What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours(39)
Jacob laughed and leaned toward her with his lips all smoochy, but she pushed his face away with a breadstick. “Did you hear what I just said?”
He leaned in again. Not close enough for a kiss this time, but close enough for her reflection to almost completely fill his irises. Portrait of cross forty-two-year-old with, hey, really nice boobs actually. “Yes, you said you think Vi has a crush.”
“I’m two hundred percent sure about that.”
“Two hundred percent? Oh. Even if you’re right it’ll pass, J.”
J. Vi. And he still called his first wife Dee.
“Why don’t you just make the most of it, run off with her, and be half of a beautiful black intellectual couple just like you always wanted?”
Husbands one and two, Max and Sam, were white—Sam was a few years younger than Jill, but both he and Max tended to look old stood beside her. Well, not elderly. Just older than her. Whereas side by side she and Jacob looked about the same age. What age was that? If you didn’t know them you couldn’t even give a rough estimate. Jacob picked up a breadstick of his own, crunched half of it, stabbed her in the arm with the other half, and asked: “Do you really think you can do this here?”
He rarely appeased her. She wasn’t sure what to make of that given his attitude toward almost all his other friends, loved ones, clients, the efforts he made to ensure everybody else’s comfort. When he was with Jill he made her wonder whether he’d been sent to destroy her. Take the time she’d invited him to sample the first viable batch of tea leaves from the greenhouse she part-owned. Chun Mei, with its taste of sweet springtime grass. He’d sauntered downstairs inexplicably wearing a denim shirt over jeans, taken the teacup from her, and filled his cheeks with tea. “And how is this superior to a nice cup of Tetley?”
The combination of barbaric taste buds and denim on denim had set Jill’s teeth so sorely on edge that her jaw locked for a couple of minutes. Enough time for him to stare her down and walk out unadmonished. He knew what he was doing, he knew! For her part she’d given up trying not to be quite so in love with him at some point in their late teens when she’d clocked that, without deliberately cultivating any particular scent, Jacob Wallace managed to smell exactly like a just-blown-out candle. But if the feelings on his side weren’t there anymore then it was better for him to just go. His contributions to their joint bank account tripled hers but she wouldn’t have a problem doing without handwoven rugs at home and boutique hotels abroad. Doing without Jacob himself was going to make her a little bit crazy for a long time, so no she wasn’t going to make it easy for him to say his piece and then leave.
—
WITH A WEEK to go before their summer holiday Jacob all but ambushed Jill at a Tube station. She was adding another month’s worth of public transport to her Oyster card when an arm slipped around her neck and her husband murmured: “Jill, Jill . . . you can’t fight this any longer. I need to ask you something . . .”
She could’ve feigned alarm for just a couple more moments and elbowed him in the groin, but instead she turned her head and hissed: “Whose idea was it to get married in the first place, eh? Why don’t you ask around and get back to me?”
She wasn’t going to let him off just like that but he’d better not be hoping she’d cling to him either! If she didn’t feel like being on her own she could get another husband if she wanted.
(Jill had run into Max outside their friend Mary’s bakery the other day, and he’d held her at arm’s length, given her a long, admiring look, and said: “God, you’re deteriorating fast. Lucky me, getting out while the going was good, eh?”—his eyes directly contradicting his remarks. Not that she’d ever go back to Max, with whom wedded bliss had been nowhere to be found. It had made her nervous that almost all her new in-laws were Swiss bankers, but also there were the terrific nightlong rows she and Max got into. If she protested Max’s shameless revisionism by making reference to something he himself had said just the day before, he’d become “concerned” about her negativity or would hit her with some barbed comment somebody else had apparently made to him about her demeanor—it wasn’t clear whether he made them up or merely saved them. She never stopped liking Max, but did grow weary at the thought of him.)
Jill went over to the blue stand where issues of the Evening Standard were stacked, but Jacob handed her his copy.
“I know whose idea it was to get married,” he said. “I don’t need to ask around—I was there. And so were you, just another stunner among the many, many stunners of London town, drunk on a sofa with one of your best mates—”
“Excuse me . . . the best mate may have been legless, but seeing as I’m a hero of the kingdom of alcohol, I was mildly tipsy. Also don’t forget to mention that this best mate was a moderately attractive man who’d never once made so much as a hint of a move on me in all the twenty-eight years we’d known each other . . .”
“Maybe he thought it was too obvious. I mean, Jack and Jill? Anyway the two of you were thirty-nine years old, prime of life, and both solvent to boot, so the man plucked up the courage to say . . . Hang on, what did I say again?”
Do you think that maybe we’re able to love someone best when that person doesn’t know how we feel? That’s what Jacob had said, and she’d looked at him and asked if he was about to say something weird to her. She’d rather he didn’t. Having weird things said to her was a large part of her day job and why couldn’t she have time off? Jacob’s answer was that he was about to say something weird, but only a tiny bit, and maybe what he wanted to say wouldn’t come out sounding as wrong as they thought it would. Maybe it would sound normal.