Milkshakes and Heartbreaks at the Starlight Diner

by Helen Cox

  ‘All because you lost a bet?’ Boyle rubbed his chin, making some unspoken calculation.

  ‘That’s right, I wanted to back out but I couldn’t do that as the am-dram society had a shortage of men in their company. By the time we’d rehearsed and performed a two-week run of the play I realised I loved acting. I sort of had a month of soul-searching about it and then quit my job – I worked at an insurance company and never liked it that much.’ Jack shrugged.

  ‘Quite a twist of fate there. To think, if you hadn’t made the bet you might not be here.’ Boyle smiled at him. ‘And who did you make that bet with? Who do you have to thank for all this?’

  Jack stopped smiling, tilting his head at Boyle in a manner I’d never seen from him before. His mouth opened but he didn’t speak.

  ‘Come on, Jack, don’t be shy. Tell us who it was.’

  Jack glanced in my direction out of the corner of his eye. Was he trying to send me some sort of signal to pull the fire alarm or pretend I was having a seizure? If he was I couldn’t work out which he wanted me to do so I sat quiet. Like the rest of the audience. Waiting.

  ‘I made the bet with my wife,’ Jack replied. Ex-wife, I corrected in my head. That’s why he’d been so cagey. Boyle was finding a way into Jack talking about his divorce. Typical.

  ‘Oh,’ said Boyle. ‘That’s right, you’re married aren’t you?’ Were married, I corrected again.

  ‘Uh…’ Jack hesitated. ‘Yes. I’m married. Got married when I was twenty-four.’ Why was everyone speaking in the present tense? The marriage they were talking about was past…

  ‘I’m just teasing, Jack. You’re coy about it but I know you’re married because I have a very special surprise for you. Your wife, Laura. She is right this second sitting backstage.’

  ‘What?’ Jack’s eyes became hardened blue marbles … hardened by anger and what looked like dread.

  ‘Come on out, Laura,’ said Boyle, not giving Jack even a split second to react to the news his ex-wife was on set. The audience ‘aaahhed’ and a woman with long, red hair stepped out from back stage. Tall and athletic, she was a vision in a black satin dress. It shimmered under the spotlights as she walked. Her eyes were a deep, venomous green and, although she was wearing a lot of make-up, they looked dark around the sockets, like she hadn’t had much sleep. She smiled a thin smile, cocked her head at Jack and walked over to sit in the spare seat waiting for her. She swept her auburn mane over her shoulders and reached over, putting a hand on top of Jack’s. My boyfriend was holding hands with his wife on network television.

  Jack’s face had drained. His head moved in tentative jerks towards the audience. Towards me. I shook my head, trying to think of another explanation besides the only obvious explanation. Jack was still married? Jack was married. That’s why he never talked about his divorce. He never had one. For some reason he was trying to hide the fact he was still in wedlock. And what was I? I was, as Boyle had said, his mistress. But how had Jack kept this a secret? And then it dawned on me: he hadn’t. Boyle had been onto him all along. Boyle had tried to tell me and I didn’t listen. Was Boyle the good guy?

  I was still breathing. I could feel my chest lurching up and down but I didn’t know how that was possible because I was sure my heart had stopped dead.

  ‘Now that’s a pretty picture. You two reunited after what I believe has been a difficult time in your marriage,’ Boyle said.

  The look of bewilderment on Jack’s face, and the fact this moment was being beamed out live across America, was Boyle’s ultimate revenge for the beating Jack had given him. Jack shoved his head into his free hand.

  ‘I’m so happy to be here,’ Laura purred, taking no notice of Jack’s obvious torture. ‘I know we have some working out to do but –’ she squeezed his hand ‘– I think we can make this work.’ I looked harder at her. She looked familiar…

  ‘I know you’ve wanted this for a long time, Laura,’ said Boyle.

  ‘Jack is all I’ve ever wanted,’ his wife said, with a thin, unnatural smile that stretched almost the entire length of her face. At her words the true gravity of what was happening settled in my gut. He deceived me. He was just using me. None of this made sense but so many thoughts screamed out in my head I couldn’t concentrate on any one in particular.

  I needed space.

  I needed quiet.

  I needed to breathe…

  Searching around for an escape route, I was confronted by Mona’s look of horror followed in quick succession by Angela’s equally dismayed face. The conversation on-stage continued but I couldn’t hear any of it. I was conscious of one shining detail. The orange fire exit sign sizzling near the front of the stage. Illuminated, just as the nice woman with the headset had promised it would be.

  ‘Excuse me, please, coming through,’ I said, my voice quiet at first but getting louder and louder as I climbed over seats, elbowed people in the face and stood on people’s feet in an attempt to get out of there. Mona called after me but I couldn’t slow down. I needed out. The audience gasped as I forced my way to the door. ‘It’s her.’ I heard them hissing amongst themselves.

  ‘Jack, you brought that woman?’ Laura said over her microphone. Her voice had a hard rasp to it and the words ‘that woman’ seemed to echo everywhere around.

  ‘Esther.’ Jack intercepted me at the bottom of the raked seating. He grabbed hold of my arms. I wrestled to get free. ‘Esther, please. This isn’t what it seems. I promise.’

  ‘What good is a promise from you?’ I screamed at him with tears in my eyes. I don’t know where I found the strength but a moment later I charged at him, pushing him away with such force that he toppled backwards to the floor. As he fell, Laura slid into view. Her brow furrowed in a frown despite the strange suggestion of a smile at the corners of her mouth.

  ‘You get away from my husband,’ she shouted at me. I looked down at Jack and then back at her.

  Somewhere, on the periphery, Mona and Angela approached. Their voices should’ve grown louder as they hustled down to the stage but instead they were fading away. Staring, wide-eyed around the circle of faces, it was like someone had hit the ‘mute’ button on the whole scene. Mona’s lips moved but nothing reached my ears. Angela chimed in. And then Boyle. But I couldn’t hear them over the thumping of my own heart. The beat pulsed through my whole body to the point I thought it might shake me to pieces.

  ‘How could you do this?’ Jack almost wailed at Laura, slicing through silence, restoring audio.

  ‘I said get away from him.’ Laura took a step forward. She wasn’t going to have to tell me again. Without so much as a glance in Jack’s direction, I turned on my heel and ran.

  ‘Esther!’ Jack shouted after me. ‘Esther, wait!’ But he was too late. I rammed open the fire door and broke away into the early evening. The studio’s alarm ringing in my ears.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  I knocked on Mum’s hotel door and she answered straight away. She’d been packing for her flight home, as planned, while watching Boyle’s show on TV, and she’d been crying. She wrapped her arms tight around me. I wept as she worked that strange magic only mothers can when they hold you and make you believe, no matter what, you will be OK.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Mum. ‘Did you have any idea?’

  ‘No,’ I said through my tears. ‘You know married men aren’t my type. But…’

  ‘What?’ Mum’s forehead creased in irritation at having to ask a second time. ‘But, what? Esther?’

  ‘I think I’ve seen her before.’

  ‘Who? His wife? Where?’

  ‘At the diner. I didn’t recognise her properly in the studio because she’d had a makeover but it was her. She came in a few weeks ago and sat in the corner with her hood up, watching us all.’

  ‘Well, that can’t be a coincidence,’ said Mum.

  ‘No.’ I sighed. ‘If she wanted to get back together with Jack she was probably hoping to run into him. Or maybe…maybe he even agreed to meet he
r and then just didn’t show…’

  ‘Do you really think he’d do that?’ Mum’s lower lip trembled as she spoke.

  ‘After today, I don’t think I can put anything past him.’

  ‘I just can’t believe he would…’ Mum shook her head, unable to reconcile a person who’d do this with the man we’d had dinner with just a few nights ago.

  ‘I know.’ I kicked my shoes off and flopped down on her bed.

  ‘Are you going to talk to him about it?’ asked Mum.

  ‘What’s the point? Nothing he can say can justify what he’s just put me through.’ She came over, sat beside me and rubbed the small of my back. I closed my eyes and curled my body up into a tight ball, trying to steady my thoughts.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ she asked.

  ‘I think I want to leave New York.’ My voice wavered through my tears. New York was supposed to be a clean slate. But Jack had scrawled all over that now with his lies. And how could it ever have been a clean slate anyway? The deep, dark impressions made by my last life were still there, underneath. ‘My notice at the diner is only a week. Then I’ll leave. If it’s OK, I want to come home.’

  ‘Of course it’s OK.’ She was surprised but doing her best to hide it. ‘Your room is still there, just the way you left it. Complete with the Roxy Music poster you’ll never let me pull down.’ I sort of hated Mum for making me laugh at a moment like that, when all I wanted was to be miserable, and I sort of loved her for it too.

  ‘Roxy Music are an important footnote in pop music history,’ I said, ‘and Bryan Ferry still has a certain je ne sais quoi.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Mum replied. ‘Drink?’ But before I could place an order for something stronger than I could probably handle the hotel phone let out a shrill bleat. I glared at it from my weird, twisted angle on the bed. The mattress jerked as Mum got up to answer.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Knight speaking.’ Mum’s telephone voice was so subconscious a tic that it didn’t even falter in moments of extreme crisis, such as this. But then she took in a sharp breath, as though someone had stabbed her in the stomach and looked down at me.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, already half-suspecting the answer.

  ‘Jack’s downstairs, he wants to talk to you,’ she said, covering the receiver with her hand.

  ‘I’m deeply uninterested.’ I rolled onto my back and fixed my eyes on the ceiling.

  ‘Can you call back?’ I heard Mum say. My right eye twitched. If she even tried to defend Jack I didn’t trust what I’d do. My whole body was rigid with anger.

  ‘Esther,’ she began.

  ‘Mum, please don’t say what I think you’re about to say.’ I covered my whole face with my hands. My breathing was deep and hot and huffy.

  ‘Look. You know I want you to come back home but I don’t want you to have any regrets.’

  ‘It’s far too late for that, Mother.’ I let out a rueful little laugh that didn’t at all sound like it belonged to me.

  ‘Alright, I don’t want you to add Jack to your list of regrets.’ She sighed.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said in a hollow voice that I did recognise as mine, all too well.

  ‘It might be good to face him. There may be an explanation…’ she tried.

  ‘I don’t want to see him,’ I said through my teeth.

  ‘You feel that way now but eventually you’ll start to wonder. Closure is important, love. You know that better than anyone.’

  The phone bleated again. I frowned at it and then at Mum.

  ‘Well, what should I tell them?’ she asked.

  The hotel bar was, like the rest of the place, decorated in shades of red and gold and when I walked in Jack was already perched on a bar stool. His head hung over a glass of whiskey. I could’ve been downstairs a lot quicker but the temptation to let him stew was too great and so I’d spent longer than necessary splashing my face with water; brushing my hair and using Mum’s perfume to freshen up. I thought I’d get some dark satisfaction from whatever state he’d worked himself into but in reality seeing him so broken brought me no pleasure at all. It just made me sick we were in such a mess and that because of his lies I was going to have to let him go.

  He looked over as I walked in and stood up a touch too straight, like he was standing to attention rather than greeting somebody he’d been sleeping with for the past week or so. Drawing closer, I noticed he had that look on his face. The look I’d seen many a time in the past week that always preceded a kiss. His eyes fixated on my mouth, deep in concentration. I folded my lips in on themselves, afraid that despite the dreadfulness of all he’d put me through they might turn traitor and flirt with Jack against my will.

  At this, his whole being seemed to deflate. He understood. This was really happening. He’d driven me away. He stiffened once more as though bracing himself for a punch and gestured to the stool next to his before sitting back in his seat.

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ asked Jack.

  ‘I’m not here for the refreshments.’ I did all I could to keep my voice detached even though I could see he was suffering. And, more than anything else, that was killing me. ‘Why don’t you just say what you’ve got to say so we can get this over with?’ I looked down at the polished, black marble of the bar. I didn’t trust myself to keep it together if I actually looked at him.

  ‘Esther, I know what I’ve done is…’ He shoved the whiskey glass to his lips and gulped before the word ‘unforgivable’ shuddered out of his mouth. ‘But I think I deserve the chance to explain, the same chance I gave you.’

  ‘Do you?’ I raised both eyebrows. ‘Well, I think I have been through enough!’ I shouted that last word and the bar tender scowled. Noticing his distaste, and that of a few other friendship groups lounging around nearby, I lowered my voice to a growl and mustered the courage to make eye contact. ‘You knew what I’d been through.’ I pointed at him. ‘You knew it all and you…you…arrgh. I’m such an idiot.’

  Jack looked at the ground, perhaps not able to look at me whilst I was in this state or maybe some small part of him felt ashamed.

  ‘I wanted to tell you. I tried so many times but…’ he began.

  ‘But you knew I’d never knowingly be your mistress.’

  ‘What? No. That’s not what this is.’ He sighed. ‘Laura and I aren’t divorced. But it’s only because she claimed to be mentally ill when I tried to file for it. The court deemed her too unstable to deal with the divorce proceedings. Believe me, I’ve wanted an end to this marriage for a long time.’ He ran a hand through his hair as he sometimes did in moments of stress. I used to think it was sort of adorable.

  ‘Then why did you keep it from me? After everything we’ve been through. You could’ve told me when I was with you on the bridge that night after Boyle wrote his article or any of the times we’ve…’ I shivered at the memory of all I’d done with Jack without knowing that deep down, beneath it all, he was deceiving me. ‘Or any of the times we’ve been together. But you didn’t even try. Not once.’

  ‘Well, actually, I did.’ He looked at me square on. ‘But you didn’t remember.’

  ‘I’d remember a crucial piece of information like that, don’t you think?’

  ‘Not if you’d had a lot of vodka.’

  I started. My head fell back on its hinges toward the ceiling where crystal chandeliers twinkled, oblivious to my pain. Several things I’d puzzled over now made sense. After our Vodkageddon, Jack was disappointed I didn’t remember anything and in the picture Jessie Marble took we looked absorbed with one another for reasons I had no recollection of. ‘That night,’ Jack continued, ‘when I told you and not Angela I was still married, I knew I should be with you.’ I pouted my lips to one side. Could this be the truth? He’d no way of proving he’d told me but equally I’d no way of proving he hadn’t. ‘I wanted to tell you, not her or anybody else,’ he continued. ‘I’ve never, ever volunteered that information to anyone. But you, I’d known you for a week and
…’ So that’s why he’d broken up with Angela and headed straight to see me at my flat. He’d told me. And I, knowing what it was like to want out of a marriage, had understood. But then I hadn’t remembered and he had to tell me all over again, only he couldn’t.

  I sat stock-still, moving just my lips.

  ‘If you trusted me as much as all that why didn’t you just tell me again?’ I had him there. Yes, it was horrible but it didn’t make sense that he could share his darkest secrets with me when I was out of my head on vodka and not when I was sober. Or whilst we’d laid naked in each other’s arms for hours, talking about whatever nonsense floated into our head. Why not then?

  ‘I wanted to. I did try. I didn’t want anything serious to happen until I’d told you. That’s why I didn’t take you home on the night of the hop. But, I suppose I’m weak. I wanted you so badly. And then when we were together it was so…’ He waved his hand, unable to find the words. ‘And each time I felt terrible afterwards and I’d convince myself that next time I was going to tell you but we had a rocky beginning. I didn’t want to scare you away.’ I pushed my glasses a touch further up my nose as though it might help me see whether he was telling the truth.

  ‘That everything? Holding back won’t do you any favours right now,’ I said. Jack picked up his glass. Glanced at me out of the corner of his eye and took a swig of whiskey.

  ‘I was ashamed.’ He nodded to himself as if admitting this for the first time.

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Laura… wanted kids. But we couldn’t.’ His shoulders slumped low. His chin quivered with the weight of whatever secret he was still holding onto.

  ‘Why are you ashamed of that?’

  ‘Because I was to blame. I wouldn’t see a doctor. I was afraid they’d tell me what they eventually did tell me: that I was the reason we couldn’t have a baby. The doctor’s said it was something genetic. In me. I was…I was…in denial.’ He paused. Now his hand was trembling as much as his chin. The whiskey in his glass sloshed about as he raised it to his lips.