Something Gave

Something Gave

He told her to eat with her eyes first.
It was a degustation menu. She played up her naïveté and asked if that had anything to do with disgusting. Ivo missed the twinkle in her eye, the mock coquette in the tilt of her head, so he spent the time until the first of the twelve courses arrived explaining the root of each word. Astonishingly, eventually, indeed, the same: the Latin word for taste. Then a huge plate was placed square on the linen tablecloth in front of her and Wray did as she was told. Ate slowly with her eyes before reaching for a fork. This was Picasso in his cubist phase. A construction of squares and cubes in contrasting colours. A tumble of edible dice on china.
She looked up from the pork belly and whipped jus to acknowledge she was also listening to the discussion about the matched wines. The sommelier hovered while Ivo sniffed the gaping mouth of his wine glass. Smell, smell, mmm, yes.
In a mirror movement, Wray raised her glass and prayed for a high note of strawberries and tasted – gustus – instead, only, coldness on her tongue. A pleasant cold, not the biting temperature outside this retrofitted bank made to look like a French courtesan’s boudoir. Loads of red velvet not confined to hints, flourishes or high notes.
‘Lovely,’ she murmured as a catch-all. This was as far away from her teenage years of getting on the piss back home as you could get. She was nevertheless confident her palate would one day appreciate the expense.
The sommelier bowed and retreated. She and Ivo were alone on opposite sides of the table so the hand on her shoulder was always going to be a shock. She’d slipped her cashmere wrap across the back of the chair; the touch was skin on skin. Was this part of normal service from high-end waitstaff? Wray’s naïveté was often real. One day she would graduate from university and into life, but for now she was merely studying both with passion.
After the hand on her shoulder, the oncoming kiss on her cheek set off a chain reaction of clashing cutlery and smeared food that would need bleaching from the tablecloth. A swamp of face powder and Libre perfume mugged her senses.
The voice at her side was at once light and gravelly, a voice chiselled by time and smokes. ‘My darling Laura, so good to see you back, and Ivo you’re looking fit.’
Ivo was half-standing by this time.
‘Maurethe,’ he cried. ‘I didn’t think you’d be out and about.’
‘The dreaded Covid has been seen off and my exclusion is past, thank God.’
God’s name was uttered as if He was a good friend. Ivo too clearly knew this Maurethe well, but there was no time for introductions. Because the old woman’s eyes fell from him to Wray’s upturned face and flared into glassy balls of horror. ‘You sweet girl,’ she managed, ‘a case of mistaken identity.’ She laughed it off. ‘The food is divine here. I must away.’ She was a woman of her word.
Silence settled. Ivo stretched across and squeezed Wray’s hand. ‘You are very beautiful,’ he said.
Wray knew she wasn’t. There was no reason to bung it on with the added ‘very.’

Wray didn’t mean to follow Ivo’s wife, Laura, the following Friday. Ivo was a bit of fun: the idea of a wife hadn’t even been part of the equation until the misidentification at the posh dinner.
Impulse had sent her to surprise Ivo for lunch. She approached his office block, tottering on heals across the faux-cobbles of the business precinct, mobile in hand ready to text the ‘come-hither’ image she’d taken that morning straight out of the shower along with the suggestion he come down to meet her for a bite.
Her timing was good, or bad. Ivo was already coming out of his office. From the street, she watched him step from the elevator into the glass cube of the foyer. The woman on his arm was talking. He lent in, lending an ear. They fitted together like pieces of a puzzle. As they parted, he kissed her. On a scale of Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss to your grandma at Christmas, the display was caring, maybe, sexy, not in the least. The performative affection of a longstanding couple.
Wray sheltered behind a parking pay station until the wife had passed. After one last look at her phone and the enticement of her own smile in her unsent message to Ivo, she turned to follow her. She was at this moment only certain of one thing: that old Maurethe woman in the restaurant needed glasses. Even from behind, Wray did not look a bit like Ivo’s wife who had twenty years on her. Wray tasted the word plump in her mouth.
The wife was in a business suit, her hair high off her shoulders in a twisted bun. Her neck bare. Maybe, Wray considered as she came too close when the pedestrian light turned red at the next intersection, just maybe, they were similar in that point where their heads attached to their bodies. She felt a trace-tremor of Ivo’s teeth nuzzling her neck. The insistent beeping and flashing on the traffic pole swatted the memory away. She pulled her scrunchie off and released her pony tail. Her blonde hair was almost to her waist.
Blaming only innocent curiosity, she followed the other woman into Myers. Watched the wife quickly select two off-white blouses, one with a flounce, one without, and join the queue to the Fitting Rooms. Loitering, Wray shuffled through the closest display, the clickety-clack of plastic hanger against hanger playing as she trolled through the rack of black slacks. The noise sounded like a 1950s typist showing off her 100 words a minute.
Another woman approached. ‘Is this the line for the Fitting Rooms?’
The wife’s eyes assented. ‘Though,’ she said, as if the question was the start of a conversation, ‘they should call them Fatting Rooms. You go in feeling pretty okay then you see yourself from every angle in those mirrors coming at you on all sides…’
‘Under those awful lights,’ the stranger joined in, her pile of potential purchases cascading over her arm in a froth of subdued fabrics.
‘You come out seeing yourself entirely differently.’
‘And not in a good way.’
Wray could not see the joke but they were both laughing. And not just them, the others too in the line. All the interchangeably invisible middle-aged women.
‘These lunchtime queues,’ the woman at the back sighed. ‘But what can you do?’
‘Yes,’ the wife agreed, ‘with work waiting on your desk for when you get back.’
‘The juggling.’
‘The muddle of it all.’
And yet, still the laughing eyes. ‘Just another thing on top of everything else in our day. Sometimes you think something’s gotta give,’ the wife said. ‘And don’t get me started on child care.’
It came the wife’s turn to enter a cubicle. Wray heard a curtain swish across.

There was absolutely no excuse to follow the wife into the fitting room, and yet Wray grabbed a pair of slacks and joined the queue. When she got in, the previous discussion amongst the older women was not continuing. The only voices were those of a mother and child in the far cubicle.
The thin curtains conferred something of the confessional. What is said in there in hushed voices is for the pair alone. Nor did Wray want to overhear the exchange about the swimwear.
‘You know you’d have to be more careful if you got a bikini, you’d need more sunblock, your back and stomach too,’ warned the mother.
Wray pictured the daughter in front of the angled mirrors, a tube of flesh and potential, legs naturally smooth and chest Instagrammable as a boy’s. She imagined the girl standing in a pool of one-piece togs discarded like sealskins on the floor. She imagined the girl had chosen a pink bikini instead. Wray’s own first bikini had been pink. She’d loved herself in it. Pre-pubescent, eager, on the cusp. Yes. This. Is. Me.
Another warning from the mother behind the curtain. ‘Your dad’s not going to like it.’
Wray bristled. The poor kid had a right to stake a claim on bodily autonomy.
‘Let me do the talking when we get home. He thinks you’re too young for this but here’s the deal…’
Strategic silences, negotiating, deals… Being a girl was difficult. Being a woman too. Wray suddenly didn’t know why she was there. She felt uncomfortable, unable to avoid staring at her front and her back and her profile in the damned mirrors. Not even pretending to try on the trousers. It was a relief to hear curtains being tugged aside. A bustle of bodies moving.
‘Aren’t they lovely,’ exclaimed Ivo’s wife in the corridor to the cubicles, centimetres away through the thin fabric of Wray’s.
The child’s voice piped up. ‘I couldn’t decide but I like the yellow bikini best.’
‘Good choice. Like sunflowers,’ praised Ivo’s wife.
‘My guineapig’s name is Sunflower!’
‘You don’t say!’

Wray kept seeing middle-aged women in black suits on the street, the corporate uniform, the uniformity of them. The indivisible invisibility of them. I will never be one of this tribe, she thought. The vehemence she felt in this denial worried her.
Her phone rang. Ivo’s deep voice offered a lifeline. ‘Lunch?’
Her stomach growled at the word. ‘I was thinking the exact same thing earlier.’
‘I’ll meet you at our favourite then.’
Wray watched her reflection striding in the plate glass of the post office. Her embroidered peasant blouse bloated on the breeze making her huge. She slapped down her marching arms. The blouse settled around her hips again, representing her as she wanted to be seen.
The Greenhouse Brasserie when she got there was a calm oasis off a side street. She looked through one of the picture frame windows. Ivo was already sitting up against a sidewall. He hadn’t seen her yet. His eyes were the colour of his shirt, both the comfortable grey of a slow, lazy evening. He was smiling at something on his phone. Something unknowable. Something she couldn’t even begin to imagine. But he looked up and turned the smile on her as soon as she entered. Put her body in the spotlight.
Wray wondered whether the little girl with the guineapig called Sunflower was home yet. She didn’t want to think it, did anyway: how right the bikini-wary father was to want to protect his daughter from the unremitting male gaze.
‘They have octopus as the special,’ he said by way of greeting. ‘Now, if you’ve never had grilled polpo, let me introduce you.’
Pronouncing polpo fully rounded and accented as he had, sounded put-on and false when she tried. She found she was not hungry after all.