The Colour of Tea (24 page)

Pete tries to sit up. I put my hand against his back, helping him. His face is twisted in pain. He looks up at Léon, his eyes full of fury.

“Should I get some ice?” Don calls out.

Marjory says, “Yes, that would be great. See if the clubhouse has an ice pack in the freezer.”

“I’ll go with you,” Celine offers.

As they jog off together, Pete continues to stare at Léon. His gaze is hard.

“You fucker,” he hisses.

“Pardon?” Léon leans forward, concern and confusion on his face.

“I said,
You. Fucker.
”

Léon turns to Marjory and me, as if for an explanation. We glance at each other.

“Bloody hell, Pete,” I whisper, rubbing his back.

“It wasn’t his fault,” Marjory says gently.

“Like hell it wasn’t!” Pete growls. He winces and closes his eyes.

Léon stands up straighter. The tone of Pete’s voice and the look on his face do not need any interpretation now.

Pete’s eyes spring back open. “He walloped that ball right at my face! If that wasn’t enough, now he’s dumped water all over me!”

“Pete, I don’t think …” I raise my voice now, hoping to reason with him. Or just shut him up.

“French prick. You did that on purpose and you know it. First Grace and now this,” he spits.

Marjory stares at me but says nothing. Léon doesn’t even look at me. I feel like I am being pulled into a sink that is being drained of water. Sucked down and down. I can feel my stomach lurch.

Léon’s confusion has been replaced with a cool mask. “I’m very sorry, but you are mistaken, Pete. I did not hit you on purpose,” he says.

“Ha!” Pete cries.

“Why would I hit you deliberately? That’s … that’s absurd.”

Marjory looks at me again, caught in the middle of this unexpected conflict.

“I don’t know
why
you would hit me. Shit! I don’t know why you hit me, or why you insist on hitting on my wife. How should I know?” Pete is practically snarling now. “You French bastards are all the same.”

Léon takes another step backward.

“Pete, I think maybe you have a concussion, I think, ah …” Marjory stumbles to a stop.

“What are you talking about?” I whisper to Pete urgently. I feel slightly nauseated.

“Oh God, here we go. You
know
what I am talking about, Grace!” He throws his hands up toward the sky. “He helps you at the supermarket, he makes
macarons
with you, he buys champagne, bloody chocolate forks …”

“What’s going on?” Marjory mouths to me over Pete’s head.

“You are
my
wife, Grace,” he spits. “Or did you forget?” His eyes are accusing as they lock with mine.

I have that tumbling, guilty feeling again in my stomach and try not to look at Léon. Pete leans back against his palm and
presses his weight into his legs, trying to stand up. He lets out a weak grunt. The raw emotion makes him look ugly.

“Hey, what are you doing? Sit down,” I say, grabbing his shoulder. “Please, just sit down and take it easy.”

“I’m not stupid!” he screams at Léon.

Léon draws himself up even straighter. He looks a little pale. “I have never … I would never …
hit on
your wife.” He glances back over his shoulder as if checking for Celine, but she is still at the clubhouse. He picks up his tennis racquet and has turned to walk away when Pete leaps toward him. Pete’s fist plunges into Léon’s stomach, below his rib cage, and Léon doubles over. I hear Léon’s soft bark as his breath escapes his chest. Marjory lets out a shrill cry, and that’s when I notice Don has come up behind us. He grabs Pete’s shoulders and yanks him backward. Léon looks up for a split second, and his blue eyes connect with mine.

Verre de Mer—Sea Glass

Pistachio with Buttercream Filling

T
he doctor recommends ordinary painkillers and a good spell with an ice pack and sends us on our way, the tension between us seething. We say nothing of the incident. I’m scared to open my mouth in case I say something too terrible, something I can’t take back. I can’t look at him. Pete tells me he will make a roast chicken, perhaps a touch of apology in his voice. I nod but say nothing, heading into the study to complete some online ordering for Lillian’s. One of the specialty pastry goods suppliers in Hong Kong will now ship to Macau. I have been so excited about it but am filled only with guilt and confusion and anger as I scroll through the screens of Microplane zesters, tart molds, sugar thermometers, Mauviel beating bowls.

Pete pushes his dinner around his plate. Yorkshire puddings, glossy carrots, chunks of crispy-skinned potatoes. The smell is heady. We sit opposite each other at the dining table.

I clear my throat. “Nothing has happened, Pete. Léon is a friend.”

Pete puts down his knife and fork and holds his hands together. He looks at his plate rather than at me.

“He’s … he has helped me. With Lillian’s. There’s
nothing
going on.”

I think of the chocolate fork, the blue of Léon’s eyes, my dream. I swallow down a piece of chicken that seems to have swollen with my guilt.

“I see how you look at him,” Pete says quietly.

I open my mouth to respond, but I can’t think of an explanation. He is right. I can account for my actions but not my fantasies. My pause reveals my feelings; we both notice it.

“Nothing has happened between us,” I repeat, holding on to the truth of each word, despite my face feeling warm. “Pete? Nothing.”

Pete stares at me for a moment, then runs a hand through his hair. He pushes a potato around his plate with his fork. Then he puts the cutlery down slowly and exhales. His breath is long, as if he is breathing out the weight of the world. Then he leans on his elbows and puts his fists to his mouth.

“We have to talk. I’m sorry, Grace.” The words seem to catch in his throat.

“Well, you shouldn’t have hit him.”

“It’s not that.”

“What then?”

He pauses.

“Gracie, I had … sex … with …”

The air seems to go still and hot.

“What? Who …”

“A prostitute. At the Lisboa.”

Now I feel like I have been elbowed in the guts. “At the Lisboa,” I echo. I reach for my wineglass, feel the smooth, cool weight of it against my palm.

Pete looks down. I stare at the top of his head and notice where his hair is thinning.

“At the Lisboa,” I say again.

There are a few silvery hairs on his crown, new ones, or at least
ones I hadn’t noticed. I imagine this head above someone else, someone else having this same view.

“God.” The word rushes out like a little prayer. I wonder if I will be sick.

“Grace, I …” His chin is lifted now so I can see his face, the lines and deep grooves. He looks different to me, foreign somehow. It is as if a mask has been stripped away. His face is a curiosity, like I am seeing it for the first time. The stray hairs between his eyebrows and above his nose, the creases of his neck, the wisps of hair by his collar which need trimming. He doesn’t finish his sentence but looks at me with his mouth open, as if paused to say something further that got lost.

“When?” My voice sounds like it is coming from far away.

“March, it was in March. I got drunk … I …”

I think of the nights he came home late. Maybe drunk. I don’t know. It suddenly feels as though I haven’t really noticed him in a while. My husband. More like a flatmate. Have we really been living like this since March?

“Grace. It was a mistake. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

And then he says the very thing neither of us has had the guts to say. He brings up the subject that has hovered over us for months. He speaks slowly, tasting each bitter word as it comes out of his mouth.

“When you said … when the doctor said that we couldn’t have …”

I think of Pete on our wedding day. The orange shirt. Bali heat. The look on his face. But then I imagine his head above someone else. His face, straining, looking down at another woman’s body. My stomach aches, and it is hard to breathe. I observe it as if outside myself. The odd feeling, the mouthful of meal netted in my throat, my chest tight.

“Because we can’t have children you had sex with a prostitute?”

“It wasn’t like that. It’s just that … Shit. We never talk about it, Grace. I mean, babies. The tests. We never talk about any of it.”

“You want to
talk
about it?”

I stand up, unsure what to do next but unable to stay sitting. The tight feeling in my lungs starts to burn. I want to say the nastiest things; I want to spear him with something he will never forget. I want him to hurt.

“You want to talk about it, after you accuse me …
me
… of looking at a man the wrong way. After
you
sleep with another woman …”

“Grace …”

“A woman that you
paid
to have sex with you?”

“Shit. It wasn’t—I mean, it was awful … I …” He is reaching for my hand across the table, but I step back, my chair sliding a few inches. I scream at him inside my head. How dare you? How could you? I will never forgive you! I feel like Mama, so hot and mad I could do anything. I can almost see her face in front of me, pale and ferocious.

“Please, Grace,” he says, “don’t go. We need … we need …”

“We need what? Huh? We need what, Pete?” The words come out growling. I can feel a stinging heat racing through my blood, through my veins. I feel like I have been injected with Mama. Red and wild. I want to say things I cannot retract. Things like, I shouldn’t have married you. The things she said to me once:
I don’t need you. I don’t want you here. Perhaps you were a mistake.
I feel myself start to shake. His hand reaches for mine.

“Don’t come near me! Don’t you come near me!” My voice wobbles.

He looks up at me, silent, mouth hanging open uselessly. He implores me with his eyes, dark and sorrowful.

I want to scream those things Mama had said. The last terrible
things that could never be erased.
Leave me! Leave me now and never come back! Don’t you ever come back!
I can feel the tears bubbling up as if from the depths of my being.

“I don’t want to talk to you; I don’t want to even look at you.”

I pick up my plate with a quivering hand and throw it against the wall. It shatters loudly. Gravy slides down the paint in a sticky brown stain. My heart pounds, as though trying to tear through my chest. I can’t be in this room anymore. I push the chair aside and hear it clatter to the floor. I don’t look back. I storm into the study and slam the door. I sit in front of the computer screen, panting, with tears running down my hot cheeks.

My hands shake as the sobs hurl themselves out of me. I breathe in and then out, in and then out. Slowly, slowly. The tightness in my chest subsides to a dull ache, like a headache from a hangover. I feel so exhausted. As though I’ve run a marathon.

Eventually I hear a rattle as Pete picks up his keys. He leaves, closing the door behind him quietly. I put my head down next to the keyboard and stare at the Tab key until it goes blurry.

Dearest Mama,

I am worn down. I feel like a piece of glass in the ocean. Starting out all bright and glittery, and now soft and green and tumbled and opaque; laid out on the sand. Is there a way back from here?

Did you wake up one day, Mama, and feel surprised by how your life was? I felt like that this morning. The sun shining through the windows of the spare room. Pete wasn’t beside me. I reached out for him, but my hand fell on smooth, empty sheets, and it woke me up with a throat full of anger. I put my hand in front of my face, and I thought, Whose hand is this? Aren’t you supposed to know the back of your hand like, well, the back of your hand? I don’t know my hand
at all, Mama. I don’t know my hand or my leg or my face. I certainly don’t know my heart.

I am a stranger to myself.

The only place I know myself is in Lillian’s.

Your loving daughter,
Grace

Une Vie Tranquille—A Quiet Life

Pineapple with Butterscotch Ganache

T
he bell above the door chimes, pulling me up sharply from my thoughts. I am staring into the oven in a dull kind of stupor, watching
macarons
rise; the gentle forming of something new. My stomach twists into a knot when I hear a man’s voice talking to Rilla. I know I shouldn’t, but I lean a little toward the sound of it. Rilla’s head pokes around the kitchen door, and she speaks quietly.

“Grace? It’s Léon. He wants to see you.”

I wonder if she notices my eyes widen, whether she can hear my heartbeat thrumming in the cage of my chest. She doesn’t say anything, just moves to the sink with cups and saucers. I run my fingers through my hair.

He is wearing a black leather jacket and jeans. He gives me a careful smile. Heat rises from my neck and crawls up my chin to my cheeks.

“Hi, Léon, how are you?”

“I am fine,” he replies calmly. He leans over the counter to place a kiss on each of my cheeks, and I bump against him. The teapot rattles on the bench.

“Can I get you anything?” The percussion of my heart increases its tempo.

“Oh no. I mean … I wanted to talk to you.”

I gesture toward a table and untie my apron.

“Rilla?” I call out.

“Yes?”

“Would you mind getting us some coffees and a couple of
macarons
?”

She comes out of the kitchen, and her eyes dart between Léon and me.

“Of course, Grace.”

Léon gives a little forced smile. “I’m sorry; I don’t mean to interrupt you during your work. I just thought it would be best to talk. About … well, you know.”

I nod. I know.

He settles into his seat, then looks around the café for a few moments, as if checking to see who is here. The whistling of the milk steamer pierces the awkward silence.

“Léon, I’m so sorry about the other day …”

“Here you go.”

Rilla places an espresso in front of Léon and a cappuccino in front of me, and sets a plate of yellow
macarons
between us. Pineapple and butterscotch—
Une Vie Tranquille.
She smiles, then goes back to the kitchen.