“Because if she does know, you’re going to call her and talk about it for hours and try to analyze how messed up it all is, and Idon’t want you to do that.”
“We care about you.”
“Iknow, but Idon’t want the two of you talking about me behind my back if I’m not there.”
“If you’re there, it kind of defeats the purpose talking about you behind your back.”
Jillian says, “Exactly.” They arrive at her car, and she changes out of her athleisure wear like a magic trick, back into a suit with high heels, dropping off Clemence on her way back downtown to the office.
Clemence makes a soft-boiledegg for dinner, and eats it feeling like a baby. Even her spoon is small, the tiniest of all her utensils with a slightly bent handle. As with everything she has found in her kitchen, she wonders about its provenance, and the journey any item would have had to take to end up as part of the hodgepodge that is her furnished bachelor apartment. She thinks about how that’s gendered, too—where do all the bachelorettes get to live? Never mind the divorcees, she considers thearbitrariness of these distinctions. And how can there possibly be order at all in a universe in which Jillian has been cheating on Jeremy? With hertherapist?
Clemence is forced to use all the strength she possesses not to text Naomi. Even though it really wouldn’t be so disloyal as Jillian is making out. No, instead she’d be trying to understand how Jillian could do something so out of character. If she could talk about it with Naomi, she’d be able (maybe?) to hash out some sense of it, to put the broken pieces of her perceptions back together into something recognizable, but instead she’s on her own. Poor Jeremy. As accommodating as Jillian is rigid, but if things work out, this will be the reason why—in addition to Jillian’s fundamental goodness. Clemence and Toad were never very compatible anyway, beyond how well they photographed together, complementary at first glance, but that was only superficial. Clemence doesn’t miss her husband at all, and she hopes—that initial heartbreak aside—he will come to feel the same. Being lonely together was lonelier than being on her own.
Which she knows for a fact now, four months into this new adventure. Clemence has not yet worn out her own company entirely. She can eat an egg with a tiny spoon, and nobody asks her any questions, and she can go to bed early, or stay up very late. She can sleep in the nude, and walk around all morning draped in a bedsheet. She can measure the hours by the church bells, and never attend another service, instead sitting out on her balcony, feeling autumn’s chill setting in, rereadingThe Republic of Love, a novel she’s read a thousand times,and nobody’s going to make a snide remark. Clemence realizes her main aversion to the cataloguing system at the bookstore is that those had been Toad’s distinctions, too, between frothy women’s books and literature that was worth one’s while. Although he tended to read mostly non-fiction, anyway, and then would fail to finish those books. Acopy ofGuns, Germs, and Steelhad been sitting on his bedside as long as she’d known him. Worthwhile in itself—Clemence read it. She has never gotten over the chapter about the impossibility of domesticating the zebra. Because certainly people have tried. But zebras are stubborn creatures, and prone to biting, digging in their teeth, and refusing to let go.
Sixteen
Clemence sees Toby for the first time since she started dreaming of Toby, for the first time since she kissed him—although Toby usually has Charles’s body when she finds him in those dreams, and sometimes he’s actually Charles altogether. Even though these days, with school back in session and the allure of his sexy doctor wife, Clemence doesn’t see Charles at all, and it’s Toby who arrives in her life every Thursday on those morning shifts for which Crampton pays her with ancient bills stuffed in recycled envelopes.
Clemence had wondered if things with Toby might be different after what transpired the day of the head wound, but at first it’s hard to tell because he’s got his face in a book, more conspicuously than usual. She can’t even see if the wound has healed, and he refuses to look up. So she waits; but surely they’ve developed a rapport. Why does this feel like they’ve gone back to the beginning?
Because Toby stays frozen, his whole body clenched. She goes to ring the bell, and only then does he speak: “Please don’t. Ican’t stand that sound.” He’s still hiding.
She says, “Nobody at any level of literacy could spend that long on a single page. Iknow you’re not reading.” Reaching over the desk to push the book down, and there he is—that face, those lips, those sad eyes, and the cut on his head is healing well. Proud of her first aid, she reaches out to touch the wound, but Toby recoils.
“What?”
“Idon’t understand what you’re doing,” Toby says. “Are you making fun of me? Is this a joke? Because Idon’t get it.”
“Iwas just—” says Clemence, but she actually doesn’t know what she’s doing, either. This was never supposed to be part of the script.
“Like maybe it’s an elaborate set-up?” he continues. “With Crampton, and that old lady at your house. Idon’t understand, but Idon’t appreciate being someone’s joke.” He’s speaking very deliberately, and Clemence can tell that he’d practised these lines, and honestly it only makes him more endearing more because she can see the inner workings of his heart. Oh, Toby.
She doesn’t want to further upset him. “She made you soup,” Clemence tells him. “My landlady, Mrs. Yeung.” She has carried the jar over in her bag, and now she takes it out and puts in on the counter. “You should put it in the fridge. It’s very good soup. And nobody is making fun of you.” Her voice is quiet and calm. No sudden moves. “I’m here for the books.”
“You have to talk to me.” He accepts the soup. He’s picked up the jar, is examining its contents.
“But Ilike that part.” She shrugs. “Ilike you.” She really does, inexplicably. “Is that okay?”
“Maybe?”
“I’ll try not to bother you,” she says. “Leave you to your reading for now,” and she tiptoes over to Women’s Fiction, looking back once to see that he’s watching her. She waves, and he waves back. He’s not quite smiling, but she can see that he could be if he tried.
Aperson has to be the change they wish to see in the world, Clemence thinks, as she once again sets about the task of rearranging shelves in a bookstore crowded beyond capacity. Her ex-husband never believed this, scoffing at her self-importance. “You’re just one cog in one wheel of a system,” he’d say. “Asystem set up for your failure.” Whenever she’d complain that the system didn’t work, he’d counter that it was working precisely the way it was intended to, for the rich to profit and the oppressed to be oppressed, and what was the point of anything short of a revolution, which was never going to happen? This was how Toad justified his work as an analyst for an international mining conglomerate, destroying pristine acres of Bolivian rainforest in the process. When she’d first met him, he had dreams of being a botanist.
Maybe Clemence hasn’t changed the world, but she’s changedherworld, and who is to say that doesn’t matter? She spent so many years being complacent, going with the flow, and she’d been miserable. And now she’s notmiserable anymore, she’s even happy, or approaching something like it. She has purpose in a way she never did when she was writing about wedding gowns and bridesmaid shoes. The cogs all count for something, is what she’s thinking, as she’s envisioning “Classics” and “Modern Fiction” shelves. Much less offensive to her own sensibilities, women’s stories up there with all the others. She wonders if this ever might be a place where people browse. If they got rid of the dust, they’d be able to welcome shoppers with respiratory ailments. What if they took away some of the books stacked in front of the window and dared to let in a bit of light?
“Toby?” she calls, and she knows he’s heard her because she hears him sigh. “Would you ever think of bringing chairs in here?”
“We’ve already got a chair,” he points out, and he’s right. There’s a big cozy chair across from the cash, except it’s easy to miss, stacked high with boxes of books and piles of books.
“But like, what if we had chairs that people could sit on? Somewhere comfortable to sit where they could browse through their books?”
“They could go to the library,” he says. “They don’t even mind if you sleep there.”
Clemence stands up and heads over to face him again, everything less strange between them now that they’re talking. “I’m thinking of ways to freshen things up.”
“Fresh is a stretch,” says Toby. “If you were looking for something fresh, wouldn’t you go someplace else?”
