The Best Thing for You (24 page)

Inside the apartment they busied themselves, lighting lamps, stowing food in the fridge, stacking the library books next to the sofa. A book on Germany in the thirties, a biography of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. They had traded off portions of the story – Ulrike and Mackintosh were Thom’s, David and Hannah were Anika’s – and delighted in pouncing on each other’s inaccuracies. Baader-Meinhof was the seventies, not the late sixties, Anika would say, and Thom would respond by touching on some detail about the Nuremberg Laws she had sketched in only vaguely, unsure of herself.

Where is it? Thom asked now, as she squirted soy sauce in a bowl and unwrapped a plastic tray of California rolls. Outside the carol ships glowed on the dark bay. Oh, but their lives were delightful now!

What? she said.

The metronome.

Then they were putting their coats and shoes back on and hurrying back downstairs, because Anika had taken it to the library with them, had almost invariably left it in the stacks, sitting on an empty shelf where she had pulled it out to compare to an Aubrey Beardsley drawing Thom had found. But by the time they got back to the library it was closed.

That’s just as well, Thom said. The staff will have found it and put it in the lost and found. We’ll get it back tomorrow.

Stupid, Anika said, not really meaning it, tapping herself on the forehead.

They did not open the library books that night after all; it seemed pointless without the metronome as touchstone.

The next day, after Thom had left, Anika went back to the library, but none of the librarians remembered having seen a
blue metronome on the shelves. The lost and found, a wooden milk crate, contained only several umbrellas and a pair of child’s rubber boots.

Never mind, Anika said, and thanked the librarians for their trouble.

Since she was out anyway she decided to do her shopping for that evening’s meal, and to make up for the disappointment of the loss of the metronome she decided to go all out, with flowers and wine and an expensive cut of meat, something cooked slowly, to a heady succulence. As she moved through the morning, constructing the meal in her mind and moving from shop to shop, she found she was in a particularly good mood. They had moved from one phase of their life to the next, perhaps, that she could contemplate such a meal without agonizing over the cost and wistfully settling for something less; that she could lose an antique, valuable maybe, and care so little. The irony of having money was that you thought less of it, cared less about it, mourned its loss a little less.

When Thom got home that evening she waited for him to ask about the metronome, but the question never came. He told her about his day, spent consulting with a team of web designers. That was the future, he said, talking as much to himself as to her. There was money there, and all the work a person could want. He would take some evening classes, pick up some new skills. Most Web designers were techno-brats with no graphic ability at all, he said. He was eager to get on the computer, even before she had served dessert, and show her examples of their work, and explain how he could do it better.

As his computer skills blossomed and her wallet grew swollen with paycheques, they began to fill the apartment with the nice things they had always craved, books and rugs and pictures, better clothes in the cupboards, better food in the fridge. Anika
grew brisk and efficient, with her new job and newly moneyed life; the days of aimless wandering and elaborate, painstaking meals she consigned, privately, to an underemployed and slightly depressed past. Thom became cool, the one with the newest sunglasses, the tickets to movie premieres, the fastest computer, the latest
CDS
, the loudest laugh. He met interesting people, he did stylish things for them, and they rewarded him. He never asked about the metronome. Sometimes Anika imagined it ticking away – someone would have found it and fixed it, surely – marking off the days and weeks and months until he remembered it, their talisman. Eventually she gave up waiting. She watched him drink his martinis, swear at his computer, criticize her clothes, kiss her hands. She saw that her feelings for him would swing from patience to impatience, liking to loathing, closeness to distance, and there was nothing she could do about it. Nothing but wait, and wait, and wait for the needle to swing back, and hope that their love would not prove so delicate, so ambiguous, and so easily, irretrievably lost.

THE BEST THING FOR YOU

T
he idea first came to her one limpid yellow morning toward the end of the war, as she sat across the breakfast table from her husband, watching him chew with toast-textured jaws. The minutes were falling down like dominoes, and she had a full day planned once he had left for the eight-fifteen, so that the idea had at first seemed negligible, a silver coin of a lake glimpsed from the window seat of an airplane, easy to forget.

When do I expect you tonight? she asked, turning back to the immediate clutter of her coffee, her magazines, on the table in front of her. Grape nuts, Victory Bonds.

And he, across his plate and paper: Late. Tanner’s invited everyone for drinks. How’s eight-thirty?

Well, that’s fine, she said.

Make lamb chops.

All right.

Kiss me.

Shave.

Kiss me anyway.

She moved to his lap and closed her eyes and there it was again, a long way off yet winking deliberately. She had planned
a day of work and errands, and wondered if this funny little fantasy would accompany her through the sequence.

Our lady of the dry cleaning, she murmured. Our lady of the cold cuts.

I’ll bring you a present, he said thickly.

Hm.

He was big but helpless: these were the first and last things she had learned about him. Do you like this? she would ask, after they were married and she no longer had to play shy. This? With a single finger she could belabour his breathing, tip him past speech. But just now her mind was elsewhere, on the day’s goals, and on this funny bright bauble her fancy had produced.

Oh, that’s good, her husband said.

She got up and went to the bedroom to dress.

After he had gone she marked her mouth with lipstick, gathered her keys and pocketbook, and locked up the little bungalow their four parents had helped them buy. On the sidewalk her heels ticked nicely. She was twenty-two and cute, pale plump skin and blackish curls, tarry-eyed, small. Her husband, ten years older, was gross and blond, a prairie boy, cheerful and dairy-bland. He worked for the Vancouver
Daily Province
, not writing but with the equipment, the presses and type, though he was hoping to get into photography. They had been married for two years.

She joined the queue for the streetcar, behind a handless man and a girl and another man in uniform. Carnegie Library, please, she told the driver when it was her turn.

I know, the driver said.

She spent the morning in a chair in a block of sun in the cold stone library, working with a notebook and a French grammar, occasionally distracted by thoughts of the handless man. He had kept touching the girl with his stump, once even smoothing her
hair with it while he and the officer talked about baseball. Towards the end of the morning she set down the grammar and picked up
Le jeu de l’amour et du hasard
by Marivaux. She wrote in her notebook, in a rather round, childish hand:

Silvia: Are we not pleased with Léandre when we see him? But, at home, he says not a word, nor laughs nor growls, his soul is frozen, solitary, inaccessible. His wife does not know it, has no relations with it; she is wed but to a figurine from a cabinet, who appears at the table to stifle with apathy, with chill and boredom, all that surrounds him. Is this not a delightful husband?

Lisette: I freeze before the story you tell me; but what of Tersandre?

Silvia: Yes, Tersandre!

At noon she closed her notebook, returned her little books to the shelf, and walked into a day that had turned warm and dull. Gulls like paper gulls tipped and looped between the buildings, through the soft, soiled cottony sky. In a café on Hastings she ordered bread and butter and tea and ate slowly, staring at the window. She was trying to remember how many pairs of intact stockings she had. The idea came again, bright as a gewgaw, beginning to annoy her. Stockings were expensive, and she decided to make do for another week or two. Perhaps, anyway, this was the gift her husband had spoken of: a single expensive pair of stockings. That would be an intelligent gift.

The streetcar deposited her on a tree-lined street equidistant from her home and the food store, an edifice so new they had only just finished laying the parking lot tar. Inside she tarried. They were offering a home delivery service now, she noted, but it was more than she could afford.

At the meat counter she waited patiently behind four other women, watching the butcher scissor off half a dozen sausage
links and wrap them in brown paper, watching the woman in front of her sweep her baby’s mouth out with a finger and wipe what she had found on her coat, watching the door to the back swing open just as she stepped up to the counter and a boy of sixteen or seventeen appear in a clean apron, glancing at his similarly aproned father and receiving a nod.

Hello, Stephen, she said, smiling gently.

Ma’am.

What a clever boy, she thought, as he wrapped her chops and ham, weighed the neat packages, and wrote sums on them with a pen. She didn’t like the way he rushed through everything, racing his father and beating him to the single set of scales, slapping her purchases, her food after all, on the counter. He had learned the business but not the manners of the business. He had also propositioned her once, three months ago now, scribbling a note on the underside of one of the brown paper flaps for her to discover when she got home and started to cook. He had not yet grown into his nose and ears but was not terribly unpleasant either: hair dark like her own, eyes a pretty, lashy hazel. He had an inch or two on her and probably weighed less. Skin angrier some days than others, lips a bit thin. She never considered shopping elsewhere, simply appropriated the name he had penned, using it each time to show him his own youth.

Anything else for you? he asked, not meeting her eye.

No, thank you.

Though if I were to do it, she thought, walking home, mightn’t a boy like that be useful? Mightn’t he be just the one? She swung the string bag of apples and purchases by her calf, smiling at how quickly the little silver crime had overflowed its banks, eroding a river, a bright thread through her thinking.

That night, when her husband got home, she was in a good mood. She turned up the radio and made him dance with her in the living room, still in his shoes and overcoat. This was the kind of thing he liked. She had cooked carefully and he praised the meal, his favourite, and the candles and the shiny windows and her good housekeeping generally.

You’re high, she said.

What? he said, laughing. A little. No, listen, though, I got an assignment. That Bonner trial on Monday, you know, they want me to wait in the alley behind the courthouse and get the woman as she comes out. They think she’ll come out the back way.