Vanishing and Other Stories

by Deborah Willis

  The wife looks at the hair on her husband’s arm, the one he has thrown over her stomach. She thinks to herself: Everything is fine. Everything will be fine.

  “She sounds stupid.” The son thumps the bed.

  “Ben.” The wife holds his shoulder. “Enough.”

  “I don’t think she was stupid,” says the husband. “Just hopeful. Optimistic.”

  “What does that mean? Optimistic?” Ben pulls at the dog’s ears. “Tash? Are you asleep, Tash?”

  The wife runs her fingers along her husband’s forearm.

  “Optimistic?” He pulls his hand away and rolls from the bed. “I guess it means she’s stupid.”

  MAYBE THE BOY arrives at the wife’s office the following Tuesday, as he always does. He walks in and shuts the door with his boot. “So. He’s not a bad-looking guy.”

  “You probably shouldn’t be here.”

  “And he’s very tall.” The boy points to a framed photograph of the wife, the husband, and the son that hangs on the wall. “That picture doesn’t do him justice.”

  “Stop looking at that.” The wife is embarrassed by the quality of the photo: the sun glares in the three faces and they squint into it, watery-eyed, overexposed. “You shouldn’t be here. What if he stops by again?”

  “You don’t often see forty-something guys who are that athletic.”

  “He rides his bike to work every day, and works in the yard on weekends.” The wife covers her face. “He’s so—maybe ‘upstanding’ is the word. This kind of thing—”

  “This sordid affair?”

  “It would be so foreign to him.”

  “I hate to admit it, but I think the guy could beat me up. I think he’s stronger than me.”

  She can’t help but smile. “You’d make up for it in speed.”

  “Is that a comment on my lovemaking?” The boy drops to his knees in front of her. “I’m already feeling young, inexperienced.”

  “I mean it. You can’t be here.”

  “Hey.” The boy kisses her wrist. “Don’t say that.”

  “I’m sorry, Jamie.” Out the window, students weave through the stand of sequoia, going from class to class, requirement to requirement.

  “You’re serious.” He turns her to face him. “I’ll leave if you want me to. If that’s what you really want.”

  The wife studies his eyes—lichen green. She touches his hair. His face. “You know, I bet you’re right. I bet he could beat you up.”

  The boy kisses under her eyes. “He’s practically Harrison Ford.”

  She undoes the top button of his shirt and he slides his hand along the seam of her pants.

  “I must have a death wish,” he says, and her zipper is undone.

  “Seems reasonable.” Her hand against his chest. “Perfectly natural.”

  MAYBE THE WIFE continues to meet the boy in her office every Tuesday afternoon and continues to sleep beside her husband every night. And in between she marks lab exams, teaches classes. Classes on the Caribbean bluehead, for example. They begin life as small yellow fish with short fins. But at any time they can trade their shimmering yellow scales for the more threatening blue head, black and white mid-body, and green posterior. This way the fish can spawn up to a hundred times per day and defend their territory. It sounds impossible, but it’s simple. They’re just like us, she explains to her students, and wipes chalk from her hands. They just do what they have to do.

  MAYBE THE WIFE starts to imagine a life with this boy. She imagines living in his apartment: low ceilings, little daylight, photographs hung like laundry from a string in the bathroom. She imagines being there when he comes home from art school, his eyes tired, his black bookbag cutting into his shoulder. She imagines it as a quiet existence, disordered but also precise, like the boy’s experiments in the darkroom.

  In her real life, the wife and the husband alternate making dinner and doing dishes each night. They hire a young woman—one of the wife’s students—to dust their furniture, scrub their bathroom, and vacuum their floors once a week. Ben is allowed to watch half an hour of television every evening. At night the wife and the husband share a drink and whisper to each other across the table. In bed, the husband’s breath tastes of red wine and toothpaste.

  It’s nothing like the boy’s chaos. The first time the wife walked into his apartment, there were days of dishes hardened in the sink. Egg yolk stuck to a pan, ketchup skin on a plate. The bathroom: towels on the floor, mildew along the tub. And what does it matter? thought the wife, as the boy kissed her that first time. Let the dishes sit on the counter. Let the bacteria flourish. She ran her hands tentatively up his arms. She hadn’t forgotten about her husband, not at all. She could hear his voice: You’re being ridiculous, Wendy, idiotic. But the boy had one hand on her back, one in her hair, and he pulled her against his mouth. This boy who smelled like sand and something else, something chemical. This boy who had stood in the kitchen and listened to her talk nervously about birds—the difference between a Pelagic and a Double-Crested Cormorant—then kissed her, stopped her mid-sentence. This boy who made her feel like she was twenty again. Made her feel ridiculous, yes, idiotic. Made her feel crazy and awkward and wild.

  BUT STILL, there are things she would miss. Her husband across the table from her, tired and good-looking, or in the yard, his shirt off as he rakes the leaves from the Garry oak. And the house: the sunny entranceway and the rhododendrons in the garden. Her son’s room: yellow paint on the wall, the big window, toys on the floor, the shelf of brightly coloured books. Her son.

  But maybe, if she moved into the boy’s apartment, the son could come too. He would love it. No one would tell him to tidy his room. No one would tell him to brush his teeth. The wife and the boy would let him order pizza. They would let him drink pop. They would let him go to sleep when he was tired and wake when he was rested. Because how could they—the wife and the boy—how could they justify rules? What right would they have to tell someone what to do? Not only would they let the son watch television all night, but he would learn how a television worked. The boy would sit with him on the floor—that dingy carpet—and show him the insides of the small black-and-white set. The two of them would spend an afternoon taking the television apart and putting it back together, like a puzzle. Then they would move the rabbit ears around so the son could watch the screen disintegrate and rebuild itself. Nothing would be forbidden, nothing hidden. All the complexities: red wire, green.

  MAYBE THE WIFE continues to meet the boy in her office every Tuesday and continues to sleep beside her husband every night. In between she marks lab exams, teaches classes. Maybe this becomes, like everything else, routine.

  MAYBE THE HUSBAND is calm about it, cool.

  “And you can go to your Indo-Pacific wrasse.” He drinks the last of his wine. “He seems like a nice enough kid.”

  The wife watches light reflect off her glass. “Is that what you really want?”

  “I need a break. I need to think this through.” When he stands, his chair scrapes along the tile floor. “And Ben will stay here with me.”

  The wife feels stiff, feels caught. She can hardly breathe.

  The husband dumps the rest of her wine in the sink. Then he rinses their glasses, as he does every night, so the red won’t stain the bottom.

  MAYBE SHE BUZZES the boy’s apartment. “It’s me.”

  “I’ll come down.”

  The wife puts her forehead to the window as he takes the stairs two at a time. When he opens the door, she says, “He wants time to himself.” The boy lets her press into him, dig her nails into his back. “Time.” She feels his T-shirt against her cheek. “It could mean anything.”

  “Maybe he’ll think it over and he’ll be okay with it.”

  “He’ll never be okay with it.”

  “Are you sure?” The boy holds her, one palm on the back of her head. “For one thing, you don’t know what he’s been doing.”

  “He hasn’t been doing anything.” The
wife lifts her face. “I would know.”

  “I’m sure he doesn’t mean it. I’m sure, if you went home, he wouldn’t turn you away. Would he?”

  “Can we go upstairs?”

  “Did you tell him you were coming here?”

  “Jamie, please?”

  “We can’t go up there right now.” The boy wipes away hair that sticks to the wife’s wet face. “Sara’s over.”

  The ex-girlfriend. The ex-girlfriend who doesn’t eat meat, or drink, or do drugs. That’s how they met, at a “dry” party, where her band was playing. “She’s sweet,” the boy said when the wife noticed the picture on his wall. Then he shrugged.

  “She just dropped by, Wendy. It’s nothing.”

  “Okay.” The wife nods, because there isn’t much else to say. “Okay.”

  WHETHER SHE GETS AWAY WITH IT, or not. Whether she stays with him, or not. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Or at least, sometimes it doesn’t matter. What matters is this: for years the wife has studied coho salmon—their intricate bone structure, their fussy habits—and finally she understands them. And not just their sneaking around, or their risk-all sex. All of it: gestation, survival, then that mad drive upriver, toward desire and toward—away from—they don’t know what. Now she gets it. But only briefly, and only sometimes, like when she suddenly thinks of the boy’s quick smile, his naked hip. Maybe she’ll be colouring in a book with her son, or standing in front of her grad class, and she thinks: I get it. I understand coho salmon. She wants to tell this to her students, but how can she? To those young, focused faces? They would think she was crazy, or drunk. So she lifts her hands, drops them. I get it, she wants to say: We’re alive. This is called being alive.

  MAYBE THE BOY DOESN’T ARRIVE at the wife’s office the following Tuesday, as he always does. Maybe, instead, the wife finds a photograph slipped under her door: an eagle holding a fish in its talons. Sun glinting off the scales. The bird is half in, half out of the frame. A blur of feathers, flight.

  MAYBE THERE’S A MOMENT when no one says a word. No one moves. The boy in the leather chair, the wife with her hands tucked under her knees. After she has turned her head but before the husband speaks, before the boy stands. Light through the drapes, unvacuumed carpet, stacks of lab books. A half-empty coffee cup that leaves a ring on the desk. And a pause, one second when they are still. The wife, the husband, the boy. There’s more than one way it could go.

  s k y t h e a t r e

  THE MOST BEAUTIFUL GIRL in my school was named Mary Louise. Though the name has a Roman Catholic ring to it, I don’t think she was a believer. She did, however, bring out a religious kind of devotion in most of us who went to high school with her. We loved and hated and feared her with the same fervency that we might a goddess. I was at the age when I noticed feminine beauty more than masculine, because I was always comparing myself with other girls. So I can still remember that Mary Louise had long legs, ankles that were perhaps too thick, and dark eyes. She was tall and had such a confident gait that she reminded me of a horse—maybe Pegasus, or one of the lucky horses that drew Apollo’s chariot. She looked as if she could have been that close to the sun.

  In fact, the sun always seemed to be touching her. Her skin had a permanent tan, and even in winter the ends of her hair were bleached. This might have been because she spent each summer outside, swimming and water-skiing at her family’s cabin in Ontario. I’m not sure how I knew this detail, since I was a grade beneath her and was never her friend. But somehow I’d heard about the cabin, imagined that Mary Louise spent two months in her bathing suit, and was jealous of the way she must have looked. I could picture her driving a motorboat and canoeing. I imagined that at night she and her family played board games, or took out their binoculars and looked at the clear night sky.

  She might have had a summer boyfriend, some seasonal romance, while she was at the cottage. But when she came back in the fall, she returned to the only boy in the school whose beauty matched her own. Jordan Burke was so pretty that his face was almost boring. He had the cheekbones of a girl, blue eyes, and curly blond hair that frothed around his ears. I never spoke to him, but he appeared to be angelic and shy. They looked perfect together. And they were perfect: she was the star of the girls’ basketball team, and it was rumoured that he was an excellent student. Every September, they walked through the halls holding hands, reunited. They had none of the awkwardness that the rest of us exhibited—sweat stains, acne, sexual fear. They seemed comfortable and happy in their bodies, like Adam and Eve before they understood they were naked. The sight of Jordan and Mary Louise was like the smell of new binders, or the sound of a book’s spine being cracked. It announced the new season, and seemed familiar, unchanging, part of the natural order.

  That is, until one September—it was her final year, my penultimate—Mary Louise came back from her cottage in a wheelchair.

  There were different stories. She’d slipped off the dock. She’d been thrown from a horse. She’d been drunk. She’d been sober. Eventually we found out the truth: she’d climbed the steep rock that lined the lakeshore—I could picture her scrambling up, her arms reaching and her legs strong—and she dove into water that was too shallow. She’d done what all our mothers had cautioned us against, and she’d suffered the consequences our mothers warned us about too. Mary Louise had injured her spinal cord. She couldn’t move her legs. She would never walk again.

  When I first saw her, I was sitting on the floor outside my homeroom with my best friend, Sylvia. Syl was using a blue pen to draw a butterfly onto the knee of her jeans, and I was braiding and unbraiding my hair. We were talking about The Bell Jar, because we were sixteen, and we wanted to be depressed in New York. We would have even settled for being happy in New York. It was the first day of school and we wanted to be anywhere but where we were, and then Mary Louise rolled past us in her chair. I let my hair unravel, and Syl looked up from her butterfly. We stopped talking, as did the other students. The hallway had the kind of hush you find in churches.

  It wasn’t that we’d never seen a girl in a wheelchair before, and it wasn’t just the wheelchair, either. It was that Mary Louise’s face seemed to have gone still, along with her legs. Her head was bent forward, her eyes focused on the floor, and she seemed to wish she were invisible. I remember the soft noise the wheels made on the polished floor.

  For the first time, I was aware of luck—that flimsy, moody thing. We existed in a world that seemed to hold to a pleasing pattern: we took the bus to school each morning, and every afternoon the same bus returned us to our safe streets. We lived in a city that was always booming, or about to boom, a city that was sunny even in winter. And we existed in a world of rules, some imposed by our parents and teachers, but more by our own sense of social boundaries. Some people were deemed attractive and some were not, some were popular and some were not. If this was unfair, at least it was unchanging.

  But suddenly we saw that life was not the still water we’d believed it to be. Mary Louise had been going about the same middle-class, suburban, privileged existence that we led—except that hers was even more privileged than ours. She must have had our same unthinking confidence in the future, until her destiny swerved like a canoe caught in a current. She’d once possessed something elusive and unmistakable, something beyond even beauty—maybe charisma, maybe grace—and that something had been wrenched from her. Fortune’s wheel had turned. I found this terrifying. I found it comforting.

  I DON’T MEAN THAT Mary Louise was no longer pretty. But she was more ordinary. Instead of being a goddess, far above us mortals, she had become the Divine who moves among us. As she rolled past, she was both Leda and the swan. She was the Holy Ghost and she was a broken Christ.

  Is this what we thought at the time? Probably not. Most of the girls, myself included, probably felt pity and a secret sense of triumph. And I can’t speak for the boys. Maybe they instantly betrayed their queen and struck her from their hearts, removed her from their sexual fantasies fo
rever. Or maybe, in her new incarnation, they found her even more desirable than before: a pretty girl who couldn’t run away.

  TO THE RELIEF OF MY PARENTS, I was an ordinary kid. I did my homework, played defence on the field-hockey team, and listened to the kind of music that got played on the radio. I had plenty of friends and had never been seriously teased or ostracized by my peers. I never got cavities, though once I had mono. And any beauty I possessed belonged to youth, not to me: I wore my hair in a ponytail, got freckles in the summer, and was of average height. This ordinariness was probably what Mary Louise liked about me, for those five minutes that she liked me.

  Of course, being no different from most girls, I didn’t love my body. I was annoyed by the late development of my breasts, my bad posture, and the stretch marks that scarred my hips and abdomen. But I liked what my body could do. I could easily run the laps required in gym class, and enjoyed the adrenalin of field-hockey games. When I wasn’t at school, I liked to ride my bike around with Syl. We could ride and ride and feel like we hadn’t gone anywhere, because in our neighbourhood each street looked like every other street: double garages, aerated lawns, pastel stucco. We never got tired, so we biked for hours and talked about moving to somewhere like Venice or Paris, somewhere we’d only seen in magazines, somewhere that was instantly recognizable.

  When we got bored of biking, we’d go to Mac’s and buy a bag of five-cent candies. Then we’d lie on the patch of grass beside the parking lot and talk about boys. The boys we talked about were not actually the boys who talked to us. We worshipped the ones who were older than us, or far above us in the intricate social atmosphere. The Jordan Burkes and Dan Houstons and Ryan Watkinses of our world.