by Alix Ohlin
He started to cry, pulling his hair with both hands. Sobbing, choking on his snot, he curled into a ball next to the rink and tried to huddle there for warmth. Probably he would have spent the night there, but one of the hockey fathers came up to him and said he had to leave, that he was scaring the children.
This was the end of one part of his life. Afterward, he was calmer. He stopped drinking so much. He went to work, came home, was well behaved.
But he still wasn’t sleeping, and he spent his nights on the couch, hollow-eyed, watching TV with headphones on, so as not to keep Marcie up. They went out to dinner with friends and he would sit quietly at the table, a pleasant smile on his face, rarely saying anything at all. He was like a well-trained dog, patiently attending his master, observing human behavior that had nothing to do with him. Many of these people complimented him on how well he was doing, and he couldn’t tell if this was sarcastic, encouraging, or ripe with condescension, like telling a child how good he is at checkers. After a while he understood all they meant was that compared to the alcoholic rages, the quiet calm looked more like normalcy, and perhaps this was enough. So he tried to adopt the contours of a regular life, molding himself to it as if his personality were made of clay.
He got a promotion at the stationery store, to evening supervisor, and his hours changed. By the time he left, the parks were quiet and there were no boys to remind him of Yozefu.
Christmas came, then went.
In January there was an ice storm, and the store lost its electricity. He called the manager, who told him to close up early and go home, so he walked home with the sting of sleet against his face. The city was stippled with light and dark, some buildings still sparkling, others black, a pattern of blankness and power.
When he got home, the lights were off, and Marcie was startled to see him. He explained what happened, and she burst into tears.
“It’s just a storm,” he said, puzzled. “The electricity will come back on.”
She was sitting on the living-room couch, and candles flickered on the coffee table in front of her. There were two glasses of wine there, sedimented with red.
“I’m sorry,” she said, now crying hard.
He had no idea what she was talking about. “It’s okay,” he said.
“No it’s not,” she said. She was curling into herself, her head down. “I know I should be more patient, but I just needed somebody. I’ve been so lonely. I’m so alone.”
Tug had trouble focusing his attention on the scene before him, this woman and her tears. With some difficulty he realized she was still talking.
“I guess you want to know who it is,” she was saying. “It’s Jake. I know, I know, it’s terrible, but he and Joanne are having trouble and he and I were just, well, comforting each other, I guess. That old story.”
“Who’s Jake?” Tug said.
Marcie raised her head, tucked her blond hair behind her ears, and drew a deep breath. When she spoke, her tone was acidic. “Jake and Joanne Herschfeld,” she said, very slowly, “are our friends. We had dinner with them last weekend.”
“Oh,” he said. “Right.”
“You’re not even here,” she said. Then the anger passed and she started sobbing again. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m messing them up, I’m messing us up. I should be supporting you. I’m evil, I’m terrible, I’m the worst.”
Feeling sorry for her, he put his hand on her knee. (She told him later that it was the first time he had touched her in months.) He wanted to say something to make her feel better. He looked down at his fingers and thought of a child running through the streets carrying his own severed hand in the one he still had.
“This,” he said, looking at her. “This is nothing.”
By the time the power came back on she was living with her parents. Over the next week she emptied the apartment of her possessions, and was gone.
Should he have felt sad? Probably; but he didn’t. He was enormously relieved. And best of all, he was freed from the obligation to think about the future, in which he no longer had any interest. He was released.
Of that day on the mountain he wouldn’t say much, only that the idea of not having to sit in front of the television at three a.m. waiting for the night to end, of not having to pretend to be happy for the sake of other people, was perilously tempting. It was luxurious, almost a reward. He never said that he wanted to die.
He did say, “I wish I’d stayed in Africa.”
When Grace thanked him for telling her all this, he shrugged. “You can tell people your story,” he said, “or any terrible story, and it doesn’t make any difference. Things just keep happening, over and over again.”
NINE
Montreal, 1996
AFTER SHE LEARNED the truth about Tug, Grace thought everything would be different; it seemed as though she had broken through a barrier and found herself in Tug’s own country, closer to the heart of things. Tug himself acted differently—glad that he’d told her, glad that she’d understood why he hadn’t wanted to talk about it earlier. Reliving it was something he had already done, and now he wanted to move beyond it and live somewhere else.
“I’m not that person anymore,” he said. “I need to get used to life in the comfortable nations.”
“Comfortable nations?” Grace asked.
“I heard an aid worker say that once. He said the hardest part wasn’t being over there but coming back. Supermarkets. Cars everywhere. Too many choices. That kind of thing.”
“It’s not that bad to have supermarkets and choices, is it?”
“No,” he said, “it isn’t.”
In this comfortable nation, it was a cold spring. Grace and Tug went skiing every chance they could. She loved seeing him up ahead of her, striding hard, his shoulders broad against the gray sky; sometimes he would turn around to see where she was, and she loved that he checked.
They spent their weekends together, except for Tug’s Saturday shift at the stationery store. They went to movies or, more often, stayed at Grace’s place and cooked. While the stews simmered or the meat roasted, they read or napped or talked. He asked her tons of questions, and she asked as many in return. Now there was no limit to their conversation. He wanted to know everything about her childhood, her family, her life with Mitch; she even told him about Kevin and the child she’d chosen not to keep. She heard all about his adolescence, his first girlfriend, his family’s summer house in Muskoka, his sister in Toronto and her two spoiled children.
Tug seemed fine most of the time, but occasionally he erupted into fits of anger over things she considered trivial. He couldn’t sit through a movie he found stupid and would retreat to the lobby and pace there, while the ushers looked at him worriedly. Gradually she understood that he often didn’t sleep, because his mind was at a simmering boil, his muscles clenched with its heat. He brought the same explosiveness to bed, covering her body with his, kissing her neck, her shoulders, and everywhere else, murmuring in her ear. Afterward, as they held each other, he gave off so much warmth that his chest grew slippery with sweat.
This didn’t trouble Grace all that much, and he did seem to be getting better. What did bother her was that he didn’t want to hear about her patients. He never once asked about her sessions, and when she offered anecdotes he would change the subject as quickly and politely as he could, visibly shutting down. But she came to understand that he’d been through enough trauma and didn’t need to be reminded of how much of it surrounded him. In a way it was also good for her, because it enabled her to draw a firm line between work and home. Work ended the second she left the office, and by not speaking to him about it, she found she thought about it less. During the day she concentrated on her patients, clear-minded, sharp with perspective, then later she focused on Tug.
When she made him laugh, the pulse of satisfaction was so powerful it was almost physical. Getting to know him, to understand the depths of him, felt like her vocation, a task set to her specific parame
ters. He was difficult, and the terms of their relationship complicated, yet being with him was somehow perfect. She’d been waiting to feel like this for years.
One Sunday they had planned to go shopping. She needed a new coffeemaker and a few other kitchen things, and wanted to take him to a store she liked in Little Italy. They were apart the night before; Tug had explained that he didn’t feel well and wanted to go to bed early. In the morning he didn’t come over, which was unlike him; she had never once known him not to show up where and when he said he would. And he didn’t answer the phone.
Thinking he might’ve come down with something, she drove over to his apartment and rang the bell. The lights were off, and she heard nothing inside. He hadn’t given her a key. But when she turned the handle, the door was unlocked. She walked in and said, “Tug?”
They spent almost all their time at her place, and she’d been here very little since the first weeks they’d known each other. Not much had changed. It was still very neat: no dust, no disarray, not even any mail. Wondering where he put everything, she called his name again.
Getting no response, she climbed the stairs. The apartment was so quiet that she thought he must be out. She walked into his bedroom, and stopped short.
He was lying on the bed, on top of the covers, staring up at the ceiling, his mouth open. His lips were rimmed with white flecks. Then she was on top of him, shaking him, her hands gripping his shirtsleeves, her own heart flopping and seizing, and she said, “What did you take, Tug? What did you take?”
He seemed to be looking at her through the wrong end of a telescope, and it took him a full minute to resolve her into something he recognized. “I didn’t take anything,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
Kneeling next to him on the bed, she wanted to wipe away the flecks from his mouth—spittle, she realized, from the hours he’d been lying there—but she could sense, as if there were an actual barricade, how little he wanted to be touched.
“We were supposed to go out,” she said softly. “Did you forget?”
“Oh.” He looked up back up at the ceiling, then at her. “I’m sorry,” he said, the words sounding hollow, void of content or color.
“Hey,” she said. “Talk to me. Are you okay?”
He swallowed. “A little sick, I guess.”
“Let me get you something,” she said, touching his hand as lightly as she could, knowing he wasn’t physically sick. “Water?”
He nodded. She left the room to fetch it, shaken by the look in his eyes. It wasn’t sadness or numbness, regret or remorse. He knew she wanted to take care of him, and he was looking at her with pity.
When she came back with the glass, though, he was sitting propped up on pillows like an actual invalid. As he drank she opened the curtains, letting the watery March day filter into the room with a lusterless, cloudy, blue-gray light.
He had licked his lips and his mouth was clear. “I’m sorry,” he said again.
“You don’t have to apologize to me,” she said.
“I felt bad last night, and I couldn’t sleep. And then the hours just kind of blended together. I lost track of things.”
“I figured it was something like that.”
There were things she could have said, but she didn’t because she knew he had heard them before. She herself had said them. So instead she sat with him silently, and after a while the clouds seemed to clear and the light grew a little less pale.
Afterward, they didn’t talk about it much.
Tug had gotten up and taken a shower, and they went off to Little Italy. At first he acted vague, distant, like a child who’d just woken from a nap and was still half submerged in the dream world. But soon he was helping her pick out the coffeemaker, and bought her a set of espresso cups, and by the time they were having lunch he was back to his normal self—asking questions, making her laugh. They went back to her place and went to bed, and it was like the conversation they should have had: tentative, then opening, finally finding their rhythm together. For the rest of the day it was as if nothing strange had ever happened.
But the incident had rattled her. She caught herself staring at him, wondering what had set it off. A child he’d seen in the street? A call from his ex-wife? She wanted to ask, but also not to, because she hoped that not asking would bring him to her of his own volition. Whenever he saw her looking at him quizzically, he would shake his head—knowing exactly what she was thinking, and asking her to let it go.
But she couldn’t. Two days later, they were making dinner when she poured him a glass of wine and said, “Can we talk about it?”
“Of course we can,” he said, in a tone that implied just the opposite. He was looking down at a clove of garlic, slicing it carefully. “What do you want to know?”
“Anything,” she said. “Does it happen often?”
“Does what happen often?”
“You know what I mean.”
He sighed heavily and wiped his forehead with the knife still clutched in his hand, seeming more irritated than anything else. “No,” he said, “not often.” Then he grabbed a tomato and started chopping it, round pieces collapsing into their own juice on the plastic board.
“So was it something I said?”
She had meant this as a joke but he flared with annoyance. “Yes, Grace, it was something you said. It was how you ask questions in that special therapist voice that’s supposed to make people tell you everything.”
Take a minute, she told herself. Breathe. She slowly poured herself a glass of wine, watching the liquid rise up in the crystal, a small dark sea. “Why does it upset you so much for me to ask questions?” she said.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. If you don’t know, then I can’t tell you.”
“Yes, you can,” she said softly. “You just don’t want to.”
“You’re right,” Tug said. “I don’t want to talk to you at all.” He put down the knife and walked out of the kitchen and out of the apartment.
Grace stood there with the half-chopped food, the still-full glasses. Nothing like this had ever happened to her before. Even in their darkest hours—especially then—she and Mitch had never stalked out of a conversation before it was finished. However estranged they had been, or angry, or terribly sad, they had remained almost maddeningly communicative. And since then she hadn’t really gotten to know anybody well enough to feel stricken by an argument, or by a departure, the way she did now.
She felt bereft. She put the food away in plastic containers, drank the wine, and went to bed without eating. She lay there on her back, adopting Tug’s favorite position, as if by imitating him physically she could enter his mental space too. But of course he was still far away, and she only felt more alone.
At midnight the buzzer rang. When she opened the door, his coat was wet from freezing rain, his curls dark and damp, his eyes exhausted.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She would have carried him inside if she could have. Instead she opened the door wider and stepped back. He walked toward the bedroom, shedding his coat and sweater, rubbing his wet curly hair, explaining that he was testy and tired, that he’d be able to talk about it later but just couldn’t right now, and he led her by this trail of words to the bed and they crawled in together. She could feel his pulse racing like a frantic animal’s. He kissed her hair.
He looked tired in the morning, his creases and wrinkles pronounced, his cheeks ruddy. Even his hands were rough and scaly. He had been weathered by the world. She wanted to pour all the energy she had into him, to siphon it into his bloodstream and organs, to blow the air from her lungs into his.
They lay in bed holding each other, Tug’s chest to her back, and she was crying. She didn’t want to be, but she was, her face resting on his elbow, the hair on his arm scratchy against her skin.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Please don’t cry.”
She nodded, though she could hardly move her head, he was holding her so tightly. “You need a doctor,”
she said. “The right medication … ”
“You’re going to be late for work,” he said softly, kissing her cheek. “Don’t worry. I’ll be fine. Just being with you helps a lot.”
A few weeks passed and Tug seemed better. He began talking more about his time in Rwanda, the other aid workers, the rolling landscape, the people. He talked about Marcie, too, how he had failed her every time they were together, yet didn’t want to stop failing—because failure was where he lived now, it was his comfortable new home. Stories would come to him at inconvenient, even bizarre times. Once they were in the supermarket, and he turned to her at the butcher counter and told her about a man he’d seen by the side of the road, his body dotted with open sores, flies perched on him, waiting for him to hurry up and die. Grace stood there listening and nodding until he said, “Anyway,” and he was done. He turned to the butcher and bought their rack of lamb and only when they walked away did she notice the looks other customers were giving them, wary and aghast.
Another time they had dinner with her friends Azra and Mike at a Portuguese restaurant on Duluth. The first half of the meal was fine. They drank two bottles of wine and made small talk about the food, the cold weather, Azra’s job. Grace’s oldest friend, since high school, she had a dental practice in Côte St.-Luc and always joked that the two of them should set up an office together, a suite where they could each have an office and hang out together between appointments.
“I’ll drill the teeth and you drill the minds,” she said, laughing, as the dessert came.
“You’re drunk,” Mike said affectionately.
“What do you think, Tug?” Azra said.
He didn’t answer, and Grace glanced at him. His cheeks were red, his forehead sweaty. She put her hand on his leg, but she could tell it didn’t soothe him, that he didn’t even register it was there.
“I think it’s a pile of crap,” he said.
