The Wife's Tale

by Lori Lansens

  Wading down the high school hallway for the first time since spring graduation, Mary could not conceive of a way to tell Gooch about her pregnancy. She glimpsed her huge boyfriend through the open double doors to the parking lot, leaning against the tan Duster, shaking his head fatally as though he’d already heard the news. She was surprised to see cigarette smoke swirling near his ear, and Sylvie Lafleur beside him, childlike next to the giant teen. Sylvie glanced up to find Mary watching from the shadow of the hallway, waved, then ground the cigarette with the toe of her shoe and started in Mary’s direction.

  “You talk to your boyfriend,” she called on her approach. “Tell him it’s a crime to throw away his future.” She dropped her h’s and th’s and said ’im instead of him, and trow instead of throw. “There are so many options. So many choices.” She sounded, briefly, like a tiny white French Ms. Bolt.

  The future. Although she tried to see the big picture, Mary found her canvas painted over, scene upon scene, not quite right. A bad angle. A poor perspective. A landscape where there should be a portrait. All the pictures vandalized with graffiti, the same dripping red word, Gooch. “Pick one, Murray,” Orin would say, holding a bouquet of assorted lollipops. “Pick. One.”

  “She’s giving me shit because I don’t want to go to McGill,” Gooch explained, after Ms. Lafleur disappeared back into the school. “She’s already worked it out. Which I did not ask her to do.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m not going.”

  “Okay.”

  “If I did go, I’d want you to come with me.”

  “Come with you?”

  “Come with me. Or I’d still see you on weekends.”

  “McGill is in Montreal. That’s seven hours away.”

  “I can’t leave my mother anyway. Not now. This thing with Asswipe isn’t gonna last. I can’t leave her. With Heather.”

  “You don’t even speak French, Gooch.”

  “The journalism school is outstanding.”

  Outstanding. Such an American word. “Yeah?”

  “She thinks she can help me get assistance. There’s the insurance money from my dad, but she thinks I should save that.”

  “Okay.”

  “She thinks I’m a gifted writer.”

  “She does?” Mary didn’t mean to sound so surprised. She’d never read anything Gooch had written, even though she knew he’d received the highest grades for his efforts. She crumpled into his arms, as sorry for the banal tone of her announcement as she was to give him the news. “Oh Gooch,” she said, “I’m pregnant.”

  On an evening several days later, gathered around a boozy campfire at the lake, Mary and Gooch announced their engagement to their friends. The girls squealed their delight and fawned over Mary, envying the way her cup ranneth over, while the boys—young men, really, old enough to drink legally, vote, go to war—responded with short nods and thumps to Gooch’s broad back.

  No one wondered if the pair was getting married because Mary was pregnant. They already knew that. And it didn’t seem a particularly poor decision to any of them. The greatest tragedy, as the young people saw it, was already behind them. Gooch’s fate sealed by the accident. He would not go to an American college on a basketball scholarship. They would never see him play on network TV. He had lost his chance, at the sharpest bend in the river, to be extraordinary. Gooch got drunk that night, his tolerance for alcohol out of step with his tolerance for tragedy, and threw Mary the keys when it was time to drive home.

  Aware that errant recollections of bygone days never brought comfort or deeper understanding, Mary wondered why she seemed incapable of releasing the past. Her rambling mind seemed to have no more restraint than her wanting mouth. Even struggling out the doors of the apartment building on the river, she thought not of where she was but where she used to be. She missed the sound of her father’s voice.

  In the white noise of wind Mary heard the ringing of a phone. Pushing down the walkway, she felt the sound like a whip. Punishing. If she had that cellphone in her purse instead of charging on the counter at home, Gooch would be calling. As he was calling her now, she felt sure. He’d likely left a message at the drugstore. And tried her at the house. She imagined him frantic, calling around to find her, as if she were the one who hadn’t come home.

  RECONFIGURED AND REBORN

  Outside the apartment building, Mary’s attention was caught by the neon lights of the convenience store across the road. Tasting the chocolate and nuts embedded in her molars, she badly needed a drink. And something salty if she had to sit in the truck on surveillance, waiting for Sylvie Lafleur to return. She considered the distance and the darkening sky, and the heaviness of her legs and the cut on her foot, wondering if she should drive. Calculating her distance from the truck, she heaved a sigh and started for the road with slow, percussive steps.

  Typically, Mary disliked shopping in convenience stores, with their dearth of fruits and vegetables or boxes of fiber cereal to conceal the cartful of scrumptious junk foods she would actually eat. And she hated the way the foreign clerks watched her drizzling orange cheese on stale nachos or filling gallon cups with soda or lifting snack bags to the counter, thinking their own sniggering cultural versions of Lady, you need that like a hole in the head.

  Entering the store Mary should have been shocked, but wasn’t in the least, to see Sylvie Lafleur at the counter, paying for a carton of king-size cigarettes. This meeting of fat wife and slender mistress in an overbright store on a stormy fall day was simply life in Leaford, a town too small for coincidence. Rain slicker tossed carelessly over pyjamas, fine hair curled from the damp air, the French woman looked withered as winter. She smiled seeing Mary Gooch standing before her in her navy scrubs, just as she always did when they chanced to meet. “Mary.”

  Mary cleared her throat. “Hello, Ms. Lafleur.”

  “I haven’t seen you in so long. Are you well?” Sylvie rasped, though the answer seemed apparent.

  Gooch sprang to Mary’s mind, the way he would answer a person, when they asked how he was with Livin’ the dream. I’m livin’ the dream. People were charmed by his response, and especially amused when he said it within the context of hauling a sofa bed up two flights of stairs. “Fine. And you?”

  Sylvie opened her carton of cigarettes, tearing at the foil with her chipped, stained fingers, laughter resigned. “I spend all day smoking in my pyjamas. Retirement suits me, don’t you think?”

  In her scrutiny of the woman’s aging face, Mary could not find a scintilla of guilt. No remorse. No apology. No mea. No culpa. A skinny, amoral slut, she decided.

  “How’s Gooch?” Sylvie inquired innocently. And there it was—a twitch in the eyelid. A blink. A shift. A tell. Gooch had taught her about tells, those nervous twitches: a scratch, a pucker, a cough, that tip off the liar’s bluff. He could always tell a tell, he’d say proudly, which was why he usually won at cards. Watching Sylvie twitch, Mary felt relieved, like a mysteriously ill person upon finally receiving a diagnosis, to know that it wasn’t all in her mind.

  Mary admired her own directness, even if it was all she had left. “Gooch didn’t come home last night. I thought you might know where he is.”

  The older woman squeezed her eyes shut, shrinking one vertebra at a time until Mary felt like the big fat bully to Sylvie’s scrawny little kid. “Let’s go outside. Can we go outside so I can smoke?”

  Mary briefly enjoyed the thought that the other woman was dying for a cigarette. “Do you know where he is, Ms. Lafleur?”

  “I don’t, Mary. I don’t know where is Gooch.”

  “He didn’t go to your place last night?”

  Behind the counter, the Korean man thrust open the hot-dog case. Having served Mary on a number of occasions, he was anxious to get on with the transaction. “Three? Works?”

  Mary shook her head without looking at the man. “Did he call you?”

  Sylvie glanced briefly at the clerk before launching in a whisper. “You want to
do this here? Okay. But you must know I haven’t seen Gooch in years. Years.”

  That wasn’t technically true. They’d run into Sylvie just the prior month at the Kinsmen Corn Roast. And they often met, the three of them, in the hallway, when Gooch came along on her visits to Orin. But Mary knew what Sylvie meant, and was inclined to believe her.

  “And it was one time. Only. You must know this.”

  Mary was more mystified by this than she’d ever been by the torrid affair she’d always assumed.

  “He used to come, it’s true, but that was years ago, and only to sleep it off a little on the sofa. We talked. Let’s go outside now,” she said, soothing her impatient cigarette.

  “You talked?”

  “Politics. Movies. It’s so boring, really.” There were tears growing in the older woman’s eyes, a babyish crinkle in her chin. It was because she wanted a cigarette that badly, or was genuinely remorseful. “Sometimes I made him cinnamon toast,” she confessed.

  So there it was. Sylvie Lafleur had cared deeply for her illicit young friend, shared his passion for the planet, a fascination with world politics, an appreciation of old movies. She’d stroked his hair while he slumbered on her sofa, and fed him toast before he drove home to his hapless wife. It was not a lover but a mother that Gooch had needed so desperately, and had found in his guidance counsellor.

  “One time?”

  “I promise.”

  The promise didn’t ring as hollow as it should have. “When?”

  “It was the last time. It’s more than ten years, Mary. I told him he couldn’t come any more. That’s it. The last time. The only time.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?”

  “Yes, why? The one time? Why then?”

  Sylvie took a moment before she admitted, “It was after my mother died. I was turning forty-five. I was feeling so old. It was already years since any man touched me. I was a little drunk. I thought it might never happen for me again. He pitied me. I felt like such a fool after.”

  As Sylvie blushed and huffed, fiddling with her cigarette, Mary remembered reading something about French women believing that all women of a certain age must make a choice between their forward faces and lagging behinds. There was some sensible reasoning involved; one needed fat to plump out the wrinkles and make youthful the face, but that same fat weighted the nether cheeks like marbles in a sack. It was obvious in Sylvie Lafleur’s sunken eyes and crepe skin, apparent in the road map of vertical wrinkles at her mouth and the horizontal ones at her eyes, that she had chosen to save her ass.

  “I’m sorry, Mary. I’m glad to have the chance to say so. I’m so sorry.” Sylvie shrugged again, glancing past Mary at the darkening sky. “Can we go out now, so I can smoke? Please?”

  “No,” Mary decided, surprising herself. “And me? Did you talk with my husband about me?”

  “Not really. He would say sometimes how he wanted you to be happy.”

  “But where was he all those nights since? All those other nights?” Mary didn’t really expect an answer. She might as well have been asking the Korean clerk.

  “It’s been so many years. I don’t know him any more. I don’t know where is Gooch.” She paused. “I hope you can forgive me.”

  Realizing that she was blocking the path to the door, and that there was nothing left to say, Mary stepped aside to let Sylvie by. She had no sense of time, and felt confused when she turned to find that the French woman had disappeared like a puff of smoke from one of her evil cigarettes, gone so quickly that Mary wondered if she’d dreamed the whole conversation. She found the eyes of the Korean watching her, and held up her hand to show three fingers.

  Waiting for the hot dogs, Mary leaned against the automated cash machine, remembering her conversation with The Greek—hours ago? Days ago? Years ago? The unseen clock. The spinning hands spiralling out of control. Did you check the bank account?

  She reached into her purse to find the access card, which she had never used before. Though she’d argued passionately with Gooch, she didn’t so much care about the redundancy of human tellers; she was simply too lazy to learn something new. She made several clumsy attempts at inserting the silver card into the slot, and felt smug when it was finally accepted. The machine catered to idiots, just as Gooch had promised. She had no trouble remembering the code—the month and day of their anniversary. Today.

  She followed the prompts, asking the machine for twenty dollars and pressing the button yes when it politely inquired if she’d like to know her balance. She extracted her card and yanked out the receipt. She read the number. Checked again. She knew the balance in their joint bank account—three hundred and twenty-four dollars. Gooch had warned that’s all they had. This number at the bottom of the thin white sheet was incorrect. She jammed the silver card back in the slot as the Korean rang up the sale, asking the machine for another twenty dollars and another receipt. The total balance, incorrect again, less twenty more dollars. Mary puzzled over the paper. Something was wrong. In fact, everything was wrong. Why should the account balance be right?

  She slid the plastic card back into the machine, ignoring the Korean and the hot dogs, pushing the buttons without pausing to read, instantly expert, asking the machine not for its typical offer but for more. Would you like another amount? Yes. Not to exceed four hundred dollars. Fine then, four hundred dollars. And a receipt? Yes, please.

  She waited as the machine clicked away, anxious that the police might burst through the doors to arrest her. She was asking for more money than she knew they had. Wasn’t that the same as writing a fraudulent cheque? When the machine spat out the four hundred dollars in twenties, she snatched it from the cash cradle and shoved it into the deep pockets of her uniform before the Korean, or God, could see. She looked at the receipt. Minus twenty. Minus twenty. Minus four hundred dollars. But the balance was still wrong.

  She left the store, the Korean man, the hot dogs and the soda, clutching the receipt in her hands, assaulted by a fierce driving wind. Mary wondered how sliver-thin Sylvie made it home, and scanned the black sky, expecting to see her wispy form cast about by the currents, like those insipid plastic shopping bags.

  Gooch gone. An excess of twenty-five thousand dollars in the bank account. Where is God when you need her, she thought.

  As if to answer the question—as if God had been waiting in the wings and just got the cue—there was sudden thunderous applause and the black day sky was lit by staggered, vengeful lightning. No water effects, just awesome pyrotechnics. Mary made her way across the road, trucking through the still-green grass along the side of the apartment building, the slip of paper pinched between thumb and forefinger the way customers carried their prescriptions at Raymond Russell’s. The mystery of the additional funds beckoned, along with her rising fear that Gooch’s disappearance was not accidental.

  With his dark hood pulled up to hide his purple hair, Mary didn’t at first recognize the teenaged boy squatting near the back entrance of the building as the boy who was now living in her father’s old apartment. He appeared, cloaked in black, like a sullen crow, a giant outcast from the mocking clan dotting the branches of a nearby tree. In the charcoal clouds above there were quick explosive electrical charges, swirling currents and a blinding charge of light across the sky. Not shy sheet lightning but frantic fork lightning, brilliant zagged bolts, protesting shockwaves, rage of thunder, arcing white tentacles dying, reconfigured and reborn. Blazing. Angry. The God Irma grew up with.

  It was not Mary’s intention to look at the boy with the purple hair or his to look at her, but their eyes met, and at precisely the same time as the boy breathed, “Holy shit!” Mary whispered, “Holy cow!” He drew his hood forward and cast down his eyes once more. The moment over, fleeting as an orgasm and fleeing, like Ms. Bolt. Gooch. The crows shivered and cawed from the barren tree, Gone, gone, gone.

  Finding the handle on the truck door, Mary climbed inside, assailed by the rich scent of chocolate. She rested her hea
d and closed her eyes, unable to resist the voices of her parents whispering into her ear. Well, if he wasn’t having an affair with Frenchie, he must have been having an affair with someone, Irma would have said. Orin had been fond of Gooch but would be no less pragmatic about his disappearance: Well, the only thing to do is find him, I guess. Confront him. If you think you can’t let him go. Have you called his mother?

  Called his mother? Why would she call his mother? Mary didn’t want to alarm Eden if there was nothing to be alarmed about. She was also unprepared to admit to the woman (whom she had telephoned dutifully at noon Pacific Time the last Sunday of each month for the first ten years of their marriage, and who had always sounded equally surprised and disappointed—“Oh Mary, it’s you”) that she’d been right all along. She couldn’t call Gooch’s mother anyway. The cellular phone was still charging in the socket at home.

  She’d told Gooch, when he’d given her the phone, that she would never remember to bring it with her. She also knew she’d never figure out how to use it, since she feared the simplest technology, which, like the automated teller, seemed to offer further opportunity for failure. Every machine, except the cash register at work, was a gadget to confound her. For similar reasons, she’d objected when Gooch wanted to get a personal computer “like everyone else in the free world.” She’d argued that they couldn’t afford it, but she’d also read enough advice columns to worry that the Internet was a passport to porn and would lead to other unsavoury addictions. Gooch had called her a Luddite. She didn’t know what that meant but she wished she were not one. Then she would have a cellphone, and she could call someone.