Whirl Away

by Russell Wangersky

  Funny, he thought, how sounds can actually seem accusing.

  It was Anna in the shower, washing the angry right down into her skin. The water so hot that she’d come out branded in red blotches across her back, marked with flags combining her penitent frustration with slowly developing fury.

  Once, he would have listened for that shower, for those sentinel calling pipes, like a bloodhound scenting lost children, his face high towards the ceiling, his head turning back and forth to triangulate the sound, just so he could rush up the stairs to join her, pulling his sweatshirt over his head as he took the stairs two at a time. Opening the bathroom door because knocking was unnecessary, just like invitations were. She would be expecting him anyway, obeying a kind of naked hunger that neither of them was remotely embarrassed about. Dancing together through the curtain of drops. Wet rhythm, tango, rumba. Tile-rattling, grout-gripping pas de deux.

  Anna was always eager in a way that pulled him right out of himself. With Anna, he thought, you might start out self-conscious and self-aware, but the concept of being separate and self-contained melted away quickly.

  They’d met in university and had somehow managed to hang on through that curious gap when graduates suddenly change from moving in one similar direction to casting out along their own individual routes. Keith couldn’t help but think that staying together was mostly her doing, that she had managed against serious odds to drag him through with her, an alchemy made easy by the lure of all that raw desire.

  Anna, with her intense face caught in a tight frame of short blond hair. A woman who’d always had a penchant for hiding herself inside clothes large enough to be someone else’s, a woman you found like a small and important discovery.

  She had planned on postgraduate work in English, but when the fellowship didn’t come through, she’d wound up as a newspaper reporter, doomed to the entertainment beat and the crushing duty of interviewing up-and-comers who were always on their way to somewhere else while Anna stayed solidly, pointedly, in the same place.

  Keith, at one time, carried a brief fantasy of heading somewhere, almost anywhere, else. He’d toyed with the idea of the police or the military, and ended up turning sideways into a surprisingly simple job inspecting elevators and pressurized tanks for the provincial government. The inspections were so routine he couldn’t remember the last time one of the pieces of equipment had actually failed: a page or two of copied visual inspection reports, with boxes to check off and the occasional single line for a written comment. There was the all-important space at the bottom to mark and initial, but only after the fee was paid.

  Keith could work all day and then be completely unable to remember the location of the last building he’d been in, the work stretching out behind him in a seemingly endless collection of cables, grease, pulleys and confined spaces. When someone lost something down the crack between the elevator car and the shaft, they never, ever went looking for it. It was like people were expecting something unknown in the dark—monsters under the bed. So Keith found change and keys and sometimes toys at the bottom of any number of elevator shafts, abandoned because asking for help was too much trouble.

  For a while, Keith’s and Anna’s jobs—because they were jobs, not anything like careers—were enough, as long as there was also home and the sheer probability of each other’s arms. When he thought about it, Keith guessed that Anna was probably less comfortable with what they had settled for than he was, less satisfied with the way things had worked out, and it reared its head in strange ways. Every month, new solutions had to be found for the problems that cropped up between them, problems that he wasn’t even aware existed until she mentioned them.

  Problems with work he could handle. Hers were editors who were bastards or who demanded more work than they were willing to pay for, days that were so long she ended up bringing home one of the portable computers from the office so they could at least be in the same house while she pounded out the last few details of a story before she could file it to the news desk. Harder for Keith to comprehend were the problems between them. It was always a revelation to him when it turned out they had issues that he hadn’t even started to consider, that he hadn’t even known were there. He knew it was probably a weakness of his—knew it because she told him it was—and thought he must be skating without ever thinking about testing or measuring the emotional ice beneath them, that he didn’t spend enough time considering where they were going. Anna saw much better where the rough edges came together, he thought.

  When they had time, they’d talk about it, and Anna would outline the problems and detail the possible solutions, and he’d agree desperately every time, worried that the best of his intentions did nothing but set them both up for more crushing falls.

  “You just don’t get it, do you?” she’d say, exasperated, words like hands thrown up in the air. She’d explain and he’d listen, but the sentences seemed to come out in a foreign language he didn’t understand.

  Afterwards, both of them would tread carefully, circling each other, moving slowly like they were driving on an unfamiliar road at night and trying not to pile into the unanticipated, last-moment potholes.

  But they had muddled along until they married, anyway. Then they bought a house that backed onto a uniform hill capped with a line of Gower Street rowhouses, all the houses the same height, all knit together at their tops, a unison of roofs. Keith supposed that any anchor could be a good mooring. Then again, he didn’t really know much about boats.

  The kitchen was at the back of the house, and while washing dishes, Keith would watch the sky darken over the row of homes opposite, knowing even when there was nothing left except the glow of their windows that, barring complete catastrophe, they would always be there. The rooflines weren’t straight, but they sagged in the same places every single morning and evening, and he found a particular comfort in that.

  Once, they argued about paint colours for the front hall and the living room, Anna definite and Keith confused, because he thought he hadn’t said anything. In an argument-that-wasn’t-really-an-argument (because, he thought, neither of them was disagreeing, really) he found himself reaching out to touch the existing paint, as if trying to feel with his fingertips just why it was that the existing colour couldn’t suit, as if there were some mystery wrapped up in there that physical contact would surely let him discover. Anna shouted that if it was the painting he was so damned worried about, she’d do it all.

  As weeks went by, and then months, he found himself more and more alone in the kitchen at the back of the house and not really minding, and he tried to tell himself that Anna’s work was getting harder, more time-consuming, and that she really didn’t like cooking anyway. He did like cooking, more and more, testing and trying, smelling and tasting.

  While he worked over the stove, he tried to rationalize that it really was all right if they each moved around in their different spheres, barely touching, keeping different hours so that their clocks only overlapped for a rushed hour or two in the evenings. He told himself it was all right even if, when he ran upstairs to the shower, he somehow didn’t feel as welcome with her, or sometimes didn’t welcome the opportunity. Keith forced himself not to think about that even on those days when the shower ran especially long, when he knew it was her way of beckoning, carefully unspoken and noncommittal, so that no one would have to lose face. So that no one would have to acknowledge needs unmet or unrecognized, unintentionally edged with a smudge of shame.

  He was aware of it anyway from the delicate moue of disappointment she’d have in one corner of her mouth when she came downstairs. It was an expression she would not really know she was making and one he would flatly refuse to recognize. He’d know at the same time that he could gleefully and maliciously play dumb, and that she’d feel wounded without being able to clearly find anyone to blame for the hurt.

  Alone, before she came downstairs, he would find a small and visceral release in cutting through the thin tubes of green onions, the
sharp tang of their smell rising around his carefully busy hands like mist from damp, bare soil. He didn’t know whether it was the onions or the knife or the distance in his expression that kept her away when she finally came downstairs, arms still ruddy from the hot water, turning her face away and searching the fridge for the white wine before heading back up the stairs. But something clearly did keep her away, and he didn’t even really notice for long, especially when there were several things cooking at once, the burners lit up glowing red and the steam rising.

  He had taught himself to cook out of a mixture of curiosity and necessity—a cup of each, he thought, then stir gently with the whites of two eggs. Necessity, because they had to eat, and it had become clear that no one else was really interested in cooking. Curiosity, because cooking seemed both earthy and magical; something would develop that was so clearly not a product of mere ingredients and temperature and careful attention to the military order of recipes. Later, there would be the addition of a touch of frustrated sensuality, hinted at in fractional scents and flavours, added in infinitesimal amounts like saffron or some other impossibly expensive spice.

  Keith started with the simple recipes he remembered from growing up: onion-rich tomato sauces, heavy with garlic and flaked oregano, then thick lasagna and a rich beef stew simmered in brown gravy all day long, heavy chunks of potato and hints of red wine and flat, strong bay leaves. The kinds of things he could remember his mother making without ever looking at a cookbook, as if recipes were written under her skin like a web of small, broken, insistent capillaries.

  Then he moved on to longer, more complicated experiments. Soon he had a small block of slab bacon, double smoked, well travelled and wrapped tight in several layers of plastic, buried in the freezer so that he could shave off just a few thin slices to hide in the very beginning of sauces. Mushrooms: white button first, then porcini, then the complication of oyster mushrooms, balancing both taste and texture.

  Different specialty vinegars, lined up in the back of the cupboard like a spectrum of similar but slightly distinguishable moods. He moved dinner back a half-hour or so to have more time to prepare, but Anna didn’t seem to mind. She simply swallowed the whole half-hour up with work, and never reached a point where she couldn’t stand the hunger.

  In the process of cooking, he found that even the simple things became more complicated, more layered, more involved. He loved the way the onions changed, the heat under the pan working on sugars you couldn’t even taste in the raw, sharp bulbs, a caramelized brown that appeared only over heat. First it was all the onion cousins: yellow, Spanish, vidalia, pearl. Stuck-up shallots. Then it was the close-knit and exotic rice family: arborio, jasmine, basmati.

  It was like meeting the relatives one at a time over days, each one slightly more peculiar than the one you’d met just before: one minute, meeting a long-grained mother-in-law with perfectly placed hair and a rigid, accepting smile; the next moment, being introduced to a wizened, blossoming uncle who had no children but who collected model trains, and who ran those trains regularly and hard and alone on their steel rails all night until their small working engines made the air smell like steel wool pressed tight up under your nose.

  Keith even liked to roll the different food names around in his mouth, as if the words themselves were flavours or curious, half-recognized scents, five-spice and fennel and licorice, oily anise. He introduced himself to the curious cult and range and temper of the hot peppers. Anna didn’t really seem to care; he could chatter away about the different ways he’d looked at a cooking problem and she took it in as if he were talking about different weights of elevator cable.

  At parties, though, he found he could talk about food with anyone, and people would either understand or just bask in the idea of it. By then Keith had a row of expensive knives, raw steel blades with their own patina, carefully oiled, always washed by hand because the dishwasher would make them sprout rust on the very first trip; sharp knives that could leave a cut on your finger as fine as a thread, a cut the knives seemed to relish making, a cut that only slowly learned to ooze blood.

  Then the night came when he was making a wine sauce with black peppercorns, watching the wine darkening and purpling in the silver of the pan, and wondering if buying a gas range would be a ridiculous suggestion to make with money still so tight. The peppercorns looked invincible and still dry in their black and wrinkled armour, woody and impervious, as if they were intent on giving up nothing about themselves despite the torture; and the alcohol from the wine boiled off into the air in a wave that made Keith shiver when it caught in his nose and stopped his breath.

  Anna was leaning in the doorway with her wineglass again, rejoining the campaign, looking at him. And Keith wondered if she had realized, at that very moment, how formal they had become with each other, the way they had learned to keep artificial spaces around themselves, moving to the sides of the hall when they passed each other, as if they were almost strangers. He’d been noticing it for weeks, like a hint of varnish in the air, even though nothing had been painted.

  Being the first to notice it felt somehow wrong, because it occurred to Keith all at once that it should have been her recognizing the circles they’d built around each other. It had always been her job to see the shadows long before he did; it was as if she had fallen down on the job. Keith couldn’t decide if he’d fallen in the shower and struck his head or if she’d fallen from the watchtower where she was supposed to be safely overlooking their lives.

  As he watched, Anna drank, the glass nearly empty now, her eyes measuring as she looked back at him.

  The wine sauce was boiling unheeded, spattering over the edge of the pot, tiny droplets landing on the hot white enamel and annealing themselves into flat black specks instantaneously, their presence not even visible in the air until they were fixed in place on the stove, the circular pattern forming around the pot becoming more complete with each passing moment.

  On the back burner, a big iron pot was heating languidly, a pool of olive oil splitting apart into droplets on top of the water and then rejoining in a green and round-edged blob. Whenever he picked up the lid of the pot, he could smell the feral rich breath of trees in the oil. Next to that pot there was broccoli, still green and cold in the steamer, slivered almonds to go over the top like unexpected snow.

  She reached her hand out towards him then, her palm down and fingers spread, the rest of her arm so straight it looked as if her elbow were on the verge of bending backwards too. All in one—invitation, supplication, desperation.

  Keith realized he was holding a wooden spoon out in front of him like a short sword, a pot lid in his other hand like a shield, and all he really needed was a colander for a helmet and he’d be back in grade four, calling fellow soldiers to suit up from the armoury in the drawer under the stove. He realized that he felt exactly like a nine-year-old, felt as if he should have his lower lip stuck firmly out.

  “So, maybe I’ve been working too hard,” Anna said as Keith put the spoon and lid down, and she set her wineglass on the kitchen table. “Smells good.”

  It came out short, like an admission, as if prised out against her will, like ground given. Or deliberately surrendered. Then she pulled his hand up to her lips, kissed it, and smiled.

  “Onions,” she said.

  “Poached with mushrooms in balsamic vinegar,” he started. “They’re in the fridge for a salad . . .”

  She reached a finger across, put it on his lips. “Okay,” she said, her voice dropping two quick notes at the end of the word, final and full stop.

  He smelled soap on her hand and something else, something high and sharp, like new leather or the bright salt of beach rocks, but a smell he remembered immediately and jarringly as distinctively hers. It had been a long time since he had smelled it. Smelled it and known it.

  Anna had the fingers of her left hand woven through his, familiar and cool and smooth and right, the feel of them running through him like a signal coursing through
wires.

  The windows were all dark by then, and the blue had bled right out of the sky so that the houses opposite, even the last matte black edge of their roofs, had finally vanished. The whole row dark, like every eye was resolutely and deliberately closed, carefully paying no attention at all. Keith knew the houses were all still out there, was absolutely certain of it, each one of them holding its simple truth, out of sight and waiting. And that every one would be there the next morning, surfacing with the rising sun. That there was trust in some anchors, set careful, deep and solid.

  He turned off each of the burners and followed her, counted every step of the stairs. As they passed through each doorway, he thought of tumblers falling into place in combination locks—and of walking along the top of a fence, one foot in front of the other, and the tremulous, careful way you have to watch a roux to be sure the butter won’t suddenly and angrily brown then burn.

  Later, there was the soft feel of cotton against his skin, and the quickening of breath, and Keith felt himself coming all apart into shards of images, sound and smell and sentences that flashed through his mind like scraps cut out at random and glued down on construction paper.

  Onions, garlic, limes, smooth skin, urgent hip, the swell of lower lip.

  Sugar hunkering down over low heat, crystals slowly softening and surrendering their shape—butter melting, shifting silent from waxy solid to easy slip.

  Wait, wait, be patient—wait until the water reaches the necessary, and rolling, boil.

  Apples, sharp vinegar, crushed basil, sea salt and iodine.

  Salt, like sweat. Like tears.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I write in a combination of doubt, wonder, fear and occasional confidence, and would not be able to write at all without the help of those who believe in and support my work and also who help tamp down the occasional darkness.