“Ooops. Okay. Thanks.”
Jet lag, I think. He’s still jet-lagged. I’m going to have to work on him to get him into my happy mood. I don’t think he’s quite got into the swing of goodwill. When we did Christmas combined with New Year we were all festived out. He’s never witnessed how much effort I put into the celebrations before they start to pall. And this year I’m superpumped.
I hand him back his purple gift. “You have to put it under the ironic tree. We’ll wait until we’ve finished the picnic and then we can open our plethora of gifts.”
He groans impatiently, bends down, and puts the gift under the tree, throwing me a look that says, I can’t believe I’m doing this. “Good King Wenceslas,” he says, picking up the background music over the hum of the heater. “You’re serious about this Christmas malarkey, aren’t you?”
“Totally,” I say. “Greatest Christmas Hits. Part of my outstanding collection of CDs no one else wanted.”
“Why am I not surprised?” he says.
I laugh, hoping he might too. But he doesn’t. “You ready to picnic?”
“Sure,” he says. “You ready for prosecco? Or is the bunny drinking carrot juice?”
“HoHoHo,” I say.
I’m playing flippant and silly and am about to bounce into the kitchen, but then I catch that look on his face. The one I hate. The one that says he has something to tell me but doesn’t know how.
“What’s wrong?” I say, before remembering I don’t want to know. “No, don’t tell me. Let’s just pretend everything’s fabulous and full of good cheer.”
He walks up to me and takes me by my acrylic fur paws.
“Oh, Jennifer,” he says. “I knew you’d guess. I knew you’d drag it out of me.”
“Have I?” I gulp. “Am I Jennifer now?”
“I’m not sure how best to say this.” His eyelids flutter as my bobtail droops into my rabbit feet. “I thought I’d wait until we’d opened our presents and then you would know how much I love you and how much this pains me.”
“What pains you?” I say. “Arthritis? Please tell me it’s arthritis.”
“Come here.” He leads me to the sofa and sits down, bidding me to sit next to him. I shift my tail and shuffle back against the arm, keeping a bit of distance.
The room is crowding in on me. Everything is starting to look cheap and nasty instead of fun and frivolous.
His lips ruffle. “You do believe me when I say I love you, don’t you?” he says.
I remove my hands from the mittens. Suddenly I’m very hot. “It depends what follows,” I say.
“Jesus,” he says, puffing his cheeks. “For once it’s hot in here.”
“I’ll turn off the space heater.”
“No, don’t,” he says. “Just listen.”
“I’m all ears.” I hold up my pink and white bunny ears.
He reverse rotates his shoulders. “When I got your letter,” he says. “I was devastated. Devastated that you were going to die. We hadn’t been together for some time and it surprised me how much it got to me. So I called you and we met and that’s when I decided I wanted to be with you. Until the end. Which I did, darling. I really did.”
“Get to the ‘but,’ Harry. I feel I need to hear the ‘but.’”
He rolls his eyes. “Okay.”
Nooooo. There is a “but.” “Jingle Bells” starts playing. It sounds tinny and threatening and wrong. I want to close my eyes and shut my ears.
“I told a little white lie.” He shakes his head, trying to look remorseful. He looks back at me like he’s waiting for my probe. I stare right back at him.
“You remember I told you Melissa and I were no longer together?”
I continue to stare.
“It wasn’t exactly true.”
I twitch. “What do you mean? Not exactly?”
“Exactly that,” he repeats. He looks away.
This is not good, my head is saying. This is not good, my heart is saying. For once they agree.
“We were still living with each other.”
“Fine. So you finished with her after we’d talked?”
He pushes back his hair. His face is flushed. There are beads of perspiration breaking out on his forehead and his upper lip.
I get up. I want to turn off the heater, not because I want to spare him the sweat but because the noise is getting to me. My nerves are jangling.
“Just sit!” he says. “Please.”
I sit back down again, right on the bobtail. “Ouch.”
“I’m really sorry. Truly I am. I had no idea this was going to happen.”
“Harry, I don’t understand what you’re saying. What was going to happen?”
“You still don’t get it, do you? Melissa and I. We’re still together.”
I fall back onto the arm of the sofa. “Don’t be ridiculous. How can you be?”
He reaches out, puts his hands on my knees, gazes at me all forlorn. “We are. She lives in my apartment. Well, she has a key.”
“So get it back!” I know this is not the point. I push away his hands, stand up. This time I’m ignoring his instruction. I turn off the heater and turn off the CD. Everything’s getting to me now. I can barely bring myself to look at him even in my peripheral vision. I pace. “But we’ve been together. Whenever you’ve gotten back from a trip, we’ve been together. Don’t tell me the trips were a lie?”
He sits there, his head now in his hands. “They were real. I promise. And, yes, we have been together. I wanted that. And Melissa understood. She wanted me to be with you.”
I look at him and he looks back at me, pleading.
“Whoa. Hang on a minute. Did you say what I think you said? Melissa understood? Melissa wanted you to be with me?” I’m trying to absorb this. The pieces of the puzzle start to fall into place. He never once invited me back to his flat. He took me away, to be out of the way. “That’s very kind of her,” I say. “How extraordinarily generous.”
“She is kind—”
“Oh shut up, Harry!”
“Sorry,” he says.
I’m pacing back and forth, up and down and across the room in my ridiculous onesie, feeling entirely ugly and fat and stupid and mortified. I accidentally upset the bowl of chicken wings, then purposefully kick them across the rug.
“Sweetheart! Don’t be mad.”
“Don’t you dare ‘sweetheart’ me. What should I be? Thrilled for you? Oh, congratulations, I hope you’ll both be very happy? I couldn’t be more mad. Now, let me get this straight. Melissa let you be with me because I was dying. She was letting you hang out with me until the end, the end you wanted so desperately to help me through, because she knew that once I was dead, you’d be back?”
“God! You make it sound—”
“Disgusting. Right? So she let you have sex with me, because I was nearly a corpse?”
“She doesn’t know about the sex.”
“Oh, right! Oh, that’s okay then. Well, let’s just keep that little intimacy to ourselves, shall we? I suppose it was her idea to give me a private screening of my favorite film? Which you’ve now ruined.”
He lets out a frustrated sigh. “That was my idea.”
“Well, you’re just full of them, aren’t you?”
I take my arms out of the sleeves of the onesie. I’m down to my T-shirt and I’m sweltering. I’m sure there must be patches of sweat under my armpits. I bet Melissa doesn’t sweat. I bet she’d never wear a cheap onesie. I tie the arms around my waist and the rabbit paws flap in front of me with every step I take.
“Sit down, Jennifer!”
“Stop calling me that. You don’t need to keep rubbing it in.”
“Please sit down.”
“No!” I swing round, hands on hips, giving him full-on eye contact. “Now I get it. Now
I’ve heard it all. That’s why we’re doing Christmas early, isn’t it? Because you’re spending New Year’s with her.”
He looks guilty.
“Arrrrgggghhhhhh! I’m such an idiot. That must have been so inconvenient for you when you heard I wasn’t going to die. No wonder you behaved the way you did. No wonder you were so horrified.”
He’s speechless. His body language says it all.
“But you recovered really well, didn’t you? You took me out for a pity dinner and a pity fuck while you were trying to work out how you could extract yourself from this relationship. You’ve even bought me a pity present.” I stride over to the tree and pick up his pathetic little purple package with its pathetic little bow and throw it back at him. It falls at his feet and he picks it up and places it on his lap. He looks like Gulliver with a Lilliputian suitcase, packed and ready to go. “Well, I don’t need your consolation prize, thank you.”
He rolls his eyes. To him I’m just a woman overreacting.
“Do you know what?” I say, taking him in. “I actually fell for it. I believed you truly loved me and wanted to be with me until my dying day. I fell for all the When Harry Met Sally and Mallomar schtick. And when you were horrified when I told you I wasn’t dying, I believed you were entitled to take your time to absorb the news because it was a shock for me, too. I actually felt sorry for you because I understood how difficult it was to rationalize such a huge UNFORTUNATE MISTAKE.”
“Not unfortunate. Don’t be like that.”
I hoot. “Not for me. But, oh boy, did it put a spanner in the works of your little plan. There I was, happily celebrating our love, when all the time Melissa was lying in your cozy bed, counting the days until she could have you back in her arms, as soon as mine were cold with rigor mortis.”
“You make it sound like something horrible.”
“It is horrible!” I stamp on a chicken wing. “Fuck!” I grab my foot, rubbing the sole, hopping to maintain my balance. “It’s worse than horrible. It’s . . . it’s . . . I can’t even put a label on it, it’s that bad.” I release my foot and steady myself.
“No, it isn’t,” he protests. “You have to understand. You have to trust me. It was done with good intentions.”
“Oh, Harry. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” I stare him down. “And I will never . . . ever . . . trust you again.”
“I think I’ll go.” He stands up and I push him back on the couch with such unexpected force, he tumbles awkwardly and drops his Lilliputian case to the floor.
“No, you won’t,” I say. “You’re going to sit right there and listen to ME now!” He looks back at me. “What the fuck?”
“Don’t you ‘what the fuck’ me! Last time I let you go all too easily. In fact, I cleared the path for you. This time is different. This time, you’re going to hear me out.”
“Okay, okay,” he says, holding up his hands.
“And shut up with your patronizing gestures.” I kick the food aside and walk the short length of the wall, pulling at the red and green decorations, ripping them from where they had been taped with festive optimism and love, like I’m ripping up my heart. I can feel his eyes follow me, as though he’s waiting for a gap to appear so he can make a sudden break for it.
I lean against the wall and pull the mistletoe from its post above my head, tearing at the leaves, bursting the white berries. One by one.
“The truth is, Harry, I sensed there was something wrong with your reaction the night I told you there’d been a mistake. My head knew it, but my heart didn’t want to believe it. So I let you off the hook. I always let you off the hook. You must think I’m really stupid. And I don’t blame you. Because I’ve behaved like an idiot. One who loves you. And I thought you loved me.”
“I do love you.”
“How can you say that and still happily tear me apart? What kind of love is that?” I hold on to my anger. It’s my one moment. I’m not going to waste it this time. “I’ve always believed we were meant to be together and when you came back because of my letter, I knew it was destiny. That you would be there for me until the end. And you told me this great new yarn about Melissa. And yet again, I believed you. But we weren’t each other’s destiny. Ever! Were we? You were only passing time with me. It was only ever about you and your heroic journey. It was always about you. You’re a self-serving narcissistic illusionist and I fell for the pretty smoke and mirrors.”
“Hang on a minute! You wanted me! You needed me!”
“Get over yourself. Yes, I was thrilled that you wanted to be there for me. Yes, I really wanted you to hold my hand. I was frightened. And maybe if I’d died, you would have been seen as this martyr, this knight in shining armor who made the end of my life a decent one. But I didn’t die, did I? You were outed. And that’s why I can’t see anything good in your intentions. In fact, you make me sick.”
He folds his arms across his chest and sneers, flashing his annoying white veneers. “Well, that’s okay then, isn’t it,” he yells. “Because now we don’t have to pretend to each other anymore. You don’t have to pretend you’re dying and I don’t have to pretend to love you.”
“WHAT?” I feel my breath quickening, and my heart is pounding so fast it might gallop out of my body. I move toward him. I need to eyeball him. “You think I was pretending?”
He eyeballs me back. “What else? No one makes that kind of mistake. You did it purely to get me back in your bed. You thought you’d be able to keep me there, once you had me hooked. You wanted a pity fuck.”
I let rip a burst of laughter. “Are you mad? You think I’m that desperate?”
“Deny it.”
“Fuck you, Harry! Do not flatter yourself. Go back to Melissa. The two of you deserve each other. You can enjoy looking in the mirror together, admiring how wonderful you both are.”
He stands up and I feel the air shift between us. “Do you know what? That’s precisely what I’m going to do.”
I step back. “Good! And you can take your gift with you. I’m sorry you went to so much trouble. And while you’re at it, you can take these, as well.” I bounce down and grab the bowl of cocktail sausages. “Here!” I throw them in his face. There’s an adrenaline rush of pleasure. It emboldens me. “And here’s some relish to go with them!” I pick up the spicy tomato sauce, throwing the bowl at his fake white teeth. “And no double dipping. I know what you’re like now.”
He ducks awkwardly so that it bounces off the top of his head and flips over. The sauce trickles down his face, into his eyes and onto his shoulders and he stands there, spluttering, looking like a burst blood boil, slopping it away. “That fucking stings, you stupid bitch. And this is a Prada jumper.”
“Gee. Sorry about that.”
He’s rubbing his eyes. “You see this!” He shakes the bloodied gift bag at me. “It was a token of my generosity. But you wouldn’t understand that, would you?”
I dash to the tree, its lights still flashing festive joy, oblivious to the carnage, and grab his Christmas pudding jumper, clutching it to my chest like he’s going to have to fight me for it. “Oh, no? Well, now you’ll never know the extent of my generosity either.”
“Perfect,” he says, flicking off more sauce from his jumper. “Just perfect.” He picks up the bottles of prosecco and shoves everything back in his bag. “And I’ll take these home for Melissa. Although I’ll leave you one. You probably enjoy drinking alone. You must be so practiced at it.”
“Well, well, well!” I sneer. “You can be a right little bitch when you show your true colors, can’t you?” I’m at boiling point. “But take it. I won’t be needing it, thanks all the same. Want to know why?” I’m so past caring now.
He gazes at me, locking horns, his face streaked red and fierce. “You know what, Jennifer Cole, I couldn’t give a damn.”
“Well, Rhett Butler, I’m going to tell yo
u anyway . . .” I throw his gift back toward the tree. Its branches teeter and flicker. I put my hands on my hips, allowing a dramatic pause. “I’m PREGNANT!”
His eyes burst out of their sockets. He rubs them with the heels of his hands and groans in pain. “You’re WHAT?”
I stand there smiling, the revelation feeling more satisfying than I could ever have hoped. “I’m UP THE DUFF,” I say.
He gives a derisive snort. “Well, there’s no way it’s mine.”
I stare at him, saying nothing.
He rolls his eyes. “I repeat. There’s no fucking way it’s mine!” Steam is practically coming out of his ears.
I throw him a look of contempt. “Did I say it was?”
Confusion washes over his face. He’s openmouthed. “Well, isn’t it?” he blusters.
I look at my hands, casually examining my fingernails.
“Whose is it, then?”
“I don’t think you have the right to ask me that question.”
“Jesus, you’re such a fuckup.”
I look back at him. “And you’re not? You’ve got it so right?”
He shrugs.
“Well, Mr. Wrong, I’d like you to leave.”
“You don’t have to ask,” he spits. “I’m off.” He gathers his pride and picks up his bag. “Tally Ho Ho Ho,” he says. His one flash of humor.
“Just go!” I say and throw a further handful of sausages at his back.
He grabs his coat, slams the front door behind him, and I hear the beep of his car alarm, the heavy thud of his car door.
I rest my back against the wall and slide down it. I sit staring at nothing, then burst into hysterical laughter, the chill of cold air blowing from under the weather strip, before dissolving into hysterical tears. What just happened? What the hell just happened?
Eventually, I pick myself up and wander back into the sitting room. I look at the detritus of our hoax love affair, pick up the can of cream, and spray it everywhere. For a brief moment, it feels good.
“Well, that’s one hell of a mess,” I say and sit down on the couch, my tail between my legs.
I look around the room in sad contemplation.
Death and Other Happy Endings Page 24