Sunday, December 23
The kids celebrate the Sunday before Christmas by waking up at 6 a.m. and stampeding en masse down the stairs.
‘Who needs an alarm clock?’ Alex groans. Rolls out of bed. ‘Staying in bed?’ I pull a pillow over my head in response.
When he’s gone, I realise I have tears in my eyes. I don’t think about why. Reasons enough. Still. I am not pleased with myself.
When I finally get up, I channel disquiet into breakfast. Eggs. Bacon. Pancakes. And waffles. Cassandra walks into the kitchen as I’m throwing dishes onto the table.
‘Holy cow!’ she exclaims. ‘Who’s coming over for breakfast?’
‘Lacey,’ I say promptly. ‘Call her, sweetie, or pop over. Ask her and Clayton and whoever’s over there to come.’
I need a hit of Lacey. I need to be enveloped in her arms.
‘Probably just Lacey and Clayton,’ Cassandra says. ‘I don’t see Clint’s car in the driveway.’
No secrets in our neighbourhood.
Seven minutes later, we’re all around the table – the boys and Annie making a ruckus, Cassandra staring at Lacey’s earrings and dress with admiration and envy, me forcing food down my throat.
‘Eat more.’ Lacey heaps more eggs onto my plate. And suddenly I notice there is no diamond ring glittering on her finger.
When she leans over to refill my coffee – hostess always, even in my house – I spot it on a thin chain around her neck. She sees me look, and pops it under her top.
‘A story for later,’ she mouths. And when the kids leave us to watch a movie, I wait for her to tell me.
But first she insists on doing the dishes. And makes me eat more. Makes another pot of coffee.
I wait.
Alex comes back into the kitchen.
‘Remember how I said your neglectful husband was going to have to go out on December twenty-fourth to do Christmas shopping?’ he says. ‘Well, I’m a day ahead of schedule. Can I disappear for a few hours?’
‘With or without kids?’ I ask.
‘God, without,’ he says. ‘Please.’
I give him permission. He kisses me. Disappears.
Lacey finishes the dishes and, finally, she sits opposite me at the table. Pours out the coffee.
‘I can’t put it back on just yet,’ she says. And the rage that’s been flowing through me intermittently finds a new target. I know exactly what he’s done, the bastard. Of course. And it doesn’t make it any better that I always thought that this is what he would do: that I never believed he would, finally, marry Lacey. That I was always sure that, after letting her plan and indulge, in the end, he would run. And run in what a spectacular way: creating a situation so untenable for Lacey that she would be the one to walk.
There is a part of me that recognises that my anger at him makes no real sense. What does it matter?
But the part of me that loves Lacey – that loves my mother – is so fucking angry.
So angry I miss the story and hear…
‘…so I finally said, well, I won’t make you take back the ring, but I’m not wearing it on my finger until I figure out what I want to do,’ Lacey says.
‘Oh,’ I say. What?
Lacey shrugs expressively.
‘I know,’ she says. ‘I know you would tell him to go to hell. Heck, you would have told him to go to hell the first time he made a baby with her.’
‘The first time,’ I echo. A part of me wants to laugh hysterically. ‘I forgave him the first baby’ Lacey is effectively saying. ‘The second one is a little hard to stomach.’
But is that what she’s really saying?
No. Because she is Lacey.
‘I did break up with him, the first time,’ Lacey says. ‘Remember? And how long did that last? Three weeks. Twenty days, actually. I can do without him for about twenty days.’
I wonder what Sofia’s ‘I’m able to do without him’ metric for Clint is. And does she think of Lacey as the ‘other’ girlfriend, the other ‘wife’, or does she think of herself as the one on the side? According to Lacey, Sofia has always been more off-than-on than Lacey…but she’s been around for longer. Clint was with her – or at least tumbling back to her intermittently – when he met Lacey.
And made Clayton with her.
A circumstance that Lacey used to explain her ultimate reaction to the first ‘Hey, baby, Sofia’s having my baby but it’s you I really, really love’ situation.
‘First, I was angry, so angry,’ Lacey says. ‘Of course. So angry. Not even, you know, because she was pregnant. But because he had been telling me for months – for years – that he wasn’t with her any more. Well, clearly he had been with her. And probably repeatedly.’
Yes.
‘Which,’ she says, reading me, ‘also would have made me angry. But, you know. I forgive. A lot.’
‘But then –’ she shrugs, and no one shrugs quite like Lacey ‘– I thought…I believed…I know. We are meant to be together. We have been together for lifetimes. Coming together. Fighting. Ultimately working things out.’
I say nothing.
‘I know you think it’s all crap,’ she says mildly, without rancour. ‘But. I believe. And. Well. After we were apart – what happens every time we are apart – I realised I want him in my life. No terms.’
‘Well, but now you want him in your life on marriage terms,’ I say. The diamond ring has popped out from under her collar and glitters. She reaches for it, twirls it.
‘So this time,’ she says, ‘this time, I knew he was with her sometimes. And with others. Because, you know. That’s him. And I have not…I have had my fun too, you know.’
I didn’t, actually. But I am not surprised.
‘But another baby’s a little hard to absorb.’ She puts into words what I’ve been thinking. ‘Especially while we’re planning a wedding.’
I nod. This I do understand. And I also understand this:
‘It probably happened because you’re planning a wedding,’ I say.
And Lacey tilts her head.
‘What?’ she says. She gives my throwaway sentence much too much consideration. ‘Say it again,’ she demands.
‘It probably happened because you’re planning a wedding,’ I repeat.
‘Oh-my-God,’ she says. ‘Oh-my-God. You are so right. Oh-my-God.’ She gets up in a gorgeous, fluid motion. ‘Can I leave Clayton here for a while? I’ve got to go.’
Yes, she does. This I understand too. And she will do this: call Clint. Text Clint. Fuck Clint. Forgive Clint.
If he’s still game – marry Clint.
I watch through the window as she crosses my lawn and driveway to get to her front door, and I see her take the ring off her neck and slip it back on to her finger.
Oh, Lacey.
I text Alex the shorthand of what just happened. He texts me back.
The phone vibrates in my hand as I read. It’s my father calling. And I am not talking to him. Possibly never ever talking to him again.
Lacey, I know, would forgive him. Perhaps not be angry in the first place. But I am not Lacey.
I would like to be like Lacey, a little bit.
Fuck.
I check the voicemail: six of them, maybe more, from my father.
All variants on the same theme. He’s sorry. Can we talk?
I don’t want to. I so don’t want to. But.
I type, ‘I’m home alone with the kids. Come over.’
And there he is, 45 minutes later. Covered by my children, who adore their Gramps beyond all reason. As they hug him, kiss him and wrestle him, he throws me a ‘See? I am a really good grandfather. See?’ look.
Fuck him.
I leave the living room and go to the kitchen. Start making another pot of coffee.
‘Jane.’
He’s standing three feet behind me. I feel his presence.
‘My sweetheart,’ he says.
I don’t turn around.
‘Jane, I’m so sorry.’
‘What for?’ I ask. The coffee grinder whirrs. My voice sounds funny. I am not crying.
‘What for?’ I repeat. Half-turn my face. He looks at me, then backs away to the kitchen table. Sits down.
‘For…everything,’ he says. ‘For leaving. For not telling you earlier. I told myself you knew – that your mother had told you. And you…I was so happy.’ He stops. He doesn’t know how to articulate it, but I’m his daughter and I know exactly what he is thinking in this moment: I loved him. I accepted him. I was angry and shaken, but I loved him. I forgave him – or it looked like I forgave him. And it was so easy, so convenient to think that I knew everything and still accepted him unconditionally.
Unconditional acceptance. Big deal.
I leave him sitting at the table looking at my back until the kettle comes to a boil. I pour the water into the cafetière. Then stand there the four long minutes needed for it to be drinkable. Pour coffee into two mugs. Add cream and sugar to his.
Carry them to the table.
Set them down carefully.
Sit down.
Am I going to ask him why?
Yes.
‘What happened?’ I ask. I’m looking into my coffee mug, not at him. ‘What happened to “I was going to have peace in my family at any price?”’
And I know the answer before he speaks it. Because, after all, I’ve been there, with them. I’ve seen it.
‘There has not been peace in the family for a very, very long time,’ he says. ‘You know this, Jane. You have asked me…’ His voice trails off.
I should accept this. Stop here. Hug him. Love him. Let him be my dad. Unconditional acceptance. I can give this to Marie. To Lacey and Clint. Even, sort of, sometimes, to Nicola in her anger and Paul in his stupidity.
I need to give this to my father.
But. Not quite yet.
‘Why now?’ I ask. ‘Why…after forty-three years? Just before Christmas? Why now?’
And when he tells me, haltingly, slowly, badly – I get up and walk out of the kitchen. Into the living room. Slide between the children on the couch – ‘What are you guys watching now?’ ‘Elf, again!’ – pull them around me and close my eyes.
‘Jane…’ He stands in the doorway.
‘You have to leave now,’ I say.
‘Jane, my sweetheart,’ he pleads.
‘Leave my house,’ I say. ‘Now.’
The kids start to turn their heads away from the movie; I see Cassandra’s brow furrow.
‘Dad,’ I say. ‘You know what I need right now. Please go.’
And he’s gone.
I should call Alex. Text Marie.
I sit on the couch surrounded by my children and struggle to understand my father as Will Ferrell’s overgrown faux-elf character tries to make his father love him.
I should definitely not call my mother.
So I text her.
The phone rings two minutes later, and it’s her, and I realise I asked for this. Perhaps I even want it. So I answer it, and, cradling it between my ear and neck, retreat back into the kitchen. Two mugs of untouched coffee still on the table.
‘Jane, my love,’ my mother says. And she – the wife being left, the one who is suffering, becomes the comforter, automatically, because she is the mother, my mother. She says – what does she say? That she will be fine. That he loves me and the kids, so much. And – and here I laugh, I actually laugh – that ‘men do these things.’
‘Are you angry?’ I ask her.
‘So fucking angry,’ she says. It’s the first time I’ve heard my mother swear. ‘So fucking angry, Jane. But I will be fine. And you will forgive him.’
‘Will you?’ I ask her.
‘Probably not,’ she says. And I laugh, hysterically.
I spend the rest of the afternoon practising how I’m going to tell the story to Alex. I might say this: ‘Hey, guess what? Not only did my father leave my mother after forty-three years of marriage, he left her for someone else. Just like your jackass of a father. Do you still like him?’
Or I might say this: ‘But wait, it gets better. He wasn’t actually having an affair, oh, no, not my Puritan, perfect, honest, upright father. No, that would be…ungentlemanlike. Uncouth. He’s met someone he likes. Someone he would like to get to know better. Someone he’d like to ask out for a coffee, dinner. But he can’t because he’s fucking married to my mother so he had to leave her! He left my mother so he could ask someone else out for a fucking coffee!’
Or this: ‘My father left his marriage of forty-three years so he wouldn’t feel guilty about maybe-sort-of flirting with a sixty-year-old widow.’
Or, perhaps, this: ‘My father has totally lost his mind.’
Or…
I wonder if Alex will defend him. He loves my dad, always has. What will he say? Will he say, ‘Surely, Jane, you can understand how your father couldn’t live a lie?’ He will say, ‘Forty-three years is a long time, Jane.’
If he says, ‘Surely, Jane, after forty-three years, he deserves a chance at a little bit of happiness in his retirement years,’ I will scream.
If he says, ‘But he had to be honest, Jane. Can’t you understand that?’ I will leave.
As I pound chicken breasts with a metal meat mallet into barely edible mush, I try to articulate to myself why I’m so angry.
I was angry when I thought my mother left. Because 43 years is a long, long time and walking out on that…fuck. Why? Why would you do that?
I was angry when I learned he left. Because 43 years is a long, long time, and he put up with everything in those 43 years. Everything.
I am infuriated right now, because he left not because he was done – his cup of patience runneth over – not even because he found something else…but because he wanted to be free to pursue the opportunity to find something else. He left 43 years for…what?
A ‘maybe’ coffee date.
Not a mad, passionate love affair. Not something better than my mother. Just…potential. A maybe.
A fucking maybe. An opportunity.
I hope the little widow – I picture her as five foot zero, with a white beehive hairdo – turns him down flat.
Or strings him along for a couple of months, and then breaks his heart.
I hope he dies alone, miserable, celibate and full of regret.
I hope he goes crawling back to my mother…and that she kicks him in the teeth.
So angry.
So so angry.
The anger stays with me the rest of the day as I move through all the quotidian tasks, cleaning the kitchen, feeding the children, listening to Alex’s account of the insanity that was the mall on the Sunday before Christmas.
The children ask to stay up all night, and I have no energy to fight them. And what does it matter, it’s Sunday, it’s almost Christmas. La-di-dah. Bath, tooth-brushing and into their rooms, with books and gaming devices. The boys ask to borrow my laptop so they can watch Elf again in bed. I give it to them. Annie crawls into bed between them. Cassandra goes to her own bed with Anne of the Island.
‘Do you want to watch a movie as well?’ Alex asks. ‘Come. On the couch. With me.’
I don’t. I so don’t.
But I go.
He tries to make a choice that pleases me. Love Actually. ‘It’s got Colin Firth and Alan Rickman in it,’ he says. ‘You’ll love it.’
I hate it.
‘Alex?’ As Emma Thompson’s character throws a fit over the Alan Rickman character’s lame attempt at an affair, I hit the pause button on the remote. ‘Alex? I need you to promise me something.’
‘Anything. The moon,’ he mutters, and reaches over and strokes my arm, then my breast, gently. ‘So long as it doesn’t involve me ever having to go to a mall in December again.’
‘Promise me that no matter what happens, our children have one set of parents. For ever,’ I say.
‘I promised you that on our wedding day, remember?’ he says. Calm. Eyes on the screen, not on me. ‘The big discussion about how I wanted to leave out “till death do us part”, and you insisted that if you were going to marry me, it was for ever and ever, and not until I decided – or you decided – you wanted something else? Remember? To you I pledge my troth and all that?’
‘I remember.’ I smile at the memory. Saying ‘to you I pledge my troth’ was funny and we both laughed as we said it. So did our friends. I have a sudden, too sharp, image of Matt’s face. Laughing. I remember when he pledged eternal faithfulness to Joy, I had to look down at my shoes. And bite my lips. ‘What I mean, though – that you promise me we stay married no matter what. No matter what I do, what you do – this marriage, this family is for ever.’
‘What are you talking about, Jane?’ He’s looking at me now. Not happy. There’s a crease in his forehead.
‘Stupid shit,’ I say. Tears circle in my eyes. ‘Do you want me to stop?’
He looks at me. He wants me to stop. I close my eyes. And my mouth.
‘No,’ he says, suddenly. ‘Talk to me, Jane. Tell me.’
Those two words, in his mouth, in his voice. I shudder. But I talk.
I tell him why my father left my mother.
I tell him why Nicola left Paul – or Paul Nicola, depending on how you assign blame, interpret motivation. How that marriage ended.
I tell him how I think Marie and JP’s marriage might end. Because she’s unsure, restless.
I tell him how much Lacey is capable of forgiving.
I go back to talking about my parents. Because that’s the one that’s really ripping me.
‘Forty-three years of ups-and-downs, sure, of building and rebuilding, of life – all of a sudden, over, because my father didn’t even think it honourable to think lusty thoughts about some sixty-year-old widow unless he left my mother. Who he hasn’t even…and may never…Where the fuck is the sense in that?’ I ask.
‘What are you saying?’ Alex asks.
‘That if he had just…got it out of his system, gone on a few dates – seen her wrinkles close up a few times, been on the wrong end of her nagging – that maybe my parents wouldn’t be doing this. He wouldn’t have left. They’d be celebrating their fiftieth a few years from now.’
Alex shakes his head. He doesn’t believe me, I can tell. But I want to finish the thought, the argument. ‘And Nicola. Look at Nicola and Paul, two people who will now be miserable and fighting for the rest of their lives over assets and parenting plans and who gets which holidays and all that shit. And why? Because she couldn’t ride it out. He didn’t even want to leave, right? He just wanted to…’
‘Well, then he shouldn’t have fucked the intern,’ Alex says reasonably. ‘Sometimes, things are just that black and white, Jane. This thing is.’
‘It’s not,’ I argue. ‘Because people want things – get restless – frustrated – bored – whatever. Those are all normal emotions. And monogamy’s hard. And sometimes boring. And often frustrating. And – throwing away fifteen years, forty years, whatever, because of…well. I won’t do it. And you don’t get to either.’
‘Jane? I’m no expert on family law, but I think you’ve just sanctioned any future affairs I may have,’ Alex says. ‘But, love…I said nothing to even suggest I sanction any affair you might have. Do you understand?’
Oh, Alex. Yes. I understand. The curse of my fucking life, that I understand completely and so self-deception is denied me.
I laugh.
He sidles closer, kisses me on the forehead. ‘But, Jane…all those marriages? They were all fucked up. Nicola and Paul were a disaster. You know that. JP’s a jackass. Your parents – your parents have been fighting for years. Decades. And Clint and Lacey – Jesus-fucking-Christ. Who wants that? And us – Jane, we’re great together. We’re nothing like any of them.’
I shrug. Nod.
‘I know,’ I say. ‘But. You know. I still want you to promise me.’
He says nothing.
I unpause the movie.
Emma Thompson continues to freak out at Alan Rickman. And he takes it.
Finally:
‘Jane?’ I turn my head. Meet his eyes. ‘I want you. For ever.’
I smile. I kiss him on his still creased forehead.
‘I love you, father-of-my-children and husband-till-death-do-us-part,’ I say.
We watch the rest of the movie in silence.
When we go upstairs, the kids are all asleep, even Cassandra, her book on the bed. We turn out the lights. Go to bed.
Still silent. It takes Alex a long time to get to sleep. And I lie beside him. Frustrated, angry, aching, wanting to wail on my dad, my mom. Everyone.
And wanting to fuck Matt.
And not wanting or caring for permission to do so.