Vanishing and Other Stories (31 page)

 

 

BUT STILL
, there are things she would miss. Her husband across the table from her, tired and good-looking, or in the yard, his shirt off as he rakes the leaves from the Garry oak. And the house: the sunny entranceway and the rhododendrons in the garden. Her son's room: yellow paint on the wall, the big window, toys on the floor, the shelf of brightly coloured books. Her son.

But maybe, if she moved into the boy's apartment, the son could come too. He would love it. No one would tell him to tidy his room. No one would tell him to brush his teeth. The wife and the boy would let him order pizza. They would let him drink pop. They would let him go to sleep when he was tired and wake when he was rested. Because how could they—the wife and the boy—how could they justify rules? What right would they have to tell someone what to do? Not only would they let the son watch television all night, but he would learn how a television worked. The boy would sit with him on the floor—that dingy carpet—and show him the insides of the small black-and-white set. The two of them would spend an afternoon taking the television apart and putting it back together, like a puzzle. Then they would move the rabbit ears around so the son could watch the screen disintegrate and rebuild itself. Nothing would be forbidden, nothing hidden. All the complexities: red wire, green.

 

 

MAYBE THE WIFE
continues to meet the boy in her office every Tuesday and continues to sleep beside her husband every night. In
between she marks lab exams, teaches classes. Maybe this becomes, like everything else, routine.

 

 

MAYBE THE HUSBAND
is calm about it, cool.

“And you can go to your Indo-Pacific wrasse.” He drinks the last of his wine. “He seems like a nice enough kid.”

The wife watches light reflect off her glass. “Is that what you really want?”

“I need a break. I need to think this through.” When he stands, his chair scrapes along the tile floor. “And Ben will stay here with me.”

The wife feels stiff, feels caught. She can hardly breathe.

The husband dumps the rest of her wine in the sink. Then he rinses their glasses, as he does every night, so the red won't stain the bottom.

 

 

MAYBE SHE BUZZES
the boy's apartment. “It's me.”

“I'll come down.”

The wife puts her forehead to the window as he takes the stairs two at a time. When he opens the door, she says, “He wants time to himself.” The boy lets her press into him, dig her nails into his back. “Time.” She feels his T-shirt against her cheek. “It could mean anything.”

“Maybe he'll think it over and he'll be okay with it.”

“He'll never be okay with it.”

“Are you sure?” The boy holds her, one palm on the back of her head. “For one thing, you don't know what he's been doing.”

“He hasn't been doing anything.” The wife lifts her face. “I would know.”

“I'm sure he doesn't mean it. I'm sure, if you went home, he wouldn't turn you away. Would he?”

“Can we go upstairs?”

“Did you tell him you were coming here?”

“Jamie, please?”

“We can't go up there right now.” The boy wipes away hair that sticks to the wife's wet face. “Sara's over.”

The ex-girlfriend. The ex-girlfriend who doesn't eat meat, or drink, or do drugs. That's how they met, at a “dry” party, where her band was playing. “She's sweet,” the boy said when the wife noticed the picture on his wall. Then he shrugged.

“She just dropped by, Wendy. It's nothing.”

“Okay.” The wife nods, because there isn't much else to say. “Okay.”

 

 

WHETHER SHE GETS AWAY WITH IT
, or not. Whether she stays with him, or not. Maybe it doesn't matter. Or at least, sometimes it doesn't matter. What matters is this: for years the wife has studied coho salmon—their intricate bone structure, their fussy habits—and finally she understands them. And not just their sneaking around, or their risk-all sex. All of it: gestation, survival, then that mad drive upriver, toward desire and toward—away from—they don't know what. Now she gets it. But only briefly, and only
sometimes, like when she suddenly thinks of the boy's quick smile, his naked hip. Maybe she'll be colouring in a book with her son, or standing in front of her grad class, and she thinks: I get it. I understand coho salmon. She wants to tell this to her students, but how can she? To those young, focused faces? They would think she was crazy, or drunk. So she lifts her hands, drops them. I get it, she wants to say: We're alive. This is called being alive.

 

 

MAYBE THE BOY DOESN
'
T ARRIVE
at the wife's office the following Tuesday, as he always does. Maybe, instead, the wife finds a photograph slipped under her door: an eagle holding a fish in its talons. Sun glinting off the scales. The bird is half in, half out of the frame. A blur of feathers, flight.

 

 

MAYBE THERE
'
S A MOMENT
when no one says a word. No one moves. The boy in the leather chair, the wife with her hands tucked under her knees. After she has turned her head but before the husband speaks, before the boy stands. Light through the drapes, unvacuumed carpet, stacks of lab books. A half-empty coffee cup that leaves a ring on the desk. And a pause, one second when they are still. The wife, the husband, the boy. There's more than one way it could go.

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL GIRL
in my school was named Mary Louise. Though the name has a Roman Catholic ring to it, I don't think she was a believer. She did, however, bring out a religious kind of devotion in most of us who went to high school with her. We loved and hated and feared her with the same fervency that we might a goddess. I was at the age when I noticed feminine beauty more than masculine, because I was always comparing myself with other girls. So I can still remember that Mary Louise had long legs, ankles that were perhaps too thick, and dark eyes. She was tall and had such a confident gait that she reminded me of a horse—maybe Pegasus, or one of the lucky horses that drew Apollo's chariot. She looked as if she could have been that close to the sun.

In fact, the sun always seemed to be touching her. Her skin had a permanent tan, and even in winter the ends of her hair were bleached. This might have been because she spent each summer
outside, swimming and water-skiing at her family's cabin in Ontario. I'm not sure how I knew this detail, since I was a grade beneath her and was never her friend. But somehow I'd heard about the cabin, imagined that Mary Louise spent two months in her bathing suit, and was jealous of the way she must have looked. I could picture her driving a motorboat and canoeing. I imagined that at night she and her family played board games, or took out their binoculars and looked at the clear night sky.

She might have had a summer boyfriend, some seasonal romance, while she was at the cottage. But when she came back in the fall, she returned to the only boy in the school whose beauty matched her own. Jordan Burke was so pretty that his face was almost boring. He had the cheekbones of a girl, blue eyes, and curly blond hair that frothed around his ears. I never spoke to him, but he appeared to be angelic and shy. They looked perfect together. And they were perfect: she was the star of the girls' basketball team, and it was rumoured that he was an excellent student. Every September, they walked through the halls holding hands, reunited. They had none of the awkwardness that the rest of us exhibited—sweat stains, acne, sexual fear. They seemed comfortable and happy in their bodies, like Adam and Eve before they understood they were naked. The sight of Jordan and Mary Louise was like the smell of new binders, or the sound of a book's spine being cracked. It announced the new season, and seemed familiar, unchanging, part of the natural order.