And he would have lost.
This concept, of losing and winning, had always been present between them. Initially born from their unremitting arguments and polemicsâfrom the need to prove or disprove, to build up a solid case in support of an opinion, or tear one down, it gradually transformed itself into something more, into an artful vying for ground, a constant attempt to gain the upper hand, seize territory. Their discourse had become something tactical, the private weighing out of victories and losses, every word measured for the cutting quality of its edge, syllables jutting from the sentences like bayonets. There were times when Emily would hear herself setting up for a costly forward advance, one that was sure to find them both sulking long afterwards (or retreating to bathrooms and bedsheets to charily lick their wounds), and it would occur to her that, at that moment, there was no real benefit to be made by causing damage, nor did she even want to. Yet she would. Fights about workspace, silence, selfishness, nickels and dimes, fridge magnets. Emily began to feel like a captive in the language that they'd developed between each other, tongue-tied in the dialect of combative exchange. How can we expect, she wonderedâwhile he furiously washed the dishes, plates clanking above the major and minor scales that she was trying to warm up toâto fashion a lasting peace on a frontline when even armistices are written in the tongue of war? Soldiers and mercenaries are not trained to reconstruct, rebuild, start anew. They're not meant to. They've committed themselves to something else, know nothing else. Which meant, Emily began to suspect, that the greatest obstacle for engaged opponents who found themselves finally wishing for peace wasn't in figuring out how to lay their weapons down; it was in having taken up arms in the first place.
It was a month before their fifth anniversary when Shane mentioned the place in the country he wanted to show her, a place, he'd promised, that she was going to love. Everything about the idea had made her uneasy from the get-go, though she hadn't understood what his actual intentions were until she was there, standing in the cold and mildewed air of the brick-worked building, looking out from one of its windows. It was in the area where he'd grown up, on the outskirts of Beamsville, a small town on the Niagara Peninsula just across the lake from Toronto (whose bleary skyline could be seen from the shore on a clear day, writhing over a band of water mirage like gasoline vapour). The place belonged to friends of the family, a failed attempt at a guesthouse. Furniture unarranged and draped over with white sheets and mattress covers, to keep out the resourcefulness of moths and the patience of dust, armchairs and La-Z-Boys in the shape of Halloween ghouls, of children in ghost costumes with their eyeholes yet uncut, raising their arms in a still-framed “booOOooh,” which was as soundless as wind under the doorsills.
The wood flooring crackled and moaned beneath her footsteps to the window, where she had stopped to look outside. In the yard it was early spring, fruit trees in bloom, grass the green of limes, shadows short and edged abruptly. She crossed her arms over her chest and tried to rub some warmth into her sides. Galaxies of particles churned in a slat of light at her shins.
“Well? What do you think? It's great, isn't it? I was thinking . . .” he shifted his weight onto a joint in the wood strips that complained with a whine, “I was thinking about the time off we both have, coming up in June, and . . . I was thinking that we could . . . that it would be good for us if we . . . you know, spent some . . . time.”
Finally understanding what it was all about, and even appreciating it, she found she had little to say. Instead, she noticed the strand of a spiderweb hanging down from the top of the window frame. There was a tiny paint chip dangling from its tip, which was stirring, pivoting slightly, in miniscule degrees, as if of its own volition. A gleam of gesso clinging to the end of an invisible thread, like hope.
She sighed, leaning closer to the window as if tipping over with a towering weight, her forehead butting up softly against the glass, the sun shaving her cheekbones. She was thinking about the reality of his plan, thinking further afield than the reach of his good intentions, about what it would actually mean, the two of them being cooped up in a new and empty space for two weeks, where there were no familiar ambits to retreat across, no corners reconnaissanced for the hiding. Emily was no romantic. She knew that the kind of damage they'd inflicted by now was far beyond what could be held up to the most well-meaning lips and kissed better. Especially here, in the country of his youth, where they wouldn't even be on equal ground to try, where he would have an obvious latitudinal advantage, passing oak trees with his infant memories swinging under the branches, walking along vineyard rows where he'd harvested grapes as a teen, their stunted vines stretching out into dramatic renditions of the crucifix, muscles of bark flexed and contorted tighter than two thousand years of martyrdom. They'd kill each other.
She was as surprised as he was to hear herself say it. “I want . . .” she hadn't turned around, was still leaning against the window, “I want a divorce.” She spoke into the glass, her breath spray-painting a misty halo in front of her mouth. “A quick and painless divorce,” she added quietly.
She still hadn't turned around. There was a long pause while he looked for words that he was incapable of finding. The ghouls stood still.
“That's all,” she murmured at the flowering trees of his salad days, the pink of the magnolias rusting at the fringes, their enormous petals unfurling until they dropped, white cups of silk gathering at the base of the trees like clothes at the foot of a nuptial bed. “It's all I want.”
Contrary to the nature of their marriage, their divorce was, in fact, quick and painless. The only hang-up was a transitional twelve days when Emily didn't have an apartment; while waiting for one of the roommates to move out of a sober bungalow she'd found, she'd unwisely accepted an invitation from her parents to stay at their place.
She'd come from a large family, the middle child with five sisters and a brother. Both of her parents were school teachers, a profession, Emily held, that called to it only the most boring people. Her parents' one binding commonality was the way they approached raising their kids. Above all else, they wanted to foster their children's intellect, encourage them to be bold thinkers, to be analytical, critical, and, failing that, to at least become knowledgeable, cultivated, conversant. The manner in which they approached this was insisting that their children never be given chores or household duties: no cooking, cleaning, caring for younger siblings; so long as they were seen to be reading, studying, perfecting some sort of skill or art, they were exempt from everything they thought of as toilsome or menial. An approach that had Emily's parents, particularly her mother, working several times the amount of the average person, as well as rendering Emily utterly useless in the kitchen later on in her life, inept at controlling textile-incinerating irons, and the owner of underwear that was all three to six shades away from its original colour. Even now, at thirty-seven, she couldn't boil an egg without bungling it in some way, a fact she vehemently reproached her parents for whenever she saw them. Particularly her mother.
“I'm just worried about you,” her mother had begun on her second night in the house, after brewing Emily an evening cup of tea in the kitchen. “Is that so wrong?”
“Some other time, will you, Mom?”
“Well, it's not going to get any easier, is it? At your age. To find a man. And this one was so clever. Certainly played well. Had a good job. Made it to the symphony.” She broke off to look thoughtfully at the refrigerator. “And, sweetie, I'm afraid your big bones aren't getting any smaller.”
Emily gave an acerbic look that her mother managed to evade.
“You
are
going to audition for a position in the symphony again this year, aren't you? You're bound to get it one of these times, hon.”
Emily walked to the sink, poured her tea into it, clunked the cup into the steaming basin, and left the room.
Her mother's apprehensions about her attractiveness were ill founded. After her divorce, Emily was tired but hungry, and enjoyed a phase of casual flings and easygoing affairs that came about with little effort and were based almost entirely on sex. She met Cedric two years after her divorce, following what had been a disastrous experiment with a woman, a possessive and clingy violist who tipped easily into hysteria, a woman who'd had the habit of asking comprehensive questions about past lovers, then calling Emily hard and cold and brusque for her responses, criticisms that became self-fulfilling realities. When they split up, a door's trimming was damaged from the slamming, picture frames shattered. While one of her roommates helped her sweep up the mess, she told herself that this was the last of them, that what she needed now was some time alone, to plant a few shoots of calm in her life, however distractingly fruitful her soil happened to be.
When she was offered to play a gig for a retirement party at a golf course on the south shore of Lake Simcoe, she thought that getting out of the city and into the fresh air for an afternoon would do her good. The retiree was an insurance broker and classical aficionado whose company had splurged for an hour and a half of live Bruch and Dvorák at his reception. Emily's quartet played on a sunken stage while his associates, allies, and adversaries filed into the hall and mingled with cocktails in their hands, standing around, nursing tumblers and champagne flutes, schooners, and seidels. She'd glimpsed some of them giving a nudge, wink, and gesture toward the musicians, a cluster of the men stepping closer for a better look. One of them was watching her closely, eyeing the way her knees protruded from the black of her dress on either side of her cello, which was almost the size of a human body. When she finally met his eyesâa shallow, watery blue, framed in wrinkles he'd won from sunny fairwaysâhe'd smiled and pushed his drink out into the air between them, as if to indicate how impressed he was with her precision, or was it her bowing technique, her controlled and understated expression? She looked back at her music stand, half-smirking at the absurdity.
During a short break midway through the performance she retreated outside with a glass of wine, a non-smoker's rendition of a cigarette break. Cedric had searched around until he'd found her there, on a terrace overlooking the wide green of the eighteenth hole. He accosted her with predictable compliments that progressed toward a predictable come-on. She sidestepped it by asking about him. He was, in fact, he'd instantly volunteered, recently divorced. (Likely the only thing they had in common, thought Emily, stepping out of her shoes to stretch the arches of her feet, toes splayed on the patio stones).
“So I guess you gotta practise a lot. Keep those hands in tip-top shape,” Cedric said, watching the bare skin of her feet in the sun.
“If you do it well, you use your whole body actually,” Emily offered as if to no one in particular.
“Your whole body, eh?” Cedric looked the whole of her body over. “That is really . . . interesting, you know . . .”
Listening to him speak she found him to be conservative, prudish, coarse, and provincial. And besides being fourteen years her senior, Emily thought he was irritatingly sure of himself, standing in front of her with his glass of sparkling wine, searing with confidence, a womanizer who'd been forced to philander for decades with the careful discretion of a married man but had, at long last, been unleashed from it. There was nothing stopping him now. He was overweight, unread, unwise, and on top of the world with it, limping into middle age with the notion that he was infallible. It was embarrassing really.
What was more, she understood that he'd been drawn to her image alone, that he was talking to the charcoal dress he assumed she always wore, to her refined lipstick and the practised way she could hold a wineglass. Emily knew how far off that mark she was, considering the previous hours that had brought her there; from her morning coffee in her scruffy sweater, with its murky stains and ratty holes along the hem, the squabble in the car concerning gas money, which diplomatically eased into who was dating whom. Which was in turn interrupted when one of the violinists realized they were lost, having turned onto a road of cracked pavement that gave way to gravel, dogs running out from driveways to chase their car, a quick blur of teeth and hackles, manic barking receding into the dust behind them, until they'd found the right road and pulled into the golf course anxious that they were late, their one-thousand-dollar station wagonâwith fifty thousand dollars' worth of instruments crammed insideâthe most rundown vehicle in the parking lot. And she knew what it would look like later, when they were finished playing, changing into jeans again, scoffing food from the posh mirrors of the caterer's trays in a back room, catching glimpses of her saliva-filmed fingers between the crumbs and picked-through remains of bocconcini and cocktail shrimp, of baba ghanouj and prosciutto.
Emily heard him speaking, and heard herself responding to it, but was stunned to hear how receptive she sounded, offering him all the right cues, maintaining her distance, but also the flow, the measured trickle toward intimacy. Then, without even meaning to, she let him know of a concert that she would be playing at the following week. He said he'd be there, watching it, and waiting to buy her a drink when it was over.
“You know,” she'd responded, swirling her wine, holding it up to the afternoon clouds as if to check the vintage's legs. She gave it a long sniff, her nose deep in the glass, then sipped from it delicately, putting it back in the cup of her other hand with a finality akin to placing it on a table. “The truth is: I'm not all that sure you could handle me.” She grinned mysteriously, looked away. As she surveyed an isolated curtain of rain in the distance, a watercolour smear in the sky drifting north, she could actually sense how smitten he was.