“It may be healthy,” her mum said, beginning to lose her equilibrium at last, “but it’s not going to get you anywhere in another relationship. It’s idealism, is what it is, and it’s not one bit realistic. You weren’t a star. You weren’t living in hotels half the time, far from your wife and child, handsome and talented and so charming, with women throwing themselves at you everywhere you went. Men need release, and they can separate the emotional from the physical so much better than we can. If you know that he cheated, you probably confronted him with it, didn’t you? I’m sure you did. And he told you it didn’t mean anything, because it didn’t. He told you that you were the only woman he loved. You can blow up at me all you like, but it doesn’t make it any less true. Dylan was a loving, kind, generous husband.”
“Men need release? That’s the reason? Don’t women need release, too? It doesn’t take another person to get it. That’s what they make shower heads for.”
No scrubbing happening anymore. “Zora Adrianne.” Her mum’s voice was sharp. “Nobody—and I mean nobody—wants a woman with that kind of mouth.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Zora was feeling absolutely reckless, driving with the top down, throwing caution to the winds for the second time today. It felt good. In fact, she wanted to laugh. Could be hysteria. “I think I know some men who do. Maybe they aren’t lovely. Maybe they’re even a bit rough around the edges. An honest man I can be honest with, though? He’ll do.”
Her mother turned to face her. There was judgment there, and Zora didn’t care. “Who’s your example, then? Rhys Fletcher, whom you’re kissing in the bathroom? I’m not even going to ask about that. I’m just going to hope it’s what you told Isaiah, because anything else would be shameful. Yes, I’m going to say the word. Shameful. And don’t get on your high horse with me. You can hardly get more rough around the edges than Rhys Fletcher, and you just told me that, surprise! He has a daughter. How will his wife feel when she hears about that? Except that she already knows, and obviously, if the girl’s six, that wasn’t the thing that ended their marriage. Why? Because she accepted the good and the bad together.”
Zora was having trouble breathing. She tried to say something, but it wouldn’t come out.
Her mother put a hand on her shoulder and softened her tone. “All I’m asking, darling, is that you consider being a little more practical. Yes, you were hurt, and I understand that, but it was years ago. It’s over and done. Marriage is a partnership. All partnerships involve compromise. You get something, and you give something. I’m not saying not to pursue your career. I was never more upset than when you gave up your architecture, was I? Art was my own dream, and I couldn’t have been happier to know you were going to be doing something so close to that. I told you not to get pregnant, too, but you did anyway. You made your own choices, like we all do. Dylan was your choice. You had your eyes open, I thought. That’s fine. Keep them open. Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face now. Don’t look for perfection and overlook somebody good enough, who can give you what you need. Just make him somebody suitable next time, somebody you have a real future with, for Isaiah’s sake. You’ve got what I can only call a lowbrow side, darling, and it’s not your best side. A plastic surgeon isn’t going to look like a Maori rugby star. Nobody gets everything, so take care what you put highest on your list.”
“I thought Dylan was lovely,” Zora said, when she could say anything. “What happened to that?”
“You didn’t seem to think so,” her mum said, in a stunning display of illogic. “And who knows who it’ll be next time?”
Zora tried to think of an answer. She couldn’t. “I’m not looking for perfection,” she finally told her mother. “I’m not looking for anything at all. I’ve got everything in the world I need. Right down to the shower head.”
Rhys headed up the wide stone steps of Finn’s house in Mount Eden at nine the next morning, and because he didn’t feel like jumping up them two at a time, he did just that. The body went where the mind took it.
Finn answered the door with his youngest kid, dressed only in a nappy, in one big arm. He took a long look at Rhys and asked, “Why do you look as buggered as you did a week ago?”
Rhys could have answered, Because I couldn’t sleep. Instead, he said, “Never mind. Let’s go over those plans.”
Jenna appeared in the doorway. “Hi, Rhys,” she said, and he bent down, kissed her cheek, and thought again what a nice woman she was. She said, “I met Casey on Saturday, did Zora tell you? What a sweetheart. Congratulations. That sounds funny to say, when she’s six, but kids come to you in all sorts of ways. Wonderful to see Zora again, too.” After that, she smiled some more, took the toddler from Finn, and headed back into the house, and Rhys thought, I’m surrounded by mums and dads and kids, and it’s all right. When did that happen? And how is it that I’m almost there, but I feel nowhere close?
Finn said, “Let’s go golfing.”
“We’re not going golfing,” Rhys said. “Too much to do, mate.”
“We’ll talk while we golf. Efficient, eh. Nine holes. Got your clubs in your boot?”
“If I wanted to golf,” Rhys said, “I’d have had you meet me in Titirangi. Ten minutes from my house.”
“Yeh,” Finn said. “Hang on a sec. I’ll get my clubs.”
Did Rhys feel more relaxed, a few hours and quite a few tree-shaded Remuera Golf Club kilometers later, headed up Finn’s steps again? Yes, he did, and also yes, they’d talked over most of what they needed to. Finn opened the door and said, “Let’s see what we can scare up for lunch. We’ll fuel up, and then we’ll finish this,” and Rhys threw up his mental hands, went in and made a sandwich, and took it into the lounge with Finn along with a cup of tea, his laptop, and his notebook. He did have to move a naked baby doll over on the couch in order to sit down, however.
“I want to try swapping the wings around,” he was saying twenty minutes later, his sandwich forgotten on the coffee table. “I think Kevvie could give us more on the right.”
“You sure?” Finn asked, frowning. “He’s gone well on the left so far.”
“I’d like to see him on the openside, find out what he can do there. He’s got more finesse than Matt, and Matt’s going to be better at bashing his way up the guts. He’s young and raw, but he’s got the power, and we need to give him his head to use it. If it doesn’t go, we’ll swap them back. Let’s talk about the lineout.”
He’d started to chart a set piece, sketching fast, explaining, when a little girl wandered into the room. Her curly ginger hair was in a high ponytail that looked neat, but not any neater than Rhys was managing himself now, and her top had a unicorn on it. Unicorns were a thing, it seemed, because ever since he’d found Casey, he’d seen them everywhere. The little girl headed straight for his couch, climbed up on it beside him, picked up the baby doll, and said, “Daddy, my baby has lost her bottle.”
Rhys paused in his sketching.
Finn said, “Say ‘Excuse me,’ Lily.”
“’Scuse me,” she said. “My baby has lost her bottle.” She turned big, accusing green eyes onto Rhys. He was doomed to be followed by accusing little-girl eyes, it seemed. “I think it’s under your bottom.”
Rhys stood up and turned around. Yes, there was a tiny, white-plastic bottle in the corner of the cushion. He handed it to Lily, and she said, “Thank you. She needs her milk, because it’s her lunchtime, and she’s a baby.” Which was logical.
“She needs clothes to eat lunch, surely,” Rhys said.
“No,” Lily said. “She’s ’posed to be naked, because she is going swimming very soon. She doesn’t have any togs, because they got losted, so she has to be naked. But first she has to drink milk. And then she can go swimming.”
“She’s a girl, eh,” Rhys said.
“Yes. Because she doesn’t have a penis. Boys have a penis, but dolls never have a penis. So dolls are all girls.”
Finn said, “There you are, mate. Can’t argue with that.”
Jenna came into the room fast and said, “Sorry. Lily got away from me. Come play in the kitchen, sweetie. Daddy’s busy working.”
“OK,” Lily said, “but I have to kiss him first.” Another scramble up onto the other couch, a smacking kiss and a rub of her hand down Finn’s hard cheek, and she took off, dragging the doll by one arm. The girl doll.
“Can I bring you boys another cup of tea?” Jenna asked.
“Nah,” Finn said. “I’ll make it, once we’ve finished. Pretty soon now.”
She took off after her daughter, and Finn said to Rhys, “Normally, this would be the moment when I ask you how it’s going with Casey, but I’m waiting until that cup of tea.”
Or, Rhys thought, this would be the moment when I ask you why it is that I used to feel lucky not to be married and have four kids, and now I realize that I’m not actually as lucky as I thought. Except that it’s not a question I can ask.
Zora turned the van eastward. Five o’clock had come early this morning. Extremely early. Exceptionally early. That was what you got when your brother had had other plans for his Sunday night, the way somebody with a social life tended to do, and instead of getting some reassurance from an actual live person, you’d lain on the couch, drunk half a bottle of wine, laughed, cried, steamed up, and let yourself believe that a man could be devoted to a woman, absolutely and forever.
All right, only in Pride and Prejudice, which was set in the nineteenth century and involved fictional people, but it still counted, sort of. Jane Austen had believed it, and other people believed it enough to still buy the book and watch the movie two hundred years later, so there you were. Besides, seeing Mr. Darcy be so hopelessly attracted, so nobly determined to make things right, and so smolderingly hot was good for her. About the only company she had right now was her dirty fantasies and her apparently outmoded standards, so she might as well spend the night with the one person who shared them, even if that was Jane Austen and she was dead.
It had been a drunken thought, but her own.
She may have cried some at the end. She may also have crossed her legs when Elizabeth’s eyes had met Darcy’s over the piano, his hard face had softened at last, and both of them had known that there couldn’t ever be anybody else. Also that all Darcy wanted at that moment was to draw Elizabeth down on his bed, shove her bodice down with a slow hand, and show her everything her body could possibly feel for hours on end, and all Elizabeth wanted was something vaguely like that, too, which she wouldn’t even have been able to fantasize adequately about, because she’d never had sex. And all Zora had wanted was to believe that Mr. Darcy had been as attentive, intense, and careful a lover, and Elizabeth as gorgeously shocked and satisfied, on their fictional, completely nonexistent wedding night as she imagined them.
Also, at least the BBC, unlike her mum, her dad, Rhys, Dylan, and probably Hayden, was willing to tell her, Yes, cheating’s a dealbreaker.
She’d got up at five o’clock anyway. She might not be good at everything, but she was good at soldiering on. If ninety percent of life was showing up, she had ninety percent taped. And when Rhys had brought Casey over before school, she’d focused on the girl, not on him.
It had been fine. It would be fine. Rhys’s face had been back to “shut down,” anyway, like Mr. Darcy’s pre-revelation, so that told her what she needed to know. Tomorrow, she’d drive him to the airport, since he’d insisted that it was better if she have his car, “just in case,” and then she’d have twelve days to take care of bunnies and kids and get herself right again.
In his bed. In his bath, too, in front of the windows as the sun set over the mountains.
And it came to pass in an eveningtide, that David arose from off his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king's house: and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful to look upon.
He wouldn’t be there, and she wasn’t all that beautiful. What was her problem? Other than the kind of insistent need that couldn’t be cured by a shower head?
Now, she had the van loaded down with her Monday subscription deliveries, and was turning up a quiet street in Mount Eden to drop off the first of them, which was to Jenna and Finn Douglas’s address. Jenna had asked for her flowers on Mondays rather than Fridays, unlike the rest of her residential customers, “because Finn will never notice flowers on Friday, and neither will I. Too many game thoughts for him, and too many kids in the house at the weekend for me. We always end up with extras, somehow. My quiet time’s during the week. I want them then.”
She saw a silver BMW SUV with a dent in the front fender parked out front, and nearly turned around again. She felt scrubbed raw, and she wasn’t sure she could face Rhys. Even though, for once, she was wearing makeup and looking relatively polished, in leggings and an embroidered tunic. Business-delivery mode.
Harden up, she told herself, then took the arrangement out of the back of the van, climbed the steps, and rang the doorbell. You won’t even see him. You’ll hand over the flowers to Jenna and leave.
Jenna answered the door, smiled like the sun at sight of the flowers, and said, “I’m feeling so brilliant for asking you for these. I still hate it when Finn leaves on one of these trips, but those are going to console me. So beautiful. Thank you.”
“I’m glad you like them,” Zora said. She always felt a little shy, the first time she delivered to a new client. She’d gone with the same thing she’d done for her mum last night, because she’d loved how it had turned out. She’d thought about sunflowers, something more late-summery and androgynous, but she’d done the blush-and-pale-green instead. It was prettier, that was all. It was gorgeous and lush and feminine and special. Men liked pretty things, too, especially if they could tell themselves that their appreciation had to do with appreciating a woman.
That was a confused thought. Probably the wine talking, still, or the relentlessly sexual thoughts that kept intruding, three years’ worth of them arriving in one hard rush.
“Do you have time for a cup of tea?” Jenna asked. “Ten minutes?”
“Sure,” Zora said. She knew Rhys was in there. She said yes anyway. Ten minutes.
Jenna’s littler kids were playing with a train set in the lounge when she walked through the house, and Rhys and Finn were sitting at the kitchen table. Having a cup of tea, what else. When Rhys saw her, he stood up, and her heart did some kind of flip and flutter, like she hadn’t seen him a few hours earlier.
“Hi,” he said. Smiling with his eyes all the way. She’d surprised him, clearly, because he didn’t have that blank look he so often did when he looked at her.
“Zora’s brought me my first flower delivery,” Jenna said. “I didn’t tell you that I subscribed, Finn. Surprise! I subscribed. I need pretty things, I decided, and isn’t this gorgeous?”
“You do need pretty things,” Finn said. “I’ve got no problem with that. Hi, Zora.” He kissed her cheek. Rhys didn’t. “Good to see you again. Thanks for making my wife happy. Always a good thing.”
His face was even craggier than it had been when he’d been playing with Dylan, his body was exactly as rock-solid, and both he and Rhys looked like they could lace up their boots right now and run onto the field, and like they were just hoping somebody wouldn’t turn up in time so they could do it. That was a lot of rugby muscle for one kitchen, she thought confusedly. The confusion was possibly because Rhys was still looking at her, and Rhys’s eyes made her knees go weak.
“Do you have a prettier vase?” she asked Jenna, who was filling the electric jug at the sink. “Since I’m here, I may as well do that for you. I deliver them in jars so people can do their own vases, but . . .” She was babbling. She knew it. She needed to get her hands busy, and fast.
Ten minutes. Floral arranging, cup of tea, and out. And if she tingled the whole ten minutes? Nobody had to know.
Zora had left. Rhys needed to leave, too. He’d just finish this tea first.
She’d seemed rattled, hadn’t she
? Or was that him? He didn’t know. She hadn’t said anything the day before about what had happened. In fact, she’d barely looked at him, either yesterday afternoon when he’d dropped her and Isaiah off, or this morning, either, which told him everything.
He shouldn’t have talked about orgasms. He’d known it at the time. It had slipped out, that was all, and everything else had seemed inevitable, exactly like that story she’d told. Like once you saw that woman naked in the moonlight, you had no choice.
Finn said, “. . . it’s going.”
“Pardon?” Rhys blinked.
Finn exchanged a glance with Jenna. “I was asking you how it was going with Casey. Saying I’d meant to ask you sooner.”
“Oh. Fine. Zora’s watching her. I told you that, though. She’s a good mum, and good to Casey, too. Better, I thought, for her to be with whanau.”
“Yes,” Jenna said. “I’m sure. To have other people who love her. Does she talk about her mum?”
“No,” Rhys said, then hesitated. “Should she? I’ve wondered.”
Jenna said, “You’ll have to excuse my interest. This is what I used to do, teach Year One. Do you want to know what I think? Or no? If it’s no, that’s all right.”
Finn took her hand under the table. Rhys couldn’t see it happen, exactly, but he could tell it had. “Yes,” Rhys told her. “I do.”
“Kids go along with what happens in their lives,” Jenna said. “First, because they don’t have a choice, and second, because they haven’t had the life experience we have, so they don’t compare their lives to what they expected, the way we do. That’s a good thing in some ways, because it means they can roll with the punches better, and a not-so-good thing in others, because they have no perspective. They don’t know that it gets better.”
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