Daisy Dooley Does Divorce

by Anna Pasternak

  Suddenly Julius broke into my little acid reverie and I prayed that we weren’t actually connected via emotional contagion or he’d know what an alpha bitch I could be. “The dead gain such importance by dying, don’t they?” he said with unbearable sorrow.

  I nodded, berating myself for not cottoning on to the fact that driving to his mother’s family home stirred up emotion. When was I going to grow up to the fact that not everything was always about me?

  “Every day since my mother’s death I’ve thought of her, yet when she was alive I didn’t think much about her at all,” he said. “Now, every time someone at work says, ‘It’s your mother on the phone,’ or ‘I’m off to have lunch with my mother,’ I miss her.”

  I couldn’t begin to visualize Julius’s pain, as the thought of losing my own mother, however batty she was, was both a real and unimaginable fear for me. Before I knew it, Julius had swerved across the motorway and stopped on the hard shoulder. He cupped my face with his hands. “Daisy, you must understand that my loss is so great that the only way I know how to cope is to shut off.”

  “No,” I said, “that’s not the way to cope. The way to heal this pain is to open your heart and let someone in.” Inside I was imploring, “Me, me, me.”

  “Don’t you get it?” he said sadly. “I’m incapable of having a proper relationship. I don’t know how they work.”

  “Most of us think that relationships are about taking responsibility for someone else’s happiness, but they’re not,” I said. “We’re only responsible for our own feelings. That’s not to say we can’t share our hopes and fears but we can’t make anyone else happy and vice versa.”

  Julius turned on the engine. “I can’t afford to feel this,” he said. My heart was pounding.

  “This what?”

  He looked at me, then winked. “This . . . distracted. Come on, we’re going to be late.”

  Standing in Julius’s grandmother’s drawing room, a grand, stately affair with gilt mirrors and massive crystal chandeliers, Julius beckoned to a pair of louvered doors with strange shafts of light filtering through the slats. He pulled them apart to reveal another set of doors covered with thin plastic panels. When he opened them, I gasped, unable to believe my eyes. Ahead lay a vast conservatory with Gothic windows reaching up to a large, glass-domed ceiling. Beneath the dome, tented netting created a colonial effect. Gravel paths ran through flower beds bursting with tropical plants and, in the center, a fountain trailed water into an oval pond. Water lilies danced on the surface, while huge banana leaves hovered over deep pink hibiscus mingled with pale pink Busy Lizzie. Bougain-villea, heavy with red and purple flowers, pushed for space among crimson rhododendrons, while oleander shrubs snuggled next to avocado trees. The riot of color was breathtaking, but what made me cry out in amazement were the hundreds of butterflies soaring up to the ceiling and hanging off every plant.

  “This is why I wanted to bring you here,” Julius said. “Breeding butterflies is my hobby. This is my escape.”

  I had always suspected that to protect himself, Julius had sought refuge somewhere, but to have kept this passion hidden from me for this long was astounding.

  Julius bent down to place a small brightly colored pad in one of the many low trays filled with water that littered the gravel paths. “What’s that?” I asked.

  “It’s called a scouring pad. The butterflies are attracted to the color and land on it to feed. It’s to supplement their diet during winter when there isn’t much nectar about.” He gestured toward the ceiling. “There are more.” I craned my head back to look at the clear round trays shaped like flowers hanging from the ceiling. “The butterflies drink through holes in the lid. Here, come and look at this.” Julius led me toward an oleander tree and motioned to its leaves. From it hung metallic drops that looked like tiny nuggets of gold. “This is the pupa of the Striped Blue Crow butterfly. The pupa hopes to be mistaken for a drop of rain. You can get up to fifteen on a bush in the summer, when it literally shimmers.”

  I peered at the oleander bush. “Butterflies are such delicate creatures,” he said, staring up at the tiny flecks of color heading for the netting beneath the dome. “So many things can go wrong that it always amazes me that they emerge from their chrysalis at all. Too much heat, not hot enough, too moist, too dry—at every stage they can die or become deformed. You should never touch a butterfly with your hands because the acid from your skin can destroy them. You have to use a paint brush. Everything in here is monitored with precision; we keep the air between seventy-five and eighty degrees Fahrenheit.”

  As I watched Julius carefully tilting leaves and admiring them, I was beside myself. There is nothing like a man doing something with expertise—skiing, dancing, leaping over a fence, or reversing into a tight parking space—to turn a woman to mush. Actually physical attraction can grow from the most mundane contact; you can suddenly find a bloke sexy when he hauls out the rubbish, does the laundry, chops wood, or shells peas, but this . . . it was unbelievable. That Julius could be such a ruthless operator yet have this secretive, sensitive side made him all the more special.

  “Did you know that the principle task of the butterfly is to reproduce?” he said. “They have a fantastic mating ritual. The male dance is made up of movements and wing beats because his forewings have androconial scales that release aphrodisiac pheromones or love dust. So just before he wants to mate, he’ll close his wings over his female’s antennae and give her a blast. He then moves in a semicircular direction around her. If she’s up for it, she’ll raise her wings and expose her abdomen.”

  He moved around me in a semicircular direction and I lifted up my jumper and gave him a flash of rounded tummy. His eyes crinkled and we laughed in total togetherness. For a moment I knew I had full advantage over my opponent, Alice, because I had the ability to amuse Julius. He looked at me with tenderness as he gestured to the door. “Come on, it can get awfully heady in here. I want to show you something else before we meet my grandmother.” As if to guide me, he put his hand lightly on the small of my back and I let my body soften into his palm. “Do you know one of the reasons why I was drawn to butterflies as a child?” he said. “Because butterflies are fragile survivors. They exhibit virtually no parental concern for their offspring.” He eyed me levelly. “Except choosing a safe place to leave their eggs.”

  Tears sprang unexpectedly into my eyes. I quickly brushed them aside.

  Julius led me upstairs and past rows of doors, some of which were ajar, giving glimpses into well-appointed bedrooms with chintz-covered headboards, puffy silk eider-downs, and dressing tables on which lay old-fashioned tins of shortbread, crystal water glasses, and matching water jugs. Everything was luxurious without being ostentatious. Old money combined with impeccable taste. Julius led me into his room. He sat on the bed and motioned for me to join him. He was sitting so close that his scent of Penhaligon’s wafted over me. I half closed my eyes in anticipation when I realized that he was putting something in my hand. I looked down. It was an ice-blue Fabergé egg.

  “My God, this is incredible,” I said.

  “Open it,” he said, putting his fingers over mine. My heart was beating so fast, I wondered if he could hear it. He pressed a tiny mechanism on the egg and a bejeweled butterfly rose up. I had never seen anything like it—or come close to something so precious in my life before. The light from the window picked out the dancing colors of the rubies, sapphires, and emeralds.

  I stared at it, holding it up and examining the exquisite detail of the craftsmanship. Then I carefully placed it on the bedside table. Julius lay back against the pillows and I joined him. We lay side by side and he took my hand.

  “Do you know the history of Fabergé eggs?” he asked.

  “I know they’re Russian,” I said.

  “Yup. In 1885 Tsar Alexander III commissioned the first Imperial Easter egg for his wife, the Empress Maria Fedorovna. This initiated a tradition that continued until the revolution. The romance of the
egg is the element of surprise—the gift inside.” He squeezed my hand.

  “What was inside the first egg?”

  “A tiny golden hen with ruby eyes. The shell was gold and matte white enamel. After the first, each egg took about a year to make and was designed to reflect the previous year’s important events. All in all, fifty Imperial eggs were made by the House of Fabergé.”

  “Is yours an Imperial egg?”

  “No. Other rich Russians started to commission them when they realized that it was the fashionable thing to do. My father bought this from a dealer in New York in the early sixties.” He paused. “It was his gift to my mother for giving birth to me.”

  I turned on my side to face him. “And that’s why she left it to you?”

  He turned to face me; we were breath-smellingly close but our faces were not actually touching. I could see a small speck of sleep still lodged in the corner of his eye.

  “I suppose she left it to me,” he said slowly, “instead of a suicide note.” The way he said “suicide” sent a jolt of shock through me. “She left this by my bed and left my brother, Piers, a note.”

  He was staring right through me, scanning me for the correct response. I knew I had to judge the moment with extreme delicacy; a sudden move in the wrong direction and I would frighten him, a deer darting off into the undergrowth.

  “She chose a safe place to leave her egg,” I said gently. Did I detect a hint of a smile?

  “She didn’t leave me a note,” he repeated, again driving home that this was the most revelatory detail he could ever give me about himself.

  “Julius,” I said, “she didn’t need to.”

  He grabbed me and hugged me, burying his face in the crook of my neck. He sighed deeply, full of relief and regret.

  “Sometimes,” I said gingerly, “we decide to bury a longing that seems impossible to fulfill because we cannot bear the pain. The danger is that if we forget that longing and cannot access it again, we lose a piece of ourselves.”

  He looked at me and he knew. He knew I was saying: “You’re worthy of your longing. Don’t be afraid. Choose me.” I waited for him to agree, or at least to kiss me, but as always, I’d gone too far too soon with my emotional candor. He pulled away and said, “Come on, we’re going to be late for lunch.”

  All through lunch, I felt I was in an out-of-body bubble. I heard Julius and his grandmother but I could not connect. Instead I watched them through the filter of my despair. Bringing me to see his butterflies was Julius’s way of explaining why he wasn’t going to jettison Alice and marry me. He had his work and his secret passion, and that was enough. It was safer that way.

  I looked at Grace, at her high cheekbones framed with elegant pale gray hair, at the diamonds dancing at her throat, and I envied her. Not just her frail beauty—I noticed the trellis of veins running across her hands and how her rings, now too big, hung to one side of her fingers—but her poise. She had an inner stillness, a complete acceptance, as if she had learned early on in life not to wear herself out fighting the incoming tide. As she listened to Julius talk, her blue eyes radiated wamth. She loved him dearly. I wondered if she thought it strange that he had brought me and not Alice to see her. Did she understand? Beneath her charm there was a knowing. When she lightly rested her hand on my arm as I thanked her for lunch, was she subtly urging me to let her grandson go? But could I let my battle go? Finally give up on Julius? We drove back to London in silence; it wasn’t tense but it wasn’t easy either. It was the worn stillness of defeat. What more was there to say?

  Lucy and I sat in the Jacuzzi, bubbles exploding in our faces. We were among an achingly self-conscious metropolitan crowd at an expensive state-of-the-art spa in the countryside, an adjunct to a fashionable hotel. The other female guests, all honed and leggy, were the types who considered pampering their birthright, as much a part of their beautifying ritual as preshower loofahing or daily flossing, whereas I winced at the extravagance and their sense of entitlement. Luce had booked us a girlie weekend on Edward’s credit card as a mini act of empowerment. I was in such a state about Julius that I told her I needed help “diffusing my inner invalidator.” I explained that I couldn’t stop chipping away at my self-esteem because I was full of gnawing self-reproach.

  “Whenever a relationship, or in this case the promise of a re-relationship is over, I always go into a charged celibate state, where I cannot envision anyone ever kissing me or holding me again,” I said to Lucy. “Apart from that ill-fated night with Troy, I haven’t had sex for thirteen months.”

  “Still keeping track, are you?” she laughed.

  It was easy to remember the last time I got jiggy with Jamie, as I slept with him ten days before I left him. Chemistry is inexplicable: the sex was good right up until the end. He bored me senseless, yet the moment we got horizontal he could reach me. I often thought that we showed the best of ourselves to each other in bed. Not in terms of flipping each other over like kippers but in acrobatic feats of honesty. I think it was the only place we felt safe with each other because, bizarrely, lying naked, we never had to pretend.

  Real passion borders destruction because in relationships we believe we need to sacrifice part of ourselves. That was true with me and Jamie. We were passionate and antagonistic toward each other and we went on sacrificing our happiness until something broke in the end. But we never ran out of steam sexually—maybe we just needed the release? The physical liberation from so much emotional frustration?

  “I miss sex,” I admitted. “Well, not sex exactly but intimacy. Not that I’ve had much experience with emotional intimacy. Jamie and I never lay entwined, sharing secrets, giggling as dawn broke.”

  “But at least you didn’t have to schedule sex,” sighed Lucy. “That’s what Edward and I have to do, as kids remove all spontaneity. And then he’s so predictable. He presses my nipples like they are some sort of direct dial to my clitoris. All I want is a little tenderness, a feeling of real emotional connection, not this hurried foreplay as if he’s checking off a list.”

  I blinked away water that was splashing up into my face. “It’s just so difficult to get it all right, isn’t it?” I said. “Men, sex, communication, emotional fulfillment, feeling like enough of a woman to be the person you want to be. Fancying them and liking them as well, while feeling confident that they feel the same about you. I’ve begun to think that nothing is ever rock-solid long term—no man, no situation—and that the happiest people just accept small pockets of bliss, or even contentment, when they can.”

  Lucy shrugged as if to say “maybe.” After a while I admitted, “I’ve had this terrible twitch beneath my eyes. Just doesn’t stop.”

  “Nervous tension.” She nodded.

  “Sexual frustration more like it.”

  “No, that makes your teeth fall out in dreams,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I confessed, “I dream about that too.”

  Later, in the sauna, I lay back and wailed, “Lucy, what am I going to do? I’ve no job, no home, no man. I’m pretty much broke—my life is a complete failure.”

  “You need to get a job,” Lucy said admonishingly. “With so much time on your hands you are likely to get even more obsessive and neurotic than you already are.”

  I agreed with her. Three years out of work since I married Jamie had hardly given me relaxing time at the drawing board of life as I calmly planned my next move. Boredom and lack of achievement had simply annihilated my sense of self-belief to the point that I was completely poleaxed when it came to thinking about what I could ever do again. And now I was running out of money. The little nest egg I’d sat on after leaving Jamie and selling our flat was nearly empty. I could just about pay my way with Luce and Jess when we went out for drinks or dinner if I carried on living at Mum’s but I couldn’t contemplate planning a holiday or buying new clothes, let alone anything as grounding and grown-up as getting a mortgage on a pad of my own. That was why I felt so trapped. Any self-help tome worth its salt wou
ld conclude that I was in stasis, stuck in a situation where there didn’t seem to be any potential for growth or change.

  I knew I shouldn’t have but when I got back to Mum’s after the weekend, I couldn’t resist sending Julius an e-mail. “It’s not difficult to be successful,” I typed. “It is difficult to be successful and fulfilled. And success without fulfillment is failure.” I turned off the computer only to mentally await his reply.

  5

  Dick Delivery Boys

  It was over a month and Julius still had not replied to my e-mail. Nor had the various publishing companies to whom I had sent my imaginatively doctored résumé. However the obsessive checking of my in-box suddenly yielded a punch-the-air result. Miles e-mailed to say that he had quit Hong Kong and was coming back to London, where he had bought a secondhand bookshop. Even better, he offered me a job.

  Okay, so when I waltzed out of university throbbing with my own importance having gained a respectable degree in English, it never occurred to me that I’d be working in a bookshop. Be nominated for a literary prize, more like it. I had such an unshakable sense of my own destiny that I assumed I’d do something high ranking and important—something that would mark me out as capable and special. Well, that was then and this was now and while it wasn’t that I was aspirationless, I just felt that the pluck had drained from me. I wanted to find a sense of purpose and, of course, earn professional acclaim (and with that surely the respect of my father), but ever since I gave up my career in publishing, I’d lost faith in my future and myself.

  While I was relieved that this twist of fate meant that at least I would be employed again—I secretly put it down to my nightly missives to my guardian angels where I wrote out my requests like a Christmas wish list, then tucked them under my pillow—Lucy and Jess greeted the news of Miles’s imminent return with condescension. “Miles is a mixed blessing,” huffed Jess. “He’s good for a mercy jump but you must remember, like all male commitment-phobes past forty, Miles is basically a screwed-up, selfish git.”