February (24 page)

Natalie Bateman sips her champagne and her eyes close. She has an earnest way of tucking her hair behind her ears that makes her look truthful. It was as though that nun back in high school, John thinks—unconsciously letting his own mouth open as Natalie tugs another snail off the prong with her teeth, and closing his mouth as she closes hers, her lips full and wet—it was as if that nun had opened his forehead and put a chestnut of geometry and kindness behind the bone. He had felt bruised by the power and intent of her stare. She taught math, but John had seen it was not math. It was religion. She wrote on the board and covered herself in white dust, the residue of answers. John could see that the answers were spectral but had certain physical properties, and the answers had blasted through the nun and she was covered in their pure white residue.

And John thought: she should not be allowed to do this, just move the hard nut of love into his head. He might explode. But he had asked for it. He had asked for mercy. And the nun had leaned in and said, Aw, honey. Which was what she always said to students who had made an effort to follow but could not follow. And she made the decision, and John saw her make it. He saw it in her eyes, and then he knew. The knowledge fell out of his brain onto the exam paper, and when he stood up from the exam it was gone.

Natalie Bateman passes a package to everyone at the table, a glossy black envelope that folds out ingeniously, with pockets and inserts—glossy eight-by-tens of locations and the bios of key personnel, designers, actors, directors, location scouts. There is a breakdown of the deliverables, sample budgets and storyboards.

The sun is going down and John glances at his watch. He will be on a plane to Toronto by 9 p.m. There are things he has to do. He has seen a white T-shirt in a shop window, no bigger than his hand.
I Heart New York
.

HOME

Helen Invisible, November 2008

HELEN IS AT
Value Village with the cellphone and it buzzes against her hip. Louise is calling to say the police are doing riot training in the parking lot near her house.

They’re getting ready for riots, Louise says. They do this every year. The nurses might go on strike. Half the cops are married to nurses. They’ve got their shields and helmets with the visors and they advance together. If the nurses get out of hand they’ll hit the nurses over the head with those batons they have. I’m here in my car just to watch. Those horses, Helen, what lovely animals.

Louise’s son is a cop. Sean, Louise’s son, is a long-distance runner with silver hair who cleans the house and makes his wife coffee every morning and brings it to her in bed. Sherry Aucoin. And he takes care of his mother without complaint. Sean shovels for Louise in winter and gets her medication and sets up her computer. He does her plumbing and fixes the motion-sensitive light over the back door and puts down salt on her walk.

What they do, Helen. They bang, Louise says.

I’m looking at a cashmere sweater, Helen says.

They hit the batons against the shields, a drumming effect, and it’s very intimidating, Louise says. Very exciting.

These minutes cost me, Helen says. She turns to the side to get rid of the static. I have this phone for emergencies.

Are we going to look at kitchen counters today, Louise says. Helen has discovered a hitch under the arm of the sweater. The sweater is beaded and pink and very soft. She puts her face in it and there is a smell of perfume. Somebody wore this sweater, she thinks.

I’m not wasting any more minutes, Louise, Helen says. Meet me at the hardware store in an hour. And she hangs up.

There is a tall, hunched woman a little ways down the aisle with permed black hair so sparse her white scalp shows through. The woman is trying on a coat. She is looking down the length of herself, smoothing the fur with one hand, the other hand clutching the collar closed at the neck.

Very nice, Helen says. The woman gives the coat a little swish. She strikes a pose. Then she lets her arms drop.

We had eight die out our way since September, the woman says. I’m in Flower’s Cove up on the Northern Peninsula. That’s a lot of people for a small community. I’m here with my friend Alice, and I said to myself, this is a nice coat. She flicks her hand through the fur again.

It looks very warm, Helen says.

Do we buy these things to make ourselves feel better, the woman asks. She comes up close to Helen then. Her watery eyes sink loosely into soft pouches of skin, veined with fine wine-coloured threads. One tooth is outlined in gold and her breath smells of spearmint gum.

In Flower’s Cove I’m guessing you need a warm coat, Helen says. She has the sleeve of the pink sweater bunched up in her fist.

The priest was the last, the woman whispers. She turns to the rack and begins sliding the steel hangers over the bar quickly, stopping at something flaring red. Took a heart attack at the door of the church. He was from town. Originally.

Did he? Awful, Helen says.

If I were small like you, the woman says. She nods at the sweater in Helen’s hand. I would treat myself. She flicks through several more hangers and pauses at something silver that catches the light with a flash.

Because life is short, she says. Life is very, very. She draws the silver shirt out and puts it in her cart.

Helen thinks of Louise saying: I am not wowed. Louise had not been wowed about a shade of taupe Helen showed her at the hardware store last week. They were looking at the samples and they had winnowed the pile, and Helen said she wanted something fresh and clean. She held out the paint sample at arm’s length.

Louise lifted her bifocals from the string around her neck and put them on. They both glanced at the ceiling to determine what kind of light was shining on the sample. Then Louise shook her head and removed her glasses.

I am not wowed, she said.

Helen thinks of her granddaughter Claire, coming for a visit a few days ago. Claire had rung the bell and then she’d stood looking down the street, the sunlight in her hair, and then she’d turned and put her face to the glass of Helen’s front door and blocked the light with her cupped hands, her nose pressed flat and white. She had been looking straight at Helen and could not see her.

Helen was invisible. Claire was looking straight at her and not seeing anything at all.

And Helen thinks of Barry, who is working right now in her living room.
I am wowed
, Helen thinks. She feels a clutch of surprise. As if a fist has closed on her heart. She feels lust. But also something more layered and dangerous than lust. Something deeper.

Companionship
, she thinks. A longing for it.

Treat yourself, the woman says, nodding at the sweater in Helen’s hand.

Oh, I can’t, Helen says. She puts the sweater back on the rack.

. . . . .

Seance, November 2008

JOHN HAS LEFT
the boozy business meeting and is walking several blocks in the direction of his hotel. Outside a novelty shop there are four inflated George Bush punching bags, weighted with sand, bowing and tottering and bouncing off each other in the wind. It has begun to snow. John is supposed to buy an airline ticket for Gabrielle but he needs a coffee. He needs, always, a pause before parting with money.

John needs a pause to think about the baby.

It is very, very cold in New York.

He ducks into a coffee shop where the staff wear earpieces and peaked caps. They marshal the line so it moves along, pointing to a clerk behind the counter and saying: Inez is ready for you now. Or: Jasmine, at the end, is ready.

A woman asks if she can sit with John because the coffee shop is crowded. She unzips her jacket and sighs so deeply she falls into herself like a cake.

They are getting ready for Christmas in New York and there is a fashion window across the street with mannequins in red evening gowns and a gold fireplace and a pyramid of gold boxes. The reflections of yellow cabs float in the glass like giant carp.

The woman sitting across from John in the café says she channels spirits for a living. It’s draining work, she says. She glances over at the counter that holds the cream and milk, and says she needs sugar and she’s going to get some. But instead she narrows her eyes and stays very still.

I feel a vibe, she says to John. Coming from you.

Let me get the sugar for you, John says. What do you want? Sugar?

I believe you’ve lost someone, the woman says. She stands up. She is about to pronounce upon John and all that he is; but an ambulance tears down the street and she is distracted. The siren screams and the red light from the cherry washes over the woman, once, twice, gone.

John thinks of the men and women who had been sleeping on the plane from Singapore, the red sun spilling in their windows. People with their mouths hanging open; the concentrated, hard-won abandon on their faces. Was that just yesterday? The world below had seemed like a dream they were conjuring together.

I’ll just get the sugar, the woman says. She is wearing, John notices, faded black jogging pants and cracked plastic sandals with white sports socks and a lilac down jacket with grime around the cuffs. She comes back to the table wagging a packet of sugar between her finger and thumb.

You commune with the dead you were saying, John says.

The woman pours the sugar and jerks her teabag by the string. Spirits come to me, she says. She smiles at John and rubs her hands together over the steam of the tea.

So, with candles, he asks. He is thinking about Jane Downey at the Hyatt in Toronto. John has booked her a suite and he has a reservation for himself. A separate room. Would they sleep together? He has never had sex with a pregnant woman. Jane Downey said he would be able to feel the baby move.

You just have to put your hand on my tummy, she said.

I don’t need candles, the woman in the café tells John. He can smell her raspberry tea.

You hear voices, John says.

Spirits show themselves, the woman says.

And you hold seances.

Seance is an old-fashioned word, the woman says. We say channelling now.

And it costs, John says.

The woman pulls the teabag out of the cup and drops it onto a pile of napkins. A red stain spreads at once. I have to charge, she says.

John takes a bank card out of his wallet and turns it end over end on the table and picks his teeth with it; then he realizes what he is doing and puts it away. All he can really think about is the baby. He is having crazy thoughts. He is thinking: Why not marry Jane. Or: Just don’t show up and it will all go away.

He is thinking about the way it had been light for twentyfour hours that week in Iceland with Jane, and he has a crazy notion that the light made her pregnant. The light had done something to them both. Befuddled them. They had hiked and eaten a lamb dinner with wine, and there had been orange light on the broken up, glittering pieces of hardened lava, and the stories of berserkers that Jane wrote about in her notebook while the tour guide talked.

I’m just curious about how it works, John says to the woman in the coffee shop.

Everything’s on the surface with you, she says. I’m seeing things already. Things from your past. Things in your future.

What things, John says.

The woman shrugs. Shapes, she says. Colours. I see sadness and loss. That’s without even trying.

That’s pretty good, John says. Without trying.

She glances up from her cup and her eyes, John sees, are green. She has an intense, theatrical glare. Her skin is milky and her eyebrows thick and arching. She must have been beautiful when she was younger.

Something is coming, the woman says. John takes a twenty out of his wallet and slides it across the table to the psychic.

What’s coming, he says. Jane had an infinite capacity for generosity, that’s what he remembers. Or he is mixing her up with all women everywhere. He and Jane had a week together. Jane was angular. Lean. Cinnamon-coloured hair, wild curls.

John has avoided being a father all his adult life. It has taken stealth and some underhandedness. It has taken clarity of purpose when the moment called for dreamy abandon. He has practised withdrawal. He has kept what he wants, what he
actually
wants for his life, in the centre of his thoughts even while in the throes of orgasm. He’s kept a tight fist on the reins of himself.

I’ll tell you what the future holds for you, the psychic says. She has not touched the money. The bill is sitting in the middle of the table. When the door opens, the bill lifts a little and moves sideways.

Maybe, John thinks, he doesn’t want to know what’s in the future. He has given a lot of thought to the nature of time and how a life can be over much too quickly, if you’re not careful. The present is always dissolving into the past, he realized long ago. The present dissolves. It gets used up. The past is virulent and ravenous and everything can be devoured in a matter of seconds.

That’s the enigma of the present. The past has already infiltrated it; the past has set up camp, deployed soldiers with toothbrushes to scrub away all of the
now
, and the more you think about it, the faster everything dissolves. There is no present. There was no present. Or, another way to think about it: your life could go on without you.

John had enjoyed making love to a gorgeous woman in Reykjavik. That is true. There was sunshine all day and all night. He hadn’t stopped to think about it.

Looking back, it seems to John as though he’d been in the present with Jane. The whole week had happened in the present tense. Maybe that is love. These are the kinds of crazy thoughts he is entertaining.

He and Jane had gone to the Blue Lagoon and put white mud on their faces because they were told it would heal them. They’d laughed at that because they felt there was nothing to heal. They both claimed they’d never felt better.

Stay in my apartment, John had said to Jane. Be my guest. Because it was fun and the sunlight lasted, waning only slightly at about four in the morning, and there wasn’t a whole lot else to do. He’d watched the waterfall splash down over Jane’s head and onto her hands as she held them up, and the water fell in a glossy sheen over her face, and her mouth was open, and her hair was plastered down and shiny. Her nipples in the glossy red bathing suit. The curve of her hip. He had seen the shadow of her belly button. The hard ropes of waterfall had washed the white mud off her face in rivulets.