Chapter 25
Twenty-Five
Clemence tells her story to Dr. Penelope Harkness, who’s written the book on marriage and is now developing the podcast. She tells her about Toad, and Larry and Lisa, and returning to her hometown for a new life on her own terms. She imagines that Dr. Harkness will have to add a new chapter to her marriage book, and invite her to be a guest on the pod.
She likes the idea of being an object of fascination, anticipates raising Dr. Harkness’s sculpted eyebrows—but the eyebrows remain unmoved.
Which is not surprising. Dr. Harkness’s entire face is plastic, which Clemence imagines is partly the result of too much surgery, but also necessary in her line of work.
Or does Penelope Harkness simply think Clemence is boring?
And Penelope Harkness just makes a humming noise, a hmmm of acknowledgement perhaps. She certainly doesn’t probe for details. She is meeting with Clemence for the purpose of her index, and Clemence thinks about how much time she spends sorting through other people’s stuff these days.
“I guess you get a lot of people pouring their heart out to you,” she says, to fill the awkward silence.
“It does happen,” says Dr. Penelope, who has not been forthcoming about her personal life.
Her home is silent, austere. There are no photographs, and it might as well be a museum.
She seems more like a statue than a person.
Her hair is perfect and as unmoving as her eyebrows.
She has published four books previously, all of them bestsellers, but this is the first one that she’s publishing herself.
Dr. Penelope is all business. Clemence doubts she’s even listed on Yelp.
She isn’t what Clemence had been expecting based on the connection through her sister Grace.
Grace’s friends tend to be more authentic, wearing hearts on their sleeves, often literally in the form of elaborate tattoos.
Whereas Dr. Penelope’s skin is pristine.
Her arms are white and smooth—not even a freckle.
Love Means Having to Say You’re Sorry is a guide to repairing broken marriages, about communication and apologizing and taking responsibility for one’s actions.
And Clemence imagines how it would have felt to have this book come into her life a year ago, if Toad had brought it home and placed it in her hands.
She thinks about how much of their love was about saying sorry over and over again.
Clemence had disappointed her husband a thousand times, and it was mutual.
Toad was excruciatingly annoying—every time he breathed it sounded like a sigh.
Clemence had spent a lot of time apologizing to Toad, but never in the way Dr. Penelope intended.
The only thing she had been genuinely sorry for was all of it, that she hadn’t listened to that voice in her head that first night they were out together, that she’d allowed everything to happen knowing it was ultimately unsustainable.
Which wasn’t fair to Toad, who wasn’t a bad person, and deserved a partner who believed in him, and for a while she’d tried to be that partner, faking it until she was making it, but that didn’t work, and Clemence was sorry about this, too.
That she’d been faking everything, and any apology she’d delivered would also have been fakery, and the slow torture of it all could have gone on forever.
She asks Dr. Penelope what she thinks about all this.
But Dr. Penelope is only interested in finding out if Clemence has experience writing audio scripts.
“I can sense you have a flair for the dramatic,” she says.
Is that a compliment? She’s going to be using transcripts of her clients’ sessions for the podcast—with their permission, of course, but obtaining these will likely be simple.
She’s looking for a writer to change details for the sake of anonymity, to spice up the dialogue.
She has clients, she admits, who are pretty insufferable, and it’s asking a lot of listeners to submit to that.
Clemence fibs and tells her she’s well versed in the area.
Wedding Belles had made a podcast, a last-ditch effort to avoid sinking into media obsolescence, though Clemence was part of another department, but Dr. Penelope doesn’t need to know that.
Clemence tells her about her years at the magazine, about everything it taught her about the wedding-industrial complex.
“Now there’s a scourge,” she says, and Dr. Penelope agrees. Clemence tells her about her own wedding, and the trip to Tahiti. “I was so consumed by the idea of the wedding that it never occurred to me what a commitment we were making. Or supposed to be making.”
“It’s a huge commitment,” says Dr. Penelope. “The rest of your life. But who’s to say that a handful of years isn’t also some kind of an achievement? It’s hard work, marriage. Even one that doesn’t last.”
“But maybe I didn’t work hard enough,” Clemence admits. “I think I knew it was never going to work. We both wanted different things.”
“Like what?”
“Well, I wanted to not be married to him. It’s pretty irreconcilable.”
“And you want me to absolve you,” says Dr. Penelope.
Does she? Maybe. “I guess you get a lot of that from people, too.”
“All the time. But the permission has to come from within yourself. It doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks. I really do think any marriage can be saved if both parties are invested in making it happen, but the investment is what matters. Otherwise, you’re just sleepwalking through your life.”
“You’re saying that love means having to say you’re sorry …” Clemence is trying to make sense of it all, “but you actually have to mean it.”
Dr. Penelope nods. “Your sister told me that you were in a tight spot.”
“Did she?”
“It’s hard out there for an indexer,” she says. “Just like bank tellers, and grocery store clerks. Going the way of the dodo.”
“I don’t know if it’s all as bad as that,” says Clemence.
Dr. Penelope says, “The dodo didn’t, either.”