“You shouldn’t mix your drinks,” I told her, having noticed her switching between whiskey and vodka.
“Yeah? Just shows you how shit hot I really am when I can mix my drinks and diagnose your problems.” B waved the waitress over and I looked down at her card again. B Beautiful, hair and make-up artist to the stars, her card read. No wonder she didn’t take shit, she dealt with whiny actors’ insecurities every day.
I enjoyed B’s straightforwardness. We danced suggestively on the dance floor and when some other VIP ladies tried to give me attention, B turned them down flat for me by telling them how rude they were for interrupting our night of anonymity. Sending them off with a scowl, she smirked and winked then continued to dance like nothing had happened. At that point, I knew I’d see B again at some stage. She was definitely a much needed female friend who met and liked me for me, not for whom I was famous for being. Phoebe was a friend, but she had been a groupie first.
****
Caleb winked at me as I helped B into her jacket. I knew what he was thinking. I gave him a small smile then another secret smile in B’s direction. She’d had enough and I was happy to leave, it wasn’t the night I thought I was going to have at the club, but it turned out to be the one that I had needed. It had been a while since I’d taken a girl home and not fucked her but I had the car I ordered drop B home first then headed back to my place alone.
I was pretty drunk, but not to the point where my legs didn’t work in a coordinated way. It was just enough to dull the ache that had been growing since the conversation with Brody the night before. After talking to B, I knew they were both right. Brody knew me well, but it had taken a chance meeting with a stranger to finally figure out I had possible attachment issues.
****
Waking the following morning, the first thing that came into my mind was the open conversation I’d had with B. Part of me felt I was stupid to talk so openly with a complete stranger like that. For all I knew she may have sold the story already. Plenty of people saw us together in the nightclub and we’d drunk enough that our dances had probably looked practically pornographic from the way I grabbed her ass as others watched us grind against each other. It wasn’t dry humping, but it wasn’t far off it either.
My night in B’s company wasn’t the most pressing thought in my mind as I got dressed that morning. It was time for honest answers from my dad, because if Brody and B were right, I needed all the information about his past to change my outlook with women. My father and I had never really spoken about my mother after she left, and the times I had brought the subject up I felt disloyal for asking. The hurt in his eyes said more than words could; he was a damaged man for what my mother had done to him.
After a while I stopped asking, and even when I became an adult it had still been a mute topic of conversation between us. Apprehensive about hurting him, I knew I’d have to handle our talk with sensitivity, but there was no way I was heading back to the US without knowing what happened between them.
Dad was washing his pride and joy, his classic black E-Type Jaguar, when I arrived. I gave it to him as a birthday gift the year before I went to America. I’d offered to buy him a house, but he wouldn’t move. I couldn’t figure that out because our family home must have held so many unhappy memories for him; my parents had bought it together the year after they got married.
“Looking good, Dad,” I said, sliding out of my pewter-gray colored Range Rover. My dad’s speculative gaze immediately focused on the muddy foot plate. I smirked because I knew he’d want to clean it.
“Just finishing up here. Go on in before someone recognizes you. Put the kettle on and make some tea, if you remember how. I’ll be in shortly,” he said with a smirk.
Stepping over his water hose I made my way into the kitchen to do as he asked. Once I switched the kettle on, I wandered through to the living room and flopped heavily onto the couch, looking around the room that hadn’t changed in around twenty years. Apart from the curtains, TV, and the leather Lazy Boy chair my dad had treated himself to for his fiftieth birthday, everything else was exactly the same as when my mother had been at home.
A sudden bang as the outside door closed pulled me out of my daydream. Glancing up toward the living room door I saw him come into view, drying his hands on a dish towel. “To what do I owe the pleasure? Two visits in one week. Are you dying?”
Shaking my head, I smiled ruefully at his sarcasm. I didn’t visit enough, I knew that already, but my dad was a free agent, recently retired, and the one with all the free time. He should’ve been visiting me. Besides it hadn’t felt like home for a long time and revisiting didn’t fill me with happy memories.
“Leaving Sunday, is it?”
“Yeah,” I said, remembering I’d texted him the news. I stood and followed as he turned to go back to the kitchen. Moving past him, I opened the fridge and took out the milk carton before I began making the tea. Not having direct eye contact with him by having something to do made me less nervous about bringing the subject up. I just had to know what went down with him and my mother. If their relationship had screwed with me in some way like everyone thought.
“I finished with Phoebe,” I informed him, then proceeded to tell him what I felt about women and how Brody and B had viewed it. Of course, I left out the part where I had only met B the night before. Turning, I put the mugs of tea on the table and saw my dad sitting on the chair staring at the floor. His face was an ashen gray color, and he instantly looked older from my unexpected challenge to his memories.
When his eyes connected with mine, sadness, pain, and the distraught expression his face reflected back at me served as a reminder of early years after my mother left. Slowly, I sat down on the farmhouse pine chair across the table from him and waited patiently for him to respond.
For several minutes, he remained quiet; an internal personal struggle brewing all the memories to the surface, his mind sifting through them to find what he wanted to say. A couple of times his eyes darted to mine and as quick as the connection was made it was broken. I nearly caved and told him it didn’t matter, but I needed to know.
Eventually, his eyes settled on mine and stared hard. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his neck and he had the look of a guilty man.
“I had an affair. I’m not proud of it,” he added quickly.
My heart hammered in my chest, a tornado of emotions swirling and gathering speed. I said nothing, knowing if I had reacted he would have said nothing else.
“Elizabeth, your mother, was a good woman. A lovely girl, but she…fuck this is so difficult, you’re her son, for Christ’s sake.”
“I asked the question. I know the truth can be ugly. I need this, Dad. I can’t say it won’t change how I feel, or make me pissed that you haven’t ever been honest about—”
“I’ve never been dishonest. I may not have said much on the subject, but I’ve never been dishonest with you, son. You need to address your mom for that.” I frowned, puzzled by what he meant.
“Go on, just say it,” I prompted, and tried to sound gentle.
Dad cupped his hand around his mug and hugged it like it was life support, his nails blanching white with the pressure.
“We didn’t have much in the way of intimacy,” he said, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. His hand fell away from the cup and busily brushed some crumbs together on the table.
“You weren’t getting enough so instead of trying to work that out you went elsewhere? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“It wasn’t that our sex drives were incompatible. Your mother just wouldn’t…it didn’t matter what I did she shunned me. For every caring touch, I gave her, she’d automatically link it to what else she thought I wanted from her. Namely sex. She hated sex. Hated me touching her.”
Frowning, while I listened, it still wasn’t that clear. “You tried it on too much?”
“No, Gray, that’s not what I’m saying. Elizabeth never wanted me to touch he
r. If I hugged her she pulled away saying to me, ‘Is that all you can think about?’ Every time I tried to show her affection it was a precursor to me wanting sex in her eyes. This is hard to talk about with you, son, but trust me I loved her so much. I’d have done anything for her. I did for a long time, figuring it was me. I had to make it work.”
“She couldn’t have been that bad, you had me after all,” I challenged.
“Yeah, we did. And I thank God for the gift of you every day. You are the ray of light in all the heartache I’ve suffered. The bad decisions I’ve made.”
My gaze was full of suspicion toward him. I’d been around enough guys who had cheated on women to know when to call bullshit, but the only thing I read in my dad’s body language was defeat. After a long silence, he sighed heavily and shook his head.
“Okay. You asked. She was seventeen, I was nineteen. She’d been raised in a strong Catholic family and her parents were friends with mine. Most good Catholic girls practiced abstinence, and looking back, our courtship was like something from the Victorian times, but I fell in love with her on sight and got swept up in the enthusiasm of our parents’ encouragement for us to be a couple. All my mates used to take a rise out of me, but I felt they were jealous. She was worth it.”
Heaving a deep breath, he continued. “Elizabeth was a quiet, reserved girl, and I admired what I thought was her strength of character for standing by what she believed in. It was her parents who drove the short engagement between us, and we married a year after we met, two months after her eighteenth birthday. I’d had girls before her, and I knew how to please them, but with Elizabeth…I dunno, she just couldn’t accept sex for pleasure. I don’t think she ever loved me. Not in the way a man loves a woman.”
Was there something wrong with her? Am I the same? He had made a statement that sounded pretty much like what Brody had been telling me. Listening to him talk intimately about what had gone wrong with them was difficult. Not only was it hard for my father to say those things to me. It tore me in half to hear them. He’d been in a marriage without intimacy, and I couldn’t imagine what that must have been like for him. I was about to say I didn’t need to hear anymore, but he drew himself up straight in his chair, looked up at the ceiling then stared directly at me. His eyes screamed how sorry he was.
“Five times. We had sex five times before Elizabeth fell pregnant with you,” he snickered and looked sheepishly at me. “I’d been banking on it taking a lot longer personally.” The wry half smile reflected his sadness as he looked down at the table and shook his head slowly. “Five times in eight months; five times in eight years, Gray. I know that’s too much information but that’s the truth. In all that time, I tried not to push her, tried to be patient, but she wouldn’t even talk to me about it, like she was too pure to open her mind to her feelings, and it felt like she didn’t give a damn about mine.”
My heart ached watching him relive his failed marriage with my mother. There was nothing I could have said that would have made the outcome any different. I sat in silence, unwilling to force him to disclose anything else, but I still had so many questions I wanted answers to. A couple of minutes later, he glanced sideways and sighed heavily again.
“After your birth, she told me she’d done her duty by giving me the son I asked for, and I never got near her again, Gray. Don’t get me wrong, your mother was a good woman, a very beautiful woman, but a puritan. When she walked into a room every man in it paid attention to her, but she was stone cold. For eight years, I remained faithful because I loved her, hoping one day she’d change. I thought one day she’d realize what we could be together. But the only time I ever saw a smile on her face was at mass on Sundays.” He stood and walked over to the kettle, pouring a little more water into his cup then turned to face me again.
“Eventually, I caved and had a short office affair with a girl half my age. She chased me hard and one day in a moment of weakness I gave in, too tired to fight the need that had gone unfulfilled for so long. Riddled with guilt I came clean, thinking it may be the catalyst we needed to address the problem in our own relationship, maybe get some counselling or something, but she packed her bags that same afternoon. She told me she’d be in touch but I’ve heard nothing since.”
“It’s okay, Dad. I get it. You don’t have to say anything else.”
“Why now, Gray?”
“Do you think I’m like her in some ways, emotionally?”
“God, no. Your mother wasn’t keen on being touched. She didn’t like sex…or me enough to want to have sex with me. What makes you ask that?”
“Been talking to Brody about some stuff to do with how I view women. He thinks what happened with you guys has affected me more than I thought.”
“Hmm, I just thought you weren’t very demonstrative as a kid, but you loved being hugged. You never brought any girls home though. And Brody thinks you have problems?”
“He thinks I should talk to someone.”
“And what do you think?”
“With everything you just told me, and from what you say about my mother, she definitely had issues. What about her parents?”
“Oh, there was a massive falling out. I spoke to my father about the problems we were having and he approached hers. It turned out she never wanted to get married in the first place. I thought she was a strong girl, but she was weak to do that to me. You’re nothing like her, Gray. You’re just afraid you’ll get burned the way I did.”
“Perhaps talking to someone about it may just shake enough in me that would help me understand my own feelings. Thanks Dad, that must have been tough to talk about with me, I appreciate your honesty. And for the record, I’ve never blamed you for her walking away. I have no respect for a woman who can walk away from her child the way she did.”
Relief washed over my father’s face as he stood when I did. He hugged me and I felt his desperation to stay connected to me. I responded with a tight squeeze because he meant as much to me as I did to him. “I love you, Dad,” I told him. I couldn’t begin to imagine how he felt all these years, but I was even more confident I had done the right thing in not stringing Phoebe along. If I didn’t feel how she felt, it was better to let her go and not keep plodding along as if something would suddenly click. My dad had done that and look where it had gotten him. I decided that before I got involved with anyone else, I needed to take more time to myself to work things out.
Chapter 25
Voicemail ~ Gray
During the journey back to New York I had a lot to think about. The little I could remember about my mother made sense in some ways. She wasn’t tactile with my dad at all when I was a small boy. There was always a strained atmosphere in the house when my dad came home from work. Most of the time I’d felt like she didn’t like him.
I used to think she just hadn’t loved me enough to stay, but from what my dad said, I wondered if my mother was actually capable of love. My thoughts were still playing heavily on my mind by the time I slid my key in the lock and dumped my carry-on in the hallway of my apartment.
My apartment in New York was vastly different to my London one. Polished, rosewood flooring in contrast to the dull, unvarnished oak in my pad at home. Floor to ceiling windows that looked out across the Hudson River was a much more appealing view than my apartment in Docklands in London.
I hit the answerphone and took two paces toward the kitchen. “Message received. Friday June 28th at 6:42 pm,” the machine began and my heart stalled, reacting immediately in shock at the voice in the first message.
“H...hi…umm, Gray. I hope this is your number I’m speaking to. When it rang, it changed tones so I don’t know if I’ve gone to an answering service or your phone diverted. Umm…it’s me, Hettie. I…umm know it’s been a long time but I want to apologize for the way I behaved when we were last together. It was…weird, right? I think it was the aftermath of Harris that made me behave like that. That, and you suddenly being here again after so many y
ears. I know it’s probably too late because it’s been a long time since we met up, but I just wanted to…okay…well, I umm…I just wanted to say sorry.” I heard a long sigh and a click ended the call.
Fuck. The message was almost six weeks old and it had been well over a year since I’d met up with her again. My heart raced at the sound of her voice, but squeezed painfully to think that she’d think I had snubbed her when she had reached out. I wondered if she’d seen pictures of me and Phoebe, they’d been everywhere on the internet. I pulled a bottle of water from the fridge, snapped the cap, and swallowed three quarters of the clear liquid while I listened to the other nine messages that were on there. Placing the plastic bottle on the side, I went back and listened to hers again.
On impulse, I picked up the handset with the intention of calling her back, but the stuff Brody said was at the back of my mind; where it had been ever since our conversation at his place. If I called her what would that mean to her?
Instead of calling her back, I thumbed through the cards in my wallet and pulled out the one I thought I was done with, but had kept there just the same. Flicking it between my fingers, I debated whether or not I really needed to make that contact. The fact I still had it and was thinking about it, I knew there was nothing to lose…apart from the doctor’s fee.
“Can’t say I’m surprised to hear from you again, Gray,” Doctor Fleur said when I called her private number. She’d given me her ‘safe’ number to protect our privacy because I was famous. Her integrity was important to her, and I could see how smart she was to think about keeping our sessions totally confidential. As soon as I confirmed the appointment I deleted all messages on my machine, apart from one—Hettie’s.
****
Following extensive psychotherapy sessions my counselor believed there was indeed a problem, and after the emotional journey I had taken she decided the root of my issues with women was born from a mistrust of others…more specifically females. In her view, I was scared to get close; drawing an imaginary line in the sand, for fear they’d abandon me.
Notes On Love Page 23