The Journey Prize Stories 27

by Various

So my husband said to me, “I wouldn’t mind getting laid.”

  “Your wish,” I said, putting my hand on his leg, “is my command.”

  Which ended up being a natural transition to my husband telling me that he meant he wanted to sleep with a man.

  There are pictures you have of people you love, a kind of X-ray that you think reveals their inner lives and shines it bright on the wall like a kabuki shadow puppet play. And then, when the curtain is pulled back and the puppets behind it look nothing like the images you had imagined, you’re forced to pick up the Lego blocks of reality and rebuild them in a manner you can live with.

  He saw my expression and let the joint fall out of his mouth. It landed on the shawl and sparked until we both frantically patted it out. Our hands met a few times, violent with slapping sounds. Once we’d beaten the joint into a stubbly mess, I took out a spare I’d rolled in case the first one suffered a premature death.

  I handed him the replacement joint and asked him, the way you’d talk to someone hard of hearing, “Repeat what you just said.”

  “What did I just say?”

  “That you want to sleep with a man. Is that what you said? Did I hear you right?”

  He frowned. “I thought you knew.”

  Did I know? I might have known. There were signs. Then again, if you told me my husband had been a closet uni-bomber, I could have found signs supporting that claim as well. He was anti-social sometimes. He was the only person I knew who liked licking the glue on envelopes. If I’m not mistaken, the uni-bomber liked doing that, too.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m stoned. Very, irredeemably stoned.”

  I considered the joint. It still lit up his face like the wet sunset thing. “Did you ever find me attractive?”

  He stopped to think and he did so in a way that I found terribly honest, as if I’d just put him in charge of ending all the genocides going on around the world and he had to confront the way that we as Westerners fit into that sort of thing. “I do find you attractive,” he said finally. “Kind of the way you can tell a piece of art is beautiful without actually, you know, necessarily wanting to sleep with it.”

  “So that’s it, then,” I said to him. “You want me to seek out a male partner who can be with you in ways I can’t.”

  Had you given me a card and asked me to briefly describe what intercourse looked and felt like, I would’ve said, “Earnest and Fairly Fulfilling.” Past lovers had been more passionate, more acutely attuned to the power of friction on the clusters of nerve in the sexual parts of my body. But my husband did his best, and his best manifested itself nearly every time we slept together, which amounted to twice a week. Children hadn’t been possible on account of my uterus. According to the doctor, it had the warped shape of one of Dali’s clocks. A part of me felt ashamed that I couldn’t give him children and assumed my infertility accounted for our subpar sex life. I explained that to him.

  “Fuck my disfigured uterus,” I said.

  My husband sighed. “When have I ever talked about having kids?”

  “When have you ever talked about putting a penis inside your mouth?”

  Digging himself deeper into his shawl, my husband conceded that it was a good point.

  The man I was considering had dark hair, very short with a swoop of bangs. In the picture my co-worker Hattie showed me, he almost looked like a woman. He modelled for a hair product company, she told me. You wouldn’t call him handsome or beautiful. More like striking. Hattie described him this way: “Looking at him in person makes you feel like you’ve been hit by something very sharp.”

  “And this is a good thing?”

  “This is a good thing.”

  Hattie was the only one so far who had agreed to help me find a man for my husband. Most people said very bad things to me about the status of our marriage. These were the kinds of people who exchanged crystal swans and called it love, while simultaneously thinking up elaborate ways to inflict harm on one another. My mother believed in traditional marriage norms, even when one-half of the marriage was dying of cancer, as my husband was.

  “What you’re doing will crush you,” she said.

  “I’m already being crushed,” I said, referring to the cancer and the crushing weight of its metastasization.

  “But this one will crush you more,” my mother said.

  When I told him about the conversation, my husband said, “Maybe she’s right,” and that was the only time since he got cancer that I couldn’t stand him.

  I’d tried some other things before deciding to find him a man to sleep with. For a week I bound my breasts with tensor bandages left over from the time I sprained my ankle. Little hairs sprouted on my legs and under my arms, and I stopped waxing the fine thin line of down that stretched thin as dental floss just above my upper lip. I even bought a wig. Wearing it transformed me into one of the Beatles. When I tried it on and approached my husband and said in my deepest voice, “You need your plumbing fixed?” he blinked twice. Only one blink would have done.

  You wonder: What kind of man should my husband sleep with? I thought of me, but as a man, and realized maybe that was the point, that he wanted a “not me.” Which in some lights, might seem horrible. In the light I chose, it meant that his attraction to men could only be an inversion of his attraction, or lack thereof, to me, such that in loving men, according to some curious physics, he was also loving me, too.

  —

  The plan was for Alex and Hattie to show up to our apartment in tandem. From there, Hattie and I would gradually fade away as my husband and Alex interacted. My husband was having one of his good nights, and even though I don’t believe in God, I thanked Him or Her or It for small graces. I’d preemptively gotten the bed ready, washing the sheets so when the time came things would be in place. Pillows were fluffed. Scented candles and condoms placed at convenient locations throughout the room. Anticipating a night on the couch, I made sure to have an old sleeping bag curled up behind our television set in the living room, ready for retrieval.

  Things started poorly when Alex showed up minus Hattie. “Food poisoning,” he said apologetically. He handed over a bottle of shiraz. “I wasn’t going to come, but she made me promise I would anyway.”

  “And a good thing you did,” I said, modulating my voice to sound cheery and absolutely comfortable with Alex’s presence. I took his coat and called my husband over. “Would be a shame for all the food I made to go to waste.”

  My husband introduced himself. I searched his face for evidence of enchantment. They shook hands and I tried to determine the nature of that handshake. Was it gentle and sensual? Firm and flirty? Thirty pounds lighter than he usually was, my husband practically swam in his collared shirt. His pants didn’t fit him well, but he smelled nice and I’d shaved him, so his face had the glow of a nice stone zapped by a laser beam.

  “I was just thinking,” I said, engaging in damage control by leading them to the kitchen, “that you two could talk. It’s my understanding that you’ve been out of the closet for a long time. My husband here could probably use a few pointers.”

  “Jesus Christ,” my husband sighed. He touched his temple. To Alex he said, “You’ll have to excuse her,” which I took to be a good sign, since it implied collusion on their part, a gendered taking of sides.

  I’d prepared a dinner of salmon and coleslaw and mashed potatoes, knowing my husband could get portions of each down. Their talk amounted to a lot of polite, empty banter. Hattie had simply told Alex that my husband recently came out, on account of an unspecified illness that was not, Hattie made sure to make clear, HIV. Since he didn’t know he was on a date, being test-driven by both of us (or just me—I later learned that my husband thought I was joking about setting him up with men), Alex didn’t pick up a lot of the cues a person on a date would normally pick up on. Twice I encouraged my husband to compliment him. Twice my compliments evaporated into the ether.

  Occasionally I tried to raise the stakes by introducing sex
uality into the conversation. “What’s your favourite sexual position?” I said. “How do you feel about pornography?”

  “I don’t watch it much,” Alex said, eyes lowered to the food on his plate.

  “Us neither,” I said, though I added that my husband might, since prior to this point, it was probably the only way he’d been able to experience gay sex.

  I waited for Alex’s good looks to stab my husband’s heart sharply the way Hattie said. My husband asked me to help him to the washroom. I wasn’t sure I wanted to leave Alex alone in the kitchen, where he might steal the nice forks and knives my grandmother left me when she died. It turned out my husband didn’t need my help. He squeezed my upper arm until it ached. “You can’t do what you’re doing, Abby.”

  “What am I doing?”

  “You can’t force someone to want to have sex with me.”

  “Pardon me for thinking that the rest of the world would find you as pretty as I find you.”

  “It’s not that.” He let go of me and looked into his hands. “I shouldn’t have said what I said to you. It wasn’t fair.”

  I took a deep breath. “How many times have I done something very bad and you forgave me?” I said, touching his face up near the sideburns, where his skin was slightly more pale. “You’ve got cancer. If that’s not grounds for getting something you want, I don’t know what is.”

  My mother had actually been the one to put it in my head that a man could smell when a woman couldn’t give birth. Despite having only one child, she thought of herself as kind of like that stone Venus from Willendorf, hips rounded with fertility. In her mind, all roads to motherhood and relationships led to her.

  Even though it was ten at night, long past her bed time, we rang my mother up. My husband and my mother never got along, but only because he hated her because she acted like she hated me. Who knows, maybe she did hate me. We lit another one of the joints. My husband dialled since, after a few hits, I couldn’t translate the symbols on the phone’s dial pad. He handed me the phone. We were in the outer space of marijuana intoxication.

  As the phone rang, I could picture my mother taking off the stupid little mask she wore to bed. I could picture her hair coiled around pink plastic cylinders that made bunches of follicles curl.

  “He’s a homosexual,” I said when she answered.

  “Who is this?”

  “Gay. Flaming. So the thing you said about me being a defective woman? Stuff it.”

  She recognized my voice and said, “I know he’s a homosexual. Are you all right? Do you need me to come over?”

  Slamming the phone down, I reached for the remains of the joint and lit it.

  “That must have felt nice,” my husband said, coming up behind me and rubbing my shoulders with weak, skeletal hands. I turned in my chair and buried my face into his stomach.

  “Screw you for dying,” I said. His fingers made electricity behind my ears.

  “I’m not dead yet,” he said. It occurred to me that what he’d said was true.

  Hattie called me up and said that I’d probably be fired from work, since I hadn’t called in to explain my absence. It wasn’t a particularly meaningful job—I worked at a non-profit organizing fundraising events, only I knew the non-profit was covertly for-profit, so its success or failure didn’t faze me.

  “I say we fight the bullshit,” Hattie said. “If they fire you, I know a friend of a friend who’s a workplace rights lawyer. We’d gut them real quick.”

  I said I didn’t care. We went for lunch and she asked how my terminally ill husband was doing.

  “Mostly like shit. He can barely walk, but he puts up a good front.” That morning, he puked on the floor of the bathroom and passed out in it. How he had anything to throw up was beyond me. Without him knowing, I’d been keeping a diary of his food and fluid intake and found that in the last three days he’d consumed the equivalent of a two-inch cube of cheese, three thumbs of orange juice, and a soggy bowl of cereal.

  “I was always jealous,” Hattie said. She picked out a leaf of spinach. “You two always had this thing. I can’t explain it.”

  For the last three years, she’d been on a series of hopeless first and second dates that ended short of her expectations. As far as I could tell, she had a lot of sex but felt an emptiness in her gut when she wasn’t in love with someone.

  “It’s too bad he wasn’t looking for another woman.” She swallowed the spinach leaf and pursed her eyebrows. “Sorry. I’m a shit.”

  “No arguments here.”

  I watched as she took the water carafe at the centre of the table and filled up both our glasses. “Have you found a guy for him?”

  Stabbing at my own salad, I answered, “Negatory.”

  Since the awkward dinner with Alex, I tried to set up one more date, this time with a nice, clearly homosexual man I met at the grocery store. But the man had a boyfriend, and besides, my husband said he wasn’t thinking about screwing men. Jokingly, he said that he wanted to keep his soul pure so that he could gain access to the kingdom of heaven.

  “Don’t be an asshole,” I said, picking up one of the pillows we’d designated as a surrogate for him and punching it.

  “Oof.” He doubled over, as if I’d just thumped a voodoo doll of him. “Uppercut to the kidneys.”

  One day, when he didn’t seem to be dying as much, he took me by the wrist while I was skinning potatoes and brought me to the living room. He was sleeping in there now. Going upstairs took too much out of him. There were scented candles that he lit with as much grace as he could muster and erotic movies with titles like Love in 49 Positions and Having Sex in the City. I don’t know how he set it all up without me noticing. The couch was pulled out and neatly made, with condoms on a nearby table. My husband took my face and kissed it, transferring an explosion of mint toothpaste into my mouth. The taste went straight inside my body, into my veins. I stepped back slowly, the way they say you should when dealing with angry bears, and said, “What’s going on?”

  “I want to have sex with you.” He started unbuttoning my blouse. I was still holding the potato peeler.

  “You can’t just tell me you’re gay and then ask to have sex with me.”

  “But I’m dying.” This had been our mantra, our reason for doing things like decorating our bedroom with old Mad Magazine covers and buying a fish just because neither of us had ever owned one before. “Aren’t I allowed to ask for what I want?”

  “You don’t want this.”

  “How do you know?”

  What should a wife do when she has to argue against her husband and herself? He put his hands under my shirt and said he liked how small my breasts were. I told him I liked how small his penis was and he got that it was a joke right away. I asked him if he wanted me to wear a baseball cap to make me more masculine, if he wanted me to use a tensor bandage to keep my breasts clamped down. “Do you want me to try to be Ringo again?”

  “No, I want to have sex with you.” His pants came off. I joined him under the covers. “Give me a minute,” he said, his hands disappearing below his waist. He started trying to get hard. A glaze of sweat formed on his face. “Almost there,” he said.

  “Let’s just sit here a minute and breathe,” I said. At first my husband positioned the parts of his face—nose, eyes, eyebrows—in a scene of frustration. Then he relaxed and after a while, our breathing synchronized without either of us noticing. Kissing him on the forehead, I took the potato peeler back to the kitchen and ran the blade against the vegetable’s ruddy skin.

  A lot of animals go off on their own when they’re about to die. When I was eight, our spaniel dug a hole for herself under the house and burrowed there. We found her later that week, serene in her little grave. Apparently elephants do that too. Apparently so do husbands.

  I brought his breakfast into the living room on a tray. Usually he drank the milkshake I made and picked a bit at other things. This time he looked at me and said, “I want you to go back to work.”r />
  “And I want a golden toilet. Sometimes we don’t get what we want.”

  “I mean it. At least to talk to them about you coming back when things escalate to the point where they can’t escalate anymore.”

  The way he said escalate made me think of moving stairs, of my beautiful gay husband standing on an escalator and slowly going to heaven. It was an unnecessary, melancholy thought. “It doesn’t matter if I don’t go back. I’ll find another job.” In fact, head hunters sometimes called the house, so we both knew that was the case. In the end, I told him I’d go. “But only because I need to pick up some more pot on the way.”

  As usual, the signs were there. Before digging her own grave, our spaniel seemed unusually calm. Everything she did felt premeditated. On my way out, my husband slapped my ass and told me he loved me. Is it perverse to associate the words I love you with entombing? The playful gesture of ass-slapping with sinking submarines filled with men forced to accept their watery fate?

  At work, my superior, Vargo, told me a joke. “What’s worse than a paper cut?”

  “A lot of things.”

  “Don’t ruin it,” Vargo said, and he repeated, “What’s worse than a paper cut?”

  “I don’t know, Vargo. What?”

  “The Holocaust.” His head tilted back, mouth opening like a Pez dispenser. “Isn’t that bad? I think it’s so bad. Bad, bad, bad.” Because I felt sorry for Vargo, I laughed too. He told me that I could come back to work whenever. He asked about my husband and touched my arm and I remembered that Vargo tried to sleep with me when I first started working at the non-profit.

  On the way out, Hattie made her hand into a phone and mouthed the words, “Call me.”

  While I was listening to Vargo’s joke, my husband collapsed on the front porch. I sorted out the timing and the exact second Vargo assaulted me with his tasteless punchline, our neighbour was calling an ambulance. And somewhere on the coast of Brazil, a butterfly flapping its wings had caused all of this.

  My husband was still in his bathrobe when I got to the hospital. The nurse at the triage said he’d been acting delirious. He saw me and apologized six or eight times. “I told them not to take me. I even tried to fight back. It’s going to be expensive.” A ludicrous sight that must have been, that bath-robed husband of mine, warding away the rescue attempts with darting punches, a beetle on its carapace.