Husband Hunters (16 page)

‘I’d better have a shower,’ Simon said, rolling off the bed and pulling his boxer shorts up in one, slick movement. He shut the door after him.

Daniela lay still and wondered what next. Simon was a good guy. She had never thought of him romantically before because of Liz; Liz who he had so eagerly bought a lingerie pattern kit for a few weeks earlier as a gesture of his affection. Dani felt guilty about Liz. But on the other hand, she did seem to make him miserable.

She listened to the hiss of the water and the churn of the pipes as he turned the hot tap on as hard as it would go. After five minutes of water splattering and sloshing, the stream stopped. The exhaust fan started up. She pictured him towelling himself. There was a softer patter of water as the sink tap came on and Dani heard teeth-brushing sounds. There were spits and gargles. A brief pause, and then the door opened and shut. There was silence for a moment. She listened for footsteps. Were they going towards his room or hers? She heard his bedroom door open and then shut. Silence for a few more minutes. Then he spoke.

‘I’m just going to grab some milk,’ he shouted from down the hall.

‘Oh. Okay.’

‘Do you want anything?’

‘Um. No, thanks.’

‘Okay. Bye.’

‘Bye.’

The front door slammed. He didn’t come back for the rest of the day. Dani waited for him through five hours of daytime television and the six o’clock news. She prayed for sleep to relieve her of having to endure her thundering headache, but sleep didn’t come until it was very dark outside.

When she woke up the next morning, she felt better. She leapt out of bed, grateful to be headache free, and trotted down the hall to the bathroom. As she reached for the knob, it turned. The door opened and there was Simon, looking sheepish.

‘Oh, hi,’ she said.

‘I ended up watching the rugby at a mate’s. I wasn’t sure if you were home when I came back,’ he blurted out.

‘Oh, fine, that’s fine. You don’t have to explain.’

He nodded.

‘I’d better go. I’ve got an early job.’

And go he did. Daniela hardly saw him for the rest of the week.

Hi, Clementine. This is Ray. I was sorry you had to cancel dinner last week. I hope you’ve recovered from the tonsillitis. I was wondering if you wanted to re-schedule?

Ray was the third man Clementine had met on the hunt; one of the bachelors from York 64. She paused before replying. It was a chance at something new. An escape hatch.

She slowly typed her response:
Nice to hear from you Ray, but I’m afraid I’m seeing someone. It was lovely to meet you.

Her finger wavered over the send button. She rolled her head back until her neck cracked.

Did she really want to take a gamble on Jason?

Around 8.50am the morning after he had told her about the divorce, her office intercom had buzzed a long, impatient buzz.

‘It’s me,’ he’d said. ‘Can I come up?’

‘Jason, what are you doing here?’ she hissed into the speaker. ‘I have a client due in ten minutes.’ As Clementine spoke, she shrank a little, wary that people might see them; people might guess. She didn’t want her office contaminated by their betrayal. ‘You have to leave.’

There was silence.

She pushed the red button to the box downstairs. ‘Jason? JASON?’ Nothing. Clem went to her window. He wasn’t at the door below. Warily, she reached for the first file she would need for the morning. As she started reading, there was a loud bang on her door.

‘Clementine. Clementine! Open up.’

She rushed over. ‘Shh! Jason, you have to go!’

He kept banging.

She opened the door a crack. He was unshaven and his shirt hadn’t been ironed. His eyes were bleary and his face seemed somehow creased, too, as though it was also in need of an iron.

‘You do believe me, don’t you?’ he had said. ‘I’m leaving. I just need time.’

Clementine let the door open a little more and he pushed his way in. He was carrying a bunch of roses.

‘Pink,’ he held them out to her. ‘I wanted to get red, but the florist said pink meant devotion.’ Clementine had taken the bouquet and buried her nose in its folds.

Now, a week later, they were still in a vase on her desk; their tips dried and curled. She touched them and a few petals broke away and fell onto the desktop.

She looked at the message she’d written to Ray.
I’m seeing someone
. It wasn’t strictly true. She was still a free agent, and could still say yes to someone else. Yes to dinner, yes to a guilt-free romance, yes to a man who didn’t already have a wife.

Images raced through her head likes scenes from a slasher flick: all the broken women who had sat opposite her, twisting sodden tissues as they recounted how they had discovered their husband’s affairs. Clementine balled her fists and dug them into her eye sockets to blot out the sight of them.

She sent the text. While the phone was still in her hand, a birthday message arrived from Melanie:
Happy birthday, Madame Crosley! May all your dreams come true. Yes,
all
of them. You deserve it.

Clem’s face burned with shame. She put her phone into a drawer and slammed it shut.

‘I’ve never seen you be so stern before,’ Jason had said, catching her hand and pulling her to him. ‘The way you walked out of that bar without looking back, you were so proud. So confident. It was sexy.’

Clem had squirmed but he held her tight. She had not been able to forget what he had said, that he hadn’t meant to fall in love.

‘One kiss,’ he’d pleaded. ‘To show me you believe me.’

She turned her face away and focused on the scene outside the window. A woman in a red coat was lugging a pram up the steep Foveaux Street climb. She was fighting against the wind.

‘I can’t break up your marriage,’ Clementine said.

He took her chin in his hands and turned it towards him. ‘It was over long before I met you. I told you that. I just never had a reason to leave.’ His voice was strained. He took her by the shoulders and squared her body with his.

‘Believe me?’ His sounded meek. Clem looked at the ground. He lifted her face gently.

When he kissed her, his large mouth was soft and comforting. She didn’t fight it. She kissed him back, all the while her head repeated: It’s over. It’s over. It’s over. He moved his hands from her arms to her waist, then slid them around her back. She felt him lift her off the ground.

The intercom buzzer buzzed.

‘Oh no,’ Clem whispered, breaking away from Jason’s lips.

‘They can wait,’ he said.

She didn’t have a secretary to tell impatient clients she was running behind. She untangled herself from Jason’s arms and landed with a thud on the carpet.

‘You have to go,’ she said, shoving her shirt — which had become untucked — back into her skirt.

‘Ten more seconds. I’ve missed you’— his breath was short — ‘I’ve missed you so much.’

He eased her against her desk and leaned his weight into her body, tipping her over so she was on her back. Then he ran his hand up her stockinged leg to where a garter belt caught the top of her stay-ups. ‘Oh, my God,’ he breathed.

The buzzer sounded again. It was longer, more insistent this time.

His hand was fiddling with the clip of her garter. She smiled a joyless smile. She only wore garters on two occasions: date night and laundry day, when all of her sensible stockings were in the wash. And here she was, accidentally dressed like a call-girl, in her marriage counsellor’s office with someone else’s husband.

‘You have to go.’ She pushed him off and stood up, pulling down her skirt and straightening her hair. ‘Pretend you’re a client,’ she said.

He gave her a wicked smile. ‘No.’ She pointed to the door. ‘When you leave.’ She sat behind her desk and tried to tidy things up while Jason let himself out.

‘Ms Crosley said to go on in,’ he told her waiting client. Clementine heard him apologise for going over time. ‘It’s just I think we’re about to make a breakthrough.’

Clementine’s phone had been ringing and pinging with birthday messages all day. Each one was like a little poison dart sent to punish her.
May every happiness be yours
…
I hope you get what you want!
…
Birthday salutations to the classiest gal I know!

Will and Rebecca called and put the boys on the phone. They sang a tuneless ‘Happy Birthday’ and made Clementine’s throat tighten with longing. She turned the phone off and pulled out the files for her afternoon clients.

She had three more sessions scheduled for the day, including another new patient —Gordon Carson — who was coming to terms with his wife’s terminal prognosis. He was a father and an accountant who squeezed the session in between work and cooking dinner.

‘We’re seeing someone together, but I want to be able to talk about my fears,’ he said, picking little balls of lint off the knees of his pants.

‘I think that’s very wise.’ Clementine touched his arm. ‘Tell me about her.’

His eyes glimmered. ‘She’s been beating it for six years,’ he said. ‘It started in her breast. We fought it. It came back, so we fought it again. She had double mastectomy and a lifetime of chemo. In November the doctors told us she was in remission. It was the third time. Last month she started having back pain, so we went to our oncologist. You should have seen the results of the scan. Nefarious white blobs all over her body. Her spine, her stomach, her’ — he gasped —’her lungs.’

Clementine shivered. She had seen those white marks before; sinister shadows seared onto the X-ray of a loved one.

‘With treatment the doctors say she has six months. Maybe a year.’

The hour slipped away as they discussed his grief. He continued to de-fleece his pants while unburdening himself. His sadness was underlined by more practical worries, including how he would manage to support his family without his wife’s income. They had hobbled by on sick-leave and insurance payments so far. Clem’s counselling sessions were covered by an employee mental health scheme offered by his workplace.

‘The kids haven’t had new shoes in two years, and at their age they really need them,’ he said.

When he left, Clementine started compiling a list of books she thought would help him and his wife as the disease took hold. Her next client was running late, so she started reading up on the treatment for his wife’s particular cancer and how the coming few months would likely progress for the Carson family. She marvelled at the progress that had been made since she had first waded into this murky area of life.

Then she searched for some literature she could recommend for the children.

Her next client had come and gone before she remembered to conduct her ritualistic phone-scan. She had a missed call and a voice message from Jason. As she dialled to retrieve it, she wondered if he had somehow found out it was her birthday.

They had planned to meet at Quay to ‘talk about the future’ that night. It was exactly one week since he’d come to her office with roses, and she had told him he wasn’t to contact her until they met at the restaurant.

‘I don’t want to be sneaking around,’ she had said, as she had pushed him out the door.

She twisted her mother’s ring as the service retrieved the voice message.

‘Clem’— Jason’s voice didn’t sound like someone delivering a birthday message — ‘I’m afraid I can’t make dinner tonight. Call you over the weekend.’

No.

She played it again. ‘Call you over the weekend.’

No!

With shaking hands she replayed the message one more time. By the end of the third hearing, her breathing had become shallow; she was overcome with the sense that her chest was going to cave into the cavity where her heart had once sat.

‘Fuck,’ she whispered into her empty office. She sent a quick apology to her nanna, explaining that this man was shredding her sanity and ruining her life.

She opened an internet browser and aggressively typed ‘Damon’ ‘Standard and Poor’s’ and ‘Sydney’ into the search engine. She had meant to do this a week ago, but had been blindsided by the sudden rush of affection for Jason after he had charged into her office. That was probably his plan all along, she thought angrily as she pounded the computer keys.

Google came up with several options for Damons in Sydney. Without knowing his last name she had to file through a string of entries that had nothing to do with Standard and Poor’s. Finally she found a LinkedIn profile. Damon Dresner. A familiar face stared back at her. The image was black and white, but her memory of his vivid blue eyes was clear. She instantly felt better. He would tell her the truth. There was a heroism to his good looks. His features were strong. He had a cleft chin, high cheek bones and Roman nose. His blond hair was thick and worn in a slightly dated style. It swept across his brow like Robert Redford’s patriotic fringe in
All The President’s Men
. Next to the photo was a contact number. She reached for her phone and dialled.

‘Hi, Damon. It’s Clementine Crosley.’

‘Hello there!’ He sounded surprised but friendly.

‘How are you?’

‘Good, I’m good. How are you?’

‘I’m good also.’ There was a pause while Clementine calculated how to raise the topic of his best friend’s infidelity — something she should have done before dialling.

Damon spoke.

‘This isn’t a social call, is it?’

‘No. I’m sorry to bother you at work, it’s just … I just wanted to ask, well … I’m not the first, am I?’

‘Not the first …?’

‘You know.’ There was another long pause. Clementine felt she already knew the answer.

‘Umm. Well …’

Clementine twisted her ring, thinking, sorry, Nanna, but fuck-fuck-fuck.

‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have bothered you,’ she said hastily.

‘Clementine, I don’t know what to say. I’ve known Jason a long time. He’s a mate. My best mate. But he has always had a wandering eye.’

She wanted to ask Damon if she could trust Jason, but she knew she had already gone too far in calling. She felt stupid and weak.

‘It’s my birthday,’ she blurted, as if this offered some explanation. In a way perhaps it did. She wasn’t twenty-five any more. She could no longer end a relationship because the guy’s nose whistled when he ate, and think, there’s plenty of time to find a man with a quiet nose. All of the men with quiet noses were married now.

‘Happy birthday.’ His voice was warm.

‘Thanks. I should go. I’m sorry to have bothered you.’

‘It’s okay.’

‘I’d better go.’ Clementine hung up, stinging with embarrassment.

There was a knock at the door.

‘Clem.’ Tess, another psychologist who rented an office down the hall, stuck her head around the door. ‘Can you help me? It happened again.’ Tess had somehow set her internet browser to Urdu, and everything was coming up in a squiggly, illegible text.

After they found the command to change it back to English, Clementine returned to her office. Daniela and Annabel were there, standing around a cake with brilliant smiles on their faces. Three balloons were tied to Clementine’s chair.

‘Happy birthday!’ they yodelled.

‘How did you know?’ She hugged each of them and then Tess, who was standing behind her looking pleased.

‘Dani remembered your high-school parties,’ said Annabel.

‘It’s the same day as my pa’s,’ Daniela said. ‘I’ll never forget how great your eighteenth and twenty-first parties sounded when everybody else was talking about them. Both times I had to go to family dinners — I was devastated.’

‘I wish I had organised a dinner or something,’ said Annabel. ‘Are you doing anything tonight?’

Clementine thought about telling them everything, about Jason and what Damon had just revealed, but she bit her tongue.

‘I did have dinner plans with someone, but something came up at the last minute.’

‘Oh.’ Annabel pulled a sorrowful face. ‘Shall we go out?’

‘No, no,’ Clem said. ‘I think I’m just going to write it off and officially start my thirty-fifth year tomorrow.’