Page 63 of We All Live Here
“You must be giving off pheromones! You’re every middle-aged woman’s fantasy!” Anoushka always speaks in exclamation marks, but today they’re extra emphatic. “You must tell me your secrets! Rupert has been the most dreadful bore this year. It’s like all he wants to do is sit on the sofa and watchThe Repair Shopevery night. I need to be rolling aroundin a workshop being filthy with some gorgeous stranger! You need to include a how-to guide in your manuscript!”
“So,” Lila drags her attention back to the call, “what do you think they’ll offer?”
“I’ve told them if they want a pre-empt it’s got to be a good six figures. And she didn’t balk. So let’s wait and see. But I have high hopes. High hopes!”
Anoushka rings off and Lila walks home in a daze. It takes her two streets to realize that the unfamiliar feeling she is flooded with is hope.
•••
That night, afterthe girls have gone to bed (or after Violet has gone to bed: she has no idea how late Celie stays up in her room), she watches an episode ofLa Familia Esperanza. Estella Esperanza is being pursued by a younger man, the gorgeous doctor who treated her bullet wound from two episodes previously. His expressions of love are ardent, and he seems to understand the deep conflict within her. But she doesn’t take him seriously, locked as she is onto the memory of her husband, her obsession with separating him from his younger lover. Lila, who is eating a packet of shortbread biscuits in lieu of dinner, takes a short breath as the doctor lifts Estella’s hand to his mouth, flooded again with the feel of Gabriel’s lips on her palm, the strange, erotic certainty of the gesture. Estella pulls away her hand, furious and vulnerable, and says something in rapid-fire Spanish that is subtitled:You make too many assumptions! Don’t touch me!
Lila stares at the screen, then looks down at her phone. She types:Really loved seeing you today. Let’s do it again soon x
It makes her blush even to type it. She waits a few minutes, but he doesn’t answer. There are no pulsing dots suggesting a carefully crafted reply, nothing. Her message disappears into cyberspace and hangs somewhere in the ether. Don’t overthink it, she tells herself, as she feels herpost-date high start to plummet. He’s a busy man. And he was clearly having a bad evening. She wonders, briefly, if she should be a more high-drama kind of woman. Whether that would make men respond to her, make her absence an unforgettable hole in their lives.
And then her phone buzzes.
Me too, Bellissima. See you very soonx
Chapter Twenty-two
Gene has won two roles. The first is a straightforward toothpaste advert: a day’s filming in which he mostly just has to show off his impressive dental work. Apparently the selection of older English actors he was up against had teeth like yellowed fence posts. He is also to be an elderly businessman visiting from New York in a well-funded period drama and has so far spent a week “in character,” harrumphing gently at the dinner table and pontificating about the dreadful charlatans of Wall Street. His two lines have required endless rehearsal, and from any point in the house one might at any given moment hear the carefully projected words “But, Mr. Arbuthnot, if one owns a shipping line then one is guaranteed a lifetime of security. Can you really say that about Dow’s list of stocks?” spoken in an infinite variety of ways, with the emphasis placed variously onguaranteed,lifetime, andstocks. Violet can now repeat the lines verbatim, and has taken to muttering them under her breath while watching television or brushing her teeth. Truant has been triggered by an over-emphatic shouted recitation of thesecond line and now grumbles audibly whenever Gene starts speaking. It is one day’s filming, at a stately home in Oxfordshire, and Gene has rarely been more cheerful.
“They pay well, honey,” he says to Lila. “I’m going to be able to give you some rent! And, you never know, if I make an impression in this drama it could be a recurring part.”
She should be pleased for him. But while she accepts his hugs, and smiles at the latest infinitesimally different performance, she sometimes wonders whether she will ever feel about Gene as one is meant to feel about a father. She can never just see him as he is, because she sees simultaneously the shadow version of him at the same time: the gap in the little gathering of mourners around her mother’s grave, the missing paternal arm around her shoulders when she needed it most.
He has been taking Truant for a walk in the afternoons “so you can focus on your work.” Bill says, with some surprise, that it’s a nice gesture, but all Lila can think is that it’s pure Gene: he cannot bear it if there is one person who does not love him, and if this person happens to be a dog, he will simply charm that dog into submission too.
Eleanor says she should give him a break, he is at least trying, and you cannot hang on to anger forever (apparently at this age it’s terrible for your naso-labial folds) but she still finds herself niggling at him—So when’s the next audition, Gene? Any news on that other job you went for?—all underpinned by what she actually wants to say, which isWhen are you going to leave again?
She stands at the sink, watching as Gene takes advantage of Jensen’s arrival back at work to recite lines at him in the garden. He is now wearing a tweed jacket of Bill’s (he has asked to borrow it) and a cravat, and Jensen is standing in front of him, his hands resting on a metal gardening fork as Gene walks up and down declaiming in what might well have been a statesmanlike manner, had he not been wearing a pair of faded Stars and Stripes Y-fronts underneath the tweed jacket.
“But, Mr. Arbuthnot, if one owns a shipping line then one is guaranteed a lifetime of security…”
Jensen’s eyebrows are raised and he is nodding in an encouraging manner. He seems to have an infinite amount of patience for these old men and their foibles. But, then, he doesn’t have to live with them.
Lila looks back at the washing-up, then at her phone, checking for text messages she may have missed. Gabriel has not suggested another date. When Eleanor had asked about follow-up she had simply said, “Oh, yes, he texted,” with the kind of secretive smile that suggested content that cannot be shared in public. Eleanor had been a bit nonplussed by the whole palm-kissing thing, but as their tastes are clearly very different in the sexual arena just now, Lila isn’t going to worry about that.
Bill, meanwhile, is preparing for his dinner with Penelope Stockbridge. He has changed his mind about the menu three times, eventually settling on sea bass with a fennel and lime salad followed by a lemon parfait pudding. This has required three separate trips to the supermarket as Bill, normally possessed of an ordered mind, has clearly found the idea of a dinner date so discombobulating that he has forgotten vital ingredients, mislaid roasting pans, and lost confidence in his dish choices twice.
“Pal, you could order in two hamburgers for all she’s going to care. She just wants a big ol’ slice of Bill pie, you know what I’m saying?” Gene says laconically, dipping his finger into the parfait and jumping when Bill swats him with a tea-towel.
“I don’t know whether it’s too informal to eat in the kitchen. Is it too informal? Does it suggest a certain lack of finesse?”
“Serve it on a tray in the bedroom,” says Gene, with a lascivious wink, and at that point Lila has to ask him to take Truant for another walk.
He is just leaving, having been reminded twice to put on some trousers, when Jensen appears at the back door. “Hey.”
“Hey!” she says. She is wearing rubber gloves covered with soap bubbles and has to lift her arms to push her hair off her face.
“Just…wanted to say a proper hello. You’re not…the most talkative on text.”
Lila winces internally. He had sent a further two texts in the ten days he had been away and she had been so consumed with thoughts of Gabriel that she had failed to respond to the second and sent a simple cheeryHope you’re having a nice time with your folksto the third.
“Yeah,” she says awkwardly. “Sorry. I’m not really a big texting person.”
He doesn’t seem to mind. He stands on the threshold of the garden door, his boots covered with dirt, his sandy hair awry on one side, like that of a toddler who has just been roused from sleep. “No problem. I just wondered…if maybe you’d like to go out again sometime.”
