Chapter 21
Twenty-One
Jillian and Jeremy have been seeing a therapist, a different therapist, one they didn’t find on Yelp and who has prescribed that they partake in scheduled date nights.
Jeremy texted Clemence to ask if she might help—the prospect of Jillian having to scrounge for child care for these date nights could be the straw that breaks their marriage’s back, and Jeremy doesn’t want that.
So he’s wondering if Clemence might be able to babysit.
Careful to emphasize that Clemence is not a babysitter; he knows she’s not a babysitter.
He doesn’t want to cause offence by suggesting she’s a babysitter, and Clemence goes off—what’s wrong with being a babysitter?
Care work is work and it’s work that she values, and she’s certainly not too good for that.
To suggest as much as sexism, and Jeremy texts back, “Whoa whoa whoa.” He just meant that Clemence wasn’t really into kids.
Which she isn’t, but Jillian’s daughters are non-feral as kids go, plus while Clemence really isn’t into kids, she wants to play a role in preserving the institution that is Jillian and Jeremy.
She is a tiny bit concerned that philandering and divorce are contagious, and feels responsible.
Also, they are going to pay her, and every little bit helps.
Even better? Naomi has agreed to come over to keep her company, and Jillian had finally told her about Dr. Yelp, so she and Clemence can sit down together and make sense of the whole thing once the kids are in bed.
Hannah and Chloe are the kind of children who could make Clemence almost consider having kids, or at least see the point of the exercise, because they are smart and funny and entirely responsible for their own toileting habits.
They make microwave popcorn and get dressed into matching pyjamas, and Clemence notes that caring for them is actually more fulfilling and less weird than talking to Toby, plus it pays better.
But of course, Toby himself comes with benefits, which Clemence finds herself discussing with Naomi when she arrives after work, long after the kids’ bedtime.
Naomi has brought wine, and the two of them are curled up on the couch to hang out for the first time in ages.
“But I thought the whole reason for an unsuitable attachment was so you wouldn’t get attached,” says Naomi.
“I don’t know if you’d call it attached,” says Clemence.
“Not even at the lips?” asks Naomi, who’s been filled in on all the details. The way the whole thing with Toby
is a bit like that junior high school party game where you’re kissing in the closet, except it goes on well beyond seven minutes, but stops mainly at groping and those deep passionate kisses that are so intimate and rapt that it feels like getting off, and every time they come back out into the light, Clemence’s legs are weak, she’s dizzy, and it’s hard to walk.
They’ve upset all kinds of stacks in the closet, and now paperbacks litter the floor.
She’s imagined lying down on them, the softness of their worn paper and cracked spines, how it might feel like a bed—what a mattress.
Clemence has imagined a lot of things. “The closet thing is weird,” says Naomi. “What’s up with that?”
“I guess because it’s private,” says Clemence.
She’s picking dust bunnies out of her hair all the time now.
But she also loves it, the closet under the stairs, Ursa Major—Asia Minor.
The way that she can’t see what she’s doing in there, which means somehow that she doesn’t have to think about it, either.
That what happens with Toby exists on another plane, and when she tries to explain to anybody else it doesn’t make sense.
It sounds stupid and sordid, and Toby’s weird.
Of course, Toby is weird. But in the darkness, his weirdness seems to matter less, and she loves the way he makes her feel, the slow and steady desire.
She’d never known desire to be steady, instead of overwhelming want and satiation—too much and then nothing.
But oh, the way he can eke her out, pulling feelings from places she didn’t she could feel.
“But it’s only kissing, you said,” clarifies Naomi.
“There’s nothing only about it.” And Naomi nods.
She gets it. Naomi has no interest in the strings and drama that accompany relationships.
Naomi is Clemence’s guru in opting out of the narratives society offers a woman for how her life is supposed to be.
She is married to her job, and it’s an inspiring, fruitful relationship, and every few weeks she hooks up with partners via various apps for the creative and wild sex that’s outlined beforehand in startling specificity.
There is a trapeze folded into a dresser drawer in Naomi’s spare room that Clemence only knows about from the two weeks she was staying there, and she can’t envision how a person could begin to use it.
If she asked, Naomi would explain it to her, but some things are best left to the imagination.
All of which is to say that Naomi, of all people, understands what a kiss can be.
“But do you think you’d still want to kiss him if that closet had a functioning light bulb?
And if the answer is no, what does that mean?
” Clemence thinks about this, and Naomi continues, “And if the answer is no, I think that’s okay.
Not everything needs to be dragged out into the light of day.
But I think it’s important you really want what you want, is what I’m saying.
Isn’t that kind of the point of wanting after all? ”
And here, they begin to talk about Jillian, about how what she wants is Jeremy, but not with the way that things are, and how her affair with the therapist was a cry for help.
“Jillian never cries for help like normal people,” says Naomi. In crying for help, as in all things, Jillian would be extraordinary.
“Weren’t you stunned when she told you?” Clemence asks. She needs Naomi to be stunned. Naomi’s signature pose is refusing to be rattled, but surely this one thing must have shaken her. “Especially the part about Yelp.”
“Especially the part about Yelp,” says Naomi. “Because Jillian is usually so responsible. You’d think she’d get a decent referral, you know? She doesn’t trust Yelp to find a dry cleaner, so it seems strange she’d use it for a therapist.”
“But maybe a Yelp therapist was precisely what she was looking for. It all makes sense. You know Jillian and her way with precision. A good therapist wouldn’t have been useful to her, but a bad one permitted her to act out in a most fulfilling fashion.
And now look—she and Jeremy are out on a date together.
She says it’s like their relationship has been renewed and he’s finally invested after a few years of coasting on autopilot. ”
“But maybe that’s just luck,” says Naomi. “It all could have unfolded very differently.”
“I want to report him,” says Clemence. “The therapist. But she knows that I will, so she won’t tell me his name.”
“I know his name,” says Naomi. “He’s the first result when you look up therapists on Yelp.”
“We could leave a review.”
“An honest review.”
“Oh yes, let’s write that review,” and Naomi pulls out her phone and they start composing a paragraph about the therapist who’d preyed upon their friend. One star.