After the Party (21 page)

Jem gazed at him unblinkingly. “That's terrible,” she said, somewhat inadequately, she felt.

“It's a nightmare,” he said, his jaw set tight with suppressed anger.

“And there's nothing anyone can do? Nothing to help her?”

“No,” he said decisively. “No. It's very simple. You either want
to help yourself. Or you don't. Paulette doesn't. It's easier for her to live the way she does than to change. As hard as it is to imagine, she's taken the easy option.” He shrugged. Jem watched him with interest. The cool, soft façade had slipped a bit and she could see someone underneath that she wasn't entirely comfortable with. There was something there in the hardness of his jaw when he talked about his ex, something more than just anger or resentment; it was more like
hatred
. It unnerved her slightly and she cleared her throat.

“Sorry.” He smiled. “Sorry. I told you. A bad story. Anyway, moving swiftly on . . .”

“No, it's not that, it's fine, it's just really, really sad.”

Joel's face had lost its cruel angles and he looked serene again, gentle and calm. “Yes.” He smiled. “Really, really sad.”

“And there's been no one else?”

“Nope. Just me. And Jessie. Just us.”

“And you've done it all yourself, all the parenting?”

He nodded.

“Well”—she raised her beer bottle to his—“in that case, a toast, to you, to Superdad.”

“Well, I don't know about that, but yes, to me, why not?” He grinned at her and they brought their bottles together and as they did so their knuckles whispered against each other, just a touch. Jem waited for her body to process the touch, to react in some way, but it didn't. Joel on the other hand flushed and glanced at her in surprise. And it was then that Jem knew, in that tiny, barely perceptible pinch of time, that she had him. And the moment she knew she had him, it was immediately clear to her that she didn't want him.

She did not want to stand naked in front of him. She did not want his hand against her cheek, her bare flesh. She did
not want him to stare at her with longing in a shadowy room. She just wanted to have a nice evening with him. And then she just wanted to go to bed alone, with a clear conscience, and see Ralph tomorrow morning and maybe stand naked in front of him.

But it seemed as though the flimsy, lacy, silly narrative she'd written in the air with the dull ache of her loneliness and the giddiness of her confusion had developed its own momentum. This, she would think when she looked back at this moment as she would a thousand times over the next few months, was the moment at which her baby should have awoken, should have shredded the mounting tension with a plaintive cry through the winking monitor on the kitchen counter. This should have been the moment when the girls came careering helter-skelter into the kitchen all breathless anecdotes or complaining dissonance. This should have been the moment when the phone rang, when the doorbell went, when the roof blew off the house in a freak tornado, when in fact anything at all had happened that might have ended the silence and broken the spell and prevented Joel from opening his mouth and saying: “And a toast to you too, for this amazing meal, and for making me feel special for the first time in a very, very long time. I'm really blown away by this”—he indicated his food, then he stopped and stared at Jem, meaningfully—“and by you.”

Jem caught her breath. She smiled. “Oh, honestly. It's nothing. It's just nice to have some company.”

Joel's face fell into serious lines. “No, seriously. It's been a long time since I met someone like you, someone so genuine, someone so real. I was starting to get a bit cynical about, well, people in general, but women especially. But you—you're different.”

The smile on Jem's face had frozen. There it was. The declaration.
She hadn't heard it for many years now:
You're not like other girls. You're different from anyone I've ever met before
. As a young woman, this had been the pattern to Jem's relationships. She would meet a boy. She would like a boy. But the boy would very quickly like her more than she liked him and she would be too polite and too soft to pull out as quickly as she needed to, and then the boy would fall stupidly in love and become very clingy and very needy and she would stick it out until the last possible moment before ending it, usually in a scenario involving tears and, on two separate occasions, threats of suicide. Then she'd met Ralph and Ralph had said: “You're not like other girls. You're different from anyone I've ever met before.” And Jem had breathed a sigh of relief and thought that it was the first time it had been said to her and not made her feel like she was sinking in emotional quicksand.

But something had happened over the years, and it was clear to Jem that Ralph felt cheated. She was no longer “different from the other girls”; she was just like them. “You mums,” he would say disparagingly, lumping her into a pot of nagging, shouting, preoccupied women. “What is it with you mums?”

So, Jem had been primed and ready for someone to see the girl she used to be. And now someone had, and, in a way, she felt pleased:
See, Ralph, it's you that's changed, not me, I am still delightful, I am still special, you just can't see it anymore
. But in another way, she was unnerved. She felt transparent, she felt naked. She felt vulnerable and stupid. And more than that, she felt guilty.

She had brought this man into her life, through curiosity, through loneliness, through vanity and yes, through boredom. He was here because she had wanted him to come here and make her feel again like the sort of woman that men painted pictures of. She felt slightly ashamed of herself for using this
man to discover what she had already known deep down inside: that there was no other man for her than Ralph. There never had been and there never would be. It was not destiny that had brought this man into her kitchen, it was her, Jem, plain and simple. And now she wanted him gone from it.

She rubbed her elbows with the palms of her lightly sweating hands and stretched the frozen smile a little further. “Oh, hardly,” she managed. “Just a mum, just like all the other mums.”

“No,” said Joel, his eyes never leaving hers. “Not like all the other mums. Better than the other mums.”

Jem flushed and she let her gaze fall to the tabletop. No babies cried. No three-year-old girls appeared. The silence drew out. “Well, that's very, very nice of you to say. Thank you.”

“No,” said Joel, “thank you.”

This time Joel looked away first and the moment vaporized gently between them. The clatter of cutlery against crockery filled the air again, the creak of the cat flap, the claws of the cat, click-click-clicking against the wooden floors. Time resumed. Things returned to normal. They could carry on being two parents killing some time together.

It was over.

For now.

R
alph appraised his front door in the early morning light. His street slept, for it was a Saturday morning. Spring had come to his home while he'd been gone. Beadlike buds of pearly white and green adorned the tips of bushes, and the trees were starting to show their new leaves. Glancing up, he could see that the curtains in his bedroom were open wide. No lie-ins with small children. He imagined the kitchen, Jem in her camisole and shorts, her black hair around her face. He imagined Scarlett, chocolate spread around her mouth, her feet in pink slippers. He imagined Blake, in his nighttime sleeper, bouncing in his chair on the kitchen counter. The TV would be on, they would be watching
Milkshake!
Nine o'clock, what would it be,
Jane and the Dragon
? Maybe
Little Princess
? The sounds of a Saturday morning in his home.

He put his key into the lock and he turned it silently. He wanted his return to be a surprise. The air smelled of toast. And of something else, something much more subtle and indescribable, the nuanced and unique smell of home.

“Daddy!” Scarlett saw him first and threw herself around his legs and then into his arms. She wrapped her legs around his torso and her arms around the back of his neck and screamed “Daddy!” again. Ralph carried her into the kitchen, triumphantly. Jem looked up from the kitchen table, where she'd
been reading the paper, and smiled at him. “Well, look at you,” she said.

“What?” he said, moving Scarlett onto his hip.

“You're so brown!”

“Am I?” he said, reaching to view himself in the mirror behind the table. “I didn't think I'd picked up any color.”

“God, you really have, you look amazing.”

Jem got to her feet and came toward him. She had Blake over her shoulder, where he gnawed pensively on the side of his balled-up fist. Ralph glanced at him tenderly and then at Jem. “God, I missed you,” he said.

Jem reacted as he'd hoped she would to his words and came to embrace him. Scarlett pulled Jem toward them with her other arm and the four of them stood like that for a moment, smelling each other's forgotten smells, feeling each other's warm breath, absorbing their togetherness. Ralph kissed the top of Jem's head and Jem looked up at him and smiled. “I missed you too,” she said.

“Did you miss me, Daddy?”

Ralph looked into the dark serious eyes of his daughter and said: “Every minute of every day. And you,” he said, passing his daughter toward Jem and holding out his hands for his baby boy, “I missed you too.” He plucked Blake from Jem's shoulder and turned the baby to face him. He looked different, his skin was less blotchy, his features were more defined and he felt heavier and more solid in Ralph's arms. Blake blinked at him in surprise. Ralph laughed and blinked back. “Yes, indeed,” he said. “Who is this strange man? Well, I am your daddy and I know you think you managed to get rid of me, but I'm afraid I'm back and you're going to have to share your mummy with me again.” Blake blinked again and then slowly his face
collapsed into a grimace of sheer terror and he started to wail, but instead of taking this as yet another sign that his son was not really a part of him, that his son belonged to his mother, Ralph brought his baby toward his body and held him there, held him chest to chest, whispered soothing words into his ear, rocked him gently, whispered in his tiny ear, “It's okay, little man, it's okay, little man. You don't need to cry, Daddy's here, Daddy's here.” He held the back of his head in the palm of his hand and he let the baby go floppy against his body. “There,” he said, “there.”

He looked at Jem. Jem looked at him. They didn't say a word but they both knew. This was a fresh start. This was a new beginning.

“It's great to be home,” said Ralph, his nose buried in the soft, warm scalp of his baby son. “Really, really great.”

But what neither of them knew was that during their week apart both of them had opened doors into their souls, not very wide, just a crack, but while those doors had been open something had gotten in, something strong and determined that would eat away at the very foundations of their union until there was almost nothing left to see.

J
em was very happy to have Ralph back. From the moment she saw him walk into the kitchen with Scarlett in his arms, his skin tanned to a delicate shade of chestnut, in his low-slung jeans and beaten-up leather jacket, looking so relaxed and so handsome and so like the man she'd been in love with for eleven years, she knew that she wanted to keep him. She'd known it even before; she'd known it last night at the dining table with Joel. It was blindingly obvious that her attraction to Joel had been nothing more than a blip. It was as clear as light that she would never be able to share either her life or her body with any man other than Ralph. She'd lain in bed last night replaying the memories, the times they'd shared before the babies, the nights she'd lain awake, her nose above Ralph's sleeping head, breathing him in, whispering silently to him,
I love you I love you I love you
, aching for the love of him. She remembered walking down the street, their hands entwined, their arms entwined, always touching, never apart. She remembered—God, she remembered crying after sex.
Crying after sex
. Such a cliché. But still, how many times did a person cry after sex in a lifetime? It all meant something. She thought about how much they'd sacrificed to have their babies, the intimacy, the passion, the fun—more than anything, the fun. She realized that this, what they were going through right now, was nothing more
than a page in a book. And then this morning, before Ralph had come home, she'd been gazing into the garden through the kitchen window and as her gaze retreated from the garden and back toward the windowsill she'd noticed a small green bulb pushing through from the depths of a potted orchid. The orchid had been a gift from her sister for her birthday about two years ago. At first it had been lush and plump, five fat cream and pink flowers quivering gently from an arced stalk. Over a period of about four months each fat bloom had thinned and lightened and fallen in turn, tissue-light, onto the kitchen counter below. The leaves shriveled and browned and they too fell away from the orchid until all that was left was a thin brown twig. The orchid was dead.

But now, here was new life. All those months when it had sat there pretending to be dead it was just gathering its strength, biding its time. Before long there would be more leaves, a new arc of plumptious flowers. And as Jem stared at the small green bulb pulsing from the arid remains of the orchid, it occurred to her that maybe relationships were like orchids. Just because it looked dead did not mean that there was not still life in it, did not in fact mean that the relationship could not be once more spectacular. An orchid could die and grow, and die and grow and every time be transformed to its state of original splendor. So too could her love for Ralph, so too could their union.