Cleo

Respect

A cat demands to be treated as an equal. She expects nothing less. Patronize a feline at your peril.

Carrying out a secret affair in a newsroom is like working in a chocolate factory and trying to stay skinny.

“There’s someone called Dustin on the phone for you,” said Nicole, cool and quizzical.

To make ourselves feel more relaxed about our age difference I’d summoned up famous historical love affairs in which the woman was considerably older—Cleopatra and Antony, Yoko and John, and of course, Mrs. Robinson and Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate.

Philip used the code name Dustin when he called me at the office. At his work I left messages that Mrs. Robinson had called.

“Who’s Dustin?” Nicole probed.

“Distant cousin.”

“Oh well, I suppose it’s good you’ve moved on from that toy boy.”

The times Philip and I spent together were growing more precious. I looked forward to them the way a child counts the days till Christmas. After two months of clandestine meetings, I wondered how much longer I’d be able to keep my life so neatly compartmentalized. Whenever he stayed the night while the kids were in residence, I woke him before dawn and made sure he creaked safely out the front door before an impressionable eye flicked open. The last thing I wanted was for them to have to deal with a transient adult male. Yet on our weekends alone together I’d see him looking so comfortable with Cleo draped over his knee it felt like he’d always been part of my emotional framework. Always—a risky word in anyone’s language.

“So when do I get to meet the kids?” he asked. “You’ve told me so much about them it’s like I know them already.”

“Soon.” Cleo looked up at me from his lap and winked.

“In twenty years’ time?”

“Not here at the house. I don’t want them thinking you’re invading their territory.”

“Okay. Let’s get together on neutral ground. There’s a new pizza parlor in town.”

He’d obviously thought it through. How could I possibly object to a casual meeting in a pizza parlor? I was in love with Philip, but had ongoing proof that romantic love is like a swimming pool. People fall into it and scramble out of it wet and disheveled, usually in one piece but damaged, all the time.

The love for my children was a different beast altogether. It was fierce and unfathomable. I’d willingly fight to the death for them. Besides, he had no hope of comprehending the grief I carried for Sam. Not that I wanted him to shoulder my sadness in any way, but if he wanted to be part of our lives he needed to acknowledge its existence.

He had every reason to turn around and run. But if he burst into my children’s lives and abandoned them brokenhearted I’d tear his limbs off, preferably one at a time, slowly and with no pain relief whatsoever.

Rob slipped into his favorite sweatshirt, several sizes too big for him, with USA emblazoned on the front. I buckled Lydia’s red shoes, licked a tissue and wiped mysterious goo off her cheek.

“Try and be well behaved,” I instructed them. “He’s not used to children.”

“What sort of person isn’t used to children?” asked Rob. “Anyway, I’m not a kid anymore.”

The pizza parlor was carved out of the ground under a shopping arcade. Descending a fake marble staircase, complete with wrought-iron railings, the kids seemed impressed. Quiet at least. I was grateful the place hadn’t been open long enough to reek of tired fat. Fake ivy clambered over polystyrene columns. Red and white checked tablecloths screamed at the glistening cash register. It felt like a movie set, with us as an unlikely set of actors auditioning for the role of Family Group.

I was relieved when the waiter escorted us to a discreet table under the stairs. Anyone from work could turn up at a joint like this. It would be through the office like chickenpox by Monday morning—“Brown and Toyboy Test Drive Family Outing. Has She Lost Plot?!”

We ordered pizza and Coke. Rob was no longer a bubbly kid; he’d elongated into a thirteen-year-old with a tank full of testosterone. He was sullen, silent and determined to show no interest in someone who wasn’t used to children. I’d warned Philip it was a difficult age. Lydia, who had insisted on wearing three strands of beads around her neck, vacuumed her glass until it was almost empty. Philip seemed slightly unnerved when her slurping noises echoed against the plastic wall panels.

“Don’t do that!” I hissed at the child.

“Why not? It’s fun.”

“It’s not polite.”

“But this is,” she said, lifting the straw from her glass and tipping the remains of her Coke onto her tartan skirt.

“No, it’s not!” I said, dabbing her skirt with a paper napkin. I glanced at Philip, who was studying the menu as if it was a legal document. Now he surely understood why I never wanted this collision of realities to take place.

“Haven’t you got a mother?” Lydia asked, kicking the table leg and making the cutlery hiccup.

“Yes, I do,” he said, lowering the menu to welcome the first unsolicited contact from the children.

“Why don’t you go home and be with her?”

Silence. I waited for Philip to scrape his chair back and run.

“She’s busy tonight.”

“Tell her not to be. We’ve got our mother. You’ve got yours. You don’t need our mother, too.”

“Strangers in the Night” dribbled out of a nearby speaker. To the untrained ear the recording had been made inside a shipping container, with musicians scraping instruments made of tin cans. Their Muzak was a welcome silence filler.

Philip’s attention moved to the paper place mats with games printed on them. He asked Rob if he’d like to play snakes and ladders. (Not snakes and ladders! I wanted to tell Philip. Rob grew out of that years ago. He thinks it’s a game for babies!) But it wasn’t Philip’s fault he hadn’t kept pace with child development. I held my breath waiting for the inevitable combination of rejection and scorn to catapult across the table.

“I’d rather play this,” Rob said, indicating a mass of dots arranged in rectangles. I hadn’t seen the game before, but it looked brutally competitive. Each player was allowed one pencil stroke to join two dots at a time, gradually amassing territories of fully formed rectangles. Whoever gained the largest number of completed rectangles won the game. This was the restaurant place mat version of war.

The game started casually enough for me to munch through a triangle of Hawaiian pizza while concentrating on keeping Lydia’s mouth full so no more conversational frogs could leap out of it.

To keep the atmosphere cheerful I read from a section of the menu about the history of pizza, since its humble beginnings when the Greeks first came up with the idea of decorating flat bread.

“The real turning point was in the early nineteenth century, when a Neapolitan baker called Raffaele Esposito decided to make a bread that would stand out from everyone else’s. He started by just adding cheese…”

I was, of course, reading all this while surreptitiously monitoring the battle taking place between the two men in my life. Rob claimed a cluster of rectangles in the right-hand corner. Philip filled in a strip on the other side. The game was evenly matched.

“After a while he started putting sauce under the cheese. He let the dough fluff out to the shape of a pie…”

Rob’s territory was spreading across the square. Philip, on the other hand, appeared to be making listless progress on his side. My lips wanted to smile, but I tried to keep them in a straight line. Philip was demonstrating unexpected maturity by letting Rob win. Maybe he was stepfather material after all. He certainly looked the part in his corduroy trousers and fisherman’s knit jumper.

“Everyone loved Esposito’s pizza so much he was asked to create a special one for the King and Queen of Italy. He made one in the colors of the Italian flag—red sauce, white cheese, green basil…”

The two blocks of rectangles moved closer together. Their pencils flashed like swords. It was starting to look like a draw. That would be okay, I thought, as long as Rob’s dignity was kept intact. There was hardly any free space left now.

“He named his pizza Margherita, after the queen…”

The tension was unbearable.

“The new Margherita pizza was a huge hit.”

I didn’t dare watch the last few strokes. I knew it was over when I heard two pencils clatter onto the tabletop.

“You won,” said Rob, with a brave smile.

“You what?!” I said, turning to Philip.

“It was a tough game,” he said, shrugging with an unmistakable glint of satisfaction.

A tough game? Didn’t he understand there’s no such thing as a tough game when children were involved, especially my children? My kids’ lives were tough enough without some jerk in pseudo stepdad corduroys turning up and knocking their self-esteem around.

I should never have let Philip near them. He was behaving like a child. Worse than a child. And the last thing I needed was another child. The relationship was doomed. Rob would be devastated for days after losing that game.

We drove home in silence and exchanged chaste farewells at the gate.

“It’s good he’s going home,” said Lydia, echoing my thoughts. “His mother will be missing him.”

“What did you think?” I asked Rob after I’d fed Cleo and put Lydia to bed.

“He’s cool.”

“I don’t suppose he comes across as a very warm person.”

“No, I like him.”

“You like him? But he beat you at that stupid game.”

“I’m sick of the way grown-ups always go out of their way to let me win,” said Rob. “They think I don’t notice. He treated me as an adult. He’s cool. You should see more of him.”