Gravity Is the Thing

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  ‘Well then, by all means,’ Finn replied. ‘Be my guest.’

  I raised an eyebrow. His smile fell. He leaned forward, studying me closely.

  ‘If you did have an affair,’ he said, ‘I’d forgive you.’

  *

  There’s no punctuation when somebody is missing. This was why my teacher’s book bothered me.

  There are semicolons, I suppose. When Robert became ‘long-term missing’. Each time Matilda aged his photograph for us.

  But now, like my father—and in her heart, my mother—I knew Robert was dead. I had fashioned my own final punctuation. In the darkest night, I’d wake breathless: what if I was wrong, what if he was just around the corner, what if he sensed that I had quit?

  ‘Twenty years after a person disappears,’ Matilda had told us, ‘the file is usually closed.’

  That’s 2010. Five years from now. That will be another form of punctuation, I suppose, another lie.

  *

  In Montreal, I wanted, more than anything, to bake. I baked caramel cakes, banana loaves, ginger cookies. Dustings and sprayings of flour between me and the world.

  I’d never shown much interest before, but here I panicked into baking.

  Also, Finn and I spent a lot of time wandering through Indigo or Chapters—those are bookshops—and once I remember him calling me over to the poetry section. He had found a poem addressed to a man without a sense of smell. It was by a Scottish poet, Kate Clanchy. I read it while Finn watched my face.

  ‘Everything about this is perfect,’ I said.

  Finn replied, ‘I know.’

  He said it made him sad, thinking of my baking, thinking of working at the table and slowly becoming aware of faint drifts of baking, or arriving home, opening the door and the blast of it, an instant immersion in baking, and these were things that the man in this poem would never experience. ‘Unless the poet describes them for him,’ I pointed out.

  ‘I’ll email her,’ said Finn, ‘and suggest she write a follow-up.’

  *

  We painted the apartment walls, congratulating each other on the transformation. If you want to double the size and light of a place, replace the turquoise-and-rose-striped wallpaper with eggshell paint. If you want to revitalise a living room, tear down the plastic grapevine. Weekends, we scoured designer furniture stores and tried out couches.

  ‘Wait until my mother sees this!’ Finnegan breathed.

  *

  Finnegan’s mother never visited.

  But in the summer, friends visited from Sydney!

  Natalia and her sister Tia, to be precise. They slept on air mattresses in our living room. We took them biking to Atwater Market, to our favourite bar, Cobalt, where there was a free Pac-Man game, and hiking on Mount Royal.

  We wandered around the Jazz Festival with them, and saw comedy at Just for Laughs. Natalia and I were so smitten by one comedian, we bought tickets to his show the following night. It was all the same jokes, even the ‘improvised’ bits. Though disillusioned, we remained fond of him. We all went on a road trip to Tadoussac and saw beluga whales from a Zodiac. Finnegan’s cousins invited us to spend a couple of nights in their cottage by a lake on the way back.

  Much of that stay was spent helping the cousins clear the thatching from the roof of their boatshed. You peeled the thatching in chunks and sent it sliding down the slope of the roof. There were pliers for removing the nails, and hessian bags for gathering the thatch.

  When chunks of thatch slid down the roof they could hit you in the eye.

  At night, we swam in the lake. Natalia and I chatted on the wharf, while Finn and Tia sat in the rowboat drinking beer. The moon was bouncing like a puppet on a string, they said, like they’d never seen the moon bounce before. Natalia and I climbed into the boat, but the moon was still.

  Mostly we ate hamburgers and corn on the cob, and the Canadians used words like fixings and makings.

  The sisters stayed in Montreal three weeks altogether.

  ‘Three weeks is maybe a little too long,’ Finn and I agreed, folding the air out of the mattresses.

  *

  Chapter 279

  Also, it can be wrong, knowledge. Consider folk etymology, false accusations, hypercorrection, wrongful imprisonment, errors, mistakes and false starts.

  So many things we think we know, and then it turns out we don’t! Cigarettes were once considered good for your health! Carbohydrates, like overalls, tumble in and out of our good graces. Everything proved is eventually disproved, cures stop working, diseases find loopholes, there are sharp intakes of breath.

  *

  We both joined the YMCA. Finn loves to swim. All through high school, he used to win at Zone in backstroke and butterfly.

  ‘You should be swimming in the Olympics!’ I had urged when the Athens Olympics approached last year. ‘Get your swimmers! Let’s go to Greece!’

  But he explained that he’d always come second-last when he got to Regionals. Second-last. Every single race at Regionals.

  ‘You never told me that bit,’ I said, interested. He’d told me often, with great modesty, how he used to win at Zone, but we’d never got past that stage.

  A few times, I accompanied Finn to the Y, but mostly I just low-level loathed myself for not going. I couldn’t understand the French well enough to do the classes, treadmills and elliptical machines depress me, and I find lap-swimming indescribably boring. Nothing happens. You reach the end of the pool, turn, and start again. At least when you play scales, you can switch keys. (Now you’re going to tell me that you can switch strokes while swimming, but it’s not the same at all.)

  Also, the slow lanes at the Y were always crowded, toes tickling my nose, hands slapping down on the soles of my feet, a woman in a candy-pink bathing suit bobbing up and down at the end of the lane. Over in the fast lane, Finn tore up and down the length of the pool.

  *

  We had a lot of sex, Finn and I, this year. We were both working at home, we were both bored, and we wanted a baby.

  It was always athletic and excellent. Sometimes my throat was raspy from shrieking so much.

  ‘You have a sore throat?’ Finn enquired once, hearing my husky, raw voice.

  I reminded him why.

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ he said, genuinely contrite. He was the one providing my orgasms, so we agreed that it made sense for him to take the blame.

  *

  Some days, actually, we had so much sex I started to feel delusional.

  This is like being at a holiday resort, I thought, and eating slice after slice of rich chocolate cake, the kind of cake with creamy layers, a cherry liqueur centre. It’s great, the cake, it’s delicious, but after a while, you start to think: Shall we try the tennis or the paddle boats instead?

  *

  It was strange living in Montreal without friends. I had Finnegan, and we both had David Chin, and I formed acquaintanceships with people in my writing classes. But the courses ended, and we lost touch.

  Some days I imagined David Chin’s wife, Cindy, arriving in a dazzle of bright smiles and warmth, arms outstretched, and she and I would talk fast, becoming friends instantly, overlapping words and laughter, arranging to catch up over coffee.

  Other days, I saw her as sharp and haughty, or raucous, or pale with nerves. Quite soon, Finn and I decided that she didn’t exist at all, and that David had invented her.

  *

  I got pregnant three times this year.

  The first time was in April. I did the test and we stared at each other, dizzy. But three weeks later, I was bleeding and it was done.

  I felt foolish for believing that pregnancy would lead to a baby. I had known about miscarriage, I just hadn’t found it very likely.

  ‘That’s fine,’ we agreed. ‘That was a test run. Now we’re all set.’

  All set was something we’d picked up from the Canadians. You’re all set now? they’d say, after placing our order before us in a diner, and we’d say, Yes, thanks, and smiled at
each other.

  The second time was in August. Finn and I were on a road trip across America: beautiful! magnificent! breathtaking! We smiled at rock formations and majestic trees, found cheap motels, gathered ice for our esky—our icebox, as they call it, more prosaically—and we stopped at a pharmacy in Denver, Colorado, to buy a test.

  We were celebrating at Applebee’s that night when a friendly couple from Florida began chatting with us. Finn got drunk and told them I was pregnant.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he explained to me. ‘We’ll never see them again.’

  They laughed at this.

  I didn’t care. I like to break rules. Also, it seemed to me, superstitiously speaking, that telling people would make the pregnancy work out. Our error the last time had been in not telling. By waiting three months, slavishly following the rules of superstition, we had defeated ourselves.

  This was reverse superstition.

  We outlined this theory between us while the couple watched. They laughed again.

  Later, they laughed at my accent. ‘It was a dare,’ I said, telling the story of our move to Montreal, and they looked at each other and chortled.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘What?’ Finn said.

  ‘Your accent,’ they laughed. ‘It’s so cute.’ The word dare, they explained, had been left incomplete, I had left them in suspense, they were waiting for the final r.

  Later that night, I couldn’t get to sleep. I don’t have an accent, I thought at the couple. YOU do. Over and over, no variation: I don’t have an accent. YOU do.

  The next day the pregnancy was over.

  ‘I don’t know if this is too early even to call it a miscarriage,’ I said, crying into Finn’s chest. ‘I’m embarrassed to be crying.’

  He said, ‘You were pregnant and now you’re not. There was a baby and now there’s not. That’s a miscarriage. You can cry.’

  Grateful, I cried harder.

  We lay side by side on the bed for a while. I said, ‘Tell me your secrets, Finnegan. Tell me all about you.’

  He laughed. ‘You’re always asking that. Look. Here I am, beside you.’

  The motel room that night was small and shadowy and the internet would not work. Finn spent hours trying to make it work and eventually demanded a cut in our room rate. I went to the fitness room and ran on the treadmill. A crack ran down the paintwork from the ceiling to the floor, and a hook dangled loose from the window frame. I pounded the treadmill, holding both it and my accent responsible.

  *

  While on our road trip, we listened to talkback radio to get a sense of where we were. ‘Somebody has to teach the left wing what free speech really means!’ and ‘I’m going to send you a copy of this book: Why Liberalism is a Mental Disorder,’ and a lot of talk about ‘illegals’. Conversations about Iraq merged into talk of illegals, the topics not discrete. ‘Illegals are biological weapons,’ a caller said, ‘’cause they’re bringing in disease.’ ‘I think it’s safe to say,’ the host replied, ‘that each illegal is responsible, in some way, for a thousand American deaths.’

  ‘Jesus,’ we said to each other.

  Another guy was talking about affirmative action. ‘So now,’ he said, ‘if I’m in the hospital, and the doctor is black? I’m not going to lie to you. I’m going to ask that doctor for his credentials. ’Cause if he’s only there on account of this affirmative action, I want another doctor, thank you.’

  ‘Holy shit,’ we said.

  But we were driving through beautiful countryside, canyons and deserts, pulling over, taking photos, meeting friendly people, smart people, good people. You can’t judge a country by its talkback radio.

  Another day, we pulled over at a beach in Oregon and saw a gathering of little wooden crosses in the sand, each with a picture of a lost soldier, impossibly young, smiling for his photograph.

  We drove by pro-life demonstrations, with huge photographs of impossibly cute, plump-cheeked babies.

  It all seemed connected to me: the soldiers, the illegals, the plump smiling babies with hands reaching out to be taken, to grow up, join the army, shoot illegals, my cut-off words, my lost babies. And I was angry with Americans whenever they said water, or later, anything with a final r; the rounding of that r struck me as superfluous, an embellishment, unnecessary.

  *

  After our road trip, we decided to take a break from sex. ‘To refresh the system,’ we suggested. ‘To hit the restart button.’

  Around this time, things became strange with me. Everything made me cry. The ends of novels and TV shows. When there was no milk, or plenty of milk. When there was tuna in the fridge, mixed with mayonnaise, enough for me to put on a baguette.

  I started watching sports programs and the coverage made me cry. When small girls vaulted perfectly then landed and hopped three times. When people knocked over hurdles or landed awkwardly in the sand; when rowers slowed, almost at the finish line, and gave up. When young men executed dives with high levels of difficulty and the commentator gasped, ‘He nailed it!’

  Those divers and their tiny splashes. They made a small opening into the water with their hands and inched their whole bodies through.

  At night, I got out of bed and stood at the window. In the darkness, I saw the absence of knowledge as a great dark pool.

  Not a pool; if it was a pool you would at least know it was water, and you could touch it, put your hand inside it, feel the cold or the unexpected warmth, reach down even to a sandy, muddy, silty bottom, to pebbles or starfish or weeds.

  Not a shadow either, because then at least you’d know that somewhere light was being blocked.

  The absence of knowledge reared from behind me, defining my past, and another absence, an absence of children, loomed ahead of me. The two reached out and tugged at each other.

  *

  Finn went to the Y every afternoon to swim his laps. He often picked up dinner on the way back and he would stand at the door, his hair ruffled and wet, singing down the hall: ‘I am the purchaser of chilli peppers!’

  Stupid things like that always made me laugh.

  *

  I talked to my mother on the phone and she told me Xuang had got himself a dog, a Newfoundland named Bartholomew. Only she pronounced each syllable in turn, so that each took a line of its own:

  New

  Found

  Land

  I thought of the teacher from The Art of the Story, how the words slipped their lines in his book, a Slinky descending a flight of concrete steps. I loved how my mother weighed each syllable in turn, placing each before me, as if the land had been found anew.

  Here, they say it in one thrust, newfendland, a dart puffed quickly through a slender blowpipe.

  The next day, coincidentally, The Art of the Story teacher sent me an email. He mentioned that a bunch of people were attending his book launch party in October, and would I like to come?

  I would say a bunch of grapes, or a bunch of flowers. Never a bunch of people. But I liked the way he, and various other North Americans, use this expression.

  *

  Across the road from our apartment was a convenience store called a dep. They call them deps here in Quebec, David Chin explained.

  We would buy David drinks, to thank him for his insights into Montreal, and he would rush to the bar to buy us drinks in return, and so we plied each other with drinks all night, and the pool cues hit our faces, and we laughed, and I wondered what he’d done with his wife.

  The guy in our dep went to Australia once. He wanted to tell us about it. No offence, he said, but he found the people unfriendly. He wasn’t expecting that. ‘Maybe it was because summer was nearly over so they were depressed?’ he wondered.

  ‘Beautiful beaches,’ he said, ‘but you can’t swim!’

  ‘What do you mean, you can’t swim?’ Finn asked.

  ‘The sharks and the jellyfish.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ I said. ‘Box jellyfish up north. But in Sydney—’

  He said
he was in Darling Harbour and he and his friends looked in the water and saw jellyfish everywhere!

  ‘But those jellyfish—’ I began, but he was laughing at the absurdity of beaches where you could not swim. He went to a nude beach, he said, but he only walked into the water up to his knees. He couldn’t believe the people swimming! In that water, with those sharks and jellyfish!

  ‘But the jellyfish—,’ Finn and I began in unison. ‘And there hasn’t been a shark attack since—’

  But now he wanted to talk about how difficult it was to find your way to the Sydney Harbour Bridge for the bridge climb.

  ‘You can see it,’ he said. ‘You can see the bridge, but you can’t reach it.’ He had stood beneath the bridge swearing in French.

  He was right there, I said to Finn later, he was right there in Australia and he missed it.

  *

  One night, we were supposed to be going out to watch an ice hockey game with David Chin and then, after the game, back to David’s place for a drink.

  But I was sneezing and my eyes had turned to slits. My head had that floaty, achy feeling.

  ‘You have to stay home,’ Finn told me, and I knew that he was right.

  Of course, I waited up for Finn. ‘You met the wife?’ I pounced, while he was still opening the door.

  No, he said, he didn’t meet her, she was sleeping by the time they arrived at David’s place after the game. But he saw her boots. ‘So it turns out,’ he said, ‘she exists.’

  ‘He could have bought a pair of woman’s boots,’ I said, sceptical.

  Finn said the boots had looked worn.

  I didn’t know what to say to that.

  *

  My cold stayed around for a while. It got into my sinuses. I felt desperate, tragic, weary.

  Finn frowned at me.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, referring to the frown, and he replied, exasperated, ‘I’m worried about you!’

  ‘But it’s just a cold.’

  ‘Tell me how you feel,’ he prompted. ‘Describe the way you feel.’

  I thought about how solicitous we were of one another. How we encouraged the other to rest. You sleep, I’ll wake you in an hour.