{ interlude } and the mouth changes; the same mouth is now another mouth
Everything that's wrong in Martel Lefevre's life can ultimately be traced back to the man himself, and it is this awareness that curbs some of the more creative swearing he would otherwise be employing right about now. It's either that or the six year old, carrying a shirt down from upstairs and shoving it at him because small children don't really give a damn that it's fine in the house because he keeps it this temperature on purpose and for a reason, it's winter and people don't wander around without their shirts in winter.
"-take it back upstairs, Inga, and stop getting into Daddy's wardrobe-"
"Inga? Ingrid's there?"
"-of course she's fucking- Ingrid." Martel hangs up, at this point, and bundles his child in the shirt she brought him until she starts shrieking with laughter (a more pleasant counterpoint to the immediate ring of the phone) and carrying them both back upstairs himself. The phone, as incessant and insistent as the woman on the other end of it, continues to ring.
It goes to voicemail - twice - and keeps ringing long after he's deposited the morality and seasonal appropriateness police with her nanny and sufficiently conveyed to Katherine that he doesn't want to hear from either of them until he's dealt with this. Katherine, who is used to this household and enjoys not being fired, doesn't comment on how it might help to answer the phone. It probably won't help (it almost never does), but he does eventually.
"What."
"You could say hello," she says, hurt and reproachful, and if he were the sort of man who was inclined to be touched by these things then he might be, and he might feel guilty, and he might even admit to himself that it's not a lack of trust in other women (that would be absurd, frankly, not all men are tarred with his brush and ... shouldn't be) or some irrational prejudice about Californians (more likely but still not the case, despite his burgeoning hatred of LA) but the fact that it takes longer to fall out of love than it did to fall into it. He might concede that he's been a little unreasonable, perhaps taken his retribution too far. Maybe, at the least, he'd consent to civility.
He isn't that sort of man, so instead he says, "The concept of a restraining order is very simple and, indeed, self-explanatory; I imagine its implications are likewise. Tell me, Lillias, what part of it puzzles you?"
"I'm puzzled-" he can hear the very moment that her pitch changes and he waits for the build up he knows will precede a crescendo, and even when he was engaged to her he didn't feel badly for thinking of it as a performance; Lillias is an actress and for some reason that continues to escape him she refuses to stop just because she's not on a stage, "-by how you seem to believe that you can really do this indefinitely. We have a child, Martel! You can't cut me out of your life like this."
"You are making it very difficult for me, but don't worry, dear; I have a knack." The funny thing is that the conversation - a kind description - still sounds remarkably like the ones they had before. To a discerning listener, though, the difference is easy to spot: Lillias's comparatively small attempts to be patient and understanding and reasonable slowly battered down in the face of Martel's refusal to give ground, his heels dug in and his responses coming almost by rote. The difference is that he isn't listening to her.
"-look, Lillias, I'd love absolutely nothing more than to listen to you rehash the past six years for the next four hours, but I need to go and take my eyeball out."
He hangs up again, swiftly, in the precious few seconds that he's actually managed to render her speechless.