Opening the door to Andrew’s walk-in, I looked at the suits, the shirts, all hung neatly. I stared, hunting for a flash of truth. Reaching into the nearest jacket pocket, I felt a slippery square sleeve of plastic, condom-sized—but it was only an empty vitamin packet. I backed out and shut the door.
Television on, I crawled into bed just as some news from home came on screen. “Canada’s most notorious murder investigation has yielded seven additional charges against alleged serial killer Robert William Pickton, bringing the total number to twenty-nine.” In Vancouver the story would have been milked far longer; the screen would have filled with what looked like mug shots of lonesome-eyed, rough-skinned women. The anchor would have reminded us that most of the victims were drug-addicted prostitutes. But in America, he just moved on.
My mind flashed to Petra sipping sake yesterday afternoon. “You know how I make up my mind: fast. I will call and tell Andrew I am done. And this way it ruins his weekend with the babysitter.”
I woke to the ringing phone. On the television, sitcom actors gesticulated wildly to the tune of canned laughter. I reached for the receiver.
Groggy, at first I thought it was my father on the line. It wouldn’t be him though. It wasn’t his resentment that I kept trying to appease. It wasn’t his fury that tarred my dreams.
“Clay? What time is it?”
“Noon. What do you want?”
It was 3 a.m. in New York: midnight in Vancouver. I guessed that was “noon” bourbon time. The contempt in his voice made my chest pound.
“Why are you at the Waldorf?”
I burrowed into my pillow as I struggled for the words to extricate myself. Perhaps I had called him as one would a priest: I wanted absolution. “My friend and her, uh—her lovah—have a suite here for two weeks. They went away for the weekend.”
“Lover? Is he married?” His voice had a wandering acid quality, nasty and sloppy at once. “Sure he is. You have no boundaries. This whole—This sleeping with someone else’s husband, it’s like eating candy from a stranger’s mouth.” His voice trailed. “The Pickton thing is on the news again. More of ’em. More and more. They just couldn’t stay home, could they.”
Two years ago, we had sat over a strained Christmas dinner in our mother’s house. Dad was living in an apartment in West Vancouver and he preferred to spend holidays with his girlfriend. Over turkey that night, Clayton maintained that he had dated one of the women whose body parts had been found.
My mother shut her eyes. My jaw slackened in disbelief that he might actually try to shove this under our nails now.
It was Clayton, of course, who had caught our father with Clarita. His rage was explosive: full of thrown punches and screeching tires. Never mind the hell-fury of a woman scorned, it was Clay who smashed out the windows of our father’s car and it was Clay who struck Clarita. There was talk of charges; money passed hands. In the end, my mother was left to be Queen of the Shit Jobs once again.
Clay had never dated a down-and-out drug addict. I was sure of it. My brother’s taste tended toward the daughters of diplomats and CEOs. He had often referred to his girlfriends as high-stepping show ponies, and the more they loved him, the worse he treated them. He seemed to feel that love made each of those girls complicit in her own undoing and therefore deserving of his disdain. Perhaps he imagined those women out at Pickton’s pig farm to have been the ultimate colluders.
“No surprise she became a hooker. Did she ever like to fuck!” he had hooted over Christmas dinner, and then shovelled more turkey into his mouth.
“Listen—” I said to him now.
“You listen. You collude …” He was too drunk to humiliate me with skill, to make my skin crawl the way he usually could.
“When’s the last time you were at a meeting?”
“Don’t you know everything? Live and let live,” he said.
The line went dead.
I looked to the television and thought of the Chinese contortionist.
Soon light began to seep around the drapes. I got out of bed, turned off the TV and repacked my bag.
On the nightstand I figured to be Petra’s I set the bottle of unopened wine. On a bit of hotel stationery I thanked them for spoiling me, for breakfast and beautiful sheets.
Before leaving for Penn station, Petra had decided not to phone Andrew but to wait until they could talk face to face. “Besides,” she said, “he turns off his mobile when he rides the train. I don’t want to leave a message. It’s not very dramatic.”
I wondered if the wine would help facilitate a good dialogue, as my brother had once suggested (after therapy, but before AA)—or turn the room to a maudlin soup. Maybe not the right note of drama either.
As I took a last look around the suite, the hotel’s sleek black catalogue cover beckoned, its bronze art deco society girl stepping carelessly across The Waldorf Collection. I knew I didn’t want to bring any of this home with me. As I let myself out, I imagined the maids coming, making things comfortable, each transgression soon wiped away.
By the end of the following week, I had turned in my article on the state of romantic unions. I tossed in facts and figures that illustrated the connection between ovulation and infidelity, orgasms and offspring, adding tidbits of personal anecdote. Felicia enjoyed it when my fact-checkers called her. To bolster my stories, she has been a lesbian with a shoe fetish, a co-ed who strips to pay tuition and now a travel agent who is sleeping with a wealthy, married doctor. An American travel agent who is not called Petra.
The next time I heard from Petra, she and Andrew had hashed things out. He had confessed his jealousies, his fear that she would leave him. “I’m in a struggle,” she wrote. “Can’t stay and can’t leave. I miss him when he is away and don’t want to go on when he is here.”
In my article I quoted C.S. Lewis: “We read to know we are not alone.” We sleep with the married to know the same thing. I can hear my brother rant that I have profited from the grief of others. But people crave witnesses, I want to tell him. I am sure of it now. We crave the eyes of others to know we are not alone.
You’re Taking All the Fun Out of It
HE USED TO WEAR SUITS. These snappy looking slacks-and-blazer combos in rich chocolate browns and blacks so black they were blue. He was a snappy talker too, always had a clever comeback for the neighbours or cashiers at the supermarket. Not too clever though. I guess that’s one thing I picked up watching him in those days, wondering what made him different from other witty guys in suits: a person hates to feel as though what comes out of his or her mouth is merely a set-up for what comes out of yours. When my father spoke, it was as if he were pleased you spoke first because he’d been waiting all day to hear you. And he’d say something double-ended, something that made your opening remark seem as funny and clever as his reply. I noticed the voice he used too, soft so you had to listen closely, a little conspiratorial. Nothing like an implied secret to make a person feel special.
Except for her. My mother never seemed to feel so special around him, that I recall anyway. Although she must have at some point. She was snappy in her own right, or perhaps snappy’s not the right word. She was effervescent. That is, before she got so agitated.
It seemed, when I was about nine or ten, that a switch flipped and her playfulness became a humming energy that she could barely contain. She tried four or five different jobs, mostly clerical—light typing, filing, answering phones, that sort of thing—but her mind wandered. There just wasn’t enough going on at a reception desk to hold her thoughts. As I recall, she quit, officially, once, was fired twice, and once she left for lunch and never came back.
At first the only thing that seemed to soothe her was driving, or rather, being driven; she didn’t have a licence. But she loved moving fast down the highways; it seemed to give her a sense of peace that nothing else did. So on weekends, Dad would drive us out to the country and, each time, as the speedometer passed the sixty miles per hour mark, my mother would sigh as though
she had just lowered herself into a warm bath. She would begin to smile and say things like, “Look, honey, sheepies,” into the back seat at me. Playful and relaxed again, sheep were sheepies, eggs became eggies.
Problem was, my mother never seemed to see logistics in quite the same way he did and often the country drives would have the two of them very much in their own seats staring out the windows shaking their heads. My mother might see a small herd of horses along the highway. She would say something like, “Oh, look at them … sweet old things. Alan, stop the car, pull over.” Trucks could be roaring by in the other lane, cars in front of us and behind. I would get excited, flinging myself half over the front seat, seconding the request, yelping for him to stop.
He’d zoom right past, though, and she would look back out the rear window with her mouth open and say, “Alan! Why didn’t you stop? They’re back there. Stop!”
Calmly, he’d reply, “Honey, they’re on the other side of the road. There’s nowhere to stop.”
Then she would say something like, “Of course there is. Don’t be silly. Come on, go back. You’re taking all the fun out of it!”
He would chuckle as though she had to be goofing with him. He’d try to explain that he couldn’t just pull over in all this traffic. There wasn’t a turnoff. He needed a spot to pull off the highway.
She’d begin to sputter, “A spot? That was a spot. For god’s sake, Alan, why can’t you just pull over instead of making a big production out of everything?”
My father would grip the steering wheel with one hand, and start fiddling with the radio or something, or maybe just rub at his forehead as if he were trying to get a stain off. But usually he’d take a deep breath and sigh. After all, part of my mother’s effervescence was her spontaneity. She liked to just do, rather than to “make a big song and dance out of it.” It was about here that he would try to jolly her up again, laugh, and put a hand on her leg. She would most likely tisk and swat him away, and keep looking out the window, her elbow balanced on the bottom of the open window frame, touching the top with her fingertips. She might sigh again and drop her hand into the wind so she could swim her fingers through the air. This is where he would get her—reach over again and squeeze her leg, say something like, “You better watch your hand out there; you’re going to accidentally punch a cow and make some farmer awful mad.”
In those days, my mother would still tuck her chin and laugh in spite of herself, call him an idiot through giggles.
She’d been working as a sort of Girl Friday at a used car lot for two weeks the afternoon she showed up at school. I was in grade six. She walked into the classroom in her office clothes, informing the teacher that she had to take me for the rest of the day, smiling brightly and chucking my chin as she explained that I had a dentist appointment.
“What dentist appointment?” I asked.
“I don’t like to get her upset by telling her ahead of time,” she told Mrs. MacConnel. “It’s easier to do it this way.”
My teacher nodded, Of course.
I stared, wondering at my mother as she beamed, stuffing my arms into coat sleeves and pushing me along out of the classroom as if I were a toddler.
“Nice to meet you,” she called as we left. “Thanks very much.”
Outside the school, I wanted to know what dentist appointment.
“Oh, there’s no appointment. I made it up. I was just tired of today and I felt like seeing you.”
I stared over my shoulder at the school and back at her.
“Don’t you ever just feel like tap dancing?” she asked me.
I waited for some sort of punch line, but she put her arm across my shoulders and we started walking.
She’d been at the car lot, she said, calling people all morning from a list they’d given her. She was supposed to call each number and ask how they were making out with the used car they’d purchased at Bobby Gordon’s.
“Now the object of the game,” she told me, “was not to find out if they really liked their car, it was just to make sure they still lived at the same address so fat old Bobby Gordon’ll have a place to mail his flyers. He’s starting up a carpet cleaning business. I had people on the phone screaming in my ear all morning, telling me what a horrible heap he’d sold them, how it was a piece of junk and fixing it cost more than the car did in the first place. All I could think about was tap dancing. I used to be a tap dancer, you know.”
I knew. In a scrapbook she’d shown me once, there were black and white photographs of her when she was a kid, and two newspaper clippings, one at eleven years old, the other when she was a teenager, blonde hair in a swinging ponytail, trophy in her hand. She won the district tap finals when she was eighteen years old. She met my father right about then, though, and they were married soon after she’d graduated high school.
Tap dancing became sort of silly at that point, a stunt performed by fools and people who delivered singing telegrams. So she dropped it.
My mother and I made our way over to Broadway, where she took me into The Dance Shop and had me try on four or five pairs of tap shoes until she declared, “Yes, that looks like it.” She stepped back and took me in from another angle, head to toe, corners of her eyes crinkling with pleasure. “What do you think? Are they yours?”
I tried to clack around the floor a little, dance the way I’d seen kids do on a talent show I watched Saturday mornings, but I had a nervous stomach all of a sudden, what with all this delinquency, hers and mine. In her case though, she wouldn’t have an excuse; if she didn’t quit Bobby Gordon’s car lot, she’d get fired again. But still, at that moment I couldn’t help feeling like a brand new car myself, she was so pleased with my feet.
When we got home, she had me put on some play clothes and she did the same. She got me to help her move each piece of furniture out of the spare room, which as of last year had become her sewing room. She’d seen some celebrity on television boasting that she made all her own clothes and my mother decided she could easily make all our clothes and save us hundreds of dollars—not to mention make us into one stylish family with her knock-offs of designer outfits spotted in magazines. She made an apron.
Once the room was clear of furniture and sewing paraphernalia, she went and grabbed any tools she could find in the garage and we set to work ripping up the carpet.
“You can’t dance with no floor,” she said.
Freeing up a corner of the carpet, she had a look at the hardwood underneath and declared it to be in not-too-bad-a-shape. But she wanted it to glint. We’d get it resurfaced, she said.
I helped her rip free the rest and roll it up while she muttered about its colour.
“Beige. Why did I ever let him talk me into a beige carpet anyway? It’s enough to bore me into a coma …”
Dad drove up just as we dragged it the last foot or two into the garage. His face dropped when he saw the long tube of short shag being pushed against the wall. He asked what was going on.
“We’re making ourselves a dance studio,” she told him and her voice had a choppy, defiant quality. As if she were a brat and she knew it.
He looked from her to the rolled rug, took a breath and closed his eyes a moment. As he composed himself, he appeared odd to me, suddenly out of place. Opening his eyes, he gave me a stiff sort of smile and asked if I could go make us all some tea, which is when I noticed the tail of his shirt coming out, spitting up over his belt. I was so used to the button-down quality he normally possessed, the assured crispness, that this minor dishevelment made him look to me as if he’d lost a battle he hadn’t begun to fight.
He took my mother’s arm and led her into the house and up the stairs. I followed quietly, hanging back a little, waiting until their bedroom door closed before I made my way nearer.
Their voices were low—his growling, exasperated, hers hissing and quick.
I heard: “Marion, that carpet’s … six months! … What are you trying to prove?”
“Oh for god’s sake … woman’s
prerogative … Would it kill you … ?”
“Woman’s what? Just because … and why are you home from work?”
“ … shysters anyway. I want to teach Mitzi to tap dance … my own money!”
“ … you work, it’s your money, but when I work, it’s ours … you think it’s boring just because it’s not about you!”
His voice was getting closer. I snuck back down the stairs as the door opened, her words suddenly clear and sharp.
“Hardly! But I sure as hell think it’s boring when it’s about you.”
After school the next day, I brought home Nancy Donner. She was in my class and wanted in on these tap lessons.
My mother was tickled to have a second pupil. Not only that but “Donner? Is that your last name? Isn’t that a riot, my last name used to be Donner! Wouldn’t that be funny if we were related!”
She told Nancy to call her Marion; she’d never liked “Mrs. Adler.” Was never really her. I hadn’t heard her say that before. I knew Donner was her family’s name but it had never occurred to me that she might miss it.
She had bought two black leotards for me the day before and suddenly she was in my room, rummaging for the second so she could give it to Nancy. “You’ll match,” she said, a thrill on her face. “It’ll be adorable.”
As we changed into our outfits, Nancy whispered about how pretty my mother was, that she was beautiful like a movie star. I yanked at my underpants, trying to tuck them back under the leotard, and stared at my bedroom door as though I could examine my mother on the other side.
“How old is Marion anyway? She looks more like your big sister.”
I could feel my face screwing up at the sound of “Marion.” Seemed like Nancy was just showing off now. Both of them were.
“Old,” I told her and glared at the door again. “She must be thirty.”
When we came into the spare room, Marion had set up an old record player from the basement. She had scrubbed the floor and it wasn’t looking too bad, not shiny exactly, but not bad.
Greedy Little Eyes Page 6
