Sleep (2 page)

Idiots
, he thinks.

Past the bottleneck he picks up speed at once. The red tail-lights of the cars ahead of him weave through the highway’s dips and curves as if riding the air, held disembodied by the dark swath the valley forms against the backdrop of the city. He remembers driving here as a teen in his first car, a reconditioned MG he’d paid for out of his own pocket, the top down and the pedal to the floor while his blood pumped through his veins and the wind roared around him. Back then the valley seemed some hopeful landscape of the future, with the river
winding its way toward the lake beneath the flyovers and cloverleaves, and the skyscrapers of downtown beckoning in the distance. Now, he realizes, he is looking instead at the past, that all this is part of an order already in full decline.

There is a clearing near their exit where more than once David has seen deer grazing, as many as a dozen of them. Somehow they have managed to find a corridor here from open country, have been able to thrive in these back-yard-sized patches of bush between murderous highway on one side and the endless concrete and cracked asphalt and brick of the east end on the other. David thinks of them not as some harbinger of a return to the wilderness of old but a sign that nature is on the march, trying to force a new accommodation. All over the city the animals have grown urban, the raccoons long ago but now coyotes, hawks, herds of deer. Meanwhile, the humans grow savage. Jogging past the camps of the homeless that dot the valley, David has seen the scattered bits of offal and bone and matted fur from their kills.

At their exit David steals another look at Marcus.

“Still awake back there?”

Marcus shifts in his seat.

“Are
you
?”

David ought to laugh, feel proud even; it is a sophisticated response. Instead, he hears the voice of Julia. He has the urge to shake the boy, to strike him. He fears that one day, he will.

He remembers the promise he made to himself at Marcus’s birth. That he would never do what his own father had done. That he would never make an enemy of his son.

In the darkness, the tree-lined streets of their neighbourhood give off the dead calm of a village. When David was a kid, coming out here to visit an uncle who ran an east-end vegetable
shop, the streets teemed with children and grizzled men and old women in black and the yards were staked with laundry lines or with tomatoes and beans. Now, the area is already into its third or fourth wave of gentrification, the houses, mostly two-storey semis on postage-stamp lots, all burnished and bevelled and bleached for maximum value added and their gardens as manicured as Versailles, still with fall flowers in bloom or roses in their second or third flourishing.

David and Julia’s place is a standout, a detached Victorian in yellow brick that was built when the tracts east of the valley were still open fields. Of the dozens of places they saw at the time of their move here from Montreal, this was the only one Julia would even consider, though it was too large by half and had never been properly updated. Exactly the sort of place David hated then, fusty and creaky and small-roomed, hemmed in on every side by the inconvenience of the old. David got enough of the old in his work; at home he preferred something more neutral. Clean lines, lots of light, a place he could see his own life in.

Before Marcus, there was this house: it was the project Julia poured all her energies into, all her unspoken resentment at being uprooted for the sake of David’s career, this despite his having negotiated a place for her here better than anything she would have got back home. For a while her reputation even seemed set to eclipse his own, her dissertation coming out with one of the more respectable academic presses to critical raves while his follow-up to his first book was almost universally panned, presumably to punish him for the first one’s success. By her third year Julia was leveraging enough research money to bring her teaching load down to nearly the same level as David’s, though instead of trying to bank a few more publications for her tenure review she instead put the time she’d freed up into the house.

She had become obsessed with restoring the place as closely as possible to its original form, which meant tearing down a mudroom at the back and adding a front veranda, having custom plasterwork done and ordering custom baseboards and period wallpaper, all of this on top of the furnace that needed replacing and the attic that needed insulating and the electrical panel that needed upgrading. David was staggered by the bills coming in. They had bought the place on a pre-emptive bid that was well above the asking price to head off the chance of losing it in an auction, then had sunk the last of his book money into the down payment. When David’s second book failed even to earn back its advance, all the reno work had to come right off their salaries. Before his marriage David had always made a point of living large, of picking up tabs, of dressing well, of always ordering the premium wine, but with the money flowing out like water he began to harp on every expense.

At bottom even the money was probably a tangent, every one of their arguments over the house so compromised from the start by other agendas that resolution was never a realistic prospect, maybe not even a hoped-for one. All that mattered, really, was to make a point. For Julia, that this was David’s own doing, the price to pay for taking her away from everything familiar, from a place where her life might have been her own; for David, that even casting the move in these terms, as what he had wanted, was just a cover for what he’d been denied. What he had wanted then, what would have made sense, was not a puffed-up chair at a second-rate university in a city he had no wish to return to but an appointment at one of the better schools south of the border. Someplace where ambition wasn’t seen as a disease. Where they would have paid him real money. He could have had that then.

His breaking point with the house came over some vintage door hardware Julia had ordered from England, half of it, David thought, stuff his brother could have picked up for nothing from salvage.

“This isn’t Daddy’s mausoleum on the hill!” David had screamed at her. “Daddy’s not paying the fucking bills!”

That was a constant refrain with him at the time, the implication that Julia’s extravagances were somehow born of the same old-money contempt that her father—who insisted on pronouncing David’s surname, Pace, as
Pah-cheh
, though it probably hadn’t been said that way since before David’s own father had stepped off the boat—had shown for David from the day he’d first laid eyes on him. And yet at the outset David had taken pleasure in indulging her, still flush with his successes and believing the money would never end. And it wasn’t that he had ever really pushed her to seek his brother’s services, or that the hardware she’d ordered was much of an extravagance next to what they’d already spent by then. When it had arrived, Julia had come to him in all innocence to show him a lock set from the 1800s whose wooden knobs, carved in a beehive pattern, were delicately canted from the uneven wear of whatever hands had touched them over the centuries. Not in a decade of scouring would Danny have turned up anything that exquisite in salvage. David thinks of those knobs now every time he opens one of the house’s doors: after the argument, Julia had returned all the vintage stuff to wherever she’d got it from and had simply left in place the generic hardware the house had come with.

David parks on the street but turns to find that Marcus, uncharacteristically, has nodded off after all, slumped like a shooting victim against the restraints of his car seat. The sight of him asleep like that sparks a complicated burst of emotion
in David, a mix of fear and remorse and maybe what for want of a better word he might call love, though that is the part that feels most malevolent, most likely to lead to failure or bad judgment or ill will. Again the image flashes through his head of the stopped car and with it the panic comes as well, even more gut-wrenching now, as though it is only in these incremental waves that he is able to take in the fullness of it. Yet beneath the panic is the memory of that second self who sat steely and clear-eyed and calm, exhilarated, almost, at the crucial instant. Who saved their lives, perhaps, but as if all that had really mattered was the sense, for maybe the first time in months or years, of being fully awake, of being fully alive.

He can’t bring himself to rouse Marcus and sits staring out at his house, seeming to see it as a stranger might. The front veranda is bathed in a sallow light that gives way by slow degrees to shadow like the light from a fire, one of Julia’s period touches. The veranda had been one of her biggest projects, though only after their blowout—when work on the house essentially ceased, so that to this day it is dotted with little jobs that were never completed—was David finally able to see it as something more than the price tag it had come with. What had struck him as mere frippery at first, its filigreed sconces, its endless balusters and spindles, took on a kind of resonance, of depth. He would look at the veranda and see the homestead the house had once been, this stubborn bit of empire at the edge of the bush. Somehow Julia had succeeded in conjuring that ghost. What was the point of all those arguments they’d had except to rob her, to rob them both, of the pleasure of what she’d accomplished? Why had he come to see the house as something she was taking from him rather than something she was giving him?

A second chance
. He stares out and can see it shimmering in front of him, a chance at the life he has always wanted. The
beautiful house, the beautiful wife, the beautiful child; the successful career. The life that, despite himself, he actually has. And yet even as it sits waiting for him he wonders at the stranger shifting inside him who sees only the lie of it.

At the sound of them at the door Julia comes out of the kitchen and at once bends to take Marcus in her arms, not so much as looking at David. She is dressed in sweats but he gets a whiff of body powder or perfume as if she has changed back from something nicer.

“Did you see the echidna?”

“We couldn’t. Dad said that part wasn’t open.”

“I’m sure it was closed if your dad said it was. You’ll see it next time.”

David knows he has to speak, make contact, but also that there is nothing he can say that will be the right thing.

“What smells so good?”

“It might have been good, if you’d been here an hour ago.”

The dining table is set with candlesticks and wine, the good china. No doubt she has spent much of the afternoon cooking and planning, nursing, against the odds, the hope that it might still be possible to enjoy an evening at home with her husband and son. Time after time David forgets this side of her, her vestigial need to make house, her hope for the restoration of a domestic order that has never really existed. Or he doesn’t forget: he suppresses. This is not the Julia he fell in love with; it is not the Julia he married. The Julia he fell in love with was the rising star, the one who loved her work, who could spend hours in the archives poring through letters and journals and laundry lists until the right detail finally leapt out at her. Now it is as if she has cut out that part of herself like a tumour she needed to be free of.

For Marcus, as usual, there is an entirely separate meal, hot dogs with canned beans in molasses. It boggles David how Julia dotes on him but then feeds him this poison. How she trains him to want only that. Pancakes. French fries. Macaroni and cheese from a box. These are the raw materials building the boy’s sinew and bone, his brain. It makes David think of the cut-throat contractors his father used to rail against who knocked together whole housing blocks out of cardboard and spit. His father had been a bastard, but at least he’d had standards. None of his buildings looked old the week after they went up. Nor would he ever have allowed to enter his house any of the processed chemical confections that Julia insists on feeding Marcus.

“You have to eat the bun too,” Julia says, though it is the punkiest sort of white bread. “And some of the beans.”

“I don’t like the beans.”

David holds his tongue.

“You have to eat some of them. For Mommy.”

“Please, Mom. I don’t like them.”

“Just three spoons, then. For Mommy.”

The same ordeal, night after night; the same anger in David that they have veered so badly off course. The anger spirals in him until he has lost all perspective, no longer sure if it is Julia or just the drug coursing through him or if the anger is what he wants, all that keeps him going.

They have hardly exchanged a word the whole meal. David gets up silently when they have finished and starts clearing the table.

“Thanks, Julia,” Julia says. “Great supper.”

He goes up to his office on the third floor while Julia gets Marcus ready for bed, though he knows how much she hates it
when he does this. No point offering help when she is in this mood. The truth, though, is that he is afraid, afraid Marcus will say something, that he himself will. That something will come out of him that he can’t take back.

His office is the one room in the house that bears no mark of Julia’s restorations. The same desk in aluminum and brushed glass that he had in his apartment in Montreal; a wall of built-ins for his library done in painted MDF. On a top shelf, a row of the various editions of his own work, his only indulgence. None of the little flourishes his fellow classicists go in for, the Romanists especially, the period maps on every wall, the framed coinage, the seventeenth-century editions of Tacitus or Virgil or Livy that belonged to some Cambridge schoolboy. Most of them have a toilet seat from Hadrian’s Villa or a collarbone from the catacombs that they’ve purloined at some point and that they’ll bring out like pornography to titillate their colleagues. David had been cured of that impulse early on, when his mother had taken him on his first trip to Rome at age twelve. He had picked up a loose bit of mosaic to pocket as a souvenir while they were visiting Ostia Antica, and the young cicerone who was showing them around had grown suddenly grave, impressing on David what would happen if every tourist took home a piece of the place. It was a lesson that stuck with him.