Lessons in Heartbreak

by Cathy Kelly

  Where was her lover now that she needed him? With his wife, that’s where.

  Izzie sat down on her small couch and cried. All the romance and the excitement counted for absolutely nothing at that moment. She could tell herself it didn’t matter that she didn’t have a husband, 2.5 children and a crippling mortgage, but at moments like this, it did matter.

  She knew she wasn’t the only woman to fall for a married man, but it felt like it – she was in a club with only one member, a spectacularly stupid member.

  Still, when her cell phone rang, she leapt to it, hoping that it might be him, eyes too blurry to focus on the number.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hey, girl, how are you doing?’ Carla’s smoky Marlboro Lights voice was warm with concern.

  Izzie slumped against the wall beside the phone. ‘OK,’ she mumbled.

  ‘I’m sorry I told you to go home. I got to thinking that you’d be climbing the walls by now.’

  Izzie laughed. ‘How’d you know that?’

  ‘Instinct.’

  ‘Whatever it is, it’s spot on,’ Izzie replied. ‘I can see the lure of the barstool now. All those people I used to think were losers for sitting in bars in the afternoon – they have a point.’

  ‘You could join me on a barstool tonight? First, we eat, then we hit a club or two. Might take your mind off things.’

  ‘Count me in,’ Izzie said. If she stayed at home, she would cry herself to sleep, she knew.

  They arranged to meet in SoHo at eight and when her phone rang moments later, Izzie answered it without looking, thinking it was Carla ringing back.

  ‘Hi,’ she said warmly.

  ‘Hello.’

  It was him. Colder than he’d ever sounded before, but still him.

  The driving rain hitting her face outside the museum benefit came starkly back into her mind. She thought of his arm on his wife, the stunning WASP blonde with racehorse legs, and the blank look on his face as he stared at Izzie.

  Then, she remembered her father’s voice on the phone, along with the vision of Gran lying in a coma, and all the vicious things she’d planned to say to Joe vanished. She needed him like she’d never needed him before.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, starting to sob. ‘I’m sorry, Joe. It’s awful, my grandmother back home in Ireland is sick: she’s had a stroke and they don’t know if she’s going to be all right, and it’s awful…’

  ‘Oh my love,’ he murmured, frost gone. ‘I’ll be right over.’

  He was there in ten minutes.

  At the door, he said nothing, just held out his arms and let her come to him where he drew her into the tightest bear hug she’d ever experienced.

  ‘Baby,’ he kept saying over and over again, his hands tenderly stroking her as if she were a child.

  Finally safe, she cried until her face was raw and she felt too tired even to stand.

  He brought her over to the couch and they sat, Izzie curled up on his lap. The comfort from feeling small and loved was immense.

  ‘Thank you,’ she sighed, her head bent against the wall of his chest.

  Curled up against him, she talked about Gran: about how she’d practically lived in Lily’s house after her mother died, and how Gran had been the only person who didn’t shy away from talking about her mum.

  ‘Dad didn’t know what to do. He thought that if we talked about Mum, I’d get upset, so it was better if we didn’t. That was fine for the first year when I couldn’t talk about Mum, but afterwards, when I wanted to, he’d change the subject so fast. Maybe he couldn’t talk for his own sake, either.’

  ‘What was she like?’ he asked.

  ‘A lot like my dad: vague and artistic. She painted. She’d walk around with paint smudges all over her clothes and on her face and not even notice. She’d go to the supermarket in her slippers and laugh if you mentioned it to her. Bohemian, I guess. She had quite dark skin, not like me, and she loved the sun. She had a mole on her back that went very dark, and she didn’t think anything of it. By the time they realised it was cancerous, she had only weeks to live.’

  Joe said nothing, just carried on gently stroking her hair.

  ‘Dad went to pieces, like today,’ she sighed. ‘Nothing new there. Gran stepped in and took over. She raised me.’

  ‘Tell me about her,’ he said, moving so that they were both lying on the couch now, his long legs hanging over the end, Izzie feeling fragile against him, the way she always did because he was such a big man.

  So she talked: about Gran blazing a trail in Tamarin by leaving to train as a nurse in London during the war, of the stories she’d told of being a twenty-one-year-old in another country, and how she’d coped.

  ‘That’s probably why I wanted to travel when I left school,’ Izzie said. ‘I’d grown up hearing Gran talk about another world outside Tamarin, and it felt like what I had to do.’

  ‘But she went back to Ireland, though, didn’t she?’

  Izzie nodded. ‘She went back after the war, married my granddad and has been there ever since.’

  ‘I know you’re going home, but not for good, right? I don’t want you to leave New York,’ he murmured. ‘Your grandmother needs you now, but not to stay. I need you even more, Izzie.’

  He moved his hand from stroking her hair to gently trace the curve of her waist and hip, settling around the firm swelling of her buttocks.

  Fear and death made people think of love, Gran had told her once. That thought flickered through Izzie’s consciousness as she felt her body answering Joe’s hunger.

  People regularly went home from funerals and made love, she knew, to banish the cold, hard reality of death. Gran wouldn’t die, she just couldn’t. As if the fierce passion of their lovemaking could keep her grandmother’s heart beating through some spiritual intervention, Izzie Silver kissed her lover back with more hunger than ever before.

  Life and love couldn’t end, it couldn’t.

  They ended up in the bed after all, since the couch was too small for both of them. Joe had lifted Izzie up and carried her to the bed, throwing off the pretty pillows that decorated it so they had more room, pinioning her to the bed with his weight as he adored her body, kissing, sucking, licking. The second time was gentler, more loving and less fierce.

  When he was inside her, he cradled her face in his hands and gazed into her eyes with such love that Izzie wanted to cry, but he didn’t say anything, only called her name as he came.

  After their exertions, Joe lay beside her, breathing deeply. Izzie was sure he was asleep, and she lay curled against him.

  As she lay there, she allowed herself to dream. What if he said that this was the time for him to leave his home and come to her?

  You need me now, Izzie. I’m going to be there for you. I’m coming to Tamarin too.

  And Izzie, who knew she’d never, ever have asked him for that because she wasn’t the sort of woman to walk round with a chisel in her purse, trying to prise him off his wife, would say:

  Thank you, I’d hoped you’d say that, but I’d never ask.

  If she’d asked, she’d be no better than the sort of woman she hated: the professional girlfriends who picked married men with big bank balances and used skills like safe-crackers to get their hands on the money. That wasn’t Izzie.

  But if he came to her now, how wonderful it would be. She’d be able to cope a little better if he were with her, holding her hand, sitting beside her in the hospital with Gran.

  ‘This is the man I love, Gran,’ she’d whisper, and even, God forbid, if Gran never woke up, Izzie would have brought Joe to meet her. She so wanted Gran’s approval of the man she loved. Even though it was all so unconventional and difficult, it would work out, because love found a way, didn’t it?

  The love of her life stretched beside her and then moved so that he was propped up on one arm, staring down at her.

  She gazed up at him happily, eyes tracing the familiar lines of his face and loving what she saw.

 
‘Izzie, I need to know why you came to the museum last night,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ she asked, her happy daydream crashing to the ground. ‘Can’t you guess?’

  ‘Well, no.’

  This time, she sat up and pulled the sheet protectively over her breasts.

  ‘Oh, come on, Joe,’ she said. ‘It’s not rocket science. You’re one of the smartest people I know. Surely you can figure it out.’

  ‘You wanted to look at my wife?’

  He couldn’t say her name: couldn’t say ‘Elizabeth’. As if saying it here in Izzie’s apartment would taint her. Elizabeth was the one to be protected, not the other way round.

  Izzie shivered at what this meant.

  ‘I could look at her in any magazine, Joe,’ she said calmly. ‘I wanted to see you together – don’t you get it? You and her, together. Wouldn’t you want to see me and him together, if I was the one who was married?’ she asked incredulously.

  ‘If you were married, we wouldn’t be together,’ Joe said bluntly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to share you.’ He shrugged. ‘That wouldn’t be an option. I’d never see someone who was involved with anyone else.’

  Rage boiled up inside her.

  ‘You bastard!’ she hissed. ‘I get to share you, but you’d refuse to share me. You are so hypocritical.’

  ‘Me, hypocritical? I don’t think so.’ Joe’s eyes were like cold steel and they bored into her.

  Izzie was shocked by the ferocity of his glare.

  ‘What I didn’t think we were getting into was you turning up like a stalker to watch me and my wife with our friends.’

  His words actually hurt her physically. She hadn’t known words could do that.

  ‘I can’t believe you’re saying this to me,’ she said. She no longer felt angry, just very scared and very shocked. This was not how it was supposed to be. Where was the Joe who’d looked down on her as they’d made love, as if he’d like to gaze at her face with love for ever.

  The words just slipped out. ‘I thought you loved me?’

  The silence gaped like one of the valleys near the New Mexico pueblo where she’d been just days before. Outside, police cars roared past, droning sirens into the afternoon.

  ‘I thought you and Elizabeth were just together for the kids? That’s what you told me. Is that the truth or not?’

  ‘Izzie –’ he began, ‘I do love you, but it’s not that simple.’

  And then she knew for sure. Carla had been right. He hadn’t loved her. He’d loved making love to her, sure, but as for the Real Thing – that was all one-sided. Her side.

  ‘Don’t say anything.’ She scrambled out of the bed, dragging the sheet with her, wrapping it around her body like an Egyptian mummy. She didn’t want him looking at her naked body ever again. She felt so ashamed: ashamed, humiliated, stupid. He’d used her. She loved him, thought he loved her too. But she was wrong.

  ‘Let’s not fight,’ he said gently. ‘I didn’t come here for that.’

  The shred of dignity left to Izzie stopped her saying: What did you come here for, then? Because the answer was simple: to fuck you, my handy little girlfriend. That’s all she was. A convenience store – available for late-night drinks, dinner and free sex. For the first time ever, she had respect for the hard-boiled identikit New York girlfriends of married men. At least they understood the rules of the game and they considered it a profession. Get your man and get something from him. She’d considered herself different: his true love. She was his equal and she wasn’t the sort of woman who wanted things from a man. She wasn’t in it for gifts – she was in it for love. Except he was in it for something different. No shit, Sherlock.

  ‘No,’ she said, reaching inside herself and finding one last thread of calmness. ‘Let’s not fight. I have to pack.’

  Pack? She didn’t care if she travelled on the flight without a single item of luggage but the clothes she stood up in. Still, it was a good excuse.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, sliding gracefully out of the bed. He was such a handsome male animal, she thought, watching him. Everything she found physically attractive: no fat, just hard muscle and a hard business brain, and now – she’d just found out – a hard heart.

  ‘What time is your flight?’ he murmured.

  ‘Five forty tomorrow evening,’ she said.

  ‘Nothing earlier.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you want, I could get you on the private plane,’ he said.

  Like a computer finally downloading a big email, the litany of vicious things she’d planned to say earlier came online in Izzie’s brain. The thread of calm vanished.

  ‘But not the company plane, right? That might really let people know that you were screwing me. No, you’d have to take a favour from someone or else pay to fly me home, because God forbid that any of your employees should find out about me, the boss’s whore.’

  ‘Izzie,’ he said, sounding hurt, ‘I never made you feel that way, I never meant to.’

  ‘I know, but that’s still how I feel,’ she said.

  ‘Guess we’re fighting after all.’

  ‘No, you’re leaving,’ she said. ‘In fact, I am too. I’ve got things to buy.’ She grabbed a sweatshirt and sweatpants from her closet and went into the tiny bathroom. Twenty seconds later, she emerged, wearing the tracksuit and her hair messy from where she’d hauled it over her head. Who cared about her hair? Bed-hair and life-is-over-hair looked pretty much the same. ‘I’m going. You can let yourself out.’

  ‘Don’t go,’ he said urgently.

  ‘Tough, I’m going,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to wait here and listen to more of your lies.’

  ‘They’re not lies, Izzie. I love you, it’s just difficult now. Complicated –’

  ‘I’ll undo some of the complications, then,’ she snapped. ‘Consider me out of your life, Joe. Does that make it easier?’

  She snagged her purse from the hall, grabbed her keys and was gone.

  She ran down the stairs to the street in case he came after her, and then ran two blocks to a coffee shop they’d never been to together, just in case he came after her.

  But he wouldn’t, she realised, as she stood at the counter and tried to summon up the brainpower to actually order something.

  ‘Er…skinny latte, please,’ she said to the barista.

  Joe wouldn’t follow her. He didn’t want an emotional girlfriend who had expectations: he wanted an easy lay who wouldn’t cause trouble. Or did he? She’d trusted him, had been sure he was telling the truth. But if he was, and if he loved her, wouldn’t he walk away now to be with her?

  She sat at a table and stirred sugar into her latte. What a hideous day this had turned out to be. First, darling Gran: now, this.

  ‘Oh, Gran,’ she said to herself, ‘I’ve let you down so much. Let both of us down, actually. Bet you thought you’d taught me better, huh?’

  A mother with a baby in a stroller and several bags of groceries underneath, sat tiredly down at the table beside her. Izzie watched the mother and child sadly. She’d never have that, not now. Motherhood was a destination getting further and further away from her. Once, she’d thought it was a right, inevitable. Women got married and had children. Then, it became a challenge: harder than originally thought, but still possible. And now…now it looked impossible, unless she went it alone.

  Suddenly, she could understand women who reached forty and went looking for donor sperm to father their babies. If there was no man on the scene to be your baby’s daddy, and the time bomb that was worn-out ovaries was ticking away, what else did you do? Wait like Sleeping Beauty for a non-existent prince? Or save yourself.

  The baby wriggled in her stroller and Izzie caught sight of her properly. Downy African-American curls framed an exquisite face with chubby cheeks and huge dark eyes like inky pools. In her peachy pink sleepsuit, she looked like a little doll.

  ‘She’s lovely,’ Izzie said to the tired mom, w
ho instantly brightened.

  ‘Yeah, isn’t she? My little princess.’

  ‘Does she sleep?’

  What Izzie knew about small children could be written on the head of a pin with room left over for the State of the Union speech, but she knew that sleep patterns were as important to mothers as New York Fashion Week was to her.

  ‘She’s getting better,’ the mother said, warming to her theme. ‘She went six whole hours last night, didn’t you, honey?’ she cooed to her baby. ‘You got kids?’ she asked Izzie.

  Izzie felt the prickle of tears in her eyes.

  She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Not everyone wants ‘em,’ the woman agreed.

  Izzie nodded. She didn’t trust herself to speak. She pushed her barely touched latte away from her. ‘Bye,’ she gulped and ran out.

  It was too late for her to have a baby, she thought, wild with grief. It wasn’t that her eggs were too old or that her body was too decrepit: it was that her heart was a dried-out husk and you couldn’t nourish another human being when there was nothing left in you.

  ‘Don’t go yet, Gran,’ she whispered up to the Manhattan sky. ‘Please don’t go yet. I need to see you one last time, please.’

  EIGHT

  Izzie’s in-control façade had stayed in place throughout the entire flight, the roller-coaster turbulence of their descent into Dublin airport, and the long march through the glass hallways of the airport to the baggage reclaim.

  She travelled so much for business that she could adopt her woman-business-traveller look easily. With her pink silk eyemask for sleeping on the flight, her moisturiser to cope with the dryness of the cabin, and her flat shoes (socks in her carry-on bags), she had travelling down pat.

  It was only when the airport double doors swept open and she was suddenly out of the international-no-man’s-land of the airport and into the actual country of her birth that it all hit her.

  This wasn’t a routine work trip or even a planned trip home: this was an emergency visit because her beloved grandmother might be dying.