Belinda McKeon - Tender

“But I’ll never be getting married, Catherine,” James said then, and he shook his head.

“Oh, Jesus, me neither,” Catherine practically shouted.

James held up a hand to dismiss this. “Oh, no, you will, you will of course,” he said, clicking his tongue. “Of course all that will happen for you.”

“No, no, I never want to get married,” Catherine said, feeling the need to stamp it truly down. “I want my freedom. And I can’t see myself ever meeting that person. You know?”

Then came a laugh, the very thing she had been wanting from him, but it was not the light laugh she had hoped for; it was hollow. It was hard. “Oh, yes, Catherine,” he said. “I think I know what you mean.”

Better not to speak at all, she decided now; nothing she could come up with could work for her, none of her words could carry her through. She had never known confusion like this; it had such infuriating depths, so many levels opening and sliding into one another. James was seething, it seemed to her; he was rigid, beside her, with a darkness that appeared to have come upon him from nowhere, and she was its landing ground, it seemed — or, maybe, she was its cause? It was in his eyes, and it was in the set of his shoulders, and it was in the lock of his jaw, and she saw all this, and she wanted to run from it, wanted to protest; how had she provoked it?

“All of this is a way of saying something, Catherine,” James blurted.

“Yes?” she said, her heart pounding.

“It’s a way of saying I won’t be giving my mother a wedding. I’m not that kind.”

“OK,” she said, dumbfounded.

He looked at her. “I’m…different,” he said slowly.

“OK.”

“So that’s how it is.”

She nodded; a rapid one-two. She knew but she did not know. She knew but she could not trust herself. She was so often wrong. She was so often sloppy, melodramatic, blurting her exaggerations like a fool.

“OK,” she said again.

James bit his bottom lip, pressing the teeth in hard. “I decided a while ago that I wanted to tell you, but there was never the chance — over the phone wasn’t right.”

“Oh God,” she said, picturing the front room at home, the cord across the hall. “Of course not. No, no.”

“So I asked you here.”

“Yes.”

“Because I feel so close to you. And because I wanted to tell you in person.”

“Oh, yeah! I’m so glad you told me, James. I’m so glad…”

“You’re not the first person I’ve told, obviously.”

“Obviously,” she said, feeling, despite herself, a little offended.

“I mean, Amy and Lorraine know. I told them a few weeks ago.”

“OK!” she said, nodding, desperately trying for the right note of brightness. “OK!” she repeated, and she sounded like some annoying bird.

“Of course, they said they already knew.” He laughed properly for a moment. “Fuckers.”

“Ha!” Catherine said, with the same stupid brightness.

“But the big thing for me now, you see, is to tell my mother. Because she doesn’t know, needless to say. And I think it’s time for her to know.”

“Oh—” Catherine started, but James shook his head to indicate that he did not want her to speak.

“I’ve been needing to tell her. This weekend has just confirmed that for me. The way she’s been around you. You know? It’s time.”

“OK.”

“And it’s not going to be pretty, Catherine,” he said, kicking at the dust of the path as he walked. “I know that much.”

“Ah, no,” Catherine said quickly. “Ah, James.”

“No, no,” he said firmly. “I know that much. She’s not going to take it well.”

Catherine swallowed. She tried to find the right thing to say, and when it came to her, she felt a rush of gratitude. “But your mother is so brilliant, ” she said, taking James’s arm. As she said it, she was picturing Peggy as she had been at the kitchen table that morning, cigarette in hand, gold bangles jangling, freckles on the bridge of her nose, the V-neck of her cotton top. That was a nice top, a modern top, a top that not many women Peggy’s age, Catherine thought, would wear. None of this she said to James; none of this could be helpful to him. But still, she said again, she was sure that his mother would be fine. Would, she said again, be brilliant .

He shook his head. “I don’t think so, Catherine.”

“But why? ” Catherine felt almost stung; this seemed to her, suddenly, like a battle she wanted to win. “Why do you say that? Initially, maybe, she’ll be surprised. But she’s so great, James. She’s so mad about you.”

“How she is now is not what we’re talking about, Catherine,” James said, snatching his arm away from hers, and his tone was as sharp as she had ever heard it. He stepped ahead of her, his hands shoved in his pockets again. “How she is now, ” he said over his shoulder, “is not the problem. The woman she is now is a woman who is seeing her son in a certain way. With you, for instance — well, I’ve told you.”

“She was just being friendly to me, for Christ’s sake!”

He stopped and looked back at her. For a moment she thought she saw tears in his eyes. But no, he was not crying. He was grimacing. He looked truly disappointed in her; he looked utterly sick of her. He sighed, staring past her now to the fields on the other side of the water. “Maybe I should never have let her believe even as much as she does.”

Catherine said nothing. Tears of her own were ready to start up, she suspected; she did not trust herself to speak.

“I mean, all of this, can’t you see, all of this — the way she sees the two of us, the way she’s so delighted with you — all of this, Catherine, is why .” He shook his head, and it was not dampness she had seen in his eyes, Catherine realized; it was pain.

“James,” she said weakly.

“You know, I was always close to Amy — you know that.”

She nodded. He had told her that Amy had been his best friend all through the last years of school; he had told her how, since Amy had started college and he had gone to Berlin, they had grown apart a little, and that this had been sad for him, but that it had felt natural. And anyway, he had said, now he had her. Now he had Catherine. Catherine had not allowed herself to think it through, what James had meant by this. Catherine, like the frightened child she was, had not allowed herself to ask. Now she felt a stab of envy at the thought of how much better Amy would have been at handling this situation, this conversation; how much better, it struck her, Amy very possibly already had been. Had he told Amy and Lorraine that he wanted to tell his mother? Probably. And probably they had not reacted anything like this; probably, they had reacted with common sense and calmness.

“And, you know, I think my mother had ideas about me and Amy too, is what I’m saying, but it didn’t matter so much back then,” James said. “We were kids. And Amy was never out here with me, not the way you are now.”

“OK,” Catherine nodded.

“I suppose what I’m saying is that I’ve never had to see the way my mother looked at a girl before now. At the way she looked at me with a girl, I mean.”

“Right.”

“And so, no . No more. It’s bad enough. I’m nineteen years old, Catherine. I have to put a name on it. I need her to know.”

“Of course you do,” Catherine said, and she reached out to touch him, but could not land on the right place; every part of him seemed to be some kind of force field. She let her hand go to the top of his arm, near where she had seen his father touch him the day before; she rubbed him there. He seemed to start at the feeling of her hand on him, as though he had not known it was coming, but then he relaxed. But then he sighed heavily, so maybe it was not relaxation at all; maybe it was exhaustion.