Goodnight, Beautiful: A Novel

by Dorothy Koomson

  Nova. Nova. Nova.

  That’s all I heard from him. Every other word that came out of his mouth was “Nova.” Why don’t you just marry her?! I’d been tempted to say to him on more than one occasion.

  What kind of a name is Nova, anyway? I thought as Mal and I wandered down a cobbled street in East London to the pool bar where we were meeting the amazing Nova.

  Who on earth is called Nova? If you were named that, wouldn’t you simply change it? Wouldn’t you try to fit in with everyone else and change it? Unless, of course, you wanted to stand out. You wanted people to remember you. You thought you were soooooo incredibly special that you had to have such a ridiculous name.

  Admittedly, Mal had an equally unusual name—probably more unusual than hers—but at least he made the effort to fit in by shortening it to Mal. She … she didn’t.

  I knew what she looked like. I hadn’t met her, I hadn’t seen any pictures of her, but I knew what she’d be like: tall and slender, naturally blond hair down to her waist, perfectly applied makeup. She’d wear tight jeans—Guess, because she could afford them—so they would show off her perfect bum as she leaned over the pool table to sink the perfect shot.

  It was obvious from the way Mal constantly talked about her that he was besotted with her and that she knew it. They’d grown up together, he explained, and they’d never gone out together. But he clearly wanted her. Clearly. It was apparent in the way he became animated, excited, alive, every time he talked about her. I knew, as well, that she was incredibly confident: you didn’t have a name like hers, be a manager of a restaurant at twenty-five while finishing off a Ph.D. in psychology, without thinking you were God’s gift to the universe. And, obviously, she used Mal’s feelings to her advantage.

  The only possible explanation as to why someone as incredible as him was still single was that she liked him that way. He probably told this “Nova” about the newest woman he’d started dating. He’d introduce her to “Nova” and “Nova” wouldn’t like the idea that she was about to be ousted as the most important person in his life, so she’d probably get dressed up in expensive, frilly bits that masqueraded as underwear, put on a raincoat and turn up at Mal’s flat. They wouldn’t even move from the corridor before she delivered her ultimatum: “Dump this woman and you get to have sex with me again.” He might even resist for a little while, try to explain that he liked this latest girlfriend, more than the others, but then she’d undo her raincoat, letting him see the black lace, barely reining in her creamy-white breasts and barely covering her landing-strip-waxed bikini area, and he’d fold like tissue paper. He’d be pawing at her underwear, ripping it off her—she wouldn’t care, she could afford lots of it—and taking her right there up against the corridor wall.

  All the while, the poor unsuspecting girlfriend would be waiting for him to call, not having a clue she was being made a fool of before she was dumped.

  Ever since he’d suggested I meet “Nova,” I had been preparing myself to be removed from his life. I’d canceled the meeting four times so I could have longer with him. So I could make sure that the sex was so great that he wouldn’t be thinking of someone else. So I wouldn’t have to meet my rival and find myself lacking. But I couldn’t cancel again. I had to make sure that after this meeting, I didn’t leave him alone long enough for her to come over and make her demands.

  In the bar, there were three men—two of them playing pool at the center table, one nursing a drink at the bar, and the bartender. She was nowhere to be seen. We were a little late—my fault, I’d purposely seduced Mal against the wall in his shared flat just before we left—so she should have been here by now. My heart leapt with joy. Maybe she’d left, maybe she couldn’t make it—either way, I had a stay of execution. I didn’t have to face this “Nova” after all. I got to keep my boyfriend for another day.

  Across the big smoky room with its wide circular bar and large green pool tables, the black door to the lavatories with a pink pool table symbol on it opened, and out she stepped. I knew instantly it was her. She smiled at us, gave a little wave, and right on cue, I felt Mal light up beside me as he smiled back at her. Three things occurred to me in quick succession as I rummaged around for a suitably realistic smile to paint on my face:

  He hadn’t told me she was black.

  He hadn’t told me she was so incredibly beautiful.

  It was so over with Mal and me.

  Mal bought us a round of drinks and went to play pool with the man sitting at the bar. They knew each other vaguely and he obviously wanted to leave us alone to bond, to quickly and suddenly become friends. As if that was going to ever happen.

  I’d seen her eyes run over me, quickly, expertly assessing me, but I hadn’t been able to read what she thought. She and Mal were similar like that, they could hide what they were thinking behind a blank face and benign smile. I’d worn the dress I’d been wearing when I met Mal. It was my talisman, my good luck charm, and a way to ward off the evil threat of this “friend.” I’d teamed it with jeans and these amazing jeweled sandals I’d borrowed from Candice. I’d spent hours painstakingly applying makeup that made me look as if I wasn’t wearing makeup. I wanted to look naturally, casually classy.

  I could tell she hadn’t had similar worries about meeting me: she had not a scrap of makeup on but her skin glowed, and her brown eyes were huge, with the longest natural eyelashes I’d ever seen. Her long black braids, woven here and there with strands of brown and blond, flowed loose around her face, and all she wore on her perfectly curved body was a gray tank top, plain jeans and a little black cardigan with black beading across the front.

  “Men are idiots, aren’t they?” Nova said to me.

  I rolled my eyes inside: she obviously thought it was acceptable to slag off men as a way of bonding.

  “What I should say is that man,” she pointed to my boyfriend, “is an idiot.”

  I said nothing. She wasn’t going to trick me into bad-mouthing my lover so he would “accidentally” hear about it sometime in the not too distant future.

  “Mal talks about you all the time,” she said. “Knowing him, I’m pretty sure he talks about me all the time, too.”

  Arrogant bitch, I thought.

  “It’s nothing sinister, he just thinks that if he constantly tells you how wonderful I am, and repeats every two seconds how amazing you are to me, that we’ll take his word for it and we’ll want to spend every minute we’re not with him with each other.” She smiled one of those wide open grins that I’d imagine drove most men crazy with desire—Julia Roberts had that smile in Pretty Woman. It illuminated her face, and would ignite every pleasure center in a man’s brain—not just the sexual ones, either. Triggering the friendship area of a man’s brain whilst you looked like she did would be a one-way ticket to driving him out of his head with lust and affection. No wonder Mal was obsessed with her.

  “Obviously it’s going to have exactly the opposite effect,” she continued. She had amazing lips. Blowjob lips, someone—I think Vince—had once called lips that full. How could any man not want those lips crushed under his in a kiss, or wrapped around his cock to create the ultimate in ecstasy? How could Mal not want that? In my head I quickly rewrote the scenario where she forced him to dump his latest girlfriend: it wasn’t sex against the wall in the corridor, it was the ultimate in oral sex. With those lips. When she reached up and touched her mouth, surreptitiously trying to rub at the corners, like I did when I feared I hadn’t been diligent enough with my napkin, I realized I’d been staring at her lips.

  “I know you don’t like me, Stephanie,” she said. She didn’t grin. She was being serious. “I’m not surprised when that idiot has probably been extolling my virtues. It’d have been a much better idea to tell you all the bad stuff about me.

  “What I’m trying to say is, Mal is an idiot if he thinks that going on and on about someone being wonderful will endear them to another person. I don’t know about you, but it takes a lot to call someone my fri
end. And, thanks to Mal, if I have to earn your friendship, I’m probably starting off in the minus figures.” Another of her grins. “I would like to get to know you, though. Maybe become friends eventually? You’re the first person Mal’s gone out with that … I’ve never seen him like this about anyone.”

  “Not even you?” I blurted out. I didn’t believe what she said.

  “Me?” Her face was twisted in genuine surprise. “You think Mal has ever felt that way about me?” She pressed her hand across her formidable chest, leaned forward, her face still painted with surprise. “Me?” She shook her head in disbelief, sat back and all at once looked harrowed. Sad. Dejected. It was a brief expression, but a genuine one. It came over her and then flitted away. So genuine was it that she didn’t even have time to hide it behind a game face before I saw it.

  “You really have nothing to worry about on that score,” she said after licking her lips and trying to return her expression to the one that she wore before. “He’s never …” She stopped, stared into the mid-distance as though trying to work out the best way to say it. “I had a massive crush on him when I was eighteen. I thought he was ‘the one.’ I was so in love with him and I thought because he knew me and we’d grown up together that he would maybe feel the same way about me. I decided to tell him at one point and he stopped me before I could say anything by telling me he could never feel that way about a friend. About me, basically. It makes sense, I suppose. And I’m glad, to be honest. At the time it broke my heart, but if we had gone out with each other, we couldn’t have been friends if we’d split up. And Mal, well, I need him in my life. He’s always been there and it’d be a tragedy if he wasn’t because we’d tried to go out with each other. So, no, he’s never felt that way about me. Not even a little bit.”

  Her honesty shamed me. A lot. There I was accusing her of all sorts when, secretly, she was living with a broken heart. She said it was mended, she said it was for the best, but which one of us didn’t have a little piece of our heart that was forever broken? That time would never be able to weave its magic over and heal?

  I looked at Nova again, and suddenly she was even more beautiful. Before it was her sexiness that made her beautiful and a rival; now it was her honesty. Which made her even more divine. How Mal could not be in love with her was the real mystery.

  Nova stared into the mid-distance, her head slightly on one side, a gentle frown pleating her forehead as if she was calculating something, or rummaging through the rooms of her mind for some vital piece of information. She came out of her trance suddenly, and turned to me. “Do you think other women have thought that?” she asked as though we’d been having a conversation. Her big dark eyes waited on me to catch up, to enlighten her as to what these other women had thought.

  “Thought what?” I asked.

  “That Mal feels that way about me? I always thought they didn’t like me because he gives everyone the ‘love me, love my friend’ routine and that gets their backs up. Now I’m thinking … I really hope they didn’t think that me and him … God, they must have hated me.” Her gaze wandered back to where she had recently been, sorting through the bits of information she had about Mal’s past. “What if they thought it was down to me that things never worked out?” she wondered aloud. Her eyes widened suddenly and she swung her gaze and body back toward me. “What if they thought that I made him end things with them? That after I met them or something, I’d turn up at Mal’s place and use his feelings for me to get him to finish with them. Or even offer him sexual favors to get him to dump them?”

  The shame of it. My body slunk down slightly in my seat as my cheeks exploded red with the absolute bloody shame of it.

  Her eyes double-took as she stared at me. She’d been looking to me for reassurance and now had seen me becoming an unflattering, unreassuring crimson. “That’s what you thought, isn’t it?” she said.

  I glanced away and picked up my glass of wine, sipping it with my head hung low while she groaned, slapped her hand over her eyes and shook her head.

  “Do you know the very worst part of all of this?” she asked from behind her hand, her fingers cracking a fraction so she could see me as she talked to me.

  I shook my head, too ashamed was I to actually speak to the woman who I had been minutes away from writing things about on toilet walls.

  “Until this very moment, it never, ever occurred to me that’s why none of Mal’s exes liked me. I actually thought it was a combination of him going on about how close we were and my personality.” She placed her hands on her cheeks, looked forlorn. “My naïveté annoys me sometimes. How could I have not known?” She sighed deeply, her frustration evident. “How?”

  “It’s sort of a compliment, if you think about it,” I said, trying to make it up to her.

  “How’s that?” she asked.

  “You made an impression on each of them. Imagine how insulting it would be if they met you and thought nothing of you. Mal gives you this big buildup and then they find you’re plain and inconsequential. That’d be awful.”

  She treated me to another of her smiles. “You’re very sweet, but I’d rather people didn’t hate me for the wrong reasons, though you’re lovely to try.”

  “It’s guilt.”

  “Now that you know the truth, I do hope you will give me a chance? Mal is so important to me, and I like people who make him happy. You make him happy.” She shrugged happily. “I’d like us to try to be friends.”

  Her sincerity was unnerving. She made it seem that being open, being honest, was easy, uncomplicated. It wasn’t beset with a thousand million problems. Until I met Mal, and now her, I hadn’t known people could be that honest and not fret about it. How could you sleep at night knowing people hadn’t been presented with your best you? The you that you wanted the world to see?

  I glanced over at Mal: he was watching his opponent, studying his form, learning all he could so he could win the game, win the prize. I returned my attention to Nova. She was Mal’s best friend, she was a huge part of his life. My relationship with him would run a lot smoother with her on-side. Or with her not around at all.

  I smiled at her. “Yes, let’s try.”

  She smiled back and I knew then, her honesty, her openness, her love of Mal would probably destroy her.

  “And you know what else? What if you do everything you can to make things perfect between you and your husband, to make your life as complete and wonderful as possible, to create a warm, inviting home and a happy, fun-filled life, because all you’ve ever wanted is to have your husband love you? What if you love him so much but you know it’s not enough? It’ll probably never be good enough because no matter how incredible everyone thinks you look on the outside, you know on the inside that you’re broken. And he deserves better. He deserves the woman that he’s given the other half of his heart to, but you want him so much you can never let him go. What do you do then?”

  “I need to talk to you,” he said on the phone.

  My fingers tightened around the handset, but I couldn’t react properly because I was at work. I knew it was because of her.

  Mal had given her my number and we’d met alone six times in the last two months for coffee, and each time she’d brought me something to eat—a cake, cookies, flapjacks, muffins, scones, a pie. I’d eventually asked her if she thought I needed fattening up or something, and she had replied she liked baking for her friends. Then she’d said she didn’t mean to offend me and she’d stop doing it. At which point I’d said no, of course don’t do that, it’s a lovely gesture. And it had all been an act. Just like when I first met her. That woman with a forever-broken-piece-of-her-heart routine: the carefully pitched pain sitting in her eyes, the lowered voice, the staring off, the pretending to have not known how his other girlfriends had been intimidated by her. All an act.

  “Can I see you after work?” Mal was saying.

  Well, I thought as I struggled to keep my voice light and not shrill and terrified as I agreed to meet h
im, I’m not going quietly like the others. If it comes down to it, I will fight her, womano-a-womano. I am not losing him.

  Arriving at the pub later that day, I stood by the bar and sought him out amongst the smoke-fuzzed crowd. As always, the breath caught in my chest and my heart skipped a beat when I saw him. He stared into his pint, swimming in deep, untroubled thought. Serene. I wasn’t sure if that was a word that applied to men. But it did to him. Whenever I surreptitiously watched him, I noticed he was always calm. Nothing about him seemed troubled. If he did have moments of being upset, he hid it well, disguised by a veneer of calmness and serenity.

  Nova isn’t having him, it’s as simple as that.

  “Hi,” I said, fixing a bright smile to my face, even though I was trembling as I lowered myself into the seat opposite him.

  His face creased into a smile that brought all the love I felt for him rushing to the surface of my soul. I couldn’t imagine being without him, not for one minute. “Steph, hi.” He stood up and kissed my cheek, the heat of him lingering long after he had been to and returned from the bar to get me a drink.

  “Look,” he began, “I’ll get to the point. If I don’t, I won’t say what I’ve got to say. And as we found out with my name, that’s not the best way forward.”

  I didn’t usually drink more than two glasses of wine. I’d spent a lot of time getting drunk as a teenager, getting my fill on the high of it, and it wasn’t worth it. Not anymore. But right then I wanted to down the glass of wine in front of me and then a few more. I wanted to be numb when he said whatever it was he was going to say. With a trembling hand, I picked up the glass of wine in front of me and tossed half of it back in one gulp. I needed the remaining half to make a sufficient impact should I need to throw something in his face before I walked out. That would be seconds before I slapped him, marched out into the street, hailed a cab to Nova’s restaurant to deal with her. Depending on how that went, I’d either be spending the night crying myself to sleep or recovering in the hospital.