You’re paying for it with all of those dinners and concert tickets, she says.
And is it worth it?
She’s annoyed to find she has teared up. She didn’t mean to. She doesn’t want him to think he has hurt her feelings. She’s not hurt, only — she’s feeling something she can’t name, something that feels like hot froth inside her throat. Anger, anger, she thinks. But she’s curious: Where does it come from?
He has put his hand on her upper knee, or lower thigh, but now he pulls the car over, gives her his full attention.
Spit it out.
It’s a kind of rejection.
Not of you.
Maybe. You don’t know me well enough to know that.
You’re absolutely right, he says.
A couple of moments’ pause.
But you’re not going to change, are you?
He says, Mandalay, I really like you. I really, really like your company. I don’t want to go down the conventional relationship road. I’ve experienced it and it isn’t for me. I don’t want why didn’t you pick dog food up on your way home and can’t tell her I’ve never liked asparagus in case it hurts her feelings and we need to go to Home Depot this weekend and pick out a light fixture for the bathroom and why weren’t you home at seven like you said you’d be. I don’t want it. I won’t do it. It’s important that you understand that I’m telling you the truth.
Quality of experience.
She’s so angry. But she gets it. She does understand what he’s saying. And it’s not so different than anything she’s thought of herself. She’s always said she didn’t want a conventional relationship, marriage, two kids, house in the suburb, Christmas with the in-laws. She’s always thought that. The things he’s rejecting are not things she needs.
Whatever is making her angry is something else.
And then suddenly, all she’s thinking of is that she needs to save face.
Goddammit, Duane, she says. You don’t know how much you’re missing out on, giving up listening to my brother-in-law talk about third party withholdings.
He laughs. That’s actually something I know about, he says. It’s actually something that has some interest for me in corporate law.
Really?
No, he says. It’s boring as hell.
She laughs, as he meant her to. She doesn’t know why she teared up. She still feels shaky, not in control. It’s not how she wants it to be, between them. She is not this woman who cries because she is afraid of rejection, or because she doesn’t get her own way.
She has imagined introducing Duane to Cleo and Trent. Has thought: They are part of his world; he’ll see more of who I am, if he meets them. Now she’s ashamed of that fantasy, as if she’s been contemplating some sort of deception, a masquerade or some kind of exchange to gain some cachet, with either Cleo or Duane.
But still. It doesn’t feel right, not to ever mention Cleo, or her kids, or sweet dopey Cliff, with his nature-show obsession, his cat. Or, especially, Bodhi, come back miraculously into her life. Especially Bodhi, who has reminded her of something, who has opened the door to something she had long given up on. Though she can’t name it; she can’t quite articulate it, it’s there, a kind of empathy and openness that seems to have no place in her relationship with Duane.
You okay now? Duane asks, after a moment.
What can she say? They are pulled over beside a highway; there is a bridge ahead of them. She is wearing a new dress, a dark slippery shimmer of a dress. She wants to see this art show; it’s important.
Sure, she says, and waits for the car to slip back into the stream of northbound traffic.
DUANE SAYS: You’ve gone shopping.
Maybe, she says. Is it permitted?
They’re walking in Yaletown, en route to dinner. He bumps her a little with his hip. He hasn’t done that before.
You look very elegant, he says.
She is lying by omission, perhaps. But she can hardly say, I had nothing to wear, and I just spent an entire month’s disposable income on new outfits.
He says, carefully, Women seem to need more changes of clothes than men do. I never thought about it before, but I imagine having any kind of social or work life requires a certain level of — sartorial expense.
Is he implying that she has been spending too much, or too little? He doesn’t continue until they’re seated in the restaurant, with drinks. Then he says, I’d really enjoy it if you let me treat you to some — feathers and furbelows — once in a while. He seems odd, formal.
I can afford to buy my own clothes, she says.
He just nods.
Unless, of course, you think I have really bad taste.
I think you look beautiful and elegant, he says.
Do you want to go shopping with me?
No, he says. Not my thing. Sitting in a shop waiting while women try clothes on. Sorry.
Okay, she says.
Look, he says, let’s not beat around the bush. I know you probably don’t have the kind of clothes women tend to wear out to decent restaurants and concerts and so on. I’m just realizing that it’s probably a big expense. As you’re going out to places I choose, I’m offering to subsidize you.
You’re offering to buy me clothes to wear when you take me out for dinners or concerts.
Something like that.
But you’re already paying for everything.
I have told you, it doesn’t make any difference to me.
She’s tempted. And thinks: If he buys me so much as a pair of socks, I’ll have lost my autonomy. My dignity.
And yet she does not know why this should be true.
SHE SLEEPS OVER only occasionally: once a week. Usually one of them has to work early the next day. They end up at his place more often, but he usually drives her home quite early, around ten. Sometimes, if he seems really tired, she takes a cab. She doesn’t mind: It makes her feel autonomous, sophisticated, a little dangerous, even. Like someone in a movie.
If there were any movies about women who were independent and self-reliant, who didn’t end up raped and/or murdered, or turn out to be serial killers.
He apologizes sometimes: not for her having to leave, exactly, but for her having come to his place and then to leave. He says: We both need to wake up in our own space.
You could come to my place, she says.
I do.
Not very often.
Your bed isn’t very comfortable.
It’s true. She still has the double-sized pine slat-and-futon bed that she bought with one of her first paycheques, back in her twenties. She’s used to it, but she has to admit his bed is of a different species entirely.
At first she assumes he’ll ask her to move in one day. Or more likely, that they’ll get a bigger place, together.
They don’t have this conversation, but she’s old enough and experienced enough to know that Duane’s personal space is really important to him. She has known one or two men like this: They don’t invite women into their space casually. They don’t do sleepovers. They like their space, their routines. No slippery slope of leaving a toothbrush and then a change of clothes, a yoga mat, one’s own brand of yogurt in the fridge. Women, too. Cleo was like that. When she had her own apartment, Mandalay had crashed there a few times, but Cleo always rounded up Mandalay’s things, before she went off to her classes, put them in ziplock bags, handed them to Mandalay.
Of course it’s logical. The irritation of some men she’d spent weekends with, picking up her stuff, or complaining about it. It makes sense, it does. It’s just that she’s never before been in a longer term relationship that hasn’t progressed to the point of one of them moving in with the other. It seems just the way things are meant to go. Romantic relationships progress or die, don’t they?
IT HAS NEVER OCCURRED to her before to wonder what a man saw in her. If he asked her out, wanted to date her, sleep with her, she just assumed it was because he was attracted to her. If she accepted, because she was attracted to h
im. She assumed that there were mysterious, inexplicable forces at play, deciding who found whom attractive — and she took for granted that she was attractive to most men — and left it at that. And when things went badly, she assumed that the guy had problems: He was too controlling, too territorial, too jealous, too lazy. He had a roving eye. He was cheap or immature or depressive or not ready to commit.
She had never thought incompatible. She assumed that she was compatible with most men. Obviously she weeded out the worst cases before getting involved — the drunks and users, the unwashed, the thieves and moochers, the hitters and yellers. It didn’t really take very long to figure out who these were.
Women who say they found out their husbands were addicts or abusers or con artists a couple of years into the marriage — she never buys that. She thinks that they are willfully blind. She’s had a lot of bad boyfriends, but she always knew early on. The signs were always there from the beginning, she had to admit.
But with Duane. The delight in it, in the gradual unfolding of him, of herself, as if maybe billions of micro-hooks were meshing together, with billions of tiny satisfying clicks. Her brain tickles, fizzes, as if some new section of her is coming into being.
Do you have parents? she asks.
Yes, I have parents.
What do they do? Where are they?
They live in Ottawa. My dad’s a retired civil servant. Tax department. My mom is a retired elementary school teacher.
Do you like them?
Sometimes, yes.
What are they like?
He says: Ordinary. My mother is kind and concerned about people and often obsessed with tiny details and a bit naïve. My father is cautious and self-critical. They are responsible and try not to offend and they don’t do or think anything interesting.
Which could be a good thing, with parents, she says.
He laughs. Yes.
They must have some eccentricities. Quirks.
He says, They go to Florida every year, for four months. January through April. They stay in the same condominium every year, for which they pay exorbitantly. When the Canadian dollar is low, they fill their second piece of checked luggage with toilet paper and coffee and laundry detergent. Oh, and peanut butter.
This doesn’t seem so very strange to Mandalay, except that she can’t imagine how much it costs to stay in a condo in Florida for four months out of every year.
And do they bring something back in their empty suitcases when they come back?
I’m not sure, he says. I’m guessing Tommy Bahama shirts, as that’s what my brother and I get for Christmas every year.
Every year?
You doubt me?
You must have an impressive collection.
I do, he says. I do. One day I’m going to sew them all together into a massive quilt and spread it out somewhere public. An art installation.
Like Christo.
Exactly. I’ll wrap Siwash Rock in it. A statement against creeping US capitalism.
She’s not sure if he’s being funny, and if he is, what he’s being funny about.
Do you have parents? he asks.
She says, My father was a millwright, sort of a hippie, too. He was a lot older than my mother. He worked himself to death, I think. He died twenty years ago, when I was thirteen. My mother’s kind of a hippie, too. She paints.
How she edits. She says: Up the coast. Small town. She does not say Butterfly Lake, because people over a certain age have heard about it: Butterfly Lake was in the news so much in the mid-eighties, and most people have ideas about it already, which will shape how they will react to her story, to her.
He says, My wife died of cancer. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want you to flinch when someone mentions cancer in my presence. I don’t want you to avoid mentioning cancer. One day I might tell you more about her, but not now.
He says she is right. That what they are for each other is a kind of seawall against loneliness. And if so, he says, the relationship needs to step up. We need more emotional intimacy. More knowledge of each other. More trust.
She thinks: It is still about intensity of experience. He has merely come to understand that his enjoyment of her time with him, even their sexual pleasure, will be heightened if there is more knowledge of each other. More sense of risk.
She thinks, Because he has changed his mind on this matter, he will change his mind about other things.
HE SAYS: Four or five nights of the week I work late. I want to come home and retreat inside of myself. I do not have it in me to be aware of someone else’s needs.
Maybe it would be better, Mandalay says, if he hadn’t had to work at the kind of job that depleted him like that.
Ha, he said. You’re an idealist. But it’s not possible for every job to be simply fun or to fit into shorter work week.
Why not?
And it’s not always a matter of being depleted. I love my work. It’s very interesting to me. It doesn’t deplete me. It’s just that it takes fourteen hours to get through it, sometimes, and then I am tired of thinking.
Why do you need to put in sixty-hour work weeks? Do you need to make that much money?
No, obviously not. Why do I? Let’s see. Because my firm wants a certain number of billable hours. They get paid too. Because if I don’t put the hours into my cases, they won’t get finished in a timely fashion. If I started turning some of them down, I would start losing my reputation and my presence. The competition would not only take those clients, but others would stop seeing me as an expert in my area, because I wouldn’t be producing as much, so I would get fewer cases, and not as interesting or lucrative ones.
IT’S NOT ABOUT THE MONEY, he says. But when she tells him how much she makes, he is shocked. But you are getting shares, then?
No. Just wage.
But you’re running the damn place, and you co-created it. You’re doing a management job, the hours you put in and the growth you’ve created. You’re being remunerated at about the same rate as a barista.
That’s not the point, she says. I like my job. I like the arrangement. There are intangibles.
Really? And you can put those into your retirement fund, can you? How much is the owner making?
You know what, she says. She’s laughing, but she is starting to feel the prickle of anger along the back of her neck. It’s my decision, so back off.
It’s just that I know this world inside and out, he says. I see people every week in court who are getting screwed by management.
Okay, she says. Maybe you’re right. But I do need you to back off.
Also, he says, it’s not just about you personally. It’s about economic and social parity. What you choose to accept affects what others can ask for.
I don’t want to have this conversation, she says.
He’s sweating heavily, from his head, as if he’s undergoing a great physical strain. But he draws in breath sharply, over his teeth, and says, fine. Okay. You’re right. Not my business, unless you ask me.
PARVANEH ASKS: Will he ask you to marry him?
I don’t know, she says. That’s maybe not what this is about.
Is he single?
Widowed.
That is the best kind. A wealthy widower. No kids? Truly, Mandalay, you won’t find better. Do you love him?
I’m in it for the fun, she says. We have a great time together. We relax, we enjoy ourselves, we really like each other. We’re happy as we are.
Ahhh, Parvaneh says. You are what, thirty-three! You should be thinking about marriage. You should always be thinking, Is this one that I could be married to? You should be thinking long-term.
I’m not sure I want to marry. I like having a career.
You should have children, Parvaneh says. If you don’t, nobody will visit you when you are old.
Mandalay laughs. This isn’t Iran. Women can have perfectly good lives without husbands, here.
That’s another thing, Parvaneh says. Western women are free t
o choose, but they choose badly. I hear the afternoon women talking, you know. She means the young women with the strollers. They are already talking about how they hate their husbands, how they think they will leave them. About having affairs.
I think it’s very complicated, Mandalay says. Women here are free to choose, but they get caught up in unrealistic expectations of what their lives will be like. That’s what makes them unhappy.
She has just thought of that, and it seems a pretty good insight. It’s something she wouldn’t have understood, a few months ago.
And another thing, Mandalay, Parvaneh says. This isn’t a career.
But Mandalay hardly hears her over the rumble of the bread machine.
THIS IS WHAT IT’S LIKE. It’s like finding yourself on another planet and having an alien life form approach you and start humming your secret, favourite song.
It’s like climbing a mountain and being able to see the world around you, and then looking back and seeing the whole of your life as a trail to this point — a trail that makes sense.
It’s like having all of your cells and molecules replaced by better ones — ones they’ve always wanted to be. Mandalay feels that she has been transfigured into someone smarter, wittier, wiser, more perceptive, more hopeful. Also, more open, generous, kind. She feels the world is lit up now: everything transformed, beautiful.
SHE CALLS HIM, on his mobile phone, one evening when she hasn’t seen him or heard from him for a couple of days — though they have plans for the weekend — and when the call goes to voice mail, she doesn’t leave a message. When she sees him next, he says, You called me. It’s a statement, not a question.
Is it not permitted?
He laughs, not spontaneously. Of course it’s permitted. I wouldn’t have given you my number otherwise.
Okay, she says.
Did you call for a specific reason?
No, she says.
Nothing urgent?
No.
I imagined not. Or you would have left a message.
I’m still getting the impression that I shouldn’t have called you, she says. His honesty, she thinks, liberates her. She is able to be bluntly honest, too.
I am not implying that, he says. I just wondered why you called.
What is Going to Happen Next Page 13
