Goodnight, Beautiful: A Novel (14 page)

S
o far, these past four days, I have managed to avoid those two women who were gossiping about me.

It had all been pretty tame compared to the half-truths and stories people used to tell about me, but it’s such a shock to have it happen as an adult. When I’ve all but convinced myself there is nothing wrong with me.

I program an hour on the running machine on a steep incline and hit the “go” button. I need to run. I hadn’t been able to come early today, before work—my way of avoiding my two critics—because Mal, for some reason, had wanted me this morning.

Being so desperately wanted by him is such a rare occurrence that I hadn’t resisted. We didn’t make it to Paris on Saturday, we spent the day in bed, watching DVDs and eating junk food. After that first time, first thing, we didn’t make love again; we snuggled but that was as far as it went. But this morning, he had pounced on me the second the alarm went off and I opened my eyes. It wasn’t once, either—he’d been like a man in heat. Twice in the bedroom, then in the shower, then, as I was leaning over the kitchen counter reading the paper and waiting for my toast to pop up, he had popped up instead. He’d actually ripped the seam of my favorite pair of (
very
expensive) panties in his haste. Then in the shower again. Five times in one morning is unheard-of.
He’d only left because his BlackBerry had bleeped, reminding him about a meeting with the board members he absolutely could not miss.

Each time had been fast, frantic and unexpectedly hard, a vague sense of detachment lingering afterwards. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought he was having an affair or thinking of having an affair, and this was his guilt sex.

But he wouldn’t. I know that now.
Now
, when it’s too late, I know he wouldn’t ever do that.

The terrain starts to rise beneath my feet, and I feel it coming, my lungs pushing harder, my heart thudding faster, the blood starting to race in my veins. I love this. The buildup. The rush toward ecstasy.

I shouldn’t really complain about Mal being all over me. Sometimes for months he doesn’t seem to know I’m female, let alone someone who’s meant to turn him on. And those times never coincide with the times I don’t feel up to it, and I have to either close my eyes and let him get on with it, or find excuses to get out of it.

Not that he’d mind if I said, “Mal, I’m not feeling a hundred percent right now, can I just go to bed on my own?” He’d probably appreciate it. It would mean I was being honest. He wouldn’t spend his time wondering if it was a symptom, because it would be. I suppose I don’t confide in him because I can’t stand the way he changes. Subtly, but definitely, if I do tell the absolute truth.

The way he starts checking the medicine cabinet, and looking for evidence, and “disappearing” the razors and painkillers, and turning up at work to pick me up, and talking to my doctor behind my back. Honestly, you have one little slip every now and again and your husband acts as though you’re some sort of nut job. When really, like every other woman out there, you’re just moody. I’m just moody.

I was a moody child.

I was a moody teenager.

I am a moody adult.

No big deal if you ask me. HUGE deal if you ask my husband.

As I near the peak of my hill, I feel the sweat pouring off me, just how I like it. I feel cleansed after a run, tamed and cleansed. Anything bad sweated away with a good, old-fashioned workout.

I start to speed up for the last few hundred meters.

Maybe he is feeling guilty after Friday night. For telling on me—on us—in front of all our friends. I’ve had to avoid all their phone calls and emails since. I’m bracing myself for Carole or Ruth to show up at my work. Or maybe, like my steep-incline running, sex has become Mal’s displacement activity because—like me—all he can do is think about her and him.

I’ve been on the Internet for hours searching and searching. I’d found out a few scraps of information. She hadn’t used her doctorate to become a practicing clinical psychologist as planned; she had opened a so-called psychic café—get your aura cleansed or something with your coffee—near Brighton. But there were no pictures of her. And most importantly, no pictures of him.

When I come out of the showers, bundled up in a towel, my hair in clumpy tangles around my face, those women are in the locker room.

Automatically my heart skips a beat, and I hesitate in the doorway for a moment, wondering if I should turn around and go away before they see me.

The brunette looks up from lacing a pink and white sneaker and catches my eye—she turns red, like last Friday. If I walk away now, I’ll seem cowardly, and as if I have done something wrong. And where would I go? Back to the showers and lurk
around, making other women think I’m spying on them? Essentially giving more people more reasons to talk about me?

Focusing on the wall opposite, I walk in and head for my locker. I type in the code and pull open the door, and keeping it ajar to afford myself a little privacy, I pull out my panties. Hooking the towel over my shoulders, I pull them on, then fasten on my bra.

I know they’re still in here, that they’re probably watching me, trying to find more things to add to the list of inaccuracies they’ve made up about me. I can hear them whispering, I can feel them nudging each other. In about three seconds, I’m going to spin round and tell them to say whatever it is they’ve got to say to my face.

“We’re really sorry,” one of them says. “About last Friday, we’re really sorry.”

I pull on my hipster denim skirt and button it up, pretending not to have heard.

“We didn’t mean for you to overhear,” the other says as I tug on my top. Usually I would at least towel-dry my hair, but I have to get out of here as soon as possible.

“It’s just ’cause we’re jealous,” the first one says.

“Yeah, you’ve done amazingly well and we’re still stuck here with our goal weights nothing more than pie-in-the-sky numbers,” the other adds.

“We’re truly sorry.”

I slip on my jacket, pull my bag from my locker and drop my sneakers on the ground, shoving each foot into them without socks. I don’t even bother to pull out the backs, so I have to wear them like heavy flip-flops on my feet.

I have anger, pure unadulterated rage, fizzing in my veins. What am I supposed to do, tell them it’s OK? Agree with them?
Try to make them feel better by telling them it doesn’t matter? That I completely understand?

How did their bad behavior become my problem? At least the people who used to write that I was a “slut whore” and a “crazy slag” on toilet walls never expected me to forgive them for it.

I slam shut my locker with such force that the whole bank of lockers sways violently, threatening to topple over. I spin around and face them, stand frozen for a second, glaring at each of them. They both shrink back a little. My nostrils are probably flaring, my eyes narrow and fierce.

The backs of my sneakers dig into my soles as I march out of the locker room. Seconds later I march back in, my sneakers still like flip-flops. I stop in front of the women.

“Just because someone’s husband is good-looking, it doesn’t make him perfect,” I say. “Doesn’t mean being thin is enough to make your marriage work. Just because he’s good-looking doesn’t mean he isn’t flawed in every way possible.”

I was wearing black.

I was wearing a black designer shift dress I’d found in one of the charity shops in central London where all the celebs leave their castoffs. It was last season, but I knew I could pull it off if I wore it with ironic casualness: with my hair in a slightly messy side chignon, and flats, it would seem that I had this season’s clothes but I was fashionable enough to wear what I want, when I want, and know that I still looked good in it. Once I bought it, I couldn’t afford to eat for a week, but I had to have it. Between fashion and food, there was no contest. When something suited me, I had to have it, no matter what I needed to sacrifice to get it. It was a simple case of self-esteem economics: once I looked
good, I would feel good. Sometimes looking good, being groomed on the outside, was all that kept me going on the inside. Some women filled the hole inside them with food, their work, alcohol, drugs, unwise sex—I knew that my vice was keeping myself “together.” Running every morning, perfecting my makeup, wearing clothes that suited me—looking the part so I would feel the part.

I’d been in the bar for ten minutes on my own, waiting for a couple of the other legal secretaries I worked with to show up. I checked my watch again, suppressing a sigh as the big hand slid to the five—showing me that it was 8:25 p.m. We’d arranged to meet in this cool bar just behind Marble Arch at seven-thirty, and I’d arrived just after eight because I knew they were always fashionably late—we all were. This time, we’d all outdone ourselves. Some of the partners at the large law firm where we worked had those mobile phone things. Phones you took with you in your bag or briefcase, so you could ring people and ask them where they were if they were late, or ring to tell them you had been delayed. But none of us were even close to being that rich. We had to make arrangements and stick to them, or make use of the pay phones.

Rather than sit alone in a booth, I stood at the bar with a Sex on the Beach, surveying the other drinkers. It was quiet, empty and sedate for that time on a Friday night. Maybe Candice, who read all the gossip columns religiously, had got it wrong, maybe this wasn’t the latest place to be, after all. There weren’t that many men in here, nor were there the sort of women who men would come to try to bed. A smattering of after-work types sat in a couple of booths, but none that interested me. I turned back to the bar, returned my attention to my drink. I could only afford one more, so was nursing the cocktail, using the stiff straw
to move the ice around in the practiced way of someone who didn’t earn very much. I’d been known to make a drink last all night the week before payday.

I glanced up from the depths of my drink and he was there. Standing beside me, having appeared from nowhere, it seemed. “Hello,” he said. I hadn’t seen him in the bar—I would have noticed if I had. I’m sure very few people didn’t notice him. He was a tall man, with dark honey-blond hair that lay in boyish curls all over his head. He had a strong jaw and sculpted body; he wore a blue, lightweight V-neck sweater and baggy brown cords that sat on his slender hips. He had a watch on his wrist and that was it. Simply dressed, devastatingly gorgeous.

I smiled a hello back because I was speechless. He was talking to me. This god of a man was talking to me. Men approached me all the time, but none as … none like him. He was out of my league, surely.
Surely.

“I saw you coming in here earlier, just as I was leaving, and I decided that if I got to Oxford Circus tube and I was still thinking about you, then I would come back and say hello.”

My mind did a mental calculation: with his legs, it’d take him ten, fifteen minutes to walk to Oxford Circus tube station from here, the same time back, which meant he was telling me that since he saw me, I’d been on his mind for half an hour. Half an hour. It was all true, wasn’t it? All the romance stories I watched and read, they were all true: there is someone perfect out there for you and you might never know it. He had been thinking about me for half an hour and after a mere glimpse of me. That sort of thing
never
happened to me. And look at him, as well.
Look
at him.

“So you’ve said hello,” I said. I noticed how warm his eyes were. They were a dark russet-brown that sparkled like a log fire
burning gently in the hearth. “What’s your next line?” I sounded so cool and laid-back; in reality my heart was racing. Our eyes met then, and all my thoughts evaporated. After his eyes had cleared my mind, they moved on to my heart, making it thump so loud and violently, it hurt.

He shook his head, his gaze locked on mine. “I don’t have one.” He smiled then, and I thought my heart would explode. “My mate told me to remember kisses if I manage to speak to a woman I truly like.”

“Kisses?” I breathed, my gaze flitting to his lips. Pink and firm and quite probably made to fit perfectly over my mouth.

He nodded. “Keep It Short, Sweet and Especially Simple. K.I.S.S.E.S.”

“Kisses,” I repeated. We were talking about kissing. We’d only just met, but kissing was on our lips.

“She’s going to be insufferable after this,” he said.

She?!
My thoughts of a spring wedding halted in their tracks like a needle scratched across a record.
Who’s this “she”?! And why is my future husband talking about her? Doesn’t he know that is terribly bad form?
“Who’s ‘she’?” I asked, a thin smile stretched across my face. I was trying valiantly to steel myself to hear that he had a girlfriend and was flirting with me because he couldn’t help himself. A clear euphemism for: you’re a quick bunk-up. Or, worse, maybe they had an open relationship, so he was allowed to sleep with other women, on the understanding that he would always be with her.
Or
, I felt my whole body balk at the horror of it, maybe they were swingers. I’d read about it in the papers and a couple of magazines. They were into partner-swapping and … God help me,
threesomes.
Maybe he wanted me to join them.

“My best friend, Nova. She told me to go out tonight because
she had a feeling I’d meet someone special. She gets these feelings about things. She rang me six times today to make sure I was going out. She said I’d regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t. I tried explaining to her that if I didn’t go out, there’d be no way of disproving her theory, and if I did come out and didn’t meet someone, she’d explain it away by saying I didn’t go to the right place. Either way, she wins. But I’m glad I came out tonight.” He smiled again. All thoughts of this woman, this friend, flew from my head like dust motes flying from a room with all the windows suddenly thrown open. All I could see was the softening of the lines of his face when he turned his mouth up to smile. I knew at that moment that I didn’t want any other man to smile at me ever again. I didn’t want him to smile like that at any other person. I wanted him to be mine. “Well, I will be glad I came out if I get your number.”