“Oh yes, let’s write that review,” and Naomi pulls out her phone and they start composing a paragraph about the therapist who’d preyed upon their friend. One star.
Twenty-Two
Clemence can’t stop thinking about it, though: Whydoeseverything with Toby have to happen in the dark? Despite Mrs. Yeung’s assessment, she pretty’s sure Toby isn’t a vampire, although he probably has some medical condition that is analogous. But all the same, she wants to bring him out into the light. She wants to invite him over to her place for dinner, taking into account his varied dietary needs, of course. Her brand-new second-hand knife set has inspired her.
Clemence stops by the bookshop and makes the proposal, giving him absolutely no opportunity to decline. She tells him when to arrive. She says she’ll meet him on the porch; there’s no need to ring the bell and alert the entire household. Confirming that she knows he can’t eat gluten, and yes, he’s sensitive to soy. And while he indeed drinks milk, he can’t handle cheese. Clemence is aware of what she’s getting into, refusing to be waylaid by any of his excuses.
The menu will be a challenge, though, with Toby’s requirements and the fact that she’ll have to cook on a hot plate. Clemence goes up to the main street to shop, skipping Crampton’s grocery store with its decrepit produce, no doubt doused in pesticides. Crampton thinks that organics are a scam, and she might be right, Clemence considers, as she checks out the stock at the health food store that’s opened up next to the cheese place. The store has a smoothie bar, and she wonders if they’re paying the beautiful people to sit in the window sipping through paper straws, because such people seem to come and go in rotation. Clemence has been hoping to buy a cauliflower, except the ones in this place cost as much as an actual steak.
But Clemence feels obligated to support the health food store, which had been kind enough to display a poster for the jumble sale in their window alongside the beautiful people. So she purchases the cauliflower which, the woman on the cash assures her, has never been treated with pesticides and was actually picked from an urban farm just this morning. And Clemence also buys some local vegan cheese, the kind made from something that isn’t cashews because Toby is also allergic to nuts. Afancy sorbet for dessert, and she’s got a bottle of wine at home already. This meal, she thinks, is a feat of engineering, but she’s inspired by the challenge and enjoys putting it all together.
Once everything is prepared, and she’s got herself ready, Clemence goes downstairs to wait for Toby and she’s also still wondering if he’ll actually show up. Toby had said he was coming, and his schedule is wide open,as far as Clemence knows, apart from his shifts at the bookstore. The rest of his life he spends in his apartment on his computer, where he’s part of an online gaming community, but they won’t mind if he skips an evening here and there, he tells her. “They think that you’re my girlfriend,” he’s told her in a droll, ironic tone, and Clemence is mortified to feel her heart skip a beat, and then even more concerned that Toby seems to consider this a stretch. As if the idea is that ridiculous.
But there he is, right on time, and she greets him, knowing she looks good in her black tunic with a lavender scarf and matching earrings, an effect that’s cute but not trying hard. And Toby definitely isn’t trying hard, either, wearing the only outfit she’s ever seen him in, jeans and a wrinkled button-down that’s tucked in too tight. His expression is confused and he seems out of place, which is also part of his usual look.
“Ithought we could try something different,” Clemence tries to explain on the way up the stairs. “Might be nice to know you in another kind of context.” And useful as well. To see Toby in the daylight, or at least by bulb light, and it’s a relief to note that he does not appear to have any kind of open sore right now. He’s also brought her a bottle of wine, albeit one coated in a thick layer of dust, like it’s been sitting around his apartment for a hundred years, but Clemence sort of thinks of dust astheirsolid matter, the same way other couples might have a song, so it’s actually a sweet gesture.
When they arrive at the top of the house at her door, she’s more nervous than when she’d brought him overwhile he was bleeding. Because the path forward then was determined: stanch that wound. But now where she’s taking him might lead anywhere. Her stomach all fizzy, and she hates this, because isn’t the point of a relationship with Toby that she doesn’t have to dissolve into bubbles? Maybe the whole affair is a mistake, but they’ve come too far—and climbed too many stairs—to turn back now.
Dinner is ready and waiting. She’s fashioned a macaroni cheese dish except with cauliflower instead of pasta, boiled and then diced with the new sharp knives, and she’d been thinking about Charles’s kitchen as she prepared the meal, what kind of spaceship it must be for knives like these to be discarded as jumble. She and Charles, Clemence had reminded herself, live in very different worlds, and maybe it’s not even especially significant after all that they both like books. Because who doesn’t like books, really? Toby also likes books and here he is sitting at her table. Clemence needs to focus on the here and now, and not just what happens to be bright and shiny (and/or muscly).
They sip wine from her plastic glasses over stilted conversation about the weather and then the housing crisis, a stiltedness that Clemence can’t decide is the result of general awkwardness or sexual tension, but at least the glasses have stems, and Toby isn’t snobbish at all about that sort of thing. Clemence has a corkscrew, because Naomi and Jillian had presented her with one as a housewarming gift on the night they came over to drink on the balcony. Toby breaks the cork as he’s opening the wine,pieces falling down into the bottle, which doesn’t seem to bother him in the slightest.
“I’ll just pick the bits out,” he says, dipping his fingers in their glasses, and she really can’t object, because she’s been happy enough to let him stick his fingers into all kinds of other places.
The wine is good, and Toby seems relatively enthusiastic as she serves the main course, which doesn’t appear at all appetizing, a palette of beige. He promises her it’s fine, and Clemence finally sits down before him at her own place. She has lit a tea light for ambience, the effect rendering Toby even more ghostly than usual. The cauliflower tastes better than it looks, or at least as good as a vegetable substitute for pasta could hope to taste, especially one cooked on a hot plate, but maybe that’s a low bar. Clemence and Toby are in the midst of a conversation about the virtues of vegan cheese, because he’s tried many brands and has strong feelings, and so does she, because it’scheeseafter all (or is it?), and then he stops in the middle of his sentence.
She says, “What.”
He says, “Nothing.” Looking everywhere but in her direction, his eyes darting. Toby is nervous. Something is wrong. He rattles his fork on the edge of the plate an unconscious gesture.
“Are you allergic?” Does Toby carry an EpiPen? “What’s happening?” Clemence doesn’t want to panic, but now it’s too late.
Toby says, “It’s fine.” He’s a terrible liar. This table is too small for two. This room is claustrophobic. “It’s fine,” herepeats, as though assuring himself. Taking a deep breath, he stops rattling the fork, whose prongs he now administers to the slop on his plate with the precision of a surgeon.
“What is it?” Clemence leans over to see.
“Get back!” He covers the plate with his hand. His voice is sharp. Then he softens his tone: “It’s nothing.” Still not letting her see the plate, he picks up his fork again. “Mmmm,” he says as he chews, such an unconvincing portrayal of a person enjoying what he’s eating.
“You don’t like it.”
His mouth is full, but he stuffs in more. “I’m eating,” he tells her anyway, in a tone of consternation. “It’s delicious.” Almost mockingly. He says, “Yum.” This is awful.
The meal is not good. Clemence knows it’s not good, though that’s not entirely her fault—the fact of her non-kitchen, plus Toby’s dietary requirements are ridiculous, not to mention obnoxiously inconsistent. But he doesn’t need to pretend. He’s humiliating her now, and she’s had enough of this. What is the point of trying to please a person so prone to pickiness and fuss? “Just stop,” she says, giving up entirely. Reaching across the table to take his plate, but he won’t let it go, his grip surprisingly strong. He won’t let her take it. He won’t let her see. “What is it?” she demands.
“Ithink,” Toby says. “It’s a caterpillar?” Releasing his grip. And he’s right. Afat green caterpillar on the edge of his plate, one with yellow stripes, the archetype of caterpillars, struck down in the prime of its life in a pot of boiling water. Finished off by vegan cheese sauce if the boiling wasn’t enough.
If there could be anything more absurd than Toby himself sitting at her table, the caterpillar is it. Clemence can’t believe this, collapsing back into her chair, the plate in her hands. This is a nightmare. “Iwashed it, Iswear.” Though perhaps not so carefully. With organic produce, she figured, you didn’t have to. But surely a decent rinse ought to have done the job. With an insect that big, wouldn’t she have been able to see it? Hacking the cauliflower to pieces with her fancy knife, she’d spied nothing at all. The creature must have been clinging to life on an underside of the floret, manoeuvring out of the way to escape her shiny blade. It was certainly dead now, as she prodded it with her finger. Would the situation be more or less gross if the caterpillar were living?
Toby says, “It’s fine. Imean, it’s not like Iate it. Not even close. And Ididn’t want to make a big deal out of it. You’d gone to all this trouble. You—”
She tells him, “Stop.” Toby has never before seemed so achingly human, which is to say, aware and concerned with the feelings of another. Toby is trying and this is intoxicating. “Stop talking.” The food itself was never the point of this meal, instead the opportunity for them to be together in a different kind of light, or any light at all. So that Clemence could know for sure that their arrangement, while atypical, was nothing she had to be ashamed of, or one that compromised her dignity. This man, who was squeamish as all get-out, had nearly eaten a caterpillar to preserve her honour, had stuffed his mouth with cauliflower that was caterpillar-compromised. And now all Clemencewants to do is kiss that mouth. She’s crossed her fingers that he’s carrying that one brand of condom that won’t give him a rash. She wants to bring Toby to her daybed and throw all the throw cushions to the floor, and she does all this while telling him, “Iwant to do everything. Okay? Everything. You can ask, if you want to, but you don’t have to.”
The sex is middling.Here the whole dream fizzles. It’s exactly what you’d expect with someone like Toby, who’s fragile, delicate, and whiny in a way it’s easy to forget about when he’s sticking his tongue down your throat and has his hand up your shirt in a closet. In her bed, though, he’s lost whatever physical fluidity he might possess in the dark. He bumps his head on the bedframe, and later possibly dislocates his shoulder, and when one thing simply leads to the next thing, it’s much less dazzling than the overwhelming anticipation of waiting. The getting is not as rewarding as wanting is, which is probably a good thing to learn.
But Clemence nearly fed him a caterpillar, so she holds none of this against him, and while she’s disappointed that their lovemaking was not transportive, she knows he’s a good person, and he makes her feel good, too. He’s got an ice pack on his head, but his skinny arms are wrapped around her, and she is listening to his heart beat in his pale, scraggy chest.Beat. Beat.And then nothing. And then it beats again.
She looks up at him with a confused expression, andhe knows what she’s asking. “Ihave a heart murmur,” he explains.
