Chapter 3
Three
Clemence does not have a rabbit, but she’s been adopted by a cat, a beautiful one-eyed Himalayan who creeps into her apartment when she leaves the balcony door open.
The cat waits for her, skulking along the rooflines, perching on chimney tops, going unseen by most of the world below, and now Clemence waits for him, too, no longer attempting to shoo him away because there’s no point, he doesn’t budge, and also he seems well tempered and well groomed: altogether pleasant company.
He seems like a creature that doesn’t have fleas or chew on wiring.
And so when she goes out for brunch with Jillian and Naomi, and they’re concerned about her being lonely, asking whether she’s managed to meet anybody in her neighbourhood, she will be able to tell them that she has indeed.
“I’ve been so worried about you,” says Jillian. “Just with all the upheaval, and you jumping into new things so fast. Coming back here, and renting that place before you’ve even seen it, and the smell in the stairs.”
“The smell in the stairs,” says Clemence, “has not improved. But I mean, it’s not like I’m hanging out on the stairs.”
“Is the smell why you haven’t had me over yet?
” asks Naomi, and indeed it’s part of the reason.
Naomi is famously fastidious, and even worse than simply being judgmental, she pretends she isn’t.
To compensate for her judgment, she’d sit down on the stairs, and remark on the fresh air.
She’d breathe in deep and pretend it was fine, which would be awkward for everyone.
But the real reason Clemence hasn’t had her friends over yet, or even seen them lately, is that her friends are so busy.
This brunch had been rescheduled three times already, and, up until the moment Jillian and Naomi arrived, Clemence wasn’t sure the gathering was going to happen this time, either.
Jillian has two kids and a demanding law practice, and Naomi owns a boutique marketing firm whose downtown office has a living wall.
They both own property and vehicles, and have dependents, if you consider a living wall such a thing, which Clemence does, having recently killed a cactus through lack of affection.
She’d purchased the plant from the artisan market in Sorauren Park, which featured no fewer than seven purveyors of succulents, and how does a person even choose between all that?
In the end, she’d selected the cactus that was most heavily discounted, and maybe you get what you pay for, because she’d taken it home and watched it wither before her eyes.
“You probably overwatered it,” Naomi explains once Clemence has filled them in.
“I didn’t water it at all.”
“Well then,” says Jillian, “there’s your problem.”
“The thing that gets me, though,” says Clemence, because they’ve been talking about work, about what Clemence might possibly do now that the industry upon which she’s built her entire career has ceased to exist, “thinking about the succulents, I mean, is the way that capitalism has backed women into a corner. And I say this as a person who made a living for years writing about wedding dresses. But, I mean how can there be seven different people selling succulents at a single market?”
“It’s a side hustle,” says Naomi, who explains she’d read a thing about that particular market on blogTO the week before. “And the hustle is real. The woman who runs it is a tyrant. She banned a vendor once because her name was too long and wouldn’t fit on the promotions.”
“But isn’t a side hustle worse?” Clemence asks.
“Imagine having a full-time job and a cactus biz? That’s exhausting.
And then there are the skincare coaches and dog therapists, and all those women who sell leggings in a cult.
Why doesn’t anybody have a real job anymore?
It’s like women entered the workforce but they ran out of jobs, so they just started making stuff up. ”
“I have a friend,” says Jillian, “who’s literally a nail mechanic.”
“What is that?” Naomi asks.
Jillian says, “She’s certified.”
“By who?” Clemence is outraged. There should not be an authoritative body certifying anybody’s repair of fingernails. “Fingernails fix themselves. Nope, me, I’m going back to basics,” she tells her friends. “I’m going to be an indexer.”
She is met with blank faces. “People do that?” asks Jillian. “I assumed it’s all automated.”
Clemence explains how not all of it is, because they barely give out academic tenure anymore, so most university professors are elderly and fixed in twentieth-century non-technical ways.
“They post job listings in the back of poorly circulated magazines,” she says, “which cuts down on competition in terms of getting gigs.” She was even qualified, having aced an elective indexing course back in university.
“Does it pay any better than the cactus trade, though?” asks Naomi.
Clemence says, “Fortunately, I’m a woman of modest means.
” Today’s brunch is a rare indulgence, and she has ordered the cheapest items on the menu—a fruit bowl and buttered toast. But it feels extravagant enough to be sitting on a restaurant patio on a beautiful day in the company of her two dearest friends, watching the world go by along King Street.
After she and Toad had moved to the West Coast, it had been hard to acquire friends who felt like real ones.
Plus she had been so consumed by the novelty of coupledom, anyway, and it was hard to meet anybody in the subdivision where they bought their home …
until she met Larry and Lisa, and look where that led.
“You know, I’m happy for you. You’re really doing it,” Naomi tells her, and Clemence glows in her regard. “It’s not easy, coming back here, and starting over like this.”
Jillian asks if she’s seen that guy again, meaning Charles from the porch. She’s disappointed when Clemence confesses that she hasn’t—“I don’t think he even lives there.”
“You’re not just hiding, trying to avoid spicing up your love life?”
“I don’t have a love life. I don’t want a love life,” says Clemence, “… although there is someone.” And this is the part where she explains about the cat, everything except the fact that he’s a cat.
“Now, come on,” they say. “Tell us all about him.”
“Or her,” says Naomi, very open-minded.
Jillian says, “Spill it.”
So Clemence explains about Bailey, which is the name she’s given him. “He’s kind of quiet,” she says, trying to make it all sound normal. “He likes heights.” She is failing. They look confused. “Climbing,” she clarifies. “Loves rock climbing,” she explains.
“Maybe he’ll take you sometime,” says Naomi. “A little expedition.”
“I mean,” Clemence says. “It’s just nice to have someone around.
” But has she caught herself out now? Proving them right, that she’s bored and unhappy on her own?
Because she isn’t—but if she insisted, they’d refuse to believe her.
Her friends know her too well, except they don’t know that now she’s different.
“So, what’s he do?” Jillian asks her.
Clemence thinks of his stretches, the way he arches his back with his paws out front. “Yoga. He teaches yoga.”
“You should have brought him,” says Naomi. “We could have met him.”
“Oh, I don’t think we’re there yet,” says Clemence. “Things are still pretty casual.”
“Between the yoga and the rock climbing, though,” says Jillian. “I mean, he’s got to be pretty well built.”
“He is,” says Clemence. “He is, well, built.” Not a word of a lie. Oh, except the teaching the yoga part. Everything else, her friends had inferred.
“So you’ve slept with him,” Jillian follows.
“I knew it!” Naomi says.
“No,” says Clemence, closing her eyes. Was everybody obsessed with sex, or just these two? She looks at them again. “We’re taking it slow.” The server comes around again and adds hot water to her little teapot. “Still getting to know him.”
“Have you heard from Toad?” asks Naomi.
“Absolutely nothing,” she tells her friends.
“Which is fine.” It was, and it had even been true …
until yesterday, when a letter from their lawyer, now only Toad’s lawyer, she guesses, arrived in her parents’ mailbox.
Clemence had left her cellphone in Seattle—it was on Toad’s family plan, anyway—so mail was the only way he could get in touch.
She had a new number now, and her mother had called to tell her about the envelope, and Clemence can’t get that envelope out of her mind, the image of it stacked atop a pile of bills and takeout flyers on the counter by the phone, nondescript and portentous at once.
“A clean break is the best thing for both of us,” she tells her friends firmly.
Which is also what Clemence has been telling herself, the chief appeal of a clean break from her point of view being that she won’t have to keep atoning for her sins for the rest of her life.
Those sins a means to an end, it is true, this end specifically—it feels like she’s dug her own tunnel out of jail—but now she doesn’t want to pursue this conversation any further, and her friends have intuited as much, moving on from her love life to another fraught topic: Naomi’s parents, who’d recently returned to Japan after a four-week stay.
Naomi explains, “My mother set me up three times while she was here—twice with people she’d met in the elevator and another time with a guy who was working at Starbucks.”
“And how did that work out?” asks Jillian.
“Not great,” Naomi answers. “Especially since neither of the elevator guys knew what was happening. I think they thought she was kidnapping them, but they were way too polite to protest, which is the first sign that they weren’t my type.”
“What about Starbucks guy?”
Naomi shrugs. “He brought me a muffin. It was even fresh. So that was something. But my mother was disappointed. She’d thought he was at least a student, doing his PhD, but he was just really into coffee, so she dismissed him, and now my parents are gone, and so are the dates, and my life and my place are my own again. ”
Clemence says, “See? That’s exactly it. It’s luxurious.”
Jillian says, “Nothing about your flat is luxurious.”
“It’s an existential kind of luxury,” says Clemence. “Marriage was my prison, and now I’m free of it.” It sounds like she’s being melodramatic but she isn’t.