Authors: Joan Thomas
“Hey,” he calls. “Where you been?”
“Out for a walk. Where did you go?”
He veers across the street and brakes. “Just grabbed a coffee.” In spite of the cold, he’s wearing shorts. “Did Sylvie get away all right?”
“Yup. They should be almost there by now.”
He’s agile, swinging off the bike. But his legs look old, all the mechanics of their tendons and muscles on full display. He’s owned these shorts since Sylvie was born. He may even be carrying provisions for his journey in their several saggy pockets: a lunch bag with boiled eggs wrapped in waxed paper, a flashlight, a creased map. His freckles have spread and paled and blurred. They’re showing their true nature as sun damage. He’s a grandfather, isn’t he. Liz thinks about Krzysztof Nowak’s stony face when that neighbour walked into the party blowing on the loon whistle. Aiden, if he’d been taken in, would have looked at Liz with comic chagrin. She feels the customary fondness for her husband rising in her chest, and she feels something else – a sense of dismay at the film that’s just unspooled in her memory, which failed to reveal anything really.
They walk up their driveway and Aiden rolls open the garage door – it’s an old door that opens like an old-fashioned wooden pencil case. He wheels his bike in and she walks towards the garbage can and drops in the dog bag. She turns, and Aiden is right there. “We’ll have the day to ourselves,” she says, and takes his arm, and they cross the yard and climb the steps of the deck together.
T
HERE’S THE LITTLE LANE TO THE COTTAGES AT Presley Point, and there is Noah, grinning in front of cabin eleven. He’s tanned and his hair is longer: he looks like his lake self. “Refugees from the city,” he says, kissing her lightly.
His cabin is closer to the lake than cabin two, where she stayed with him last year. It’s a shack in comparison; it has no glass windows, only screens and shutters hinged at the top and propped up with sticks. “It’s fine,” Sylvie says as her eyes adjust to the dark and she takes in the peeling linoleum and the sagging bed. “It’s all you need.”
She’d throw herself at him but the baby is fussing in her arms, tremulous and stinking. So she sits on the old couch to change her and Noah watches attentively. Afterwards she hands the baby to him. He does it right, careful to support her head. While he holds her and looks at her warily, Sylvie wanders around the cabin, still a little shaky from the drive. Getting onto the highway was the worst part. She’d never driven an entrance ramp before, and a truck blasted its air horn at her and roared past in a threatening way. She swerved and her two right tires hit the rumble strip, and then
a sports car zoomed by and the driver slowed down as soon as he was past her, flashing his brake lights just to be an asshole. And all this time the baby was screaming her lungs out. But they made it.
This cabin is just one room, with a bathroom built into a corner. Nailed to the wall on the kitchen side is Noah’s silver sleeve, the scale armour she always thought was a falconer’s sleeve. She touches one of the leaves with a finger.
“It’s not silver!”
“It was made from beer cans.”
She flips the leaf over and, sure enough, it has a Labatt’s Blue logo on the underside. Somebody spent a lot of time making that sleeve, though, cutting the leaves and stapling them onto the fabric so they overlapped perfectly. She pictures a Labatt’s-drinking props man bent over a workbench and swearing every time he nicked his fingers.
Noah is holding the baby crookedly and she’s letting out little pips of distress. She’s hungry and there’s no point in his even trying. Sylvie takes her back and arranges a baby blanket over her shoulder so Noah won’t be too freaked. To her disappointment, he puts on his cap and picks up his laptop and goes out. To the store at the end of the cabin line, he says, to try to get a wireless connection. And she sits there in the dark and chilly cabin with the baby chomping on her, more alone than if he were a thousand miles away.
When he gets back, they set out for a walk. She doesn’t even ask him if he wants to carry the baby; she just straps the sling on herself. They walk up the high trail along the line of cabins, towards a little path that climbs a cliff jutting out into the lake, a lake the grey of the ocean. Last summer when Sylvie was here, grass-green waves lapped the shore like thick paint. It’s too early now for algae bloom. A white fishing boat crosses the water towards a line of little white flags. “That’s their nets,” Noah says. They stand
in a cold wind and watch two men haul the first net up and onto the deck and start tossing the fish into the hold. Snatching up the flashing pickerel one at a time, as though they’re racing to count them – 26, 27, 28, 29.
“I was talking to a fisher at the dock yesterday,” Noah says. “He’s harvesting eight hundred pounds a day. He has to lift his nets every six hours.”
Sylvie can’t take her eyes off the thrashing mass of silver fish gasping in the net, hauled out of an overly fecund lake where all this life is a sign of its dying. “He calls it harvesting?” she says. “Did you ask him if he plants them?”
When the fish are counted and the boat is gone, Sylvie and Noah step back onto the sandy path, the baby hanging face-out in the sling on her front. She’s a quiet weight on Sylvie’s chest and they’re almost back at the cabin. If they can get her out of the sling without waking her up, they’ll have a couple of hours to themselves.
“Are her eyes closed?” Sylvie asks Noah.
“Yeah. She looks pissed off.”
“Her expressions are funny.” She tells him what happened on Main Street that morning, when a cop car pulled up right beside them at a stoplight. “I was really scared. ‘Play it cool, baby,’ I said, and I looked in the back and she was staring straight ahead, looking totally innocent.”
That’s a mistake. The penny drops for Noah – she can see it drop. He takes a step away from her as if he needs some distance to see her clearly, and then he’s silhouetted against the lake and she can hardly see his face. “You haven’t taken your road test. You don’t have your licence!”
She gives him an
oh, well
shrug. “I was fine,” she says. “What difference does it make? My driving is the same, with that little piece of paper or without it.” She was fine once she got up to speed,
that part is true. Once she got up into the lake country there were almost no other cars on the road, and she felt as if she were on one of those rides at the Ex, where your little red car whizzes along a track and you rotate a big plastic steering wheel and you couldn’t go off the road if you tried.
She rips open the Velcro fastener of the sling. “Take her. If you pick her up gently, we can get her to bed without waking her up.”
But he just stands there. “Sylvie, you’re not insured without a licence. I just assumed you’d taken your test. If you hit somebody, if they end up paralyzed, they’ll
sue
you. For millions of dollars!”
“Good luck,” she says, “trying to get money from me.”
His whole body reacts to this. “Christ! What about your kid? What about keeping her safe?”
“
My
kid?” She sees his face go red. She’s shaken by the way they’re staring at each other, how far their eyes have stabbed into their real and baffled selves. “My kid,” she says again fiercely. “Take her. She’s yours. You can look after her from now on.”
He takes the baby, pries her out of the sling, and lifts her awkwardly to his chest. He’s at the cabin door, he reaches out his free hand to yank it open. Sylvie hears its spring complain and she turns and walks in the other direction. Everything’s moving around her, the leaves trembling in the wind and the water pixellated in the light and dark grey clouds racing towards the lake as if they’re in a stop-motion film. She lets out a howl of fury. “We were fine!” she yells.
On the overlook there’s a crude bench made from a split tree trunk. She walks out to it and sits down. From here she can’t hear a thing going on in the cabin. Nothing in front of her except water and sky – she’s out on the rim of the known world. She lowers herself onto the bench and lies with her knees up, watching the clouds jostle high above her. Feeling the wind lick at her front
where the baby was lying, snatching up the feel of her and carrying it coolly away.
W
e’ll have the day to ourselves
. That was code, of course. When they fall onto the bed in the loft, Liz knows she wants it, but her lust is … elusive. At first she won’t let him take off her panties – sometimes that’s best. Then, almost as soon as he’s inside her, she feels an orgasm gathering like storm clouds in the distance. When it overtakes her, it’s not about sex, it’s about Aiden, how hungry his mouth feels, how
taken over
he seems, and tears spring out of the corners of her eyes as she comes. Afterwards she lies sloped along Aiden’s warm side, the tears still tickling in her ears and his long, freckled arm holding her. Sex is a miracle, she thinks. “Sex is a fucking miracle,” she says, and he lets out a little snort of appreciation.
Although actually she’s becoming less and less a fan of daytime sex. Partly because of the skylight, through which the sun pours, gloating at the fishy whiteness of their skin and the way the flesh on the inside of her upper arms has started to crinkle. “Why the hell did we put in that skylight?” she asks.
His shoulder moves under her cheek. “It was a trend at the time.”
“Well, it was our one big mistake.” The Plexiglas has yellowed; it looks like a window in a trashy mobile home. “I think it was your bright idea, Aiden.”
“Mine? I’ve never had an idea in my life. Not about home renos.”
He has an arm up, studying his bent elbow. “You know, I was lying here thinking about my old friend the poet G. M. Hopkins. He used to keep a list of his sins in his journal. They were pretty funny. ‘I was strangely aroused by an etching of a crucified arm’ – that was one of them. Poor guy. Poor, tormented bastard. Picture
the priest on the other side listening to that. Say his confessor was gay. Wouldn’t it make a great screenplay?”
“It’s been done,” Liz says. “The straight version. I’ve seen it.” She pulls up the light duvet. He reaches over and pushes it down.
“You know, Aiden, you were right into decorating in those days. You
were
. You replaced the baseboards. You took off all those layers of wallpaper. I was slaving away with a little scraper and you walked in with that great big steamer. I couldn’t believe it.” She runs her hand along his ribs. “And it’s a good thing,” she says. “Other people have engagement rings. They put a notice in the paper and they rent a hall. They send out invitations. All I had to go by was this house.
He’s doing it
, I kept telling myself.
He must be in
. The day you installed the crown moulding in the dining room, I ran over to Charlotte’s and said to her, ‘It’s official.’ ”
“Crown moulding. I don’t even know what that is.” He pinches her upper arm softly. “I was just trying to score another blow job in the pantry.”
She tips her head up and gives him a long kiss. “You can’t pretend with me,” she says. “Look what happened to Charlotte and Roger. Once their house was gone, it was over.” It’s true. Charlotte and Roger had a big scheme: they were going to take their kids out of school and travel around Europe until their money ran out. They sold the house and put all their stuff in storage, and then the two of them were standing in the backyard at Charlotte’s mom’s, arguing about whether to buy their caravan in England or on the Continent, and suddenly they looked at each other and realized there was no reason to bother. All they had to do at that point was pick up their backpacks and walk away. Well, they had to sort the kids out as well. But this is Liz’s point about a house – it anchors you. Such a huge joint investment, you can’t do anything crazy and impulsive when you hit a bad patch.
Aiden reaches up and yanks at his pillow. “That’s one version of things,” he says. “But I often wonder what really happened.”
“To Charlotte and Roger?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, I’m not sure they were ever that good together. I think they dreamed up the trip to distract themselves from how bad it was. For one thing, Roger could never last longer than a minute. It was always like having sex with a teenage boy.”
“God, Liz, how could you possibly know that?”
“I’m just going by the way he was with me.”
“No, seriously.”
“Charlotte told me, of course.”
“She shouldn’t have told you. It’s not respectful.”
“Aiden, we’ve been best friends for twenty-five years.”
“All the same.” He pinches her arm again, this time in rebuke. “It’s a female thing. I hear it all the time. Women plunder their partner’s privacy, they don’t give a shit. You share confidences like … like they’re your currency. Men don’t operate that way.”
“No? So what do guys use as currency? With their friends.”
He thinks for a minute. “They share their drugs.”
“Ah.”
And then his head rolls in the other direction, and she props herself up on an elbow and watches sleep overtake him. That’s the thing about Aiden: you never know what he’s thinking. The main miracle of sex is what it does to him – the needy look it brings out on the face of a guy who never really needs anything from anybody. She nestles against him, still savouring the afterglow. Enjoy it. Because, odds are, tomorrow or the day after, he’s going to stage one of his big withdrawals. Poor guy, she always says to herself, he’s scared of me. I might suck out all his juices, like a lady spider.
She rolls to the side and the granite cotton of the sheet fills her
vision. The way she put her hand on Aiden’s arm in the backyard just now – was it sex she was wanting? Truthfully? Not exactly. She was in a strangely worked-up state, but it wasn’t lust. It was just the fitting thing to do, staging a bit of afternoon delight when the house is empty. Marriage is made up of fitting gestures. If you always do what you feel like doing, you’ll never make a relationship work. Of course, you can take that too far. Like Liz’s mother, who was, you might say, a perfect collection of fitting gestures. But suddenly Liz feels a rare pulse of sympathy for her mother. Somebody has to pick up the slack, given that men pretty much do what they want. And then she’s on a daybed in a house of wood and glass furnished entirely by the forest, with Krzysztof over her. The moment comes back to her whole. Not his perfection (though no doubt he was perfect) but the perfection of her desire, her desire to be made real. What are you supposed to do in such moments?