Chapter 21 #2
‘We ran in entirely different circles,’ she finally explains. This small detail breathes life into me, and it’s more than she’s given me in ages. I am afraid to blink in case she decides to close the door shut again. ‘Dating with your step-brother … ew, no,’ she says.
She walks to the closet in the hallway and pulls out fresh bedding. ‘I’m beat,’ she says. Quickly, I move to take the linens from her.
‘You know, a buddy of mine might have a room coming up in the financial district in the next few weeks,’ she says slowly.
‘I’m not sure if it would be a permanent thing, and it’s a little out of the way of the action, but it would definitely get you through to summer, until you …
y’know, find your feet properly. Say, if you are sticking around.
’ And there it fucking is. Now she’s no longer in need of a live-in therapist.
‘Oh, sure. I mean, I really don’t want to be a burden here or anything.’
‘No, no, not a burden,’ Naomi counters, a catch in her voice. ‘It’s just that … well, I’m sure you didn’t move here all the way from London to be out here in the ’burbs with me, right? Like, life is just out there, waiting to be lived.’
A small part of me wants to tell her that I’m exactly where I am meant to be.
So, Ted, a reporter will ask. You seem really content these days. Happy in your skin. For the first time in a long time.
Well, that is all down to my incredible wife.
It’s a funny story, really. This beautiful, smart woman from Ireland had helped my sister through a very tough time, and one night I just came over, and there she was, making dinner for everyone.
It was like a thunderbolt. A coup de foudre, as we might say at home. In any case, it was wonderful.
‘In fact, now that I think of it,’ Naomi adds, trying to sound as if she hasn’t been trying to bring this up for some time. ‘I can show you it on Craigslist. You can get a feel for the space.’
She pulls open my laptop on the desk and, to my horror, the screen is still open on the Tedettes’ forum.
Ted’s photo stares right back at us. Fuck.
My stomach feels as though it’s running to the four corners of my torso.
I stand behind her, waiting for her to go a bit postal about exactly why I might be looking at websites with her brother’s face on them.
I close my eyes, waiting for the detonation.
Instead, she is peering so closely at the keyboard, over her glasses, trying to find and type in the letters C, R, A, I … that she seems to miss what’s on the screen entirely. I exhale a little as she presses return. Ted’s face disappears and she focuses in on finding the goddam house listing.
I drive up to the Craigslist condo, where Jesse, the anaesthetist that Naomi is friends with, is standing outside.
He has sandy hair and the sort of jawline that somehow screams ‘popular in high school’.
The vibe is decidedly ‘I came from money, and an absolute ton of it’.
In another life, I might have been attracted to someone like Jesse.
I could look at him on a daily basis, cooking dinner or watching sports on TV or walking out of our lavishly spacious shared bathroom.
But, alas, not in this life. My dance card is already full.
‘You must be Esther,’ he says warmly as we shake hands. His smile is extremely … orthodontic. We walk briskly towards the building. ‘How’s she doing anyway?’ He speaks with genuine concern for her.
‘She’s OK. In love, I think. And this new guy Stevie seems like a good person,’ I say, hoping that I’m not divulging too much.
‘And you’re writing a book,’ Jesse says.
Christ, did I say book? ‘It’s more like a play, I think,’ I tell him. My head is still on Ted, but I guess there’s no harm in impressing this dude, either. ‘Like a comedy project.’
‘Oh, right … it’s just that Naomi said it was a thing about grieving?’ Jesse says, confused.
‘It is and it isn’t. Gallows humour and all that,’ I clarify, although I am stumped when it comes to offering him more detail than that.
We take the lift to a very high floor.
‘So the good news is that the super is on the first floor, if there’s ever a problem,’ he explains. ‘Luckily, the lift is never out of service – you can see why that’s a lucky thing. The stairs to the eighteenth floor would not be considered friends.’
I am nodding with interest, but his words are landing on me like fluttery moths, because there is no way at all I am moving here. It’s going to take a lot more for Naomi to dislodge me than hinting about someone else’s spare room.
‘Rent is nine hundred dollars a month, which is actually pretty good for the area,’ Jesse is explaining. There’s not a fart’s hope in hell I could afford that, even if I wanted to. I’m going to have to throw the deal.
As I open wardrobes and look inside washing machines, I think back to the awful flatmates I had when I first moved to London.
There was Jones, who lied about being a journalist on a glossy magazine, full of false promises about free shampoos and moisturizers.
On the first weekend Ruthie the dog-groomer moved in, I went into the shared bathroom to find three guys wearing nothing but cowboy hats, taking a shower together.
After her there was Nathan, who was minimalist to the point that I jokingly referred to him as a serial killer.
He moved out not long after, taking his extremely meagre belongings with him.
Jesse is showing off a huge TV mounted on the wall. ‘Plasma … all the channels …’ He’s starting to sound like the teacher on the old Peanuts cartoon. Wah-wah-wah.
‘Oh,’ I tell him. ‘The TV would be a problem. I’ll probably be spending a lot of time writing.’ A pause for effect. ‘About death.’
‘Well,’ he says, ready for negotiation, ‘I don’t really watch it that much. It won’t be too much of a problem. I could maybe move it into my room.’
What other dealbreakers are there? I think back to Ruthie, the dog-groomer and semi-professional orgy-organizer.
‘How do you feel about overnight guests?’
‘Um, that’s cool.’
‘OK, I’m really glad you said that. I’m part of a community, you know, that likes … free love. Polyamory.’ He’s drawing a blank. ‘Swinging.’
‘Swinging?’ Jesse says. Is his confusion a Jesse thing or a Canada thing?
‘Like, group sex. It’s definitely something I like to tap into wherever I am.
’ The second the words leave my mouth, I fret that he will bring this information back to Naomi.
Something in his clean and orderly demeanour tells me he won’t.
Besides, his eyes are bugging. God love him, he’s never said the words ‘group sex’ out loud in his life.
He nods slowly, taking it all in, before faltering slightly. ‘You know what, I’ll have to get back to you. A couple of other parties have told me they are interested. I’ll email you in a couple of days.’
I am not like other sixteen-year-olds, who slam doors, space out squeezing their spots in front of Home and Away and play records in their bedrooms until the walls rattle.
My mother and I are actually OK in each other’s company, mainly because we are like two people who found themselves washed ashore together after the years-long storm that was my father.
Now that she is on her own, she is a calmer person and a calmer mother.
One day, on the way home from school, I find a man’s tie in the glove compartment of the car, in among the mints and maps and cans of hairspray. ‘That’s your dad’s,’ she says with absolute conviction, and I think no more of it.
A few weeks later, the discovery of a bottle of massage oil in the sitting room elicits nothing but irritation from her. ‘Stop looking into it so much,’ she says. ‘Jesus, can a woman not look after herself a bit around here?’
Eventually, she comes clean about her and Patrick, my father’s old boss.
‘We’re just having a bit of fun, seeing where this takes us.
’ She winks at me as though we’re friends.
She is physically unable to keep the good news to herself in any case.
She loves being in love, and she has the bloom of a June rose about her.
The bloom is lovely to see. Though we’ve not said as much, we don’t want to return to a living situation where there are even cross words.
It’s not long before Patrick arrives at Hiroshima, smarmy all the way up and down and suitcases in hand. The vibe shift is instant, and overpowering. Within weeks, our delicate, exquisite equilibrium is ruptured.
‘Why can’t he just live somewhere else?’ I plead. ‘We’re better off on our own, the two of us.’
‘Just as well you don’t get a say, then,’ she says pointedly. She is pulling away from me, from our cosy kinship, and I am feeling displaced. Less like a daughter, more like a lodger.
The feeling like a spare prick ramps up even more on the night before my Leaving Cert exams; the first night I hear them screaming blue thunder at each other during an argument.
A glass shattering against the wall, then complete silence.
I cannot believe we are back here, already, after managing to get through the first time, and the following morning I tell her as much.
‘I have no idea what you are talking about,’ she says, exhaling a perfect arrow of blue smoke in my direction. She is the only person who can make smoking in the kitchen of a three-bed semi look even remotely glamorous. The bloom is gone from her skin.
‘Please let’s get rid of him,’ I say. ‘Let’s not go back to this.’
She knows I know that she has shat the bed. ‘What’s it to you? Sure you’ll be in college soon, doing your own thing,’ she reasons.
She taps her cigarette ash in a way that makes me think there’s more to say.
‘Actually, Patrick says he will happily pay for your college accommodation, to save you a commute to wherever you are going.’
‘You’re kicking me out?’
‘Where in the last five minutes have I mentioned anything about kicking you out? This is to make your life easier. Good Lord, why couldn’t I have had one of those children that was actually grateful for things?’
The truth of it catches in my throat. ‘No, you’re choosing Patrick over me.’
‘Esther, must you always be this dramatic? Jesus,’ she says between deep drags. ‘You’d honestly do anyone’s head in.’