Jill Akkerman’s husband had been wanting to have a talk with her for weeks, and she was 200 percent sure that it was going to be an unpleasant one. The signs were subtle, but she was a psychologist. So was he; she’d been warned that this would probably be her toughest marriage. In the month before their summer holiday he was so busy that she hardly saw him at home, and when he was in she used the unofficial zoning of their household to postpone the talk. No harsh words were to be said in bed, or in the kitchen. Neither of them had made these rules, but since this had somehow become part of their code of conduct, Jill and Jacob continued to do their bit toward keeping their meals and their dreams untainted. Conversation in the bedroom and kitchen tended toward the lighthearted, so she stuck to those rooms as often as possible when she wasn’t at work. Jacob had had the house renovated to her wishes; there weren’t many changes, just the addition of a few extra doorways. She preferred rooms with a minimum of two doorways, so you had options. You didn’t have to go out the same way you came in. In the bedroom she moved from the bed to the floor and back again with her books and gadgets. Sex was out of the question. He didn’t even raise the question, just watched her with a glint of amusement in his eyes. In the kitchen she cleaned diligently and sharpened knives until they broke. Jacob bought more and presented them to her with witty asides she heard only dimly beneath the louder fear that he might add: “Can I see you in the living room for a minute?”
—
HE DID CATCH her in the living room once but she ran so fast around the edge of the room and out of the nearest door that she toppled and broke a painted jug they’d chosen together on their honeymoon.
Jill wouldn’t have minded receiving some advice but ultimately opted not to mention this situation to anybody outside of the marriage. Not to her own therapist and certainly not to Lena or Sam. Jacob was about to leave her. She didn’t want him to, but this was her third marriage and his second; she knew how these things went. She’d met Jacob’s new colleague over dinner and the colleague, Viviane, was well dressed, husky-voiced, and generally delightful company, knowledgeable on a number of topics and curious about a variety of others. Jill had found herself joining Jacob in addressing her as “Vi,” and when Vi left the table for a few moments to answer a phone call Jill whispered: “You realize she’s got a crush on you?”
Jacob laughed and leaned toward her with his lips all smoochy, but she pushed his face away with a breadstick. “Did you hear what I just said?”
He leaned in again. Not close enough for a kiss this time, but close enough for her reflection to almost completely fill his irises. Portrait of cross forty-two-year-old with, hey, really nice boobs actually. “Yes, you said you think Vi has a crush.”
“I’m two hundred percent sure about that.”
“Two hundred percent? Oh. Even if you’re right it’ll pass, J.”
J. Vi. And he still called his first wife Dee.
“Why don’t you just make the most of it, run off with her, and be half of a beautiful black intellectual couple just like you always wanted?”
Husbands one and two, Max and Sam, were white—Sam was a few years younger than Jill, but both he and Max tended to look old stood beside her. Well, not elderly. Just older than her. Whereas side by side she and Jacob looked about the same age. What age was that? If you didn’t know them you couldn’t even give a rough estimate. Jacob picked up a breadstick of his own, crunched half of it, stabbed her in the arm with the other half, and asked: “Do you really think you can do this here?”
He rarely appeased her. She wasn’t sure what to make of that given his attitude toward almost all his other friends, loved ones, clients, the efforts he made to ensure everybody else’s comfort. When he was with Jill he made her wonder whether he’d been sent to destroy her. Take the time she’d invited him to sample the first viable batch of tea leaves from the greenhouse she part-owned. Chun Mei, with its taste of sweet springtime grass. He’d sauntered downstairs inexplicably wearing a denim shirt over jeans, taken the teacup from her, and filled his cheeks with tea. “And how is this superior to a nice cup of Tetley?”
The combination of barbaric taste buds and denim on denim had set Jill’s teeth so sorely on edge that her jaw locked for a couple of minutes. Enough time for him to stare her down and walk out unadmonished. He knew what he was doing, he knew! For her part she’d given up trying not to be quite so in love with him at some point in their late teens when she’d clocked that, without deliberately cultivating any particular scent, Jacob Wallace managed to smell exactly like a just-blown-out candle. But if the feelings on his side weren’t there anymore then it was better for him to just go. His contributions to their joint bank account tripled hers but she wouldn’t have a problem doing without handwoven rugs at home and boutique hotels abroad. Doing without Jacob himself was going to make her a little bit crazy for a long time, so no she wasn’t going to make it easy for him to say his piece and then leave.
—
WITH A WEEK to go before their summer holiday Jacob all but ambushed Jill at a Tube station. She was adding another month’s worth of public transport to her Oyster card when an arm slipped around her neck and her husband murmured: “Jill, Jill . . . you can’t fight this any longer. I need to ask you something . . .”
She could’ve feigned alarm for just a couple more moments and elbowed him in the groin, but instead she turned her head and hissed: “Whose idea was it to get married in the first place, eh? Why don’t you ask around and get back to me?”
She wasn’t going to let him off just like that but he’d better not be hoping she’d cling to him either! If she didn’t feel like being on her own she could get another husband if she wanted.
(Jill had run into Max outside their friend Mary’s bakery the other day, and he’d held her at arm’s length, given her a long, admiring look, and said: “God, you’re deteriorating fast. Lucky me, getting out while the going was good, eh?”—his eyes directly contradicting his remarks. Not that she’d ever go back to Max, with whom wedded bliss had been nowhere to be found. It had made her nervous that almost all her new in-laws were Swiss bankers, but also there were the terrific nightlong rows she and Max got into. If she protested Max’s shameless revisionism by making reference to something he himself had said just the day before, he’d become “concerned” about her negativity or would hit her with some barbed comment somebody else had apparently made to him about her demeanor—it wasn’t clear whether he made them up or merely saved them. She never stopped liking Max, but did grow weary at the thought of him.)
Jill went over to the blue stand where issues of the Evening Standard were stacked, but Jacob handed her his copy.
“I know whose idea it was to get married,” he said. “I don’t need to ask around—I was there. And so were you, just another stunner among the many, many stunners of London town, drunk on a sofa with one of your best mates—”
“Excuse me . . . the best mate may have been legless, but seeing as I’m a hero of the kingdom of alcohol, I was mildly tipsy. Also don’t forget to mention that this best mate was a moderately attractive man who’d never once made so much as a hint of a move on me in all the twenty-eight years we’d known each other . . .”
“Maybe he thought it was too obvious. I mean, Jack and Jill? Anyway the two of you were thirty-nine years old, prime of life, and both solvent to boot, so the man plucked up the courage to say . . . Hang on, what did I say again?”
Do you think that maybe we’re able to love someone best when that person doesn’t know how we feel? That’s what Jacob had said, and she’d looked at him and asked if he was about to say something weird to her. She’d rather he didn’t. Having weird things said to her was a large part of her day job and why couldn’t she have time off? Jacob’s answer was that he was about to say something weird, but only a tiny bit, and maybe what he wanted to say wouldn’t come out sounding as wrong as they thought it would. Maybe it w
ould sound normal.
Let’s get married and have sublime blasian babies before it’s too late, Jacob had blurted after she’d nodded at him to continue. Jill stretched an arm out and refilled both their shot glasses. It was already too late for babies. She’d had a sort of deadly serious running joke with both her previous husbands that having children would have to wait “until the war’s over.” But none of the ongoing wars looked likely to ever end, and she could no longer see carrying a child in her future. Not physically, and not mentally either. Maybe that had always been the case.
“I’m not going to marry you, mate.”
“Oh. That’s . . . well, I mean, why not? Because I said blasian? Because we haven’t known each other for long enough?”
In her head she’d replied: Because I can’t just keep getting married all the time, and also because I’m pissed off with you for making me sit through two of my own weddings and one of yours before it occurred to you that maybe we should have tried it together first.
Aloud she’d said that they were too old, adding that they didn’t need to get married. She said they could just see each other, if he wanted. She advised sleeping the question off. Maybe he’d wake up and realize that he only wanted to get married when he drank a lot of soju.
“But that wasn’t good enough for the rejected suitor,” Jacob continued, settling down into the Tube seat beside hers. “He’d been wanting to marry this woman for ages, long before the adult realization that marriage isn’t all that necessary . . . so he proposed again the following evening. The babies don’t have to happen, he said, and then he sang the cheesiest Korean song he could find . . .”
Was Jacob about to sing “What’s Wrong with My Age” right there on the Tube with all these boys and girls and men and women looking? They were already looking, since he hadn’t bothered to keep his voice down.
Still, she stuck up for “What’s Wrong with My Age.” “It’s not a cheesy song! It’s your singing that makes it cheesy. I love that song.”
“Me too. But I’m afraid it is inherently cheddar, J.”
Jacob turned to Jill, opened his arms and sang, in Korean, of staring into the mirror and bidding time to stand aside. The lyrics sprang to her own lips as she listened, and by the time he was challenging her to deny that his age was the perfect age for love, she was smiling the words right back at him.
As he sang, she realized something. He hadn’t been thinking about leaving her. Whatever he’d been working up to asking her, it was about something else entirely. She placed a finger over his lips: “And when they wed their parents and all their friends stood up in the church pews and sang ‘At last’ . . .” but Jacob made a halfhearted attempt to bite her, then said: “Hey! Hey Jill. Are you thinking about leaving me?”
She didn’t answer that. One of the things she’d learned about him early on was that he had an inbuilt and near-infallible lie detector, and all of a sudden she wasn’t sure whether what she’d really been doing for the past few weeks was skillfully molding her own desire to be single again into an image of his. It could be that all Jill’s leaving and being left had now made it impossible for her to stay with anyone.
—
FOR MOST of their lives she and Jacob had both been afraid of the same thing: not being deemed worthy to share a home with a family. They were both foster kids. Nobody ever said you were unworthy, not to your face, but there was talk of adults and children not being “the right fit” for each other. The adults were the ones who decided that, so when “fit” was brought up they were really talking about the child. This left Jacob, and Jill, and Lena (Jill’s onetime foster sister during an idyllic but brief lull) ever-ready to have to leave a home, or to be left. Jacob became extremely capable, a facilitator, someone you wanted around because he smoothed your path—whether through his skill as a polyglot or his general aura of “can do.” Lena was pretty much lawless, used to wear a pair of sunglasses on the back of her head and a badge that said HELL, which she tapped whenever anyone asked her where she was “originally from,” and she was so clearly somebody that you could trust with your life that reform always seemed possible for her. Jill advanced an entirely false impression of herself as biddable and in need of protection. Ah, I’m just a little chickadee who won’t survive the winter unless I nestle under your life-sustaining wing. Far from original, but it worked.
—
THEY WENT OUT to dinner at their favorite restaurant—the benefits were twofold: delicious chargrilled broccoli plus the discussion of Jacob’s question without having to bring it into the house with them. Jacob proposed sacrificing their summer holiday to a project of his, an idea he was developing as part of his work as a bereavement counselor. So that was it, the question he’d been building up to for weeks. Do you mind giving up your holiday to test-run my project? She was embarrassed that he felt he’d had to work up to asking her this; it was a question that would’ve been easily raised and just as easily settled with an unselfish partner. Regarding him her support was in fact unconditional and to date she’d thought she adequately expressed this; now she fought demoralization as she heard him out. His project focused on a particular type of experience that a large number of his clients reported having undergone. “To oversimplify the descriptions I’ve been given, this experience presents as . . . an implosion of memory. And as the subjects drift through the subsequent debris, they calmly develop a conviction that they do not do so alone. These presences aren’t reported as ghostly, but living ones . . . minutes, sometimes hours when the mourner feels as if they’ve either returned to a day when the deceased was still alive or the deceased has just arrived in the present time with them . . . and what’s interesting about these lapses people experience is that most of them happen under fairly similar physical conditions.”
“So you’ve put together some sort of program that induces this feeling of . . . presence?”
“Well, that’s what I’m aiming for. Of course it’d only be for mourners who need that feeling from time to time and can’t make it happen by themselves. We’re calling it ‘Presence.’ And now we’ve got some funding . . .”
“You clever thing.”
“Really it was Vi who got the funding together. She’s a bit of a whiz at that. Lots of international contacts.”
“I’m sure that’s only the tip of Vi’s iceberg.” She made a quick attempt to estimate the extent to which new information concerning the relationship between Vi and Jacob might shake her. Sam had had his affairs, and Jill had come to an understanding of them as a form of boundary setting, actions taken against a fear that any one person could or did know “everything” about you. Jill was never more aggravating than when she got busy understanding things, and yet these rationalizations of hers might not be such a big problem this time around, as she was finding that the thought of various deep, sweet secrets between Jacob and Vi had something of a mechanical effect on her. Air seeped out of her and very little came back in—she breathed as though subject to strangulation and sat on her hands to suppress tentacle-like tendencies such as thrashing about, and clinging. The more Jacob told her about the testing of his program, the more she wondered if her first misgivings hadn’t been right after all. He was genuinely willing to be a guinea pig for his own prototype, she could see that, but maybe this was also Leaving Jill, Phase 1: Practice.
—
“OK, I’LL HELP. But since I don’t know anyone else who’d ask me to spend two weeks pretending he’s no longer in the world, tell me this first: Are you really not thinking about leaving me?” she asked.
That glint of amusement again. “Get this through your head, Jill Akkerman: I’m not leaving you. And you—are you leaving me?”
“I’m not leaving you, Jacob Wallace.”
She watched him put her expression, posture, and phrasing through his lie detector. She passed. His gaze lost intensity.
“Remember that psychologist who s
aid we had an unhealthy dependence on each other?” asked the boy who’d learned Korean along with Jill and the couple who’d eventually adopted her. Her parents had wanted to have a new family language, and Jacob had learned too, so that he could be a part of that family. He’d been an honorary Akkerman for over half his life now.
“Yeah . . . we owe our careers to him, I think. He made us want to see what his job would be like if someone did it properly.”
“He might have been right, though,” Jacob said.
“Oh?”
“I just mean . . . if it was healthy, it might be easier to give up.”
She poured him more wine and they raised their glasses to unhealthy dependencies. Then he told her the specifics of their test for Presence. They needed two bases. Jacob would stay at their Holland Park house with the projection of Jill’s presence and Jill would need to stay at her flat in Catford, a parting gift from Max that she would’ve rejected if that hadn’t meant starting another fight with him. Jill’s current tenants were away in Prague until the autumn and when she called them to ask if they were all right with her being in the flat for a couple of weeks they said it was fine. “Just don’t break anything . . .” Radha said. Workmen came to the flat to make some adjustments to wiring and to secrete the contents of what looked like gas canisters into the walls. Jacob gave her a full list of the substances she’d be breathing in. While they were all substances found unaltered in wildlife, mixing them was bound to be a different matter.
“This is essentially going to be like an acid trip that lasts for two weeks, isn’t it?”
Jacob only said: “Not really. You’ll see.”
After the necessary alterations had been made to both houses Jill and Jacob recorded three conversations—the purpose of which was to place the mourner in the midst of a familiar exchange, the kind we’re always having with friends and family, repeating ourselves and repeating ourselves, going over what we know about each other to prove that we still know these things and will not, cannot, forget them. Vi set up a camera at Jacob’s office and filmed Jacob’s face as he and Jill repeated the conversation they’d had on the Tube about whose idea it had been to get married. They talked about their earliest impressions of each other too, and by the time it came to filming their third conversation they couldn’t think of anything else they wanted to say, so they kept it brief. Sex returned to the Akkerman-Wallace bedroom—to every room in their house in fact, their sweat mingling in the summer heat.
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours Page 13
