He’s glad to be startled out of this reverie by a noise at the side of the house and moves towards the living room window, carrying Helen’s rings, hot in his hands. The oil truck has pulled across the driveway and he sees a long, thick hose snaking towards the house, vanishing from sight. The clang he heard was the sound of the nozzle slipping into position. The house is sucking up the oil, the air is charged with it, an unhealthy waft of fossil fuel rises through the registers. The driver appears from the side of the house, turns with a broad smile towards the window where he’s standing, and waves. How easy it would be for her. He pulls back without waving, letting the curtain fall. The hose is wound back into the truck, the length of it looks spent and victorious, drags noisily along the driveway, leaving a little smear of oil.
TONIGHT, HELEN ARRIVES back after supper. Ephram hears the front door and starts to wind his slow way from his room to the front hall, following along behind her playing the Corelli again on his violin.
“Hello, my favourite son,” she says to Ephram, bending slightly to kiss him on the cheek.
Ephram loses just one beat to answer, “Only son.”
This is their standard greeting and Ephram’s fingers scuttle like fast spiders on the strings, his arm moving the bow more passionately now that she’s home to hear. A wave of sound follows her, like a too-loud movie score. He approaches to kiss his wife on the cheek but takes one of Ephram’s quickly moving bow strokes in the gut before he can reach her. She laughs.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing,” she says.
“You like seeing me hurt?” he asks. Ephram continues to weave between them.
“Practice in your room! Leave your mother alone,” he yells. Silence drops over the three of them suddenly as Ephram lowers his violin to his side and looks away, towards the floor, ashamed that he has been noticed following his mother around like a sissy.
“I decide if it’s enough. You hear me?” Helen says.
Helen glares at him, then breaks the standoff by turning to Ephram, lifting his chin and saying, “Hi, sweetheart. You sound fantastic. How was your day?”
Donny sees that Ephram is happy to be given this chance to hide his hurt feelings, but he casts a wary glance at his father.
“Guess what caused the ice age?” he says, tucking the violin under his arm like a shield, the way he’s been taught to.
“Is this a riddle?” Helen says. “Well, let me think. Somebody was in a bad mood.”
“No! It’s science, Mom.”
“Someone couldn’t bear the perfection of the planet, the lush green—all the reptiles moving slowly through the warm swamps without a care in the world.” Ephram thinks she’s still joking but Donny hears the bitterness.
“That’s not science,” Ephram says.
“Lust, selfishness, just plain nastiness are part of evolution. Where would we be without them?” This is for him.
“Mom!”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“A giant asteroid from outer space. Boom! And then the dust caused everything to get cold and dark, which killed off the dinosaurs and turned their bones into stone. And it could happen today. There are asteroids all over the place.”
“Don’t I know it,” Helen says.
LATER, IN THEIR BEDROOM, they have sex, good for both of them. Then she says things to him that make him feel ashamed. Through the night he remembers her voice and the way it sounded both beautiful and frightening. Beautiful, with its feminine idiosyncratic lift in the middle of sentences. Frightening in her complete dismissal of him. He’s agitated all night. He hears her over and over in his head. This is what she said: “Did you know that you aged twenty years in five minutes? Suddenly, there you were, a pathetic middle-aged man. No different from any other.”
He lies in bed as she sleeps beside him, looking unselfconscious and contained, maybe even a bit smug. He remembers her last summer dabbing at an infected wound on his backside. He had sat on a shingle nail that had landed on a patio chair. The neighbours had just had their roof redone, and it was only after this mishap that he thought to climb up and clean out the eaves trough. He hadn’t mentioned it, but she noticed the little puncture a few days later, when it had grown red and sore. After a tetanus shot she insisted on, she cleaned and changed the small gauze square twice a day.
“Tell your mistress not to be so rough,” she had said and kissed, then slapped, his buttock. She seemed to be enjoying playing nurse and he had a sense of how humiliating his future would be, with her tending his body as efficiently as she handled cold poultry on the way to the oven. She had always said she would outlive him. She kissed and patted Ephram’s bottom exactly that way, during diaper changes when he was a baby. And here he is, well on his way to old age, as far as she’s concerned. He thinks bitterly that he’s collapsed in on his own clichés, while she is someone surprising and new. Someone he hasn’t laid eyes on for years. Someone who can always slip away, her body sealing over like a pool closing over a stone.
HE’S FOLLOWING HER. He’s not proud of this, but there it is. He’s cleared work from his calendar for her day off. It will happen soon, that he knows. His wife has never been one to procrastinate, a quality that makes her such a wonderful nurse. The way she moves inside her jeans is no-nonsense, as though she can barely wait to get out of them.
She stops to talk to Anastasia, their elderly Russian neighbour, near the grocery store. Although Anastasia shuffles along slowly, the top half of her is ever in motion, hands waving, red hair hennaed and blowing in the wind. Helen is wearing purple gloves and her hands mirror Anastasia’s, fly around as she talks. The two of them look like they are conducting a symphony, all mischief and high spirits, but all he can hear from behind a blue spruce is the rattled-pod sound of the wind.
Anastasia has had four husbands. “Lucky in love,” Helen has said to him, being fond of her.
“Not so lucky for the men,” he answered, but she wouldn’t laugh now. With how she’s feeling about him, she would say Anastasia has been unlucky to have so many husbands. Now the significance of this dawns on him. So they talk about men, he realizes. He’s come home from meetings and heard the two of them cackling in the kitchen over tea but never wondered what they found so funny. He’s also heard Anastasia’s low voice soothing, sympathetic, and Helen’s, soft and indistinguishable. Has she told her about what’s going on? What kind of advice was offered? As he watches them talking on the street, he can almost hear Anastasia, in her accented crone’s voice, giving Helen pointers, like a madam in a whorehouse educating a new recruit.
Keep him guessing what you’ll do next.
Remember, he wants you on your knees.
Find that hollow at the base of his spine and caress.
The sinewy explicit voice is irresistible. He sees Helen doing all these things to a faceless man, her wild hair, excited with static, electrifying another man’s thighs. He tries to remember if he saw her wedding ring in the dish beside the sink and wills her to remove her purple glove so he can see her left hand. But she reaches out her gloved hand to Anastasia before she moves on.
He follows and waits outside the grocery store. After just fifteen minutes, she comes out with more bags than she can comfortably carry home. Moving fast along a parallel street, he’s there with his coat off when she arrives. He opens the door for her, takes the bags.
“You should have taken the car. Or told me and I would have gone with you.”
“Well, you know how it is,” she says. “Faced with all that choice, it’s so hard to tease out what you need from what you want.”
“What the hell does that mean?” he asks.
She looks at him with her fine pale brows drawn together, mouth pursed. Helen is not one to blush. Her emotions are too controlled for that, but the pale skin around her eyebrows reddens when she’s embarrassed or perturbed. And her eyes get a slightly bloodshot look to them, as though she’s been crying, but she never sheds a tear.
“
What do you think I mean?” she asks, temper flaring.
“What you want. What you need.” He hates the vindictive way his voice mocks her but he can’t stop it.
“You know what? This is crazy.” And she’s gone to the kitchen, having grabbed the bags out of his hands, tinned food hitting her legs so hard he knows they’ll leave bruises on her pale skin.
HE’S HIDING ALONG the rape path, waiting for Helen to pass on her way to work. She’s a little late today, which gave him the chance to get here first and scout out a hidden place. The wild lilacs and thorn bushes along the path are bare this time of year so he’s been forced to retreat to the thick stunted boughs of the spruce that grow along the power line. The hydro company must have come along recently and cut the tall tops off the mature trees. The thick bottoms end abruptly in unnatural light, but he’s hidden.
She was talking on the telephone when he left. When he picked up the receiver in his office he heard her voice, “You have to watch out for those tiny bones,” she said. “If you’re not careful, they’ll stick in your throat.” She laughed. Then she said, “Is that someone on your end? The connection’s changed.”
“No. That’s on your end,” a woman’s voice said, someone he couldn’t identify. There was silence as Helen considered this, and he hung up. Then he listened outside their bedroom door where Helen was getting ready for work as she talked on the phone to someone else.
“I was thinking of you.” A pause. “Maybe not.” She was speaking quietly, confidentially and he could only make out phrases here and there.
“Soon,” she said, and he felt a sick turn in his stomach.
Now, waiting for her, he sees her ambling along the path. She’s moving more slowly than usual, with troubled eyes looking upwards. The light illuminating her is unnaturally bright, as though she’s on a movie set, and he can see her internal thoughts as though she is the most brilliant of actresses. She’s clearly pale and strained, eyes ringed with tiredness. Then a flash of guilt. At least he hopes it’s guilt. But all her emotions, no matter how painful, make her appear worthy of an audience’s intense focus.
Then she stops walking towards him, looking at the truncated treetops just above where he’s hidden and his heart starts to pound with a kick of adrenaline. But she doesn’t know he’s here, so close he could almost reach out and grab her. She touches the collar of her jacket and pulls it closer with a little shiver. Her face is luminous in the unfamiliar light, pale, and her hair so fiery and wild, despite the neat job she’s done with pins and braiding, folding and tucking. Then he sees the change register in her face like fleeting sadness. Sadness for the loss of the green swaying crowns of the trees or for her innocence he wouldn’t know. The light doesn’t penetrate to her thoughts, but she is dazzling. She walks on, passes him, and he edges out of his hiding place. Her shoes are soundless, but sexy in the way she plants each foot straight and delicate as a deer in brush. Then she’s out of sight.
He’s not quite free of the trees when he hears the sound of running feet. He turns and sees a woman careening away from him, also dressed in nursing clothes. Her breath is ragged with her exertion, and he can’t see her face but knows from the flailing way her limbs pump hard and fast that she’s terrified of him.
THIS IS HIS SIXTH COFFEE in the hospital cafeteria. Maybe it’s the speedy effects of institutional caffeine, but he’s growing bolder. Nurses come and go on breaks or the ends of shifts. Most of them are laughing and if he closes his eyes he could almost be back in high school. Almost, though, because back then he wouldn’t have been able to take his eyes off the incredible variety of women. Young women coming out of the washroom, stray hairs rising like halos around their heads. The variety of hip bones, sharp or softly moulded, the scent of females everywhere.
But these nurses all seem pretty generic to him in their pastel uniforms and sensible shoes. It’s the men who hold his attention: the muscular new breed of male nurses wearing scrubs, the orderlies with little pot-bellies and quick efficient movements, janitors pushing defeated brooms, knowing that they’re the bottom of the food chain. And the doctors, always the officious, balding but ever-more-virile male doctors. Even if the women here in the cafeteria didn’t keep a respectful distance, he’d know who the doctors were.
“I heard you were down here,” Helen says. “What are you doing?’
She’s standing just behind his left shoulder and he doesn’t know how long she’s been looking down at his neck or counting the coffee cups on his table. He has to turn around to see her properly. Her hands are on her hips, but then he sees that they’re not. Her hands are together, demurely joined, level with her groin.
He can’t think of anything to say.
“Are you spying on me,” she says, but not as a question.
“What do you expect from me,” he says.
“Maturity,” she says.
“What’s so mature about revenge?”
Now it’s her turn to look at him with nothing to say.
“It’s just an excuse, isn’t it? There’s someone, and now you have the justification to do what you want to do. And you can blame it on me,” he says.
“I’m not talking to you when you’re like this,” she says, starting to turn away.
“Is it him?” He grabs her with one hand, pulls her back towards him, points with the other hand at one of the doctors. “Or him? That guy with the muscular thighs. I bet you’d lap that up.”
“Stop it,” she hisses at him.
“Or maybe that one, the dark poetic type.”
She cuts him short. “Fuck off,” she says.
They look at each other. He can’t help but feel a little skirmish of victory in his chest when she’s the one to look away.
They end up going for lunch. He doesn’t care why. She came close to turning around and walking away from him, and if she had, it would have been forever. She doesn’t seem surprised when he ushers her into a cab at the hospital entrance, and in his confusion about where to take her, he automatically gives the name of a restaurant he’s been to several times before, Jack’s, although not with her. Luckily, the waitress doesn’t seem to remember him.
They sit at a narrow wooden table adorned with a small white bowl of sea salt, and almost standing upright in the salt, a silver spoon small enough for cocaine. There is also a thin green vase holding one long and bending sprig of tropical fern and incredibly, a woodland flower, a jack-in-the-pulpit.
“Is it real?” Helen asks, reaching out her fingers to stroke the firm green polyp that is Jack and the smooth green-and-white striped hood.
He reaches out and barely misses her hand as he touches the flower. The soft plastic is cool to the touch.
“No. But a very good fake,” he says.
Like you, he can see her thinking, but she won’t lower herself enough to say it out loud.
He drinks beer and she sips tea as they wait for sandwiches that will look frazzled and exotic when they arrive, garnished with some kind of sprouts he has never seen in a grocery store. They talk about Ephram’s upcoming violin exam, carefully, almost formally, sharing a concern and both of them are humbled by what they have in common.
“You’re awfully hard on him,” she says. “He’s still so little.” She’s almost apologetic, cautious. He thinks before answering.
“He’s too hard on himself. He thinks he isn’t allowed to make a mistake. I’m trying to give him some perspective.”
“Oh, perspective,” she says, formulates a thought, then lets it go.
A young couple sits down at the table beside them, so close that he knows these two tables are normally one table for a larger, undoubtedly more boisterous party. The young woman sits next to Helen, attractive, shoulder-length blond hair. She’s wearing a tight thin-strapped top more suitable for summer. Her light brown arms are bare and covered with goosebumps. The man beside him keeps leaning forward, meeting her lips across the table. He hasn’t seen the man’s face, just the glossy back of his hair, curl
ing down voluptuously over his collar. Their hands intertwine, stroking and exploring each other’s fingers and palms. The kiss deepens. Then they draw back, staring deeply and quietly at one another. They draw apart whenever the waiter asks them what they would like, but wine is all they seem to want. Wine, and each other. He remembers only too well. But instead of missing the other woman, he misses Helen, even though she’s sitting across from him.
He continues talking, trying to fill in the silences. Now they’re talking about work. He’s telling her about a start-up company that’s doing well. Meanwhile, the couple moves in closer so that their feet are entwined and their legs touch. Helen tells him about a piece of equipment that went on the fritz and how much scurrying around they’ve had to do without it. They’re being so polite, neither of them willing to acknowledge what’s going on beside them.
Finally it’s time to leave. The couple is still lost in their timeless explorations, wine glass still bearing the lipstick mark of her now-bare lips. He wonders if Helen didn’t notice the couple after all. She hasn’t given any kind of sign. But then she turns to him as she’s slipping one arm into her jacket, leans towards him and says, “Nothing makes a person crazier than sex.”
She shakes her head almost imperceptibly, sadly. “I don’t envy them at all.” Then she pauses to put her arm through the other sleeve. “Or maybe I do.”
This is typical of the new Helen, leveling this at him, setting him off balance, then turning away, all innocence.
SHE’S LATE COMING HOME. Ephram is in bed, and now Donny is free to move from window to window, waiting for the headlights of a taxi to light up the formal dining room they never use. The violin exam will be the day after tomorrow and Ephram has been restless. After Ephram is finally asleep, Donny remembers that he forgot to go over the study and the scales with his son. He forgot about the monotonous part of practice, just as important as the flashy Corelli. He had been impatient with Ephram, and instead of slowing the tempo, he had insisted that a good night’s sleep would be better than practice. All the while wishing for the door to open and Helen to walk back into their lives. It feels as though she’s been gone for years.
Blood Secrets Page 13
