Chapter 15
Fifteen
Clemence dreams about Toby, about his lips, and in the dream those lips do more than just receive her fleeting kiss, and when she wakes up in the morning, she’s unable to distinguish between Toby in reality and everything that happened in her head, which is confusing and embarrassing.
She knows that when she sees him, she will blush, and any discerning person will be able to tell that something’s going on, and luckily Toby isn’t discerning in the slightest, but this doesn’t make Clemence feel any more confident about the matter.
She meets Jillian in High Park and they go for a walk.
Jillian’s is the kind of lifestyle in which the suffix “power” gets applied to various items and activities, including juices, lifting, brokering, and yes, walking, and so Clemence finds herself chasing her friend up and down the hiking trails.
She has worn inappropriate shoes, flimsy slip-ons, which make her heels hurt, but she doesn’t complain, because Jillian has made time for this in her busy day, time for friendship and physical fitness.
Jillian is also clearly in much better shape than Clemence, because she doesn’t get winded at all.
“I think you’ve gotten off track,” she calls out over her shoulder, moving a tree branch that snaps back and hits Clemence in the face.
“I thought the point of all this was to forget about men, to be your own centre. To fill your life with other things—that’s what you said.
A spiritual pilgrimage. But you’re acting as silly as a schoolgirl. No offence.”
There is none taken. Jillian is right. And now they’ve arrived at a rock face, and Clemence’s heart falls at the premise of having to scale it, because even in the right shoes, it would have been impossible, but luckily there is another path that winds around it, and Clemence follows her friend along that trail.
“I think I was confused,” says Clemence, “about the difference between going off one man and going off all men in general. I’d forgotten there were men who aren’t Toad.
And I’d forgotten what it felt like to lust after those men.
To feel that tension. The anticipation of a kiss.
Jillian, it’s fun. It’s like my soul has come back to life.
Do you know what a relief that is? Do you know that I’ve been masturbating so much that I’ve triggered my carpal tunnel? ”
“Is that good news?” asks Jillian.
“I think so.”
“I know a good physiotherapist.”
“It’s not desperate yet. I bought a brace at the drug store. It might also be my office set-up. The kitchen table in my place is not exactly ergonomic, and I’ve got this new editing project.”
“Love poems.”
“They’re pretty erotic,” says Clemence. “Sometimes I wonder if everyone affiliated with Sandro is a sexual deviant. Let’s just say I have to take lots of breaks.”
“Clemence!” Jillian hurls a pinecone at her head, and it hurts. “You’re making me uncomfortable.” But Jillian brings it out in Clemence, with her straitlacedness and unflappability. Sometimes Clemence wants to make Jillian flap. It’s not healthy to keep so much pent up inside.
And maybe Jillian agrees, because she almost explodes with the following sentence: “I’m having an affair with my therapist.” These woods are empty and expansive, and Jillian’s exclamation echoes on the breeze.
“What?” Clemence feels displaced. She’s supposed to be the outlandish one.
She had been on the cusp of disclosing that Toad is trying to get in touch—his familiar number lit up on her phone yesterday, and she’d felt a dread so potent and familiar that it felt like being married to him—but she’s refusing to answer his calls.
“You have a therapist?” Clemence is not being funny—this is the greatest surprise of her friend’s revelation. “And isn’t that wildly inappropriate?”
“You’re not the only one who gets to have a shadow side.” And then Jillian charges away into a thicket.
Clemence follows, getting burrs stuck all over her cardigan, and probably in her hair.
During this whole outing, she’d felt like Jillian was trying to get away from her, and now she realizes she wasn’t wrong.
But when she finally reaches her friend, Jillian has stopped moving, perched on a big rock under a maple tree.
Looking up, Clemence sees that the leaves are beginning to turn.
Jillian is crying. Clemence sits down beside her and tentatively moves close enough to put her arms around her. Jillian has never been touchy-feely, but she consents to this, collapsing in Clemence’s embrace. She says, “It’s so fucked up. I know it’s so fucked up. And nobody knows, except Jeremy.”
“Jeremy knows?”
“He wants me to report him, but I can’t. I don’t feel like he was taking advantage. It just happened. I was as responsible as he was. I wanted it.”
“But Jeremy knows?” Clemence doesn’t get it.
“It’s over now. Mostly.”
“Mostly?”
“Jeremy doesn’t know that part. Clemence, I’m a terrible person.”
“You’re not.” She isn’t. But this isn’t Jillian, either. What’s going on here? Jillian is sensible, and this is lunacy. “But this is a lot.”
“So, like, I know,” says Jillian, “is what I’m saying.
About what you’re going through. I understand.
Do you know that when Jeremy and I have sex, we have to schedule it on the Google Calendar?
Do you know what that does to a couple, to have this regimented, impossible, exhausting, never-ending onslaught of a life? ”
Clemence says, “Kind of.” But she’d never had it that bad.
Things had been rough with her and Toad, but this sounded like a different kind of awful.
They didn’t have kids and she didn’t really love him, which made the stakes so much lower when she walked away.
“So what are you going to do?” She finds Jillian’s efficiency remarkable—as with friendship and physical fitness, Jillian didn’t have time to have an affair and go to therapy, so she decided to do both at once.
Jillian says, “I think I’m going to do nothing.
Kind of anticlimactic, right? To go on this journey and end up right where I started, but it’s not like that.
I feel different now. All those things I took for granted, and then once they were on the line, I realized I didn’t want to lose them after all—my marriage, our family.
And I’ve been lucky. Jeremy wants to work through it.
Of course he does. Six months ago, that would have been the whole problem, how accommodating he can be.
Sometimes it’s like living with a balloon instead of a person, you know?
He just floats and here I am losing my mind, but he’s always exactly the same, and I just want him to have a reaction.
I want him to be furious, too, instead of so docile.
But if both of us were furious, everything would explode.
I see that now. One of has to be the accepting one, the forgiving one, and I’m so damn lucky that’s how he is.
I didn’t understand before. I didn’t understand what I’d be losing if I lost him, but now I know. ”
They sit in silence, listening to the whistle of a cardinal somewhere overhead. Jillian moves closer, and lays her head on Clemence’s shoulder.
“What does it mean, ‘mostly’ over?” Clemence finally asks.
“Well, I mean, I’m not seeing him as a therapist anymore.”
Clemence laughs, as she is supposed to. “But who does that?” She turns to face her friend. “If you went public about this, he’d be in all kinds of trouble. And who else has he done this to?”
“He’s been going through a crisis. He got divorced, then his mother died, and his half-brother is an incel, and he needs to sell the house, but the brother refuses to come out of the basement.”
“Where did you find this guy?”
“On Yelp.”
“Jillian!” Clemence cannot fit all these details into her scheme of reality. “You’re supposed to be the smart one.”
“His rating was great, and I needed an appointment in a hurry. He got me in the very next day.” Jillian pulls out her phone and checks the time. “We should keep walking.” She takes off again.
“You just don’t want to face me,” Clemence calls after her.
“I don’t want to be late for my three o’clock,” says Jillian once Clemence has caught up. But she says, “Thank you for listening. And for not hating me.”
“How could I hate you?” Clemence asks her.
“Honestly, hearing your story, I kind of hate myself less. So, like, I love you.” They walked a little farther, and the parking lot appeared in the distance.
“If it’s over, though, shouldn’t it be actually over?
” Fuzzy boundaries were dangerous. “What does Jeremy think of that?”
“You’ll be not shocked to learned that Jeremy has been remarkably easygoing. He wants to give me the space to figure out what I need to know. He says that when I’m ready, he’ll be waiting.”
“And that’s an offer that doesn’t expire?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t want to chance it, though.”
Jillian says, “I know that now.”
“Does Naomi know?”
“I’m not going to tell you.”
“Why not?”
“Because if she does know, you’re going to call her and talk about it for hours and try to analyze how messed up it all is, and I don’t want you to do that.”
“We care about you.”
“I know, but I don’t want the two of you talking about me behind my back if I’m not there.”
“If you’re there, it kind of defeats the purpose talking about you behind your back.”
Jillian says, “Exactly.” They arrive at her car, and she changes out of her athleisure wear like a magic trick, back into a suit with high heels, dropping off Clemence on her way back downtown to the office.
Clemence makes a soft-boiled egg for dinner, and eats it feeling like a baby.
Even her spoon is small, the tiniest of all her utensils with a slightly bent handle.
As with everything she has found in her kitchen, she wonders about its provenance, and the journey any item would have had to take to end up as part of the hodgepodge that is her furnished bachelor apartment.
She thinks about how that’s gendered, too—where do all the bachelorettes get to live?
Never mind the divorcees, she considers the arbitrariness of these distinctions.
And how can there possibly be order at all in a universe in which Jillian has been cheating on Jeremy? With her therapist?
Clemence is forced to use all the strength she possesses not to text Naomi.
Even though it really wouldn’t be so disloyal as Jillian is making out.
No, instead she’d be trying to understand how Jillian could do something so out of character.
If she could talk about it with Naomi, she’d be able (maybe?) to hash out some sense of it, to put the broken pieces of her perceptions back together into something recognizable, but instead she’s on her own.
Poor Jeremy. As accommodating as Jillian is rigid, but if things work out, this will be the reason why—in addition to Jillian’s fundamental goodness.
Clemence and Toad were never very compatible anyway, beyond how well they photographed together, complementary at first glance, but that was only superficial.
Clemence doesn’t miss her husband at all, and she hopes—that initial heartbreak aside—he will come to feel the same.
Being lonely together was lonelier than being on her own.
Which she knows for a fact now, four months into this new adventure.
Clemence has not yet worn out her own company entirely.
She can eat an egg with a tiny spoon, and nobody asks her any questions, and she can go to bed early, or stay up very late.
She can sleep in the nude, and walk around all morning draped in a bedsheet.
She can measure the hours by the church bells, and never attend another service, instead sitting out on her balcony, feeling autumn’s chill setting in, rereading The Republic of Love, a novel she’s read a thousand times, and nobody’s going to make a snide remark.
Clemence realizes her main aversion to the cataloguing system at the bookstore is that those had been Toad’s distinctions, too, between frothy women’s books and literature that was worth one’s while.
Although he tended to read mostly non-fiction, anyway, and then would fail to finish those books.
A copy of Guns, Germs, and Steel had been sitting on his bedside as long as she’d known him.
Worthwhile in itself—Clemence read it. She has never gotten over the chapter about the impossibility of domesticating the zebra.
Because certainly people have tried. But zebras are stubborn creatures, and prone to biting, digging in their teeth, and refusing to let go.