence needed to get out of her system, and could be something they’d pursue together.
Toad was willing to be adventurous. He could change.
Do whatever it took to get them out of this rut. He would do it, he said.
So Toad loved her! He really loved her! And he was even willing to fight for her—but it was so far from enough.
Clemence told him straight. “I think it’s us that I need to get out of my system.
” They were over, they should’ve never even started, and she was most disappointed in herself for dragging Toad into this life in the first place when she’d never been properly invested.
Could she learn to trust herself and follow her instincts after having steered her life so wrong?
· · ·
“But the problem,” Jillian reminds Clemence now in the treehouse flat with all that golden light, “is that you never followed your instincts in the first place. Instead, you ignored the red flags and your feelings, trying to convince yourself that the story you were living was true.”
They are sitting among the boxes they’d just hauled up the stairs, and they’re both sweating.
Clemence knows she owes Jillian big time because the stairs are steep, and the boxes heavy and awkward—bits and pieces of crockery, piles of shoes, sheets and towels salvaged from her parents’ place.
The basics, she’d thought, having left almost everything with Toad, but this isn’t minimalism because the apartment is cluttered already, and Clemence hasn’t started unpacking.
“What I want,” she tells Jillian, not for the first time, “is a reset.” She gets up for another glass of water, letting the tap run so the water gets cold.
There is a partially filled ice cube tray in the freezer compartment of her mini fridge, but the idea of somebody else’s ice is disgusting.
The apartment is clean enough at first glance, but the fridge needs to be wiped down.
“A tabula rasa,” she says, refilling her glass and then Jillian’s.
They are parched. She’d offered to take Jillian out for a drink, but Jillian has no time for that.
She’s helped Clemence move, and now she needs to get back to work, and then go home to her family.
“Kind of makes me feel young again, though,” says Jillian, holding the glass against her sweaty forehead. “I can’t remember the last time I helped somebody move.” Everybody else their age has the capacity to hire movers, and even packers.
“Too bad we’ll feel ninety-seven tomorrow,” says Clemence.
“So many stairs,” Jillian admits.
Clemence says, “I owe you.”
“You really do.” Jillian puts down her glass and looks around. “It is a cozy flat, you know. A bit like Bridget Jones’s. The kind of place where you’d end up running outside to kiss Mark Darcy in your underwear. You better watch out for that.”
And Clemence says, “God forbid.” No, there would be no such humiliations here in her new life, no snogging in the street.
Her intention is to begin a very different kind of story, one that doesn’t end with a wedding.
She desires to become one of those excellent women that Barbara Pym wrote about in her mid-century novels, helping out at church bazaars, fortified with a nice mug of Ovaltine.
A woman of substance, of character, who isn’t defined by her relationship to a man.
Because Clemence is finished with recklessness, and impulsiveness.
Clemence Lathbury, she longs to have people start thinking.
She’s such a stalwart. An actual noun. And she’s going to start with her new landlady, Mrs. Yeung, and become the kind of woman that people can count on.
“My Bridget Jones years,” she tells Jillian, “are behind me.”
“But isn’t that what you said when you got married?” The closest Jillian will come to saying I told you so. Such disloyalty is cancelled out by the boxes she carried up the stairs, so Clemence lets her have it.
She walks Jillian downstairs and they linger on the porch.
Jillian says, “You’re really okay?” Everybody is worried about Clemence. Nobody has been convinced by Clemence’s act of keeping it together, if all this is just an act. Is it? Clemence can’t even convince herself.
But she promises her friend, “I’ve never been better.” And this she means. For the first time in her life, Clemence is free to chart her own course, and she still doesn’t know where she’s going, but she doesn’t have to have it all figured out just yet.
She’s about to offer Jillian one more metaphorical bouquet of gratitude for her help this afternoon, with a promise to pay her back with babysitting, or she’ll bake her a cake …
until Clemence remembers she no longer has an oven.
And then the front door opens behind them, and Clemence and Jillian turn around, taking in an impressive pair of biceps attached to a beautiful dark-haired man who looks surprised to find them there.
Until he figures it out. “You’re the woman in the attic,” he says.
“Um, the madwoman,” says Clemence, unable to resist, and Jillian punches her in the arm.
“Well, I’m Edward Rochester,” says the guy.
Clemence says “Really?”
He looks disappointed. He’d thought they had a rapport. He says, “No. I’m Charles. This is my mom’s place, and she’s not happy with you.”
“There’s been a misunderstanding,” Clemence tells him.
“And it’s too late to do anything about it now,” Jillian has her lawyer’s voice on. “The lease is signed. She can’t discriminate. If your mother was looking for a male tenant, she should have specified.”
“She usually doesn’t have to,” says Charles. “One look at the place, and that’s enough. Most women tend toward, um, a different aesthetic.”
“Well, I guess I’m not most women, then,” says Clemence, determined to stand her ground, to not be dazzled by this Charles just because he happens to be handsome, but Jillian is punching her again—what? “And I signed the lease sight unseen. I was out of town and needed something fast.”
“So you’re desperate,” says Charles.
“No, I’m just not choosy,” Clemence corrects him. “When it comes to an apartment, I mean,” she adds, speaking too fast, once she realizes how bad this sounds. “Your mother let me use an online signature. She didn’t even ask.”
“Well, I hope you know what you’re getting into,” says Charles, pulling the door shut behind him. “This house isn’t very fancy.” A screen falls off the window behind him, as if for emphasis.
“That part,” says Jillian, “is obvious.”
“And I’m not looking for fancy, anyway,” adds Clemence.
Jillian says, “She really isn’t. She’s devoting herself to living austerely, to writing her own story. Becoming like a character out of a book.”
“But not Jane Eyre,” says Charles, who is proving more literate than his biceps suggested at first sight.
“More like Eat, Pray, Love,” says Jillian.
“But without the love,” Clemence insists. “Just Eat and Pray.”
“Pray,” Charles repeats, gesturing toward the steeple above the treetops at the end of the block. “So you’re a churchgoer. My mom might come around to you after all.”
“A churchgoer,” says Clemence, trying out the words. She really wants this living arrangement to work. “Well, I mean, it’s possible.” An awkward silence hangs in the air, especially because what Clemence has just said is a lie.
“Well. I guess I’ll be seeing you around …” Charles says, his voice trailing off as he starts walking away, down the steps to the sidewalk.
“Clemence!” Jillian’s shrieking after him as they watch him go. “Her name is Clemence.”
And now Clemence is doing the punching. “What are you doing?” she hiss-pers.
“He totally likes you,” says Jillian, way too loud, perhaps the reason that Charles is looking back over his shoulder, offering a smile and a wave.
“He totally doesn’t. And even if he did, it wouldn’t matter.”
“Oh, you’re going to be fighting them off,” says Jillian. “There is nothing more irresistible than a woman who’s unavailable. Just you wait.”
Unfortunately, Jillian is usually correct about most things.
For example, Clemence observes, surveying her surroundings once she’s back upstairs, her new place really does have a certain charm, in spite of the dinginess, because the light through the doors acts like a filter that softens everything, making it easy to ignore the stains on the wall from where the roof leaked, or to notice that the kitchen is makeshift to the point of depressing.
The furnishings, at least, are definitively hideous—one saving grace.
The armchair reupholstered with mismatched prints, the particle-board coffee table missing a chunk on one side.
The daybed, which would be her bed and sofa at once, was probably pretty once upon a time, a young girl’s princess dream, but the spindles are tarnished now, the mattress lumpy, uncomfortable.
“You’re sure you’re going to be able to sleep on this?” Jillian had asked.
But the effort to do so would be the point.
In her new life, Clemence will learn to adapt and make do, and to not succumb to her every urge or desire.
She will learn that she is stronger and more resilient than she thinks, more than everybody thinks, proving that she is tough and has grit.
That she has character, unlike the sort of woman who wimps her way through seven years of marriage and then ends it all in a most craven act of betrayal.
She’d heard it in the sound of his voice. “I just don’t understand,” Toad kept repeating, unbearably. It took so long for his shock to wear off. He was like a zombie for days. “You knew I would be coming home. I come at the same time every single day.”
“But I was just so sick of hiding,” said Clemence. And waiting. It had been the only way she could think of to light the fuse.
“You should have said something,” said Toad, for the six hundredth time. “We could have found a way to kick things up a notch. Together.”
“But you wouldn’t have been listening if I did,” said Clemence.
“And I think that I was … already gone.” Maybe I was never here, but she wasn’t so cruel as to say that.
And why is it only after she’s hurt Toad that she feels any tenderness toward him?
No one can build a relationship on that, though certainly, she’s tried.
But now it’s over. And perhaps what she’d always suspected isn’t even true, that everybody in love has those same doubts, that everybody is simply going through the motions.
What if “going through the motions” isn’t life at all?
Because hers hadn’t been a life, instead, an illusion.
Clemence had created the kind of life you might order out of a catalogue, and it had proved, in the end, as two-dimensional as that.
What will happen now, she wonders, in her new life, one that’s less a catalogue than a yard sale, or one of Barbara Pym’s jumble sales, constructed of odds and ends, other people’s discards?
Clemence would never have selected any of these items, or this room in which she finds herself, but this is the point.
Mild depravity and lumpy beds—could this be the road to excellent womanhood?