Bear #2
It makes Maia feel odd to think of Bear cycling across town to stand in front of that house—they’d moved to the flat near Mehri and Fern’s just after the trial, before his first birthday.
She thinks of his life as being relatively untouched by their father, but now she can see him, toes braced against the pavement to steady his mountain bike, looking up at the windows, filling in the gaps of what he knows with things that may or may not be worse than the truth.
She wonders who lives there now and if they feel it.
If they sense the violence of what happened there.
Not just with Vihaan, but all the things before.
“Yeah, the flat has always been more us,” she says.
“You shouldn’t go there. To the old house, I mean. ”
“I’m not trying to dig stuff up. I just…” He trails off.
“Yeah, I know,” Maia says, and squeezes his foot.
Cora is going on a date. She sits in front of the small tabletop mirror in her room and twists the barrel of a lipstick to reveal an unspoiled dusky rose.
She smooths its chiseled tip carefully across her lips and then stares at herself.
At the beauty counter, surrounded by other women, it had seemed normal—fun, almost—but now it just strikes her as odd to be choosing a particular part of herself to highlight in this way.
A neon arrow: Here, this is where you should look.
She realizes her lips have come to feel as unsensual as an elbow or a knee and it startles her to think they might be expected to reawaken, to become something more.
“You don’t have to kiss him,” Mehri had said. “It’s just a date. You go, you chat, you eat dinner together. It doesn’t have to be anything more unless you want it to be.”
His name is Felix. He has an open smile and curly hair that flops back into his eyes like a coil in a spring rebounding whenever he pushes it away.
At forty-eight, he’s only a year older than her and it reminds her how young she is, because he doesn’t seem old at all.
He wears a shirt of soft brushed cotton unbuttoned at the collar, and she finds herself aware of the small triangle of skin this reveals—fresh and creamy white.
Warm, she imagines. Then the bob of his Adam’s apple.
The light dusting of stubble on his chin.
He’s a vet and tells her about the animals and their owners as though they are characters from a book he finds particularly endearing.
“It’s odd, you know. My contact with people is through this singular prism, but it’s amazing how deeply I’ll end up feeling I know them.
I see how they deal with stress and grief, how they cope when their pet becomes incontinent and starts leaving gifts on the sofa.
” His eyes crinkle at the edges. “Most of the time I’ll never know what they do for a living, but I’ll hear the way they talk to their cat as they lift it out of the carrier.
There’s…I don’t know…a vulnerability in that.
That they let me in.” She can picture him there, with his reassuring smile.
The animals’ fear. The faint smell of disinfectant.
He refills her glass from the bottle of wine they’ve ordered, asks interesting questions.
He is easy to talk to. She likes him. He is the type of person she could be attracted to.
He is nice to her. Kind. And this is the sticking point.
She’s used to people being nice to her—her children, Mehri and Fern, Roland, the other gardeners at work—but those, she thinks, are interactions that don’t have the same consequence.
As Felix talks, she feels herself weighing each gesture, each sentence, as that of a potential partner, someone who she might let into her life.
And as they talk, she realizes everything that tilts the balance in his favor upsets some other internal measure.
She feels as though she has entered a funfair house of mirrors, where whatever is there in front of her may not be what it seems.
Later, on the phone to Mehri, she tries to explain. “No man can win. If he’s nice, it just feels like he’s trying to charm me. When he asked questions, do you know what I thought?”
“That he was on a reconnaissance mission to find your weak spots.”
“Yes. Saving them up to use against me later. I don’t want a man who’s horrible to me, but how can I trust a man who’s nice?”
“Because most men aren’t like Gordon.”
“I know that logically, but it doesn’t change the way I feel. Even though I know you—Roland—wouldn’t have set me up with just anyone, but—”
“Listen, Roland knows this guy’s ex. Felix is still friends with her. That’s not the dating history of an abuser, is it?”
“Why didn’t you tell me that before?”
“I didn’t know. It was only while I was sitting here waiting for you to call that Roland said.”
“You were worried about me?”
Mehri sighs. “No. Or maybe a bit. But only in the way I was when Fern went on a first date.”
“I remember that. You fell asleep on the sofa after a bottle of wine and didn’t know if she’d come in safely until the next day.”
“She’s still alive,” Mehri laughs. “No harm done. He was a nice boy. Jake, or Joseph. Something beginning with J. But listen, Cora, I love having you all to myself, but it’s not right. You deserve to be loved. And by someone good.”
“You love me.”
“Yes, but I’m not going to take off your clothes and ravish you. You need that bit too.”
“I’m not sure I want that bit,” Cora says.
“Of course you’re not. You’ve locked that side of yourself away to focus on the children. But look, Bear’s fourteen—he’s off seeing Bees—you never know, by next year he might be spending the whole summer down in Brighton with her.”
“You’re acting like I don’t have a life. This is too much for one night,” Cora says. “I’ve been on a date and now you’re—”
“I’m sorry, you’re right,” Mehri says, and they both laugh, and the conversation moves on to Mrs. Wilbur, Mehri’s neighbor.
The next morning is Sunday. Cora wants to enjoy her day off and the quiet of the flat before Bear arrives home, but she knows she won’t be able to switch off until she’s dealt with Felix.
And so she sits in bed at 7:30 a.m. and composes a text she hopes is friendly, but also makes it clear last night was a one-off.
Her phone pings a couple of hours later.
Hi Cora,
Thank you for letting me know where I stand. I had a lovely night anyway.
All the best, Felix.
And in his perfectly punctuated politeness, he is again both someone who seems well mannered and kind, and someone she cannot trust. She glances at her watch.
It’s a few hours until Bear is due. She could look through the seed catalog she’s brought home from work, put on some Tchaikovsky and stretch her muscles.
These are all things she would normally delight in.
But today, she’s impatient to be serving lunch and putting on the washing machine with Bear’s clothes from the weekend.
She wants to settle back into just being Mum again.