After all my carry-on, I was actually able to collate Suzi’s changes within a day and get her book back to the designer. To my surprise, she’d actually been quite thorough and organised with all of the corrections she’d made. This much revision at such a late stage was not ideal, but she’d avoided it being a complete disaster by numbering everything very clearly and being very descriptive about where to move the images. Perhaps I had trained her a little bit, after all.
Rita, however, was becoming a pain. She was always texting me, inviting me out for charity dinners or Max over for play dates. I felt as though I needed to break up with her properly and tell her that she wasn’t my type. Courting women for my husband had become messy, and I was left dealing with the fallout. I kept on making excuses, saying Max had football practice or maths tutoring or I was on deadline. But when she called me to find out whether I wanted to come along to a Thermomix demonstration at her place, something in me snapped.
‘I’m sorry, Rita, I’ve got to be honest. I’m really not into Thermomixes. I don’t know much about them, but I’m very suspicious. I don’t know how all that pulverised food can actually be so much better for us. And if I’m going to be completely honest, I think there are two types of people in the world: Thermomix people and non-Thermomix people. And I’m not sure the two types of people should mix.’
Needless to say, she stopped texting and calling me after that. It was easy to cut her off at school, because Max was never very interested in Evan anyway. So Annie and Rita were out of the picture, but I was getting the feeling that Suzi had gone underground with Luke.
I started checking his phone when he was in the shower, but frustratingly I couldn’t find any evidence. He was either being very clever and deleting all of their messages or traces of their calls, or they were playing out their relationship in another sphere. I wondered whether perhaps she was visiting him at the Patch.
After dinner one night he was working in the study on plans for some new plots at the back of the Patch. I went and sat on the armchair. He looked at me uneasily. I was disrupting his work, and he was probably wary of another discussion that would lead to yet another dispassionate argument.
‘I’m excited about MONA next week,’ I said.
‘Me, too.’
‘Did you hear how Suzi got on? Did she like it?’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I haven’t heard.’
I looked him straight in the eyes. They were a clear green, nothing signalling L-I-A-R in them. I felt disappointed. I’d thought that the two of them had hit it off at the launch, that now that was it, they were on a runaway train to togetherland.
‘You work with her. Did she say anything to you?’
‘We’re not really talking, after all those issues with her book.’
I crept off to our bedroom and lay on the bed thinking. I didn’t know what was going on inside me. One moment I was seething with jealousy about them dancing together, the next I was bitterly disappointed to discover they weren’t having some kind of secret affair. All this was taking a toll on me.
And was Jarvis actually worth it? Maybe Hattie was right. What did I really know about him? Maybe I should try to discover whether he had some kind of erectile dysfunction. Maybe I should find out how he ironed his shirts and placed them in his cupboard, whether he could use a lawnmower, how he interacted with kids, whether he could cook a decent meal, whether he was a saver or a spender. All this was the sort of stuff that could destroy relationships. The little things. The domestic things. How had I put so much faith in someone whom I hadn’t even spent more than twenty minutes with in real life in the past twelve years? My heart thumped anxiously.
But was that even the point? Wasn’t my relationship with Luke doomed anyway? I was sure that I would never have fallen down that deep, dark love well with Jarvis if my relationship with Luke had been any good. Jarvis made me feel alive, sexy, desirable, He made me want to turn my whole world upside-down, just for him. Luke, on the other hand, made me feel like the mother of his child, a useful household organiser, someone he could tolerate in his space, just barely. They were apples and oranges, yin and yang. Luke was white and Jarvis black, and I was being drawn to the dark side.
I felt I’d lost control of the situation though. If Luke was telling the truth and he hadn’t been in contact with Suzi, then I didn’t know how to draw them back towards each other. I’d behaved so badly towards Suzi that there was no way I could pick up the phone and invite her over for dinner again. I’d ruined the courtship by letting my own insecurities get in the way of my plan.
So I lay there, searching my soul with an industrial-sized torch. What did I really want? A lifetime with Luke, pretending to be happy? Living with Luke was okay. If I had to be with him until my dying day then I could do it. He would be all right. He could still make me laugh. We worked as a team. We were compatible in a domestic sort of way. Or Jarvis? With him, I imagined this beautiful artistic lifestyle: bringing cups of coffee to him in his sunlit studio and talking about themes and ideas in his work. I liked the idea of walking around his exhibition launches, our hands intertwined like lattice, as he’d once said. In the evenings, we would drink red wine by the fire and look through a hardcover, fully illustrated book about Ron Mueck. We could lie in bed naked, his hand softly on my belly, and read passages from Russian short stories to each other. We could travel to New York, just to see a Mike Kelley exhibition. My imagination was expansive and everything seemed possible with Jarvis.
I could imagine Jarvis and I getting old together, him with thick black-framed round glasses, one of those intelligent older men, with short grey hair, maybe a goatie. I felt as though life would never get boring with him, he would always be able to engage me with his intellect and his views on the world, like he did in his messages to me. Luke, on the other hand, well, our conversation had all but dried up already. We would be like mutes when we were older. I could see us as the old couple who went out for dinner and didn’t have anything to say to each other, except for comments about the menu and ‘what are you having?’ Ugh.
So that torch of mine shone on Jarvis. I was pretty sure that it was him I wanted, despite everything. It was the harder choice to make. But as he’d often said in his messages to me, he had faith that everything would work out in the end, that everyone would be happy. Sometimes I questioned this. I didn’t know how everyone could be happy in the end, but maybe they could. Maybe Jarvis could be a good influence in Max’s life; he could inspire the artistic side of him. While Luke enlightened Max with sports and horticulture, Jarvis could impress him with the arts. Max could have two great role models in his life. I was actually doubling his experiences.
Jarvis had a number of nieces and nephews whom he talked about. He seemed to adore them. Because he felt he was never going to have children of his own, he’d showered them with his love. Often he had the boys staying over with him. He’d told me about an expensive pastel set he’d bought for his niece just the other week, even though she was only six, and he hardly had enough money to pay the rent that month. That was the kind of person who would make a great stepfather, surely?
I logged in and checked the email messages on my phone, looking for a sign from the gods, and there it was: a simple YouTube link from Jarvis, to the Bob Dylan song ‘I Want You’. I listened to the track, and it was so raw and sincere, it was just what I needed to reassure me that I had the right man in my spotlight.