The Best Thing for You

by Annabel Lyon

  Inside the apartment they busied themselves, lighting lamps, stowing food in the fridge, stacking the library books next to the sofa. A book on Germany in the thirties, a biography of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. They had traded off portions of the story – Ulrike and Mackintosh were Thom’s, David and Hannah were Anika’s – and delighted in pouncing on each other’s inaccuracies. Baader-Meinhof was the seventies, not the late sixties, Anika would say, and Thom would respond by touching on some detail about the Nuremberg Laws she had sketched in only vaguely, unsure of herself.

  Where is it? Thom asked now, as she squirted soy sauce in a bowl and unwrapped a plastic tray of California rolls. Outside the carol ships glowed on the dark bay. Oh, but their lives were delightful now!

  What? she said.

  The metronome.

  Then they were putting their coats and shoes back on and hurrying back downstairs, because Anika had taken it to the library with them, had almost invariably left it in the stacks, sitting on an empty shelf where she had pulled it out to compare to an Aubrey Beardsley drawing Thom had found. But by the time they got back to the library it was closed.

  That’s just as well, Thom said. The staff will have found it and put it in the lost and found. We’ll get it back tomorrow.

  Stupid, Anika said, not really meaning it, tapping herself on the forehead.

  They did not open the library books that night after all; it seemed pointless without the metronome as touchstone.

  The next day, after Thom had left, Anika went back to the library, but none of the librarians remembered having seen a blue metronome on the shelves. The lost and found, a wooden milk crate, contained only several umbrellas and a pair of child’s rubber boots.

  Never mind, Anika said, and thanked the librarians for their trouble.

  Since she was out anyway she decided to do her shopping for that evening’s meal, and to make up for the disappointment of the loss of the metronome she decided to go all out, with flowers and wine and an expensive cut of meat, something cooked slowly, to a heady succulence. As she moved through the morning, constructing the meal in her mind and moving from shop to shop, she found she was in a particularly good mood. They had moved from one phase of their life to the next, perhaps, that she could contemplate such a meal without agonizing over the cost and wistfully settling for something less; that she could lose an antique, valuable maybe, and care so little. The irony of having money was that you thought less of it, cared less about it, mourned its loss a little less.

  When Thom got home that evening she waited for him to ask about the metronome, but the question never came. He told her about his day, spent consulting with a team of web designers. That was the future, he said, talking as much to himself as to her. There was money there, and all the work a person could want. He would take some evening classes, pick up some new skills. Most Web designers were techno-brats with no graphic ability at all, he said. He was eager to get on the computer, even before she had served dessert, and show her examples of their work, and explain how he could do it better.

  As his computer skills blossomed and her wallet grew swollen with paycheques, they began to fill the apartment with the nice things they had always craved, books and rugs and pictures, better clothes in the cupboards, better food in the fridge. Anika grew brisk and efficient, with her new job and newly moneyed life; the days of aimless wandering and elaborate, painstaking meals she consigned, privately, to an underemployed and slightly depressed past. Thom became cool, the one with the newest sunglasses, the tickets to movie premieres, the fastest computer, the latest CDS, the loudest laugh. He met interesting people, he did stylish things for them, and they rewarded him. He never asked about the metronome. Sometimes Anika imagined it ticking away – someone would have found it and fixed it, surely – marking off the days and weeks and months until he remembered it, their talisman. Eventually she gave up waiting. She watched him drink his martinis, swear at his computer, criticize her clothes, kiss her hands. She saw that her feelings for him would swing from patience to impatience, liking to loathing, closeness to distance, and there was nothing she could do about it. Nothing but wait, and wait, and wait for the needle to swing back, and hope that their love would not prove so delicate, so ambiguous, and so easily, irretrievably lost.

  THE BEST THING FOR YOU

  The idea first came to her one limpid yellow morning toward the end of the war, as she sat across the breakfast table from her husband, watching him chew with toast-textured jaws. The minutes were falling down like dominoes, and she had a full day planned once he had left for the eight-fifteen, so that the idea had at first seemed negligible, a silver coin of a lake glimpsed from the window seat of an airplane, easy to forget.

  When do I expect you tonight? she asked, turning back to the immediate clutter of her coffee, her magazines, on the table in front of her. Grape nuts, Victory Bonds.

  And he, across his plate and paper: Late. Tanner’s invited everyone for drinks. How’s eight-thirty?

  Well, that’s fine, she said.

  Make lamb chops.

  All right.

  Kiss me.

  Shave.

  Kiss me anyway.

  She moved to his lap and closed her eyes and there it was again, a long way off yet winking deliberately. She had planned a day of work and errands, and wondered if this funny little fantasy would accompany her through the sequence.

  Our lady of the dry cleaning, she murmured. Our lady of the cold cuts.

  I’ll bring you a present, he said thickly.

  Hm.

  He was big but helpless: these were the first and last things she had learned about him. Do you like this? she would ask, after they were married and she no longer had to play shy. This? With a single finger she could belabour his breathing, tip him past speech. But just now her mind was elsewhere, on the day’s goals, and on this funny bright bauble her fancy had produced.

  Oh, that’s good, her husband said.

  She got up and went to the bedroom to dress.

  After he had gone she marked her mouth with lipstick, gathered her keys and pocketbook, and locked up the little bungalow their four parents had helped them buy. On the sidewalk her heels ticked nicely. She was twenty-two and cute, pale plump skin and blackish curls, tarry-eyed, small. Her husband, ten years older, was gross and blond, a prairie boy, cheerful and dairy-bland. He worked for the Vancouver Daily Province, not writing but with the equipment, the presses and type, though he was hoping to get into photography. They had been married for two years.

  She joined the queue for the streetcar, behind a handless man and a girl and another man in uniform. Carnegie Library, please, she told the driver when it was her turn.

  I know, the driver said.

  She spent the morning in a chair in a block of sun in the cold stone library, working with a notebook and a French grammar, occasionally distracted by thoughts of the handless man. He had kept touching the girl with his stump, once even smoothing her hair with it while he and the officer talked about baseball. Towards the end of the morning she set down the grammar and picked up Le jeu de l’amour et du hasard by Marivaux. She wrote in her notebook, in a rather round, childish hand:

  Silvia: Are we not pleased with Léandre when we see him? But, at home, he says not a word, nor laughs nor growls, his soul is frozen, solitary, inaccessible. His wife does not know it, has no relations with it; she is wed but to a figurine from a cabinet, who appears at the table to stifle with apathy, with chill and boredom, all that surrounds him. Is this not a delightful husband?

  Lisette: I freeze before the story you tell me; but what of Tersandre?

  Silvia: Yes, Tersandre!

  At noon she closed her notebook, returned her little books to the shelf, and walked into a day that had turned warm and dull. Gulls like paper gulls tipped and looped between the buildings, through the soft, soiled cottony sky. In a café on Hastings she ordered bread and butter and tea and ate slowly, staring at the window. She was trying to remembe
r how many pairs of intact stockings she had. The idea came again, bright as a gewgaw, beginning to annoy her. Stockings were expensive, and she decided to make do for another week or two. Perhaps, anyway, this was the gift her husband had spoken of: a single expensive pair of stockings. That would be an intelligent gift.

  The streetcar deposited her on a tree-lined street equidistant from her home and the food store, an edifice so new they had only just finished laying the parking lot tar. Inside she tarried. They were offering a home delivery service now, she noted, but it was more than she could afford.

  At the meat counter she waited patiently behind four other women, watching the butcher scissor off half a dozen sausage links and wrap them in brown paper, watching the woman in front of her sweep her baby’s mouth out with a finger and wipe what she had found on her coat, watching the door to the back swing open just as she stepped up to the counter and a boy of sixteen or seventeen appear in a clean apron, glancing at his similarly aproned father and receiving a nod.

  Hello, Stephen, she said, smiling gently.

  Ma’am.

  What a clever boy, she thought, as he wrapped her chops and ham, weighed the neat packages, and wrote sums on them with a pen. She didn’t like the way he rushed through everything, racing his father and beating him to the single set of scales, slapping her purchases, her food after all, on the counter. He had learned the business but not the manners of the business. He had also propositioned her once, three months ago now, scribbling a note on the underside of one of the brown paper flaps for her to discover when she got home and started to cook. He had not yet grown into his nose and ears but was not terribly unpleasant either: hair dark like her own, eyes a pretty, lashy hazel. He had an inch or two on her and probably weighed less. Skin angrier some days than others, lips a bit thin. She never considered shopping elsewhere, simply appropriated the name he had penned, using it each time to show him his own youth.

  Anything else for you? he asked, not meeting her eye.

  No, thank you.

  Though if I were to do it, she thought, walking home, mightn’t a boy like that be useful? Mightn’t he be just the one? She swung the string bag of apples and purchases by her calf, smiling at how quickly the little silver crime had overflowed its banks, eroding a river, a bright thread through her thinking.

  That night, when her husband got home, she was in a good mood. She turned up the radio and made him dance with her in the living room, still in his shoes and overcoat. This was the kind of thing he liked. She had cooked carefully and he praised the meal, his favourite, and the candles and the shiny windows and her good housekeeping generally.

  You’re high, she said.

  What? he said, laughing. A little. No, listen, though, I got an assignment. That Bonner trial on Monday, you know, they want me to wait in the alley behind the courthouse and get the woman as she comes out. They think she’ll come out the back way.

  She’ll have a veil.

  He laughed again. Is that what you’d do, baby? Wear a veil?

  No. But she will.

  I’m going down there tomorrow. Saturday there won’t be too many people around. Just check out the lighting, the angles. Figure out where this goddamn back door is anyway. Then there’s this bar on Granville, Peretti was telling me, where a lot of them like to go. I thought I might look in there. He said he’d introduce me to some –

  Will you be late?

  Well, yes, he said patiently. I’ve got to see the place at the same time of day, under the same conditions. That’ll be late afternoon, so I guess I’ll just grab a bite out, then this –

  Just that I might go to the pictures.

  Sure, sure.

  She washed the dishes and he dried.

  Peretti was in Spain, he said after a while, as though the sentence clinched something in his thinking. He set a pan on the counter.

  Hey, not there, she said. Next to the stove. Hey, where’s my present?

  Hey, her husband said.

  Please.

  What have you done to earn a present?

  Nothing, she said immediately.

  He hung the tea towel, with its chickens, on the back of a chair.

  Nothing, she said. I’ve been bad, actually. I’ve had terrible, shameful thoughts all day long. Dead nuns are weeping for me. I should be punished.

  He stared at her. She hesitated.

  It’s a game, she said. Just a game.

  Still staring, he lifted his hands to his face, fingers stiff around nothing, as though framing a shot of her as she stood there at the sink.

  The next day, Saturday, opening the paper packet of ham to make sandwiches for lunch, she found a second note.

  Up from the basement, where he kept his photographic equipment, came her husband, in a pair of corduroy pants and an old wool sweater. When he saw her he said, Do they fit all right?

  Her present, he meant. She extended a leg toward him, toes pointed, so he could see.

  I’ve been thinking, he said. You can’t say no right away. Only I was thinking it might help me if you came along this afternoon.

  Me?

  You can be the woman. Stand by the door where she’s going to stand so I can work out the details on my own time, nobody rushing me. Like a dress rehearsal. I don’t want to get there on Monday surrounded by pros and realize I’ve got the wrong damn lens.

  Of course not, she said. All right, I guess. I’ll feel like a fool, though.

  Now you’re talking.

  Will I miss my show?

  Shouldn’t, he said. I shouldn’t need more than an hour.

  I mean, you don’t need me to come to that bar?

  He laughed. Baby, no.

  I might be late too, after, she said. If I meet some of the girls.

  Paint the town, he said, biting into his sandwich.

  He didn’t like her hat. It’s in the way, he said.

  It’s because of people like you she’ll be wearing it. Think about it. She doesn’t want her picture taken.

  How do you know so much about it?

  A couple passing the mouth of the alley paused to look.

  Trust me, she said.

  He was taking readings and scribbling in a notebook.

  Are you sure this is the right door?

  His flash bathed the alley in a sudden milky light.

  Buddy!

  Just a couple of real ones.

  A small crowd had stopped to watch. Hey, mister! someone called. What’s it for?

  He couldn’t resist. The Daily Province.

  Who is she?

  It started to rain again. That’s it, he said softly to himself, and the flash exploded again, showing everything.

  Who is she?

  Hold this one, baby, he said, handing her a lens. She shielded it in the breast of her coat while he packed up, hurrying against the rain. His touch with the equipment was getting more confident, she thought. Gently he took the lens back from her and zipped it into a thickly padded pouch that fitted into a hollow in the camera bag he wore slung across his chest.

  Who is she?

  Who is she? her husband said, as she tipped her hat lower over her face. He took her elbow and steered her firmly through the crowd, out of the alley. Well, I like that!

  On the corner they kissed. Don’t wait up, he said.

  You neither.

  Stay dry, he added, as the lights changed and she stepped into the street to cross. They were going in different directions. Belatedly he called, What’s the show?

  She waved without looking back, acknowledging his voice over the rain and the traffic noise.

  The picture was a silly one, something about a housewife who secretly supported her family by singing in a seedy nightclub. Her husband, a blind man, thought she went babysitting every evening. A neighbour who noticed the long silver dress under her drab coat thought she was having an affair. Then one night at the club the housewife witnessed a murder. She knew she should go into hiding, but her husband needed her help. She
decided to stay with him, relying on her meek housewife persona as a disguise. When the hit man tracked her to her neighbourhood, he was stumped. I’m looking for a real glamorous dame, he told the grocer, the florist, the vicar, but no one knew who that could be.

  Is this seat taken? a man asked.

  The movie was half over. He must have been watching her from somewhere else in the theatre.

  But I’m in love with you, the neighbour, an artist, told the housewife. He had followed her to the club one night and discovered her secret. Come to New York with me. They will adore you in New York!

  I won’t run away, the fervent housewife said. My life is with my husband.

  Oh, for Christ’s sake, the man in the next seat said as she squeezed past him. I was only –

  Outside the sky was rain-cool, rain-cleared. She walked for a while to clear the nonsense out of her head, then turned into a long, narrow café with a velvet cloth hanging like a thought across the door. He was sitting in a booth at the back. She walked over, sat down opposite him, and said, Why are you bothering me?

  Bothering you? he said. Jesus, if that’s what you want to call it. An invitation, a polite –

  You wrote on my meat.

  You know why, he said. Obviously.

  She looked down then and saw his hands on the table were trembly.

  Aren’t you having anything? she asked.

  I was waiting for you.

  Of a single accord they studied the items arrayed on the table between them – spoons, salt and pepper, and a tall glass sugar shaker – collecting themselves.

  You were pretty sure of yourself, she said, more kindly.

  No I wasn’t.

  She signalled the waitress for coffees.

  I’m an existentialist, he said.

  She said something in French.