Big Little Lies(81)

No one in that big, laughing family would ever believe that Perry could be violent, and Celeste had no desire for them to know, because the Perry who bought perfumes for his aunties was not the Perry who lost his temper.
Susi didn’t know Perry. She knew examples and case studies and statistics. She didn’t know that Perry’s temper was only one part of him, it wasn’t all of him. He wasn’t just a man who hit his wife. He was a man who read bedtime stories to his children and put on funny voices, who spoke kindly to waitresses. Perry wasn’t a villain. He was a man who just sometimes behaved very badly.
Other women in this situation were afraid that their husbands would find them and kill them if they tried to leave, but Celeste was afraid she’d miss him. The pure pleasure of seeing the boys run to him when he returned from a trip, watching him drop his bags and get straight down on his knees, arms held wide. “I need to kiss Mummy now,” he’d say.
This was not simple. This was just a very strange marriage.
She walked back through the apartment, ignoring the kitchen. It was small and poky. She didn’t want to think about cooking in that kitchen. The boys whining: I’m hungry! Me too!
Instead she went back into the main bedroom and plugged the lamp into the electrical outlet. The electricity was still on. The colors of the lamp turned rich and vibrant. She sat back and admired it. She loved her funny-looking lamp.
After she moved in she would have Jane and Madeline over to visit. She would show them her lamp and they’d cram onto that tiny balcony and have afternoon tea.
If she left Pirriwee, she’d miss her morning walks around the headland with Jane. For the most part they’d walked in silence. It was like a shared meditation. If Madeline had walked with them, they would have all three talked the whole time, but it was a different dynamic when it was just Jane and Celeste.
Recently, they’d both began to tentatively open up. It was interesting how you could say things when you were walking that you might not otherwise have said with the pressure of eye contact across a table. Celeste thought of the morning when Jane had told her about Ziggy’s biological father, the repulsive man who had more or less raped her. She shuddered.
At least sex with Perry had never been violent, even when it followed violence, even when it was part of their strange, intense game of making up, of forgiving and forgetting. It was always about love, and it was always very, very good. Before she met Perry, she had never felt as powerful an attraction to a man, and she knew she never would again. It wasn’t possible. It was too specific to them.
She would miss sex. She would miss living near the beach. She would miss coffee with Madeline. She would miss staying up late and watching DVD series with Perry. She would miss Perry’s family.
When you divorce someone, you divorce their whole family, Madeline had told her once. Madeline had been close to Nathan’s older sister, but now they rarely saw each other. Celeste would have to give up Perry’s family as well as everything else.
There was too much to miss, too much to sacrifice.
Well. This was just an exercise.
She didn’t have to go through with any of it. It was all just a theoretical exercise to impress her counselor, who probably wouldn’t be all that impressed, because in the end this was really just about money. Celeste wasn’t showing any particular courage. She could afford to rent and furnish an apartment that she would probably never use, using money that her husband had earned. Most of Susi’s clients probably had no access to money, whereas Celeste could withdraw large chunks of cash from different accounts without Perry even noticing, or if he did, she could easily make up an excuse. She could tell him a friend needed cash and he wouldn’t blink. He’d offer to give more. He wasn’t like those other men who kept their wives virtually imprisoned by restricting their movements, their access to money. Celeste was as free as a bird.
She looked around the room. No built-in wardrobe. She’d have to buy a closet. How had she missed that at the inspection? The first time Madeline had seen Celeste’s enormous walk-in wardrobe, her eyes had gotten shiny, as if she’d heard a piece of beautiful music or poetry. “This, right here, is my dream come true.”
Celeste’s life was another person’s dream come true.
“No one deserves to live like this,” Susi had said, but Susi hadn’t seen the whole of their lives. She hadn’t seen the expression on the boys’ faces when Perry spun his crazy stories about early-morning flights across the ocean. “You can’t really fly, Daddy. Can he fly, Mummy? Can he?” She hadn’t seen Perry rap-dancing with his kids or slow-dancing with Celeste on their balcony, the moon sitting low in the sky, shining on the sea as if it were there just for them.