The Mistress's Revenge: A Novel

by Tamar Cohen

  So I thought up another password which I’m guaranteed to have forgotten by tomorrow. The happy pills make me forget all kinds of things. Sometimes it’s a problem (last week’s dentist appointment, Tilly’s art project), but other times it’s actually a bonus (stupid fucking Pete). I wrote the password down on a Post-it and dropped it into the drawer of my filing cabinet next to the unopened mail, but I’m sure to forget I’ve done that by tomorrow. In a few weeks or months, I might come across that Post-it and wonder why I’ve scribbled Tilly*Jamie94 in big red writing.

  I sighed a little once I’d done that, imagining you trying to access my emails, but finding yourself locked out. It felt rather mean-spirited somehow. But then I realized that if you’d indeed been sending me some sort of warning, you’d expect me to change the password, and that made me feel at the same time both reassured (you wouldn’t take it as a personal rejection) and disappointed (you wanted me to sever this last secret link to you).

  Even after I’d clicked the “password reset” box, I couldn’t get it out of my mind, the thought of you spying on my movements from the comfort of your box room office, keeping tabs on me, rifling through the shabby records of my life. Did you feel anything, I wonder, reading the words I’d written to other people, after all those millions of words I used to write just for you? Did you have even the teeniest trace of regret when you realized that my life was (just about) limping along without you, that despite the things you used to say about us being one being, we were after all “separate” (your favorite word). For a second I saw us as Siamese twins who had just been successfully operated on. Usually in such cases there’s one stronger one, isn’t there, one that greedily claims the shared organs, the shared limbs, for its own? And then there’s the other one, who gets left with the dregs, with a heart too weak to pump on its own and a skeleton that can’t support its own body’s weight. The runt, incapable of sustaining itself independently. No prizes for guessing which of us would be which.

  Daniel and I had another of our rare “heated debates” earlier.

  As you know, we hardly ever argue. That would involve a certain investment of emotion on our parts that both of us are really past bestowing. But this evening, tensions never far from the surface flared rustily into life.

  It started with dinner. Daniel and I ate together, the kids having already been fed (does that make them sound like livestock? I don’t mean it like that). For some reason, maybe because neither of us was talking, I started listening to Daniel as he ate. You know how when you tune into someone’s eating, it becomes quite impossible to focus on anything else? I became fixated on the fork going into his gaping mouth, the noisy, excessive mastication, the obscene undulating of his throat. The noise seemed to grow louder to fill the silence between us, and I stopped even pretending to eat my own food, feeling suddenly nauseous, but Daniel continued putting fork to mouth as if nothing was wrong. Couldn’t he hear how disgusting he sounded? It was difficult to believe he wasn’t doing it on purpose.

  So I started to speak, just to cover up the noise.

  I tried to explain (oh futile endeavour) that I felt like something was snapping inside me, brittle as a dried-up reed. Don’t worry, I didn’t mention you, of course. I’ve become adept at talking around what Helen calls the Elephant in the Room. In fact I’m so good at avoiding that elephant I could probably dance nimbly around it blindfolded. But that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten that fucking great elephant is there. Anyway, I digress. So I was trying to tell Daniel that I was worried about my state of mind. I didn’t want to overstate the case, you understand. I wouldn’t want to end up sectioned and straining against a straitjacket in some padded cell. But I had a sudden irrational urge to involve him in my life, if only because we share a bed and two children and a drawerful of unopened mail. Since the early days, when he fussed around me like an old woman, enjoying the drama of my sudden emotional collapse, the novelty has worn off, and Daniel has withdrawn into his default position of silent disapproval.

  “Some days I feel as if I’m going mad,” I told him.

  Daniel looked up from the kitchen table where he was reading the Guardian sports pages over the top of his dinner plate, his newly acquired specs looking unconvincing, like a theatrical prop.

  “I feel like that most days,” he told me.

  I tried again.

  “I’m so tired all the time, and yet I can’t sleep. Whenever I close my eyes, I feel like I’m drowning.” It wasn’t the most original analogy I know, but I couldn’t really think of another way of describing that rush of anxiety, burning its way up through my chest and up into my brain, that kept me awake at night, heart pounding.

  “Well, I’m more tired,” was Daniel’s response. “This training I’m doing is really hard, you know. At least you can go back to bed in the afternoon if you’re tired. I mean it’s not as if you’ve got loads of working piling up at the moment, is it?”

  Well, it was uncalled for, don’t you think? That underhand dig about the work, when I’m the one who has kept us going all this time, through Daniel’s myriad failed schemes and halfhearted ventures?

  “Depression is not a competition, you know,” I told him, knowing even as I said it that that’s exactly what it is. A competition between me and Daniel to see who has made the other the most miserable, each counting up our past resentments, keeping score with old disappointments and unfulfilled dreams.

  After that, the atmosphere got rapidly worse.

  Daniel is slow to be riled, but when he is, he takes a vicious pleasure in his own bad humor, savoring his sense of his own self-righteousness.

  His argument was that my “depression” (his quotation marks, not mine. You should have seen his expression as his fingers made the gestures in the air, his eyebrows arched in mocking disbelief) was largely self-inflicted and, having been thus inflicted, entirely self-perpetuated.

  He feels, apparently, that the antidepressants and the visits to Helen are all manifestations of my unhealthy need to be at the center of some inflated and ongoing crisis. In other words, Clive, he thinks I’m a drama queen.

  Well, given that he has only a fraction of the facts at his disposal, I suppose he could be forgiven for thinking that I’m the sole author of my own misery. (See how I’m trying to empathize even with Daniel—it’s practically second nature to me now.) He thinks I should “snap out of it” and “think of the children for a change.” I didn’t tell him how I can’t really think about anything anymore, how my brain seems alternately full of rage or full of sawdust. He’d probably just tell me that his brain was under even greater pressure, and we’d enter another level of our new favorite family game: Competitive Breakdowns.

  I told him—and I’m not proud of it—that he was an emotional bully. Which isn’t entirely either true or fair. I tried to summon up tears to support my cause, but none were forthcoming. He said I was selfish and self-obsessed.

  The problem is, of course, that he’s right in a lot of ways. (Not that I’d ever use that word about him within his hearing: “right.”) I’ve brought it all on myself, every last bit of it. But no matter how many times I remind myself of that, I still can’t quite believe it. Because saying I caused it all makes me sound like someone with power, someone who can make things happen. Yet I know that you’re the one with all the power, and that everything that has happened has happened to me, not because of me.

  Daniel became quite heated and visibly puffed up with his own indignation as he talked. He developed a deep red flush on his neck that spread like ink on blotting paper. I watched transfixed as it bled outward, staining the skin around the nugget of his Adam’s apple, reaching crimson fingers up toward his chin. Meanwhile he threw phrases at me like “narcissistic personality” and “emotionally manipulative.” It struck me that he might have been reading the book I borrowed from Helen Bunion’s office. I waited for him to drop in something about owning my own actions, which would prove my suspicions beyond any doubt, but he stopped short.
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  “We used to be happy,” he told me suddenly, and I was so surprised to hear that word coming from his mouth, it was like he was talking in tongues. “Then something happened. You vacated our relationship.”

  I’m serious, that’s exactly what he said. You vacated our relationship. It made me sound like a fire warden.

  “Now I don’t even know who you are anymore,” he told me, and then he left the kitchen very suddenly. It was a terrific performance, I have to say. I almost could have believed he’d choreographed it in advance.

  After he’d left I stayed leaning against the fridge where I’d been standing. To tell you the truth, I was a little taken aback. Usually Daniel’s idea of talking about our relationship is to wait until absolutely backed into a corner then say something totally noncommittal like “We’re okay, aren’t we?” which can obviously mean absolutely anything, or nothing, depending on your point of view.

  When we first got together sixteen years ago it used to bother me. I’d try everything to get him to open up, convinced that if I could just find the right approach, the right combination of words, I’d unlock the deep well of feeling he clearly harbored, bringing it all to the surface. It took more than ten years before I’d finally admit that the problem wasn’t finding a way to unleash his suppressed emotions, the problem was believing that they actually existed in the first place. At least in any form I’d recognize.

  I thought about what he’d said about us being “happy.” Were we ever happy, Daniel and I? Looking back I recall some happy moments. I can summon them right now. They play across my mind like a PowerPoint presentation. Playing Scrabble under a palm tree on a white sandy Thai beach, lying in bed on Sunday mornings reading the papers with the kids wedged between us watching cartoons, drunken dinners with friends, barbecues in sunny gardens. Those moments unquestionably existed, but then I can find happy moments in every period of my life, yet I wouldn’t say these were all happy periods. In fact I struggle to find one period I’d really call happy. It’s easy to rewrite the past, making it fit in with how it’s convenient for us to view it now. Yet I still maintain that while Daniel and I kept each other company through some very happy moments in our lives, by and large that happiness wasn’t a result of the two of us. We enjoyed some happiness together, but that happiness was shop-bought rather than homemade.

  And what about us, Clive? Did we make each other happy? I can see your face now if I was to ask you that. I can see you making that expression of distaste, as if you’d bitten into a too-sour plum. You always felt happiness was a bourgeois concern, and that when people said they were searching for happiness what they really meant was blandness. Your idea of how other people defined happiness was a Hallmark card, something a bit tacky, a bit tawdry, a meaningless sugar rush of emotion. So I never asked you.

  Yet in one of your emails after York Way Friday, (when you were still sending me messages to explain yourself, before you raised the drawbridge and retreated into defensive silence), you said you’d realized you’d never make me happy. As if after all, I’d turned out to be just like all the rest, trawling for happiness on the shelves of Homebase or in the pages of the Argos catalogue.

  At the time I’d argued with you, pretended outrage at your assumptions. Told you I’d never look to someone else to make me feel complete. I was lying of course. I wanted to be happy, just like all the rest. And obviously I must have thought that you could make me so.

  I never once thought that about Daniel. Isn’t that terrible? But still I didn’t correct him when he said that thing about how we used to be happy. It’s not something you can readily say to someone, is it? No, you got it wrong. I wonder whether he really believes it, or whether maybe Daniel’s definition is so different from what we had, that intermittent parallel worlds kind of contentment, counts as being genuinely happy.

  Whatever the truth, Daniel thinks that what has gone wrong over the last few years, the inexorable slide from that pinnacle of happiness (as he now sees it) to where we are today, is down to me emotionally checking out, vacating our relationship. I wonder what he’d say if he knew about you, Clive. You know, something tells me part of him would feel glad, vindicated. If the problems started because of you, it would absolve him from responsibility. It wouldn’t be about happiness anymore, or lack of it, it would be about lots of other things—sex, excitement, adrenaline, money.

  There have been many times over the last few months where I’ve been tempted to tell him, not out of any altruistic motive, but out of desperation to share my misery around, to let him know just how much I’ve been suffering. Ridiculous, isn’t it? I’ve rolled the words around in my mouth like mint imperials, rehearsing how they’d sound, preparing myself for his reaction. And yet of course I’ve stayed silent, protecting my link to you, our last surviving secret.

  I suspect you see it rather differently, this tie that binds the two of us together. I imagine it’s a burden to you now, a shackle you’d much rather shake free. Does it clink along behind you, as you walk with Susan arm in arm, one leg faintly dragging at the back as you pull it along? Does it lie in between you on that huge daybed, nestling down amongst all those smugly plumped-up feather cushions, taking up space in that all-important middle ground? Is it elephant shaped, our secret? Does Susan run a curious hand around its invisible trunk, fumbling along invisible ears, wondering, always wondering about that lingering elephant shit smell?

  Like it or not, Clive (and my guess is not. Call me clairvoyant), though we may have been surgically separated, we Siamese twins, we nevertheless remain bound together. I feel you straining against the binds. After all, you’re the stronger one, you took the legs, the healthy organs, the lion’s share of the pumping heart of us. You are aching to be off. And yet still you cannot be altogether free. It worries you, I bet. You wonder if you’ll always carry me round with you, the shriveled carcass of your long-dead twin. I do feel for you, I really do. It’s awful to be forced to carry on wearing the clothes you grew out of months ago. But try to think of it a badge of honor, a reminder of something you survived.

  What’s that famous Nietzsche quote? What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger?

  But I suppose if you think about it a different way, what doesn’t kill us can also leave us maimed.

  * * *

  I’ve been thinking a lot about what Daniel said. It’s now late and once again I’m awake in the night, waiting for the Zopiclone to work its way through my system, listening to the asthmatic wheezing of the house around me. Daniel lies asleep beside me, well used by now to my light being on in the early hours, turning his dreams permanently sun-kissed. He is unconscious yet his back still talks to me. Narrow-shouldered and accusatory, his sharp shoulder blades are like jabbing fingers, silently listing his many grievances.

  Could he be right that I “vacated” a perfectly well-functioning relationship, and all to be with you?

  Well, obviously it started me thinking about those early days. You know I never really found you terribly attractive at first. I’m sure I’ve told you that before, in those days when I was so secure in your feelings for me that I didn’t feel the need to dissemble and could afford to be cruel or hard if the fancy took me. Those were the days when truth wasn’t a luxury, but a commodity like any other, that could be tossed around with impunity, knowing that however hurtful or disagreeable, you’d still come back for more.

  It had been inevitable, of course, that sooner or later I’d progress from being your First Legitimate Female Friend to, well, what exactly? Your First Legitimate Female Friend With Benefits?

  It started, naturally, with emails. I say naturally, because ours was a relationship that would have been impossible in the pre-email days.

  How else could we have become so intense so quickly, so involved in every beating moment of each other’s lives, without ever leaving our respective homes? How else could we have left our partners in every single sense of the word (so already Daniel is proved right—I vacated him as he said), while ph
ysically remaining just where we were—you in one of your offices, me in my windowless London cubbyhole?

  Ours was a thoroughly modern email affair, each nuance played out against the soundtrack of incoming message alerts, so it was only fitting that it started off that way. The messages between us growing steadily both in volume and in intimacy. You commented on clothes you’d seen me wear, protested when I said I was going to get all my hair cut off. Details of your domestic life started creeping into your messages. “Don’t believe everything it says on the can,” you wrote in one email. “People would be shocked if they could see what Susan and I are really like.”

  You told me how you’d got married so young that you were always trying to recapture the carefree youth you’d never had. That’s why there had been all the other women, you said.

  Oh, hadn’t you mentioned the other women?

  Of course, that was a genius move, telling me about the one-night stands, the frenzied flings, the aspiring singer-songwriters, the publicity girls, the back up singers, the prostitutes—the snaking long, ignoble line of “encounters” threading its way through the fabric of your long, glittering marriage. At one stroke you’d advertised yourself as both desirable and available. You needn’t feel guilty about being a home wrecker was your subtext. How can you wreck what is already wrecked?

  But you were quick to divorce yourself (sorry about that choice of phrase) from the callow cheating bastard stereotype. None of this was a reflection on Susan, you said (I’m paraphrasing now—your voice is so deeply ingrained in me, it’s something I feel well equipped to do. I hope you’ll look on it as a sort of tribute). The women were a “necessary process” you needed to work through on your own, part of the personal development that had been interrupted by getting married while barely out of your teens. You and Susan were a team, you’d grown up together—“we brought each other up” is the phrase you used—but a team is made up of individuals with their own strengths and weaknesses. Surely I could understand that?