I don't own LwD - sometimes I feel as if it owns me, but hey, it should be so lucky!
When we last left Casey, she was being dragged off to dinner by her friend, and had just heard a bunch of strange stuff about Derek's marriage and his stay in England, which Shuli had found out from Nora.
Chapter Ten - Other Men
Midnight found me pacing furiously up and down my apartment, from one set of French doors to another (yes, I am lucky enough to have light streaming in during the summer and balconies on both sides of my living room). The events of the evening had been so … so... unexpected. I was still trembling, trying to sort it all out.
My first surprise had been Joachim. He was utterly different than Shuli had led me to believe. She'd said he was "gorgeous" or some such thing. Well, I didn't think he was, at least at first, despite his handsome grey eyes. In fact I couldn't get over the contrast with Derek, whom, you will recall, Shuli and I had just seen strolling by so nonchalantly on St. Dennis with Callum (and new wife in tow).
Joachim's hair was blond, but cropped so short he might as well not have had any. His face was thin and tanned, his forehead high and somehow exuding intelligence. His laugh was hearty; his aftershave expensive.
I wanted to hate him; but I couldn't.
If I had any doubts that Shuli thought that this was a date, then these were dispelled when she and Marcel got up to dance to some old romantic tune, leaving Joachim and me alone at the table making small talk. I asked about his work. He asked if I was married. I asked about his family. He asked if I would like to go to bed with him.
When I blushed madly and said, 'But I don't even know you… we only just met?' with a sort of embarrassed trying-to-save-his-feelings-and-mine lilt to my voice, he took this somehow as a kind of good sign, and leaned forward and kissed me, right on the lips.
He tasted of cigarettes and raspberries. I almost laughed.
Because I was a little drunk, and because I didn't want to offend Marcel, I just went with the flow and allowed Joachim to kiss me, all kinds of random thoughts speeding through my brain as he did so: my eyes open; his closed.
When he opened his eyes and pulled back, straightening himself in his seat, he gave a wry smile to see my eyes already open.
'Why, Casey! I just didn't do it for you, as they say in Canada? Okay, don't answer that, what bad manners of me to make you respond. But you can't blame me for trying. I like you very much. You are thinking of some other fellow! This is always the way, no?'
It was my turn to smile. First he embarrasses me totally; then he puts me at my ease.
Shuli and Marcel were still dancing and no way about to come to my aid.
So, oddly, I ended up telling him about Derek. All about Derek and then, since I'd started, I went on and told him about my marriage as well. My unhappy little secret, as Shuli calls it. And this man, Joachim, this almost complete stranger from Spain who had met me, liked me, and then even kissed me more swiftly than I'd done anything with anyone in my entire life, well he just went and blew me away by saying, 'Your man, he still worships you, I'd bet my life on it.'
'But, but…', I stammered. 'You don't understand. He's not my man anymore. I'm not married any more. My husband went and…' He cut me off.
'Shh. Casey. We won't speak of that man. He never was your man. I speak of your Derek Venturi. That's how you say his name, no? This woman – she's a passing thing. You are right not to give up hope.'
Had I told him I hadn't given up hope? No. In fact I'd said just the opposite. But my treacherous eyes, my shaking voice. He could tell everything.
I didn't say a word more. I had nothing left to say after pouring out all that to him.
I asked him to dance, and he agreed, and his arms around me felt more like those of a brother than Derek's had ever done.
Life is so pathetic sometimes.
--
But I'd done the unthinkable. I'd told someone about Derek, and about my brief and miserable marriage. A hundred trapped butterfly-wings flapped and flapped inside my throat, making me sick.
Up and down, I paced. Up and down. Soon Shuli was going to ring and yell at me to go to bed. Or she would come up and sit with me. I needed to calm down.
But I couldn't. All I could think about was that horrible time, nine years ago, when Derek was totally obsessed with his work and little son; and everyone thought I had moved on or didn't know how I'd felt about him in the first place, and I allowed a man called James – who seemed to be the opposite to everything Derek stood for – to make me his wife.
--
Two am. I toss and turn. I am desperate to get to sleep, knowing I will have to be at my most bouncy for Callum when we meet for lunch. But all I can feel is a monstrous sense of humiliation.
I'd met James the year I moved to Montreal as a graduate student. I was in one of his poetry classes at McGill and predictably I worshipped him a little bit already because I was so moved by his two near-flawless collections of poetry. Twist was all about people in relationships destroying each other, while Pearl was, on the surface, a collection about the uneasy balance of natural life. Mostly, however, it was about sex. Very grown-up. Something that I, still a virgin at twenty-three, was completely in awe of. You think I was crazy? Maybe so.
He had a reputation, of course, amongst the other students and I was quickly informed about his modus operandi, the places he wined and dined his women; the need to remain alert if he took me for a walk to look at the stars.
I wasn't used to such relaxed interaction with my tutors, and anyway, James never did try to seduce me in any of those ways.
He just recited poetry to me, endlessly, passionately, seductively. And when he dedicated one poem to me, and then another, including sayings of mine within the core of each, praising my work shamelessly, but so that no-one but I could guess it was aimed at me – I fancied myself a little in love.
Derek was struggling with his first teaching job (he'd quit hockey, of course, when Sandy and he came to an agreement, and trained to teach mathematics at which he was surprisingly excellent). And he was struggling with Callum, who was a tantrum-throwing two-year old. Granted, Derek only ever saw him on week-ends and for vacations or the odd day in-between if Sandy 'couldn't take it anymore'. But between his previous carefree existence and that level of commitment lay a ferocious sea of anger and determination.
Even I could barely believe the kind of man my wayward stepbrother had become.
When I called, in those days, he was either marking maths papers or about to take Callum to the park or about go to bed. He never seemed to have any fun and he certainly never seemed to have time for me anymore. Shuli was in England, doing her Masters at Cambridge. I missed them both sorely, but was too proud to complain. After all, this was grown-up little me.
When Callum had been tiny, there were many occasions on which Derek had just rung me up and asked me to come over. And I'd done it. Dropped everything and driven for six hours across the country to hold his puking baby – finding, in the process, Callum, the second love of my life.
But slowly Derek got used to the ways of his charming son – to the frightening fevers, the new teeth, the sudden delicious love affair with language. Slowly, his pride in being a father made him rely less and less on me and more on his instincts, or the internet or the girlfriend of the day.
Occasionally, in those days, I still had the pleasure of being home with Mom and George when he brought Callum for a week's holiday. But then he was exhausted, sleeping a lot and the rest of the time out drinking or playing hockey as if he needed to live a lifetime in that particular week, and it was left to Emily Davis and me and Marti to play the proud aunties. Derek never brought a girlfriend home and I never asked. We never spoke of our night in the tent.
So, James with his swooning voice and his erudition was like the antithesis of everything Derek had been and had become.
I didn't know what was happening to me until I heard my classmates whispering that I was next for the bedding block. Then I was embarrassed and scared and decided to take things easy for a while with James. My sense of self-preservation kicked in, and I started cutting his classes. I had no-one to talk to and workaholism only got me so far through each day, but I felt I was doing the right thing. I'd certainly hated being gossiped about. I went to the graduate school and asked to be removed from James' class. The kindly old secretary was shocked when she saw the amazing grades I'd been getting for my work.
I tried to walk away.
How was I to know that I was the first and only woman who had ever done that – withdrawn just before the great man made his final move?
He turned up at my tiny bed-sit just three weeks after I quit his class, bunches of flowers of every hue in his arms and a bottle of expensive wine. It was winter, and snowing everywhere, so I let him in. But I stood there, seriously, with my arms folded across my chest, intending for him to leave as soon as possible, saying the most Caseyish things I could think of in that compassionate tone of voice that had almost killed Max with frustration all those years ago. And that's when James had dropped down onto one knee, and softly, staring into my face, recited a sonnet I particularly adore. I barely understood how or when, but I must have stretched out my hand to accept the ring he proffered.
He was forty-six. I was twenty-three. Neither of us had been married before.
My parents, yes – both of them – were stunned and furious. Dad hated James on sight. Mom just kept trying to talk me out of it. Lizzie was sympathetic, but too caught up in her own first year at university.
Finally, only Shuli (who flew back specially) and Derek – stony-faced and with a puzzled-looking Callum clinging to his hand, came to our pathetic little registry ceremony. I was too embarrassed to ask why no-one came from James' family.
There was a meal, but I can't bear to think about it; the violins and orange-blossoms and champagne mingling in my head with the sound of Derek's silent but completely palpable misery.
James was very talkative and affable, touching my thigh under the table and making me feel, for all the world, as if I'd just given away my life for no good reason.
Afterwards, he went to pay the bill, and we all stood around in the snow looking at each other a little bleakly before Derek and Callum drove Shuli to the airport and James drove me back to his untidy rooms and took me to bed.
--
Six months later, it was over and I was driving myself, and what little I had left of my sanity, back to London.
You will understand me when I say that the first night James took me home was one of the only times that I actually spent the night with my husband. He was a free spirit, after all, and the world was full of beauty – especially the beauty of other women.
I never asked him, but I assumed that marriage was just seduction by another name.
He'd sized me up and decided that a ring was the price he would pay for putting me on his outstandingly long list of conquests.
I realised with a sudden and ferocious pain that the girls who'd succumbed – or pretended to succumb – to James' charms without making him fall onto one knee and sign in a book were actually a lot more worldly and sensible than I was.
I had to wait a year to be free of him and that year couldn't pass swiftly enough.
Ah, now I can see you all shaking your pretty faces at me. I can see that you think I completely deserve all the grief Derek has heaped on me in the last few weeks – the surprise wedding, the wife, the lot. If I could do THAT, if I could betray my heart by marrying a complete jackass like James when Derek was still single, why should he think I still cared for him?
But, let me tell you, that is not how things work.
You may get to judge me, Casey McDonald, for my ignorance and stupidity, and for trying to break away from the suffocating love I seem always to have felt for my stepbrother, with whom you so clearly think I should live till death do us part. But you will never get to judge me more harshly than I judge myself.
And strangely, in all the weeks and months following the separation and the eventual divorce eight years ago, no-one was a better friend to me than Derek, who never once allowed me to forget my stupidity and gullible naïveté, finding endless ways to shred my dignity, but who always, always made me laugh about it, instead of crying, and ended every Casey-is-a-total-ass conversation with his arm warm around my shoulders and his plump little son snug in my lap.
Life holds so many secret blessings.
Suddenly I find myself falling asleep with a sense of hope beneath my tired eyelids.
Come on, my faithful friends and kind reviewers, time to show yourselves and earn another chapter!