(Jill had run into Max outside their friend Mary’s bakery the other day, and he’d held her at arm’s length, given her a long, admiring look, and said: “God, you’re deteriorating fast. Lucky me, getting out while the going was good, eh?”—his eyes directly contradicting his remarks. Not that she’d ever go back to Max, with whom wedded bliss had been nowhere to be found. It had made her nervous that almost all her new in-laws were Swiss bankers, but also there were the terrific nightlong rows she and Max got into. If she protested Max’s shameless revisionism by making reference to something he himself had said just the day before, he’d become “concerned” about her negativity or would hit her with some barbed comment somebody else had apparently made to him about her demeanor — it wasn’t clear whether he made them up or merely saved them. She never stopped liking Max, but did grow weary at the thought of him.)
Jill went over to the blue stand where issues of the Evening Standard were stacked, but Jacob handed her his copy.
“I know whose idea it was to get married,” he said. “I don’t need to ask around — I was there. And so were you, just another stunner among the many, many stunners of London town, drunk on a sofa with one of your best mates—”
“Excuse me… the best mate may have been legless, but seeing as I’m a hero of the kingdom of alcohol, I was mildly tipsy. Also don’t forget to mention that this best mate was a moderately attractive man who’d never once made so much as a hint of a move on me in all the twenty-eight years we’d known each other…”
“Maybe he thought it was too obvious. I mean, Jack and Jill? Anyway the two of you were thirty-nine years old, prime of life, and both solvent to boot, so the man plucked up the courage to say… Hang on, what did I say again?”
Do you think that maybe we’re able to love someone best when that person doesn’t know how we feel? That’s what Jacob had said, and she’d looked at him and asked if he was about to say something weird to her. She’d rather he didn’t. Having weird things said to her was a large part of her day job and why couldn’t she have time off? Jacob’s answer was that he was about to say something weird, but only a tiny bit, and maybe what he wanted to say wouldn’t come out sounding as wrong as they thought it would. Maybe it would sound normal.
Let’s get married and have sublime blasian babies before it’s too late, Jacob had blurted after she’d nodded at him to continue. Jill stretched an arm out and refilled both their shot glasses. It was already too late for babies. She’d had a sort of deadly serious running joke with both her previous husbands that having children would have to wait “until the war’s over.” But none of the ongoing wars looked likely to ever end, and she could no longer see carrying a child in her future. Not physically, and not mentally either. Maybe that had always been the case.
“I’m not going to marry you, mate.”
“Oh. That’s… well, I mean, why not? Because I said blasian? Because we haven’t known each other for long enough?”
In her head she’d replied: Because I can’t just keep getting married all the time, and also because I’m pissed off with you for making me sit through two of my own weddings and one of yours before it occurred to you that maybe we should have tried it together first.
Aloud she’d said that they were too old, adding that they didn’t need to get married. She said they could just see each other, if he wanted. She advised sleeping the question off. Maybe he’d wake up and realize that he only wanted to get married when he drank a lot of soju.
“But that wasn’t good enough for the rejected suitor,” Jacob continued, settling down into the Tube seat beside hers. “He’d been wanting to marry this woman for ages, long before the adult realization that marriage isn’t all that necessary… so he proposed again the following evening. The babies don’t have to happen, he said, and then he sang the cheesiest Korean song he could find…”
Was Jacob about to sing “What’s Wrong with My Age” right there on the Tube with all these boys and girls and men and women looking? They were already looking, since he hadn’t bothered to keep his voice down.
Still, she stuck up for “What’s Wrong with My Age.” “It’s not a cheesy song! It’s your singing that makes it cheesy. I love that song.”
“Me too. But I’m afraid it is inherently cheddar, J.”
Jacob turned to Jill, opened his arms and sang, in Korean, of staring into the mirror and bidding time to stand aside. The lyrics sprang to her own lips as she listened, and by the time he was challenging her to deny that his age was the perfect age for love, she was smiling the words right back at him.
As he sang, she realized something. He hadn’t been thinking about leaving her. Whatever he’d been working up to asking her, it was about something else entirely. She placed a finger over his lips: “And when they wed their parents and all their friends stood up in the church pews and sang ‘At last’…” but Jacob made a halfhearted attempt to bite her, then said: “Hey! Hey Jill. Are you thinking about leaving me?”
She didn’t answer that. One of the things she’d learned about him early on was that he had an inbuilt and near-infallible lie detector, and all of a sudden she wasn’t sure whether what she’d really been doing for the past few weeks was skillfully molding her own desire to be single again into an image of his. It could be that all Jill’s leaving and being left had now made it impossible for her to stay with anyone.
—
FOR MOST of their lives she and Jacob had both been afraid of the same thing: not being deemed worthy to share a home with a family. They were both foster kids. Nobody ever said you were unworthy, not to your face, but there was talk of adults and children not being “the right fit” for each other. The adults were the ones who decided that, so when “fit” was brought up they were really talking about the child. This left Jacob, and Jill, and Lena (Jill’s onetime foster sister during an idyllic but brief lull) ever-ready to have to leave a home, or to be left. Jacob became extremely capable, a facilitator, someone you wanted around because he smoothed your path — whether through his skill as a polyglot or his general aura of “can do.” Lena was pretty much lawless, used to wear a pair of sunglasses on the back of her head and a badge that said HELL, which she tapped whenever anyone asked her where she was “originally from,” and she was so clearly somebody that you could trust with your life that reform always seemed possible for her. Jill advanced an entirely false impression of herself as biddable and in need of protection. Ah, I’m just a little chickadee who won’t survive the winter unless I nestle under your life-sustaining wing. Far from original, but it worked.
—
THEY WENT OUT to dinner at their favorite restaurant — the benefits were twofold: delicious chargrilled broccoli plus the discussion of Jacob’s question without having to bring it into the house with them. Jacob proposed sacrificing their summer holiday to a project of his, an idea he was developing as part of his work as a bereavement counselor. So that was it, the question he’d been building up to for weeks. Do you mind giving up your holiday to test-run my project? She was embarrassed that he felt he’d had to work up to asking her this; it was a question that would’ve been easily raised and just as easily settled with an unselfish partner. Regarding him her support was in fact unconditional and to date she’d thought she adequately expressed this; now she fought demoralization as she heard him out. His project focused on a particular type of experience that a large number of his clients reported having undergone. “To oversimplify the descriptions I’ve been given, this experience presents as… an implosion of memory. And as the subjects drift through the subsequent debris, they calmly develop a conviction that they do not do so alone. These presences aren’t reported as ghostly, but living ones… minutes, sometimes hours when the mourner feels as if they’ve either returned to a day when the deceased was still alive or the deceased has just arrived in the present time with them… and what’s interesting about these lapses people experience is that most of them happen under fairly similar physical conditions.”