Fidelity

by Michael Redhill

  There was no other car parked beside the cottage, and there were very few lights on in the cottages nearby, so she imagined herself entirely alone with the place, that it was hers again. She stood on the dock and looked up at the brown shingled roof that sloped down over the broad windows, and she saw herself inside the cottage, looking out. Such a richness of days there—long days with their hours full—that it seemed a trick of time that her memories of it felt like they could be recounted in less than an hour.

  The water lapped up on the underside of the dock. All the life down there in the water, that she had taken such pleasure in as a child—the bright sunfish, the turtles anxious to escape a child’s hand, batting away with tiny clawed feet. She took in all the smells (pine and lakewater and rained-on soil, sunned rocks, snake skin, the sweet scent of arbor); she slept in the cottage’s beds and felt her way to the bathroom in the middle of the night, the palm of her hand brushing over the paper maps. She was seven, and ten, and fifteen, and then twenty-five here. She’d brought her first boyfriends here; her parents had trusted her with the keys. She’d shared ice creams and, later, bottles of wine on this very dock, this wood that had to know her better than anything that had come after. This was one place in the world where she belonged, even now, even though what it stood for, without any challenge from reality, had been long dispersed. This was the fate of all the things that stayed with you for too long. It was a form of good luck, this unnatural permanence, but it made the rest of life harder for you, getting used to the intemperate roil of ordinary change.

  She got back into her car and pointed it in the direction she’d come, driving in the deep darkness by instinct. It was almost eleven when she got back to town.

  THE WAITRESS took her coat from the hook under the counter and put it on. Rebecca had laid her money out, and when the woman picked it up said she didn’t need change. It was a good tip; the woman could have left some time ago if not for Rebecca nursing her coffee.

  She wondered if Kevin had gone into the cabin by now and found her missing. Or if the three of them had continued to open the bottles of wine that Robert kept under the cottage, and sat and talked, or looked at the photos they were all in. She realized that if Kevin knew she was missing, there would be some trouble when she got back. She’d have to explain this part of herself that she’d so far been able to keep apart from him. That he didn’t know her the way he thought he did said something about her, but something about them as well. She’d kept this realization from herself.

  “Joe still has to clean in the kitchen,” said the waitress. She was holding a small white beaded purse in her hand. “You can stay until he goes, if you like.”

  “Is his name really Joe?”

  “Everyone calls him that.”

  “But what’s his real name?” she asked.

  “It is Ming Kang. But I call him Joe as well.”

  “And your name?”

  “Betty. Mei Li.”

  Rebecca watched her go into the kitchen and talk a moment with Joe, who looked out into the dining room and saw Rebecca for the first time. He nodded and lifted a hand in greeting to her, and she waved back, abashed. It was time for her to go, but part of her wanted to wait long enough to make a confrontation with Kevin necessary. She could not bring herself to tell her own truths by choice. She wanted to be forced.

  Betty laughed at something Joe said, and then she leaned down to him and kissed him on the lips, one hand resting on his shoulder. Joe watched her go and then turned his placid face back to Rebecca. In her mind, she drew a checkmark. Mei Li, who is also called Betty, is the waitress and is married to Ming Kang, the cook, who is also called Joe.

  Now for the rest of it.

  The Flesh Collectors

  BY FORTY-EIGHT, ROTH HAD HAD HIS MIDLIFE CRISIS, FOUR children, and three wives, the last of whom was still interested in sex, but not in having babies, and who had developed a serious allergy to latex. It was bad enough that they were still using condoms at their ages (although, granted, Sybil was eight years younger than he and could still, theoretically, reproduce), but his wife had ruled out having any part of her body removed for the purposes of pleasure, since she believed, like most Jews, that it was crucial to go to the grave whole, or else when the Messiah came you might be walking around for eternity lacking a crucial component. A missing appendix was forgivable, and certainly anything that had to be shed for life-saving reasons was as well, just as it was not a sin to drink water on Yom Kippur if you had to take medication. “Doctor’s orders,” you’d hear someone saying in the synagogue hallway, pushing some capsule to the back of their throat and drinking long and deep from the fountain between the bathrooms.

  The pill was absolutely out as well for Sybil, not because it was forbidden, but rather because it was apt to make her behave like a drugged monkey. Roth had often argued that some discomfort in the service of a happy marriage was an obligation to a good husband or wife, but Sybil had turned this argument against him. This was why Roth was staring down the possibility that he would soon have to submit a tender part of himself to a surgeon’s knife. Such an operation would leave him whole—it was more a sundering than a deletion—and so, in the sense intended by the ancients, his options were considerably less fraught than hers.

  His GP, Arnold Gravesend, told him that vasectomies, in this day and age, were twenty-minute affairs and didn’t even have to be done by scalpel. Still, the prospect of having this part of his body interfered with made Roth woozy. He’d been delaying for months now, and Sybil was withholding connubially and building a wifely case against him. “I don’t feel like breaking out into a yeast infection every time, Nathan. We’re not newlyweds anymore. If you care about our marriage, you’ll do what you have to do.”

  In principle, Roth agreed. To his own thinking, condoms provided biblical loopholes for people who were otherwise happy to follow the laws. His rabbi, Stern of Beth Israel, said that condoms did not release their users from the burden of sin. It was still spilling semen in vain, said Rabbi Stern. The good Jewish couple knows when the woman is in season and takes advantage accordingly.

  Roth had relaxed his own strictures as he’d got older. With Adele, his first wife, he didn’t even sleep in the bed with her when she was in cycle (a holdover of custom from his orthodox upbringing, even though he considered himself conservative now), but after they’d divorced he decided to be more “humane,” as the therapist had put it to him, back when there was a chance to save the marriage. There was no sense in treating the person you loved as an opportunity not to sin if it meant hurting their feelings for one week out of every four. This was excellent advice, and his second marriage, to a dark-eyed beauty named Lila he’d met at a bazaar, would have lasted for life if she hadn’t died. “The Cancer,” Lila’s mother had called it, as if there had been only one cancer in the whole world and it struck her daughter. At the funeral, she’d keened over and over again, Why did we name her for the night? “Lila” was Hebrew for night, a time when Roth’s soul was always calm.

  Sybil was a North Toronto woman. Not exotic, and street-smart rather than book-smart, but for Roth, it was time to slow down anyway and lead a simpler life. Everything but his sexual urges, which frequently troubled him, had come to a better balance. He’d blown his relationships with his first two children, from Adele, but the last two, with Lila, were still growing up and hadn’t yet learned to view him as an old fool. (That he wasn’t old, not really, was of no consequence to the first two, to whom he’d been old since he was thirty.) As time went on, Roth seemed to fill with more love for his own children than he’d ever thought he could feel, and there was still a chance to hold Lila’s and his children in the goodness of this love. These two still lived with him, ten-year-old Mitchell and his younger sister Sarah. Roth was all they had of their mother. They treated Sybil like an intruder and took his side in everything.

  “Are you going to your doctor?” Sybil had asked at breakfast.

  “Are you sick, Daddy?�
��

  He was going to reply to his son, but Sybil turned her moisturized face toward the child and said, “There is nothing wrong with your father that can’t be fixed in ten minutes.”

  “Is this the snip-snip?”

  His sister, her spoon dripping with milk colored by her cereal, looked up with her eyes creased. “What’s the snip-snip?” she asked.

  “I’m perfectly healthy, you guys,” Roth said. “There’s nothing wrong with me. And we don’t use words like ‘snip-snip’ at the kitchen table.”

  “I can’t remember the real word,” said the boy.

  Sybil collected her and Roth’s plates and laid them in the sink. She didn’t do dishes. The girl did the dishes. Roth hated having a maid, especially one that didn’t live with them. It seemed to strip the position of any residual dignity it may have had, by forcing her to show up every morning to sweep through the house, and return every evening to whatever cramped squalor she no doubt lived in. “Vasectomy,” said Sybil. The word caused a metallic wave of energy to run down Roth’s spine, as if every bone in his body had been rubbed with aluminum foil.

  “What is that?” said Sarah with disgust.

  “It means Daddy won’t be able to make a baby anymore,” he said.

  “Why?”

  Sybil ruffled the little girl’s thin black hair. “Because step-mommy doesn’t want any kids.”

  “Oh,” said his daughter. He’d already told her and Mitchell how reproduction worked. Rabbi Stern said it was all right to be explicit with children, as long as they were aware that the mysteries of sex were more important than its mechanics. Always foreground the wonders of the great fabric of life, said Stern. Roth had sought his advice less and less in recent years. I’ve had divorce and death, he thought. It sounds like God’s already made up his vast mind about me.

  When he’d sat down to talk with the children, he did so without the aid of a book or pen and paper. He simply told them the raw facts. What happened in the man’s body, in the woman’s. How it actually worked, sex. And after. The baby, inside, growing. They were fascinated. This was when Lila was still alive. It was the four of them, inviolate. The children got used to the fact that their parents had touched in that way. It made them all magical.

  Now they considered that their father did much the same thing with their stepmother. Mitchell had some sense that it was not just for making children, and the snip-snip confirmed this. Their father wanted to stop having children for good, but he still wanted to put his penis inside their stepmother’s vagina. Something else must be going on, thought the boy, like a hidden level in a video game.

  Roth and Sybil got the children ready for the bus and saw them off up at the corner. She linked her arm in his. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “What for.”

  “This whole operation thing makes you uncomfortable, and I’m being pushy. Forgive me. If you do it, you’ll do it when you’re ready, and from now on, I’ll be schtum.”

  “Schtum and you have never been that close, Sybil. But thank you. I am going to do it, though. I will.”

  “I know you will,” she said, and she squeezed his arm tight to her body. “Then you can have me at the drop of a hat, Mr. Roth.”

  HE HAD to admit, there was an imperishable upside to the whole thing, and that was the thought of the entire garden of Sybil’s body, open at all hours. He’d always been able to admit to himself that where his relationships were concerned, lust had always been a factor. Even the dourest rabbis of history would have told you no man or woman marries for the mere sake of a likeness of mind or spirit. How else to make you “as numerous as the stars in the heavens”? Such a covenant could not be accomplished without giving men and women the benefit of appetites. Roth had never had it in short supply. For a man whose external life had been as dull as the need for money can make it (he operated a company called Storage Solutions), his true life, his inner life, was lush. With Adele it had perhaps been wasted a little: the impatience and artlessness of youth. But with Lila. They’d worn the hinges off each other. Unlike many of the women he’d known then, she didn’t care for the strictest of the laws, and she wore jeans and T-shirts. She dressed for comfort. Seeing her walking around the house in the uniform of the pagan world inflamed Roth terribly. He thought it was pathetic that something as banal as blue jeans could do this to him, but desire blossoms in forbidden soil. He imagined that the sight of the tip of a woman’s nose would have a similar effect on his Muslim brethren. As long as husband and wife could be kind to each other, the prohibited was the seedbed of passion.

  ROTH’S UNCERTAINTY about his options (he would never have used the word bewilderment) brought him to Beth Israel, to see Rabbi Stern. Roth had long since given up on making sense of the many laws that were to govern his life and his behavior. These things had been drummed into him as a child, which was part of the reason he had strayed, although straying from orthodoxy to conservativism was a deviation on the order of dark rye to light. In any case, much of what he once thought he knew was now so much clutter in his mind. Stern had admonished him about his confusion many times: Roth was dangerously close to leading an unguided—and therefore impious—life.

  Stern’s study at the temple was cluttered and dark. Only a fish tank that took up one whole wall provided a useful light. Going into the rabbi’s office was like descending into an underground exhibit, with its blue glow and its undulating creatures moving back and forth behind glass.

  “Sybil wants me to have a vasectomy,” said Roth once he’d sat down.

  “You have a problem with this?”

  “No, not really.” The rabbi unwrapped a candy and left the silvery paper on the tabletop. He waited for Roth. “My problem is that I’ve had three wives. How do I know this is the last one? What if I need—?”

  “What if you need your sperm?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mmm,” said Stern. “You love Sybil?”

  “Yes.”

  “So? Have a vasectomy. You’re almost fifty, Nathan; Sybil’s almost forty. It’s over for children.”

  Roth nodded. It wasn’t really about loving Sybil, though. It was about the future, and what it might want from him. What if, one day, it wanted him to start over, not as a husband, but as a father? What if he blew it this time too, with Mitchell and Sarah? “What if I want more children, though?” he said.

  The rabbi leaned forward. He regarded Roth as one would look into a cloudy puddle, to judge its depth. “What are you thinking, Nathan?”

  “I want to save some of my sperm. In case.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “Why?”

  Stern lifted his large hands off the table and let them drop back down. The noise startled Roth; they made a sound like two mallets. “Either you commit the sin of Onan, or you commit adultery—and not just a garden variety adultery, my friend—one you’re planning. This is like the same difference between first- and second-degree murder.”

  “I thought it was a mitzvah to have children, Rabbi. To repopulate the land.”

  Stern extended a hand toward Roth as if it held an offering. “Here, Nathan. You go to some place that will freeze your sperm, and if that sperm is not used to make a baby, then you’ve spilled it in vain. But”—and here he held out the other hand—“let’s say you intend to make a baby with that sperm. We already know it’s not going anywhere near Sybil. Correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, this sperm is intended for another woman. That’s your premeditated sin, Roth. This is not good.”

  Roth stood up then, irritated enough to raise his voice. “Look—”

  “—sit down,” said the rabbi.

  “Can’t you just advise me as a man? Either I do this thing that makes me a bad person, or I go crazy. You tell me.”

  “Don’t do it, Nathan,” said Stern. “It’s not for me to tell you to go flush your soul down the toilet so you can have your cake and eat it too.” He stared at Roth a moment, blinking. “You know wha
t I mean.”

  Sweat slicked Roth’s back. What had he thought the man was going to tell him, anyway? He shook the rabbi’s hand.

  “You’ve made up your mind?”

  “I don’t know,” said Roth.

  IS THERE much difference, Roth wondered, between a person who is interested in your money and one who is interested in your soul? Should you automatically assume that the second person is looking out for you? From his years of working in a retail environment, Roth was sure he knew a great many more fulfilled people among those who had placed their faith in business, rather than in God. Money had a reassuring finiteness to it; money didn’t get ambiguous or allegorical on you. And although he understood, abstractly, that money was a metaphor, it was still true that if something cost ten dollars and you had ten dollars, you could have it. It didn’t seem to work that way in the Kingdom of Heaven. The news from up there was that through hard work and application you could ruin your first marriage, but then you could have a second chance, and you could even have two more lovely children and do it right this time. But then you could lose it all over again. If you invested your soul at ten percent compounded over fifty years, you could still have nothing in the end.

  Roth knew that this talk was just some bitter kind of Hebraic stand-up routine that looped through the mind of anyone who’d lost something or someone important to them. It went all the way back to the Tribes of Israel in the desert outside of Egypt, when God said, Guess what? You’re not slaves no more. Congratulations. Oh, by the way, did I mention the desert? Forty years only, without nothing to eat except crackers and scorpions? I thought maybe I didn’t say the desert part. No doubt that when they finally got there—the Land of Milk and Honey—half got diarrhea from the milk, and the other half went into anaphylactic shock from the honey. No, blind faith was a bad thing, and perhaps the elders were just elders, a little confused from centuries of trying to figure out the worth of an oxen. Roth was smart to go it alone.