Helen Oyeyemi - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

He rarely appeased her. She wasn’t sure what to make of that given his attitude toward almost all his other friends, loved ones, clients, the efforts he made to ensure everybody else’s comfort. When he was with Jill he made her wonder whether he’d been sent to destroy her. Take the time she’d invited him to sample the first viable batch of tea leaves from the greenhouse she part-owned. Chun Mei, with its taste of sweet springtime grass. He’d sauntered downstairs inexplicably wearing a denim shirt over jeans, taken the teacup from her, and filled his cheeks with tea. “And how is this superior to a nice cup of Tetley?”

The combination of barbaric taste buds and denim on denim had set Jill’s teeth so sorely on edge that her jaw locked for a couple of minutes. Enough time for him to stare her down and walk out unadmonished. He knew what he was doing, he knew! For her part she’d given up trying not to be quite so in love with him at some point in their late teens when she’d clocked that, without deliberately cultivating any particular scent, Jacob Wallace managed to smell exactly like a just-blown-out candle. But if the feelings on his side weren’t there anymore then it was better for him to just go. His contributions to their joint bank account tripled hers but she wouldn’t have a problem doing without handwoven rugs at home and boutique hotels abroad. Doing without Jacob himself was going to make her a little bit crazy for a long time, so no she wasn’t going to make it easy for him to say his piece and then leave.

—

WITH A WEEK to go before their summer holiday Jacob all but ambushed Jill at a Tube station. She was adding another month’s worth of public transport to her Oyster card when an arm slipped around her neck and her husband murmured: “Jill, Jill… you can’t fight this any longer. I need to ask you something…”

She could’ve feigned alarm for just a couple more moments and elbowed him in the groin, but instead she turned her head and hissed: “Whose idea was it to get married in the first place, eh? Why don’t you ask around and get back to me?”

She wasn’t going to let him off just like that but he’d better not be hoping she’d cling to him either! If she didn’t feel like being on her own she could get another husband if she wanted.

(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.