I’ll start.
Hopeful.
‘Jane?’ It’s Nicola. ‘What do you think?’
I have no fucking clue what she’s talking about. It’s possible my pulse rate is elevated and my breathing jagged. Fuck. And my eyes glassy. Marie jumps in.
‘Don’t bother her,’ she says. ‘She’s dealing with some client emergency.’ Nicola feels slighted, but I am saved. And grateful for my bizarre work-from-home job, so esoteric and complicated that no one really understands what I do – and, in this circle of stay-at-home-moms and ladies-who-lunch at least, I’m treated with cautious respect as a result.
When they’re not thinking I neglect my children and my husband’s career, that is.
‘Clients,’ I say. ‘And with these phones, we’re always on call.’
Fucking liar.
I type.
—Nervous.
Really? Pulse pounding.
—Not an adjective.
Hard.
I have to cover my mouth with my hand. Oh, my fucking God, Matt. Really? From hopeful to hard in two adjectives? Some things never change, I think. And I type:
—Some things never change.
Like your effect on me.
—Things slow at work today, are they?
Not at all. Give me an adjective.
—Titillated.
Hungry.
—Anticipating. (Is that an adjective?)
I’ll allow it.
Throbbing.
What will you wear?
—Clothes.
Not for long.
—public place
Good.
—overselling?
Ha.
‘Jane?’ It’s Marie. ‘Cassandra, waving at you madly.’
I drop the phone into my purse and leave the cafeteria. Behind me, Nicola is passing around her iPhone, showing screenshots of the rat-fuck bastard’s texts…and naked photos of the girlfriend. I choose not to think about what was involved in transferring these from his phone to hers – oh, fuck, I thought it: did he forward them during their brief ‘we must be open and honest about this if we are to save our marriage’ phase? Did she forward them to herself during the following, and still ongoing, ‘I must gather evidence if I am to skin his hide’ period? Why am I thinking about this? – and go to find out what’s up with my children.
Nothing much, as it turns out, but the candle-making isn’t as horridly uninteresting as I thought it might be, and the metal-ornamenting is actually really cool, and Henry and Eddie really want me to go with them to see the cows, so I stay with them for the rest of pioneer Christmas. And then back into our minivan. And home, with Marie and her crew of two on our heels.
Marie’s anxious.
‘Are you sure this is OK?’ she asks for the umpteenth time as she follows her kids into the house.
‘Jeezus, woman, if it wasn’t, I’d have said so when you asked me,’ I chastise. ‘Besides, four kids, six kids, not much difference. How much louder or messier can they be? I’m going to run them up the hill, get them to sled, and if I decide I want to kill them, I’ll make them watch Minecraft videos on YouTube. It’s all good. Go.’
‘Let me just get their lunch things into the kitchen,’ she says. She follows me into the kitchen, puts down the bag on the table.
Sits down.
Marie is my first, and sometimes I think only, adult female friend. Those other women – the ones from the school, the neighbourhood, the ones from Alex’s work – I socialise with. Sometimes just endure. Alex says I don’t like women very much, and perhaps he’s right. Still. Motherhood has thrust me fully into a community of women. Playgroups, playdates, playschools. Mom’s nights out. Gymnastics classes, book clubs. Goddamned pioneer Christmas field trips.
They would all be, I think, barely tolerable without Marie. And I have come to love Marie in all her facets, even her most annoying ones. One of these facets, so very, I think, feminine, and the one I enjoy the least, is that she confides in me. Constantly. She tells me of the rough patches in her marriage, the on-again-off-again online flirtation with her old flames, her secret hope – or fear – that one day this flirtation, or another, might become something else, something bigger, her immense guilt over those feelings when her marriage survives its rough patches and moves into harmony.
Because she confides – constantly, constantly, constantly – I know more about the intimacies of her marriage than I really want to. I know that when JP ‘wants to get laid’ (that’s how Marie always puts it), he turns on the charm and has even been known to unload the dishwasher. I know that, in contrast to his rather unpleasant living-room demeanour, in the bedroom he is a considerate and gentle lover – ‘the king of foreplay’. I know that he prefers to be on top – or sideways – and thinks doggie-style’s undignified. I know he gets a great deal of satisfaction from taking Marie from orgasm to orgasm. I know he doesn’t really like to give oral, his overall love of foreplay notwithstanding. In fact, he fakes it – ‘with wet fingers and slurping noises,’ Marie reports. How he thinks any woman can’t tell the difference between a finger and a tongue, I don’t know. Marie, apparently, has never called him on it. He spends a great deal of time on her boobs, and wanted her to get a boob-tightening job after she weaned their youngest to ‘get them back the way they’re supposed to be’.
I also know he prefers straight missionary vaginal sex to the best blowjob, and long stretches of abstinence followed by mara-fuck-athons to seize-the-moment quickies.
I also know, although Marie’s never put it like this, that the major problem with JP and Marie’s marriage is that JP is a wanker and treats her like shit on a daily basis.
And I also know that Marie thinks they don’t fuck enough. Whether JP’s satisfied with the situation as it is, I don’t know – I go out of my way to not talk to him, or to be in the same physical space with him. But Marie…oh, Marie wants to fuck more.
She tells me this all the time.
I suppose that’s the other reason – surely, the first must be that JP is a wanker and treats her like shit – behind her obsession with and pursuit of faux affairs.
About which she tells me all as well.
I accept Marie’s confidences as a sign of our friendship; sometimes I even enjoy them, because she tells a good story. She does not look to
