The Love Market

by Carol Mason

  I have to laugh. Because, really, I don’t know what I was expecting…. us being stiff with each other, maybe. Me feeling out of my depth. Him looking at me, and us both somehow being disappointed. Anything but not this easiness, this falling away of all the years in between then and now. He takes my small suitcase off me, ‘Come on, let’s get out of here, to eat, or get a drink or something. All right?’ He puts an arm around my shoulders and pulls me into him. ‘I can’t believe I’m touching you,’ he says.

  I am struck again by his face. That oddly charming nose, and how dark his eyes are against the pallor of his skin and how attractive a contrast I find it. Just like all those years ago.

  ‘I can’t believe I’m looking at you,’ he says, hardly taking his eyes off me as we walk. And when he smiles, the years fall away, and he looks young again. Into the soft London sunshine, Patrick directs us to the taxi line. ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ he says, his hand moving to my waist where I feel the urgent press of his fingers. ‘Forget eating for now. I think we should go back to the hotel. You drop off your bag, and then we decide what we want to do. How does that sound? Or is that far too intense for a first encounter after all these years?’ He beams at me, gazes at me with an intent, intense warmth and pleasure.

  I laugh. ‘Well…’ I’m oddly embarrassed.

  He plants a firm kiss on my mouth again. Then his hand on my back propels me up the taxi line. As he leans in and tells the taxi driver where we would like to go, all I can think is, I know this is really happening, because I’m bearing witness to it, but it still feels neither credible nor possible. I have to be catching myself in a moment of schizophrenia. A smile breaks out of me while I shake my head. He turns, catching me.

  ~ * * * ~

  I don’t see much during the ride to the hotel because I am too busy looking at him. Amazed by the proximity of him all over again. It strikes me as more than a little significant that the last time I came to London was the time I saw him, and part of me never wanted to come back again, even though Jacqui was always trying to drag me down here for weekend breaks. Astonishing really, the avenues of pure agony that have gouged so deeply in me, where this man is concerned.

  He sets my suitcase down behind the door in the dimly lit room that feels more soundless than quiet, and I am tugging off his jacket by the time he stands up. We don’t speak as our faces move in on each other, eyes locked until we can look at each other no more.

  Now, just the flourish of his jacket falling to the floor, feet scuffing along a carpet to a bed, two bodies landing as one. I open my legs and arms so we are quickly spread on each other like starfish. The unusual sensation of someone heavier than Mike on top of me. He is taller, broader, different all together than Mike. The whiff of unfamiliar deodorant as he quickly peels off his T-shirt, static crackling. My hands slide up the sides of his body where I used to be able to walk my fingers up his ribs. The soft padding on top of the muscle. My nose in his hair. The scent of his shampoo as he lowers his head to blaze moist kisses down my neck.

  Familiarizing myself with Patrick’s body after all these years is like going away on holiday and sleeping in a strange bed. That first night of finding out how a new pillow fits, a new duvet settles around you. The texture of new sheets, a fabric softener you’re not used to. The sad realisation somewhere that you’re more comfortable in this one than you ever were in yours at home.

  Patrick’s eyes lock into mine as he slides his hands down the back of my jeans, lifting my bottom. His nose up and down my neck, stopping in places, absorbing the smell and feel and taste of me. I am his strange bed.

  I tug at his belt as he reaches for the button of my jeans. Then I’m lifting my bottom again for him, as he struggles to get them off, my little white knickers coming down with the effort. The sexy peel-down of clothes against skin. All this frustrated by the fact that he now has to contend with the fiddly buckles of my sandals. A snicker from me, while he pulls at shoes, brushing his lips along the insides of my knees and looking up at the view of my crotch. ‘Success,’ he says, flinging the shoes behind him, one of them bounces off a piece of furniture. I tug his jeans over his hips. Then he takes the soles of my feet in the palms of his hands, as though his hands are stirrups, clam-shelling my legs, opening them to put himself in them, then closing them around his back.

  I have missed how we work.

  As the tears run down my cheeks as he enters me, he just kisses them away, as though I don’t have to tell him why they’re there. I remember how occasionally I would be emotional as Mike made love to me, but for different reasons. As I clasp onto him, and more tears run down, he dries them up, dotting kisses here and there.

  We are quick. And if we hadn’t slept together before, one of us might have worried about this. He groans when he comes, then he groans when I do, staying inside me, his fingers paused now between my legs, where he has been touching me, to make it happen for me, just like he remembers how.

  Our hearts hammer as we pant there for a while. I wonder what I’ve felt like to him. I move my hands to the top of his head, clasping his head between my hands, with his nose pressed into my forehead, thinking I hope he likes the woman over the girl.

  I read a study about the elusive thing of physical attraction. Somewhere in our early lives we are supposed to imprint in our minds our idea of the perfect face for us. We don’t realise we’ve done it, or even remember what it was that influenced our preference, but when we see it again later, we know. I thought it a very lovely idea.

  I am kissing the perfect face.

  Twenty

  He thinks we should eat at a bistro in the neighbourhood. We’re both hungry. I know this when I go to put my clothes back on again and feel off-balance standing up.

  ‘Did we really just do that?’ I say, hopping around, trying to locate my underwear.

  ‘We did, didn’t we?’ he plays along.

  Again, I don’t know what I’d imagined. Us having to acclimatize ourselves to one another first, perhaps.

  We dress without bothering to shower, and gaze at each other all the way downstairs in the lift, in a rapt study of each other’s faces.

  It’s a nice late May afternoon. A gentle thrum of traffic and a red bus marked South Kensington move past us in the watery yellow sunshine. Patrick’s fingers lace through mine. ‘Did I feel different?’ I ask him. ‘Was my body a lot different?’

  He looks at me, pretends to think. ‘Ummmm…. You were—How shall I say…’

  I nudge him. ‘Stop choosing your words carefully!’

  He laughs. ‘I was going to say you were just as into it as you were when we first met, and I definitely don’t have doubts about the chemistry still being there. And your body…I think your body’s fabulous.’ He pulls me into him and glues a kiss to my cheek.

  ‘More fabulous than it was when I was twenty-one?’

  ‘More fabulous.’

  I can’t resist a big grin. ‘Well that’s a good ego boost, even if I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Believe me,’ he says, whispering into the side of my face, into my hair.

  I chuckle. ‘We should have waited, and got to know each other a little more first.’

  He frowns. ‘That was us getting to know each other.’

  The neighbourhood is a-bustle. People reading newspapers outside cafés, a model-like young woman climbing into a black taxi holding a fluffy white dog, a navy blue Bentley inching out of an ivy-walled, cobbled drive.

  Patrick takes it all in. ‘You know, a few years ago I got the chance to work for CNN’s London bureau,’ he says, looking momentarily nostalgic. ‘I regret not taking it in a way. I’ve always loved this city.’

  We decide on the restaurant on the corner. A French name. Wooden tables and seats. Prints of the Folies-Bergère on its two longest walls. We gravitate to a window table, scan a menu and I order a Croque Monsieur with frites and Patrick a steak sandwich. I secretly observe him without actually looking at him. And, by the way he looks off to
the side of me, in a kind of vacant concentration, I think he’s mastered the same skill. I find I can let my eyes settle in a space five or so degrees to the left of him, then have them slide to the right, circling him as though in some bizarre animal kingdom mating dance, catching every movement of him. And I know when his eyes are doing the same dance around me.

  With his long legs and broad shoulders, he looks big and bulky and formidable, as though the chair and table are somehow too small for him. An optical illusion after being so used to seeing Mike sitting across from me.

  ‘When did you leave Asia?’ I ask him.

  ‘Nineteen ninety-seven. After Hong Kong was handed over to the Chinese. Then I was sent to cover the war in Kosovo. I was based on the Albanian border for most of the time, covering the refugee crisis. Then it was the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre, then the War in Afghanistan. I’ve been in the Middle East pretty well ever since. Up until six months ago, as I told you.’ The waiter puts down some wine, and Patrick pours us each a glass.

  ‘And your marriage?’ I ask, feeling brave.

  He meets my eyes. ‘Over before I left Hong Kong.’

  So Patrick split up with his wife not all that long after we’d met. I wonder if he contemplated contacting me then. Knowing our timing, if he had, I probably would have just got married to Mike.

  Now that we have opened a door into personal territory, I feel safe venturing in.

  ‘So you never remarried?’ I ask him, and see his expression falter slightly. One thing that hasn’t changed about him: Patrick’s tension is palpable, even when he’s trying to look relaxed. I can feel the energy of his mind working overtime and wonder if it ever stops.

  ‘Not with my life. Divorce is like a tropical disease among foreign correspondents. It eventually gets everybody.’

  ‘But hasn’t that been lonely though? Haven’t you missed having someone?’

  He briefly looks out of the window. ‘No. The job kinda becomes your love life. Relationships are things that end up becoming like work.’

  ‘What happened to her? To Anya?’ I always remembered her name because it sounded so glamorous, and I imagined she was, too.

  The food comes out quickly, and we start eating. ‘She moved back to Toronto. Married a doctor. She has a family now. Still works in the business.’

  ‘Business?’

  ‘Anya was a journalist. Did I never tell you that?’

  I am stunned. ‘No.’

  He wags the foot that is laid across his opposite knee. ‘Yes, of course, she was. I can’t believe I never told you that. I suppose we really didn’t talk about her… I met her at Carlton journalism school. We both worked in small towns for a while then landed back in Toronto at the same time. Then I applied for a job with The Associated Press. I didn’t tell her. By this time we were living together. I never thought I’d get it. But then I did.’ He looks at me briefly before gazing distantly out of the window and the people walking by. ‘She was shocked, of course. She’d just landed a good job at the Toronto Star. It was shitty timing. But we had to make a decision. My opportunity was the bigger career move. We both knew that I couldn’t not take it. So we decided to get married and go together.’

  ‘That’s very strange,’ my gaze goes up and down him. Why didn’t he tell me any of this then? ‘I always imagined her as not really having a career. Maybe because you said so little about her. Maybe I just assumed there wasn’t much to say.’

  ‘No,’ his eyes scope around my face now. ‘Anya was extremely ambitious. One of the smartest, most driven people I knew. I think that’s what attracted me—everybody—to her, really.’ He shakes his head, shrugs. ‘There was every opportunity for her to have a great career in China, freelancing. You have to understand, when you’re both out there trying to figure out a whole new culture, a new language, you’re as likely to get a good story in the grocery store as you are sitting at your desk in the bureau. In fact, more likely. And it wasn’t just me telling her that. There were many two-journalist couples with the bureau. Some of them were our friends, doing exactly what we could have been doing. But it was as if she turned resentful that I was going out to work every day, and she was left to her own devices. She seemed to think she was somehow subjugated to me, which was ridiculous. She kept going on about what she’d given up for me.’

  ‘So when you met me—’ He looks suddenly tired, his jetlag catching up.

  ‘We’d barely been out there three months. I was learning on my feet how to file daily news reports for the most influential news gathering operation in the world, wondering how the hell I was going to survive the challenge, and doubting whether we had done the right thing in getting married.’ He looks at me frankly, shakes his head in lingering exasperation. ‘It had been my idea for us to get married. Essentially I’d dragged her out there. She was clearly depressed. I felt responsible. I thought I had to at least try to make our marriage work, to make something worthwhile for her.’

  ‘Worthwhile?’ I pull my cardigan across my shoulders. ‘But you don’t stay married to someone as an incentive for them to be happy.’

  His trouble-laden eyes hold mine. ‘No. You don’t, do you? But I was young and I was in one of those “save everybody and save myself” grooves, you know. It kind of came with the territory of the job. I was coping, or surviving. I wasn’t really thinking.’

  I can feel him studying me, as I look distantly out of the window, across the road, through the traffic sliding by, thinking of all that he is telling me, and of how he has just made love to me and I can still feel that pull toward him that was always there. ‘Why didn’t you tell me any of this back then? You should have, Patrick. I was so gutted by losing you. I deserved at least to know what the reasons were.’

  He wipes his mouth with his napkin. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t handle it right. I wasn’t handling a lot of things right back then. A part of me couldn’t bring myself to talk to you about her because I didn’t even fully know my own mind.’

  We stare at one another. And I can tell that, whatever highs he might have had in his career, this is not a happy face. I am not looking at someone who is content with his life. ‘We didn’t know each other, did we?’ he says. ‘It was four days. And while you can learn a lot about someone in that time, you usually don’t go making life-altering decisions on the strength of it.’

  His words ground me. He’s absolutely right, of course. I see that now. I didn’t see it then.

  ‘If I’d told you exactly how I felt, you’d have encouraged me to leave her. And you’d have probably been right to. But I had to decide that on my own. I wanted to make sure it was about me and her. Not me, you and her. It wouldn’t have felt fair for me to do that to her.’

  I nod slowly. We finish eating. ‘I wouldn’t mind some fresh air,’ I tell him.

  He pays the bill and we leave. He takes hold of my hand as we walk down the high street. ‘If you’d been forgettable I’d have forgotten you.’ He squeezes my hand. ‘If I wasn’t still curious about you, I’d not have found myself flying the Atlantic, with hardly a minute’s thought put into the decision, just for the chance to see you again.’

  A flock of birds flap their wings in my stomach. ‘But you came here for business.’

  He kisses my cheek. ‘There was no business. Just this business.’

  We intend to walk as far as Hyde Park but our legs instinctively re-route back to the hotel, where he makes love to me again.

  ‘So tell me about this crazy job of yours,’ he says, after, propping his head up with an arm and lying on his side, looking at me.

  ‘It’s not crazy! I don’t know why men always think what I do for a living is funny.’

  ‘I don’t think it funny. The journalist in me just wonders how you made the leap from meeting me fifteen years ago in the famously romantic Love Market, and having a disastrously failed, albeit very intense relationship, and then you go home and decide to go into the matchmaking business. I mean, it would make more sense if o
urs had been a love affair that hadn’t ended so badly.’

  My eyes can’t stop consuming him, and I’m shocked again how attractive he still is. ‘It really didn’t have anything to do with meeting you,’ I tell him. ‘It was just a fluke.’

  I tell him the story of how my company came to be, and about some of my clients, while he traces a finger over my collarbones and up and down my throat. Then he picks up one of my hands and stares at it, gently turning it over in his, as though he’s fascinated by it. ‘It must seem unbelievably superficial after what you do for a living.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, shocking me, and I laugh.

  ‘Oh well at least you’re honest.’

  ‘No. I’m joking. It’s not superficial at all. Being responsible for somebody’s happiness and the biggest personal decision they will make in their lives is hardly something to be taken lightly.’ He kisses the dip in my throat. ‘I think I’d rather have my job than yours. Any day.’

  The same serious expression that I remember. The nose that I loved: long and fine-boned, with quite the pronounced bridge that gave his face a certain appealing, aristocratic imperfection. The type of nose that means a person is intelligent and engaging, and routine work is not their specialty. The intense dark eyes—if you were going to search him for flaws—just the tiniest little bit too close together, but perhaps noticeable only to someone who was a student of facial biometrics. He gazes at me as though he’s getting a fix from my face. Then his uber-intense expression launches into a smile, and an unforgotten longing fills me.

  ‘Do you want to go out for a walk?’ he asks.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Why would I want to go for a walk?’

  We make love again. When I get up and go to the toilet, I stare at my flushed face in the mirror. Then when I come back in the bedroom, he has pulled on a T-shirt and is propped up with a pillow, quite at home. Trying to look relaxed, but failing spectacularly.