Two more years. Two more years and Jax will be off to university and maybe something will change. Maybe I can go back to school. I’ll be twenty-six then, it won’t betooweird, right? The other students won’t look at me like I’m pathetic? Or a pensioner? Like I’ve missed my chance and now I’m doomed to work at Tesco forever?
Here’s the thing.
I never let myself dwell on Church and what he did to me. I never let myself admit—even in the privacy of my own mind—that I might still be in love with him. That I’m still nursing my broken heart because the broken heart is all I have left.
But sometimes—when I’m exhausted from working two full-time jobs plus parenting a hormonal teenager, when Martin is being a real dick, when the bills are piled so high I think they’ll bury me—I let myself dwell on what life would have been like if Church had shown up on our wedding day. If he’d married me and then whisked me and Jax off to his Chelsea townhouse, so I’d be free from paying rent and could keep paying tuition.
If I’d graduated with the degree I wanted and was working for the museum where I’m currently passing out canapés instead.
If my days were filled with kisses like good gin—clean and cool and biting.
If my nights were filled with gasping, uncivilized fucks.
Stop. It.
That’s the danger of dwelling on the future I wanted—it turns into pining for the man who took so much of it away. I make myself remember the gutting, lonely moments alone in the narthex, the slow heat of the tears when I realized he wasn’t coming. When I realized that I’d been made a fool of—and worse.
When I realized I loved someone more than he loved me.
There’s no word for stupidity that profound.
I pop open a bottle and start pouring, and Martin fusses off somewhere else in the back room, probably to scold someone else for being slow. Twyla snags one of the flutes I’ve just filled and knocks it back in one go.
“Come on,” she coaxes as she sees my small smile. “Have one. Fuck knows this is the best shit we’ll get to taste in a while.”
I want to. I really, really want to. I want to have a glass of champagne and disappear into some of my favorite exhibits and forget—just for twenty minutes—that my life is a sleepless grind of work and debt and putting on a brave face for Jax, who needs to have as normal an upbringing as I can manage.
I stare at the bubbling flute for a moment, and then I sigh. “With my terrible luck, Martin will smell it on me.”
“Ah yes,” Twyla says, grabbing another flute as I open up a new bottle. “This mysterious bad luck of yours. Are you ever going to tell me about it?”
What would I even say?
It’s nothing, really. Just got left at the altar by a scowling god—a god who still rules over the university department I had to leave because I was too broke. Oh, yes, he was my professor too, how thoughtful of you to ask.
It would make a great party story. If only I had time for parties.
Blocking Twyla’s reach for a third flute, I slide the now-full tray onto my hand. “It’s a tale for when we have something a lot stronger than champagne,” I say with a forced grin, and then I push out the door and follow the faint strains of music to the Great Court and the event itself.
***
The gala isin full swing now, the autumn sky just beginning to fade over the glass canopy that covers the court. The conversation and music together make for a dull, boozy roar in the echoing space.
I fix myof course I’m happy to carry a heavy tray aroundsmile on my face and begin circulating through the room, unloading flutes at a rate that would horrify Martin all over again. With each step, the second-hand shoes I’m wearing pinch my toes and send pain rolling up the balls of my feet and into my heels, but still I keep the smile plastered on. Martin won’t care if my feet hurt, but if there’s one whiff of bad attitude among the staff, he’ll unleash hell, and I can’t afford hell. Not for another two years, at any rate.
I play one of my favorite games while I circulate to keep myself from focusing on my feet, where I pretend I’m David Attenborough observing the habits of rich people. Silently, I narrate all the elaborate mating and dominance rituals unfolding around me; I describe the elaborate plumage of the subjects, their bizarre status symbols and hierarchical negotiations.
It’s a game I’ve been playing since I went through a fervent Attenborough stage after my first anthropology course at UCL, and sometimes Church and I would even play it togeth—
Nope. No Church.Just Attenborough. The one man who could never let me down.
I’m gestured over by a pale woman in a ball gown, her eyes glued to someone younger, prettier, and possibly more interesting than her, given the way the younger woman seems to be holding court in the semi-circle of people in which they are standing. The older woman’s eyes never leave her rival as she efficiently plucks a glass of champagne from my tray, and the younger woman, who clearly is paying more attention than she lets on, reaches over and does the same, so that they’re matching each other flute for flute like antagonistic cowboys matching each other shot for shot in an old Western film.
Here is the cold-blooded society maven forced to defend her committee territory from a young upstart. The upstart will have a name like Summer or Vervain, and the maven will make sure to say it as often as possible to highlight how ridiculous her very existence is. Both will use the champagne as a way to buy time for the next cutting remark.
I leave the maven and Summer/Vervain to move along the curve of the Reading Room wall, which is practically glowing against the darkening sky outside. I approach a group of men and women who are all dressed crisply and conservatively and arguing vehemently about the impact of the Asian markets on pharmaceutical investments.
Bankers. A totally different tribe than the maven and her rival.