by Wayne Grady
When did everyone in that house start hating each other? Okay, not hating, when did everyone’s gossamer love kites turn into cement? Your father basically ignored your mother, as though she were an annoying buzz in his ear that he didn’t hear anymore. Your mother started in on him the minute she got home from work. What have you two been doing? I asked you to have dinner ready so I could go to my yoga class. No, never mind, it’s too late now. Just once I’d like to ask you to do something for me and you do it. Did you even hear me asking? Or did you hear me and just not give a shit? Daphne, tell your father I’m talking to him.
But your mother had the mayor. She was peripheral damage. You were damaged at the core.
Your neck ached. You looked around Paul’s kitchen as if for the last time. You won’t miss it. Why hadn’t you noticed it before? Granite countertops, some fancy farmhouse sink, pot lights. Your father wasn’t the only capitalist in your life. But you and Paul were a couple, that seemed to have made a difference. You weren’t just Daphne, you were half of Paul and Daphne. And Paul was the environmental lawyer, the impressive guy with the three-million-dollar house and the cottage on Salt Spring. You knew he came from money but you thought he was using his power and influence to cure the ills of society, like Batman or maybe Bill Gates. But the cedar decks, oak cupboards, Douglas-fir floors: whatever made you think he was saving trees? Take it in, Daphne, and say goodbye, because when Paul gets home you are going to have it out with him, and then you are going to go back to your own quite adequate apartment full of previously enjoyed furniture and be by yourself until Wendell gets there with his canister of coke.
You found your phone and texted your come-hither message to Wendell. “You got?” You figured he could also put your stuff in his van and drive you to your apartment. Coming off coke felt like a small animal was running up your spine and burrowing into your hair. Or maybe it was from looking at snow through the window, so white on the rhododendrons, so unlike the Vancouver you’d come to know. More like the White Falls you came to forget. Cars skidding all over the streets, hydro lines down, the elderly frozen to their walkers. In the meantime, what about some wine? You might as well help yourself to a last drink on Paul.
There were two bottles of sauvignon blanc in the fridge. You opened the door perhaps a little too eagerly and one of the bottles fell out onto the tile floor. You watched it fall, powerless to move, thinking it was all right, there was another one. When it hit the tiles and smashed into a million little pieces, the noise amazed you. How could a simple bottle make so much noise? It went off like a pipe bomb, which made you think of pipeline, which made you think of traitor Paul. The floor was a total mess. Glass everywhere. Christ! You had to step in it to get the second bottle. Shit! Your life had become a series of stupid questions. When did Mariela come? What day was this? What time did Paul get home? Where did Mariela keep the mops? Why hadn’t Wendell texted back? Don’t say Wendell is going to let you down, too. You couldn’t cope. You set the second bottle on the island, leaned your hands on each side of it, and stared at it as though it were a tiny pointy-headed Buddha who knew all the answers to the questions but chose not to share. Where’s the corkscrew? Love is the answer.
The puddle on the kitchen floor dripped over the step-down onto the living room carpet. You couldn’t cross it to get the mop because, duh, there was glass on the floor. Before Paul you were Professor Curtis’s shining star, the department’s golden-haired girl, he said so this afternoon. Since Paul, so much cocaine under the bridge of your nose. You couldn’t believe your father actually called Professor Curtis. Speak, Buddha! Where’s the corkscrew? Where’s Wendell?
You’d been holding your breath. You exhaled, found the corkscrew resting miraculously beside your hand on the counter, and uncorked the bottle. The puddle had quieted. The pieces of glass on the floor were shards of ice floating on a sparkling lake. A wine-bright sea. You waded through it to the broom closet, swept the glass into a sloppy pile and said fuck it, Mariela could do the rest, and took the bottle and a wine glass into the living room, placed bottle and glass on the coffee table, and sat on the white leather sofa.
You were never anyone’s shining star, that was just Professor Courteous being courteous. Did your dad tell him to say that, to get you to go back to classes? You would anyway, now that Paul was out of your life. You were an okay student, maybe above average, maybe significantly above average. You did your homework, got your assignments in on time. You showed up. You had a little library in your apartment and read your lost-and-found books from rummage and garage sales. A perfectly good first-edition Margaret Drabble with “To Great Aunt Hilda from Your Loving Niece Grace, Christmas 1995” on the inside cover. There’s always a flaw. Books not only were history, they had histories. Like people. You carried around books like Technology and Empire and Culture and Imperialism and called yourself a postcolonial deconstructionist, as though you knew what that meant. You allowed a few professors to take you to lunch in the Faculty Club, dropped an occasional rhyming couplet into the conversation, and kept a clever but civil tongue in your head. Your grades had little to do with your grasp of the intricacies of English literature. But intricacies, by their very nature, are hard to grasp. You deserved your high marks; you maybe didn’t earn them, but you deserved them.
Well, the second glass went down well, didn’t it? It always does. You’d noticed that in restaurants, the second glass always has a little more in it than the first, but it seems like less because you drink it faster. So you order a third, and that one really does have less. Maybe you should have cleaned up the kitchen before Pipeline Paul got home. There was something you were supposed to remember about tonight, but it eluded you now. Maybe he wanted you to open a bottle of red wine to let it breathe. You’d better try some first, make sure it wasn’t corked. Your father told you once what corked meant, but you forgot. It didn’t mean it had little pieces of cork floating in it. That would make some sense. The corkscrew hurt your hand, and when you looked at your palm your lifeline was running with blood. Life is just one big metaphor, isn’t it? There were also smears of blood on your wine glass. You looked down at the white leather sofa. Oh, shit. And the white rug. Oh, Jesus. How could you not have noticed?
You wrapped a tea towel around your hand, pulled it tight, one problem solved. You poured yourself a bracer of wine, swirled it around, tossed it back. Two problems solved. Not a great wine, but expensive, so Paul would like it. Hit me again, Joe. The lifeline was your past. You read that somewhere. You’d always thought your lifeline was your future. Maybe that was your love line. How could a physical feature that evolved millions of years before there was love be a love line? There’s one for Hallmark.
Suddenly the lights came on.
“Daphne?”
You looked up from the sofa. Paul was standing by the front door.
“Daphne, what’s going on?”
“A bottle broke. I’ll clean it up. Or Mariela will. When does she come?”
“There’s blood everywhere!”
You looked around.
“Not everywhere.” He could at least be accurate.
Paul threw his hands in the air and spun around. He looked like a marionette whose strings were caught in a ceiling fan.
“What the hell is going on?” he said. He’d stopped spinning and was staring at the kitchen floor. “I’ve got people in the car. You were supposed to have dinner ready. Jesus, Daphne!” He looked at you wildly. You held up your bandaged hand, as though you had a question. Uh, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m the one who’s hurt here? All he had to do was tell you where Mariela kept the fucking mop. What did he mean, you were supposed to have dinner ready? What was this, a soup kitchen? Paul was looking at you like an alien had just burst out of your chest. Not even Kyle at his most pathetic, not even after you stood up and said you were sorry but you couldn’t and walked out of Tim Hortons, not even when you left him with tears dripping
into his double-double, ever looked at you the way Paul was looking at you now. Wendell wouldn’t have looked at you like that. Wendell would have been holding your hand and saying it was nothing serious, just a scratch, everything was going to be all right, the end of the world was a little ways off yet, kiddo. He wouldn’t have been waving his arms around like a great ape, yelling for his supper.
But it was clear that Paul had no idea the depth of his betrayal. He knew about the trouble you were having with your father, that you blamed his generation for the sickness that had been visited upon the earth, that you had cut yourself off from him because you could no longer tolerate the hypocrisy. And here Paul had been, all the time, the Fisherman’s Friend, aiding and abetting those very forces that…Oh, why go on, you couldn’t even articulate the dimensions of his deceit. That you didn’t ask was no excuse for his not telling you.
So you simply stood up to say you were sorry. Just as you did in Tim Hortons. You were sorry but you couldn’t. It was over. You were leaving. Except in Timmy’s you hadn’t been wearing heels and there wasn’t a shag rug under your feet. You went down. First to your knees and then the rest of the way. Oh god, this was so fucking typical. Flat on your face. Pain shot through your hip. Your skirt rode up. You tried to keep your bleeding hand above your head. Paul’s clients, standing in the doorway, looking down at you. No one moved. No one lifted a finger. Where was your phone? Where was your purse? You were going now, it was all too much, too, too much. You shouldn’t have thought of your father, it always did this to you. One of Paul’s clients made a move in your direction, one of them at least had a sympathetic bone in his body, but Paul put a hand on his arm. Let her be, he said. She’s all right. We’ll go to a restaurant. He was apologizing for you. She’s been under a lot of stress lately, yes, she knew you were coming for dinner, she forgets things. You guys wait in the car, I’ll help her into bed.
“Help me into bed, my ass!” you yelled from the floor. “You lay a finger on me and I’ll scratch your fucking eyes out!”
“Oh, nice talk. You fellas go back to the car, I’ll take care of this.”
When they were gone, Paul came at you. You curled up on the floor, not knowing what to protect. Your head? Your ribcage? But all he did was kneel on the floor beside you and start yelling.
“Get up!” he shouted.
“How could you work for those bastards!”
“Get the fuck up off the floor!”
“I am getting the fuck up!” This was what he called taking care of you? You rolled over onto your back, your knees bent, the submissive posture, the missionary position, then tried to sit up. He pulled on your arm.
“Don’t touch me!” you screamed. You rolled away from him. He followed on his knees, clutching at you. This was ludicrous. This was demeaning. This was how it really ended, with a bang and a whimper. He stopped trying to get you to stand. He was a lawyer, a purveyor of perverted justice. No one would believe this. Your mother would believe it. She’d nod if she’d been watching this. Yup, she’d have said, this is what happens. But no one else. “Don’t you ever touch me again!”
Your hip hurt. Good thing you had some OxyContin in your purse. If you could only find your purse. The dishtowel had come off, there was quite a gash. Oh god, this wasn’t going away, was it? This was real. Why did that bottle have to fall out of the fridge? Who designed that fucking fridge door?
Paul seemed to have come to the same conclusion. Not about the fridge door, about the finality of what was taking place. This was beneath even his contempt. He wasn’t the one acting badly. He stood up and looked down at you as you staggered to your feet. Put his hands in his pockets. You wobbled a bit but stayed upright, staring at him defiantly. Your breathing sucked. Your hair was a mess. Your hip hurt, but you’d live. You straightened your skirt. You held your hand above your head. Blood ran down your forearm. Paul looked at you with such disgust that you turned away. His look was too close to what you felt. A year, more than a year, and you hadn’t a clue what kind of shit he was.
“How could you work for those bastards, Paul?”
“Clean this shit up,” he hissed, moving towards the door.
You smirked at him. You leaned over, tottering a bit, picked your wine glass up from the coffee table, and raised it towards him in a mock toast. You considered saving some to wash down the oxys, but there was more where that came from. A whole rack full. You would drink that before leaving. He walked out, slamming the door. Fuck him. Where was Wendell? Why hadn’t he called? Where was your purse? Where was your goddamned phone?
Harry
NOVEMBER 24, 2009
People go missing all the time. Harry knows that. He even understands how it happens. A guy goes to work one morning, never returns. Sometimes he vanishes without a trace. Maybe something goes wrong, he panics and runs. Or maybe he’s been planning it for years. A credit card his wife doesn’t know about, a pied-à-terre in Montreal. There are books about it. He remembers a Simenon novel in which a middle-aged businessman is being driven to his office one morning when he looks out the car window and sees a stretch of blue sky and a row of trees that remind him of his childhood and he is suddenly overwhelmed by an urge to find that place again, to return to the beginning of all his dreams and ambitions. To go back to before they were unrealized. And so he just leaves. Takes cash out of his bank account, gets on a train, doesn’t say goodbye to his wife and daughter, and for all intents and purposes disappears. Harry remembers thinking it wouldn’t be that easy anymore, a person can’t just vanish, sooner or later he’d have to use a credit card or a cell phone. He remembers thinking that with a certain amount of regret.
Or a woman flies off to a conference in, say, South Africa, and her husband neither sees nor hears from her again. She has finally come to her senses. She’s tired of her life, has met someone at a previous conference who complimented her on her presentation, liked the way she handled questions from the floor, and she suddenly saw herself in a new light, as a different person. She stopped to look at herself in the full-length mirror in her hotel room, took more care with what she wore down to dinner. The next thing she knew she was checking to see if he was in the lobby, maybe in the bar, and he asked her if she’d be at the next conference, the one in South Africa. Probably, would he? Hmm, he wasn’t planning on it, but if she was going. They exchanged email addresses—office, not home. Nothing as definite as an assignation, but still, something of a commitment. She felt she’d have to let him know if she decided not to go. But of course she went. And after that conference, she doesn’t come back. What’s not to understand?
It doesn’t have to be another man. She can decide she’d rather have no one in her life. Being with a man has stunted her growth, her development as a woman, kept her from realizing her true potential. He smothers her, silences her, he loves her but all he really thinks about is himself. He says things like, Call me when you get in, and is upset when she doesn’t, as though not calling him on demand is her failure, her betrayal, a system breakdown. She’s an adult, she doesn’t have to account for her movements. Is that what Daphne is doing? Have they both decided they don’t have to check in with him anymore? File their itineraries with him, as though he’s a kind of Homeland Security? Ha, they should talk to Kronkman.
“It’s only been a few days,” Bernie says. “She’ll call.”
He and Bernie are walking along Harbord Avenue to their Tuesday-afternoon basketball game at the Jewish Y on Spadina. Harry’s sorry he confided in Bernie over lunch. It hasn’t been a few days, it’s been nearly a week. What day is it in South Africa? Time zones are hell on relationships. It’s the same with Daphne. No time is good for both of them. He’s now part of the world she has left behind. He’s a book she has set down, intending to read later but never picks up again.
The November sunlight is sharp and crisp, and the sky is a deep inky blue. Christmas carols have been playing in the shops on Bloor
Street all month. He tells clients it’s the season for warm reds. Italian ripassos, French burgundies, and why not one of the better South African pinotages? Maybe Elinor will bring him a bottle, if she comes back.
How does it happen? Does a person’s life suddenly seem like the first third of a novel with a complicated plot? She doesn’t know how impenetrable it is until she meets someone who isn’t part of it? A secondary character, introduced late, who takes over the story and simplifies it. Who notices her scent, not the bath oil he gave her last Christmas or the hair conditioner she’s been using for five years, but the animal smell of her, the pheromones at the base of her neck, at her wrists. Almond and vanilla, and something else, something mysteriously unidentifiable, a scent humans don’t even have a name for. That involuntary flaring of the nostrils. That sudden reckless moment that alters a life.
If it isn’t another man, maybe it’s South Africa itself. She’s far more political than he is. As a journalist he had to be impartial, or at least that was how he defended his lack of moral clarity on many issues. Elinor has no such qualms. In Cuba, she gave the impression that if she’d been living there during the revolution, she’d have been up on the barricades with Fidel and Che, sleeves rolled up, fist clenched in the air, the fierce gleam in her eye as she gazed out over the Bay of Pigs. South Africa is still recovering from apartheid, there’s still a lot of truth and reconciling to be done there. Elinor would be good at that.
“I’ve got to go home right after basketball,” Bernie says. “No going for beer.”
“What is it this time?” Harry says. “Your second cousin and his family coming for dinner? Couldn’t you have told them it’s Tuesday?”
Bernie shrugs. “Doesn’t Elinor ever want you home?” he asks.
Harry snorts. Hasn’t he been listening? No, Elinor never wants him home, not even when he is home. Worse than that, she doesn’t want to be home, either. He can play as much basketball as he likes. He can play until he drops dead. Which reminds him, shouldn’t his doctor have contacted him about the gastroscopy by now?
