Send Me A Lover (34 page)

‘So?’ I say to my mother

‘So what?’

‘You know what. Have you been yet?’

‘To the toilet?’

‘Not to the bloody toilet! To the doctor’s!’

‘I’ve been. So there. Are you proud of me? He ran some blood tests. And he increased my beautiful pretty pills. And he said that my blue cardigan matched my eyes. Now can we say no more on this?’

‘So what does he think it can be?’

‘I think if he knew that he’d have not ran tests.’

I tut. ‘When will you get the results?’

‘In a couple of weeks.’

‘A couple of weeks? Have you had any more dizziness? Any more fainting?’

She groans. ‘Ring back when you want to talk about the weather.’

And then what does she do? She hangs up on me!

~ * * * ~

Given that I am now effectively unemployed I make a small and desperate step in the right direction. There’s an unpacked box that’s marked ‘office’ and somewhere inside it, I believe, are my business cards, the ones I had printed for
Write Strategies
before Jonathan died. All I have to do is find them.

There’s also a load of other crap in here too: old CVs, a box of printer paper, an outdated telephone directory, old birthday cards sent to me from Jonathan—I quickly read these, forcing myself not to dwell on his writing or to think that he would have touched this card with his own hands, or to think that the last time I read it he’d have been alive. Then there’s something I don’t recognise: a thick, dark grey ring-binder with a black spine. The cover reads:

Write Strategies.

A Business Plan

(prepared by Jonathan Chapman, for Angela Chapman)

~ * * * ~

I fan through pages and tabulated sections: Background, Overview, Description, Market Analysis, Marketing Plan…

He’d told me a million times to get off my backside and write a business plan. He’d obviously given up on me, and decided to write one himself. He must have been going to surprise me with it.

When I was packing to move, I must have been so distracted that I didn’t even notice it.

I hug the binder to my chest. Is this Jonathan’s way of telling me that now I don’t have any excuses?

~ * * * ~

I can’t believe we’re already into August. I have Jonathan’s list of contacts in about one hundred of Vancouver’s mid-size to big businesses. Everything from software, which I know nothing about, (just like accounting firms, law firms, engineering firms), to marketing firms, which I do have a handle on, and a hot-house tomato-growing company; I’m the first to get excited over a lovely tomato.

I know what my costs will be if I do a direct-mailer. I know how much it is to run quarter to full-page ads in leading industry publications. It’s a fortune, really, or at least for me, but I’m not going to think of the downsides just yet. I know what my call-back strategy is. I’ve just forked out the fee and joined the Vancouver Board of Trade. I can wear the suit. I’m glad I never took it back.

And if all fails, U can join me in olive oil business.
Georgios writes on MSN. Georgios and I have messaged a few times now.

U serious?
I type furiously.

Very.

Tempting
… Of course it’s not. Not really. Not now that Georgios is getting it on with my ma. Speaking of. I decide to be out with it.
R U in luv with my mother?

His reply is a little slow.

She not in luv with me.

How do U know?
I bang out.

Again, a pause or two.
Ask Her.

~ * * * ~

‘I have something to tell you,’ Richard looks at me quite seriously across a small, trendy trattoria table.

‘Oh God, don’t tell me you’re moving away too!’

I never normally meet Richard for lunch. Today though, I was in the area where Richard’s (and formerly Jonathan’s) office is, and thought I’d pop in. I’ve only been up there once since Jonathan died. I remember how odd it was, at the time, walking into his once cluttered office that was bereft of files and papers. Only a lone, misshapen paper-clip on the clean surface. Jonathan had a habit of unbending them when he was stressed.

Going up there today was still strange for me. Jonathan’s office has been taken over by an articling student fresh out of the University of British Columbia. David is his name. There was a moment’s delay in my smile when he walked out of his door to greet me, and held out his hand. I looked past him, thinking maybe Jonathan has been working really really long hours; that’s why he hasn’t been home in two years… Maybe I’m going to look in there and see him.

Richard fidgets a lot—with the napkin, with a knife, picks up a bread bun, puts it down, pushes back the flop of chestnut-auburn hair from his forehead. ‘I’m not moving away, exactly. But I am moving out. Or at least, I’m thinking of it.’

I blink. ‘Out?’

‘I’m leaving Jessica.’

‘You’re leaving Jessica?’ The woman I never saw him with in the first place. Why am I thoroughly shocked and yet not at all surprised?

‘I don’t know what to say, Richard. God, this is a shock.’

‘I suppose
why
would be the obvious question… And the answer would be because I don’t love her. Maybe I never did. Not real love, like the kind I know Jonathan felt for you.’ He stops fiddling. ‘She doesn’t love me, either. I’ve asked myself if we were stripped of everything we owned, would she still want to be with me. And the answer I keep coming up with is no.’

‘But it can’t be about money. She’s making her own good money now.’

‘Yes, but if you take away all the trappings—it doesn’t matter who earned what…’ he indicates with a sweep of his hand to the table, to the wine and the finished off Cornish game hen and smoked sablefish he made us order, which I thought was a bit lavish for lunch; I almost got the feeling he was celebrating something. What? Surely not this? ‘There’s nothing there,’ he finishes. ‘Our marriage was founded on my ability to take care of her.’ He shrugs. ‘Of course I always knew that. She always knew she was pretty and she’d never marry a poor man, and she didn’t really have passion to stick it in a job back then. I’m sure she knew she’d go to the highest bidder. Only maybe right when she met me there weren’t all that many biding, for whatever reason, so somehow I won. She decided she’d do okay with me.’

He sees me smile. ‘Sorry,’ I tell him. ‘It’s just odd making it sound like a night out at the casino.’

‘Not kind, you mean?’

‘I suppose.’

He shrugs. ‘She once told me she was lazy, that’s why she never wanted to date lots of men; she just couldn’t be bothered. And I let her be lazy, certainly when it came to the idea of her working. I even encouraged her to do nothing, even though, I suppose I knew that she always looked bored, as though all her free time was a chore. I just thought that was her—she was just too well-off, and too ungrateful.’ He looks at me sadly. ‘I think we all might have underestimated her.’

‘Were you very much in love with her?’ He always seemed to be. From the moment I met them. They had met the summer before Jonathan and I did.

‘No. I thought I should be. I think, quite secretly, that I wanted to land her. And once I did, I tried to keep the myth alive.’

‘I’ve never heard you talk like this.’

He smiles. ‘I never wanted her to have her breasts done, you know.’

‘You didn’t?’ Jonathan and I had plenty to speculate on when the date for her surgery just happened to fall on Richard’s birthday.

‘I’m more of a legs man. Her breasts were fine as they were.’

‘But they look good.’ I remember her once telling me, quite seriously, how she’d rather be dead than ugly.

‘I don’t know. They irritate me. I don’t know why…’ His eyes very quickly go to my chest, as though he might be about to say something, although I can’t imagine what. But instead, he says, ‘Do you want a coffee? Or we could always go somewhere else and have one?’

‘Let’s have one here.’

He seems remarkably laid back. ‘Angie, our marriage is completely lacking in substance. There’s nothing fundamentally there. We’re like a big empty box. Just walls, sides, and packaging that keep us together.’

‘Does she feel like this too?’

‘Oh, I’m sure she does, without saying it. We don’t talk. We don’t share things with each other any more.’

I wonder if he’s worried that now she’s making her own money she might leave him. Does Richard need to be the provider? He certainly seems to like to try to take care of me.

He orders two cappuccinos for us, and a vanilla crème brulée.

‘What about Emma?’

He shakes his head. ‘I think without Emma, Jessica and I would have split up after about two years, once I’d got over being flattered that a woman as attractive as she would be interested in a plain guy like me.’ He looks off into the distance. ‘I mean, for God’s sakes, I’ve got red hair.’

I almost laugh. ‘It’s not red! It’s a sort of burnished chestnut!’

He smiles.

‘Sorry I’ve made you sound like a description on a hair colouring kit.’

He smiles again.

‘I like it,’ I tell him. ‘Your hair colour.’

‘Do you?’

‘Very much.’ And I like his hazel eyes. And I like him.

‘You know, we can’t even sit down and agree on a DVD to rent on a Friday night! That’s how polarised our interests are. That’s how intense and inflexible we’ve turned. I think when you’re not in love, you blame the other one; you start to get resentful, as though, rather than it being nobody’s fault in particular, it’s very pointedly theirs.’

Richard is quite a deep person, for a guy, I think. I wonder if he’d have talked to Jonathan like this. Whenever we’d get together as a foursome, he always seemed to gravitate to me for conversation. But then again, he did see Jonathan every day.

We don’t speak while the waiter puts our cups and dessert down. ‘Have you missed not being in love all these years?’ I ask him. I couldn’t imagine staying in a loveless marriage. And I’m pretty sure Jonathan would have felt the same. If we’d have fallen out of love, that would have been it: over.

He sits back, stares at the single rosette of cream on top of the brulée. ‘Just because I wasn’t in love with her doesn’t mean I haven’t been in love with anybody in all these years.’

I don’t want to learn he’s had an affair, if this is what he’s getting at. For some reason, in spite of everything he’s just said, that would disappoint me. ‘What are you going to do?’ I ask instead.

He shakes his head, looks at me now. When I think he’s not going to answer that, he says, ‘I’m going to try to make some wrongs right before it’s too late for everybody.’ He takes a drink of his coffee. ‘Does that sound scary?’

I shrug. ‘Brave, maybe.’

Vancouver’s key players in the business community aren’t easy to reach. Especially when their secretaries think I’m selling something. Which, I suppose I am.

I’m just about to make my twentieth frustrating cold call of the day—that’s netted me one brief conversation with an actual CEO, who told me he doesn’t need my services at this time but he’ll keep me on file—well, up his bottom too, as my mother would probably say—when my phone rings.

‘Hi Angela, it’s Crystal Rae.’

It takes me a moment to place the name.

‘Epilepsy Canada.’

‘Oh! Crystal! Sorry!’ How embarrassing of me to forget who she is!

‘That’s all right,’ she says. ‘I’m glad I’ve caught you anyway. Sorry it’s taken a little while to get back to you… I was wondering if you’d like to meet with us again to discuss your role with us, and some of your ideas, a little further.’