Bad Love

Chapter 7

As Lucy grew older the growth of her awareness of everything was remarkable. Jasmine's great worry was that before long her daughter would start noticing the problems in her parents' marriage. At her young age the anxiety such a discovery could have a crippling effect on her emotional development. Any problems that arose in her marriage Jasmine assumed the burden of to protect Lucy, her daughter's wellbeing and innocence being of paramount importance to her. At present Jasmine was entirely alone in her awareness of the many faults in her marriage; she'd grown expert at concealing what she was feeling and thinking. And it was up to her to conceal. Bradley was oblivious to the state their marriage was in because the separate lives they were increasingly living suited him just fine.

Bradley's thirst for success was unslakable. Thinking about the manner in which he approached everything in his life, Jasmine came to understand that he'd married her for her beauty, that marrying a physically attractive woman had been on his checklist. Having a child had also been on his checklist, which left only work as the area of his life still in need of attention. He turned the spare room into a study and spent his evenings and nights in there doing work that he'd brought home with him and studying correspondence for his post-graduate degrees, leaving Jasmine to deal with Lucy alone. He showed little to no interest in Jasmine for four years when out of the blue he brought up the idea of her registering for some college courses. Jasmine hadn't attended college, fearing she wasn't smart enough, and dismissed the idea out of hand. But Bradley wasn't to be deterred. Following months of assiduous "encouragement" he got Jasmine to agree to register for an accounting degree. Her attempt at obtaining a degree lasted two dispiriting semesters, during which she only managed to pass two subjects, and at the end of which she'd forlornly declared to her husband "I just can't do this anymore". Bradley couldn't get over his disappointment in her. Sometimes she got the feeling she repulsed him. Impossible as it seemed, he found a way to spend more time working. She hardly ever saw him and whenever they were in the same room together he appeared to be deliberately avoiding making eye contact with her; they spoke so little that they might as well not have been speaking at all. They did have sex though. Sex was one item on a very short list of duties he deemed her useful for. Others included making his lunch, cooking dinner, washing and ironing, and raising their child. Had it not been for Lucy, Jasmine wasn't sure how long she would have been able to sustain the situation. Her daughter was the life preserver Jasmine grabbed hold of.

Jasmine's first two years as a stay-at-home mother had been a mixed bag. She hated changing diapers every thirty minutes and being woken up at three in the morning by a crying child but loved it when Lucy was docile and cutely responsive to baby talk and funny faces. Lucy at two years of age was an entirely different matter, a much more aware and active child requiring greater effort and attention from Jasmine. Jasmine grew to be thankful for this. The responsibility of ensuring that Lucy's physical and mental development progressed well consumed all of her time and energy and kept her mind off the year she'd wasted studying accounting and her husband's growing unpleasantness. She compiled a nutrition chart for Lucy from which her diet never deviated; the children's book section of the library had every title in it checked out by Jasmine within six months. For fun they went to the beach, where they whiled away hours in the afternoon until it was time to return home so Jasmine could get dinner started. Mother and daughter grew comfortable in and fond of their routine. Thanks to her frequent trips to the library and the dependable intervals of free time afforded to her by Lucy's rigid schedule Jasmine rediscovered her love of reading. She no longer had the ambition she used to have for serious literature and found herself guiltily enjoying the works of much less estimable authors like Anita Shreve.

In every area of importance Lucy's development was nothing short of marvellous. She was polite, in perfect health, by age four she was reading fluently on her own and had discovered a talent for imagination that was wondrous. Watching Lucy render and populate her worlds and then give her characters lives to live was a joy for Jasmine. She was an enormously special child—even if others couldn't see it—and the credit belonged to Jasmine alone. And yet, Jasmine felt the sense of accomplishment she was feeling wasn't as great as it should have been. She knew, and had always known, that her utter devotion to her daughter was the shield that she was using to avoid facing up to the truth about her marriage. Until Andrew came to stay with them Jasmine had managed to largely keep such thoughts buried deep. Andrew had his whole life ahead of him and his presence reminded Jasmine of how many years she had been unhappy. Andrew spoke of writing a novel and commencing work on it soon, an ambition Jasmine greatly admired. Bradley didn't have respect for literature. The reason she'd stopped reading was because of a comment he'd once made: "You know, I spent less time a day studying for my degree than you do reading; I'm just saying."

Within days Jasmine was sharing things with Andrew that she'd never shared with anyone. In all the years that she had been living in La Lucia Jasmine hadn't made any friends, it had just been her and Lucy and before that she had been alone. Andrew was the antithesis of Bradley, and the more time that she spent with him the freer she felt to be open with him. Andrew's image of Jasmine grew clearer, he started seeing her less as the object of his desire and more as a woman. He wanted to know everything that he could about her and spent his time with them making himself a part of their lives. Lucy turned out to be a lot easier to win over than Andrew had thought she would be given Jasmine's frequent expression of her fears over her daughter's uniqueness. Like him Lucy was a big Pokémon fan; Andrew presented her with a hard drive containing every episode of Pokémon and soon they were bonding over anime and manga.

It didn't seem strange to Jasmine that she, Andrew and Lucy had so quickly formed into a family unit; she was too thankful for the positive changes that Andrew had brought to the house for her to notice anything out of the ordinary about it. She enjoyed having help with the cooking, Lucy having someone that could relate to her, having somebody that she could be open with about things that she had been keeping within her for years. For these reasons Jasmine was being increasingly drawn to Andrew, and he knew it. He wasn't ready for it to be happening so soon, he liked the way things were and was apprehensive about putting them in jeopardy. He channelled his erotic thoughts about her into long runs on the beach in the mornings and sketches of Jasmine that he did at night in the sketchbook where he had his sketches of Melissa, the last of which was a nude that she'd asked him to do of her so he wouldn't forget about her.

Jasmine had no idea that she was capable of having the kind of effect on a person that she was having on Andrew; just watching her walking around the house barefoot in jeans and a T-shirt with her hair pulled back into a plain ponytail made his heart race. Over her married years Jasmine's physical appearance had steadily diminished in importance to her and the advent of motherhood had brought about a surrender to stay-at-home mom dowdiness. Lately her appearance had increased in importance to her. She was pulling on her cheeks checking her skin's elasticity, holding out her hair and letting it fall to measure its body, looking at herself in the mirror to see if the top she was wearing was hugging too tightly to her belly, which she feared she'd allowed to get shapeless. She worried that she had become frumpy. When Andrew got back from his run on the beach in the morning she would unfailingly compare his well conditioned body to that of her husband's which, due to his smoking and workaholic tendencies, was on the uncomfortably thin side. She was spending a lot of time thinking about Andrew, comparing him to her husband.

There was an across the board windingdown taking place in Jasmine's life. Soon she would no longer be of much use toLucy, the girl to whom she'd devoted her best years, her looks were rapidlyleaving her, and her marriage had run its course. The feeling of rejuvenationthat Jasmine felt within the house due to Andrew's presence grew profoundly witheach day. She was thinking about him, watching him, and wondering what his realreason was for coming to live with them as she kept noticing him looking at herfor longer than was necessary, a tendency of his that she did nothing todiscourage.