Cleo

Exposure

In the face of real danger a cat freezes.

“He made you change your outfit?!” Nicole was trying to control the volume of her laughter, so only half the newsroom could hear.

“He didn’t make me,” I said, giggling, yet already regretting the capacity women have to be mercilessly indiscreet about their intimate encounters with men. Especially when somebody makes a fool of himself. Except this time the personal humiliation involved was mine.

If only I’d been wise enough to have said “fine” when she’d asked how the date went and left it at that. But then she would have suspected serious emotional entanglement, and nothing could be further from the truth. “He just looked mortified, so I offered to change.”

“Seriously? I wouldn’t have bothered.”

The annoying thing was, Nicole would never have to bother. She could walk down the street in her grandmother’s dressing gown and hair rollers and still turn every male head within a square mile.

“And it was a terrible play! There were so many ham actors you could’ve made a pork roast. Honestly, he has no idea…”

“Probably trying to impress you. Did you…did he try to…take things further?”

“Course not!” I said, my face suddenly feeling like it was in a sauna. The kiss was nothing. An aberration best deleted from conversation and memory. “I think he’s just lonely. I won’t be seeing him again, anyway. Too young and boring.”

“Told you so,” said Nicole, her fingers galloping over her keyboard. “Got to get this story in by eleven o’clock, and I haven’t done a word.”

“What would a guy like that want with an old solo mum with two kids, anyway?” I muttered, trying to decipher a notepad of shorthand that had made perfect sense when I’d scribbled down the words of a fading international author the previous week. The jottings now resembled ancient Arabic. “He must have a screw loose.”

“Who?” said Nicole, her attention focused on finding the home number of an elusive television director she needed to interrogate.

“The boy.”

“Oh, the toy boy. Forget him.”

Yes. That’s what he was. Toy boy, an excellent, freshly invented expression with a cleansing ring to it, like mouth wash. With a label like that he could be sealed in cellophane, put in a box and shut away as one of life’s more regrettable experiments.

Tina slid a list of story ideas onto my desk. At the bottom of the list she’d scrawled “Halloween feature. Find some way to make this interesting. We did pumpkins last year. Awful!”

Work. Where would I be without it? There was no better anesthetic.

“Phone call for you, Helen,” Mike, one of the nosier political reporters, shouted across the room. “Some snooty-sounding bloke. It’s come through on my line for some reason. I’ll transfer it to you.”

There’s an art to how a woman journalist answers her phone. She must sound fresh and approachable, in case the caller has a story that has potential to wind up on the cover of Newsweek, which is about as likely as dinosaurs stirring themselves out of their graves and plodding through suburban neighborhoods. And there must also be a Teflon edge to her tone, in case it is a nutter or the Heavy Breather.

“Thank you for last night,” the voice was measured and formal.

“Oh!” I said, stupidly.

Nicole’s fingers froze mid-air over her keyboard. She put her head to one side and whispered, “Who is it?” Her instinct for a story was always spot-on.

I nestled the phone under my chin and mimed “one l” with my fingers.

“I had a great time,” he continued.

Oh God. He was lying. He would’ve had more fun giving blood.

“So did I.”

Nicole rolled her eyes and shook her head at me slowly.

“Sorry the play wasn’t up to scratch,” he said.

“It was fine, honestly…”

Nicole took a pen from her desktop and ran it like an imitation scalpel across her neck.

“I was wondering if you’d like to go out for dinner next weekend?” he asked.

Shock rippled through me and settled on my feet like a pair of leaden shoes.

“I’ve got the kids next weekend,” I said, cool and sensible. Nicole nodded approval and resumed her keyboard tattoo. That was it. Finito. No joy, toy boy.

“What about the following weekend?” he asked.

“Oh!” my lead shoes turned molten hot. “Well, no. I don’t think I’m doing anything.”

Nicole towered over me, the steam from her nostrils almost visible.

“Good. How about seven-thirty Saturday?”

“Sounds good.”

“See you then.”

“Damn!” I muttered, clattering the receiver down.

“Why didn’t you say no?” asked Nicole, my frustrated life coach.

“I don’t know. Couldn’t think of an excuse.”

“Don’t you know ‘no’ is the new ‘yes’? If you say no to something you don’t want to do now it saves you having to go through all sorts of demoralising situations in the future. Do you seriously want to go out with someone who made you change your clothes?”

“What can I do?”

“Call him back a couple of days before the date and say your aunt died and you have to go home to the funeral.”

“Good idea. I’ll do it.”

I didn’t. For several reasons. It never feels good to lie; saying my aunt had died might tempt fate—I was very fond of Aunt Lila; Cleo approved of him and…there wasn’t really a fourth reason, apart from the memory of that extraordinary kiss.

Considering how many awkward and embarrassing things had happened on that first so-called date he was fool enough to sign up for more. He had to be mad. Or special. Or mad in a special way, or the other way around.

I often told the kids that anything’s worth trying if your chances are better than winning Lotto. Yet the possibility of there being more to the toy boy beyond his perfectly groomed surface was almost zero. On the other hand, he’d called my bluff a couple of times. Maybe I’d underestimated him.

Despite Nicole’s assurances there was no future in it, the dinner became the first of many. And I was facing a dilemma. I was beginning to enjoy the company of multifaceted Philip. If our relationship went any further, it could no longer be classified as a one-night stand, even in the loosest terms. After all, the whole point of a one-night stand is it’s impersonal, possibly unsatisfactory, and therefore not worth repeating. Sleeping with him now would be tantamount to disobeying the shrink’s instructions.

Besides which, there were other more uncomfortable matters to consider. A woman who has given birth three times is unwilling if not insane to expose her body, especially if she has avoided the rigors of the gym. “Drop a dress size in one week” diets invariably ended in “gain two sizes a week later.” After the birth of a child the female form arranges itself in mounds and folds that can charitably be described as “interesting” to artists such as Renoir and Rubens. After the birth of three, her body is more or less a Henry Moore sculpture carved in sponge rubber. A young man whose greatest physical imperfection was a subtly crooked nose (due to a rugby injury) had every reason to be warned against the dangers of unraveling acres of unruly womanly flesh. Yet, like Livingstone in search of the source of the Nile, he refused to give up.

I gradually began to understand why queen-size sheets were invented. They’re the Western woman’s equivalent of the Muslim female’s chador. With careful planning, a queen-size sheet can be arranged to cover the entire body and head with just a slit from which the eyes can peer out. “Gosh,” she says, trying to sound offhand as she peers through the slit at the impossibly toned male body, “these sheets have a mind of their own.” The other merciful invention is the light switch. Due to a condition that has afflicted her since childhood, known as Extreme Sensitivity of the Eyes to Artificial Light, it must be switched off. My body was no longer a temple. It was a garden for the blind.

It was during a lull in one of these nonvisual encounters that he invited me to spend a weekend at his family’s holiday cottage on the shores of Lake Taupo. This was starting to sound scarily on the edge of being beyond a several-night stand to something complicated.

“But I’ll have the…”

“Make it one of the weekends you don’t have the kids.”

He’d finally accepted the kids were sacred turf, part of a separate life he was banned from.

“But…there’s no one to look after the cat.”

“Cleo can come along with us, if she doesn’t get carsick.”

I told him Cleo adored riding in cars. So a couple of weeks later on a Friday night after work she jumped eagerly into the old Audi. Perched on my knee, she watched the countryside spinning past. As we headed towards the lake the hills turned gold, then crimson, before drenching themselves in deepest violet.

We arrived at the cottage after dark. The Taupo night wrapped around us like black velvet, making us blind but heighten ing our other senses. The air was heavy with piney smells. There was a spike of distant snow on the breeze. I could hear the intimate lap of waves licking the shore. The outline of the wooden house was plain and modest. Even though I couldn’t see it properly, the place had unmistakable soul. Like a child on a mystery adventure I followed the thread of Philip’s torchlight to a flyscreen door.

“Just a minute,” he said. “There’s a special hiding place for the key.”

He disappeared around the side of the house and emerged with the key soon after. “Here we go,” he said, sliding it in the lock. “Damn!”

“What’s happened?”

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’ve just broken the key.”

“Oh. Is that okay?”

“It’s stuck in the lock.”

“Can’t we break a window?”

“That would set the alarm off.”

“Let’s do it, then.”

“I can’t remember the code.”

We stood for what seemed several minutes in the dark together, Cleo tucked under my arm. Our courtship, if that’s what it was, seemed destined to be laced with complications.

“We’ll just have to stay in a motel,” he sighed. “I’ll call a locksmith in the morning.”

The sign outside the motel said “No Pets.” Cleo was smuggled through the lobby inside my handbag, without so much as a mew. Next morning, we met the wry, smiling locksmith at the cottage.

Nestled on the lake’s edge, the old house had been in Philip’s family for three generations. With French doors opening onto a stretch of grass running down to a pumice-laden beach, the setting was more spectacular than anything I’d imagined the previous night. The lake sparkled blue as a Sri Lankan sapphire. A sage-green island rose like an afterthought in the distance.

Cleo stretched gleefully in front of a driftwood fire while Philip and I walked along the river track. We paused at a bend where the river widened and spilled over rocks. Ferns bent over the water’s edge to admire their reflections. A group of midges hung expectantly in the air. If Philip wanted to understand who I was, sooner or later he’d have to know about Sam. There was a possibility the information would destroy our burgeoning romance. To take on an older woman is one thing. Add a couple of readymade kids and the scenario becomes more complicated. If Philip was willing to wade in any deeper, he’d need to try to understand the emotional picture of what it might be like to lose a child. Even if we spent the rest of our lives together and had our own children, there would always be part of me that would remain fenced off from him. The part that loved and grieved for Sam.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” I said, concentrating on a powder puff of cloud in the distance. “Rob and Lydia had an older brother…”

Th e edges of the cloud started peeling away as if it was about to dissolve into the sky. A breeze spiked off the mountains. I shivered inside my city rain jacket. If I’d had more outdoor experience I would’ve thought to bring gloves to a place like this in the depths of winter.

“I know about Sam,” he replied quietly.

“How?” I asked, surprised.

“I read the articles you wrote around the time it happened.”

“Really? What was an army boy doing reading that sort of thing?”

“Your stories were very moving,” he said, staring up at the same cloud for what seemed a long time. “Tell me about Sam.” He took my hand and rubbed it warm.

“Are you sure you want to know?”

He kissed my fingers, cocooned them in his and tucked them protectively in the pocket of his Gore-Tex jacket. “Absolutely.”

As we trudged the rest of the river track with my hand nestled in his pocket he listened to Sam’s story, the funny bits, the sad. I told him how losing a child was like having an arm or leg lopped off, except probably worse. Th at I wasn’t sure how profoundly the experience had affected me, that in fact it still did. No matter how logical I tried to be, how squarely I faced the facts Sam no longer existed, I often continued to set an extra place at the table, and would probably do so for the rest of my life. No doubt there were mothers all over the world officially “recovered” from their grief who did the same thing.

I would have forgiven him if he’d said one of the old clichés like “I can’t imagine what it must’ve been like” or one of the newer ones like “you must be so strong.” But he simply listened. For that I was grateful.

Cleo was waiting in the glow of the fire when we returned.

“And this cat, she’s part of it all,” Philip said, scooping her into his arms. “She’s your connection to Sam, isn’t she?”

Purring loudly, Cleo stretched a lazy paw and patted his neck. She yawned and snuggled into his chest. There was nowhere else she, or I, wanted to be.

Later in the day we went fishing in a dinghy, against a backdrop of mountains tinged candy-floss pink in the sunset. A plump rainbow trout provided dinner for all three of us. We drank red wine and laughed. From a “ticks in boxes” perspective we had little in common, yet we shared something Philip had recognized from the start. We were both strong individuals, unwilling or unable to belong to an in-crowd. In my case, even the out-crowd wouldn’t have me. It seemed incredible that Philip hadn’t turned away from Sam’s story or the scar of my grief. He’d intuited Cleo’s part in it, too.

I began to realize I was falling in love.