Chapter 29 #2
Clemence gets down three mismatched mugs that had come with her apartment, chipped and charmless, but at least they would not remind anyone of Clemence’s very public breakdown.
Although if anyone had mentioned it, Clemence could gently remind them that the sale made record profits, moving jumble like no committee had managed to in decades.
She’d been a part of that, in spite of everything, and the negative attention inspired by Mary-Ann Arbuckle’s campaign could hardly take all the credit.
“So you’re going to be okay here,” says Bonnie, as Clemence places the mugs on the table.
She’s talking about the cozy room and the pretty teapot, the books and papers that are piled on the table because Clemence is employed, if not altogether gainfully.
She’s talking about how Clemence’s cough has subsided after weeks of her sounding like a barking seal, her chest still rattling audibly every time she inhaled, but now she breathes almost normally.
Bonnie is still worried about mould, but the gingham curtain and the teapot have helped bring her around.
She’s exchanged numbers with Mrs. Yeung and they’ve been texting, and Bonnie admires her, trusts her to be looking out for her daughter.
“I don’t need anybody looking out for me,” Clemence tells her. “I’m a grown woman.”
“A grown woman who is still convalescing after a very scary illness,” Roger corrects her. He worries as much as Bonnie does.
“Everybody needs someone,” says Bonnie. “Though it does seem like you’ve got an awful lot of someones.
” The last month had demonstrated this, friends and family showing up.
Crampton Goldberg had sent a floral wreath, and there had been great debate as to whether she thought that Clemence had died.
Once Clemence regained capacity for speech, she’d phoned the grocery store—perhaps the last grocery store left on the planet where an actual human being answered the phone—to thank Crampton for the generous gesture, and also as proof of life.
But she hadn’t heard from Toby. Perhaps he’d gone home for the holidays to see his mother, which was what he’d been planning, even though his stepfather’s cologne aggravated his scent sensitivities, and he’d end up with brutal migraines.
Toby had tried to talk to his mother about it once, but it turned out that his stepdad had a glandular disorder and the cologne was to disguise his body odour, and Toby’s mom is stuck between a rock and hard place, and so Toby doesn’t go home a lot.
Sitting with the tea in Clemence’s apartment, no one mentions Toby now, a conspicuous omission.
Because they’d met him, Clemence’s unsuitable attachment, a face to match the idea, undeniably real, and so where had he been while his sometime girlfriend had been ill enough to be hospitalized and then even after?
He’d been there when it happened, when the paramedics came.
They’d all seen him there, as useless as the rest of them, mouth gaping, arms hanging.
And then after, once Clemence’s mom had gone in the ambulance, and the rest were figuring out what was what—touching base, making plans—he’d somehow disappeared and no one saw him again.
Clemence had been hoping for a message of some sort.
But Toby was out of reach, their relationship existing in the realm of the physical.
And they’d never had another conversation about the terms of their relationship besides its boundlessness.
Had she missed him? Truthfully, not really.
In the throes of her illness, everything was overwhelming enough that she hadn’t had the latitude to think about anything else—except she must have been, because Toby kept appearing in her fever dreams. But then so did Mrs. Yeung, and Charles, and Crampton, and Clemence wondered if she’d dreamed it all, surreal and absurd.
What if Toby was actually a figment of her imagination?
When she googled him, she got no results.
The only other person who could corroborate his existence was Crampton, and who’s to say Clemence hadn’t dreamed her up, too—but no, there was the wreath. Tangible evidence.
Clemence knows that getting rid of her parents will be a problem, that they would find every excuse to linger.
To throw her back in the car and bring her home again where she could be under their watch, with no mould, and they can monitor her life choices.
No more jumble sales, because those turned out to be stressful and dangerous—who knew?
Roger decides that he can fix the leaky pipe under her sink—he’d brought his tools specifically for the task—and stretches out underneath the gingham curtain to do so.
Bonnie says that she might as well clean Clemence’s tub while she’s waiting for him to finish, and Clemence lets her mother do what she needs to do to feel useful, taking the opportunity they’ve offered for her to take it easy.
She sits down on her bed, which will take some readjusting to.
It’s true, she’s quick to tire, and she was only planning to sit, but now she’s lying down, and she closes her eyes, listening to her mother’s tuneless hum, the incessant sound she doesn’t even know she’s making, but to Clemence it sounds like home.
When she opens her eyes again, her parents are sitting on the edge of the bed watching her.
“What? Where? How long have I been lying here?” she asks them. Lately time has been a slipstream. Has it happened again? But no, just a few minutes, they tell her. The tub is scrubbed. The leak is fixed—for now. Roger doesn’t have a good feeling about the hardware, but he’s done the best he could.
“This place needs some overhauling,” he says, looking around, but with the cost of an overhaul, the rent would no longer affordable.
It was a fact. Shabbiness was built into the program, and you learned to live with it, leaky pipes and all.
By now it’s unfathomable to consider the convenience of the kitchen she’d once had—counters that wiped clean, a stove with four burners, a refrigerator that made ice cubes and could tell you when you were out of butter.
But this place has character. This was what Bonnie said, and she even sounded like she meant it, hugging Clemence as they said goodbye, telling her no, she didn’t have to walk them to the door.
“All those stairs,” and Clemence could hear in her mother’s expression that the stairs had replaced mould as primary household threat.
“I’m going to be okay,” Clemence promises them both, after they’d promised her that they would pull the front door firmly shut behind them, testing it too because sometimes the latch sticks and the door blows open again.
“I’ll take it easy on the stairs, get lots of rest, and not push myself too hard, and take lots of vitamins. ”
And finally they are gone, and Clemence is alone, really alone, for the first time in weeks, comfortable in her own space, and properly home.
She’s missed it, the way the wind makes the windows rattle, and how the little radiator chugs along, creating a warm oasis in such a cold world.
Clemence had arrived with so little, and here she’d gone and built a universe.
She’d missed her pillows, and her books, and that beautiful teapot.
She likes this place. She doesn’t mind the solitude.
Particularly because there’s never very much of it—there’s someone knocking on the door right now.
“Come in!” Clemence shouts, looking around the room for whatever it is that her mother may have forgotten.
But when the door opens, it’s not her mother at all.
Instead, it’s Charles Yeung, a sight for sore eyes, and he’s carrying a jar of—“Soup!” Clemence exclaims. Is it possible that Charles’s pecs have become even more defined since the last time she’d seen him?
“Aren’t you supposed to be back to work? ”
“Not until next week,” he says. “My mom sent me up.”
“Of course she did,” says Clemence, who feels ridiculous reclined on her daybed, but she’s also too tired to sit up. Those stairs had been quite a climb.
But wait—there is something about Charles, something that’s wrong, and Clemence can’t seem to remember what it is.
“Are you okay?” Charles asks her, reading the bewilderment passing over her face.
“I am,” says Clemence. “I mean—” And then she remembers. “Your book! Minor Feelings! Charles! Oh my god! I thought I gave it back to you. I gave it to your mother.” She is sat up on her bed in a panic.
But Charles is laughing now. “I got it,” he says.
“Unbelievably. My mother is not the most reliable messenger. She’s got her own priorities.
Unless it’s soup, she’s just not that into it.
But then she thought you might die, and that it was being upset about the book that had done it, and she took a taxi all the way up to my place, showed up at my front door.
She’s never done that before. She normally doesn’t feel comfortable north of Highway 7.
She says she gets vertigo. I think she made a deal with God—she returns the book to me, and you get better. ”
“I guess it worked,” says Clemence. All these unseen forces beyond her knowledge. “How did your wife take it then?” Clemence asks him. “Your mother showing up there unannounced?”
“What do you mean?” says Charles.
“I don’t know.” Clemence mainly wants to demonstrate that she’s in the know, that she’s not interested in Charles in that way, and that she’s not a fool after all, in spite of all her experience attesting otherwise.
“I was just—” She was just trying to pass as someone normal.
“How come she never comes downtown with you?”
Charles says, “We’re separated. It’s been ages. I don’t even know how you know about her. I don’t think I ever said—”
“Your mother,” says Clemence.
Charles says, “Ahh.” The light is dawning.
“She talked about her all the time. I guess they were close.”
“My mother hates Claudia,” says Charles. “She always has. I wouldn’t say that was the whole problem, but she made it hard sometimes.”
Clemence says, “I had no idea.” Were other people’s lives ever what they appeared to be from the outside? “She told me all about her. You have a wife, and she’s a doctor.”
“Well, she is a doctor,” affirms Charles. “And I think my mother hates the idea of divorce even more than she hates Claudia, which is saying something. She says she was never good enough for me, but she also hopes we reconcile. She wants grandchildren. My mother contains multitudes.”
“Walt Whitman.”
“Just like him,” Charles says. “Listen, I’m sorry all this is weird. I think she was nervous, too, about you and me. She’s protective. She knows I’m not in the right headspace for a new relationship now. I think she could tell that I like you. But the timing’s just—”
“I know,” says Clemence, and she does.
“It’s honestly just refreshing to meet somebody and be friends—that doesn’t happen for me very often anymore. And besides, you’ve got a boyfriend. The Italian guy.”
Clemence has given up arguing the Italian part. “He’s not my boyfriend. I haven’t heard from him in a month.” And now here’s Charles, and he’s brought her soup. How has she managed to get all of this so wrong?
“But he left you those notes.”
“What?”
“They’re piled in the hall,” says Charles. “Did you see them on the table on your way in?” But she hadn’t bothered to look. The only mail she’d received was from Toad’s lawyer, but now that’s over. Charles says, “My mom says he was over here all the time.”
“But your mom also told me you had a wife.”
“The notes are there,” says Charles. “The notes are irrefutable. Come on!” He gestures for her to follow him back downstairs, and there they are, a stack of envelopes.
She picks them up, examining Toby’s messy scrawl with bright blue pen, like the penmanship of a child who’s writing with his eyes shut.
Ugly, and yet strangely appealing, which sums up Toby himself quite perfectly, and Clemence feels that frisson again, the curious feeling that keeps her thoughts returning to him, in spite of so many reasons why they shouldn’t.
Charles is waiting as she rips the envelope open—a piece of lined paper torn inside, torn from a three-ring binder. It’s a drawing made with the same blue ink, a rough drawing of a woman’s profile, a sparkle evident in her eye, something slyly amused within her smile.
“What is it?” asks Charles.
Clemence says, “It’s me,” surprised, and she shows him, because she’s recognized herself at once in those few lines, more familiar even than her face in the mirror. Nothing else is written on the paper except Toby’s name, scrawled in the right-hand corner.
“It’s good,” says Charles, surprised, and Clemence is surprised as well. Opening another envelope to find a different drawing, same pen, same face, Clemence laughing with her mouth open wide and her eyes shut.
The third envelope Clemence opened contains a drawing of Clemence with her chin in her hands, rolling her eyes, but she’s smiling.
“They’re really good,” says Charles. It is hard to believe. That even Toby has a hidden side, hidden talents, and that he sees her, really sees her. She’d sensed it, but here was living proof, pages and pages of it.
“I think,” says Charles, “that you’ve been on his mind.”
“What day is it?” Clemence wonders. It’s been so long since such details mattered. But it’s Thursday, which means that Toby will be at the bookshop. “I need to get my coat—” she murmurs. All the way back upstairs, but it’s freezing out.
“Here.” Charles hands her his own coat, which he’s slung over the banister. “He’s been waiting for you.” Indicating the envelopes, the drawings. “You should go.”
So she does, even though the snow is falling again, and the sidewalks are still treacherous. Making her way back to the main street again, this neighbourhood she’s been missing. All the way to the bookshop.
Because she needs to talk to Toby. Who looks up at the sound of the bells at the door.
Who sees her, and puts down his book.