You Can’t Fall in Love With Your Ex (Can You?) Read online

  “Okay, I guess,” I said.

  Then Roddy poured me a massive vodka, made me scrambled eggs on toast, massaged my feet and sat with me watching old episodes of Buffy until we were both nodding off on the sofa.

  But Felix didn’t come home.

  At midnight, Roddy said, “Sweetie, I need to get my beauty sleep, and you should, too. Want a cuppa before bed?”

  “I’m okay,” I said. “I’ll stay up for a bit, just in case.”

  “Try not to stress about it. He’ll have crashed on someone’s floor. He just needs to make a point, and you two can talk about it tomorrow and soon you’ll be cooing away at each other again like the lovebirds you are. Listen to Uncle Roddy. I know what I’m talking about.”

  Roddy might have had lots of sex, but he knew even less about relationships than I did. Still, I was desperate to believe him, and I tried to, but I still couldn’t bring myself to go to bed – to the bed that Felix and I had shared for the past eight blissful months, to lie in the sheets where we’d made love the night before, that smelled of him and of us. I didn’t know, then, that I’d never sleep there with him again, but I felt a superstitious dread of waking up in the morning and him still not being there.

  I took the sleeping bag that Felix had brought with the rest of his meagre belongings when he’d moved in – if you can call turning up with a backpack and a third of the rent ‘moving in’ – and curled up miserably on the sofa. It was the night before my first ever big part – I knew I should be feeling nervous, but this horrible sense of dread was something entirely different.

  I slept fitfully, on high alert for the sound of Felix’s feet on the stairs, his key in the lock, but it never came. And when Roddy’s alarm clock trilled at eight the next morning, I was already awake, anxiously checking and rechecking my phone for a voicemail or text I knew wasn’t there.

  There was no pandering to soloists on the day of an opening night. I was expected to turn up for class as usual, so I did. Roddy stuck by me, pretending cheerfulness, greeting his friends and clowning around as usual. But I noticed the glances people gave me, the whispers I couldn’t quite hear, Mel’s feline malevolence as she glanced towards me without meeting my eyes. I couldn’t believe I’d been so oblivious, caught in my bubble of pride and excitement, that I hadn’t noticed any of it before.

  Felix didn’t show up to class, but he couldn’t miss our final rehearsal in the afternoon. When I came into the studio after lunch – the lunch I’d been completely unable to eat – he was there, talking to Anna as if nothing had happened.

  I waited, silently, and watched. Anna was explaining a point of choreography to Felix, suggesting that his arms might be better in a different shape.

  “As if you’re moving through water, pushing against resistance,” I heard her say.

  Felix moved his arms as directed.

  “Good, yes, just like that.”

  Felix nodded and turned away, smiling. Then he saw me, and his features froze again into still indifference.

  But his cold composure couldn’t hide the ravages of a sleepless night. I’d seen Felix hungover often enough to know the signs: the dark hollows under his bloodshot eyes, the smell of smoke in his hair, the infinitesimal delay in his response to the musical cues.

  Somehow, we got through that rehearsal, but as the hour went on, I found my shock and hurt turning to anger. How could he be so fucking selfish? He’d danced major leading roles before, but I hadn’t – this was the biggest night of my career, and he’d chosen to jeopardise it. Of course he was hurting – but he could have talked to me about what he’d seen and heard, let me reassure him that I loved him, I hadn’t been unfaithful, it was all malicious and untrue.

  At last, Anna said, “That will do for now. Go and get some rest.”

  Felix shouldered his bag and headed for the door, and I followed, desperate to talk to him, explain what had happened and make things right between us.

  But Anna said, “Just a moment, please, Laura.”

  I paused, wanting to ask her if it couldn’t wait until later, but the habit of obedience to my teachers was too deeply ingrained.

  “Yes, Anna?”

  “This wedding dance, Laura, is all about Princess Aurora coming to womanhood. During it, she stops being a coquettish girl and becomes confident and sensual. We’ve seen that in you, this last few months. That’s why I felt you would be perfect to dance the role, and I supported Marius’s decision to cast you.”

  I felt tears prick my eyes – she was absolutely right. But I didn’t feel like a confident, sensual woman today, that was for sure. I felt like a frightened, lonely child. I nodded silently, knowing that if I tried to speak, I’d cry.

  “We all have times in our careers when we have to overcome adversity,” she went on. “When I danced Odette-Odile in Swan Lake – a very long time ago – I’d just discovered I was pregnant. Halfway through the run, I miscarried. I missed one show, then the next night I was back on stage. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

  “I’m sorry,” I muttered. “That must have been awful.”

  “I’m not telling you this for sympathy,” she said. “I know you’re going through a difficult time right now – you think you’re hiding it well, but you’re not. The sparkle you’ve been showing, that made your interpretation of this role so magical – it wasn’t there today.”

  I looked down at my feet and shook my head. “I guess it wasn’t.”

  “Is there anything you need to talk to me about?” she said. “Working with you young girls – I think sometimes we focus too much on technique, on developing you as dancers, and not enough on taking care of you.”

  My eyes swimming with tears, I forced myself to look up at her. Her face was full of concern. I was almost sure she’d listen to me if I told her what had happened – but then I remembered Roddy’s advice: talk to Felix, put it behind you, walk on stage and be a star. If I hurried, I would be able to catch up Felix up on the roof smoking a cigarette. On this cold, raw afternoon, I might find him alone.

  “It’s okay, Anna,” I said. “It’s just nerves, I guess.”

  She brushed a tear off my cheek with a warm, gentle finger. “All right, Laura. If that’s what you say. I know you’ll do your best tonight – I know you have it in you to be brilliant. Have you eaten anything today?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “You need to keep your strength up.” She reached into her bag and handed me a cereal bar. “Eat that, keep warm, and do your relaxation exercises. And don’t you dare let me down!”

  I managed a smile, thanked her and left the studio, running up the stairs to the roof in search of Felix. But he wasn’t there – there was only the faintest smell of cigarette smoke hanging in the freezing air.

  Chapter 17

  I dreamed the dream I had so often: that Owen was crying, and I couldn’t find him. He wasn’t in his bed, or in Darcey’s room. I thought she was asleep, but when I nudged the duvet aside, I discovered a nest of fluffy ginger kittens curled up on her pillow. Panicking now, I ran downstairs, but the ground floor of our house had been transformed into the forest from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I could hear Owen’s cries growing louder and louder, and ran through the trees searching for him, trying to call his name, but no sound came out. Then a powerful pair of arms grabbed me from behind, pinning my arms against my sides. I struggled, but couldn’t free myself. The forest was hot, humid as a tropical jungle. The air was thick and difficult to breathe, cloying my lungs so I couldn’t fill them enough to scream, and all that came out was a strangled croak.

  “Laura!” Jonathan’s voice woke me at last. “Jesus. That was quite a nightmare. I tried to hug you but you just thrashed about.”

  I opened my eyes, briefly disorientated before I realised – we were in New York, in our hotel room, and I’d taken a sleeping pill the previous night to try and stave off jet lag. It had left me with a banging headache and a foul taste in my mouth – not a great way to sta
rt a holiday.

  “I dreamed we’d lost Owen,” I said, shivering at the memory, even though the room was so warm. “And our house was all weird, with trees growing in the lounge, and there were kittens, I think.” The memory of the dream was dissipating even as I spoke, fragments drifting away as I tried to recall them, elusive as smoke.

  “Laura, the kids will be fine,” Jonathan said. “You know that, don’t you? They were as happy as anything when we dropped them at Sadie and Gareth’s yesterday.”

  “Owen was crying,” I said. “He was crying when we Skyped them last night.”

  “Laura, he threw a strop when we told him it was night-time here and we were going to bed, even though they were just having breakfast,” Jonathan said. “He was making a principled objection to the existence of time zones, toddler-style. He’s fine. They’ll both be fine.”

  “I know,” I said. “I know they’ll be okay, and Darcey couldn’t stop going on about how excited she is about the kittens” – that must be why they’d made an appearance in my dream, of course – “and the pony. They’ll have a great time. I just hope Sadie doesn’t let them eat too much junk.”

  “Or what?” Jonathan said. “Relax, darling, five days of fish-finger sandwiches won’t give them type two diabetes or scurvy or whatever you’re imagining.”

  “Don’t take the piss.” I knew he was trying to cheer me up, but I still felt anxious and irritable. “How do we get coffee here, anyway?”

  “I ordered it last night, remember?”

  Of course – when we got in from dinner, Jonathan had painstakingly filled in the room service card while I got ready for bed, but by the time he’d hung it on the door my sleeping pill had kicked in and I’d been unconscious. There had been no enthusiastic first-night-of-holiday sex for us.

  “That’ll be it now,” Jonathan said, wrapping himself in a white towelling dressing gown and answering the knock on the door. “Thanks very much. I can manage.”

  He put the laden tray down on the coffee table – our room was huge, more like a suite, really – and tipped the chambermaid.

  “Now, we’ve got bacon, pancakes, toast, pastries, melon, orange juice and, of course, coffee. Name your pleasure, darling.”

  “Just coffee, please. I’m not hungry – I might have something to eat later, when I’ve woken up properly.”

  I watched as Jonathan dressed and breakfasted simultaneously, putting on his shirt, then crunching his way through a couple of slices of toast with bacon between them before doing up the buttons, stepping into his trousers, drinking a cup of coffee then knotting his tie. He always did this at home – reading his emails while he shaved in the mornings, pausing while doing the garden to practice his golf swing with a spade.

  He called it multitasking, but for some reason I can’t put my finger on I’d always found it intensely irritating. It was irritating me now, so much that I went and had a shower so I didn’t have to watch.

  The hot water and lavish hotel toiletries made me feel more cheerful – Darcey would love the miniature bottles of shower gel, shampoo and moisturiser, and I made a mental note to steal a generous supply to take home.

  “So what’s the plan for the day?” I asked, emerging from the bathroom wrapped in a fluffy towel.

  “We could do something together this morning,” Jonathan said. “A museum, maybe? Staten Island? Whatever you fancy. Then have lunch, then I’ve got meetings all afternoon, I’m afraid, but we’ll meet this evening for cocktails and dinner somewhere fabulous – I’ll get the office manager to make a reservation. I’m sorry to have to leave you on your own so much, but you’ll be okay, won’t you?”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. “I’ll go shopping, or something.”

  “Great,” Jonathan said, but he, too, was looking at his phone, not really listening to me. “That’s weird.”

  “What’s weird?”

  “Email from Wanda in the office here – she’s saying something about the DBMG account. We’ve not had any business from them for years. Just some admin fuck-up, I expect – I’ll clear it up when I meet with them later.”

  “What’s DBMG?” I asked, more to appear interested than because I really wanted to know.

  “Energy company. They explore large-scale oil reserves, mostly in South America. That’s their version of it, anyway – mine is that they buy and then desecrate huge swathes of rain forest, and when they’re done they walk away and leave fucked-up ecology and loads of people without work. Nothing illegal, but highly unethical and exploitative as far as I’m concerned, so I was quite happy to let the account quietly slip away.”

  “That’s horrible,” I said.

  “It is horrible,” Jonathan agreed. “But they’ll carry on doing it regardless of who their financial services firm is, so there was an argument for fighting to retain the business, but…” he shrugged.

  “You didn’t fight too hard?”

  “No, I suppose I didn’t. But don’t tell that to Wanda in the Wall Street office. She’s a seriously tough cookie – I’m a bit scared of her. Anyway, we should get going, if you don’t want anything to eat?”

  I dressed hastily, gulping another cup of coffee while I did my make-up – Jonathan’s habits were nothing if not contagious – and ten minutes later we were out in the blazing hot morning, walking hand in hand up Park Avenue.

  We wandered through Central Park for a bit, until it got too hot, and then retreated to the Museum of Modern Art and spent a happy two hours exploring the galleries, together but not together. If I stopped to look at a painting, Jonathan wouldn’t wait for me, but then a few minutes later he’d come and find me and take my hand, saying, “Come here, Laura, you’ve got to see this.” And I’d go, and we’d talk about what he’d found and then drift apart again.

  It was my favourite way to look round galleries with someone – there was nothing worse than feeling you had to wait and stare at something that didn’t interest you, or risk looking like a philistine.

  It was also, I realised uncomfortably, a fairly accurate reflection of the state of our marriage. But I didn’t want to think about that, not now, not when we were happy and having a good time together. So I didn’t think – I just looked at the beautiful paintings, and when Jonathan was out of sight, I sneaked off to gaze at the ceramics display, which I knew would bore him. He found me there half an hour later.

  “I knew you’d be mooning over cups and saucers,” he teased. “I don’t know why you bother coming, when you could just go to John Lewis and do the same thing.”

  “Fuck off!” I laughed. “It’s Harrods, at the very least. Look at this, look at the glaze.”

  “Owen would smash it in about a nanosecond,” Jonathan said. “It’s gone midday. We should get some lunch and then I’ll have to head off for my two o’clock.”

  I realised I was starving, and thirsty, and my ankle was hurting from standing for so long. But when we drifted back out into the hot streets, we found ourselves doing The Dance of Lunch.

  When you’ve been together as long as Jonathan and I have, even the things that annoy you about each other become games – become mythologised almost. So it was with us and lunch. We’d been out to dinner together countless times, and it was always fine, bar the occasional overdone steak, upselling sommelier or minor row. But lunch was another matter.

  The first time it happened, we’d been going out for just a few weeks and I’d stayed over at Jonathan’s for the first time. We did all the usual stuff – woke up, had coffee, had sex, showered, and then Jonathan suggested going for lunch, so we strolled down his local high street and assessed the options.

  “What’s this place like?” I asked as we passed an organic salad bar.

  “No idea whatsoever,” Jonathan said, “and I don’t intend to find out now.”

  I was slightly taken aback, but thought, fair enough, maybe salad isn’t his thing.

  “How about Thai?” Jonathan said.

  “Really? For lunch? All that rice?” I
objected. “There’s a nice looking café there across the road.”

  “No fucking way,” Jonathan said. “It’s always rammed with families with screaming kids at weekends.”

  Little did he know that one day, we’d be one of those families. But back then, I had to admit he had a point.

  And so it went on. Jonathan put in a bid for Nando’s; I said no because their chicken wasn’t free range. I proposed a Vietnamese place, but he said the last time he’d been there the waitress was so rude he’d vowed never to go back. After half an hour of this, we decided that the next place we passed would be the one we went to, even if it turned out to be horrid, as of course it did.

  And time and time again over the years, the scenario repeated itself, until we came to recognise and fear the Dance of Lunch, which always ended in disappointment and ill temper.

  And now, here in New York, city of about a zillion restaurants, it was happening again. Jonathan wasn’t in the mood for sushi. The queue at the falafel cart was too long. I didn’t want to go to a burger place because I was worried about hormones and antibiotics in the meat. A pleasant-looking Mexican restaurant turned us away because we hadn’t booked. And all the time, I was getting hungrier and hungrier and we were both getting crosser and crosser.

  I found myself turning to passive aggression.

  “Look, we can go to the burger place if you want. I’ll just have something else – they probably do a vegetarian option, even if it’s not very good.”

  “No, Laura, don’t be a martyr,” Jonathan said. “This is your holiday, you must eat something you’ll like.”

  “It’s too late now,” I said. “We’re doing the Dance of Lunch. Wherever we end up will be minging, let’s just cut our losses and not be too late to eat anything at all.”

  “I’m sure there was a place just down the road here that I read about,” Jonathan said, getting out his phone.

  And then I gave up all hope. Once Jonathan started Googling, I knew we were well and truly fucked.