Chapter 12 Adam “Happy”
Adam
“Happy”
What the hell? Did Darius just try to…? Did Jules just nearly…?
I watch through the living room window as she walks from his Ferrari toward the front door.
His eyes stay locked on her as she disappears from my line of sight.
Then he smiles as I hear her key turning in the lock.
Why? Because she turned back to look at him before coming inside?
To wave goodbye? Or even, Jesus Christ, to blow him that same kiss I think he nearly just planted on her lips inside his car?
Did he really just try to do that? No, I must have been mistaken, right?
I feel cold. I feel sick. For a second, I wonder if he spots me as he reverses his Ferrari back out of the drive and its ten-trillion-megawatt beams sweep across the tatty sofa I’m sitting on by the window.
Then he’s gone and I grab a book off the table to pretend I’ve been sitting here reading and not waiting up for Jules.
Even though that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.
Because it’s late and I’m a decent guy is what I tell myself.
But it’s not only that, is it? It’s because I’m a jealous guy too and rattled by how well Jules and Darius have been getting on. Maybe with good bloody reason.
“Oh, you’re still up,” she says, noticing me as she hangs up her coat in the hall.
“Yeah.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Sure. Why? Shouldn’t it be?”
“Darius gave me a lift back,” she admits, either not registering or deliberately ignoring my tone. “Because your mum’s car wouldn’t start. Again…”
I keep on glaring. I want an explanation. She must have worked out that I could see the two of them from here.
“Darius thinks it’s the distributor,” she says. “But he reckons the whole car is kaput. He says he knows a dealer who owes him a favor who might trade it in.”
“Saint fucking Darius,” I say.
She glances at my whiskey glass, but this has nothing to do with that.
“So that’s what you were discussing out there so intimately, was it?” I say before I can stop myself, unable to keep the accusation from my voice. “The state of our car?”
“Oh,” she says, “so that’s where you’re going with this, is it?
No ‘Hi, Jules, how did the dinner go?’ Or ‘Gee, honey, you must be tired after working so hard.’ Or ‘Why don’t I fix you a nice cup of herb tea and run you a salts bath?
’ Instead, I get you sulking over some bullshit about me talking to one of our oldest friends in his car.
Well, hey fucking ho, Adam. Plus ca change, plus c’est la même chose. ”
“I don’t even know what that means,” I snap. Because I don’t. I’m about as fluent in French as Groucho Barx is in cat.
“So look it up in a dictionary. Although you would of course have to hold that the right way round.”
For a second, I don’t know what she’s talking about. But then I see that the book I’m pretending to read is, in fact, upside down.
“Or maybe I’ll save you the effort,” she says, her eyes now flashing with anger. “It means the more things change, the more they stay the same… Like with us. Even with everything that’s been going on in the shed…even with all that…you and me, we’re still…we’re still…”
“What?”
“Stuck.”
“Stuck?” That same word she used against me in our fight after Darius’s pool party. Only now, the way she says it, it sounds even worse, more like fucked. Leaving us no further on from that row when everything came spilling out, in spite of all the other good stuff that’s happened since.
“In the same holding pattern, Adam,” she says, stabbing her finger at the dark sky outside.
“Like planes, flying round and round each other, only never going anywhere new. And never even landing together at the same time…Well, guess what? We can’t fly around up there forever.
Because one day we’ll…we’ll run out of fuel. One day we’ll crash.”
“Oh, well, do allow me to be the first to congratulate you on your excruciatingly long and tortured metaphor,” I say, slow-clapping her.
“Simile.”
“Whatever. Because it still doesn’t make any sense. Things have changed. Are changing. Like…like…” I nearly tell her about my body and how much better I feel because of it, but stop myself just in time, grasping for something else instead. “Like what’s been happening in bed.”
“Sex. That’s really all you can think of?”
“Well, why not? Because it is good, isn’t it? Better than it was before. Because of us remembering how we used to be and bringing those memories back. Like you said,” I remind her. “Like we’re using those old experiences to fix the present.”
“Sex is just a part of a relationship, Adam. Not the relationship itself.”
“Okay, then what about…” I almost tell her about how much better I’m getting on with Nelly because of us now getting into cycling together too, but of course that would be admitting I got fit behind Jules’s back.
“What about the fact you and me are spending more time together, doing all this stuff, traveling back?”
“But we’re not, are we? Not really.” She glowers. “We go back one at a time, with the other one waiting on their own in the shed with just a zombie for company.”
“Okay, fine, but we’re still talking about it afterward, aren’t we? We’re still sharing the experience.”
Arms folded, she’s having none of it. “All we’re actually talking about is the past. Not our real lives now.”
I hate it when she does this. When she gets so bloody dogmatic. “This is you all over, isn’t it?” I snipe. “No matter what you get, you always want more. Like I gave you a goddamned multiverse time machine and that’s still not enough.”
“Because we’re still arguing, aren’t we?” she points out. “And apart from fucking like rabbits, I can’t see how we’re any happier here in the present.” Her eyes narrow. “Do you really want to know what I was talking to Darius about in the car?”
“Yeah, actually. I bloody well do.”
“Moving on. Making plans for the future.”
A sudden swell of panic rises inside me. She can’t mean…she can’t mean with him, can she? He can’t have asked her to—
“Because, actually, Adam, the dinner did go well. Really bloody well. So well that Darius is going to fully fund my pop-up restaurant.”
Oh. Okay, so not on-on, not together…But still. “You can’t,” I say.
“Why not?”
“There’ll be strings attached! There always are with him.” Like with him pretending that he’s not micromanaging Quark when it’s obvious to everyone at work that he is.
“Yes, but at least he believes in me,” Jules says. “And knows I’ll make a success of it.”
I’m about to snap back at her that she’s making a big mistake by giving him control, because whatever comes out of this, it will never truly be hers. Then I hear what she’s saying. That I haven’t believed in her. I can suddenly see it right here in her eyes, how much she’s wanted this.
“I believe in you too,” I quickly say, but it’s only now that I’ve said it out loud that I realize I actually mean it.
She can do this, can’t she? She’s an amazing chef.
Someone who could even work in Paris if that’s what she wanted.
I mean, at least that’s what her mentor, Chef Marcel, said.
“We don’t need his charity,” I add, meaning this too.
“I can sell off some of my gym equipment, can’t I?
And a couple of my bikes.” Although, shit, even that won’t be enough, I work out.
Not seeing as how they’re all second- or third-hand already.
“Or if that’s not enough then we can—” But already, I’m faltering.
“We can what, Adam? We’ve got no spare money.
Because we’ve never taken the risks to make any.
” Her look of determination now switches to one of full-on guts.
“Which is why I’m doing this, no matter what you say.
I’m taking him up on his offer and you’re not stopping me.
This isn’t just for me. It’s for us. For our family.
One of us has to do something to fix our bloody finances and find a way forward, instead of just doing nothing.
Instead of just going out on yet another fifty-mile flippin’ bike ride and hoping it’ll all go away. ”
Speech over. She marches back out into the hall and stomps up the stairs. Leaving me in total silence, like it’s not just this stupid book I’ve got upside down, but everything.
Slowly turning it over, I read the title. It’s one of hers. In bloody French. à la Recherche du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust. I type it into my phone to translate.
In Search of Lost Time.
I mean, you have got to be kidding me, right? It’s like the universe is laughing in my face.
Throwing the book hard across the room, I watch its pages flap like wings for a second as it nosedives into the glass-fronted wooden dresser, smashing its upper pane, before fluttering to the floor like a shot bird…landing right in front of the dresser’s old wooden double drawers.
Which is when I remember—oh God…maybe I do have a way out of this.
Jumping up, I rush out into the hall, through the kitchen, and out into the cold night.
Because what if this really is the universe—or even many universes—talking to me?
No, not as in Adam’s-just-gone-totally-coco-loco-and-is-hearing-voices-inside-his-head.
More like what Jules said about this whole series of crazy events being entirely personal to us.
What if In Search of Lost Time is a sign? About where I need to go next. And not just that, but the dresser’s wooden drawers are a sign too?
As soon as I get inside the shed, I jerk the blinds down to make sure Jules can’t see in from the house.
Then I head for the box of tapes and CDs, already knowing what I’m looking for.
Anything pre–October 2014. Right away, I find one.
Again, it’s like it’s glowing in the moonlight.
Just like with that first tape. Like this really is something the universe wants me to see.