‘You’re not meant to be home until at least eleven.’ I scowl at him through the Immac moustache.
He laughs indulgently. I know this has not put a single dent in his affections, although he is trying his best to laugh loudly and mockingly, to get some kind of chummy rise out of me. I’m surprised to find that I don’t care what he has seen. Time once was I would have climbed out of the window and chartered a helicopter to take me off the roof if he’d seen me in such a state of compromise.
He puts a hand on my shoulder, feeling the slippery slickness of the oil. ‘Wow, maybe this could come in useful for something,’ he begins tentatively, hopeful.
After my narrow-eyed non-response, he shrugs and makes his way to the bedroom.
‘Too soon, I guess. Still too soon.’ Whenever Johnny does decide on passive-aggressiveness, he’s not subtle about it. I wipe off the Immac with toilet roll, and rearrange myself carefully on the couch.
Oh God, I want to want you,I think.I want to feel a shiver of anticipation when you say you want to fuck me. I want to want it, because of what it would say about me, and you and our marriage. I don’t want it to be a maintenance shag, something on the to-do list, written down next to taking out the bins and cleaning out the fridge and going to the gym.A tiny part of me, barely visible to the naked eye, still wants the ‘brand-new couple’ sex, can still remember how good it felt. I don’t know how to make that part of me heard, even to myself.
Ted’s YouTube clips run to maybe two dozen. In one, he is being interviewed alongside Jami Handler, a fellow actor and someone I have already got an irrational distaste for. She sits poker straight; Ted has the coolly detached slump of the disinterested. The clip, I realize, is forBuzzFeed. ‘Is there one thing about your body that you would like to change?’ the interviewer asks them, off-camera.
Jami is already squirming in contemplation. ‘Well, I don’t like this,’ she tells Ted, pointing to her naso-labial folds.
Ted turns around to take a closer look at her face, as though he is seeing it anew. ‘Really?’
‘And actually, I have kind of a bony butt for a girl.’
‘How about you, Ted, is there anything you would change about yourself?’ the interviewer says. Both look surprised as the question lands on him.
I almost intuit a flash of insecurity as he thinks. ‘Well, Iwouldn’t mind having some wings for flying,’ he says, eyeballing the off-camera interviewer with a sort of defiance. ‘Or maybe eyes in the back of my head– that would be cool, and useful.’
‘I see what you did there,’ Jami purrs as Ted looks straight down the camera, pleased with himself. I think it is utterly adorable.
I instinctively input Ted Levy’s name into Facebook. What in the name of Magnum PI did civilization ever do before they could look up every colleague, former classmate and One that Got Away on Facebook? It must have been terrible.
Ted’s personal page pops up right away. A regular grainy photo, taken by a friend on what looks to be a sunny afternoon on the basketball court. The discovery of Ted in his private, off-camera life makes me immeasurably pleased.
Ted has most of his Facebook profile locked down pretty tight– whatever is on the wall isn’t visible to his non-friends. He has 5,002 friends already. Curiosity takes the rudder, and using my ‘Essie Marie’ Facebook profile, which I have filled out with some old photos and some randomly acquired friends, I hit ‘add friend’ on his page, and sure what harm can it do? His friend list is already open, and I search for other people with the name ‘Levy’. I will think of this instant many, many times in the far future: how this one moment changed everything and changed it utterly. Because this is the moment where I finally come face to face, in a way, with Naomi Levy.
Naomi Levy is nowhere near as stringent with her security settings as her step-brother is. I click and click and click because I can and eventually arrive at a photo album ‘July 2005, the Beaches’. Naomi looks to be forty-five or so,her wavy brown hair either a nuisance or a glory, depending on the day. Three young girls under ten, blonde and tanned, are in their wetsuits, jumping off a jetty into the sea. Looking on at them from the back of a small yacht is Ted, shirtless, hairy-backed and tanned, a glorious gorilla of a man, his eyes resting protectively on his step-nieces, unaware that the photo is even being taken. The sun is blazing and everyone is glistening and happy, all of them in this charmed life together.
The discovery has me up off the Majorca towel and jumping up and down in glee– or at least, springing on the spot so I don’t wake Johnny, who has long been in bed by now– oiled tits nearly heading towards the chandelier. I am adrenalized and breathless, barely able to believe that I have been able to give myself such access into Ted Levy’s real life. I feel like a private investigator who has hit on a breakthrough. The intimacy of the photos from his real, unscripted life makes me heady. I stare at the image, and want for it so badly to be my reality. I want those beautiful tanned children to be mine. Or at least ours. I fantasize about summers that stretch for miles; potlucks and barbecues and having the neighbours over for brewskis.
I receive a text from Brigitte as I am dreaming about sun-dappled evenings on jetties.
‘Hey! I miss you! Really hoping we can come see you soon. X.’
I’m far too high to process it or even reply.
A scenario floats into my mind, all Vaseline-lensed and warm around the edges.
‘Of course you can go out for basketball with your friends, you don’t need to ask,’ I hear my voice telling him, the casual tone that people use with their long-term partners. ‘Just be sure to come backbefore five. I’ll be making veggie fajitas. Ask your friends to drop by for some if you want.’
I can feel his kiss on my mouth, a stubbly and muscular kiss. ‘What did I ever do to deserve you?’ he will say.
I finally make it to bed, and Johnny rolls over in a way that makes me think he’s been awake for a while. He gives me a chaste, dry-lipped goodnight kiss and I lie in the darkness, thinking about what sex would be like with Ted. There’s only the tiniest sliver of guilt as I allow my mind to slip into the good place. I imagine the moment when we take our clothes off for the first time, the vulnerability involved in disrobing, and the nakedness that changes things between two people forever. I think of the way two naked bodies feel, coming into contact for the first time, one on top of the other– that quiet, warm thrill. How my whole groin would be slick, literally pulsing in anticipation to take in this new, unfamiliar guy. How in that moment, two people start speaking a whole new language to each other without words, a beautiful dance of a conversation. How you now know each other in a whole different way and certainly not in the way that everyone else knows them, because only a handful of people knows them like this.
Ted and I are lying under parasols, moist and sweaty. We are post-coital, always, always post-coital on this holiday, or just about to do it, and blissed out in each other’s company.
‘That’s the kind of sex that could make a person fall in love,’ Ted will tell me as we fall further into relaxation together. The moment is gilded with the energy that only a new relationship can bring.
‘I feel like a rotisserie chicken,’ he will then say, his baseball cap shielding him from onlookers, of which there are a few. Some ofthem look at me, wondering who I am and what my deal is, and how I got to end up with him.
‘There’s many a rotisserie chicken that would give good money to be where you are,’ I will tell him, and he laughs appreciatively.
‘Are you… licking your lips there?’ Johnny asks from the other side of the bed.
