Vanishing and Other Stories (12 page)

April and I spent that first afternoon at Vesuvius Beach. It was May, not warm enough to swim, but we did anyway. She brought a six-pack of frothy, malty beer I'd never heard of, and we plotted to seduce the young sons of tourists once July came. April manages to have a sex life, though we don't discuss it much. And she doesn't know, for example, that Peter and I only make love in the middle of the night, when the room is dark. I wake to his fingers sliding down my arms, then the sex is hard. We grip each other like strangers, hot breath on our faces. Then we fall asleep, my cheek pressed to his wet, bony chest. By morning he's gone, reading the paper or already in the kitchen with April, drinking a cappuccino.

After our trip to Vesuvius Beach, I came home to Peter, who was still on the deck. I rushed up the steps. “We're having dinner at April's.”

“So you like it here.” Peter had moved on from the newspaper and the Bible was open on his lap.

“The Bible?”

“Research.” He uses either too many or two few words. There is no in-between.

“April's that woman I went swimming with. She suggested dinner at her place, since we haven't unpacked yet.” I tried to hide that I felt giddy, being the first to make a new acquaintance.

“April? She sounded Québécoise. I wouldn't be surprised if she changed her name from the French.”

“She expects us by six. We don't have to knock.”

 

 

APRIL COULD HANDLE PETER
, his initial silences and then, later in the evening, his lectures, his educated anecdotes. She fed us pasta with seared scallops in a dill sauce (dill from the garden, of course) and poured wine into preposterously huge and heavy glasses that she had hand-painted. She told us never to buy blackberries, since she had more than she could eat in a year. Though we didn't know the names she mentioned, she fed us island gossip (apparently, everybody fucks everybody else) and Peter, like any academic, was enraptured by her tales of scandal. April pointed to the clumsy realism on her walls and explained that, though her income came from selling bread at Jana's Bakery and the Saturday market, her real love was painting.

“Painting anything. Walls, houses, canvas, wood. I'm just colourful.” She laughed too loudly, and shook her long, grey-streaked hair. Her eyes folded shut in a blissful, childish way, wrinkling her temples.

“I can tell,” said Peter, not altogether kindly.

April wore a loose olive tank top that showed her body of contradictions: soft but tanned shoulders, hard, knotted knuckles, and red fingertips. At fifty-three, she is thirteen years older than me but seems younger, bustling. Peter was right: she came from a small town in Quebec, but left at sixteen.

“Mais je peux encore faire une tourtière fantastique—la recette de ma mère.”
She had a harsh accent that clashed with Peter's Parisian French, one of three languages he knows inside out.

She buzzed about exhibiting her work at a hole-in-the-wall gallery in Fulford, how ferry tourists loved her Island Houses. I told her about Toronto: the agents, grants, shows, reviews. Peter complimented the wine.

“So you're a linguist,” April said as we ate tiny dark chocolates from a glass bowl. “If it's not too boring, doctor, tell me about your work.”

“It is too boring,” he answered, sternly but in good humour, though he rarely spares me from discussion of his latest class, chapter, lecture, or the thoughts that cram themselves into his days. He was, I assume, bored by her.

“Do you sell these?” he asked, and held up his wineglass. “We would love to have a set.”

 

 

WHEN WE RETURNED
(overfull) to our small house of unfamiliar smells and furniture, Peter didn't go to the narrow room that would serve as his office. We went to the bedroom and I flicked on the dim bedside lamp.

“I had fun,” I said, though I meant it as a question. I wondered if he had enjoyed himself.

“Yes,” Peter answered, and sat on the other side of the double bed, a bed much smaller than our own queen-sized. “She has character, I suppose.”

I kicked off my sandals and began to unbutton my shirt. “And she's a marvellous cook. Sometimes I wish I could cook—though not often.” I was chattering. For the first time in years, in this strange room, his eyes on me felt new. In Toronto, we rarely went
to bed at the same hour. Before sleep, I was used to seeing the light of his study shine through the crack in the door.

“You're burnt.” Peter touched his finger to my shoulder and I felt a pulse of pain.

“We were at the beach all day.” I went to the suitcases we'd left open in the living room and fished for moisturizing cream, tossing clothes and books on the floor. I checked my reflection in the bathroom mirror: my neck and shoulders were splotched red, the skin already puckered white in places.

When I returned to the room, Peter sat me on the bed and slipped the bra strap from my shoulder. “This might sting.” He pressed the cool cream onto my skin, gliding his hands along the angles of my back. “I looked over some of my notes today. I outlined the second chapter.”

We have discussed that his new book will be a return to his doctoral thesis, but employing more subtle thought, more mature theory. Perhaps, he will argue, naming is not simply a process of organizing the world, of owning the world, or of knowing the world—but of sundering oneself from it. Perhaps, I had said, though I always felt the opposite.

His face was so close I could smell April's wine on his breath. I touched his knee. “Maybe this was a good idea, coming here,” I said, and my skin peeled into his hands.

 

 

I SCOOP UP THE WHITE CAT
and climb back into April's car.

“You're stealing a cat?” April, in her too-dramatic way, sounds shocked, horrified.

“Let's see how the hussy feels when she's the victim.” My words are slightly slurred and I'm using April's vocabulary. The cat jumps from seat to seat in the car, smelling the torn upholstery, Kleenex box, crumpled clothes. He is young enough to be totally trusting, the same as I imagine you to be. I rub behind his ears, and his eyes seal shut in a euphoric feline smile. “A husband for a cat. It's a good deal.”

April doesn't bother to turn around. She throws the car into reverse and speeds backwards down the long narrow driveway. Her wine has worn off and the adventure is over. We drive back in silence, her car being too old for even a functioning tape deck. When we reach our gravel street, she drops me at the mailboxes.

“So I took a cat. Do you really think that's wrong?”

“Do you love him?”

“The cat?”

“The husband.”

I take April's hand. She has told me of her relationships, her brief marriage, and often asks these types of questions, fascinated by the idea of commitment, of prolonged sharing. She points out words that Peter and I pronounce in the same odd way, the sayings we employ, our constant use of “we” even when we are most distant from each other.

“Evidently,” I say. I hold April's hand, but I don't know how to explain my marriage to her: lying in bed and hearing the scratch of his pen in the next room, or the daytime routine of coffee, work, my long walks. “I'll show you my books, the sketches I've done of him.”

“Yes. Please.” April looks out at the purpled sky, the grey horizon. She squeezes my hand and I squeeze back. My new cat
digs his claws into my T-shirt as I climb out of the car and push the door shut with my hip.

I walk into the house with the cat nestled in one arm, and Peter sits in the living room, a mug of tea made with April's dried mint leaves beside him. A book open on his lap. I stand in the doorway and imagine how he must see me after so many years: my leggings emphasize my bony hips, my hair hangs limp. You must think this is the time of confrontation, when the wife's jealousy bursts out in unfinished sentences and exclamation marks. The cat licks underneath my chin.

“Sorry I'm late. I was with April. We walked down Price Road, looking for sand dollars.” A lie so perfect and poetic I want to wrap it in a tiny blue ribbon. If the study of words has taught Peter—and therefore me—anything, it's the ease of lying. Each word is a sham, a small, meaningless collection of sound that pretends to be what it is not: cat, house, husband. All fops at a costume ball. And everyone accepts this banter as if words, dressed in their masks and cloaks of consonants, were not pretending. We are all complicit, Peter once told me: just by saying good morning to a neighbour, one participates in the great lie. And then, of course, there's the pun on “lying.” But maybe you know this.

“Evidently,” he says.

“What?” I hold the cat tight to my chest.

“You were with April. You're drunk.”

I raise my hand to salute him, his statement suddenly making it true. It occurs to me that perhaps you were at this rented house while I was at yours. But everything is in its right order: the quilt Peter's mother made as a wedding gift, folded on the couch; the empty fireplace, its blackened grate; Peter, in a corduroy chair, a
book on his lap, his grey hair combed. And me, in the doorway, in my paint-stained men's shirt. “I'm going to bed.”

“Good night.”

“Thank you.”

I bring the white fluff of a cat to the bedroom with me and place him on Peter's pillow. He circles and smells the bed, then settles next to me, lets me rest my hand on his warm rising-falling stomach.

I drift in and out of sleep and hear Peter brush his teeth. I've spent too long imagining your form drifting through our rooms, and I picture you at our bathroom sink. When Peter comes to bed, I'm hardly sure if it's his weight beside me or yours.

He slides under the covers and I say into the dark, “I stole her cat.” As if he knew he was called, the cat crawls over me, his paws sinking into my stomach. Peter doesn't reply, and the cat licks my temple. Then my husband does something: he wraps one arm around my shoulders and pulls me to him, his hand on the back of my head. The cat scrambles and squirms between us.

I speak into Peter, my lips against his collarbone. “Can't you just tell me her name? Can't you just say what she looks like?” Over Peter's shoulder, through our bedroom window, I see the silhouette of the garden we let go to seed, and the huge shared yard where Marilyn grazes. Beyond that, April's lights are on, and I see her outline move outside. She is efficient and domestic even at this hour—picking blackberries. She has changed into the lace dress I first saw her in, a yellowing strap fallen off one shoulder. The white material has a faint green glow in her house lights.

She drops berries into a metal bucket and from where I lie I hear the soft
plink
of each one hitting the bottom. No, of course
not. I'm too far away. I imagine the sound. And I imagine April will make a pie, leave it steaming on her windowsill. I imagine, too, in that instant, that she'll feed it to Peter, who still presses the back of my head with his palm, whose smell is familiar, whose heart is against my chest. I understand. I see.