Sean and I met at a particularly awful charity dinner at the Museum of Natural History. I was in tears half the night because everything was going wrong, starting with an important investor falling down the stairs, moving right along to the expensive celebrity chef slicing off his fingertip. I was working my ass off so no one noticed the major screwups, which would have infuriated Dennis, and we all could have lost our jobs.
Sean introduced himself and said he worked for the investment firm that was partnering with Dennis Nylon. I acted as if we’d already met, in case we had, but I was sure I would have remembered.
He said, “Could we have dinner sometime?”
Very sweet, very cool, very clear.
Soon after that, I invited Sean to my apartment to watch Peeping Tom on DVD. It was our third date. It was a test but also a risk, inviting an attractive, rich, basically decent, basically straight-arrow guy to watch your favorite film about a psycho serial killer. If I’d pretended that my favorite film was The Sound of Music, I might as well have given up before I started. Who would want to be with a guy who wanted a woman like that?
We watched Peeping Tom with his arm around me. We’d already had sex, good sex, maybe even great sex, so I guess he thought that it demonstrated his self-restraint and good manners to be doing anything other than having more great sex. I don’t mean to sound coldhearted or boastful when I say he thought the sex was even better than it was. I think he had limited experience, mostly lukewarm relationships with disgruntled British university students and frustrated interns at the bank.
Now he was indulging me, watching a movie I liked. I’d had enough boyfriends to know that this was the kind of thing guys do at the start of a relationship. Later, they leave the room or ask you to watch the other TV—or they just grab the remote and switch to the basketball game.
All through the film, Sean and I didn’t speak. Afterward, he said, “Brilliant,” in that annoying three-syllable way the British pronounce it. “But I thought it was a little much. Didn’t you?”
Failed! He thought it was a little much. Was he one of those wussy guys who want to believe that people are nice? The kind who avoid books and movies that feature any kind of pain or suffering or violence. There are guys like that out there—more than you might think.
But not Sean. He was just pretending to be a good boy. Or maybe he was a good boy pretending to be a bad boy. It turned him on; it excited him that I liked Peeping Tom. He thought it was sexy. Scary, but scary good. It was the kind of film that that a guy might like, unlike girls, who he thought (probably because of his boring former girlfriends) just want to come home from the office and curl up with a glass of pinot grigio and the latest BBC remake of Jane Austen.
I prefer tequila or, better yet, mezcal. But never around Sean.
Later it turned out that he was a big fan of dark TV series: Breaking Bad, The Wire. Shows I didn’t like all that much, though all the kids at work did. I can’t keep track of the characters.
We eloped to Las Vegas. We told no one. We got married in the Elvis Chapel and spent three days in bed in a suite at the Bellagio. It was a nice break: sex, room service, champagne, TV. Showing off for each other.
It wasn’t the smartest thing for Sean to suggest we visit his “mum” in the north of England for our honeymoon. He kept telling me how green it was, how romantic the moors were. He knew that I loved Wuthering Heights. His town was only an hour from Haworth Parsonage, home of the Bront?s.
Two weeks of bleakness and drizzle, hideous cold, leaky rain, clouds hanging so low I couldn’t see the moors. I hate that sensation when the cold leaches through your skin to your bones. And for what? Just so Sean and I could trudge through a sad little house filled with weepy teenage girl tourists? And back to spend the night in the damp, underheated, mildew-infested row house of a sour, shrunken apple core of a woman who didn’t like her son and who liked me even less?
In general, I try not to feel sorry for people. I don’t think it’s good for the person being pitied, or for the person doing the pitying. But when I saw that house! The cracked linoleum, the stinky gas heaters, the thick dark drapes, and the furniture reeking of every lamb stew cooked there since the reign of Henry VIII. Poor Sean!
One day—when Sean was off doing the marketing—I offered his mother a sip from my flask. I made an introduction: Sean’s mom, meet Jose Cuervo. Jose, meet Sean’s mom. (Herradura, actually. Cheap tequila gives me a headache.) After a lifetime of sherry, it was a revelation. I told her I would kill her if she told Sean, and she laughed, a constipated heh heh heh, because she thought I was joking.
That night she went to bed early so Sean never suspected that she was drunk. And it gave me and his mum a conspiratorial alliance that made our stay there almost entertaining. Almost.
Oh, there was one fun thing that happened.
I’d suffered from a sort of suffocating boredom, on and off, all my life, and I knew when an attack was coming on, the way other people can sense the approach of a migraine or a dizzy spell. I knew I had to do something to keep myself from going under or acting out in a way I would regret. I’d had those feelings since I was a kid, and I had learned that something had to be done to make it go away. It was like an insect bite I had to scratch.
So I stole Sean’s mother’s ring.
It was very pretty, a sapphire surrounded by two large diamonds, set simply in gold. I complimented her on it soon after we arrived, and she blithered on about how the stones were cut and set, how her husband gave it to her before they were married, who had owned the ring before, its history all the way back to the Neanderthal era. I stopped listening. I don’t remember if I decided to steal it right then, or if the idea occurred to me on impulse when the chance arose.
One night, I’d gotten Sean’s mom a little tipsy, as usual. I was surprised that her son didn’t notice when Mom got even more unpleasant and hypercritical than normal. I suppose he had low expectations. That night she nagged him into going into the “parlor” to watch the “telly” while “the girls” tidied up. She carefully set the ring down on the windowsill above the sink to keep it safe while she did the dishes, and she toddled off to the “loo.”
I put the ring in my pocket. It was as simple as that. Now you see it, now you don’t. Impulse? Premeditation? I don’t know. I don’t care. I am not, by nature, a klepto. This was something special.
She didn’t miss the ring until she’d finished the washing up. Then she went instantly crazy. Moaning like a wounded animal. Her ring! Her beautiful ring! It wasn’t there! It wasn’t anywhere! Had it fallen down the sink? Why hadn’t she been more careful? How could she live without it?
We turned the house upside down, and poor Sean, the obedient son, had to go down to the basement and take apart the disgusting plumbing to search for it in the pipes.
Guess what? The ring never turned up. When his mum said goodbye to us, she was still weepy—more upset about the ring than about the fact that her son and his new bride were leaving.
I pointed this out to Sean on the plane, going home to New York. Business class.
I said, “Your mum loved that ring more than you.”
He said, “Don’t be hard on her, Emily.”
That’s when I took the ring out of my purse and showed it to him. He was overjoyed.
“You found it!” he said. “You darling angel! Mum will be so thrilled.”
“No,” I said. “I took it. I have no intention of giving it back. She’d just take it with her into the grave. What a ridiculous waste.”
Was this my weird American sense of humor? A practical joke? Sean smiled tentatively, as if to show me he got the joke.
I wasn’t joking.
“You stole it?”
I raised my eyebrows and shrugged.