Big Little Lies(135)

So funny. So cheeky. How they’d laughed while they drank their champagne.
“It didn’t mean anything,” said Perry to Celeste.
There was a hollow roaring sensation in her ears, as though she were deep underwater.
?   ?   ?

Jane watched Perry turn away from her to look at his wife, instantly dismissing her without even bothering to remember or acknowledge her. She’d never really existed to him. She was of no consequence in his life. He was married to a beautiful woman. Jane was pornography. Jane was the adult movie that didn’t appear on his hotel bill. Jane was Internet porn, where every fetish can be fulfilled. You have a fetish for humiliating fat girls? Enter your credit card number and click right here.
“That’s why I moved to Pirriwee,” said Jane. “Just in case you were here.”
The glass bubble elevator. The muffled, dimly lit hotel room.
She remembered how she’d looked around the room—casually, pleasurably—for more evidence of the sort of man he was, more evidence of his money and style, more evidence to indicate that this would be a delightfully lavish one-night stand. There wasn’t much to see. A closed laptop. An upright overnight bag standing neatly in the corner. Next to the laptop there was a real estate leaflet. FOR SALE. A picture of an ocean view. LUXURY FAMILY HOME OVERLOOKING THE GLORIOUS PIRRIWEE PENINSULA.
“Are you buying this house?” she’d said.
“Probably,” he answered. He was pouring her champagne.
“Do you have kids?” she asked, recklessly, stupidly. “It seems like a good house for children.” She never asked about a wife. No ring. There was no ring.
“No kids,” he said. “One day, I’d like kids.”
She’d seen something on his face: a sadness, a desperate sort of yearning, and she had thought, in all her idiotic naivety, that she knew exactly what that sadness indicated. He’d just been through a break-up! Of course he had. He was just like her, nursing a broken heart. He was desperate to find the right woman and start a family, and maybe she was even moronic enough to think, as he smiled his devastatingly attractive smile and handed her the champagne glass, that she might turn out to be that woman. Stranger things had happened!
And then stranger things did happen.
Over the years that followed, she reacted viscerally to the words “Pirriwee Peninsula” in conversation or in print. She changed the subject. She turned the page.
Then one day, without warning, she did the exact opposite. She told Ziggy they were going to the beach and they drove to the glorious Pirriwee Peninsula, and all the way there she tried to pretend that she didn’t even remember that real estate leaflet, even as she remembered it, over and over.
They played on the beach and she looked over his shoulder for a man coming out of the surf with a white-toothed smile. She listened for the sound of a wife calling out the name “Saxon.”
What did she want?
Revenge? Recognition? To show him she was skinny now? To hit him, to hurt him, to report him? To say all the things she should have said instead of her bovine “bye”? To somehow let him know that he hadn’t gotten away with it, even though of course he had?
She wanted him to see Ziggy.
She wanted him to marvel at his beautiful, serious, intense little boy.
It made no sense. It was such a stupid, strange, weird and wrong desire, she refused to properly acknowledge it and sometimes she flatly denied it.
Because how would this moment of magical fatherly marveling possibly work? “Oh, hi there! Remember me? I had a son! Here he is! No, no, of course I don’t want a relationship with you, but I do just want you to stand for a moment and marvel over your son. He loves pumpkin. He’s always loved pumpkin! Isn’t that incredible? What kid loves pumpkin? He’s shy and brave and he has excellent balance. So there you go. You’re a bastard and a prick and I hate you, but just look for a moment at your son, because isn’t it the strangest thing? Ten minutes of depravity created something perfect.”
She told herself she’d taken Ziggy to Pirriwee for the day and seen a flat for lease and “on a whim” she decided to move here. She pretended it so fiercely she almost believed it, and as the months went by and it seemed less and less likely that Saxon Banks lived here at all, it had become the truth. She stopped looking for him.
When she told Madeline the story about the night at the hotel with Saxon, it hadn’t even occurred to her to tell her that he was part of the reason she’d moved to Pirriwee. It was preposterous and embarrassing. “You wanted to run into him?” Madeline would have said, trying her best to understand. “You wanted to see that man?” How could Jane explain that she did and she didn’t want to see him? Anyway, she’d forgotten all about that real estate brochure! She had moved to Pirriwee on a whim.