Breaking Up Is Hard To DoI beg of you / Don’t say goodbye / Can’t we give our love another try? — Neil Sedaka
Part One: Television
Naturally, I was the one who came up with the underlying concept for the cafe — our cafe, I thought, smug at the irony. To be sure, I never claimed it was original. In fact, these days I enjoyed being as unoriginal as possible with my words and deeds: it allowed me to be equally blasé with my underwhelming triumphs and petty little failures.
To assist with this personal endeavor, I was watching more television than ever, often sprawled on my threadbare armchair at an irresponsible angle that triggered my pinched nerve. Every now and then, I would feel a sharp pain followed by what felt like a jolt of excruciating electricity, as though my right shoulder were being put to death for a crime beyond the pale.
I’d exercised myself into an agitated rhythm of cycling between reality shows, foreign news channels, old sitcoms, and erotic thrillers exclusively from the 1980s, which I considered to be the most potent source of scripts for trite performances of excitement and sensuality I aimed to put on. I routinely fell asleep in the armchair, which surely was proof that I was getting older than ever, and the jolt of electricity in my right shoulder routinely woke me up from frightful bouts of sleep paralysis where I screamed and screamed but there was no one coming. Then, when I was finally able to release myself from the dreaded fugue of absolute terror, I would march myself to the single bedroom, muttering and rubbing the base of my neck, before swallowing whatever remaining bars of Xanax I could find littered around the apartment or hidden in its nooks and crannies during my fits of unexplained paranoia, and collapsing onto my bed.
There was still no one coming.
I always slept on the same side of the bed (left). I had done this in every single failed relationship I’d ever had, including with my mother — unless I was sleeping with you, which you sometimes permitted me to do if I looked pitiful enough that afternoon.
Whenever I was single, or all alone in a hotel room, I instinctively held the place for another body. Sprawling out blissfully never felt like an option, and this gestured at some deep failure in my personality, like perpetual codependency or the inability to take up space. But you would casually flop onto what I universally considered to be my side regardless of companion or location, tucking yourself in, while I laid awake all night without complaint.
While you were asleep, I was not allowed to touch you or you would pointedly go into another room.
Sometimes I got a little passive-aggressive about this. “It’s a no-contact zone!” I squeaked impotently. “Social distancing only!” But no matter how annoying or solicitous I was, rubbing your back and kissing the base of your neck like I saw actors doing in the erotic thrillers, you would push me away.
It was an evening without you, the ones where I would either spend crying in the living room, smoking American Spirits on the balcony during rigorously timed breaks from my devastation, or on a gentle speedball of Adderall and Xanax. I had watched a combination of CNN (unbearable), NHK (calming), Centroamérica (disturbing), and the BBC, which reminded me of the crisp London mornings I held so dear, where I made myself breakfast while watching the sun rise over the Thames and listened to my staticky radio that I’d acquired from a charity shop, or the dreary evenings where I ate nothing but Linda McCartney sausages on sale at Tesco’s and frozen salmon because I had no money.
I queued up the news channels I didn’t like to maximally enhance my pleasure from the BBC.
My spirits lifted unexpectedly when the news segment came on, and I felt a rush of genuine enthusiasm for the first time in years. When I smiled at it, the considerable crust over my face that had formed from my weeping crumbled like a biscuit. In South Korea, apparently, the business of “break-up cafes” was booming.
The idea was very simple. When you broke up with someone, you wanted to do it somewhere conspicuously public, just in case they went bonkers and knifed you to death. I knew exactly how that worked, having been both the aggressor and the victim at various points in my life. Sometimes I turned the knife on myself and from an external point of view, you really didn’t want that to happen.
But you also didn’t want to be too cruel, and that could be unavoidable if your options are limited. I remembered when my ex-girlfriend told me, shortly after kissing me passionately on a rooftop in Covent Garden, that she had broken up with the woman she had been cheating on with me by announcing the news in a Pizza Express. The woman began to sob into her overcooked alfredo as my ex-girlfriend continued to eat the rest of her mushroom risotto in dead silence before calmly exiting the restaurant.
Surely, I thought, nobody wanted that either. As far as I knew, there was nowhere to publicly break up with someone in my provincial college town and leave them with their dignity intact: we had a pancake shop, a Wendy’s, and a highly successful Japanese restaurant that was run by undocumented Chinese immigrants. The South Korean break-up cafe provided a neat solution. It imitated the hygge of a Danish airport combined with helpful jobseeker’s center. The ambiance was soothing, with balanced colors, warm lighting, and tasteful minimal design associated with official matters like signing checks or divorce decrees, gently reminding both individuals that they were present for business reasons only. If necessary, a trained “mediator” — I imagined them clad in a bank teller’s navy suit — would join the table and employ de-escalation tactics not dissimilar from those utilized in hostage situations.
I immediately picked up the phone and called you with the impure intention of proposing our new start-up venture.
For months now, I had been brainstorming new ways to become closer to you that did not merely involve pale impressions of Robert Redford, although I knew you liked that I had become inexplicably rich after my years of equally perturbing impoverishment, and that there was something authentically suave about me that made you weak in the knees and occasionally willing to fuck me even if you were awfully callous about the Social Distancing No-Contact Zone and I did cry even when you were next to me and breathing deeply with your lovely heat radiating off your back.
You didn’t answer, although I waited as long as I could. Seconds later, my phone lit up with a text, which I read voraciously and promptly choked on: I’m talking to someone else right now. Ordinarily, I invented a romantic competitor who crushed me with their Olympic superiority, but I was now living in a world fueled by overtly predictable dialogic moves and an oddly motivating concoction of uppers and downers. I dialed again, and I mean that I literally dialed your number because, no matter where we were or how many times you changed it, I committed it to memory. It only took about three tries for you to call me back.
“What’s going on?” you asked. Your voice was more tender and worried than I’d initially anticipated, and part of me wanted to burst into hysterical tears and demand to know why you didn’t speak to me that way all the time.
“I have an indecent proposal,” I declared pompously, automatically switching into Robert Redford mode, even though my mouth was terribly dry and talking made a clicking, smacking sound that set off my headaches and might be peripherally linked to my pinched nerve. “Let’s open a cafe together. The BBC taught me about Korean break-up cafes. You’re a good cook, and I’m a skilled diplomat. Let’s help college students break up. We’ll make lots of money. Don’t you like making money?”
You were silent for at least thirty seconds before uttering, “A Korean break-up cafe? As in, with Korean food? Or for the South Korean students? There aren’t many who come here anymore, you know.”
“No,” I said impatiently and condescendingly, to charmingly negate your skepticism. “I learned about the Korean break-up cafes from the BBC. There is nothing intrinsically Korean about them. They are to help people separate amicably. Doesn’t every culture wish to separate amicably?”
“Are you high again?”
“No,” I said, as my teeth ground together, making my jaw click audibly, and the armchair momentarily floated above the floor.
More silence. Because you were no less impenetrable in the flesh, sometimes I preferred only to hear your voice. I liked to put you on speaker with the curtains fully drawn and my eyes shut tight. Especially with your accent, which you refused to let go of on principle, it was not too different from talking to an automated hotline that had long fired its human operators for “efficiency” and didn’t care to conceal this fact.
I had long given up the hope that I could somehow find the magic words, or press buttons in the correct order, that would direct me to a branch of you that remained warm and alive in all the ways I dreamed of. On your good days, I felt like I was communicating with a travel agency that promised sun-drenched holidays ahead. Press 5 for paradise, followed by the star key!
But most of the time it was like trying to file an insurance claim or get reimbursed for a cancelled flight, except the hotline tended to hang up on me rather abruptly and not the other way round.
“…but I don’t know how we’ll compete with the Chinese,” you were continuing. It sounded that my spiel had moved you enough for you to go on one of your beloved tangents about figuring out compliance and licenses and inspections and how you were reasonably familiar with obtaining borough permits, but I was too zoned out from the Xanax and focusing exclusively on the sound of your voice, a touch of hoarseness in your throat that was beautifully amplified by the speakerphone. “In any event, I refuse to cook.” And then, crossly, “Are you still there? Were you even listening to me?”
“Yeah,” I said. My jaw crackled and popped.
“Jesus. Are you on drugs?”
“No, I’m perfectly serious.”
“Serious about what?”
“Serious about the…enterprise. And I’m serious about you.”
“Yeah, right,” you sneered. “Meet me at the Japanese restaurant tomorrow, 7pm, if you mean what you say about the cafe.” As usual, you slammed down the phone with so much force that I wondered if you’d thrown it against the wall.
The flat drone of the dial tone seemed compatible with the muted NHK documentary on the Tōhuku tsunami that had been playing in the background. I had watched the same documentary at least thrice, and likely absorbed some basic knowledge about assuming the appearance of grief and regret. Shaky footage of enormous gray waves knocking over lampposts and telephone wires illuminated my hallway.
As I tussled with my sleep paralysis, and the living room became increasingly crowded with formless shadows intent on dragging me down into hell, the dial tone blared on.
Part Two: Infinite Regress
I was staring blankly at myself in the bathroom mirror as I brushed my hair to get ready for dinner. Behind the mirror was a medicine cabinet so packed to the brim that, if I opened it, about forty pill bottles would rattle out into the dirty sink, and I’d have to spend the rest of the afternoon disinfecting them individually.
Admittedly, I liked the reflection of myself enough that I was tempted to hang up another mirror behind me, to create an infinite regression of my image. It struck me that I should write a densely intertextual autobiography titled Infinite Regress, and I chuckled out loud at my own dastardly wit.
Immediately after my mother died, I spent hours rigorously examining my face for any trace of a resemblance to her. Finding nothing, I indulged in fantasies about being possessed by her spirit. But now I really did look like my mother. It was the voluminous hair, hollowed cheeks, bony shoulders, and pursed lips. I momentarily registered, with a jolt to the heart, that I was looking at myself in exactly the way she always did: like a severe myopic at their optician’s appointment, puzzling out the edges of a Snellen chart.
Come to think of it, it was probably after my mother’s death that things began to go south. I’d become so wealthy overnight that, already disinclined to work, I had no option but to quit my job and survive off the obscenely generous monthly dividends. I was now a true prodigal, and no longer a peasant.
Against her solicitor’s stern advice, I liquidated my mother’s estate in London and squandered it all on surrealist art and documentary photography that would likely be described as “challenging”.
The solicitor’s name was Christopher Briggs, Senior Associate, and he never failed to forget that I was living on Eastern Standard Time. He peppered me with urgent calls at the crack of dawn, which I considered an unforgivable inconvenience despite being wide awake. He’d once had the gall to demand “exactly what I was doing”.
“I’m rebranding myself as a collector,” I said, blowing out a delicate plume of cigarette smoke whilst suppressing a cough, and feeling around in my handbag for what remained of my mother’s Ativan prescription. If I received any mail from the HRMC, I recycled it.
Because I didn’t work, it made sense to stop eating. I subsisted off a regular diet of instant coffee, pills, cigarettes, and various creative flavors of seltzer.
I avoided drinking except for whenever you did come over, which wasn’t often enough. You would pour yourself a full glass of Malbec and make me a modest Schorle. You would also bring your bong and smoke most of the weed I managed to acquire, probably because I made you so tense. Perhaps you insisted on putting on horror films because you needed to watch something more frightening than my disintegration.
If we wound up having sex (40% of the time, also not often enough), after you came, usually inside me with a grunt, you would either return to the horror film despite my protests to the contrary, or turn away from me whilst occupying my side of the bed and promptly fall into a deep, untroubled sleep.
I didn’t speak to my family anymore. I doubted that I would be able to recognize them on the street, and America was the perfect home for an English fugitive. For them, everything in between New York City and Los Angeles was a mystery they didn’t care to solve, and so I existed well outside of the hard borders of their cultural imaginary. I’d at least informed them that I was going into mourning, and it remained unclear (including to myself) whether I was intending to exit it.
Was I truly in mourning, or was it a convenient excuse that I helped myself to as soon as I could? Rash financial decisions aside, I busied myself crying all of the time, over my mother, over you, over both of you at once, and surely that had to count for something. Crying over my mother was strange. If she were alive, chances were that we would not be on speaking terms. I was unsure what I had lost, except that it felt like my heart had been stolen by organ traffickers when I wasn’t looking.
Did it make sense to say that I grieved my inability to refuse contact with her? The answer, as you often said, was “above your paygrade”.
Humiliatingly, you were the only person I saw with any regularity, and that, like all else, depended on your schedule. Back when we were both down and out in Berlin, where we’d first met — and back when we were barely making ends meet in London, I was certain that you loved me.
Maybe, just maybe, you loved me when we eventually moved to the American college town in search of better work, and you became modestly successful at teaching German, Turkish, and an upper-division course on Marx and worker exploitation. Rumor had it that you would soon be teaching a graduate seminar titled “Migration, Culture, and Values”, about the Turkish diaspora to Germany.
I only learned anything about you these days through murmurings, whispers, and rumors that floated down to me by accident alone. I found out you had flown to Istanbul for your sister’s wedding from the dumpy school librarian who I paid $250.53 in book fines to. When information was scarce, I had to find out for myself. I drove past your home in the middle of the night, and my heart sank whenever your car was absent from its port. If there were tabloid magazines about you, I would have read them cover-to-cover on the toilet.
Now there was something off-putting, even disgusting, about the sheer desperation of my longing for you, how much of a mess I became whenever you were not by my side, how I was always reaching and grabbing for you like a demented old man chasing his nurse down a sterile hospital corridor.
At some point, most likely after the time I nearly drowned myself in the tub, you’d insisted on living separately. “Baby, it was sleep paralysis!” I protested. “They call it paralysis because that’s what it does! I would never try to kill myself!” Yet you refused to listen, claiming I was offering an “explanation” as opposed to a “justification”, whatever the difference was supposed to mean.
So, here I was in my own stifling, cramped apartment while you stayed on in our house with a dog that you bought, pointedly, to replace me. And here I was, trying not to think about my dead mother, haphazardly slapping on makeup to disguise the ashy tone my skin was beginning to acquire, and making sure to leave enough time to painstakingly apply the bright red lipstick you claimed to like on me. “Like a real woman,” you used to say, your hand resting languorously on my waist before slapping my backside.
I was beginning to suspect that, all along, the fuss over the red lipstick had been a ruse for you not to kiss me. But I would never pass up the opportunity for a meal at the Japanese restaurant with you.
Part Three: Osaka Oasis
By the time I arrived at Osaka Oasis, I was humming “Midnight at the Oasis” (Heaven’s holding a half-moon / Shining just for us) and feeling lightheaded from standing up in my mother’s three-inch heels. I hadn’t left my apartment in at least a week, but I could do much worse.
Despite being the most popular restaurant in town, Osaka Oasis wasn’t trendy or kitschy. It had a kind of old-world allure to it, with its vinyl booths and gooseneck lights. Other than the neatly-arranged wooden chopsticks and soy sauce dishes, nothing in the restaurant signified that it was supposed to be Japanese. The restaurant’s logo was a yellow hibiscus, and the menus were decorated with cartoon palm trees. The Chinese immigrants, I realized, did not care what a Japanese restaurant was supposed to look like. It was enough to know that the local customers demanded sushi.
Did the local customers demand breakups?
I caught sight of the back of your head – your dark wavy hair that glimmered with streaks of silver under the tastefully dim lighting, like tinsel on a Christmas tree – and was tempted to turn around and march myself back outside. I already felt ridiculous, like a hooker playing dress-up, with the velvet babydoll dress and high heels and fire-hydrant lips. Instead, I made myself totter towards you.
You were resting your face in your hands, and you had already downed at least a glass of soju. I tried to embrace you from behind. You shot right up, as though you had heard a bomb go off, and when I angled my face to peck you on the lips, you offered only your cheek. You smelled like lemon kolonya and alcohol.
“You’re still alive,” you remarked, wiping off the lipstick stain.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” I said combatively.
You sighed and briefly placed your head back in your hands, as though you were praying earnestly to God, despite being a decided atheist. Then you muttered, “Let’s order the food and get it out of the way,” sliding the menu in my general direction.
“Order whatever you want,” I said. “I’m not eating.”
“You need to eat.”
“No.”
“You used to eat like a bird. That was not normal, but this is even more abnormal. It is scary. You need to eat or you’ll die. Are you trying to become like your mother?”
“Don’t you ever say that again.”
“Whatever.” You motioned the bespectacled waitress over and flatly recited our usual order. We had been doing this for seven years running. I imagined the waitress returning to the kitchen and announcing that the boring couple who hated each other were here again. Maybe all the staff had placed bets on whether we would make a scene.
“Do you want to go back to my place afterwards?” I asked cheerfully, feeling tingly and aroused by your indifference.
“Not tonight. Let’s just talk business here,” you said, pulling out your phone and reading a stream of insistent texts from an unknown sender.
I could see the writing was in German, and the beginnings of a word that could be “Freundin”, but I carefully averted my gaze. “Are you breaking up with me?” I whined.
“Are you trying to be funny? Is this your idea of a joke?”
“No,” I replied, tears beginning to roll down my cheek. I dabbed them away with a napkin and blew my nose loudly. The waitress returned with two glasses of water. She was trying not to look at me, the way I was trying not to read your texts, the way you were scrutinizing your phone as notification after notification popped up.
Everyone was trying to avoid witnessing each other’s pain or causing pain to themselves.
“Don’t make a scene,” you said placatingly. I sobbed harder. “I’m sorry – truly.” A director would have instructed you to place your hand on mine and squeeze it firmly, but we weren’t on TV. “Pardon. Don’t cry. I thought you were pretending we were in the cafe.”
“What bloody cafe?”
“The Japanese – I mean, Korean – break-up cafe we came here to talk about.”
“Why the fuck would you think that?”
“You’re always pretending though, aren’t you? You pretend to love me, you pretend you’re OK when you obviously aren’t, you pretend everything is funny. You tried to pretend you were asleep in the bathtub when I thought you were dead. Jesus. When I called the ambulance –”
The food arrived. I had never seen anything more unappetizing. It was a plate of thinly-sliced raw fish and an oversized sushi roll with an oily shrimp tail sticking out of it.
My overused Chanel Soleil de Tan had partly rubbed off onto the napkin, leaving a vivid orange stain. To you, I probably looked like a cold, floppy piece of salmon.
You quietly asked the waitress, as though I couldn’t speak for myself, to bring me a bowl of miso soup. A certain sadness in your eyes told me not to argue. Then you rolled up the sleeves of your denim shirt and split your chopsticks in half, and I thought about you forcefully spreading my legs open and breaking me in two. I repressed the urge to shout that I wanted you so badly that you might as well murder me. Your phone buzzed again and again, and when you were busy reading her texts (I had decided the sender was a woman), I crunched right through a blue Adderall in case I needed to be angry. Mediterranean blue, I thought bitterly.
“Anyway, I spoke to some people,” you announced in-between chews, swallowing a large piece of fish and going back in for more. Nothing could shake your appetite, it seemed. If I died, you would buy a whole chicken and devour it impassively. “You know, other faculty. My – I mean, our friends. They think the cafe is a good idea. Everyone’s sick of making their own espresso. And it doesn’t make sense for a college town to have no cafe.”
“I’m not interested in opening a cafe to sell coffee,” I said. “Fuck the coffee. The purpose of the cafe is to help people break up.”
“You’re missing the point,” you said evenly, as though I were one of your students. “This shitty town has exactly three restaurants. Three. The Koreans came up with the gimmick for market differentiation, but no differentiation is needed here. Why are you so obsessed with other people breaking up? Nobody is breaking up.”
“Does that include you and me?”
You ignored my question. “Now, we have a new problem. Well, it’s not a problem for me. The cafe is a good idea, yeah. But, look, we have erased ourselves from the picture. There is no cause for us to be the ones running it. I talked to Tobias Stirner, you know, that guy from the History department. His wife has wanted to do this for a long time. They have lots of money. Lots of it. I am busy writing my book and preparing for the seminar on diaspora studies. And, well, you…”
The Adderall was kicking in and my head was spinning with furious thoughts. It was practically exploding under the weight of a list of accusations I had composed viva voce, all tightly interwoven, with an elegant mathematical logic that you would admire, but I didn’t know where to begin. The wrongs you’d enacted upon me were innumerable.
Had you worn the denim shirt on purpose, to taunt me, when I’d told you it was my favourite shirt because it brought out the green in your eyes? I remembered late nights in London where we’d sat on the shore of the Thames, directly across from the gleaming lights of the Gherkin, which you called “that hideous egg”. How soft your lips felt, like the worn-in texture of the shirt I had repeatedly stripped off you and washed with my own hands, hands that had once held and touched and stroked you.
Why did you have to be so relentlessly cruel and mocking towards me, how could you constantly reject me, when I was suffering so much? Did you not appreciate the ingenuity of the Korean break-up cafe, how we would be providing a public service that far transcended fueling people with caffeine? How could you fail to see that I wanted to do it together, why would you outsource something that was ours to Tobias Stirner’s boring wife?
Who, exactly, was the whore you were texting? Were you texting your new girlfriend about your old girlfriend?
I said “whore” out loud, under my breath, simply because I liked the sound of the word and the soothing whoosh it made, like a breeze blowing through the palm trees on the Osaka Oasis menu.
Were the Shtirners richer than me?
“Jesus Christ,” you barked, and the room snapped back into focus. My ears rang and I reflexively rubbed my neck. “Wake the fuck up! Where were you? Were you talking to yourself?”
“I don’t feel well,” I said, nervously tracing my fingers over the palm trees’s cartoon fronds.
“Why did you even come?”
I caught your wrist before you could slam your fist on the table, hard enough to wound yourself. I grabbed it tight as I felt the muscles straining in your arm before they went limp with defeat, as though I had suffocated you. That night was the second-last time I ever saw you.
Part Four: Pretty Ballerina
I hadn’t seen my mother in six months, not since my nervous breakdown, but nothing about her had changed. She was petite and lithe as ever, her wrists so tiny that all her watches and bracelets were custom-made. Her hair was freshly-dyed and cut into a sleek pixie, her signature style, emphasizing the daintiness of her jaw.
The song she instantly brought to mind, that haunted many a spurned lover, was “Pretty Ballerina” by the Left Banke (I beg for her to tell me if she really loved me). My mother owned it on multiple tapes and CDs. Throughout her life, she’d earned herself comparisons to Audrey Hepburn and Sophia Loren. Years later, at her funeral, at least three guests had come up to me to tell me how they had been madly in love with my mother but never dared to tell her. One man tried to pull me into an embrace after his confession, but I shook him off with revulsion.
Unfortunately, my mother was no actress. Her eyes — cool, focused, and feline — regarded me with disdainful pity. You had to admire the power of her contempt: it was transformative, like a magician who could detach his assistant’s legs from her torso on command, or make her disappear entirely.
On a Saturday afternoon in Marylebone, close to where she had grown up, she was making me feel like a stained tea-towel that had been sullied by an ignorant servant who’d wiped the floor with it. Etiquette demanded that the makeshift rag (me) be thoroughly washed and swiftly returned to its proper station: polishing glassware.
Meanwhile, the metastatic cancer gnawing its way through her bones was already terminal, but neither of us knew it, nor would it have made a difference. Would it?
“Plans have to be changed,” my mother was saying matter-of-factly, her fork twirling around angel-hair spaghetti. She habitually played with her food like a cat before ordering it to be taken away. “I meet with Briggs on Monday.”
I didn’t react; I felt nothing. When I think back on that moment, I didn’t exist. I wasn’t there.
“It’s what I said in my email,” she continued, shaking some black pepper into the stiff spaghetti with a flourish. “You can’t live off love and fresh air. That man will never be able to provide for you. And I’m certainly not going to let him take advantage of me.”
“I love him,” I said, reciting the phrase in my well-practiced Jackie O voice, hoping my mother would somehow be persuaded that the man I loved was charismatic, electric, and magnetic as I’d promised. “He’s not interested in your money. He doesn’t think you have money — why would he?” I stared down meaningfully at my battered ballet flats.
My mother laughed knowingly. (Years later, I would find myself beginning to emit that very laugh.) On and on she went, and I wanted to cover my ears. More than that, I badly wanted to stamp my feet, roll onto the floor of the cafe, kicking and screaming and beating my fists on the ground, before curling up into a ball — anything for her to stop.
I hated what came out of my mouth. “You don’t understand, Mother,” I said desperately, shedding Jackie’s beseeching guile like a snake. “He went to Bosporus University. That’s the equivalent of Cambridge. And when he moved back to Berlin —”
“He studied art,” my mother reminded me, her crow’s feet lighting up with amusement. “Of course he did that. Tell me, what else would he do? Drive a taxi? And need I remind you that degrees from Africar are practically useless? He probably paid for it himself.”
“Turkey isn’t in Africa,” I said. “And he’s German.”
“He’s German,” my mother repeated dubiously, in a tinny voice that was supposed to be me. She shook her head. “Call me ignorant, but I’ve never seen a German who looks like that.” After scanning the cafe’s patrons with lightning speed, she lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “One day, people of his kind will take over Britain and Europe, and it won’t be for the right reasons. I spoke with your aunt, and my god, the rate at which they reproduce —”
I got up from my seat. My mother was unimpressed. “Sit back down,” she commanded. I obeyed.
“Things are going to change,” she repeated. “You will no longer be executrix of my will, nor the beneficiary. Do you understand? I can’t have that man pouring poison in your ear. I won’t tolerate another situation like the one with your father. I thought you’d have learned something from that, but evidently not. I’m afraid you’ll have to start depending on that little job of yours, if you can even call it a job. I suggest taking a look at your eligibility for welfare A-S-A-P. A girl like you should have no trouble. No trouble at all. Our country gives out far too many benefits to the undeserving, as it were. I’ve done it myself, and I assure you it was quite a breeze.”
I wracked my brain for gaps in my mother’s resume where she might have fallen upon the mercy of the Department of Work and Pensions.
“That’s all of it, then, I suppose,” my mother said briskly, pushing away the bowl of uneaten pasta and winding her scarf around her neck. “I won’t entertain another word about that man and how much you love him. Mark my words: he doesn’t love you. Why would he? He’s only after two things, and God knows you’ve already given him enough of at least one of them. Don’t you have anything at all to say for yourself?”
I didn’t.
“When you’ve understood the gravity of your errors, and you’ve put that man far behind, you know where to reach me. If I don’t pick up at the office, try my mobile.” Here, she tried to modulate her tone to make it gentle and maternal. The resulting effect was more “school headmistress who firmly believed in corporal punishment”.
“You have a very bright future ahead of you,” the headmistress imperiously assured. “Believe me, I’ve made sure of it, and it’s not too late to walk back this mistake.”
“He has a name, you know,” I said softly.
My mother stared at me curiously, with her beautifully unnerving cat’s eyes. I met her gaze unflinchingly. Had something shifted in the air? Without Jackie’s help, could I have made a last-minute appeal to my lover’s humanity that would change my mother forever? Had I managed to save us all from our undoing?
“Darling girl,” she said, with genuine confusion. “Whoever says he doesn’t?”
And just like that, she was gone forever. I forced myself to watch her leave, as she confidently slung her black leather handbag over one shoulder and strode out of the trattoria. I willed her to turn around and take one last longing look at me, but she didn’t. A black cab mysteriously appeared — my mother had the ability to conjure them up, too — and she stepped gracefully into it. I could see her through the passenger window, picking up her phone and making the face she did, lips pursed, brow furrowed, whenever she switched back into executive mode.
I had seen her make the same face when, at my uncle’s country home, she strode briskly into a glass door, shattering it completely. I remembered my aunt screaming in abject horror as my mother stood frozen in place, blood beginning to seep from her face and nose. “Call an ambulance!” screeched my aunt, nearly tripping up the stairs. I watched as my mother, disoriented from the impact of the collision, extracted a shard of glass from her cheek and examined it clinically. It glinted in the sun.
By the time my aunt returned with clean towels, and I had made my mother a cup of tea as we waited for the ambulance to arrive, my mother, grimacing lightly from the glass fragments that remained embedded in her face, furrowed her brow and instructed us to stop making such a fuss. Later, we found out that, superficial cuts aside, the accident had broken her perfectly-pinched Sophia Loren nose.
Alone in my seat, I sobbed inconsolably. I sobbed so hard and so uncontrollably that there was nothing in the world except me, my grief, and two concerned waiters rushing to escort me to the loo, a third surveilling from a respectful distance to ensure that I did not leave without footing the bill.
Part One: Television
Naturally, I was the one who came up with the underlying concept for the cafe — our cafe, I thought, smug at the irony. To be sure, I never claimed it was original. In fact, these days I enjoyed being as unoriginal as possible with my words and deeds: it allowed me to be equally blasé with my underwhelming triumphs and petty little failures.
To assist with this personal endeavor, I was watching more television than ever, often sprawled on my threadbare armchair at an irresponsible angle that triggered my pinched nerve. Every now and then, I would feel a sharp pain followed by what felt like a jolt of excruciating electricity, as though my right shoulder were being put to death for a crime beyond the pale.
I’d exercised myself into an agitated rhythm of cycling between reality shows, foreign news channels, old sitcoms, and erotic thrillers exclusively from the 1980s, which I considered to be the most potent source of scripts for trite performances of excitement and sensuality I aimed to put on. I routinely fell asleep in the armchair, which surely was proof that I was getting older than ever, and the jolt of electricity in my right shoulder routinely woke me up from frightful bouts of sleep paralysis where I screamed and screamed but there was no one coming. Then, when I was finally able to release myself from the dreaded fugue of absolute terror, I would march myself to the single bedroom, muttering and rubbing the base of my neck, before swallowing whatever remaining bars of Xanax I could find littered around the apartment or hidden in its nooks and crannies during my fits of unexplained paranoia, and collapsing onto my bed.
There was still no one coming.
I always slept on the same side of the bed (left). I had done this in every single failed relationship I’d ever had, including with my mother — unless I was sleeping with you, which you sometimes permitted me to do if I looked pitiful enough that afternoon.
Whenever I was single, or all alone in a hotel room, I instinctively held the place for another body. Sprawling out blissfully never felt like an option, and this gestured at some deep failure in my personality, like perpetual codependency or the inability to take up space. But you would casually flop onto what I universally considered to be my side regardless of companion or location, tucking yourself in, while I laid awake all night without complaint.
While you were asleep, I was not allowed to touch you or you would pointedly go into another room.
Sometimes I got a little passive-aggressive about this. “It’s a no-contact zone!” I squeaked impotently. “Social distancing only!” But no matter how annoying or solicitous I was, rubbing your back and kissing the base of your neck like I saw actors doing in the erotic thrillers, you would push me away.
It was an evening without you, the ones where I would either spend crying in the living room, smoking American Spirits on the balcony during rigorously timed breaks from my devastation, or on a gentle speedball of Adderall and Xanax. I had watched a combination of CNN (unbearable), NHK (calming), Centroamérica (disturbing), and the BBC, which reminded me of the crisp London mornings I held so dear, where I made myself breakfast while watching the sun rise over the Thames and listened to my staticky radio that I’d acquired from a charity shop, or the dreary evenings where I ate nothing but Linda McCartney sausages on sale at Tesco’s and frozen salmon because I had no money.
I queued up the news channels I didn’t like to maximally enhance my pleasure from the BBC.
My spirits lifted unexpectedly when the news segment came on, and I felt a rush of genuine enthusiasm for the first time in years. When I smiled at it, the considerable crust over my face that had formed from my weeping crumbled like a biscuit. In South Korea, apparently, the business of “break-up cafes” was booming.
The idea was very simple. When you broke up with someone, you wanted to do it somewhere conspicuously public, just in case they went bonkers and knifed you to death. I knew exactly how that worked, having been both the aggressor and the victim at various points in my life. Sometimes I turned the knife on myself and from an external point of view, you really didn’t want that to happen.
But you also didn’t want to be too cruel, and that could be unavoidable if your options are limited. I remembered when my ex-girlfriend told me, shortly after kissing me passionately on a rooftop in Covent Garden, that she had broken up with the woman she had been cheating on with me by announcing the news in a Pizza Express. The woman began to sob into her overcooked alfredo as my ex-girlfriend continued to eat the rest of her mushroom risotto in dead silence before calmly exiting the restaurant.
Surely, I thought, nobody wanted that either. As far as I knew, there was nowhere to publicly break up with someone in my provincial college town and leave them with their dignity intact: we had a pancake shop, a Wendy’s, and a highly successful Japanese restaurant that was run by undocumented Chinese immigrants. The South Korean break-up cafe provided a neat solution. It imitated the hygge of a Danish airport combined with helpful jobseeker’s center. The ambiance was soothing, with balanced colors, warm lighting, and tasteful minimal design associated with official matters like signing checks or divorce decrees, gently reminding both individuals that they were present for business reasons only. If necessary, a trained “mediator” — I imagined them clad in a bank teller’s navy suit — would join the table and employ de-escalation tactics not dissimilar from those utilized in hostage situations.
I immediately picked up the phone and called you with the impure intention of proposing our new start-up venture.
For months now, I had been brainstorming new ways to become closer to you that did not merely involve pale impressions of Robert Redford, although I knew you liked that I had become inexplicably rich after my years of equally perturbing impoverishment, and that there was something authentically suave about me that made you weak in the knees and occasionally willing to fuck me even if you were awfully callous about the Social Distancing No-Contact Zone and I did cry even when you were next to me and breathing deeply with your lovely heat radiating off your back.
You didn’t answer, although I waited as long as I could. Seconds later, my phone lit up with a text, which I read voraciously and promptly choked on: I’m talking to someone else right now. Ordinarily, I invented a romantic competitor who crushed me with their Olympic superiority, but I was now living in a world fueled by overtly predictable dialogic moves and an oddly motivating concoction of uppers and downers. I dialed again, and I mean that I literally dialed your number because, no matter where we were or how many times you changed it, I committed it to memory. It only took about three tries for you to call me back.
“What’s going on?” you asked. Your voice was more tender and worried than I’d initially anticipated, and part of me wanted to burst into hysterical tears and demand to know why you didn’t speak to me that way all the time.
“I have an indecent proposal,” I declared pompously, automatically switching into Robert Redford mode, even though my mouth was terribly dry and talking made a clicking, smacking sound that set off my headaches and might be peripherally linked to my pinched nerve. “Let’s open a cafe together. The BBC taught me about Korean break-up cafes. You’re a good cook, and I’m a skilled diplomat. Let’s help college students break up. We’ll make lots of money. Don’t you like making money?”
You were silent for at least thirty seconds before uttering, “A Korean break-up cafe? As in, with Korean food? Or for the South Korean students? There aren’t many who come here anymore, you know.”
“No,” I said impatiently and condescendingly, to charmingly negate your skepticism. “I learned about the Korean break-up cafes from the BBC. There is nothing intrinsically Korean about them. They are to help people separate amicably. Doesn’t every culture wish to separate amicably?”
“Are you high again?”
“No,” I said, as my teeth ground together, making my jaw click audibly, and the armchair momentarily floated above the floor.
More silence. Because you were no less impenetrable in the flesh, sometimes I preferred only to hear your voice. I liked to put you on speaker with the curtains fully drawn and my eyes shut tight. Especially with your accent, which you refused to let go of on principle, it was not too different from talking to an automated hotline that had long fired its human operators for “efficiency” and didn’t care to conceal this fact.
I had long given up the hope that I could somehow find the magic words, or press buttons in the correct order, that would direct me to a branch of you that remained warm and alive in all the ways I dreamed of. On your good days, I felt like I was communicating with a travel agency that promised sun-drenched holidays ahead. Press 5 for paradise, followed by the star key!
But most of the time it was like trying to file an insurance claim or get reimbursed for a cancelled flight, except the hotline tended to hang up on me rather abruptly and not the other way round.
“…but I don’t know how we’ll compete with the Chinese,” you were continuing. It sounded that my spiel had moved you enough for you to go on one of your beloved tangents about figuring out compliance and licenses and inspections and how you were reasonably familiar with obtaining borough permits, but I was too zoned out from the Xanax and focusing exclusively on the sound of your voice, a touch of hoarseness in your throat that was beautifully amplified by the speakerphone. “In any event, I refuse to cook.” And then, crossly, “Are you still there? Were you even listening to me?”
“Yeah,” I said. My jaw crackled and popped.
“Jesus. Are you on drugs?”
“No, I’m perfectly serious.”
“Serious about what?”
“Serious about the…enterprise. And I’m serious about you.”
“Yeah, right,” you sneered. “Meet me at the Japanese restaurant tomorrow, 7pm, if you mean what you say about the cafe.” As usual, you slammed down the phone with so much force that I wondered if you’d thrown it against the wall.
The flat drone of the dial tone seemed compatible with the muted NHK documentary on the Tōhuku tsunami that had been playing in the background. I had watched the same documentary at least thrice, and likely absorbed some basic knowledge about assuming the appearance of grief and regret. Shaky footage of enormous gray waves knocking over lampposts and telephone wires illuminated my hallway.
As I tussled with my sleep paralysis, and the living room became increasingly crowded with formless shadows intent on dragging me down into hell, the dial tone blared on.
Part Two: Infinite Regress
I was staring blankly at myself in the bathroom mirror as I brushed my hair to get ready for dinner. Behind the mirror was a medicine cabinet so packed to the brim that, if I opened it, about forty pill bottles would rattle out into the dirty sink, and I’d have to spend the rest of the afternoon disinfecting them individually.
Admittedly, I liked the reflection of myself enough that I was tempted to hang up another mirror behind me, to create an infinite regression of my image. It struck me that I should write a densely intertextual autobiography titled Infinite Regress, and I chuckled out loud at my own dastardly wit.
Immediately after my mother died, I spent hours rigorously examining my face for any trace of a resemblance to her. Finding nothing, I indulged in fantasies about being possessed by her spirit. But now I really did look like my mother. It was the voluminous hair, hollowed cheeks, bony shoulders, and pursed lips. I momentarily registered, with a jolt to the heart, that I was looking at myself in exactly the way she always did: like a severe myopic at their optician’s appointment, puzzling out the edges of a Snellen chart.
Come to think of it, it was probably after my mother’s death that things began to go south. I’d become so wealthy overnight that, already disinclined to work, I had no option but to quit my job and survive off the obscenely generous monthly dividends. I was now a true prodigal, and no longer a peasant.
Against her solicitor’s stern advice, I liquidated my mother’s estate in London and squandered it all on surrealist art and documentary photography that would likely be described as “challenging”.
The solicitor’s name was Christopher Briggs, Senior Associate, and he never failed to forget that I was living on Eastern Standard Time. He peppered me with urgent calls at the crack of dawn, which I considered an unforgivable inconvenience despite being wide awake. He’d once had the gall to demand “exactly what I was doing”.
“I’m rebranding myself as a collector,” I said, blowing out a delicate plume of cigarette smoke whilst suppressing a cough, and feeling around in my handbag for what remained of my mother’s Ativan prescription. If I received any mail from the HRMC, I recycled it.
Because I didn’t work, it made sense to stop eating. I subsisted off a regular diet of instant coffee, pills, cigarettes, and various creative flavors of seltzer.
I avoided drinking except for whenever you did come over, which wasn’t often enough. You would pour yourself a full glass of Malbec and make me a modest Schorle. You would also bring your bong and smoke most of the weed I managed to acquire, probably because I made you so tense. Perhaps you insisted on putting on horror films because you needed to watch something more frightening than my disintegration.
If we wound up having sex (40% of the time, also not often enough), after you came, usually inside me with a grunt, you would either return to the horror film despite my protests to the contrary, or turn away from me whilst occupying my side of the bed and promptly fall into a deep, untroubled sleep.
I didn’t speak to my family anymore. I doubted that I would be able to recognize them on the street, and America was the perfect home for an English fugitive. For them, everything in between New York City and Los Angeles was a mystery they didn’t care to solve, and so I existed well outside of the hard borders of their cultural imaginary. I’d at least informed them that I was going into mourning, and it remained unclear (including to myself) whether I was intending to exit it.
Was I truly in mourning, or was it a convenient excuse that I helped myself to as soon as I could? Rash financial decisions aside, I busied myself crying all of the time, over my mother, over you, over both of you at once, and surely that had to count for something. Crying over my mother was strange. If she were alive, chances were that we would not be on speaking terms. I was unsure what I had lost, except that it felt like my heart had been stolen by organ traffickers when I wasn’t looking.
Did it make sense to say that I grieved my inability to refuse contact with her? The answer, as you often said, was “above your paygrade”.
Humiliatingly, you were the only person I saw with any regularity, and that, like all else, depended on your schedule. Back when we were both down and out in Berlin, where we’d first met — and back when we were barely making ends meet in London, I was certain that you loved me.
Maybe, just maybe, you loved me when we eventually moved to the American college town in search of better work, and you became modestly successful at teaching German, Turkish, and an upper-division course on Marx and worker exploitation. Rumor had it that you would soon be teaching a graduate seminar titled “Migration, Culture, and Values”, about the Turkish diaspora to Germany.
I only learned anything about you these days through murmurings, whispers, and rumors that floated down to me by accident alone. I found out you had flown to Istanbul for your sister’s wedding from the dumpy school librarian who I paid $250.53 in book fines to. When information was scarce, I had to find out for myself. I drove past your home in the middle of the night, and my heart sank whenever your car was absent from its port. If there were tabloid magazines about you, I would have read them cover-to-cover on the toilet.
Now there was something off-putting, even disgusting, about the sheer desperation of my longing for you, how much of a mess I became whenever you were not by my side, how I was always reaching and grabbing for you like a demented old man chasing his nurse down a sterile hospital corridor.
At some point, most likely after the time I nearly drowned myself in the tub, you’d insisted on living separately. “Baby, it was sleep paralysis!” I protested. “They call it paralysis because that’s what it does! I would never try to kill myself!” Yet you refused to listen, claiming I was offering an “explanation” as opposed to a “justification”, whatever the difference was supposed to mean.
So, here I was in my own stifling, cramped apartment while you stayed on in our house with a dog that you bought, pointedly, to replace me. And here I was, trying not to think about my dead mother, haphazardly slapping on makeup to disguise the ashy tone my skin was beginning to acquire, and making sure to leave enough time to painstakingly apply the bright red lipstick you claimed to like on me. “Like a real woman,” you used to say, your hand resting languorously on my waist before slapping my backside.
I was beginning to suspect that, all along, the fuss over the red lipstick had been a ruse for you not to kiss me. But I would never pass up the opportunity for a meal at the Japanese restaurant with you.
Part Three: Osaka Oasis
By the time I arrived at Osaka Oasis, I was humming “Midnight at the Oasis” (Heaven’s holding a half-moon / Shining just for us) and feeling lightheaded from standing up in my mother’s three-inch heels. I hadn’t left my apartment in at least a week, but I could do much worse.
Despite being the most popular restaurant in town, Osaka Oasis wasn’t trendy or kitschy. It had a kind of old-world allure to it, with its vinyl booths and gooseneck lights. Other than the neatly-arranged wooden chopsticks and soy sauce dishes, nothing in the restaurant signified that it was supposed to be Japanese. The restaurant’s logo was a yellow hibiscus, and the menus were decorated with cartoon palm trees. The Chinese immigrants, I realized, did not care what a Japanese restaurant was supposed to look like. It was enough to know that the local customers demanded sushi.
Did the local customers demand breakups?
I caught sight of the back of your head – your dark wavy hair that glimmered with streaks of silver under the tastefully dim lighting, like tinsel on a Christmas tree – and was tempted to turn around and march myself back outside. I already felt ridiculous, like a hooker playing dress-up, with the velvet babydoll dress and high heels and fire-hydrant lips. Instead, I made myself totter towards you.
You were resting your face in your hands, and you had already downed at least a glass of soju. I tried to embrace you from behind. You shot right up, as though you had heard a bomb go off, and when I angled my face to peck you on the lips, you offered only your cheek. You smelled like lemon kolonya and alcohol.
“You’re still alive,” you remarked, wiping off the lipstick stain.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” I said combatively.
You sighed and briefly placed your head back in your hands, as though you were praying earnestly to God, despite being a decided atheist. Then you muttered, “Let’s order the food and get it out of the way,” sliding the menu in my general direction.
“Order whatever you want,” I said. “I’m not eating.”
“You need to eat.”
“No.”
“You used to eat like a bird. That was not normal, but this is even more abnormal. It is scary. You need to eat or you’ll die. Are you trying to become like your mother?”
“Don’t you ever say that again.”
“Whatever.” You motioned the bespectacled waitress over and flatly recited our usual order. We had been doing this for seven years running. I imagined the waitress returning to the kitchen and announcing that the boring couple who hated each other were here again. Maybe all the staff had placed bets on whether we would make a scene.
“Do you want to go back to my place afterwards?” I asked cheerfully, feeling tingly and aroused by your indifference.
“Not tonight. Let’s just talk business here,” you said, pulling out your phone and reading a stream of insistent texts from an unknown sender.
I could see the writing was in German, and the beginnings of a word that could be “Freundin”, but I carefully averted my gaze. “Are you breaking up with me?” I whined.
“Are you trying to be funny? Is this your idea of a joke?”
“No,” I replied, tears beginning to roll down my cheek. I dabbed them away with a napkin and blew my nose loudly. The waitress returned with two glasses of water. She was trying not to look at me, the way I was trying not to read your texts, the way you were scrutinizing your phone as notification after notification popped up.
Everyone was trying to avoid witnessing each other’s pain or causing pain to themselves.
“Don’t make a scene,” you said placatingly. I sobbed harder. “I’m sorry – truly.” A director would have instructed you to place your hand on mine and squeeze it firmly, but we weren’t on TV. “Pardon. Don’t cry. I thought you were pretending we were in the cafe.”
“What bloody cafe?”
“The Japanese – I mean, Korean – break-up cafe we came here to talk about.”
“Why the fuck would you think that?”
“You’re always pretending though, aren’t you? You pretend to love me, you pretend you’re OK when you obviously aren’t, you pretend everything is funny. You tried to pretend you were asleep in the bathtub when I thought you were dead. Jesus. When I called the ambulance –”
The food arrived. I had never seen anything more unappetizing. It was a plate of thinly-sliced raw fish and an oversized sushi roll with an oily shrimp tail sticking out of it.
My overused Chanel Soleil de Tan had partly rubbed off onto the napkin, leaving a vivid orange stain. To you, I probably looked like a cold, floppy piece of salmon.
You quietly asked the waitress, as though I couldn’t speak for myself, to bring me a bowl of miso soup. A certain sadness in your eyes told me not to argue. Then you rolled up the sleeves of your denim shirt and split your chopsticks in half, and I thought about you forcefully spreading my legs open and breaking me in two. I repressed the urge to shout that I wanted you so badly that you might as well murder me. Your phone buzzed again and again, and when you were busy reading her texts (I had decided the sender was a woman), I crunched right through a blue Adderall in case I needed to be angry. Mediterranean blue, I thought bitterly.
“Anyway, I spoke to some people,” you announced in-between chews, swallowing a large piece of fish and going back in for more. Nothing could shake your appetite, it seemed. If I died, you would buy a whole chicken and devour it impassively. “You know, other faculty. My – I mean, our friends. They think the cafe is a good idea. Everyone’s sick of making their own espresso. And it doesn’t make sense for a college town to have no cafe.”
“I’m not interested in opening a cafe to sell coffee,” I said. “Fuck the coffee. The purpose of the cafe is to help people break up.”
“You’re missing the point,” you said evenly, as though I were one of your students. “This shitty town has exactly three restaurants. Three. The Koreans came up with the gimmick for market differentiation, but no differentiation is needed here. Why are you so obsessed with other people breaking up? Nobody is breaking up.”
“Does that include you and me?”
You ignored my question. “Now, we have a new problem. Well, it’s not a problem for me. The cafe is a good idea, yeah. But, look, we have erased ourselves from the picture. There is no cause for us to be the ones running it. I talked to Tobias Stirner, you know, that guy from the History department. His wife has wanted to do this for a long time. They have lots of money. Lots of it. I am busy writing my book and preparing for the seminar on diaspora studies. And, well, you…”
The Adderall was kicking in and my head was spinning with furious thoughts. It was practically exploding under the weight of a list of accusations I had composed viva voce, all tightly interwoven, with an elegant mathematical logic that you would admire, but I didn’t know where to begin. The wrongs you’d enacted upon me were innumerable.
Had you worn the denim shirt on purpose, to taunt me, when I’d told you it was my favourite shirt because it brought out the green in your eyes? I remembered late nights in London where we’d sat on the shore of the Thames, directly across from the gleaming lights of the Gherkin, which you called “that hideous egg”. How soft your lips felt, like the worn-in texture of the shirt I had repeatedly stripped off you and washed with my own hands, hands that had once held and touched and stroked you.
Why did you have to be so relentlessly cruel and mocking towards me, how could you constantly reject me, when I was suffering so much? Did you not appreciate the ingenuity of the Korean break-up cafe, how we would be providing a public service that far transcended fueling people with caffeine? How could you fail to see that I wanted to do it together, why would you outsource something that was ours to Tobias Stirner’s boring wife?
Who, exactly, was the whore you were texting? Were you texting your new girlfriend about your old girlfriend?
I said “whore” out loud, under my breath, simply because I liked the sound of the word and the soothing whoosh it made, like a breeze blowing through the palm trees on the Osaka Oasis menu.
Were the Shtirners richer than me?
“Jesus Christ,” you barked, and the room snapped back into focus. My ears rang and I reflexively rubbed my neck. “Wake the fuck up! Where were you? Were you talking to yourself?”
“I don’t feel well,” I said, nervously tracing my fingers over the palm trees’s cartoon fronds.
“Why did you even come?”
I caught your wrist before you could slam your fist on the table, hard enough to wound yourself. I grabbed it tight as I felt the muscles straining in your arm before they went limp with defeat, as though I had suffocated you. That night was the second-last time I ever saw you.
Part Four: Pretty Ballerina
I hadn’t seen my mother in six months, not since my nervous breakdown, but nothing about her had changed. She was petite and lithe as ever, her wrists so tiny that all her watches and bracelets were custom-made. Her hair was freshly-dyed and cut into a sleek pixie, her signature style, emphasizing the daintiness of her jaw.
The song she instantly brought to mind, that haunted many a spurned lover, was “Pretty Ballerina” by the Left Banke (I beg for her to tell me if she really loved me). My mother owned it on multiple tapes and CDs. Throughout her life, she’d earned herself comparisons to Audrey Hepburn and Sophia Loren. Years later, at her funeral, at least three guests had come up to me to tell me how they had been madly in love with my mother but never dared to tell her. One man tried to pull me into an embrace after his confession, but I shook him off with revulsion.
Unfortunately, my mother was no actress. Her eyes — cool, focused, and feline — regarded me with disdainful pity. You had to admire the power of her contempt: it was transformative, like a magician who could detach his assistant’s legs from her torso on command, or make her disappear entirely.
On a Saturday afternoon in Marylebone, close to where she had grown up, she was making me feel like a stained tea-towel that had been sullied by an ignorant servant who’d wiped the floor with it. Etiquette demanded that the makeshift rag (me) be thoroughly washed and swiftly returned to its proper station: polishing glassware.
Meanwhile, the metastatic cancer gnawing its way through her bones was already terminal, but neither of us knew it, nor would it have made a difference. Would it?
“Plans have to be changed,” my mother was saying matter-of-factly, her fork twirling around angel-hair spaghetti. She habitually played with her food like a cat before ordering it to be taken away. “I meet with Briggs on Monday.”
I didn’t react; I felt nothing. When I think back on that moment, I didn’t exist. I wasn’t there.
“It’s what I said in my email,” she continued, shaking some black pepper into the stiff spaghetti with a flourish. “You can’t live off love and fresh air. That man will never be able to provide for you. And I’m certainly not going to let him take advantage of me.”
“I love him,” I said, reciting the phrase in my well-practiced Jackie O voice, hoping my mother would somehow be persuaded that the man I loved was charismatic, electric, and magnetic as I’d promised. “He’s not interested in your money. He doesn’t think you have money — why would he?” I stared down meaningfully at my battered ballet flats.
My mother laughed knowingly. (Years later, I would find myself beginning to emit that very laugh.) On and on she went, and I wanted to cover my ears. More than that, I badly wanted to stamp my feet, roll onto the floor of the cafe, kicking and screaming and beating my fists on the ground, before curling up into a ball — anything for her to stop.
I hated what came out of my mouth. “You don’t understand, Mother,” I said desperately, shedding Jackie’s beseeching guile like a snake. “He went to Bosporus University. That’s the equivalent of Cambridge. And when he moved back to Berlin —”
“He studied art,” my mother reminded me, her crow’s feet lighting up with amusement. “Of course he did that. Tell me, what else would he do? Drive a taxi? And need I remind you that degrees from Africar are practically useless? He probably paid for it himself.”
“Turkey isn’t in Africa,” I said. “And he’s German.”
“He’s German,” my mother repeated dubiously, in a tinny voice that was supposed to be me. She shook her head. “Call me ignorant, but I’ve never seen a German who looks like that.” After scanning the cafe’s patrons with lightning speed, she lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “One day, people of his kind will take over Britain and Europe, and it won’t be for the right reasons. I spoke with your aunt, and my god, the rate at which they reproduce —”
I got up from my seat. My mother was unimpressed. “Sit back down,” she commanded. I obeyed.
“Things are going to change,” she repeated. “You will no longer be executrix of my will, nor the beneficiary. Do you understand? I can’t have that man pouring poison in your ear. I won’t tolerate another situation like the one with your father. I thought you’d have learned something from that, but evidently not. I’m afraid you’ll have to start depending on that little job of yours, if you can even call it a job. I suggest taking a look at your eligibility for welfare A-S-A-P. A girl like you should have no trouble. No trouble at all. Our country gives out far too many benefits to the undeserving, as it were. I’ve done it myself, and I assure you it was quite a breeze.”
I wracked my brain for gaps in my mother’s resume where she might have fallen upon the mercy of the Department of Work and Pensions.
“That’s all of it, then, I suppose,” my mother said briskly, pushing away the bowl of uneaten pasta and winding her scarf around her neck. “I won’t entertain another word about that man and how much you love him. Mark my words: he doesn’t love you. Why would he? He’s only after two things, and God knows you’ve already given him enough of at least one of them. Don’t you have anything at all to say for yourself?”
I didn’t.
“When you’ve understood the gravity of your errors, and you’ve put that man far behind, you know where to reach me. If I don’t pick up at the office, try my mobile.” Here, she tried to modulate her tone to make it gentle and maternal. The resulting effect was more “school headmistress who firmly believed in corporal punishment”.
“You have a very bright future ahead of you,” the headmistress imperiously assured. “Believe me, I’ve made sure of it, and it’s not too late to walk back this mistake.”
“He has a name, you know,” I said softly.
My mother stared at me curiously, with her beautifully unnerving cat’s eyes. I met her gaze unflinchingly. Had something shifted in the air? Without Jackie’s help, could I have made a last-minute appeal to my lover’s humanity that would change my mother forever? Had I managed to save us all from our undoing?
“Darling girl,” she said, with genuine confusion. “Whoever says he doesn’t?”
And just like that, she was gone forever. I forced myself to watch her leave, as she confidently slung her black leather handbag over one shoulder and strode out of the trattoria. I willed her to turn around and take one last longing look at me, but she didn’t. A black cab mysteriously appeared — my mother had the ability to conjure them up, too — and she stepped gracefully into it. I could see her through the passenger window, picking up her phone and making the face she did, lips pursed, brow furrowed, whenever she switched back into executive mode.
I had seen her make the same face when, at my uncle’s country home, she strode briskly into a glass door, shattering it completely. I remembered my aunt screaming in abject horror as my mother stood frozen in place, blood beginning to seep from her face and nose. “Call an ambulance!” screeched my aunt, nearly tripping up the stairs. I watched as my mother, disoriented from the impact of the collision, extracted a shard of glass from her cheek and examined it clinically. It glinted in the sun.
By the time my aunt returned with clean towels, and I had made my mother a cup of tea as we waited for the ambulance to arrive, my mother, grimacing lightly from the glass fragments that remained embedded in her face, furrowed her brow and instructed us to stop making such a fuss. Later, we found out that, superficial cuts aside, the accident had broken her perfectly-pinched Sophia Loren nose.
Alone in my seat, I sobbed inconsolably. I sobbed so hard and so uncontrollably that there was nothing in the world except me, my grief, and two concerned waiters rushing to escort me to the loo, a third surveilling from a respectful distance to ensure that I did not leave without footing the bill.