Page 86 of We All Live Here
“It’s not actually you,” she stutters.
“He told me he got engaged after his girlfriend scrawled ‘Do it or forget it’ on his windscreen.” He looks up at her. “No? Who is it, then?We rolled around on the floor of the workshop until we were covered with sawdust and wood shavings…”
She feels as if her entire body has turned to ice.
“So you were just using me for…material?”
She shakes her head dumbly.
“But thisisfor your book, right? The one about rebuilding your life? This is a chapter of your book.”
She doesn’t speak. She cannot move. It is as if all the muscles in her body have liquefied. He is tapping his finger on the typewritten pages. “I told you everything. Everything I’d been through. And you have taken the night we spent together and just—just vomited it out into something you’re going to sell?”
“I—I can change the details. I—”
“Who the hellareyou, Lila?”
He looks at her with an expression she hasn’t seen before. It is, she realizes, something like revulsion.
“You told me you didn’t want a relationship because you were dealing with a load of stuff. I thought you just needed time. I got that. I thought I’d sit back and wait for the clouds to clear and see how it went. I actually thought you were a really nice person. Just a nice, honest person who was coping with a lot.”
He puts the pile of papers on the hall table and gives a bewildered shake of his head.
“Turns out I’m still a really shit judge of character.” He walks to the front door and stops on the threshold. He turns, takes a breath, like someone struggling to control himself. “You know what? Irina was a terrible, terrible girlfriend. But at least she never pretended to be anything else.” He gives her one last scathing look, and walks out of the front door.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Lila has been unprepared for how shaken she would be by Jensen’s reaction, this new version of him who finds her abhorrent, someone he no longer recognizes. She hadn’t realized how much she’d enjoyed having his benign presence around until it was gone. She finds it impossible to work on the book. Even the garden feels tainted—an immaculate green rebuke. Every time she sits down she hears his voice:Whoareyou, Lila?
It has become impossibly clear to her. How on earth had she thought she could write about her life in this way, without considering the impact on the people around her? She remembers Celie’s pointed questions at the pizza restaurant, her niggle of anxiety about how the girls would react to her stories. She hadn’t even considered Jensen’s feelings.
Eleanor, on their dog walk, pulls the kind of face that suggests his reaction is no surprise, which doesn’t make her feel any better. “You’re going to have to talk to your publishers,” she says, when Lila recounts the awful day.
“Without all the sexy stuff they’ll cancel the contract. And then I’ll have no money.”
“But you’re going to have to lose that chapter whatever you do. You can’t possibly go ahead with it. Not after this.”
Lila’s head drops into her hands. “Bloody hell, El. Do you think I’m a shitty person?”
“No. You’re a person who was in a mess and maybe lost sight of something.” Eleanor stops and puts a hand on her arm. “Though I had been wondering, Lils, how you’d feel when some of that stuff was published. It’s quite exposing, writing about your sex life. And I’m not sure you’re in the right place—or even that you’re the right person—to deal with that. Do you really want to be that person anyway? Selling your intimate life for money? It was one thing when you were writing about how to rescue a marriage—I can see that has value. But writing about your sex life—isn’t that just encouraging a kind of voyeurism? Opening yourself up to all sorts of judgment?”
“Says the woman who has spent the last eighteen months—”
“I know. I know. But me going to those parties didn’t affect anyone except me. And nobody knew who I was. It’s not something that’ll follow me around forever.”
Lila cannot talk anymore. So Eleanor talks, in the way that old friends do when they understand the particular depth of the pit you’re in. Eleanor has taken up salsa dancing. She goes to a place in Waterloo full of exotically dressed old men who want nothing more than to sling her around a dance floor. She has also started going for weekly massages, so that she can, as she puts it, stay connected to her body. “Only middle-aged women masseurs. Really strong ones who aren’t afraid to get their elbows in. Honestly, I feel great afterward and it costs a lot less than the sex parties once you factor in the sex gear and talcum powder. You should try it.”
“I can’t afford it,” Lila says.
•••
One of Francesca’sgolden rules was that if you were sunk in despondency you should move your body.Do something, darling. Go for a walk or empty a wardrobe or dig something in the garden. Whatever gets you out of your head and into your body. Lila has now stared at her screen for an hour and forty minutes and all she has achieved is to sink further and further into melancholy. When she is not melancholy, she is jittery, her brain refusing to be still long enough for her to focus on her work. Every time she reads what she has written she is flooded with shame, the angry voices of future readers.
Whoareyou, Lila?
It has turned cold, as if winter has arrived overnight, and the garden has felt chill and unwelcoming even without the drop in temperature so she decides to organize the house. Gene has brought back three large cardboard boxes from Jane’s house and, being Gene, has simply left them in the hall “because there’s no space for them in my room.” That there is definitely no space for them in the hall either is unacknowledged. As is the fact that he is now referring to “my room.” Between Gene’s extra stuff, and the never-ending exodus of things from Bill’s bungalow, Lila feels like her house has started to resemble one of those eccentric junk shops where a moose’s head sits on a chamber pot and the shelves are full of books that nobody will ever read.
She will clear some things from the attic. Gene’s boxes can go up there. If nothing else she can create some space in the hallway, and at least then she can feel as if she has achieved something. She is coming downstairs when she passes Bill on his way up. He has had a new haircut and looks oddly vulnerable and shorn. He is carrying a newspaper under his arm and in his right hand holds a tray with two cups of tea. Penelope is behind him. Lila wonders briefly if they are going to drink tea in bed.
