But he seems serious. “Exactly.” Both of them turning around as his mother comes out to the porch, and she speaks to him severely in Korean. Turns out she’s angry that he’s late, that she’s been waiting for him. She switches to English, and tells him she hopes his donation is up to par. That he’s not one of those people who bring her their boxes and boxes of garbage. She mentions the mouldy bath mats, and Charles promises her that there’s no such thing. “Clothes, mainly,” he says. “And some stuff from the kitchen that Inever use. Ihad three juicers. Who needs three juicers? Idon’t even drink juice.”
He’s not staying—just dropping by. “Of course youare,” says his mother in exasperation, but she’s prepared three plastic bags stuffed with food containers for Charles to take home with him. Including—as Clemence can see through the straining bag—the soup. For once, Mrs. Yeung doesn’t mention Charles’s wife, and she’s almost kindly as she and Clemence walk him back to his car. Though maybe it’s because she wants her son to come back downtown before too long since the tiles in the upstairs shower need replacing. Charles tells her that he’ll definitely try.
“Definitely try,” says Mrs. Yeung, as the car disappears at the end of the street. Charles had hugged her, and administered to Clemence an affectionate touch on the shoulder. “That’s how he says no way and hopes Iwon’t notice,” she adds.
“You know, Ican recommend a handyman,” Clemence says. She would have to get Tom’s contact details from Crampton. And she knows that Mrs. Yeung is about to protest that she can’t afford it, but Clemence interrupts her. “He might surprise you. He’s not particularly efficient, but apparently he’s even worse at putting up his rates.”
Inside the foyer, they begin going through Charles’s boxes, one of which is entirely women’s clothing. Good designer stuff, too, and Clemence is perusing for her own interest until it becomes clear that Charles’s wife is very small. Ablessing in disguise, perhaps, because how embarrassing would it be to have him—or, heaven forbid,his wife—show up at the house one day to find Clemence wearing clothes intended for the jumble?
She takes the set of knives in the other box, though. Mrs. Yeung urges her to, in compensation for her volunteer service, and also because they’d had to instate rules about selling knives as jumble since the year someone was nearly stabbed in an altercation about whose turn it was to refill the coffee urn. Church basements were tense places—it was best to avoid weapons altogether.
And so Clemence has something new and shiny in her kitchen now, sharp knives where all the others are dull to the point of useless. Which hasn’t mattered much, because the only thing she slices is cheese, but these new knives make her consider expanding her culinary horizons. She removes an apple from the bowl on the counter just to experience the difference, how easy a thing can be if you only have the right tools. The apple falling into perfect sections, which she places on a plate, and then she sits down at the table to eat them, thinking of Charles, and of Toby, and inexplicability. About how she is utterly failing in her quest to live theEat, Pray, Lovewithout the love. She doesn’t even really have the “eat” part, because she can’t afford restaurants, and she has only a hot plate. She thinks about all the great women whose culinary genius might have been quashed by the absence of a proper kitchen—imagine the bolognese sauces we might have been permitted had some of these maiden aunts been in possession of a decent saucepan? The advances in bread-baking, but for want of an oven. An oven—all those years she’d had an oven, a huge state-of-the-art model that was as complicated to program as a spaceship, and she’d takenit for granted. Even just the smell of something baking or roasting signalled home.
For the first time since she’d come here, Clemence’s room of her own seems kind of meagre, and she turns around to glare at the knife set on her counter, because it’s the knife set that’s at fault. Rendering everything else dull and shabby in comparison, when there is nothing she can do about it. The church bells chiming a question, seven times: What if she’s actually wasting her wild and precious life?
Twenty-One
Jillian and Jeremy have been seeing a therapist, a different therapist, one they didn’t find on Yelp and who has prescribed that they partake in scheduled date nights. Jeremy texted Clemence to ask if she might help—the prospect of Jillian having to scrounge for child care for these date nights could be the straw that breaks their marriage’s back, and Jeremy doesn’t want that. So he’s wondering if Clemence might be able to babysit. Careful to emphasize that Clemence is not a babysitter; he knows she’s not a babysitter. He doesn’t want to cause offence by suggesting she’s a babysitter, and Clemence goes off—what’s wrong with being a babysitter? Care work is work and it’s work that she values, and she’s certainly not too good for that. To suggest as much as sexism, and Jeremy texts back, “Whoa whoa whoa.” He just meant that Clemence wasn’t really into kids.
Which she isn’t, but Jillian’s daughters are non-feral as kids go, plus while Clemence really isn’t into kids, she wants to play a role in preserving the institution that is Jillian and Jeremy. She is a tiny bit concerned that philandering and divorce are contagious, and feels responsible. Also, they are going to pay her, and every little bit helps. Even better? Naomi has agreed to come over to keep her company, and Jillian had finally told her about Dr. Yelp, so she and Clemence can sit down together and make sense of the whole thing once the kids are in bed.
Hannah and Chloe are the kind of children who could make Clemence almost consider having kids, or at least see the point of the exercise, because they are smart and funny and entirely responsible for their own toileting habits. They make microwave popcorn and get dressed into matching pyjamas, and Clemence notes that caring for them is actually more fulfilling and less weird than talking to Toby, plus it pays better. But of course, Toby himself comes with benefits, which Clemence finds herself discussing with Naomi when she arrives after work, long after the kids’ bedtime. Naomi has brought wine, and the two of them are curled up on the couch to hang out for the first time in ages.
“But Ithought the whole reason for an unsuitable attachment was so you wouldn’t get attached,” says Naomi.
“Idon’t know if you’d call it attached,” says Clemence.
“Not even at the lips?” asks Naomi, who’s been filled in on all the details. The way the whole thing with Toby
is a bit like that junior high school party game where you’re kissing in the closet, except it goes on well beyond seven minutes, but stops mainly at groping and those deep passionate kisses that are so intimate and rapt that it feels like getting off, and every time they come back out into the light, Clemence’s legs are weak, she’s dizzy, and it’s hard to walk. They’ve upset all kinds of stacks in the closet, and now paperbacks litter the floor. She’s imagined lying down on them, the softness of their worn paper and cracked spines, how it might feel like a bed—what a mattress. Clemence has imagined a lot of things. “The closet thing is weird,” says Naomi. “What’s up with that?”
“Iguess because it’s private,” says Clemence. She’s picking dust bunnies out of her hair all the time now. But she also loves it, the closet under the stairs, Ursa Major—Asia Minor. The way that she can’t see what she’s doing in there, which means somehow that she doesn’t have to think about it, either. That what happens with Toby exists on another plane, and when she tries to explain to anybody else it doesn’t make sense. It sounds stupid and sordid, and Toby’s weird. Of course, Toby is weird. But in the darkness, his weirdness seems to matter less, and she loves the way he makes her feel, the slow and steady desire. She’d never known desire to be steady, instead of overwhelmingwantand satiation—too much and then nothing. But oh, the way he can eke her out, pulling feelings from places she didn’t she could feel.
“But it’s only kissing, you said,” clarifies Naomi.
“There’s nothingonlyabout it.” And Naomi nods. She gets it. Naomi has no interest in the strings and dramathat accompany relationships. Naomi is Clemence’s guru in opting out of the narratives society offers a woman for how her life is supposed to be. She is married to her job, and it’s an inspiring, fruitful relationship, and every few weeks she hooks up with partners via various apps for the creative and wild sex that’s outlined beforehand in startling specificity. There is a trapeze folded into a dresser drawer in Naomi’s spare room that Clemence only knows about from the two weeks she was staying there, and she can’t envision how a person could begin to use it. If she asked, Naomi would explain it to her, but some things are best left to the imagination. All of which is to say that Naomi, of all people, understands what a kiss can be.
“But do you think you’d still want to kiss him if that closet had a functioning light bulb? And if the answer is no, what does that mean?” Clemence thinks about this, and Naomi continues, “And if the answer is no, Ithink that’s okay. Not everything needs to be dragged out into the light of day. But Ithink it’s important you really want what you want, is what I’m saying. Isn’t that kind of the point of wanting after all?”
And here, they begin to talk about Jillian, about how what she wants is Jeremy, but not with the way that things are, and how her affair with the therapist was a cry for help.
“Jillian never cries for help like normal people,” says Naomi. In crying for help, as in all things, Jillian would be extraordinary.
“Weren’t you stunned when she told you?” Clemenceasks. She needs Naomi to be stunned. Naomi’s signature pose is refusing to be rattled, but surely this one thing must have shaken her. “Especially the part about Yelp.”
“Especially the part about Yelp,” says Naomi. “Because Jillian is usually so responsible. You’d think she’d get a decent referral, you know? She doesn’t trust Yelp to find a dry cleaner, so it seems strange she’d use it for a therapist.”
“But maybe a Yelp therapist was precisely what she was looking for. It all makes sense. You know Jillian and her way with precision. Agood therapist wouldn’t have been useful to her, but a bad one permitted her to act out in a most fulfilling fashion. And now look—she and Jeremy are out on a date together. She says it’s like their relationship has been renewed and he’s finally invested after a few years of coasting on autopilot.”
“But maybe that’s just luck,” says Naomi. “It all could have unfolded very differently.”
“Iwant to report him,” says Clemence. “The therapist. But she knows that Iwill, so she won’t tell me his name.”
“Iknow his name,” says Naomi. “He’s the first result when you look up therapists on Yelp.”
“We could leave a review.”
“An honest review.”
