CHAPTER 18
‘Oh, darling, just move your head for a second … there we are,’ said Jeremy’s mother, and when he lifted his neck up like a baby deer, he felt a cloth napkin get inserted underneath it.
‘You were crying all over the good couch, darling, and trust me, it’s impossible to reupholster because the man who did it for me the first time hanged himself a few years ago. Very sad story. He was Italian.’
‘Oh,’ Jeremy said, laying his head down on the napkin, sniffing. ‘That’s so sad. Do you know why?’
‘No,’ Maria said, shaking her head. ‘I assume he was either born over there or his parents were.’
‘That’s not what I was asking — Never mind.’
Jeremy scrubbed away at his tears while his mum bustled into the kitchen to pour herself another glass of wine.
‘Oh, my darling, what are we going to do with you?’ she asked, finishing off one bottle of chardonnay and opening another to top off the glass. ‘I just hate to see you like this. You’ve always been a sensitive soul, but you seem absolutely miserable and I still don’t really understand why.’
Jeremy sniffed again and rolled his eyes – when his mum said she hated to see him like this, she probably really did hate to see him, physically, when he was upset.
Emotion was messy and Maria liked to keep things neat.
Her apartment, which Jeremy was currently polluting with his presence, was a blinding white and beige affair, all tasteful minimalism, overlooking a south coast beach.
It wasn’t large – Jeremy was sleeping on the pull-out sofa in the study as there was no guest room. Maria didn’t like guests in her house.
‘My love,’ she always said, ‘when you’ve had as many husbands as I’ve had, you learn to value your own space.’
It wasn’t boring, but the apartment was incredibly controlled, everything in its place, inhospitable to change or clutter or anyone who wasn’t Maria and the one or two of her girlfriends who seemed to spend their lives drinking coffee on her balcony.
It was the kind of home where Jeremy’s ever-present giant water bottle would continually disappear; if he left the house to go and cry in the ocean or buy more wine, he’d return to find the water bottle had been relegated to a high cupboard somewhere, or under the sink, or once even the bin.
If it didn’t fit the aesthetic, it had to be hidden.
Jeremy sometimes feared that if he fell asleep in the wrong place, his mum would brick him up into the walls.
After Jeremy’s mortifying drunken excursion to Sam’s house, he’d found himself in a bad place – mentally, due to feeling wretched with embarrassment and shame, and physically, as his mother lived in a famously conservative regional town.
It was always fun to come home and see the train stations and bus stops and corner shops where high-schoolers had yelled slurs at him when he was a teen.
While the area was grimly familiar, the apartment wasn’t.
He often envied people who had a ‘childhood home’ – he’d shifted between various stepdads’ houses too often to feel any real claim over them or comfort from them.
But they tended to be situated around this satellite city (his mother liked her routine, and if the new husband hadn’t already lived there, she soon made them).
The real constant was that his mum was there – so, in an effort to both make himself feel better and maybe arrest the self-destructive trajectory he was on, he’d decided to come stay for a while, get out of the city, get looked after.
Unfortunately, Maria wasn’t thrilled with being thrust back into a maternal role or having her routine of power walks and manicures and cocktails with other divorced women thrown into disarray.
However, she did love someone to drink wine with, and gossip – and Jeremy’s love life counted as gossip apparently.
‘Come on, darling, come sit outside. Fresh air is good. Have some wine, blow your nose.’
Jeremy shuffled outside and sat down, squinting at the ocean, and accepted the literal goblet of cold white wine. He took a huge, joyless slug.
‘All right, tell me what’s going on,’ his mum said.
‘Did Sam break up with you? He’s a handsome little jug of cream but I promise you you’ll find someone else.
After every divorce, you think, is this it?
Am I over the hill? Will anyone ever love me again?
But there’s always some rich idiot willing to get down on one knee.
Did I tell you I’m considering a new husband?
Anyway, more on that later. You just have to pick yourself up and start again. What about that Geoffrey chap?’
Jeremy’s mum asked questions as if they were all rhetorical, never giving him the time to answer. It was how she’d won every argument with her husbands, and apparently became a kind of bogeyman to divorce lawyers.
‘No, Sam did not “break up” with me.’ Jeremy sighed, not particularly wanting to talk about it, about all his horrible mistakes, but knowing that if he didn’t, his mum would make up her own narrative and he’d spend the rest of his life trying to correct it.
Once, when he was a kid, he’d politely accepted a white chocolate Easter egg from a relative, despite hating white chocolate, and to this day his mother would still seek out white chocolate Easter eggs for him, refuting his claim he had any other preference.
‘We weren’t dating, and I didn’t even know if he was queer, and then I found out he was, but I didn’t know if he liked me, and then we slept together and it was really good, but he said he wanted to keep it breezy or whatever, so I started seeing this old author guy for my revenge scheme, which was a huge opportunity I couldn’t pass up, but I guess it did mean that I blew off Sam, and now he’s upset at me and it feels kinda unfair because it’s not like we were dating, you know?
It feels like I did something wrong, but I know I have to stop beating myself up … ’
Maria Thomas Sharp Fernandez Chatterjee looked at Jeremy over the rim of her wine glass for a moment, and then shook her immaculate silvered hair dismissively.
‘I don’t understand what you just said, and I don’t care to try,’ she said, leaning back and crossing her legs.
‘Seems all very high school, very immature.’
‘Gosh, stop sugar-coating it,’ Jeremy muttered.
‘I could do that – I could say you’re completely in the right and you did all the correct things, and then I could pat your head and make you a pie,’ Maria said witheringly.
‘I would actually love a pie,’ Jeremy said hopefully, but she moved past that quickly.
‘Darling, I’m devastated that you are sad, and if you want, I can ask my friend Bev to curse whoever made you feel bad – she’s in a coven, you know – but it sounds like you’re not being honest with yourself, and as a result, not being honest with me.
Trust me, I’ve watched a lot of relationships fall apart, and there’s always someone who can’t face up to their …
culpability in the whole thing. I won’t harp on any longer, and besides, I have to get my highlights done, but just promise me you’ll spend some time taking responsibility for whatever happened, okay?
Then we can drink wine and move on, and you can even be sad. ’
Jeremy sighed and flopped back onto his seat.
‘And,’ Maria added, ‘not to be one of those mothers who nags you about things, but you need to respond to that job offer tomorrow, and I need an excuse to pop a bottle of vintage Moet, and a new job would be a perfect excuse. Okay, ta-ta, darling.’
She disappeared out the door in a cloud of Chanel and air kisses, the clack of her heels disappearing up the driveway a few moments later.
‘Ta-ta, darling,’ Jeremy mimicked, and then sighed again, feeling petty. He was only annoyed because she was right – but he just wanted a single second where he didn’t have to think about that snapshot of disappointment emblazoned across Sam’s face as he closed the door on him.
He pulled out his laptop and opened his latest pros and cons list, simply titled employment .
It had his current job listed, with a fat stack of cons and only a smattering of begrudging pros.
On the next page it had new job , where an intimidating blank slate stretched ahead of him like a dark highway disappearing into the night.
A component of the spite plan had always been to somehow make his work more impressive.
After failing to bully his way into a promotion at PopBuzz, Jeremy had begun furiously applying for other jobs in the industry – as long as they looked more impressive and would earn him more money.
And that was how he’d ended up in a trendy cafe being interviewed for a managing editor role at one of PopBuzz’s rivals, Clix.
‘Look, let’s cut to the cheese,’ said the interviewer.
He took a loud slurp of his coffee, his chino-clad leg jittering wildly.
His name was Jed Brampton, and he wearing the unofficial uniform of people in their late forties who were making ridiculous money from underpaying young people in digital media – expensive sneakers, a puffer vest, and a beard carefully trimmed to cover a second chin.
‘This job is for people with passion. That’s what I look for in people, and I can tell you’ve got that hunger.
You want to put in the time, commit to the grind.
What I need is someone who can basically take Clix off me so I can focus on big-picture stuff, stop sweating the day to day.
It will be long hours, it will require one hundred and ten per cent of your brain, but that’s why we do this right? The challenge.’
Jeremy had done a lot of nodding, desperately searching for a point or a question among the rant. ‘I love to work,’ he said, seizing on a theme, if not a specific idea. ‘People say I’m obsessed – my friends are always telling me to calm down.’
It wasn’t a lie.