by Kate Russo
“No . . . Mum was worried he would see it as a violation of trust.”
She throws her arms up in the air. “So you want to send me home for drawing on a wall, but Charlie gets to do whatever the fuck he wants?”
“It’s not comparable, Emma.”
“Why can’t you be as hard on him as you are on me?” she asks, thrusting herself back under the duvet.
“It’s not the same.” He takes a deep breath. “Tomorrow I’ll go to the hardware store to get some paint. I can fix what you’ve done, but I need you to promise me you won’t do it again.”
“Did you say that to Charlie?” she yells, muffled, from under the covers. “‘I’ll bring you home from Manchester, but you have to promise me that you won’t take any more drugs.’”
“Something like that.”
She pops out from the duvet. “Let me know how that works out for you,” she says, before pulling the duvet on top of her again. “I’ll do the painting myself.”
Theo storms off. She can hear him swearing at the bedroom walls and floor.
She wants to apologize, but her blood boils when he scolds her like that, like she’s a puppy that’s just chewed up his favorite shoe. She knows she made a mistake drawing all over their bedroom. She even knows she’ll have to be honest about all of it with Dr. Gibson when she gets home, but if she’s learned anything from Charlie, it’s that the best way to get Theo’s attention is to behave badly. She tells herself she will apologize tomorrow.
They spend the night in different rooms, Emma in the small guest room, Theo in the master. As far as Emma is concerned, he might as well have stayed at his mother’s house. He doesn’t feel any closer to her by being in the house. In fact, he feels farther away.
* * *
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The next morning, she hears Theo moving purposefully around the house. Even his footsteps sound patronizing.
“Hi,” he says, when he sees her coming down the stairs.
She stands on the staircase, still wearing the clothes she’s been wearing for two days now. Her hair must be crazy, because he’s looking several inches above her eyes. Or maybe he can’t bear to look her in the eyes anymore. Hopefully, it’s the hair.
“This should do it,” he says, holding up supplies. He’s been to the hardware store.
“Thanks,” she says, sheepishly. She wants to be angry, but in truth, she’s thrilled that he went to buy the paint, even more thrilled that he did it without asking.
“Granola?” he asks, pointing to the kitchen island.
“Yeah, alright,” she says, although she’s not hungry. She hasn’t eaten anything since the granola she had yesterday, but she’s not going to tell him that for fear he’ll go ballistic again. Okay, not ballistic. A better word to describe Theo would be concerned. That’s the word she would use if she were writing it down for the fact jar.
He pulls down two bowls from the cabinet and pours granola into each. He slides one bowl down the island to Emma, followed by a spoon, before filling his own with milk. He eats his granola standing up, facing Emma from the other side of the island. “I’m not the only one that needs to take better care of myself,” he says, not in a patronizing way this time, but like someone who knows what’s at stake when you don’t.
From where Emma sits, she can see Bennett looking out his studio window, but he turns around quickly to make it seem like he hasn’t been watching. Normally, she’d tell Theo, try to prove to him that Bennett’s been spying, but this morning she lets it go.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “About upstairs. Do you want some help?”
He smiles. “No. That’s okay. I’m kind of looking forward to it. Something I can actually fix.” He lifts the lid off the fact jar and stares in at the full contents. “That’s a lot of truth. Does every one of these pieces of paper say, ‘Theo is a jerk’?”
“No,” she answers. Just one, she thinks. “Besides, that’s a feeling, not a fact.”
He nods, impressed, and puts the lid back on the jar. He looks around, clearly hoping to reacquaint himself with both the kitchen and the wife he left behind. When he picks up one of the avocados from the fruit bowl, it bursts in his hand.
“Eww . . .” he says, looking down at the brownish-green slime on his palm and fingers. “Why did you keep this?” He chucks it into the bin, but his hand is still coated in green slime.
Emma watches, bewildered at how quickly he dispenses with the piece of fruit that’s been taunting her all week. He’s forgotten all about the circumstances of that avocado—that it needs to face the laundry room, that Bennett touched it, that it represented a “good challenge” she could never quite bring herself to face.
He looks down at his hand, his fingers splayed out and sticky, and she can sense him plotting something. Wiggling his fingers, he smiles mischievously and reaches across the island to rub the sticky, rotten avocado flesh all over Emma’s face. Leaping off her stool, she shrieks with laughter. Game on, he chases her around the island as she continues to scream and swear at him. When he catches her, she freezes in his grasp. No laughing, no screaming. Just eye contact.
How much do I love you? Count the stars in the sky . . .
To Theo, an avocado doesn’t have a set of circumstances, it’s just fruit.
. . . Measure the waters of the oceans with a teaspoon. Number the grains of sand on the sea shore. Impossible, you say?
He leans in, tongue out, and licks the green gunk off her face. She starts to shriek, again, but he holds her tight.
For Emma, an avocado will never be just an avocado. Fact.
Mind to Motion
Claire’s got him running. “A spring cleaning for the body and soul,” was how she put it, except it doesn’t feel like spring. The blooms on the trees are still covered in a light frost. Early April mornings might as well be January, Bennett thinks, following his breath as he chugs along toward the river in dark grey sweatpants and a long-sleeved blue T-shirt—the two least offensive fitness items he could find on the sale rack at M&S. Both are made from really soft cotton and wearing the outfit doesn’t make him want to run at all. It makes him want to curl up on the futon and eat Doritos.
When he passes Ravenscourt Gardens, where he grew up, he doesn’t even look down the road. Since his mother died five years ago, he hasn’t walked, run, or driven down it. There’s no reason to. It’s someone else’s house now, someone else’s street. Though, sometimes, he does wonder if the whiskey bottle that his father hid in the garden fish pond is still there. Back when he was in school, his mother, Helen, wouldn’t allow her alcoholic husband to drink in the house, so once she had gone to bed, the bastard would drink in the garden under the stars. Gary Driscoll would happily sink into a patio chair, whiskey bottle in hand, his feet up on the wooden picnic table, with Helen’s beloved fish pond bubbling and trickling nearby. From his bedroom window, Bennett had a perfect view of his father’s ritual, the old man groaning as he got down on both knees next to the fish pond where he wedged the whiskey bottle under the water between two rocks, so it couldn’t float up to the surface. A couple times he got so pissed that he returned the bottle to the pond without screwing the cap on tight. The next morning the fish would be dead, floating on the water’s surface with the cap. On these occasions, Bennett would rush out to the garden, retrieve the cap, and throw it over the fence before his mother saw it. One time he even grabbed the dead fish, stuffed them in the pockets of his school blazer, and flushed them down the toilet after English class. When he got home, he told his mother he’d seen a heron near the pond. It wasn’t that he wanted to protect his old man, he just hated to see his parents fight. He hated the way his father would never pull back in an argument, always determined to win, no matter the consequences, no matter the tears he caused. To Gary Driscoll, nothing was below the belt and there was no such thing as an unfair fight.
* * *
Bennett likes to run before it gets busy out. He’s prone to groaning, especially when he just starts out and his knees are popping and cracking. The other people out at seven a.m. are similar over-the-hill wankers running because of bad cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes. Bennett’s running for sex, and for that reason alone, he feels smug. Claire has taken to grabbing his love handles and acting impressed. She swears they’re shrinking. He’s pretty sure she’s patronizing him, but he doesn’t care. Originally, she had wanted them to go running together, but there was no way he was doing that. “It’s not a social activity,” he told her.
“You just don’t want me to hear you puffing and panting,” she said, pinching one of those love handles.
“Yes, exactly.”
Why does she always find the painful truth to be so adorable?
“I bet you look sexy in sweatpants. Send me a picture, at least.”
Nope and nope.
He’s reluctant to use the word girlfriend to describe Claire, but she’s not. Like, a couple weeks ago, when she enquired about when she’d get to meet Mia. “What?” she said. “You don’t want to introduce your daughter to your new girlfriend?”
Nope.
Truth be told, he hasn’t said anything to Mia about Claire. It hasn’t really got anything to do with Claire, herself, it’s just that he and Mia have been a good pair ever since Eliza left and he doesn’t want to ruin that. Besides, Mia doesn’t tell him about the guys she’s dating, so it makes sense that he affords her the same distance from his love life. He knows that when Mia meets someone really special, she’ll introduce him. He worries sometimes that his and Eliza’s divorce may have irreparably damaged her ideas about love and relationships, but she’s still young. He doesn’t want to know any of the twats she’s dating now, anyway. He’s never met a twenty-year-old he liked, including the one he was.
* * *
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The morning after their first night together, Bennett came clean with Claire. Yes, the house was his, but he doesn’t live in it anymore, he lets it on AirBed. As it turns out, it wasn’t much of a secret. Claire had seen the fire exit map on the fridge, noticed that the door of the locked study was marked “private,” and she even nicked one of the tiny bottles of Molton Brown shower gel from the bathroom. Bennett has since learned that sneaking around is kind of a turn-on for Claire. Since then, more than once, she’s forced him up against the back wall of the walk-in fridge at the Claret, despite the fact that it’s impossible for a fifty-five-year-old man to get hard in a cold metal box. After that first night, when they woke up in the guest bedroom of the main house, he confessed that he actually lived in the studio in the back garden. And, well, he didn’t have a collector in Edinburgh waiting for a painting, either. She giggled, twirling the hairs on his chest with her index finger. The whole thing amused her to the point of arousal, so they had another quick fuck and then she helped him put the place back together before Emma came home. Apparently, the last guy Claire dated was an estate agent in Mayfair and the two of them used to screw around in all of his luxury listings. But she doesn’t miss that guy. He was a twat, she claims. “He wore these really wide ties. He put this gel in his hair that always made it look wet all the time,” she continued, cataloging all of her ex’s undesirable characteristics. “But those flats!” she added, gasping. “You wouldn’t believe the luxury. Well, maybe you would.” Bennett just smiled. Would she ever shut up? “I like the way you look more,” she assured him. “Dapper, but soft.” Bennett had no idea what she meant by that, but then she put her hand down his pants, so he didn’t care.
After they finished tidying up the house, he showed her the studio. She must have picked up every tube of paint on his workbench, stroked every sample of fabric stacked on the back wall. “I want you to paint me naked and sell it to some rich guy in Chelsea,” she demanded, which sounded good to him, too. Since then, she’s even let him take a few naked photos of her on his phone. Not just in the studio, but around her flat as well. So long as he says something flattering like, “I love the way the sunlight falls on your hips,” she’ll stay in the position and reply, “Go on, then.” He’s beginning to understand the point of camera phones.
Now, six weeks later, he’s still working on the painting. He’s running in the morning, painting late morning and on through to the afternoon. Most evenings he spends at Claire’s place in Stoke Newington. On the nights she works, he’ll show up late at the Claret and have a glass of wine while she finishes her shift. (This is when she tries to ravish him in the walk-in.) On Saturdays she works the day shift, so he meets her outside her flat in the early evening. They order takeaway and curl up on the sofa to watch Britain’s Got Talent (her favorite), a program that to Bennett’s mind only exists to prove that the exact opposite is true. The show seems to have a one-to-one ratio of human to dog contestants. “Is that dog British?” Bennett asked, pointing at the TV last Saturday night. Claire was curled up in his arm, eating chicken tikka masala out of a white carton. She studied the little dog, which was performing some sort of dressage routine. “It’s a Norwich terrier,” she replied with an implied Duh.
It’s strange for Bennett to be spending so much time in Northeast London, not far from where his daughter and her friends live in Dalston. He feels like he’s sneaking around. When he leaves Claire’s place in the mornings, he risks bumping into Mia at the station, where he waits to take the Overground back to West London. He’s banking on the knowledge that she doesn’t really “do” mornings, and she takes the bus most places, anyway.
Though he may be reluctant to call her a girlfriend, Claire is definitely a lifestyle change. Recently, she’s been talking about joining one of those food services that deliver the recipes and ingredients to your door. “It’s perfect!” she claims. “They deliver everything for three meals a week. That’s how many nights I have off! We wouldn’t even need to go to the store.”
We.
Roots Manuva pumps in his ears as he plods along to the river.
Off beat . . . lost the key and can’t find it
Representation of the spit in the grit
The devil on my shoulder keep tellin’ me shit
Constantly got me feeling like I’m losin’ my grip.
He keeps the iPod in one pocket and his phone in the other. The two devices bump along, bulbously, on his upper thighs as he runs. Claire suggested he get one of those iPod holders that straps to your upper arm, but Bennett told her that he’d look like an agent for MI5 with one of those things. Not his vibe. Claire looked at him funny when he used the word vibe. When the phone vibrates, he takes a quick look, not breaking stride—an AirBed booking request. He picks up his pace a little, rejuvenated by the inquiry. Bookings have been slow recently. He’s convinced it’s because of the recent review Emma left: Bennett’s house was suitable for our needs, it read. Suitable. The rainfall shower was suitable, was it? How about the six-hundred-thread-count sheets? The free posh soap? The marble countertops and six-burner gas range? All that was suitable for you, Emma? It continued: FYI. While you do get the whole house to yourself, Bennett lives very close by in a studio behind the house. For your information, Emma, some people like that. It was still a five-star review. He has to remind himself of that. He’s still a Super Host. It just wasn’t a glowing review, which he prefers.
Maybe, in hindsight, he shouldn’t have responded to the review. It could, he supposes, look petty to potential guests. Emma—he wrote and then stopped, letting the cursor pulse. I’m glad my house suited your needs. I hope you had a comfortable stay. As stated, in the available property description, yes, I do live in a studio on the premises. Other than a shared yard, the entrance to the house is completely separate and entirely private. He felt bad typing that last part, remembering how Claire had tried on Emma’s ballet flats the morning after they slept together in the hous
e. “Oh, I like these,” Claire had said, swanning around the kitchen while Bennett washed out the amaretto glasses. But he couldn’t help it, he responded because Emma’s review disappointed him. By the end of her and her husband’s stay, Bennett thought they were starting to become friendly. Her husband wasn’t around much, so Bennett was sure to wave to her whenever he was leaving the studio. She waved back, even started to smile, eventually. One afternoon they bumped into each other in the garden and she told Bennett about her drawing project, something to do with a Philip Glass song. It sounded really boring to him, but she was clearly really into it and he thought he’d love to be that passionate about an idea again. The painting of Claire was going well, but still, it’s an old idea, not a new one. “It’s very classical,” Emma said about his painting of Claire, “her pose.” Classical. That’s the thing about Emma, he could never tell what she meant. Classical? Suitable? Close by? Were these good or bad things? Partly to prove his versatility, he went back into the studio and stretched and primed a few small canvases. Perhaps he could make some smaller paintings of Claire that would be more intimate. After all, she’s his lover, not a Roman statue. Classical.
* * *
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The tide is out along the Thames, but the water is rising, slowly. Geese and swans collect along the bank, picking through the sand and sludge. For Bennett, the houses along the river are the stuff of fairy tales, so grand that many of them have names, beautifully lettered on their stone gates, like “Windroffe House.” This one has been his favorite ever since he was a child, with its lavish garden that abuts the river. When he made the mistake of telling Eliza about this, she decided to interpret it as more of a goal than a fantasy, and when the house came on the market a couple years ago for five and a half million, she came excitedly into Bennett’s studio to show him the listing. “Look! Your dream house is for sale!” She held her iPad right up to his face, scrolling through the images. “Look at their back garden office,” she enthused, “so much nicer than this shed!” And she was right, it was beautiful, far too beautiful to paint in, though he knew she’d never understand that.
