Lucy sighed, suddenly serious. “It’s so much more difficult when you’ve got children because suddenly you’re a package. A guy has to fall in love with you and the kids. All single mothers pray that they will meet a fabulous guy who’ll be the right father figure. What the biological fathers forget is that while they may turn up for access visits with guilt gifts, they are no longer the hands-on father because they’re not doing daily parenting. The new man becomes the rightful father because he’s coping with the broken nights, the tantrums, and he has to share Mummy and be patient, mature, and loving about it all.”
“Well, write that down. All those qualities are vital,” I said.
We wrote our letters in amiable silence before Lucy asked me to read mine out loud. Nervous, I took a deep breath. “Dear Life Partner,” I began. “This is not a letter that I ever thought I’d have to write because I’ve been married and I thought I’d fought the battle of loneliness and won. Now it seems that my quest for love became the battle between us. I have been so misled by my heart that it would be the easiest thing in the world for me to shut down and give up. Learn to live a life enriched by everything except a true loving life partner. To have wonderful friends, to be able to see the beauty in simple, everyday things—a sunset, a spring flower, an inspiring song—these would be safe and worthy things to plant the seed of happiness on. But what is life if we do not share our journey with another? The sunset is still beautiful but it has a melancholy resonance when you stand alone because you know how much more it would bring you alive if you watched it with another.
“I do not care how old you are (but be much younger than retirement age, please, as I want you to be able to get it up and keep it up!) but I want you to have lived; to have felt the sea change of emotion that plagues us all, to have an understanding of the interior dialogue that feeds our fears and frees our dreams. I may seem independent to you and strong—and in many ways I am. But in my inability—and with my past immaturity—to compromise, I have walked an isolating road. I have never trusted myself or another to fully open my arms and let in love and all that it entails. I want to be able to be defenseless with you. To let down my guard and let myself taste the fear but also the glory of adventure because it is boring and ultimately self-destructive and pointless not to be able to do that.
“Please, hurry up and turn up! I’ve had enough of the crying in the middle of the night, of going to parties and weddings on my own, of spending Christmas with my Mum because I don’t have a family or my own home. I’m sick of the sense that you are out there but not here by my side.”
“Oh Daisy,” whispered Lucy when I finished, “you write this stuff really well. He sounds great. You deserve to find him.”
When Lucy read me her letter, there was one bit that stayed with me. Her voice trembled as she read out: “I have two little girls. They did not deserve to be neglected by their father who has left us. Looking back, I realize that I have rarely stood and watched them play with him, able to bask in a bonded, familial glow. If you love me, please love them as your own. Cherish their sweet smiles, their brimming innocence, their innate kindness, their reserves of joy. Love us like the unit we are. Please don’t leave us in tough times or walk away because it wasn’t what you dreamed it might be. We may not look like we need you but we do and we have so much to give back.”
Her letter made me feel ashamed. Mine was full of what I needed and what I craved. But generous to the core, Lucy’s finished with what she could proffer. What decent man in his right mind could resist that?
10
PTDS
(Post-Traumatic Date Syndrome)
A month later I was leaving an evening yoga class, all bundled up in a down jacket over my pajama bottoms—to hasten the time from corpse pose to being comatose in bed—dirty hair piled on my head, when I heard my name called. I looked around to see a vaguely familiar man walking toward me. It was his deportment, the ramrod straight back yet loose-limbed gait, that told me it was Andy Benton, an old boyfriend whom I had not seen for ten years. I instantly thought of my letter; maybe this universal instant messenger stuff worked? Andy might not be The One but he’d make an ideal friend with benefits. “Hey, Daisy,” he said, smiling his inimitably suggestive smile. As he folded me against him and nuzzled my neck like an animal checking out a potential mate’s scent, I realized that Andy was still the most overtly sexual man I had even known.
He suggested a drink and as we walked to the pub, I mentally replayed our story. When I met Andy, an art director at a glossy magazine, at a launch party of a new gallery, I was twenty-seven and had never before encountered the purely sexual charge he ignited. Even with Julius emotions had tempered the charge, but here there was no emotional connection at all. From the moment I set eyes on him, I wanted him to touch me. Yes, he was attractive with dark hair and a penetrating owl brown stare, but more it was his physicality that floored me. He stood admiring the line of a piece of sculpture, and by the way he lightly ran his hand across the curved back of a large wooden bird, you knew he had a heightened appreciation for form. It was a predictably lavish bash, with mini fish-and-chip canapés wrapped in tiny newspapers and puffs of Yorkshire pudding stuffed with rare roast beef and a dot of horseradish sauce. Everything, including the waiters dressed in black, the lacquer trays of champagne fizzing in jaunty flutes, and the female guests staggering under the weight of their bouffant hair, shoulder pads, and gilt-chain jewelry, had an ironic, smug feel to it. An “Aren’t we clever to have come up with this?” attitude, when every party was exactly the same. It was all artifice and show. Men in expensive suits with flashy watches, wealth with no substance. Everyone got pissed to disguise how pissed off they were because they didn’t feel they had enough on display.
When Andy started talking to me, standing the thickness of a cigarette paper away, it was immediately obvious that we had the sort of chemistry that makes you feel that you are coming undone. We were moving through the throng of the party when he suddenly grabbed me by the arm and pushed me toward a lavatory door. Inside, he slammed me up against the wall and kissed me, pressing his hands firmly across my body. It is one of the many regrets of my life that I didn’t give in to the thrust of my desire and let him screw me then and there. Instead, due to a weak nod toward proprietary—after all, I didn’t even know him—I pulled away. He looked at me and laughed and we both knew that the dance had just begun.
He had that polished assurance with women—holding me in a certain way, openly claiming me in public by tugging me toward him—that said it all. Sure, he was a serial philanderer but who the hell cared when for days and nights on end, I was the chosen one?
I swooned through the first few weeks of our affair, blissfully unaware of the trauma ahead. Finally he confessed: his last girlfriend, whom he had left shortly before meeting me, had just told him she was pregnant with his child. He hadn’t known when they split up, but when he told me, it felt like he tore a hole through my future. Any delusions I had entertained of us having a life together—let’s face it, I had fantasized that I could be the one to tame him—shattered in an instant. As he never intended to go back to the mother of his child, we carried on seeing each other, his guilt and my shame adding to the intensity of what felt like an appallingly illicit liaison. We broke up the night his son was born.
Sitting opposite him in the pub, he looked unchanged, apart from the gray streaking his eyebrows. He was now forty-seven to my thirty-nine, and the age gap seemed to have lessened between us. He no longer appeared decadently older and I was no more in his thrall. We swapped our tales of the intervening years with painstaking honesty, admitting our follies and laughing openly over our flaws. What struck me was not so much how sexy Andy was, but how well he had matured. Now a committed, loving father to his ten-year-old son, he still lived a bachelor’s life in London during the week—working and womanizing—but weekends were for his boy. Career success had afforded him poise and sophistication, while living real life as opposed to s
hirking responsibility had given him depth.
As I told him about my failed marriage and broken affairs, I could feel myself tensing. I wanted Andy to see the carefree, optimistic girl of my twenties, not the nervous, guarded wreck I had become. It wasn’t that I was facing him makeup free and covered in a film of post-yoga sweat; it was the fact that I was mortified by how asexual I was. Knowing he would sense it, I blurted out how scared I had become of physical involvement. That I was no longer capable of lying back and letting go, emotionally or in the sack. In his open, earthy presence, I felt shut down and strange.
Outside the pub Andy took my arm and pushed me toward the bonnet of the nearest car. Then he leaned over and kissed me hard. As his arms tightened around me and the weight of his body fell against me, it was as if something inside me began to thaw. “I think you could loosen up in no time,” he whispered. “And I think I’m just the man for the job.”
I was writing the meaningful missive of the day in the bookshop when Lucy came up behind me and read it out loud. “When one lives without fear, one cannot be broken. When one lives with fear, one is broken before one begins to live.”
“Do you know what I fear the most in life?” she asked. I shook my head and guided her toward the coffee counter. “My biggest fear is that Edward’s leaving has broken a part of me that will simply never recover.” She slumped in a chair. “I’m so riddled with anxiety that I feel claustrophobic in my own life. Do you know, often when I’m going through the motions of the bath, book, bed routine with the girls, I’m present but I’m not there. I may be passing the flannel, saying ‘wash your face, angel,’ but in my out-of-body mind I am naked, running down the street, screaming. I’m so afraid that we have irrevocably damaged our daughters by upsetting their natural equilibrium that I dislike Edward more than I thought possible. Some days I feel I’m going mad as the anger of his betrayal simply doesn’t abate.
“Last week, the girls were asked to be bridesmaids for a cousin of mine. I drove them to the dress fitting after school, arriving late because the traffic was bad. Lily wouldn’t try on the little fur cape that went with the dress and while everyone there was gently coaxing her and saying, ‘Come on now, darling, just put on this lovely cape’ I had to use all my restraint not to open my mouth and scream, ‘Just put on the fucking cape.’ I almost wish I had. I’m so stressed that the slightest extra strain can trigger an almighty reaction. Daisy, I’m afraid of losing it completely.”
I handed Lucy a frothy coffee. “Most people live their entire lives in fear,” I said. “They stay in relationships because they feel they have to. It’s better to be with someone who wants to be with you than someone who has to be with you. So, Edward couldn’t go the distance but the important thing is that you are going the distance every day for those girls.”
Lucy said, “Don’t be too nice to me. It’ll finish me off.” I sat beside her and pinched her leg—hard. “Ouch! Oh, the agony of being a single mother is that you are on duty every day, doing all the boringly repetitive parenting things, and then Edward turns up for access and plays the loving father and I want to shout that a loving father doesn’t leave in the first place. Do you think he ever acknowledges what a great job I’m doing, bringing them up? Course not. There’s no note of thanks, no odd bunch of flowers, no recognition that I’m alone, night and day, shaping our precious girls.”
I looked at Lucy, tight with despair and there was nothing I could say. I knew that the only thing that alleviates the feeling that you’ve cocked up your life is the knowledge that your friends and family would do anything to see you happy again.
Fortunately Miles bounced into the bookshop and hugged Lucy. “Have you heard,” he said, “Daisy snogged Andy Benton last week.”
Lucy turned to me, amazed. “Randy Andy Art Man? The guy who set your libido on fire a decade ago?”
“I bumped into him after yoga last week,” I confessed.
“Has he called yet?” asked Miles mischievously.
“Actually, we’ve had this amazing flirty banter,” I said. “He gives very good e-mail.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” said Lucy. I led her into the stockroom and opened my laptop. Andy had sent me an e-mail two days after our encounter: “Dooley, still sexy, still crazy. How can I fulfill your fantasy?”
After much deliberation I replied, “Escape the monotony of life with me?”
“What a great reply.”
“His was even better,” I said, scrolling down my inbox. “Darling Dools. Escape is good. Irresponsibility better. Twenty-four hours in the hotel of your choice?”
I told Lucy that I had booked a hotel in the country, then freaked out about the price. Would he consider £245 for a room excessive or water off a duck’s back? As I hadn’t seen him properly for ten years, I had no way to gauge his reaction. Also, what was the etiquette of paying? I couldn’t expect him to pay as we weren’t dating and if I paid, did it make him a gigolo? So should we split it? I sent an awkward e-mail stating the price of the room and jokingly adding that it was more embarrassing to discuss the fiscal rather than sexual implications of our assignation. His reply was pure gold. “Fun is the main thing, something to remember, so yes, all that is fine. I think splitting the cost is cool, too, so let’s get over that issue and do what we want with each other for a brief moment in time . . . looking forward. A.”
The prospect of our night away had added verve because we didn’t communicate until just before we met. A brief e-mail on Friday afternoon said, “Dooley: Tomorrow. 5 p.m.”—and that was it. It meant that our night away had a charged air. It impressed that Andy was an adult; he simply wasn’t interested in trifling texts and endless e-mails.
As I walked into the hotel, I obsessed over how I should describe Andy to the receptionist. I couldn’t say, “Is my boyfriend here?” since he wasn’t my boyfriend, and it would have sounded pretty odd to have told the truth and asked, “Is my ex-boyfriend but current hook up here?” To use “partner” was equally icky and I didn’t have the sangfroid to say, “Has my stud muffin surfaced?” so I plumped for a conservative “Am I the first to arrive?” The receptionist confirmed that I was and when she asked what papers we would like in the morning, I blew it. I wracked my brains to remember what Andy read and drew a blank. (Isn’t it awful; I could remember his neck size—sixteen and a half—but not his political leaning?) Feeling pressured and in a tizzy, I blurted out, “I can’t remember what he reads.” So that was that. I had outed us as nothing more than a couple of lightweight bonking buddies.
I was shown to the room—a mismatch of modern styles with a good, firm bed but what looked like a trophy cabinet in the corner to house the minibar. The bathroom was redeemed by the Hermès products. It felt a bit Belle du Jour to lie on the bed and wait—even if I was pretending to be engrossed in Sky Movies—so I went downstairs to the bar and not without a throb of envy watched a genuine weekending couple feed each other cake and plan their next day’s outing with a large map. Suddenly I felt awfully tired at the prospect of being a faux couple going through the lovey-dovey routine and it did occur to me that Andy wouldn’t show. Maybe that would be his elaborate revenge for my leaving him a decade earlier. Tickled by the thought of such a great twist, I ordered tea and a glass of reviving champagne. Warming to my theme, I figured if Andy was going to be a no-show, I might as well have a piece of cake, so I called the waiter back.
Trying to look composed in the corner, knocking back alternate mouthfuls of champers and cake, my angst began to stir. I was sitting in a pretentious hotel waiting for an old boyfriend because I wanted there to be something more to life, something thrilling and transforming. But maybe the couple drinking tea opposite had the answer. They seemed to embody the notion that sometimes you stay together because you don’t leave. But me? I got up to go.
As soon as I stood and walked to the door, he appeared. He came straight up to me and in full view of the discreet weekenders pretending not to notice, kissed me passionate
ly on the lips. He then finished my glass of champagne and said, “Shall we?” as he motioned upstairs. Part of me was grateful that he was playing the role of fully fledged lover to perfection, the other part was furious. Why did everything in my life always feel like it was a charade? This wasn’t real, was it? Or if it was real, it wasn’t for keeps. It was a moment in time on offer to enjoy, and even before it began, I was yearning for more.
We went to the room and once the door was closed, I felt like I was in Sliding Doors. It was as if two options lay before me as to the way this could go, and I was suddenly aware that the journey between what is out there in terms of possibility and what is in our prayers is considerable and it can be difficult to navigate one’s way between the two. If I had been really honest, I would have stopped Andy as he came closer to pull me into his embrace: “Listen, I’ve made a mistake. I thought I could handle some no-strings sex, but actually I’m too attached to the outcome for that.” With that, I would have kissed him on the cheek and ran.
But wasn’t that my problem? That my bolter instinct, which took hold the minute my fantasy script wasn’t on course, and the lines I heard repeated back to me seemed to jar? So I let Andy hold me, and when he sensed that I was taut, instead of pulling away, he tightened his grip. There was something about the way he stood there, as if the warmth of his body was reading me like Braille, that enabled me to relax. We undressed each other in silence and when he lightly peppered my neck with the touch of butterfly wings, I realized how desperate I had been for that kind of gentleness. It seemed so long—like forever—since a man had been that physically sensitive to me. With Max we never quite found our groove. Jamie—well, he must have had a tenderness chip missing. Sure, we had good sex but somehow it wasn’t intimate. I could have lain and wept but I was too mortified because Andy was next to me, tanned and toned, and I felt like a giant, white slug sprawled on the bed. I was also overcome with regret because I had eaten a garlicky stir-fry for lunch and all I could think about was whether or not I had bad breath.
Daisy Dooley Does Divorce Page 21