Chapter 22 #2
If there could be anything more absurd than Toby himself sitting at her table, the caterpillar is it.
Clemence can’t believe this, collapsing back into her chair, the plate in her hands.
This is a nightmare. “I washed it, I swear.” Though perhaps not so carefully.
With organic produce, she figured, you didn’t have to.
But surely a decent rinse ought to have done the job.
With an insect that big, wouldn’t she have been able to see it?
Hacking the cauliflower to pieces with her fancy knife, she’d spied nothing at all.
The creature must have been clinging to life on an underside of the floret, manoeuvring out of the way to escape her shiny blade.
It was certainly dead now, as she prodded it with her finger.
Would the situation be more or less gross if the caterpillar were living?
Toby says, “It’s fine. I mean, it’s not like I ate it. Not even close. And I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. You’d gone to all this trouble. You—”
She tells him, “Stop.” Toby has never before seemed so achingly human, which is to say, aware and concerned with the feelings of another.
Toby is trying and this is intoxicating.
“Stop talking.” The food itself was never the point of this meal, instead the opportunity for them to be together in a different kind of light, or any light at all.
So that Clemence could know for sure that their arrangement, while atypical, was nothing she had to be ashamed of, or one that compromised her dignity.
This man, who was squeamish as all get-out, had nearly eaten a caterpillar to preserve her honour, had stuffed his mouth with cauliflower that was caterpillar-compromised.
And now all Clemence wants to do is kiss that mouth.
She’s crossed her fingers that he’s carrying that one brand of condom that won’t give him a rash.
She wants to bring Toby to her daybed and throw all the throw cushions to the floor, and she does all this while telling him, “I want to do everything. Okay? Everything. You can ask, if you want to, but you don’t have to. ”
The sex is middling. Here the whole dream fizzles.
It’s exactly what you’d expect with someone like Toby, who’s fragile, delicate, and whiny in a way it’s easy to forget about when he’s sticking his tongue down your throat and has his hand up your shirt in a closet.
In her bed, though, he’s lost whatever physical fluidity he might possess in the dark.
He bumps his head on the bedframe, and later possibly dislocates his shoulder, and when one thing simply leads to the next thing, it’s much less dazzling than the overwhelming anticipation of waiting.
The getting is not as rewarding as wanting is, which is probably a good thing to learn.
But Clemence nearly fed him a caterpillar, so she holds none of this against him, and while she’s disappointed that their lovemaking was not transportive, she knows he’s a good person, and he makes her feel good, too.
He’s got an ice pack on his head, but his skinny arms are wrapped around her, and she is listening to his heart beat in his pale, scraggy chest. Beat.
Beat. And then nothing. And then it beats again.
She looks up at him with a confused expression, and he knows what she’s asking. “I have a heart murmur,” he explains.
“Of course, you do.” It is a miracle that Toby is alive, and that he didn’t expire when he came inside her, and now she’s imagining how that would have panned out.
What Mrs. Yeung would have thought of the drama, and what a burden to carry a body, however slight, down all those stairs.
It’s such curious, angular body, too. She admires it the way she’d admire an abstract sculpture—it’s interesting.
Toby has beautiful pink nipples, the colour of his lips, and she can’t help kissing them.
And he’s kissing her hair, and this is the good part, the two of them more comfortable naked than they’ve ever been with clothes on, which should probably be the rule.
“I like the way,” he tells her, with his face buried in her hair, “that you aren’t preoccupied with defining what this is.”
“This?” She lets his nipple go. She hasn’t been preoccupied, but only because it hadn’t occurred to her. Yet. She might even never have been preoccupied at all, but it bothered her now that preoccupation seemed clearly out of bounds.
“Us,” Toby clarifies.
And Clemence looks up, resting her chin on her hand. “So there’s an us?” she asks. After all, he started it.
“Well, no,” he tells her. “That’s what I’m saying.”
“And you like that?”
“Kind of?” Toby’s not perceptive, but he knows he’s misstepped.
He’s tentative now, has lost his ease. He tries to explain.
“Sometimes I feel like maybe I’m dreaming.
See, here’s how it is. This beautiful woman walks into my life, and she kisses me, and she keeps kissing me.
” He stops, and suddenly looks concerned.
“Crampton’s not paying you for this, is she? ”
Clemence tells him no, she’s off the clock. This is strictly voluntary.
“It’s not usually so easy for me, believe it or not,” he says.
Oh, Clemence can believe it. “Frankly, it’s been a while, and people were saying that since I spend all my time in an antiquarian bookshop and my closest companion is in her eighties, it was probably going to be a while more.
But there you were, and we just had sex, and you don’t seem to want to tie me down. ”
“You don’t want to be tied down?” asks Clemence.
“If you’re talking sexually, I’m definitely open to it,” he says. “But in terms of relationships, I’ve tried it, and I just don’t think that I’m that way inclined.”
“You’re not a one-woman man?” she asks him, wondering where he’s going with this. Surely Toby is not so spoiled for choice.
“I think I’m more a no-woman man,” he says. “I’m not good at these things. People get upset with me. It’s very disruptive. I hate conflict because it gives me anxious diarrhea.”
“Toby.” She wants him to stop. “Nobody likes conflict.”
“Some people do,” he insists. “The women who go out with me. And every time they tell me that with them it will be different. Now granted, I’m talking about a limited dataset. There haven’t been so many. But it never goes well. And I don’t want that to happen with you. Because I like you too much.”
“That might be,” says Clemence, “the sweetest, strangest declaration of affection I’ve ever received from anyone.”
“You’re kind of sweet and strange yourself,” says Toby, and Clemence wants to melt into the moment entirely.
Its perfection. There is no template for this, and no reason why it should work or make sense, but here in her lumpy daybed with Toby is precisely where she wants to be.
She likes him, too. He’s totally weird, but it doesn’t even matter.
Tracing her fingers along the curious red bumps along his upper arm, which she hasn’t noticed before, and they’re particularly enflamed, so it’s strange she hadn’t. Are they hives?
“What’s this?” she asks him.
And he sighs. “Do you, by any chance, happen to have a cat?”