‘Same,’ she replied, frowning at the menu she was
holding at arm’s length
He wasn’t so sure. Judging by the expression on her
face he thought she might need glasses. Unbeknownst to him, it wasn’t just her
that was in denial. While she might have been struggling to read what was right
in front of her, he was finding it harder to focus at a distance. Sometimes he
failed to see what was approaching altogether.
The conversation had come about as they had been
comparing training injuries. Both of them suffered from weak knees. He could no
longer run and she could no longer squat. In regard to the running, he was
convinced it was age, not his creeping weight gain. With her he suspected she
might be a little ambitious, attempting to squat an unrealistic amount of free weight,
but without having the correct form. He’d seen that sort of thing before with women
who did weights. His ex-wife had stuck safely to cardio.
They were sitting opposite each other at a tiny table
in a crowded café on Saturday morning. It had become their habit to go for
breakfast after spending the night together. They met every second weekend
around his shared custody. He had explained, apologetically, that it was all
the time he could commit and was relieved when she said that that suited her
quite well. She wasn’t demanding. In fact he found her surprisingly low
maintenance, which was a novelty to him in a woman. The other women in his life;
his ex-wife and teenage daughter, were nowhere near as easy. ‘I think I’ll go for the ‘Trucker’. Apparently they do an excellent hash,’ he announced.
‘Just poached eggs and a slice of wholemeal, and maybe
another coffee for me,’ she said.
‘Your usual,’ he replied.
She was always watching her weight. Initially he had
encouraged her to relax and enjoy food when they were together and he would lay
in her favourite treats from Nosh when she came to stay. But lately he had
stopped. He could see she might put on weight easily and quickly go from curvy
to dumpy. His ex had been built like a greyhound, running on nothing but wine
and anxiety. Not that it was fair to compare them. She smiled at him across the
table and reached out her hand. He responded self-consciously. The table next
to them was so close he could have rested his cup there without stretching.
As their hands touched his thoughts flicked back to
the night before and then to the first night they had slept together. There was
no question the sex was great. He had forgotten that sex could be like that. He
had felt like a teenager just discovering the pleasure all over again. The
waiter approached with coffee, interrupting his thoughts. He looked at the coffee
with a professional eye. It was the first time they had been to this café.
The area he lived in was surrounded on all sides by a
plethora of patisseries and cafés, and he liked to try as many of them as
possible, but whenever he asked her where she wanted to go she always suggested
returning to the first one they visited – the café with the little courtyard
and garden. Their first breakfast. He hadn’t wanted her to go home. He had
spent the whole time thinking about going back to bed. He hadn’t felt that kind
of passion in his marriage for years. He had enjoyed the food at that café too,
but he had a compulsion to keep searching for better. There was always a new
place opening.
He dropped her hand to pick up the property section of
the weekend paper and folded it back on itself. He started to read the latest
article about the astronomical rise in the Auckland property market. The story
focused on an ex-state house that went to auction just a block from where they were
now sitting.
He hadn’t been looking to date when he met her. It was
a LinkedIn connection. Someone had referred her and he had been in need of a
person with her skill set. He had never seen anyone with so many recommendations
and endorsements, all referencing her ethics and practice. He was worried she
might be a bit dry. When they got together to discuss his proposition the
conversation immediately turned from business to banter. He couldn’t even
remember now who had suggested the drink or the subsequent first date.
They had shared interests around work and a similar
sense of humour. His ex hadn’t worked at all and had no interest in the details
of his business. The more he talked to this woman the more he liked her. She
wasn’t glamorous, more down to earth and practical. He recognised her values. Like
him, her partner had left her. She was faithful and the one without blame. They
lived in the same city but moved in different social circles. There were shared
acquaintances of course. It was all two degrees of separation. She had been born in a suburb close to where
they now sat, but she had married into the blue-collar suburbs. She had married
into the kind of suburb he had escaped.
They had spent their second night together at her
house. She lived in the West in a new subdivision. The house was conventional,
large and practical, built from plasterboard. It was twelve years old and she
had lived there from new. When her
marriage had eventually come to its conclusion she had given up any claim on
the business in favour of remaining in the freehold family home. She told him
that neither she, nor her ex-husband, had any real interest in real estate.
Their focus had always been on plenty of room for family and guests, a yard for
the dogs, and enough disposable income for weekends away and a stress-free
life. The house had four double bedrooms, a large office, open-plan lounge and
kitchen, two bathrooms and a double garage.
Even though the house was one of half a dozen in the
street that looked the same, inside it brimmed with personality. He had been
surprised when he visited. Her taste in furnishings was eclectic, a mix of
modern and old. Traces of the departed family remained in corners and
cupboards. There were framed holiday pictures on the stairs and the garage
still contained a lifetime of summers. It was so homey it made him a little
uncomfortable – the way it still reverberated with the life of her family even
though she lived there alone.
It was an unassuming house, especially the kitchen
where she had cooked them breakfast in the morning. Cooking was a necessity
because there was nowhere to walk to from her house. If you needed anything you
really had to get in your car and make an effort. Even then, this was an area
free of lattes and Lewis Road. He had sat and watched her move around the
kitchen, efficient and confident, plating up a full breakfast in no time at all,
like a seasoned pro. As he observed her he noticed that all the kitchen fittings
were off the shelf. Her stove was electric. The bench was composite. It was a
kitset job, not well fitted – functional, not flash. She told him how much she
loved to cook, especially bake and how she missed having people to cook for.
Her two were older than his. He sat there imagining the lunch box treats she
was describing as she grilled the bacon, scrambled the eggs and added a dash of
lemon to the sautéed mushrooms. His ex hadn’t been keen on cooking.
As he left, he stopped to look at the garden. Like
him, the woman hated gardening. She said she had wanted to plant natives but
they grew too slowly. He didn’t comment but the truth was he didn’t like
natives. They never looked right in the suburbs. Instead she had compromised by
planting some native flax as well as some popular imports. The yucca’s were
huge and now framed the house. She told
him that she had selected the yucca as they grew straight up and the tap-root
grew straight down. You could take cuttings if they branched, and they were
easily transplanted before they got too big. She was happy with her choices.
The garden was low maintenance. It suited the house and reflected the residents
in the houses around her. He admired her practicality but he thought the garden
could be prettier. As he drove away he
tried to imagine himself living in a house like that, but he couldn’t. Still,
when he returned home to his rental all he could see was what was absent.
He lived in one of the gentrified areas of the inner
city. He loved the leafy suburbs with the renovated bungalows and wedding cake villas.
This was the kind of area he had dreamed of living in when he was growing up. The
colonial past renovated and repaired, restored to face another one hundred years.
No house dare be anything but neutral. The streets were planted with aging oaks
and the gardens embraced their English heritage. There were camellias, roses
and even boxed hedges. Big old trees
stretched their branches to provide shady avenues and the streets all had humps
to remind drivers to slow down and enjoy the dappled light. Meanwhile their
roots dug down and spread wide, and when they eventually pushed back up to the
surface, they cracked the pavements and roads in the process. These trees were
firmly anchored, clutching the ground that surrounded the Kiwi dream – a full
site, wooden floors, a gas hob and marble worktops.
He was renting a bungalow just around the corner from
the former family home, as was his ex, while he tried to find a way to get back
on the ladder, with only half the equity they had salvaged from their marriage.
He talked fondly of his old house and he
showed the woman photos. Even he could hear the regret and sense of loss in his
voice. She asked him if living so close to his former home was healthy. She
wondered if residing so close to the ruins of a relationship and a dream never
realised was like trying to stay friends with an ex.
‘Maybe there needs to be a time of separation, a time
where you allow yourself to grieve,’ she said. He thought at first that she was being
sarcastic, but she wasn’t.
The house had been such a great buy. It was before the
boom and he’d had a reasonable deposit to be able to afford the plain bungalow in
the mid fives. Once he moved his family in they’d started to renovate. As the
children grew so must the house to keep up with the demands. They had borrowed
heavily, but he knew that no risk meant no capital gain. The problem was that it
wasn’t just a cosmetic renovation – with these old places it never was.
There was the wiring, the floors, the bathrooms, and
that was when he discovered the problem with the plumbing. The mighty oak in
the front yard had spread its roots far and wide and taken possession of some
fundamental piping along the way. The expense of having to protect the tree and
repair the pipes had been a nasty shock. This unexpected hitch meant that when
it came to the kitchen the budget was already blown.
Of course there was no choice. Everyone knew the
kitchen was where the money went. There could be no compromise. Re-mortgaging
was not a risk as the property values had started to rise. The kitchen was the
heart of the home. What would be the point of everything else? It would all be
wasted if it wasn’t fully realised, with a wide screen oven, a hand painted
splash-back, imported tiles painted in France, self-closing doors, a walk-in
pantry, a butler’s sink, a six burner industrial gas hob, and of course, acres
of granite bench tops.
He had shown her the photos of the renovation as they
lay in bed together. She had ooohed and ahhhed over the kitchen, gasping when
he had revealed the cost of some of the fittings. He allowed himself to imagine
what it would be like to have someone like her in a kitchen like that. He could
picture her kneading something on the cool granite bench, flour dusting her
cheek, and him approaching her from behind. But the reality was that right now
he was in a rental and his ex-wife lived a few streets over. The children spent
a week with each parent, passing the old family home as they walked between the
two rented residences.
He returned to the article about the skyrocketing
property values. ‘1.1 million and it’s had nothing done,’ he said. ‘I won’t be happy till I’m back in a place of
my own. It’s just going to take some creative accounting.’
‘Won’t that be a huge financial strain?’ she asked. He
wasn’t sure, but he thought he heard a hint of judgement in her tone and he
remembered her recent enquiry about how big a part he thought money had played in
the collapse of his marriage.
‘I’ll manage,’ he said, slightly defensively. ‘You
have to stay on the ladder.’
‘It’s this area,’ she said. ‘It’s just so expensive.
Maybe you could look somewhere more reasonable?’
‘It’s the schools. If it wasn’t for the kids…’ he said,
trailing off before he finished the sentence.
She raised an eyebrow sceptically. ‘I don’t think the
school will exclude them every second week, will it?’
It was true that his ex-wife was still in the area, as
were other family members. He knew it wasn’t unheard of for people to lie about
their address for zoning.
‘There are other suburbs,’ she continued, ‘a bit
further West, where you can still get the style of house you want, close to the
children’s schools, and you can get in without having to harvest an organ.’
As she was speaking he realised that he should have
seen this coming.
‘Why don’t you look at Avondale,’ she said, admiring
the crema on her short black.
He nodded without answering, but inside he felt his
heart sink.
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