What You Will

‘But you did say he was angry?’

‘Not at first. I mean – well, I don’t remember his face. Or – I didn’t look at it. At first he just didn’t believe me. And then when he started to take it in, he thought it was just a re-entry thing. That I’d gone skittish or gotten self-conscious. He was saying things like, Do you want to maybe take a shower.’

‘You mean because you didn’t really kiss him when you first came in?’

Hilary went red. ‘Oh, but Christ, I couldn’t kiss him, Gwen!’ Then she laughed. ‘My clothes stank, though. God, you think that’s what he meant? And I was thinking how I must seem like – such a bitch. Cold – and – but it’s true. I was.’

‘And the champagne?’

‘That was so terrible. A bottle of Dom Pérignon. The whole fiancé thing. And you know that he’s not really like that, Gwen. He’s much more beer and Chinese noodles. There were roses, too, in this tippy glass vase on the coffee table. Those dark red kind, like rolled-up bundles of velvet, on long, long stems. They looked completely ghastly. They were studded with thorns. And they had no scent; those waxy petals, nothing at all on your nose when you try to smell them. I guess he even bought the vase. Things he’d never done, never thought of. The apartment was bare, as if he’d stuffed all the mess into closets or had cleaners come in. All so contrived. Then he opened the champagne while I was in the bathroom.’

Gwen grimaced. ‘So you had to drink it.’

‘Of course I had to. And it made me think how easy it could have been to slip back into my old life, if I had been polite at first, or pretended a little. If I had let it start to happen between us as if nothing had changed, then – I don’t know.’

‘Nah, come on. You’d just have gotten here tomorrow instead of today.’ Gwen wrapped her fingers around Hilary’s wrist, lifted it gently, dropped it on the scarred top of the oak table, lifted it and dropped it again, feeling the weight of Hilary’s arm where it swelled towards the elbow, studying the flicker of the tendons where they disappeared inside Hilary’s pushed-up sleeve. Then she let go, looked up at Hilary again. ‘Don’t you think?’

‘I was scared there was going to be a ring. I kept looking for one of those little boxes, a bulge in a pocket. And I saw myself trapped there with only him for company, starved of something else I wanted. I couldn’t breathe. I knew I couldn’t spend one night there, couldn’t sleep with him even to comfort him. And he was saying that I couldn’t expect him to swear off me all of a sudden like that, after he’d been waiting all summer and looking forward to seeing me. In a way, that was the worst. Basically, he was begging for sex. I think he even had his hands like this.’ She put her palms together as if she were praying. ‘He never asked anything about my summer, about what had happened, or what I felt. So how could sex fit? Where could it come from, in a situation like that?’

Gwen tapped the whiskey bottle, raising her eyebrows at Hilary, but Hilary shook her head.

‘We drank too much, Mark and I, last night. That was part of the problem – the crying and the screaming.’

‘But, hey, you got through a lot of misery in one awful night.’

‘I feel bad for him, Gwen. It was like I’d inflicted this terrible injury. That’s how I keep picturing it – an open wound, bleeding and twitching.’

‘Worse for Mark if you hadn’t found out in time, hon.’ Gwen was casual, like someone who’d seen it all before, lots of times. Then she stooped close across the table and spoke caressingly. ‘It’s bitter to betray someone – anyone – a lover, a friend. But don’t you think when it comes to love and marriage – the lifelong deal, I mean – for that, don’t you have to pay any price? You can’t fake that. And if you want to have children? You did the right thing.’

Hilary was white-faced, dipping her finger in the dregs of her whiskey.

Gwen insisted. ‘You have to leave this with ragged edges, Hil. If he blames you or thinks you’re a shit, then that’s what he needs to do to survive. You have to let him deal with this – without you. Because if you’re dumping Mark, you’re dumping him. The thing is broken. That’s life. It’s painful.’

‘Yeah. Painful.’ Hilary’s voice creaked. Guilt pooled in her eyes. And then she seemed to shoulder it, like a burden. ‘Listen. I know there were big things wrong with me and Mark. We were always part of some gang. Endless room-mates. Then with Eddie, a gang of three. We only ever existed as part of a clique. Never a couple. It was more like being under a spell. I was still in graduate school when the whole thing with Eddie started, and because of him, I never even finished my degree. Mark and I had been around each other for so long that it just seemed like time for something else to happen. The truth is, Paul saved me.’

She paused for a long time, leaned back in her chair. And then at last, she let it out: ‘But man, I could never have pictured Mark’s anger. His eyes turned red – flaming. In all our years together, I had never seen – this – creature in him who didn’t get what he expected. Who couldn’t make me do what he wanted. That was totally scary.’

‘Stay away from him for a while, don’t you think? Till he calms down?’

Hilary sat up. ‘God, I’m stealing you from your bed, and Will’ll be up early needing you.’

Gwen was easy with it. ‘It’s fine. Let’s do the tea, huh?’

Hilary didn’t fight her. ‘Camomile or peppermint or something?’

Gwen switched the kettle back on, took clean mugs from the cupboard, talked with her back to Hilary, flipping labels loose from tea bags, extending their little strings. ‘So what about all your stuff? How are you going to get it out of Mark’s place?’ She launched the soggy tea bags into the sink where they splatted.

‘I don’t have that much. Anyway, where would I put it? I have to get my own place first. You can always buy new stuff. I just need my books from Eddie’s apartment. I miss those.’

Gwen rapped down the two smoking mugs, sat opposite again.

Hilary cupped her hands around one mug and shook her head. ‘Mark didn’t know about Paul, so he blamed Eddie, you know? The stuff he said – aggressive, disgusting stuff. How weird I was to have a thing for an old man. Did I get off on Eddie’s obsession, or was it the power I had over his money? Then shouting at me, “Where the fuck do you think you’re going to go now? You can’t get into his apartment if I don’t give you the key. What are you going to do? Sleep in the warehouse so you can fondle his pots and his lamps and his statues? That’s what you’d really like to do, isn’t it? Sleep with him – with his fucking collection.”’ Hilary’s lips curled back from her teeth, trembled ever so slightly.

‘You think he felt jealous when Eddie was alive?’

‘Maybe there was some power thing with them. Basically Mark never understood what all the excitement was about. Eddie and I just thought he did. He couldn’t see what we saw – about the past. Turns out it made him mad. Made him into a kind of brute – a bully.’

Gwen lifted her mug to her lips, put it down again without drinking from it; there was something in Hilary’s voice, disillusionment, a tone of fuck all. ‘But you don’t think he’d try to derail Eddie’s plans?’

‘He was kind of nuts with his threats, Gwen: “I can stop the whole fucking project. Doro’s dead; he’s buried in a hole in the ground. All that stuff in his apartment and all that stuff in the warehouse is dust and bones. It’s dug up out of graves, stolen from tombs. It belonged to people who died thousands of years ago. What is this with you – dead people, the past? It’s necrophilia, that’s what it’s called. You give me the creeps with your sarcophaguses and your burial monuments and your funeral urns.”’

Gwen squeaked with outrage. ‘But a lawyer – a trusts and estates lawyer – that’s all about people dying, and about them trying to reach into the future with what they want – to exercise their will! I mean the word, “will” – it’s all about enacting what you want from beyond the grave. That’s Mark’s job, it’s what he chose. What’s going on over there in America?’

‘I know! And I said to him, “It’s sarcophagi, by the way”; but, God, I wish I hadn’t! It just infuriated him.’ At last she sipped her tea.

‘Ginger and lemon,’ murmured Gwen, watching her.

‘I like it.’ Hilary took another, longer sip. ‘Up until I said that – “It’s sarcophagi, by the way” – I think there was maybe a chance I could have persuaded Mark to give me back the key to Eddie’s apartment. But somehow that one pedantic little remark changed everything. It seems trivial, but just as I was saying it, I realised that was the point: we weren’t speaking the same language any more. I needed to be with someone who understood what I was doing – so I could remember who I was. All I really wanted was to go to Eddie’s and sit there quietly and collect myself – Well, the thing is I couldn’t ask Mark, could I, because communing with Eddie –?’ Hilary stopped, raised her hands in mock horror.

‘He would have thought you were trying to hold a seance –’ Gwen said.

‘It crossed my mind that I could get the doorman to let me in. There’s one I’m friendly with. But there are all these procedures for access now because of the value of the stuff, and then Mark could accuse me of breaking the rules, and he’d have just what he needed to get me dumped for ever from the project. Imagine thinking that way, about a guy you were going to marry! And by then it was three or four in the morning and I wanted –’

The neglected undercurrent of Paul stirred between them. Gwen acknowledged it by lifting one corner of her mouth, not a smile, but sliding her lips around to the side of her face, making a squeegee sound inside her cheek. ‘Right – you wanted to be with someone who understood why you cared so much about all those antiquities.’

‘I got down into the street with my suitcases, and hailed a cab, and the whole thing just ran away with me. Arriving, departing. What was the name of any hotel, anyway? I felt all beaten up, and yet there was energy bubbling somewhere inside me. It was like I was right in the middle of a sentence with Paul, and I thought, Now I can talk straight to him because I’m free. So I told the cab driver to take me back to the airport.’

‘I still can’t believe you didn’t phone him!’

‘It was crazy. I thought – I imagined – that somehow he knew I was coming – or … I don’t know. Paul and I never used the phone; we always just walked in and saw each other first thing every morning. It felt like such a sure thing. I had his address and I – I was so excited – so impatient – like I was running to his arms. I wanted to amaze him. I thought it would make up for torturing him all summer talking about Mark. I kept remembering that expression on his face, when he put me in the taxi – open to whatever I decided. And this would be my answer, my fabulous, dramatic answer. I thought I was in love, Gwen, that’s the thing.’ Hilary swallowed a sob. ‘God, I’m sorry,’ she said loudly, defying it. ‘I’m so fucking tired.’

Gwen got up from her chair, slipped around the table, kneeled down beside Hilary, put her arms around her. ‘It’s fine. You have to give it time, Hil.’

‘I pounded on his door for ever!’ Hilary groaned. ‘What was I thinking?!’

‘You weren’t thinking, you were feeling.’

‘What was I feeling? None of it was real.’

‘So maybe that’s a problem people have about love. That they want it to feel passionate and impulsive. Maybe you did all this to make it feel like love when it wasn’t. To throw yourself, to jump blind. Maybe you needed the end of the world as you knew it.’

‘Christ, how does anyone ever know?’ Hilary turned her chair with a raw scrape and laid her cheek on Gwen’s hair; tears darkened the fine brown strands and swelled like beads on the flecks of green oil paint stuck to a few. ‘Any normal person would have given up and gone away, realised he wasn’t going to answer, assumed he wasn’t home.’

‘Shhh,’ said Gwen, rocking her gently. ‘It’s just as well he was there so it’s over already. One day you’ll laugh about it.’

‘When he finally opened the door, he was glowing. Hair tousled, no glasses, out of breath a little, giggling – and I still thought it was all for me. That he’d been waiting and hoping. He didn’t have on a shirt, his trousers were only half done up. It’s so embarrassing. I swear. I launched myself across the threshold, into the air, arms outstretched, before I even noticed the other man right behind him. This huge, hairy guy, half naked, twice Paul’s age.’

Gwen shook with laughter. ‘I’m sorry. I know how much it’s hurting you, but you tell it so perfectly, and I see this – tableau.’