Clemence says, “Thank you.” Happy to accept whatever approval her landlady is willing to offer.
Twenty-Five
Clemence tells her story to Dr. Penelope Harkness, who’s written the book on marriage and is now developing the podcast. She tells her about Toad, and Larry and Lisa, and returning to her hometown for a new life on her own terms. She imagines that Dr. Harkness will have to add a new chapter to her marriage book, and invite her to be a guest on the pod. She likes the idea of being an object of fascination, anticipates raising Dr. Harkness’s sculpted eyebrows—but the eyebrows remain unmoved. Which is not surprising. Dr. Harkness’s entire face is plastic, which Clemence imagines is partly the result of too much surgery, but also necessary in her line of work. Or does Penelope Harkness simply think Clemence is boring?
And Penelope Harkness just makes a humming noise, ahmmmof acknowledgement perhaps. She certainly doesn’t probe for details. She is meeting with Clemencefor the purpose of her index, and Clemence thinks about how much time she spends sorting through other people’s stuff these days.
“Iguess you get a lot of people pouring their heart out to you,” she says, to fill the awkward silence.
“It does happen,” says Dr. Penelope, who has not been forthcoming about her personal life. Her home is silent, austere. There are no photographs, and it might as well be a museum. She seems more like a statue than a person. Her hair is perfect and as unmoving as her eyebrows. She has published four books previously, all of them bestsellers, but this is the first one that she’s publishing herself. Dr. Penelope is all business. Clemence doubts she’s even listed on Yelp. She isn’t what Clemence had been expecting based on the connection through her sister Grace. Grace’s friends tend to be more authentic, wearing hearts on their sleeves, often literally in the form of elaborate tattoos. Whereas Dr. Penelope’s skin is pristine. Her arms are white and smooth—not even a freckle.
Love Means Having to Say You’re Sorryis a guide to repairing broken marriages, about communication and apologizing and taking responsibility for one’s actions. And Clemence imagines how it would have felt to have this book come into her life a year ago, if Toad had brought it home and placed it in her hands. She thinks about how much of their love was about saying sorry over and over again. Clemence had disappointed her husband a thousand times, and it was mutual. Toad was excruciatingly annoying—every time he breathed it sounded like a sigh.
Clemence had spent a lot of time apologizing to Toad,but never in the way Dr. Penelope intended. The only thing she had been genuinely sorry for was all of it, that she hadn’t listened to that voice in her head that first night they were out together, that she’d allowed everything to happen knowing it was ultimately unsustainable. Which wasn’t fair to Toad, who wasn’t a bad person, and deserved a partner who believed in him, and for a while she’d tried to be that partner, faking it until she was making it, but that didn’t work, and Clemence was sorry about this, too. That she’d been faking everything, and any apology she’d delivered would also have been fakery, and the slow torture of it all could have gone on forever.
She asks Dr. Penelope what she thinks about all this.
But Dr. Penelope is only interested in finding out if Clemence has experience writing audio scripts. “Ican sense you have a flair for the dramatic,” she says. Is that a compliment? She’s going to be using transcripts of her clients’ sessions for the podcast—with their permission, of course, but obtaining these will likely be simple. She’s looking for a writer to change details for the sake of anonymity, to spice up the dialogue. She has clients, she admits, who are pretty insufferable, and it’s asking a lot of listeners to submit to that.
Clemence fibs and tells her she’s well versed in the area.Wedding Belleshad made a podcast, a last-ditch effort to avoid sinking into media obsolescence, though Clemence was part of another department, but Dr. Penelope doesn’t need to know that. Clemence tells her about her years at the magazine, about everything it taught her about the wedding-industrial complex.
“Now there’s a scourge,” she says, and Dr. Penelope agrees. Clemence tells her about her own wedding, and the trip to Tahiti. “Iwas so consumed by the idea of the wedding that it never occurred to me what a commitment we were making. Or supposed to be making.”
“It’s a huge commitment,” says Dr. Penelope. “The rest of your life. But who’s to say that a handful of years isn’t also some kind of an achievement? It’s hard work, marriage. Even one that doesn’t last.”
“But maybe Ididn’t work hard enough,” Clemence admits. “Ithink Iknew it was never going to work. We both wanted different things.”
“Like what?”
“Well, Iwanted to not be married to him. It’s pretty irreconcilable.”
“And you want me to absolve you,” says Dr. Penelope.
Does she? Maybe. “Iguess you get a lot of that from people, too.”
“All the time. But the permission has to come from within yourself. It doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks. Ireally do think any marriage can be saved if both parties are invested in making it happen, but the investment is what matters. Otherwise, you’re just sleepwalking through your life.”
“You’re saying that love means having to say you’re sorry …” Clemence is trying to make sense of it all, “but you actually have to mean it.”
Dr. Penelope nods. “Your sister told me that you were in a tight spot.”
“Did she?”
“It’s hard out there for an indexer,” she says. “Just like bank tellers, and grocery store clerks. Going the way of the dodo.”
“Idon’t know if it’s all as bad as that,” says Clemence.
Dr. Penelope says, “The dodo didn’t, either.”
Twenty-Six
Clemence continues sorting in the bookstore. By the end of November, there’s been enough progress that there’s room to walk down the central aisle two abreast, which she and Toby do on their way to the closet under the stairs—the reason why the books aren’t getting sorted any faster. She intends to spend the first hour of each shift on the shelves, but that hour keeps getting shorter. Toby has taken to appearing behind her, a hand on her shoulder, asking, “Clemence, can Isee you about something?” She doesn’t understand the subterfuge because there’s no one else around.
In the darkness of the closet, reality falls away. Clemence doesn’t have to think about the cauliflower, or the caterpillar, everything Toby had been willing to endure simply to preserve her dignity. Such willingness only making it easier for her to overlook his neuroticism, and propensity for rashes. The fact that he has neverinvited her over to his place, and that he doesn’t intend to. “Idon’t really like other people interfering with my stuff,” he says, and he’s not crazy about coming back to her apartment, either, after what happened with the cat, no matter how carefully she’s promised she’s cleaned. “With an old house like that,” he says, “it’s impossible to eliminate allergens. All those crevices are practically impenetrable.”
I’m not going to laugh, Clemence tells herself when he says this, and she doesn’t even mind that he’s refusing to let their relationship proceed in a standard fashion, inanystandard fashion, because, well, let’s just say that all the crevices are penetrable in the closet under the stairs. Their situation forcing them both to be creative, to find different ways to connect with each other. It’s never boring, which Clemence knows it could easily be if she began turning up at his place for regular booty calls. Toby is straightforward about where he stands and who he is, and so although he’s odd, he’s never disappointing. And while Toby in the daylight can be middling, Toby in the dark delivers satisfaction like she’s never known before, though it has been suggested by others that Clemence might be fooling herself.
“The closet is not a metaphor,” says Clemence, arguing Naomi’s assertions. “The closet is a closet, and this is my life. Iam allowed to do things that feel good. Surely you, of all people, should understand that.” Alecture about compartmentalization is more than a bit rich coming from someone who keeps her sex trapeze in a spare room drawer.
