Rotten Peaches

by Lisa de Nikolits

  JayRay laughs. “Yeah, I’m sure you’re right.”

  “Why Iris?” I’m aware that I sound whiny.

  “Because she’s the perfect candidate. She lives in a mansion in Mississauga, she knows the trade show gigs, she won’t object to me being on the road a lot, she’ll only hang out with me at the Canadian shows, she’s rich, she’s the right age—”

  “She’s old!”

  “She’s the right age. She’s our meal ticket, Leo, she’s the one.”

  “I hate this,” I mutter.

  “Suck it up. You have to go to therapy and I have to get married. The alternative is you and me stuck in my shithole apartment for the rest of our lives, gigging shows. You want that?”

  I shake my head. My recent brush with losing my nice life had made me nervous. “Go do your thing. Hey, she’s a client of mine; tell her I say hi. Bring her over later, I’ll mix her a special batch and say nice things about you.”

  “Don’t tell her too much,” JayRay warns. “You don’t know me that well, remember. But from what you do know, I’m a standup guy. Don’t elaborate.”

  “I know how this works. I’m on our side. I know what to do.”

  I try not to throw up when I watch JayRay walk up to Iris. I know he’s making sense, and that a plan of some kind is needed to action the necessary change in our lives but I hate this particular idea.

  I choke on my bile and set up my display. Everything is ready for the opening that evening and, knowing that I can’t bear to watch JayRay for one more minute, I leave and I walk back to my hotel room where I close the curtains and lie down on the bed.

  My life is falling apart. Therapy. Fucking therapy. I shudder. Dave suggested I go and chat to our family doctor and see if she had any recommendations for therapists and I reluctantly went. She gave me a list of websites and told me to do some research, to find someone that made sense to me.

  “I have to find my own person,” I told Dave.

  “But how?”

  “She gave me a bunch of websites. I’ll do it. I promise I will, after I get back from Vancouver. I’m not procrastinating. I leave tomorrow and there’s a lot of prep to do.”

  Dave was quiet. I could tell he thought I should be online right away, scrolling through therapists, making decisions, and setting up appointments. Instead, I was sitting on the sofa, reading a copy of The New Scientist while the girls were doing their homework at the kitchen table.

  The next day the girls were at school and I was getting ready to leave. The house was sunny and Muffin was sleeping in his basket in the corner. Dave was folding laundry and I made a move to help him but he stopped me. “You fold things badly. You leave creases.”

  Anger bubbled inside my chest. “Hey, mister, do I do anything right? Are you even interested in having me around anymore?” My eyes filled up with tears and I folded my arms. “Stop punishing me, okay? And if you can’t forgive me, I’ll leave.” My heart was pounding with fear as I said this, fearful he would say yes, go, leave.

  He turned to face me. “You keep telling me you need time. I need time too. This erosion has been going on for a while, it’s not going to fix itself. And I’m going to find a marriage counselor, that’s my call.”

  “If things have been this bad, why haven’t you said so? Why tell me now that it’s a catastrophe, with no warning?”

  “Because, like I’ve said a bunch of times, I kept hoping things would improve. I hoped it was just a mood or a phase and that the next time you came home, the real Leonie would come home with you too. But this time, you were even worse. You didn’t come to the game, then you nearly lost Muffin, and it all came to a head. If I had tried to talk to you before, you would have dismissed me outright and said I was imagining things.”

  I didn’t know what to say but I had to ask. “Dave, is it over? If it is, I’d rather know.”

  He rubbed his forehead. “I don’t want it to be. I don’t.”

  “I need you to show some compassion at least. It’s like I’m on parole.”

  “You haven’t earned compassion, Lee. Go to your show, come back, get some therapy, I’ll sort out some counseling and we’ll take it from there. I can’t give you more than that right now and you don’t deserve any more.”

  I felt shamed and humiliated and I left the kitchen without a word. I went upstairs, and packed my suitcase. I wasn’t ready to leave. I needed to think. I sat down in the reading nook that I loved so much when I first moved into the house and I looked out the window. The garden was a tangled and overgrown mess, it was a wonder that the neighbours hadn’t complained. It seemed like the house and its surrounds were falling apart just like my life. Whereas I once felt like a princess in a foreign land, now I was in exile, in a place I could no longer call my home. I looked around our bedroom, at the white rose chandelier, the high cherry wood sleigh bed, and at my dressing table. Even my dressing table looked unlived in. It was spotless and tidy, barren, in a house that exploded with life at every other opportunity.

  My body turned to concrete. It took all my will to swing my legs off the nook and get moving. I wasn’t welcome here anymore. It was time to leave.

  Dave was waiting at the bottom of the staircase and he looked up at me as I lugged my bag down. “It wasn’t fair of me to treat you like that. I’m not your father. I would never want to be like that.”

  “You just were.” My chin quivered. “Bad girl. You’re right, Dave, this isn’t working for either of us right now. Let’s hope we can fix it.”

  I tried to brush past him but he put his hand on my waist and pulled me towards him. “But do you really want to fix things, Lee? Have you even asked yourself that? How much do you want to?”

  Two big fat tears rolled down my cheeks and I bowed my head. “Well, I certainly don’t want our life to be like this. I want us to be like we were before, when I could trust you, trust you with me.”

  He nodded. “But you broke my trust, Lee.”

  “So you keep saying.”

  We were at an impasse and I realized I’d have to do something. Dave. I’d always loved his sensual mouth and I focused on that now, his almost girly, full upper lip. I leaned in slowly and kissed him, knowing he wouldn’t be able to resist me, in the same way I can’t resist JayRay.

  I kissed Dave slowly and deeply and even I felt our connection. I let go of the handle of my suitcase and I put my arms around him. I felt his arousal and I undid his belt buckle and I slid down to my knees and took him in my mouth. He groaned and cupped my head with his hands and he slowly lowered himself to the floor. I pulled off my jeans and I straddled him and rode him and we came together and I lay crumpled on top of him.

  “Well now,” Dave finally said, “I don’t know about you but that sure felt like a step in the right direction to me.”

  I looked at him and grinned. “I second that.” I rolled off him and pulled up my panties and we lay there, looking at the ceiling. I felt for his hand and held on tightly.

  “Whoa,” Dave shook himself awake. “I was dozing off. I’d better get up. Imagine if the girls came home now, we’d scar them for life.”

  I laughed and sat up. “I must be going anyway. I’ll text you later.”

  I kissed him goodbye, a kiss I hoped would wipe my record clean but when I arrived at the show, Dave had texted me; Don’t think this means you’re off the hook for therapy… xo and I ground my teeth.

  And to top it off, now I’ve got to watch my beloved JayRay sniffing around old Iris.

  I lie in my hotel room with a cool wet face cloth on my forehead. I am bereft and hopeless, as if the life has been sucked right out of me.

  16. BERNICE

  TIME PASSES AND I CAN’T QUITE FORGET how Dirk had behaved. I try to push his weeping and hysteria to the back of my mind and I succeed to a degree, but the memory calls to me, waving a red flag and disturbing the purity of my for
mer love. He was weak, he betrayed me, and he took me for granted. Nor can I forget how he chose to run back to Chrizette until she kicked him out for good.

  Am I am happy or just coasting? I miss the thrill of my affair with Dirk. There’s no adrenalin now. And, since things got finalized with Chrizette and Gerit and the kids, there’s been no excitement at all. I chastise myself for thinking that, and for needing more.

  We settle into a routine. I write during the day, or I try to. He goes to his job, selling life insurance. We have dinner at seven, with too much wine, followed by sex every other night. Blue pill sex. I know my suspicions are correct because I searched his closet and I found the Viagra hidden in a pair of shoes.

  It kind of kills the joy of it for me, imagining him having to pop a pill to get it up with me. The whole act is so premeditated and lacking in real passion. But once he takes me in his arms, it doesn’t seem to matter as much. Hard is hard and what he lacks in imagination, he make ups for by pushing the buttons he knows I like.

  But he’s stopped being magical with his tongue and fingers and I mourn that loss.

  “You used to fingerfuck me so exquisitely I thought I’d die,” I tell him. “And your tongue. Oh my god! Why don’t we do that anymore?

  “Because we’re the real thing now,” he says without even looking at me. I want to tell him I’d exchange the real thing, in a hearbeat, for the passion of our early days, but I don’t.

  We are very different people and we don’t have much to talk about. At first, we drank while we binge-watched television but we didn’t have the same viewing taste and we switched to drinking and reading instead — me, a book and him, a newspaper that supported his right-wing way of thinking.

  I decide to write a memoir. I can’t think of a single cooking thing left to do and without Betty’s help, I’m sunk. I had thought of Bake Your Way Through Grief, following the loss of a spouse, a thought that occurred to me when Dirk had vanished for those three days and it was easy to envisage my future life as a widow. But he returned and I lost the emotional thread and Betty continued to be unhelpful and it seemed like the time to admit that the Baking series had run their course.

  I like the idea of writing about my family, and JayRay and my father, and I figured that Janette’s Daytime Reveal! would have piqued interest in my personal life thereby creating a market for the book, not that I had been grateful for that at the time.

  The first few chapters of the book fly onto the page as if they’ve been waiting to be written. I chronicle my mother’s short stint as a model and her love affair and marriage to a biker. The only thing my mother had told me about my biological father was that he had been “beautiful like a young Robert Redford, only he was drunk and on a Harley.” The way she told the story, I imagined the song “Leader of the Pack” as the soundtrack to their relationship, only he hadn’t died, instead he ran out on her and their newborn child.

  I imagine my mother’s passion for a certain kind of man, a man doomed from the time he was a boy, a drunk long before his first beer, his eyes glittering and wild, his body sweet smelling, smooth, and unscarred. A boy-man whose beauty carried the promise of forever. And my mother, a catalogue model from a small town north of Durban, alone for the first time in the big city of Johannesburg, drifting into a crowd of bikers and marrying her first boyfriend.

  And then, he leaves. Just like that, he abandons her and their six-month-old baby girl. Divorces her quickly and marries another girl from the biker gang and then he leaves for the east coast of Canada because an uncle there said life was good and who doesn’t love the promise of something fresh and new?

  My mother, by pure happenstance, meets a man on a shoot. The art director of the shoot decided that they needed a prop: a Ford Model T from 1920, and a guy knew a guy who had one. The guy’s farm was a few hours north west of Johannesburg and the fellow would bring the car down. And thus, my father met my mother.

  At the end of the shoot, which only lasted a few days, my mother returned to the farm along with the Ford Model T Phaeton, my father, and me.

  “I told her I would keep her safe, and that I would keep you safe. That neither of you would never want for anything again,” my father told me.

  And to my mother, already tired out by what had happened to her in the short span of her life, and saddled with a child towards whom she showed no affinity or affection, the solution must have felt akin to winning the lottery.

  A farm. A gentleman husband. Never having to work again or worry about money. A nanny for the baby.

  I reach that point of narration and the writing grinds to a halt. I have no idea where to go from there. Who was my mother when she was at the farm? What happened to her story then? How had she felt about my biological father? Had she loved him? Was she heartbroken when he left? I don’t have a clue. And I have no idea how to answer these questions. My mother is a mystery to me.

  I reread JayRay’s emails, hoping to find a prompt that will jog the story forward but his messages are nothing more than poorly written entreaties for us to meet, with promises that he can tell me stories, oh yes, he can tell me stories.

  One evening, I leave my computer on, with JayRay’s emails on the screen, and when I return to my study, Dirk is behind my desk, reading everything.

  “Excuse me!” I’m instantly furious and I snap the off-button of the screen. “I would never help myself to your computer. How dare you?”

  His jaw clenches and I see the anger flash in his eyes. I remember that in his world women are second-class citizens and, to his mind, he has every right to read the contents of my diary, or search through my computer or closet drawers. The thought makes me shiver and I recall him telling me how he opened and read Chrizette’s letters, and scrolled through her computer and poked through her drawers. How on earth had I been okay with that?

  “Let me set you straight,” I say now. “This is my house. I am not your wife, I never will be. Keep out of my things. If you don’t, that is the end of us.”

  Dirk stands up, his hands raised in supplication. “Fine. So that was the guy on the talk show? Piece of work, né? Are you going to get in touch with him?”

  “I don’t want to talk about him,” I say through gritted teeth. “It’s none of your business, Dirk.”

  His face turns an angry purple, a lot like mine does, only his eyes bulge and they water slightly.

  “You women don’t know your place,” he says in a tight voice and he says it quietly, and just as quickly he realizes what he has said and he apologizes.

  “I am sorry. You are right. That was very old-school of me. I wasn’t thinking and it will never happen again. You have my word. I’m sorry.” His tone is contrite and I want to believe him. I tell myself that a lot has changed in his world. I can’t expect him to be an entirely different man than the one he has been all his life.

  I know that a large part of him is still trying to please his father, die Predikant, the preacher, who had threatened fire and brimstone from his pulpit, instilling in Dirk the good boere values of a righteous Afrikaaner whose wife had few rights and whose children were his possessions.

  I also know that Dirk misses the Volksraad. He misses the camaraderie of it, the brotherhood. He was a member for over twenty-two years. He’s still a believer in the cause but he has no outlet of expression, a thought which concerns me because I know that that energy cannot simply have dissipated.

  Of his day job, he never offers nothing except to say “Life insurance. It is what it is.”

  And I wonder if he misses Chrizette and their life, and his kids.

  There’s so much I don’t know, and so much that he doesn’t tell me. I resolve to be more understanding about what it is that he’s going through and I go over to him.

  “Ag now, don’t worry about it,” I say. “Let’s go and open a good bottle of red and relax. We’ve both been working hard. Let’s just be hap
py we have each other.”

  Platitudes and clichés. Banal feel-good slogans to save the day, when really, the day cannot be saved at all.

  LEONIE ON A COLLLISION COURSE

  17.

  IT’S MIDNIGHT AND I’M WIDE AWAKE, wondering where JayRay is and if he’s scoring with Iris. There’s a knock at my door. JayRay grins at me when I open it and I let him in. I wordlessly hand him a keycard to my room. This time he doesn’t give me his, which makes me feel ill. I’m already locked out of his life. I don’t want him to see how hurt I am, so I go and lie back down on the bed.

  “It’s going to be harder than I thought,” JayRay admits. “Iris is a savvy old bitch, I’ll give her that.”

  He lies down next to me and nuzzles my neck and I spoon into him despite my hurt. No matter what, I can’t resist him. “What happened?” I ask.

  “I offered to help her with some boxes and she brushed me off! She acted like I was the hired help who had come in through the front door instead of using the kitchen entrance. It was humiliating.”

  “Yeah, I know the feeling,” I say, still stung by how Dave had talked to me. “What’s your next move?”

  “I don’t know. Send her flowers?”

  “No, too smarmy. We need her car to break down or something and you happen to stop by and help her.”

  JayRay turns to me. “You’re really going to help me now? You haven’t exactly been onboard to this point.”

  “You’re my guy and if you’re going to do this, we’ll do it right.”

  “And it’s for you and me, babe, you do get that, don’t you?”

  I shrug then kiss his lower lip and nibble on his chin. “I don’t trust anyone, but I hope you won’t let me down. If you do, I might have to kill you.”

  “You won’t have to kill me,” JayRay assures me, and he cups my buttocks with his hands. “Tell me, how do I reel Iris in, hook, line and sinker?”