Page 90 of The Elements

I ordered more drinks and went to the bathroom, looking myself in the mirror and throwing some water on my face.

Although I was only in my twenties, so was still a young man, I couldn’t help but think that this is how it must feel to be young, an experience that seemed to have passed me by.

The only real difference, after all, between me and a fifteen-year-old virgin going on his first date was that when a kid that age was trying to impress a girl, he didn’t usually have his wife sitting between them.

When I returned to the table, Furia and Rebecca were locked in conversation, and for a time it felt as if they weren’t even aware of my presence.

“Have you been on a plane that Rebecca has flown?” asked Furia, turning to me eventually, and I shook my head.

“Not yet, no,” I said. “When she’s away, I’m home with Emmet.”

“And would you trust her?”

“Well, she’s a terrible driver,” I said. “So I’m not sure.”

“No I’m not,” said Rebecca, frowning.

“You are.”

“You’ve never said that before.”

“Sparing your feelings.”

“I’m a perfectly safe driver,” she insisted, turning to Furia.

“Try being her passenger.”

“I don’t know why you’re saying this. It’s simply not true.”

“Relax,” I told her. “I’m just teasing.”

“Well, stop. I don’t like it.”

There’s nothing more uncomfortable than couples arguing in public so I bit my tongue, particularly as I couldn’t quite understand why I was saying something that was actually completely untrue.

The evening ended soon after and, true to form, Rebecca and I, on the verge of a row, went to bed without exchanging another word.

A week later, I contrived to be near the University of Sydney and met Furia as she was coming out of a seminar.

I pretended that this was a chance encounter before inviting her for a drink.

We went to a bar in Redfern where the sun bore down as we sat beneath canopies in a beer garden, sunglasses on so we didn’t have to read each other’s eyes.

We talked for a long time, quite intimately, and then:

“Can I ask, what happened to you?” she asked me in a cautious, gentle tone.

“How do you mean?”

“You have a…” She thought about it, searching for the right phrase.

“You have a sadness inside you, Aaron. I saw it the night we met at Jake’s birthday party.

And—I don’t mean to be rude, it’s not a criticism—but an emotional immaturity.

You look younger than your years too, which is odd. It’s like you’re stunted in some way.”

The phrase hit home. I was still the awkward boy approaching Freya after she explained the benefits of a career in medicine to my school group, telling me that if I was interested in learning more about her profession, then she had some introductory textbooks in her apartment that she could loan me, and I could come home with her and borrow them.

“Something happened to me,” I told her carefully. “Years ago now. I was just a kid at the time.”

“Something sexual, I assume?”

“Yes.”

“At the hands of a man?”

“No, a woman.”

She sat back and nodded, considering this.

“That’s unusual,” she said.

“It’s actually more common than you might imagine. No one talks about it, except to joke about it.”

“Do you want to tell me more?”

I shook my head. “Another time, perhaps. When we get to know each other better.”

“Isn’t this exactly how we get to know each other better?” she asked. “By talking about things like this?”

“Honestly, it’s too sad a story. And this is too beautiful a day. I’d prefer to just sit here with you and not sing any sad songs.”

“Tell me about Rebecca, then.”

“What would you like to know?”

“Are you happy with her?”

My vacillation probably said it all. I simply couldn’t think of a truthful answer to the question.

“She’s very beautiful,” she said eventually.

“She is,” I agreed.

“And smart.”

“Yes. But—”

“But what?”

“I don’t want to frighten you away by saying something too intimate.”

“I don’t mean to pry. Don’t say anything that makes you uncomfortable.”

“She doesn’t love me,” I said immediately, expressing something aloud that I had always known but never had the courage to admit aloud. “And I don’t think she ever has. I don’t think she knows what love is.”

“Men always say things like that,” she said, sighing, and I worried that I was disappointing her by sounding like a clich é . “It’s always the woman’s fault.”

“No, I didn’t mean—”

“It’s OK.”

She turned away. A young couple was walking down the street hand in hand, the reverse of us in that the boy was black and the girl was white, he with his head thrown back in laughter at something she was saying.

“Why would you say such a thing about your own wife?” she asked.

“Too,” I said.

“Too? I don’t understand.”

“I say I love you , but she says I love you too . It’s never the other way around. She never initiates it.”

“Perhaps she thinks it goes unsaid.”

“It should never go unsaid.”

“Do you still sleep together?”

“That’s all we do,” I told her, laughing bitterly. “Sleep together. Physical intimacy has never been much of a thing between us.”

“How come? You’re hot. She’s hot.”

I felt thrilled by the compliment.

“She makes me feel worthless,” I continued, uncertain why I was opening up like this.

Did I want her to pity me? To take me home to her apartment and fuck me?

“Ugly. Unattractive. Unworthy. I’m still a young man, Freya.

I want someone to look at me and want me.

Why shouldn’t I have that? Others do. You must get it all the time.

Why shouldn’t I have that? What’s wrong with me? ”

“Furia,” she said.

“What?”

“You called me Freya.”

“No I didn’t.”

“You did.”

Trying to read her mind, I wondered whether she was looking into the future, at what might happen between us in a week, a month, a year, ten years, if this connection grew deeper and she became the catalyst for the end of my marriage.

Whether she was imagining what it might be like to be naked with me, as I was imagining what it might be like to be naked with her.

I stretched my arm out, leaving a hand on the table, hoping that she would give me some signal, place hers atop mine as she had after the concert.

She seemed to be considering it, because she stared at it for a long time before deciding against. Perhaps, when Rebecca had been present, it had felt like an inconsequential act whereas here, with just the two of us present, it would take on greater significance.

Or perhaps it was because it was my left hand, and my wedding ring was visible on my fourth finger.

“Be honest with me, Aaron,” she said. “Because whatever is going to happen next depends on the answer to this question. Do you believe that you and Rebecca have a future together? Do you want one?”

I took a long time to answer. I could physically feel my heart beating in my chest. The fact that she was even considering being with me made me hard.

But I couldn’t answer. I failed in this crucial moment and, after a minute or two of silence, she looked away, raised a hand to the waiter, and asked for the bill.

As usual, I simply didn’t know how to behave.

As we left, however, I took hold of her arm and asked her why she had asked me that question. She took off her sunglasses and looked directly at me.

“Because I don’t want to be responsible for breaking up a marriage if there’s a chance it can survive. Or if it should survive.”

I took a chance.

“It can’t. It won’t,” I told her. “You want to know something? The night before we got married, Rebecca’s mother said something to me that I’ve never forgotten.”

“What was it?”

“She said, don’t marry her. You’re a fool if you do.”

“Her own mother said that?”

I nodded.

“Wow,” she replied. “That explains a lot.”

“Does it?” I asked. “What does it explain?”

She shook her head and said that we’d talked enough for one day, that she had some thinking to do, and before I could remonstrate with her and ask could we move on somewhere else, a taxi passed, she raised her hand, hailed it, and was gone.

We didn’t see each other for some weeks after that but began exchanging text messages.

These were not casual messages but were almost always about the status of Rebecca’s and my relationship.

Whether we were getting on better, spending time together, having sex.

I began to worry that Furia was using me, or us, as research for a novel she was writing, but I didn’t want to challenge her in case it led to her cutting me off.

What’s happening with us? I asked in one late-night text, and although I could see that she had read it immediately, it took her more than an hour to reply.

I’m worried that I’m going to hurt you, she replied eventually. And you’ve been hurt enough already.

I’m willing to risk it.

Finally, one night, racked with desire, I showed up at her apartment building, pressing the buzzer to tell her that I was downstairs. Rather than inviting me up, however, she took the lift down to the lobby, looking both angry at my intrusion and also rather anxious.

“You can’t just show up here like this,” she told me.

“I needed to see you.”

She glanced around, and a thought—a terrible thought—occurred to me.

“Do you have someone upstairs?” I asked. She shook her head, but I could tell that she was lying and felt almost sick with jealousy. “You do, don’t you?”

“Fine. I do. I have a life, you know. And I don’t answer to you.”

“So much for having sworn off men. You never said there was anyone else in the picture,” I said, furious with myself to hear the obvious emotion in my voice.

“You never asked. I don’t know if you realize it, Aaron, but all we ever talk about is you. Your life. Your marriage. Your son. Your career. Your past. Your pain. We never talk about me at all. You never ask.”

“That’s not true,” I insisted, surprised that this was how she saw me.

“It is,” she insisted. “You tell me all the things that are wrong with your relationship, but you never talk to Rebecca about it. You speak to me like I’m your therapist.”

“I speak to you like someone I’m in love with.”

She reared back at this, looking shocked, which astonished me. She couldn’t possibly have been surprised by this.

“Aaron, you barely know me.”

“But I want to. I mean it. I’m in love with you.”

“Oh for God’s sake.”

“You’re all I think about.”

She shook her head, looking pissed off, which, in turn, pissed me off.

“Are you writing about me?” I asked angrily. “About us? Is that what this has all been about?”

“No,” she said, wrapping her arms around her body defensively.

“Then just tell me. I don’t understand what it is that you want from me.”

“I don’t want anything.”

“Then what has all this been about?”

“All of what?” she asked, raising her voice angrily.

“This,” I said in exasperation, looking around as if the lobby of her building was the ground floor of our private home. “Everything that we’ve built between us.”

“We’ve built nothing between us, Aaron. I told you early on that I’m not interested in men anymore. That I’m sick to death of men and their fucking bullshit. Bullshit like this. I want something different.”

“Then why do we meet? Why do we text? You say all I ever talk about is me and the state of my marriage, but that’s all you seem to be interested in, as if you’ve been trying to decide whether or not you should be the person who comes between Rebecca and me.”

“That is what I’ve been trying to decide,” she said.

“I don’t understand,” I said, utterly baffled, because she seemed to be contradicting herself at every turn.

“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. And I’ve realized that I should. You’re not right for each other. You’re not. You’ll never make each other happy. And you’re both too young to be living such loveless lives. You both need more.”

“So you are interested, then?” I asked.

“In what?”

“In me.”

She buried her head in her hands and groaned loudly before looking back at me.

“No, Aaron, I’m not. For one thing, you’ve lied to me.”

I took a step back, a chill spreading across my body.

“What have I lied about?”

“Do I need to spell it out?”

I stared at her. I knew what she was referring to but couldn’t bring myself to admit it. And my mind was spinning as I tried to understand how she could possibly know.

“You’re a kind man, Aaron,” she continued. “A decent man. And I have nothing but sympathy for what you’ve been through. But I’m not interested in you in a romantic sense and that’s never going to change. The truth is, I’m in love with someone else.”

I felt as if I was about to stop breathing.

“So all of this has been for nothing?” I asked. “You’ve just been leading me on?”

“I’ve been leading you absolutely nowhere. You’ve just been walking behind me all this time, trying to keep up, and you haven’t seen what’s been staring you in the face.”

Before I could say anything more, the bell above the elevator sounded and the doors opened. Emerging barefoot, wearing only a pair of denim shorts and a T-shirt, a figure emerged, looking from me to Furia and back again.

My brain couldn’t immediately comprehend how this person was here. Or why. It simply didn’t make any sense.

Furia turned around, saw her, and looked down at the floor.

“I’m sorry,” said Rebecca, looking almost relieved that the truth had finally been revealed. “This wasn’t how either of us wanted you to find out.”