The Mistress's Revenge: A Novel

by Tamar Cohen

  I was hurt about the blocking thing though. Why would you block my messages, when you used to say they were all that kept you going? And my phone calls? I didn’t even know you could do that? Is that a special app available only to iPhone users? The Blocking Your Exes App? Is there a special app for fixing a broken heart too? Is there an app for knitting back together a life ripped apart? Don’t worry, I’m teasing. I’m not completely crayzeeee. But what I don’t know, what I’m still curious about, Clive, is how a few months ago you were sneaking out of bed in the middle of the night to see if I’d left you any messages before I went to sleep, and now you don’t even want to see my name in your inbox. How does that happen? How does the person who was loved become unloved? How does someone who says they can’t live without you, willingly block you out of their life with one click of a mouse?

  How does it happen, Clive? I really want to know.

  And just remember one thing. Blocking isn’t something that can be done unilaterally, no matter who you happen to be.

  YOU CANNOT BLOCK SOMEONE FROM YOUR LIFE WHO DOESN’T WANT TO BE BLOCKED.

  Now, I must thank you for your concern about my “psychological state.” I appreciate it, I really do. Equally I appreciate your suggestions that I go to see “someone qualified to help.” I wonder who you might have in mind when you say that? Who could possibly be qualified to help me? Who knows the answers to the very specific problems behind my “psychological state”? Who is qualified to know what I need? Who can give me what I want?

  Why Clive, I do believe there’s only you.

  * * *

  Last night, when I finally got to sleep, I dreamed I was having sex with you and woke up some time afterward drenched in shame and soaked through with longing.

  You know what I miss the most about the sex, Clive? The laughter. That sounds strange, doesn’t it, but I know you of all people will understand exactly what I mean. “I’ve brought a few props,” you’d say, emptying the contents of an Ann Summers carrier bag onto the hotel bed, and we’d giggle ourselves silly trying to work out exactly what they were for (who’d have thought that all these months on, the most vivid memories of sex should be of candy-colored plastic or the chemical smell of freshly unpackaged Latex?).

  Remember the Banana Incident? I can’t believe you would have forgotten. For once you’d arrived at the hotel empty-handed, but when we’d been in bed a couple of hours, you suddenly remembered something.

  “Just stay there,” you commanded, rummaging around in your laptop bag before triumphantly flourishing a banana. Not the most original prop admittedly, but we were in the mood to have fun and you made a typically theatrical performance of both inserting it and eating it, emerging from under the sheets with your smiling mouth still stuffed with ripe fruit.

  It was only half an hour or so later when we had just started having sex again that you suddenly stopped abruptly.

  “It’s still in there,” you told me, the lust draining from your eyes.

  “What do you mean? How can it be?”

  “I can’t have got it all out. I can feel a great big lump of it still there.”

  We stared at each other, do you remember? Half laughing, half panicking, my legs still wrapped around your back, our breath still ragged from the labor of passion.

  You were very chivalrous, I have to say, dutifully feeling around inside when it was obvious my own fingers weren’t long enough for the job.

  “You’ll have to use something to fish it out,” you said eventually, admitting defeat.

  Half furious with you, half helplessly amused by the situation, I grabbed a teaspoon from the tea tray and teetered off to the bathroom, still wearing the ludicrous stilettos you loved me to wear in bed (how clichéd in the end are the desires of men?)

  “Any joy?” you kept asking, pacing up and down outside the open bathroom door like an expectant father while I perched on the edge of the toilet seat, digging around with the spoon.

  “Is there anything I can do?” and of course my all-time favorite, “Shall I pop down to the hotel kitchen to fetch a longer-handled spoon?”

  Perhaps it was the idea of you presenting yourself to a bemused hotel cook that galvanized me to probe that bit deeper, but with a sudden comedy squelch, out popped the errant lump of banana.

  “Thank God... I was feeling so dreadful... I’m such a clumsy idiot,” you said as we both gazed awestruck at the spoon with its heaped load of glistening yellowish mush.

  But do you remember how much we laughed afterward—leaning back against the bathroom walls while tears of relief and hilarity coursed down our cheeks?

  “Nothing feels off limits with you,” I emailed you later. “I never feel embarrassed.”

  But you know, things have changed a bit since then.

  Now when I look back on those five years of hotel beds and bathroom floors, with the memories of what we did and what I let you do no longer softened by the glow of love, they seem garishly strip-lit and web-cam seedy, the flickering images of bad home-shot porn.

  And when I try to recapture the laughter, it’s as slippery and elusive as a lump of stray banana.

  Helen was not happy with me today.

  I don’t know whether your supa-dupa-Harley-Street therapist ever gets cross, but when Helen does, she does this thing where she does a sigh inside her mouth. Have you ever seen someone do that? She presses her lips tightly together, so the sigh kind of escapes through her nostrils. She tries to disguise it, but I know exactly what she’s doing.

  Anyway. She did that a lot today.

  The first thing that made her cross was the fact that I’d stopped taking the Citalopram.

  “I didn’t need it,” I told her.

  “Do you think you’re in a state to judge whether or not you need it?” she asked me.

  Well, what is one supposed to say to that? If I said yes she’d probably have said my thinking was distorted by not being on the Citalopram. If I said no, she’d tell me I needed to go back on the Citalopram to get into a better state. It’s what’s known as a lose-lose situation, I believe.

  “Could it be that there’s a part of you that enjoys being miserable?” she asked me. “Is there a part of you that wants not to get better because getting better means letting go of Clive?”

  Do you see what she does, that Helen Bunion? Laying question upon question like papier-mâché, in an evergrowing edifice with a big, empty space at its core.

  That’s when I foolishly told her about meeting up with you ten days ago. And that’s when her inward sighing got really pronounced.

  “Sometimes I can’t help feeling that you enjoy sabotaging your own recovery, Sally.”

  She has these narrow green eyes that she fixes on you as she speaks, and her straight mousy hair is cut into a very tidy bob that she tucks repeatedly behind her ear. Helen was definitely a prefect at school, or a monitor. Did you have monitors at your school? I wonder (remember how you hated me saying you were posh? “I only went to a minor private school,” you said petulantly. “Only a posh person would know the difference,” I told you). Helen would have been something like stationery monitor—a responsible job but one with minimal potential for conflict or for upset.

  “Can I ask you something, Sally?” She did another inward sigh, and I knew she wasn’t going to ask anything I wanted to answer.

  “Do you really want to feel better about things?”

  At first I thought it was a rhetorical question, but then I realized she was actually waiting for me to reply.

  “Of course I do.” What else could I say in the circumstances?

  “Only it seems to me that for someone who claims to want to feel better, you’re doing everything in your power to make yourself feel worse.”

  Well, looking at it from the outside, you can see how she’d get that idea, I suppose. So I tried—stupid I know—to explain how it had been during those two days before our “date.” How I’d felt alive again, how things had started to have a point to them ag
ain.

  Helen did exaggerated sighing when she heard that, the kind that takes place quite openly, and her foot, in her sensible low-heeled brown shoes, tapped lightly but insistently on the carpet.

  I toyed with the idea of omitting the part where we slept together. It felt embarrassing and overly intimate and I knew she’d disapprove. But then again, I’m paying her £75 an hour to make me better, I can’t afford to lie to her, can I? And she can’t afford to disapprove of me.

  Helen gave an involuntary shake of the head when I said we’d gone to a hotel.

  “Whose idea was that?” Her eyebrows arched so far they almost disappeared into her hair, and she seemed decidedly unimpressed when I told her I was too drunk to remember.

  “This man encouraged you to fall in love with him and imagine you had a future together, then dropped you from a great height, without any warning or backward glance, leaving you destroyed, and when he decides he wants a quick leg over, you jump to it? Is that the kind of woman you recognize as yourself, Sally?”

  My head was pounding by this stage and I found myself too distracted by her use of the phrase “leg over” to reply. Is that what it was, Clive? Did you get your leg over? Over what I wonder? Over easy? Overdue? Over the rainbow?

  So Helen repeated it again, the bit about me recognizing myself.

  I told her I hadn’t recognized myself in months. I told her that even when I look in the mirror to brush my teeth I don’t recognize the woman who looks back, her mouth full of toothpaste, her eyes sunken into black shadows.

  Helen did one massive inward sigh and then shook her head again with what appeared to be genuine sorrow.

  “I have to tell you I think you’ve substantially set back your progress,” she told me, and though it sounds stupid, I felt tears pricking at the back of my eyes when she said that. I hadn’t been aware I’d made any progress, and now I’d gone and set it back.

  “Sally, you know this isn’t about you wanting Clive back, don’t you?”

  I looked at her in silence, not daring to blink for fear that the tears would flood out so fast, I wouldn’t know how to stop.

  “This is about you wanting to regain the control you think you’ve lost, by regaining Clive. But you know you have to put that out of your mind. Clive is gone. You have to concentrate now on the areas of your life where you do still have control: your family, your partner, your work.”

  She said a few more things but I wasn’t really listening anymore. All I could hear was that phrase repeating in my head—those three little words that mean so much. Clive is gone.

  Clive is gone.

  Clive is gone.

  Helen gave me an exercise to do, then and there, which instantly made me feel marginally better. The word “exercise” sounds so active, doesn’t it? It sounds like you’re taking charge of your life, instead of passively waiting around to develop the equivalent of life bingo wings.

  Helen had me write out a list of the ten things that annoyed me most about you, the things that gave me most cause for doubt, even when we were together.

  I was so desperate to win back her good favor, I determined to make my list as comprehensive as possible and started trying to work out what things Helen would regard as “appropriate” in a list of unwelcome traits. And, let’s face it, there were quite a few to choose from. Do you remember, Clive, how I was constantly beset with doubts and used to send you long emails detailing them all, which you’d return with your own rebuttals in capital letters. Too old, I’d write. To which you’d add, “BUT MUCH BETTER GENE POOL THAN YOU SO WE’LL CANCEL EACH OTHER OUT.” Too posh. “POSHNESS IS RELATIVE. MOST OF MY FRIENDS THINK I’M COMMON.” Too married. BLANK

  After five minutes of anxious concentration, my list read:

  1. Pompous

  2. Pugnacious

  3. Judgmental

  4. Egocentric

  5. Too short (I worried about this one, in case Helen thought me shallow, but to be frank, I was already starting to flag by this stage)

  6. Inconsistent (better)

  7. Uses intentionally annoying phrases (in what he believes to be an ironic way) like “not feeling tip top” and “I’ve gotta be honest with you...”

  8. Doesn’t love me

  9. Has overdeveloped paternal issues (okay, I have to admit I threw that in because I thought Helen might like it. Issues are some of her very favorite things. But it also carries a kernel of truth. You take your role as father a little too far, Clive. Liam and the Sacred Vessel are adults. You don’t need to be so involved in their lives. You need to become more... separate).

  10. Doesn’t love me

  10. Lies

  I was a bit nervous while I was reading out my list. I kept sneaking glances at Helen to see how my points were going down, but she was leaning back in her chair, gazing up into the middle distance with a faraway look in her eyes. Very tricky to gauge.

  As I continued down the list I faltered, and started trying to justify the points as I read them out. Then I realized I’d written “Doesn’t love me” twice. I was mortified, but I couldn’t think of anything to replace it. Then, I realized I had two number 10s.

  “I’m not really going bonkers, honest,” I laughed, unconvincingly.

  Helen just looked at me without speaking, as if she was rehearsing words in her mind before she shared them.

  “That’s a very brave list, Sally,” she told me.

  Was it? I tried to imagine which of the points might be construed as brave. Not the one about being short, or the one about being old. Oh, I suddenly remembered I hadn’t put in the one about being old, I’d decided Helen might not understand that one. After all, you’re probably not far off her own age, and only a few years off mine. Come to think of it, I couldn’t now remember why it had seemed such a big deal to me at the time. I must have been looking for reasons to find fault. I must have been so secure in how you felt that I felt able to goad you. How didn’t I know that it was all an illusion? How didn’t I know that the power I must have thought I had was as substanceless as the baby that never was?

  “What’s interesting about your list, Sally” (incidentally, does your therapist do that? Use your name all the time? Do you suppose it’s to create a bond of intimacy, or is it just to remind us who we are, in case we’ve forgotten? I rather think it’s the latter. These days, I often forget who I am. It’s good of Helen to keep jogging my memory) “is that double admission of ‘he doesn’t love me.’ It’s almost as if you’re still trying to persuade yourself that it’s true.”

  “Or maybe it’s just because I’m rubbish at counting,” I offered.

  It was a mistake. Helen gave a very pained smile, as if contracting those muscles in the corner of her mouth incurred actual physiological discomfort.

  “Why do you think you must make a joke of everything, Sally?” Her green eyes were at a funny angle, so cocked was her head to one side, and she made a funny hmmmmming noise at the end of her question. “It’s almost as if you don’t dare acknowledge to yourself the depth of your own pain. You don’t have to put an amusing spin on everything, you know? You are allowed to feel devastated. You are allowed to feel angry. It’s very important that you give yourself permission to feel deeply and to grieve. You must learn to take yourself and your needs more seriously.”

  I didn’t remind her that my needs are only wants in disguise. I didn’t tell her that the reason I don’t allow myself my pain is that I’m worried that if I open those floodgates the tsunami will sweep me away, battering me to a pulp against the rocks. I didn’t tell her about the anger that, permitted or not, comes tearing through me like vomit, unstoppable, toxic, acid smelling.

  I didn’t tell her about Liam or about the 436 emails.

  I didn’t tell her about the headaches. I didn’t tell her about the middle-of-the-night keening.

  I want Helen to like me.

  I want Helen to help me.

  I want Helen to make it stop.

  I’m worried about Sus
an. I really am.

  Ever since she came round for lunch that day, she hasn’t seemed quite “herself” (now I’m at it too, that arrogant assumption of “self” as being something positive, something to aspire to).

  I’ve called her a few times and she has seemed slightly out of sorts, as if she was thinking hard about what to say next, although Susan is usually the most straightforward of people. When I’ve suggested a night out, she has always been too tired, or too busy. “This renewal of vows is more hassle than the fucking wedding was,” she told me.

  I think she’s getting overwrought about it all. I honestly do.

  Yesterday I finally managed to get her to agree to a coffee. “It can only be a quick one,” she warned. She arrived at the Starbucks near your house with half an hour to spare before an appointment at the shop which is altering the dress she’s wearing to the big event. She’s been on a strict diet to get into the smaller size. Did you know that? I don’t think losing weight really becomes her. It has made her slightly edgier, I think. Less comforting, somehow.

  Of course I asked all about the dress. Well, it would have been rude not to, and anyway I was genuinely interested. Is it bad luck for me to describe it to you? I’m sure you and Susan are far too sensible for all that superstition.

  She says it’s fuchsia-colored raw silk, slightly ruched around the waist “to disguise the bulgy bits” (her words, not mine). Won’t it be a change to see Susan entirely dressed in a color that isn’t navy for once? It’s as if she’s reinventing herself as her second wedding present to you.

  As she was talking I couldn’t help imagining what I would have chosen in her situation. You know, after your faux marriage proposal in the Coach and Horses I used to imagine what I’d wear if it ever happened for real (in those days, it was more like “when” it happened for real). Does that shock you? I know you were a bit wounded when I laughed off your big romantic gesture, but I never told you how, for ages afterward I’d pass shop windows and think “that’d be a great dress to get married in.”