Chapter 8
Eight
So explain this,” says Naomi, whose mouth is currently stuffed with French bread. She takes a moment to swallow. “The desire for an unsuitable attachment. How that’s going to fit into your overall scheme. And why you just can’t lust after the hot guy.”
“Naomi is trying to project-manage me,” Clemence says to Jillian.
“This is what you do,” she says to Naomi, who shakes her head.
Naomi has no idea what Clemence is talking about.
And Jillian is laughing at both of them, sitting back against the railings on Clemence’s balcony, against the purple golden sunset, the dazzling colours even more so when refracted through the bubbly wine in the stemmed plastic glass she is holding aloft.
Clemence is drunk. Clemence is happy.
Clemence says, “I fear sometimes I may have bitten off more than I can chew.” It is an evening for disclosures, one more link on a chain stretching back over the decades, since they first became friends when they were still teenagers, Clemence’s current circumstances taking them back to those days of material impoverishment.
There are only two chairs at her table, and it’s too hot to sit inside, and so she’s spread a blanket on the balcony, covering up the detritus from the tree, and she’s called it a picnic.
Springing for the fancy cheeses at the fromagerie and the bread that’s almost cake from the boulangerie, and she’s feeling Parisian, sophisticated.
Her friends have brought wine that probably cost even more than everything else in her elaborate spread, but Clemence is glad.
She hasn’t been drinking much since beginning her new life.
Drinking is not the same without company.
Down below them, Charles Yeung has just finished mowing the lawn, and Clemence is explaining why he can’t be the object of her affections, no matter how attractive he appears in the soft evening light.
Clemence tells her friends, “The point is not to have any significant attachment at all, which is a definition of freedom, you know? To be accountable to nobody but myself, and to travel, to discover who I really am by where I ended up.”
“Like a tumbleweed,” suggests Jillian.
“But not in the middle of a dust bowl. And I’m not saying there is anything wrong with ties and connections.
I think connections are the basis of a meaningful life.
You know I know that, I mean—here you are!
But after so long being tied to something—to Toad, to Toad and me and our marriage, to the institution,”—her tongue trips over the consonants—“I wanted to try being untethered in that fundamental way.”
“And how’s it going?” asks Naomi.
Clemence says, “Well, okay, it’s kind of lonely. I’ve learned I’m not cut out for hermeticism.” She stops Jillian before she can say what’s next. “And I know you told me. I know you knew, but that’s not the point. I had to find out myself.”
“You need the love!” exclaims Jillian, triumphant. “Because what’s eating and praying without it? Like a two-legged table, your spiritual quest. It will topple over.”
“And he likes you,” says Naomi. “Lawn mower man. The way he looked up and waved. I’d let him hold up my table.”
But Clemence disagrees. “What I need is like a placeholder,” she says. “An object of fixation, but one that’s never going to go anywhere. Something inconsequential.” She notes the skepticism on her friends’ faces. “And I’ve thought about this a lot.”
“Well, why not try an app, then?” suggested Naomi. “For something casual. Say ‘no strings’—they love that.”
“But it’s not even about sex,” says Clemence. “I mean, I already tried that, supposing that meaningless sex might be the solution to what ailed me, but it didn’t fill me up at all.”
Jillian says, “I mean …”
Clemence tops up her glass. “We’re talking spiritually,” she insists.
“And it didn’t do a thing. And I’ve had time to reflect now.
” She takes a sip. “I think what I need is a little bit of drama. You know the way it goes when you start something with somebody at work?” She’d met Toad when they worked together in the student union pub a thousand years ago.
“And all of a sudden, you’re excited about going to work?
Even if nothing ever happens there, because it would be inappropriate.
” (Not true. She had got it on with Toad in the room in the back among boxes of beer nuts.) “And there’s this frisson.
” She feels strange saying this word out loud, because it’s one of those words she’s only seen written down, and Clemence can’t quite remember if it means what she thinks it means, but she’s thinking of fizz.
She’s watching the bubbles in Jillian’s glass again, and the sun’s nearly gone.
“Everyday life just made a little bit more exciting—and it’s more about anticipation than anything coming to fruition.
I don’t want the fruit, I want the blossom.
” Perhaps she’s making no sense at all. “But I have this problem. I mean, I’ve had it, where I always take the fruit.
I can’t say no to fruit.” This is all getting a bit Book of Genesis.
“So maybe it’s best if the fruit is a little bit rotten?
Or at least pale and dyspeptic. An unsuitable attachment, something inconsequential.
Something that wouldn’t even get written into a book. ”
“How is your book going, anyway?” Naomi asks. Ever since Clemence had mused about writing one, no one will let her forget it.
She counters, “When are you going to be getting around to having children?”
Naomi retreats.
“So you want drama,” says Jillian. “What you’re saying is that you’re bored.”
“And not horny.” Naomi has emptied another bottle of wine. There’s row of them now. Mrs. Yeung is going to see them in the recycling and arrive at conclusions—that Clemence has been entertaining visitors, that Clemence is a lush.
“Oh, I’m horny,” says Clemence. “But I like that part. I’d honestly thought that my sex drive died, but now it’s restarted, and I’d thought it never would.
It feels so good to be yearning. I thought I’d never yearn again.
But I’m good with being slow but steady.
It’s like cultivating a flame. No, I just want an object. Is that wrong?”
“Objectification?” asks Jillian. “Isn’t that supposed to be wrong?”
“Not when it’s a man,” affirms Naomi. “That’s like reverse racism. It’s nonsense. I say you’re allowed to make an object out of any man you like. So venture forth. You’re only righting the balance.”
“It’s like she’s an authority,” says Clemence to Jillian.
“As long as you like what she’s saying,” says Jillian.
“I’m saying I’m ready for the cake course now,” says Naomi, and Clemence has to haul herself back up to her feet, which is even harder to do with the world spinning.
So this is how a woman builds a life, in bits and pieces.
You realize there are these little things you’re missing—a box of matches, a roll of tape, Q-tips, a needle and thread—and you head out to buy them, many of these available in Crampton Goldberg’s little grocery store where you only have to blow the dust off.
You pick up a chive plant and put the pot on the deck, snipping odd fronds for seasoning or garnish.
You go running once, and only once, but your shoes give you blisters, so you purchase a box of Band-Aids from the pharmacy, along with a small first aid kit since you’re already there.
Clemence finally buys a can opener, and also a beautiful yellow teapot from the potter at the market in the park because she’d been drinking her tea cup by cup, and the kettle was working overtime.
She likes a pot so it can linger, lasting halfway through the morning.
She is working on her index, for a biography of Alvin Puddicombe, an obscure mid-twentieth-century regional poet, fuelled by rage and alcohol.
He used to beat up his girlfriends. Puddicombe always had girlfriends—what is the matter with women?
Clemence sits at the desk she has made at her kitchen table, and contemplates the logistics of indexing.
That she has the power to give this book a kind of shape: Puddicombe, Alvin: Impotence.
Improprieties. Infidelities. Intoxication.
Where did the impulse come from to fashion such men into legends?
When the first pot of tea is finished, she puts away that work and opens another file.
She has been writing. If anybody asks her how that book is going, she still refuses to answer, because she doesn’t want to jinx it, but at least it’s going now, words on a page.
“So this is how a woman builds a life, in bits and pieces,” she writes.
She never knew how much a box of matches would matter.
When she’d been married, she’d had all the material goods a person could desire.
Once upon a time, Clemence had been co-owner of six coffee grinders, which is hard to believe now, when going out to buy a simple yellow pencil encompasses an errand.
Leading to the need for a sharpener, of course, but she can borrow one from Doug, the agoraphobic artist who lives downstairs.
He makes her stand in his doorway sharpening the pencil to a point, the shavings trailing on the floor. He tells her the mess doesn’t matter.
It feels good to be creating, sitting at the table, pencil in hand.
To be enduring, too—the notion that soon she will have spent an entire season here.
Soon the summer will be over, fall will begin, and Clemence will discover all kinds of new things about her new home.
How the leaves change and when they’ll let go of their branches, and how the light will hit her bed in the morning when those branches are bare, and maybe it will be cool enough that she’ll have to acquire another blanket for her bed, but at the moment that seems impossible, far more likely that the heat of the summer will continue forever, just the way that Clemence, only a year ago, couldn’t have imagined a world beyond her old life with Toad.