Page 92 of Someone Else's Shoes
Something in her tone makes him glance sideways at her. His collar is turned up and he is wearing a beanie hat pulled low over his ears, which glistens with tiny drops of rain. Away from the strip lights of the kitchen his skin is less pale and the odd curl of caramel-coloured hair is whipped back on his forehead. ‘Why are you so uncomfortable? With someone helping you?’
‘I don’t know.’ She rubs her nose. ‘I don’t like charity. And it’s kind of hard having people do stuff for you when you have nothing to give back.’ She steps neatly sideways to avoid a pavement cyclist. ‘I guess most of my other friendships were … transactional. I get you into this party. You get me onto this list. I get your husband access to my husband. We go on holiday together to your amazing house on Lake Como or at Calabasas or whatever. I buy expensive clothes from you. You make me look great and drop everything to accompany me to events that my husband can’t come to.’
‘Those aren’t friendships.’
‘Isn’t everything transactional, though, when you think about it?’ she wonders aloud. ‘Most marriages are, even if it’s just “I look after you and bear you children and in return you look after me financially”? Or “I keep myself pretty and give you lots of sex so that you don’t look at anyone else”?’
He turns and stops. ‘That’s how you view marriage?’
She stammers slightly. ‘Well – everything’s a variation of that, right? All human relationships are transactional in some sense.’
She thinks then of Juliana. Who wasn’t transactional. Aleks raises his eyebrows but doesn’t say anything and after a moment she finds she is filling the silence.
‘I mean, look, even friendship. You listen to my problems, I listen to yours. You are loyal and make me feel good, andI’m loyal and make you feel good in return. That’s a form of transaction, even if it is prettier, right?’
He doesn’t seem convinced. ‘What about genuine warmth? Love? The desire to do something because you care about someone else?’
‘Well, that, too. Of course. I mean … I probably wasn’t expressing myself very well.’ She feels awkward, wrong-footed, as if she has revealed something she didn’t mean to expose.
He stops at a crossing. She feels his eyes on her and makes sure she looks straight ahead. She thinks he is about to criticize her, say something else about the way she views relationships, but when the lights change, he says, ‘You look different today.’
Her hand goes to her head. ‘Ugh. I know. My hair needs cutting and I only have mascara –’
‘No. You don’t need lots of makeup. You look … beautiful. Happier.’
She bristles slightly in her jacket. ‘I don’t know why. I have absolutely nothing to my name right now.’
‘You have self-respect. You have friends. You have satisfaction every day, of a job well done. You have agency over your own life. These are not small things.’
‘Do you never give yourself a day off from this Hallmark stuff?’
He grins. ‘No.’
She walks for a few strides in silence. Then she says, in a small voice, ‘I don’t have my son.’
He stops.
‘Honestly – I’m happy for around fifteen minutes and then I remember I don’t have my son. He’s been alone for so long. His dad – his dad thinks he …’ She swallows and takes abreath. ‘The thing is, Ray – my son – he’s had some emotional issues – probably because he’s spent so much time without his parents being around.’
Her gaze flickers sideways. Aleks’s head is dipped, as if he is listening. ‘Ray is just … he’s the greatest kid. Really. If you met him you’d get him, I know it. He’s smart, and funny, and gorgeous, and kind … He knows things – he knows all sorts of stuff I never knew. He’s really good on people. He understands them. But his dad seems to see Ray’s sensitivity and – I don’t know – his sexual orientation as some kind of negative reflection on him. Carl is, like, a caveman. The kind of guy who believes men can only be straight, tough and macho. He hasn’t allowed Ray to travel with us for ages, not for the last couple of years. There was … there was an incident a while back. Ray had a bad break-up – first love, you know? – and there was some bullying in his last school and that and all the issues with his dad kind of came to a head. It’s hard enough being fifteen at the best of times, right? But Ray, he – he kind of hit rock bottom. And that to Carl was like – well, it was like the final straw. He saw it as weakness. He cannot abide what he sees as weakness.’
She still cannot even say the thing, theincident, as they called it, for months afterwards, before Carl stopped allowing any mention of it at all. The trip in the ambulance, the stomach pump, the hushed warnings to keep all sharp objects and medications locked away for the foreseeable future. She cannot look at Aleks’s face as she speaks. The words are tumbling out of her now, heedless of the enormous lump in her throat, and they keep coming. She is oblivious to the rain, and the cold, and the stationary cars pumping lead into the air beside the traffic island. For the first time in her life she cannot stop talking. She realizes Aleks has taken her hand.
‘It was scary. Really scary. And Ray went to a residential facility – a school for kids who have issues, you know? It’s very good. Lots of psychiatrists and special doctors and activities to help kids through it. I mean it comes highly recommended, this place. Super-expensive. Half of Fifth Avenue’s kids have been through its gates, the kind of exclusive thing that the families don’t admit to but people whisper about. And I didn’t want to leave him. I didn’t. I agreed because I thought maybe that was going to be the best thing for him. What do I know about good parenting? I come from a long line of fuck-ups. I’m not even very good at friendships. I thought if he went there he wouldn’t have to cope with Carl’s rejection every day, his moods. I thought maybe I could gradually soften Carl, bring him round, make him see how great his son is. But Carl didn’t even want to talk about him once he’d gone. He just wouldn’t talk about him. When he realized he wasn’t going to benotgay, it was like Ray died for him. And then life got really complicated and I guess I took my eye off the ball. I was so busy, and travelling so much, and struggling to keep me and Carl on track.
‘I thought we were going through a patch, you know? Maybe a mid-life crisis or something. I’ve seen so many marriages fall apart and I thought I needed to stick by him, to work through it. I thought that would give Ray stability. I thought it would … give … Ray … stability.’
She stops, as a babbling group of schoolchildren feed past them in a moving snake, the teacher holding a red stick aloft. She watches as they cross the road, then gives a tiny shake of her head.
‘You know what? That wasn’t it. That was just what I told myself. I’m going to say something terrible to you. So terrible. You probably won’t want to hang out with me any more when you hear it.’
He is still holding her hand, but he has now wrapped both of his around it.
‘If I’m honest, I guess I didn’t want my life as it was to stop. I wanted Ray’s problems to just go away. I didn’t feel like I could deal with it all. I wanted to live the life I had carved out, you know? It had already cost me so much. I was afraid that if I lost Carl I would end up where I’d started. I’d be that sad, powerless little person again. So I kept hoping they could fix my family. They could fix Ray.
‘I called him every day. I mean I always call every day. But I see clearly now – it’s Carl who needs to be fixed. And that what Ray really needed … was just me. I feel so bad because he just needed me. And now because of all this I can’t – I can’t even get to him.’
She sees him gazing at her, his eyes soft. ‘Pretty crappy mom, huh?’
