Lessons in Heartbreak

by Cathy Kelly

  She’d once read that certain types of situation made the lizard brain dominate. The lizard brain was the core survival part of human beings, lower down the totem pole than the limbic system and the cerebral cortex.

  The lizard kicked into place when people reached a deep primal fear. There had been so many other hugely long medical words in the article that Anneliese had slightly tuned out, but she’d remembered that bit: that the lizard brain was basic survival and came out when the person was mortally threatened.

  Like now. When a panic attack swept over her with raging force. No sooner had she thought the words, than the breathlessness hit and she began to wheeze, feeling her chest tightening. She couldn’t breathe, her heart was racing.

  Anneliese moved so quickly that she bumped into a man bending over looking at the sports books.

  ‘Sorry,’ she half gasped, whisking past him. She had to get out and home. She needed to be in a safe place so she could make this fear and darkness go away.

  It was years since she’d had a panic attack, years. She’d forgotten how horrific they were, how she always felt as if she was going to die.

  Her hands were shaking so much, it was hard to get her keys from her bag, almost impossible to keep the key for the car at the right angle to slip it into the lock. But she did. Safe, she was a bit safe.

  She sat in the driver’s seat, shaking, trying to calm her breath.

  Breathe in, count to four, breathe out.

  When she’d felt recovered enough, she started the engine, keeping the volume turned up loud on talk radio, willing the discussion to block out her own head. She didn’t want to think.

  The house was silent when she got there – not the silence of a home where another person might be back soon, but the deadening silence of a place where only one person lived. Anneliese made herself a mug of herbal tea, the Tranquility tea that Edward used to gently tease her about. About to put the pack back in the cupboard, she took another teabag and stuck that in the mug too. She needed a double dose of tranquillity.

  Then, she took the mug and an old fleecy blanket outside to sit on the deck.

  With her feet curled up under her, mug in her hand and the blanket wrapped around her, Anneliese stared out at the crashing waves and let herself breathe slowly.

  Breathe. In and out. Slowly and deeply. Concentrate on each breath, let your lungs fill and exhale slowly through your nose. In and out. That was all you had to do every day – breathe.

  Shit, shit, it wasn’t working. Despite the deep breathing, she could feel her heartbeat fluttering along at speed, and the darkness was still in the back of her head, coming closer now.

  Fuck you, Edward, for doing this to me, Anneliese thought bitterly.

  She huddled into the fleecy blanket for warmth.

  She was not going back on the tablets, not again.

  Edward had been so good and understanding about her depression, even if he’d never entirely got it.

  ‘I feel a bit sad too sometimes, you know,’ he’d said early on in their marriage. ‘It’s not the same as you, love, but I understand, or at least, I’m trying to.’

  Anneliese, who’d chosen her words carefully when she talked about being depressed so that she didn’t scare him or make him think he was married to a complete nutcase who needed access to a straitjacket at all times, had to stop herself from laughing out loud.

  He couldn’t know or understand that depression was a part of her: she could go about her daily life like anybody else but while some people had freckles or lovely olive skin as part of their genetic make-up, she had depression. A part of her: sometimes there, sometimes not. She could go months, years, without feeling that overwhelming darkness, but when she did, it was far more than feeling a bit sad. And yet she loved him, loved him for trying.

  ‘I love you, you darling man,’ she said to him fiercely. He’d laughed too and hugged her, and Anneliese had ended up sitting on his lap, their arms wrapped round each other, and she’d felt really loved.

  This kind, complex man didn’t really understand what she went through, but he was doing his best. That was love: trying to understand your mate, even if the understanding was outside your scope.

  She remembered talking to Nell about it too. That hurt: thinking of bloody Nell knowing about Anneliese’s inner pain and then still walking off with her husband. Anneliese shuddered under her fleecy blanket.

  She was beginning to hate Nell.

  ‘How can you be feeling like that, you know, down, and still go out and be normal?’ Nell had asked once, when Beth was a little girl and Anneliese had brought her to a classmate’s birthday party and gone home to cry for two straight hours, which was where Nell had found her when she dropped round.

  ‘You put your game face on,’ Anneliese said simply, her face raw with tears. ‘You can’t sit in a corner and stare into nothingness when you’ve a child. You just can’t.’

  Not that she hadn’t felt like it many times, but mother love was a potent force. Anneliese might have had many days where she’d have liked to stay in bed, drag the duvet around her like armour and sit out the bleakness. But she couldn’t do that to her daughter.

  When Beth grew older and it became clear that she’d inherited her mother’s depression just as she’d inherited her indigo eyes, protecting Beth had become Anneliese’s life. Beth, who needed huge love and attention, came highest on the totem pole.

  Next, came Anneliese herself, sometimes staying on top of it all, sometimes falling into the pit so that she’d reluctantly have to go to the doctor and take some of those damned antidepressants, and she hated them. It was like admitting to failure and if she read one more article that said depression was like diabetes and if you had diabetes, you wouldn’t mind taking insulin to fix it, then she’d kill someone.

  Edward, dear kind Edward, had come a very definite third in his wife’s list of priorities.

  Women’s first love and concern would always be their children, if they had them, Anneliese had realised, while men’s would be their women. The two equations weren’t even on the same page.

  Had that driven Edward away – always being third in their marriage? How could he not have known that he wasn’t third through choice but because of the rules of simple survival?

  Anneliese sighed and stared out at the view that sold the house to her and Edward all those years ago. In the sharp light, Milsean Bay was like a mirror set in a valley that changed from white sand to the peaty green of the fields.

  Beyond lay the Atlantic Ocean where seagulls swooped and flecks of white foam whisked up dramatically. Be careful, roared the water. It was a lesson that locals never forgot. Tourists took boats out to explore the sheltered bay, and kidded themselves that the waters were safe, only to have to be rescued when their boats were swept out into the fierce tempest of the Atlantic.

  Basking sharks could sometimes be seen from the cliffs above the point, where a dolmen stood in grandeur. Anneliese could remember the day she and Edward had taken Beth to see the dolmen when she was small, wanting to instil a sense of pride in her.

  ‘This is our history, Beth,’ Edward had explained.

  And now he’d rewritten their family history. Anneliese didn’t know if she could ever forgive him for that. There was no justification, none.

  Of course, it didn’t matter to Edward if she forgave him or not. He wasn’t in her life any more.

  FOUR

  Izzie’s Manhattan apartment was cold and looked bare after the warmth of the New Mexico hotel. Even her beloved New York was coolly impersonal today, she decided: the cab driver who’d picked her up at the airport hadn’t been classically eccentric, just dull, and it was raining too, the type of flash flood that could drown a person in an instant.

  Wet and tired, Izzie slammed her front door shut and set her luggage down, trying to put a finger on the sense of discontent she felt. There was something about the friendliness of the pueblo, a small-town kindliness that Izzie missed from home. She was a small
-town girl, after all, she thought, feeling a rush of homesickness for Tamarin. She thought about home a lot these days. Was it because she felt so alone when Joe left late at night and her thoughts turned to her family, the other people who cared for her?

  Or was it because she felt a growing anxiety over what was happening: a relationship that was so hard to explain that she hadn’t tried to explain it to anyone, not Carla, not her dad, not Gran.

  She stripped off her dripping jacket and only then allowed herself to look at the answering machine. The message display showed a big fat zero. Zero messages.

  Horrible bloody machine. She glared at it, as if it was the machine’s fault that Joe hadn’t rung.

  Turning on the lamps to give her home some type of inner glow, Izzie stomped into the bathroom, stripped off her clothes and got into the shower to wash away the dust of the mesa. She was becoming obsessed with cleaning herself. Was Obsessive Compulsive Disorder a product of tangled love affairs? She’d never had so many showers in her life, always showering and scrubbing and oiling in the hope that, once she was in the shower, the phone would ring. It always used to. But not now. Joe hadn’t phoned in five days.

  Five days.

  ‘I’ll talk to you,’ he’d murmured the morning she flew to New Mexico.

  ‘You do that,’ she’d murmured back, wishing she could cancel, wishing something would happen so she’d be close to him, because there was a cold, isolating feeling from not being in the same city as him. What was that about?

  But he hadn’t phoned.

  Not even on the last night when they all let their hair down, when the noise of partying would have made any normal absent lover slightly jealous – which was why Izzie had hoped he’d phone then, just so she’d have the chance to move away from the hubbub and casually say that Ivan was playing the limbo-dancing game, and make it all sound fabulous. So fabulous that he’d be jealous of her being there without him…Except he hadn’t played the game. He hadn’t phoned.

  Izzie clambered out of the shower, still irritated.

  No, a shower wasn’t the right thing. A bath, that would be perfect.

  She started to fill the tub, poured in at least half of her precious Jo Malone rose bath oil, opened a bottle of white wine and made herself a spritzer for the bath, and finally sank into the fragrant bubbles.

  She sipped her spritzer, laid back with her eyes closed and tried to relax. But the blissful obliviousness baths used to bring her, a sinking-into-the-heat-thing that made her forget everything else, evaded her. As ever, since she’d met Joe, he was the only thing in her mind.

  For that first lunch, they’d met in a small, quirky Italian restaurant in the Village, the sort of place Izzie hadn’t imagined Joe would like. She’d guessed he’d prefer more uptown joints where the staff recognised every billionaire in the city. It was another thing to like about him, this difference.

  Over antipasti, they chatted and the more he talked, the more Izzie felt herself falling for him.

  He’d got a business degree, then joined J.P. Morgan’s graduate-trainee programme.

  ‘That’s when the bug hit me,’ he said, scooping up a sliver of ciabatta bread drenched with basil-infused olive oil. ‘Trading is all about instant gratification, and I loved it.’

  ‘Isn’t it stressful?’ she asked, thinking of losing millions and how she’d have to be anaesthetised if she did a job like that.

  ‘I never felt stress,’ he said. ‘I loved it. I’d trade, lose some, win some, whatever, I’d go home and go to sleep. People burned out all the time – the hours, the work-hard, play-hard mentality, it got to a lot of them, but not me.’

  At twenty-nine, he’d been running his own trading fund, a hedge fund.

  ‘That’s what it means,’ said Izzie delighted. ‘I never knew.’

  The higher up the chain he went, the more risk but also bigger percentages to be earned, until finally he ended up as head of trading for a huge bank. ‘Basically, you’re trying to systematically beat all the markets through math,’ he explained. ‘You name it, we traded it. We were a closed fund.’

  Izzie, mouth full of roasted peppers, looked at him quizzically.

  ‘Means we only reinvested profits and no new investors could get in.’

  ‘Oh.’ She nodded. This was like a masterclass in Wall Street. How many years had she known all those money guys and never had a clue what they were talking about?

  Finally, he and a friend named Leo Guard had started their own closed hedge fund, HG.

  ‘Eventually, we were doing so well, we changed the fee structure from two and twenty to five and forty.’

  ‘I add up using my fingers,’ Izzie explained. ‘I have no idea what that means.’

  He grinned and handed her some more bread.

  ‘That’s the typical fee structure: two and twenty means you get two per cent for management and twenty per cent of profits from performance.’

  ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘And you were trading in millions?’

  He nodded. ‘Imagine having six hundred under management.’

  Izzie hated to look thick. ‘Six hundred million dollars?’ she said, just to check.

  He nodded.

  ‘You’re rich, then,’ she said, hating herself for eating all that antipasti as she already felt full and the main courses would be coming soon.

  Joe laughed.

  ‘You’re the real deal, Izzie Silver,’ he said. ‘I like that.’

  ‘Honest,’ she said, pushing her plate away. ‘Not everyone likes it.’

  ‘I do. Yes, you could say I am rich.’

  ‘You don’t own a super-yacht, though?’ she asked, with a twinkle in her eye.

  He laughed again. ‘No. Do you want one, or do you simply want to date a guy with one?’

  Izzie smiled at his innocence. ‘You haven’t a clue, do you?’ she said coolly. ‘I am so far away from the type of woman who wants a man with a super-yacht that I am on a different continent.’ She rearranged things on the table, pushing the salt and pepper around. ‘The pepper is me.’ She stuck it at the edge of the table. ‘And the salt –’ she moved it to the other side completely, ‘– is the sort of woman who wants to know a guy’s bank balance before she meets him for a drink. See? Big gap, big difference. Enormous.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Just don’t do it again,’ she joked. ‘I have never in my entire life gone out with a guy because of the size of his bank balance. Ever. I did briefly – one date – go out with a guy from next door in my old apartment because he knew how to work the heating, and he’d fixed it for me one day when the super wasn’t around and I went out on a date with him, but that was it. A one-off.’

  ‘You came out with me because I gave you a ride back to the office, then?’ he teased.

  ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘Keep going with this life story of yours. Tell me some personal stuff.’

  He was forty-five, his wife was a couple of years younger and they’d married young, kids, really. Izzie was sorry she’d asked for personal stuff.

  ‘Then, Tom came along quite quickly,’ he said proudly. ‘It all changes then, you know. Do you have children?’

  Yes, in my handbag, Izzie wanted to say. ‘No, ‘fraid not. So I don’t know how it changes everything.’

  ‘Take my word for it, it does. It changes the couple dynamic, you get so caught up in the kids. But, hey, I didn’t come here to talk about my boys,’ he said.

  ‘OK, what did you come here for?’ she asked. She wasn’t sure why she was here. He was too complicated, there was too much going on in his life. She needed a rebound guy like she needed a hole in the head.

  Besides, he wasn’t even at the rebound stage: he was still in the nursing-the-broken-relationship stage. A man on the hunt for a rebound relationship didn’t necessarily want to talk about his wife and kids.

  Pity, she thought sadly. He was lovely, sexy, made her stomach whoop in a way she could never quite remember it doing before.

  It just prov
ed what she knew and what Linda had confirmed to her: all the good ones were taken. But he was a charming guy and she could enjoy lunch and mark it down to experience.

  ‘You still don’t know what I came here for?’ he asked.

  Izzie shot him a wry look.

  ‘I might want to know more about the modelling industry so I can invest in it,’ he continued.

  ‘You might just want to be introduced to long-legged models?’ she countered. ‘I’m normally quite good at working out if a man is interested in me only as a means to get to the models. Although you –’ she surveyed him ‘– aren’t the normal type. You’re too nice.’

  He pretended to gasp. ‘Nice? That’s not a word people usually use about me. I’ve been called a shark, you know.’

  ‘You’re nice,’ Izzie said, smiling back at him. It was true. For all that he was an alpha male, with all the in-built arrogance and intelligence, he had a solid, warm core to him, a devastatingly attractive bit that said he might be a rich guy but he’d been brought up to take care of people, to protect his family and his woman. Izzie felt a pang that she would never get to be said woman. There would be something wonderful about being with a man who’d take care of her.

  ‘You might pretend to be a shark but you’re a pussycat,’ she went on, teasing a little. ‘Besides, I know you don’t need me to get you introduced to the supermodels. You’re rich enough to buy all the introductions you need. Money is like an access-all-areas card, isn’t it?’

  ‘My but you’re cynical for one so young,’ he grinned.

  ‘I’m not young, I’m nearly forty,’ she said. If she’d thought he was interested in her, she’d have said she was thirty-nine. ‘It’s creeping up on me every day. I’m going to be over the hill soon.’

  A few days ago, it might have been a joke. But since the Plaza and Linda, Izzie no longer felt complacent at the thought of her approaching birthday.