Daisy Dooley Does Divorce

by Anna Pasternak

  It was liberating to have the pool to myself and I reveled in slowly moving up and down. Suddenly I heard a surge of water and the urgent splash of bubbles. I looked around and a man had entered the Jacuzzi near the pool. He was sitting back, surveying me. Crikey, he hadn’t seen me get in, had he? How could I get out now and waddle past him looking like a spotted duck? From what I could tell, without openly peering, he was quite a dish. Pretending not to have seen him, I continued my sedate laps up and down as he sat there. My skin was wrinkling fast but I refused to give in by getting out. Eventually I heard the Jacuzzi silence and he dived into the pool. When he came up for air near me, I clocked that he was tall, lithe, and had enviable thick dark hair. He swam straight up. “I’ve been admiring you,” he said. “You’ve got great style.”

  I clasped my hands across my chest and tugged at the suit. “You must be joking. This isn’t mine. The hotel loaned it to me.”

  “Not the suit. The way you swim. You can tell you’re comfortable in your own skin.”

  “If not in my borrowed suit,” I laughed.

  “It’s certainly interesting armor,” he said, cocking his head. He ran his fingers through his hair. “Max Knightly.” He smiled.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m Daisy.”

  As he looked at me with delight I thought, No, no, no! Life doesn’t happen like this. You don’t realize that you’re okay on your own one minute and meet a man like Max Knightly the next, do you?

  My face was red from the heat of the pool, beads of sweat were sticking to my hairline, and my fingertips resembled death-white wrinkled prunes, but so what? Okay, so Max was cute, but chances were that he had an even hotter cutie waiting back home, so why should I flatter him with the slightest hint of artifice? I may not have had the glow of youth (only the hormonal gleam of heavy sweat) nor the toned tummy of my twenties, but in my mind I suddenly had so much more. I felt consciously female, which according to the latest life literature means that for the first time I was experiencing a high level of intimacy with myself. Finally, I felt secure with the woman I had become, so I didn’t have to pretend I was something or someone I wasn’t.

  Avoiding the laughably lame “Do you come here often?” Max plumped for, “Who are you here with?”

  When I told him I was on my own, he seemed surprised. “I can’t believe you’re not taking advantage of the sexy hotel rooms,” he said.

  “I am,” I replied, adding, “Alone.” When he raised an eyebrow, I said, “Not like that. Don’t you know that for anyone over thirty-five, uninterrupted sleep is the new sex?”

  “So you’ve got kids?”

  “Nope. You?”

  He shook his head. When I asked why he was staying at the hotel, he told me that he lived around the corner and was a member of the spa.

  “What are you doing later?” he asked.

  “Having a massage,” was my blunt reply.

  “And after that?”

  “Enjoying room service in my dressing gown.”

  “Do you want to join me for dinner?”

  “That’s very kind but I can’t be bothered to wash my hair.”

  Max smiled, curious, but I wasn’t trying to play games. I was just too lazy—or blasé—to be anything other than honest. “It’ll be all oily from the aromatherapy,” I explained.

  “My flat is a five-minute walk away. You can wear a hat. Greasy is good,” he said.

  “And no makeup?” I asked.

  “Even better.” He smiled.

  Warming to his direct approach, I said, “Do you often pick up strange women in swimming pools?”

  “Do you often talk to strange men?”

  “Do you always answer a question with a question?”

  He grinned. “Do you?”

  We giggled. We were leaning against the side of the pool, our arms crossed on the edge, and as I looked at the droplets of water on his forearms, I felt a sudden frisson at being so physically close to an unknown, attractive man. “Why do we always tell strangers too much too soon?” I asked wistfully. “We think it’s safe,” I continued, “but then we scare ourselves because we’ve revealed our hand to someone insignificant.”

  “Insignificant?” he repeated, wincing, then added, “But you haven’t told me anything.”

  “Let’s keep it like that,” I said, moving away to the steps of the pool.

  “Why?” he called after me. “I can’t imagine that you have much to hide.”

  I stood on the top step of the pool, looking like anutterfool in my be-skirted fifties swimsuit and said, “Oh, we all have something to hide. Don’t we?”

  “As far as I can tell you’re only hiding a great figure under that saggy sack.”

  He came up the steps behind me as I was wrapping a towel around my waist. He grabbed a towel too and there was something strangely intimate to be toweling down next to a stranger whom I couldn’t help noticing had good strong legs; muscular yet finely shaped. Not a hint of yucky bulbous calf. He was buffed but that wasn’t really what caught my attention; it was more my reaction to him. Why was my overfamiliarity verging on plain rude?

  “Will I see you later?” he asked.

  “No.” I looked up coyly. “But I enjoyed our brief encounter.”

  “You think you’re getting rid of me as easily as that?” He grinned back at me.

  “I must go. I’ll be late for my massage,” I said. And I walked into the women’s changing room and shut the door.

  I was preparing to check out of the hotel the following morning when the niggle that Max hadn’t contacted me developed into a full-blown kick of disappointment. True, I’d fallen asleep immediately after my massage the night before, but there was a part of me, a heightened sensitivity even through my drifting dreams, that was waiting for the phone to ring. He had been so cocksure when we met in the spa that it had never occurred to me that he wouldn’t pursue me, and as much as I tried to pretend to myself that I wasn’t interested in him, there was still that lonely feminine side of me that craved attention. I paid the bill and was turning to leave when the woman at the front desk handed me an envelope. My heart did a mini roll of excitement. Waiting for the taxi to take me to the station, I opened the envelope. Inside was Max Knightly’s business card. He had circled his e-mail address, while on the back he had written, “Let an insignificant stranger buy you lunch.”

  I could barely wait to get home and tell Lucy and Jess, let alone get online. The next evening I called a summit at the bookshop after it closed for the evening. Lucy came with plonk and Jess bought Chinese takeaway and we sat on the comfy chairs by the cappuccino bar, eating straight from the containers. “The great thing about meeting a man in a swimming pool is that you don’t have to worry about him seeing you naked,” said Jess. “He’s already got the general idea.”

  “What, you mean he’s seen my cellulite and still isn’t put off?” I poked Jess with a chopstick.

  “What cellulite?” she asked innocently.

  “Well at least you don’t have to fork out for a blow-dry,” said Lucy. “If he fancies you with soaking hair, that’s a bonus. I always found it such a telling moment in a relationship when you could no longer be bothered to have a blow-dry before you met up.”

  “Yeah, men never seem to notice the beginning of the end—the slippery slope down the increasingly greasy hair follicles,” I said. “Can’t they tell that we go from perfectly coiffed and effortlessly sexy to suddenly flyaway or straggly?”

  “Love is blind,” said Jess, “but ends up needing bifocals to spot the split ends.” We laughed.

  “Would Max be worth a blow-dry?” asked Lucy.

  “Definitely,” I said. “Though I suspect he may be younger than me. He has that cocky, uncomplicated air of youth.”

  “He’s in his teens?” Jess snorted.

  “No, early thirties is my guess.”

  “Lucky you,” said Lucy. “A younger man is the ultimate fashion accessory for the born-again single these days.”

&nbs
p; “You don’t think that a younger man asking an older woman out is merely a form of charity?”

  “Who cares?” said Jess. “Let him refresh the parts that older guys can’t reach.”

  Jess refilled our glasses before launching into a monologue: “Listen up. There are three kinds of women.” She tapped her glass with a chopstick. “The first is the woman who wants to be taken care of. The second is the woman who wants to be in charge. The third is the smart new kind: the woman who wants to shape the guy who’s going to take care of her.”

  Suddenly we heard a crash from the stockroom and Miles lurched forward into the room. “I’m sorry, but I can’t take this any longer,” he roared. “You women are so manipulative. ‘Shaping men?’ Urgh.”

  “Where did you spring from? I thought you’d left early,” I said.

  “No. Been spying on you witches to see if I could learn anything.” He helped himself to a generous swig of wine. “But you three would get an Olympic gold if manbaiting were a recognized sport.”

  “Actually,” said Jess, “if you had been listening properly you would have learned that it’s not manipulative to pick a man to shape. It’s flattering because we pick intelligent, promising, young guys.”

  “Which is why no one has picked you,” I added.

  “I thought all you chicks lusted after alpha males,” said Miles, sitting dangerously close to Lucy. “Men who can be molded sound boringly beta to me.”

  “I agree,” said Lucy. “Males are either Masters of the Universe or nurturers. No man is ever both.”

  “Unless he’s on his third marriage,” added Jess.

  “I want an alpha male because they are not so threatened by a woman’s success, so they don’t set out to destroy you if you are a match for them,” I said.

  “Hark at the reborn career girl!” teased Miles. “Anyway, a man doesn’t automatically feel emasculated by a woman’s success; it’s when the woman in his life is disappointed in him that he feels emasculation.”

  Miles put his arm around Lucy. “So how are things with you? Are you ready to move on from your errant husband and get hot ’n’ heavy with me?”

  Lucy giggled nervously. “If only you’d asked me a week ago.” She cleared her throat. “Actually I’ve got something to tell you all. I, erm, I moved back in with Edward last week. Or rather, Edward moved back in with me.”

  I tried to smile but I couldn’t get over the feeling of disappointment, knowing Lucy was settling when she could do so much better for herself.

  Jess blurted out, “No! Why?! Oh Lucy, why?”

  Lucy looked at her coldly. “Until you’ve walked in my shoes, Jess, don’t you dare judge me.” She gave a defensive shrug and before we could stop her, she got up and left.

  I wanted my lunch date with Max Knightly to be right but I couldn’t deny that it felt wrong. There was an unsettling quality to him that I hadn’t encountered before. He may have ticked a higher-than-average number of boxes for first-date behavior but he also presented loose ends that the control freak in me found impossible to ignore.

  It was flattering that he had driven all the way from Bath to take me to lunch at a tapas bar in Notting Hill. Tick, tick. He’d had a haircut since we met and it was cut too short—why do men insist that they look more manly with a crew cut and the back of their neck weirdly shaved?—but I was able to overlook that because he was wearing nice linen trousers—his legs looked great—and he had expensive dark suede shoes. But I couldn’t ignore the fact that as we were leaving his car—a suitably sporty number—he grabbed a denim jacket from the backseat. My heart sank. I’m sorry, but when you are fast approaching forty, you can’t possibly go out with a man who wears a denim jacket and take your future together seriously, can you? I may have been open to new things but really! Apart from jeans, denim on a man who isn’t a rock star or a documentary filmmaker spells trying-too-hard up-for-a-lark irresponsibility. Even if I sneakily hated to admit that he looked pretty funky, this was not what I had in mind for myself. At all.

  However, the ticks kept coming: he was an architect (double plus for being studious and creative, while one day he’d be super successful and solvent, presumably); he had a bachelor pad in Bath that he had redesigned (fabby for weekends away from London); he was single but had recently ended a lengthy live-in relationship (so he wasn’t a commitment-phobe); he ironed his own shirts and liked to cook—beef and ale casserole being his forte (gloriously metrosexual)—but then came the absolute kicker. A complete deal breaker. When I asked him how old he was, he asked me how old I thought. He seemed far more worldly than when we had met in the pool, so I said, “Thirty-five?”

  “I’m not sure whether to be flattered or insulted,” he smiled. “I’m twenty-seven.”

  Twenty-seven? At that moment, I wanted to pick up my bag and my hopes, which were dashed across the floor, and leg it. How could I, at thirty-nine, go out with a twenty-seven-year-old? I felt all my old insecurities piling in. Get a grip Daisy. Get yourself a solid, solvent, sensible, soul mate not a sexy student look-alike who listens to bands you’ve never heard of and probably knows all sorts of indecent ways to get high. “I think you ought to know that I am thirty-nine,” I said, sounding impossibly stiff.

  He shrugged. “So?”

  “I am a divorcée with serious emotional baggage,” I continued. “I haven’t got time to play games anymore so I may as well be honest. I can’t waste months messing around with a good-time guy like you when I need to find myself a forty-something, six-figure–earning, BMW-driving alpha male to settle down and breed with.” He lit a cigarette, took a drag, leaned back, and smiled. “And at my age, the last thing I need is to hang out with a guy who smokes and wears a denim jacket,” I concluded.

  “Seems like you’ve got it all sussed,” he said. “Only problem is, he sounds awfully boring, this forty-something guy.”

  “Not necessarily,” I said, feeling strangely defensive for a man I had never even met, a figment of my imagination. “He’ll be more appropriate.”

  “Ah, appropriate,” echoed Max, nodding. “Appropriate on paper, no doubt, but what about here?” He banged his fist against his chest. “What’s appropriate in your head doesn’t always suit your heart.”

  The waitress appeared and asked, “Is everything okay?”

  Max beamed at her and said, “Yeah, we’re at the stage where we’re done with polite meaningless conversation and we’re entering that delicate, raw, honest phase.”

  The waitress laughed. “I’ll leave you to it, then.”

  “No, feel free to join in.” As I watched them, I thought how incredibly attractive Max was. But I couldn’t kid myself that he was anything other than far too young. When he asked to take me home, I shook my head. “Thanks awfully, but no thanks,” I said.

  Lucy asked me to lunch. It was the first time that I had been to her house since Edward had moved home. Her girls were back at school after the summer holidays, so we had the place to ourselves. As I sat and watched her prepare roast-chicken salad, I sensed a fragile sadness, as if her aura had a shadow side that she could not shake off. Even their house, which once seemed the epitome of luxury and style, lacked vitality. It was in the little things. I’d never seen vases with wilting arrangements and stale water before, or shriveled grapes and manky pears in the fruit bowl. This wasn’t a family fallen on hard times, it was a drowning marriage in which Lucy and Edward were fighting for air. There wasn’t any energy left for anything extraneous to survival.

  When she handed me a glass of wine I asked, “So how are things?”

  She slumped on a stool by the kitchen counter. “How do you think? Spending every single day with a man who has betrayed you is an appalling strain.”

  Lucy Perfect Primfold: always beautifully dressed, coiffed, and accessorized yet now, beneath her matte makeup and semi-colored lip gloss, there was a lifelessness, like in her home. That’s the price a woman pays to settle for the sake of her children; the toll of trying to cling on whe
n inside she knows that there is nothing real to hold on to anymore.

  “Do you still love Edward?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “You can’t love a man who doesn’t support you or make you feel cherished. Not in terms of buying the odd bunch of flowers but in terms of taking you in his arms at night and knowing that he would do anything in the world to protect you.” She turned her head away. “I’ve never felt less desired, Daisy.”

  “So you and Edward don’t sleep together?”

  “Not since his affair. I’ve tried but I don’t trust him enough to open up. Last week I had a massage and afterwards I lay in a lake of tears because it’s not until you receive a kind, loving touch that you realize how bereft you are for the right sort of physical affection. Now I look at other couples who seem united and I don’t feel jealous exactly, more incomprehension that they got it right when I got it so wrong.”

  I laughed emptily. “That’s exactly how I used to feel when I looked at you and Edward,” I said. “I thought you and Edward had it all.”

  “So did I,” said Lucy. “That’s the heartbreaking thing. But we didn’t, did we?”

  I reached out and touched her arm, searching for something comforting to say. “I remember my ghastly self-doubt after I left Jamie. That how could I, armed with my top-notch education and solid degree, make such an appalling choice over a man? It rocks the core of you—that feeling that you can’t trust your own judgment anymore. But now I feel more philosophical. People change, relationships distort, and life is both gloriously and dreadfully unpredictable.”