Blind Spot

by Laurence Miall

  Another box contained all the manuals for her computer and the printer. There was an ink cartridge. There were some software CDs. I moved to the next box — the bottom of the pile. It was very heavy to drag across the floor. Stuffed inside were old textbooks. All of them business-related. I remembered how she used to study at the dining room table. Marketing for Success. Principles of Business Management. Leadership Tips from the Pros.

  There was more. Thrown into the corners of the room were large travel books: Treasures of Tenochtitlan, The Majesty of the Mojave — titles like that. You could see a few wisps of foliage poking from some of them. My mother had been drying and pressing flowers. She made them into bouquets and placed them in vases that were dotted about the house.

  I returned to the desk. I noticed that it was pulled slightly out from the wall by six inches or so. Something caught my eye in the space. It was a poster tube, lying on its side on the floor. I pulled it out and lifted the lid.

  There was no poster inside. There was instead a roll of papers. I shook the tube upside down and the papers flurried out and settled on the floor. They were printouts of emails. They were from my mother to Jacob and from Jacob to her. It took only a few minutes to establish the pattern. Some of the messages were very long — pages long. Some of them were only a few words, briefly establishing when they would next see each other and where.

  The arranged encounters were between them and no one else. Stella wasn’t invited. My father wasn’t invited. These were not arrangements between swingers — between adults consenting to an open relationship. The correspondence before me was the furtive correspondence of adulterers.

  27

  The first message that I read gave the whole game away.

  If Leonard does not know about us, it is because he does not want to know. He withdrew from the marriage years ago. Ask yourself what matters to Leonard. You know the answer. It is work that matters to Leonard. Work matters above everything. He wants more than anything to be respected in his field around the world — from Alberta to Patagonia to the Russian steppes. In the last year or two, he feels that things are starting to go his way. All those years of toiling away in relative obscurity are going to pay off. He turned down three major conferences this year. Did you know that? He had to do that because there was not enough time for all the people clamouring for him. He loves this attention. Believe me, Mary. He loves it more than anything. He wants their respect and adulation more than he wants yours. And I cannot excuse him for that, not because I find his zeal for work unwarranted, but because to prize anything above you is madness. There is nothing more important in the world than you. The names that appear in Who’s Who under geology are blips in history. It’s remarkable that someone in a field where a million years is a heartbeat cannot recognize that. But love between two people transcends everything. It is the only thing that has ever counted.

  I am not saying that Leonard knows about us for certain, but he certainly does not want to know about us. He does not want you to tell him. Why? Because if you told him, you would wrench him away from his true love: his work.

  So don’t tell him, Mary. It’s natural to feel guilty. It would be inhuman not to feel guilty. But if you told him, you would gain nothing and lose everything. No one would be better off for it in the end, not even your negligent husband.

  There was a theme there that he returned to often. “We are only being human. It would be inhuman to deny ourselves our genuine desires. We are hurting no one.” Over and over, he contrasted being human and not human. He was very convincing. He had her believing that rejecting the affair and being honest was to go against her nature. It would have been a rejection of her very species.

  Jacob loved to tell stories. The stories were usually reflections on things he and Mary had done in the past. It was an interesting technique. I had a clear impression that he had laboured long and hard on the prose. What was he getting at? Why was he telling her things that she already knew? Why, for example, did he recount what they had done on the Labour Day long weekend of 2003?

  I felt like a child, sneaking into Hawrelak Park with a bottle of wine. There is something about love that is eternally childlike. It is why we do mischief, why we get into trouble, why we scold each other, why we giggle into the small hours of the morning. When you give in to it, you are sixteen years old again, like you were that day. You stumbled down the steep banks of the river with youth in your legs, with vitality that would not let you fall. And when we were well out of sight of any possible passersby, you said, “Get it out! Get it out!” I replied, “Get what out?” And we both collapsed into childish laughter at the perverse insinuation. Of course, I got the wine out, and before we had even settled comfortably on the grassy outcrop beside the river, you had swigged a quarter of it. You were so bad, so incorrigible that day.

  How boring Jacob made my father by comparison. He was speaking at yet another conference while his wife was tumbling down the banks of the North Saskatchewan with his colleague.

  With his next message, sent in 2004, Jacob took me all the way back to 1995. This was a major discovery. This message provided details of how they had first come together. Again, it was a conference that was my father’s undoing. Both he and Jacob gave presentations at the Seventh Annual Conference of Stratigraphy, hosted that year in Vancouver. I had already been living in Vancouver for a year by then, but nobody bothered getting in touch with me.

  My dad brought my mom. Jacob left his wife at home. Leonard attended Jacob’s presentation. Jacob did not return the gesture. Instead, that day, he excused himself on the grounds that he was sick. This was not a lie. He had food poisoning. But, as he wrote to Mary, “I made it seem more severe than it truly was, because I knew that you would be my nurse.”

  She really was a sort of nurse to him. Leonard had asked her to check in on him in between her wanderings on Robson Street. She brought him Gravol. She filled a hot water bottle for him because it felt good on his tummy. She sat with him and watched the O.J. Simpson trial. She put a damp cloth on his sweaty brow.

  No one had ever taken such good care of me. Not even my own mother.

  Outside, the city had vanished into a fog of rain. Jacob wrote that it seemed as if the whole world had vanished except them. When the television was turned off, there was absolute silence in that room. A silence that was broken by a kiss that he gave her on the lips.

  We had known it was coming. I had never found it easy to disguise my attraction to you, especially when we were alone. A kiss was initially all I wanted. Just a touch of your lips, that’s it.

  28

  The banging on the door startled me. I looked up from the small print on the white page. The light had faded outside. I ran down the stairs and let Julianne into the house. When she kissed me, her lips and face were cold.

  “Winter’s coming,” she said.

  I could hardly speak to her at first.

  “Did I wake you up?” she said. “You seem dazed.”

  “I don’t know,” I said stupidly.

  She kissed me again.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Just get your coat off,” I replied. There was a chill emanating from the faux fur. I felt frozen to the bone.

  “It’s below zero,” she said. “My ears are numb. Feel.”

  She took my hands and forced them to the sides of her head. She was brusque with this movement and I didn’t much like it. I didn’t like having to feel her ears. She was smiling, but I was frowning. There was no fun or laughter in me.

  “Let’s hope they don’t fall off,” she said.

  “They wouldn’t fall off,” I said. “They’re not frostbitten.”

  Now she was frowning.

  “What’s wrong with you, Luke? You’re so deadly serious. You seem irritated.”

  “Far more than irritated,” I said.

  I told her everything. She listened well enough, but as I became increasingly heated in relating the litany of Jacob’s sins, her continued calmn
ess was an affront to me. She didn’t seem to grasp the gravity of what was happening. She was sitting at the kitchen table and I was pacing up and down. I felt like a boxer in the ring, impatient for the fight to begin.

  “He’s a lying prick,” I said. “He looked me in my eyes and deceived me about my own parents. Dishonoured the memory of my own parents. And the fucker probably thinks he’s gotten away with it.”

  “Sit down, Luke. I hate this pacing.”

  “I can’t sit down,” I said.

  “Will you sit down for a glass of wine, at least?”

  I looked at her and said, “Whatever.”

  Julianne said she would go and buy a bottle of wine. While she was gone, I became even more irritable. I felt condescended to, as if she were the school nurse who had to make sure I got my medicine. I was averse to the notion of being calmed down. In her absence, I returned to my mother’s room and leafed through several more emails. These ones were more businesslike in tone. They were mainly to do with setting up times to meet. The couple usually met while my father was in class, teaching. Jacob deliberately ensured that his teaching schedule did not overlap with that of his colleague. This way, he could make the quick drive from campus and visit Mary. He actually lay down beside her in Leonard’s bed. She changed the sheets every time. Her laundry cycle was dictated by these visits.

  “You’re not going to do anything rash, are you?” said Julianne, once she’d poured me my first glass of wine. “You look like you want to smash something.”

  “I feel like smashing something,” I said.

  “You’re not going to bring this up with Jacob.”

  “Are you telling me or asking me?”

  “I don’t think you should.”

  “What should I do then, Julianne?”

  She put her hand on my leg. All physical contact was irking me, but I didn’t stop her.

  “It’s all in the past,” she said. “What happened, happened. It happens to countless adults. Adultery is almost nothing more than a parking fine in the court of marital misdemeanors. I mean, no one even gets worked up about it anymore — not even the church. Let’s say you were a celebrity. It would be worse for your reputation to get photographed in an ugly dress than to cheat on your partner.”

  “I don’t understand your point. I don’t care about celebrities. If you’re going to say anything, stick to the point.”

  “Okay,” she retorted. “I’ll shut up then. Better yet. I’ll go to my own home.”

  “No. I’m sorry. No, don’t go.”

  I couldn’t be alone. I would go crazy on my own. I had to drink faster, try to relax faster and slow my racing heart. I poured myself a second glass. I downed it in a minute or less. Then I poured a third.

  “I don’t want to make dinner,” I said. “Let me take you out for dinner.”

  “You’re sure?” she said.

  “I’m sure.”

  I made a mess of myself that night. For a while, my anger partly inoculated me from the effect of liquor. We had another bottle of wine with dinner at Culina. Afterwards, we sipped on cognac with dessert. Then we went home and raided the last of my parents’ liqueur. I became clumsy and sleepy. The fight had gone from my heavy, dinner-bloated body. I just wanted to collapse onto the makeshift bed in the centre of the living room floor and pass out.

  It would be the only night Julianne and I went to sleep without making love.

  In the morning, I was far worse for wear than her. She was up at dawn, chipper as a kindergarten teacher.

  “I forgot to tell you last night,” she said. “There’s a bit of a gathering at the Black Dog this evening.”

  “There is?” I said, speaking only to prove that I was alive.

  “The usual suspects will be there. It’s just to celebrate the end of our presentations for class. Mine is today, by the way. Wish me luck.”

  “Good luck,” I said.

  When she was gone, I slipped back into the fetid ditch of my sleep.

  When I surfaced for good, I went back to the emails, just like any addict goes right back to the cause of his suffering.

  Jacob,

  Yesterday was a big mistake. I did not visit your office thinking of that. Let’s stop now and it will stay just a mistake. We were friends before this happened. We can go back to that. I don’t want to be ungrateful because every part of me wanted it. Every part of me enjoyed it. But Leonard would never forgive me, or you. It’s a huge risk. It isn’t worth it. This way, it would just stay a happy memory. That’s for the best.

  Mary

  Jacob swatted aside my mother’s objections. Her initial tentativeness was probably even a turn-on for him.

  Will you leave me so unsatisfied? I don’t want sex. I want love. I am in love. I have said it all long. Will you believe me? You think that having tasted what I love more than anything, I am ready to go back to my fast? You are an oasis at the end of a desert. You can’t let me die of thirst.

  Call my office tomorrow at noon.

  She must have followed his orders. It didn’t stop. It was merely starting. Once she had convinced herself that she too was in love, the messages accelerated in frequency and intensity. But she first had to be convinced that her affair wasn’t ruining the life of another woman — that is, Stella. She asked, “You say that Stella accepts what we’re doing, but how can she?”

  Jacob had the answer.

  There is a history to this that you should know. People have often wondered why Stella and I are childless. The truth is, I always wanted a child. I did not know when I married her that her heart was dead set against starting a family of our own. I wanted to try for one within a few years, just as soon as I joined faculty. But she wasted little time in disabusing me of this notion. A baby would interfere with our freedom, with her plans, with her dreams. You remember how many hobbies she had: tarot, astrology, needlepoint, witchcraft, singing classes, and on and on. I accepted that she wouldn’t sacrifice her freedom while she was young and didn’t try to change her mind. She would think differently as she got older.

  Then she became obsessed with the idea of farming, and for a while we were struggling to make our farm work, and even though she was in her late twenties, when I raised the subject of family, her answer was almost exactly the same. She could not abandon her plans and dreams of living off the land. She told me that I would soon see she was right, and that thanks to the farm, I would be able to quit teaching soon.

  You know how that turned out.

  After the failure of the farm, which was a tragedy for us, I waited a year, and then I asked again. And in doing so, I sowed the seed of an even greater tragedy. This time I not only persuaded her to have a baby, I actually made her desperately want one. I explained that the void she had always felt in her life, the restlessness that drove her to constantly pick up this hobby and that hobby, these were because she had denied her own nature. She was meant to be a mother. The loving care she had shown to the farm had been intended for a baby.

  She became pregnant in the summer of 1979. Almost no one knew it. She did not want anyone to know until she could show them a big, shiny stomach. You and Leonard were away for the entire summer and we only went into town to see the doctor a couple of times. Then, she lost it. There had been an infection in utero which caused her massive stomach pains that required immediate attention. I was in the waiting room, chewing on the skin of my fingers until they bled. A doctor came to see me, pulled me into his office, and explained what had happened. They had done emergency surgery and scraped the dead thing out of her. She would not have survived otherwise.

  We retreated to our farm. I went on stress leave. The summer dragged on and lasted into September. It was infernally hot. We were in hell. She hated me for what had happened. She hardly ventured from the bedroom. I had to do all of the work around the house. I did not blame her for being depressed. But I was not sure how long I was supposed to endure this. October blew in with a chill wind, and she continued to hate me. She also hat
ed herself. There was a mythology creeping into her consciousness, a very dangerous story she liked to tell herself, about how I had argued against her true destiny. The stars, which had always guided her, had not foretold her bringing another human into this world. She said she should have known not to listen to me. She screamed at me that I was like a devil whispering in her ear.

  She was hysterical half the time. In November, I took her to see a psychiatrist. I lied to her, saying that he was a general practitioner who had to inspect her general health in light of the loss of the fetus. This was the only way to make her agree to go. She wanted to scream at him, too. In her mind, the medical establishment had failed her by refusing to recognize that her body was not destined to carry life. She carried on like that, and the psychiatrist decided to prescribe her pills for depression. He was a very convincing man, a very gentle soul. I could never have made her agree to take pills.

  She made a gradual recovery of sorts, but as we both know, she never fully recovered. One of the residual symptoms was her refusal to make love to me. The physical side of our marriage died. It died with that baby. I went back to teaching in January, leaving her for long hours at a time. I saw so much feminine beauty, at class change, in the quadrangle, in the swimming pool, occasionally even in the class I was teaching, and yet when I returned home, I was denied any genuine feminine warmth for myself. It was unbearable, Mary. My wife was only in her thirties, still beautiful, but I was simply not allowed to touch her. I still loved her, but I loved her increasingly like a child, not a wife.

  The arguments started up again. I was becoming infatuated with a waitress at a restaurant where I often took my lunches during the workday. It was evident that if I so desired, I could have the waitress. Knowing that made me grow in resentment for my wife. I said to her that she could not continue to live this way, like a shell of a human being. Even if she did not want to live, she should at least try it. She should force herself to live. She might find that she liked it. She should force herself to make love to me, and she might find she would like that, too. But she did not change her attitude in the slightest.