The Love Market

by Carol Mason

  She puts her napkin down. ‘It was partly the job. But it was mostly Rich. I’m a happy person, Celine, but he pulls me down. That’s why I don’t enjoy coming home to him. Does saying that make me really selfish and horrible? That I don’t want to marry him because of his depression?’

  I shake my head. ‘No, but truthfully? I don’t think that’s the real reason. I think you’re just not ready to be married to anyone yet. Maybe you need to have a life you love first.’ She seems to listen intently. ‘It’s scary letting someone who loves you go, Jacq—you once said that to me a long time ago, about Rich. But what I should have said is that something always comes along to replace what’s gone. It’s a bit like digging a hole. You shovel all the soil out, but the earth around it falls in and fills some of it back up again.’

  She smiles. ‘I like that idea.’

  I nod, feeling wistful for a moment. ‘Me too.’

  Thirty-Eight

  Aimee and I are going to Canada.

  Aimee stays at Mike’s the night before we fly. I haven’t talked to Mike since I told him two weeks ago about Patrick’s invitation. It’s only when he drops Aimee off at our house that we come face to face for the first time since we kissed. ‘Hi,’ he says, flatly, avoiding my eyes, seeming to look everywhere but into them.

  ‘Thanks for driving her,’ I tell him. Given our flight leaves shortly after two it would have been a bit of a rush if I’d had to go pick her up then drive to the airport.

  He nods. Now his eyes do meet mine and he looks at me in almost disturbing hard focus. ‘Will you phone Jacqui to tell her you got there safely?’ he asks.

  ‘Of course, but I was planning to buy a calling card, so Aimee can ring you as much as she wants. I’m sure she’ll have lots to tell you.’

  ‘Whatever you want,’ he says. ‘So long as I know you got there all right.’

  ‘Do you like my new Sketchers?’ Aimee, who darted into the house, darts to the door again. She lifts a foot to show me her new pink and brown leather running shoes that she’s just put on. ‘I’m travelling in them.’

  Amazingly, Aimee seems unperturbed by seeing Patrick, as though it just goes with the territory if she is to have her holiday in Canada. ‘Black bears live until they’re twenty-three,’ she told me the other day. ‘I was looking on the Internet. I would have thought they’d live longer. Like elephants.’

  ‘I told you, you shouldn’t wear new shoes to fly in,’ Mike says. ‘Your feet swell in the air. They’ll kill you and it’s a long time to sit in pain.’

  Aimee’s bubble is burst. She looks from her dad to me. ‘I’m sure it’ll be fine,’ I tell her, looking at Mike. ‘I think it’s only older people who suffer from swelling feet. Not someone Aimee’s age.’

  ‘Well take some Elastoplasts,’ Mike warns her. Then he says, ‘I should go. Have a safe flight.’ And then, as a bit of a throwaway line, read by an actor who is not quite talented enough to be entirely convincing, ‘Enjoy yourself.’

  ~ * * * ~

  We arrive at local time four p.m. As we proceed through the exit doors, into the arrivals hall, I spot him right away and whatever doubts I’ve harboured about coming here just disappear. He waves, his face breaking into a big smile.

  He hugs me endlessly. I’m conscious of Aimee standing stiffly beside us, so I reach an arm to include her. He kisses me now, a long kiss planted firmly on my cheek. ‘Hi,’ he says to Aimee, and places a friendly hand on her shoulder. Aimee colours bright red and looks down at her new shoes. ‘You must be Aimee.’ She smiles at the ground.

  A muggy heat hits us outside, as well as the bluest sky with gleaming sunshine. Patrick directs us around wheelie suitcases, past orange taxis, and crawling black stretch limos, through the horns and shouts, and the shrill whistle of the uniformed parking commissionaire. My first thought is that everything is bigger: cars, buildings, paths: an immediate outpouring of freedom and space. He leads us to his car, talking animatedly, one hand still on my back, and the other carrying Aimee’s suitcase. In a short-sleeved pale blue sports shirt, and faded jeans, he looks fit and lean and tanned. And I wonder how many times, for Aimee’s sake, I’m going to have to catch myself before I reach to attack him with kisses.

  And then we are bulleting along the “freeway” as he calls it, Patrick still chatting away from the front seat—about our flight, the weather, about what he’s got lined up for us to do—and Aimee intently observing the vast size of Canada from out of the back window.

  His home is a condominium in an area of the city that he calls Yorkville. It has two concierges at the gate, one of whom valet parks his navy blue Volvo SUV. His unit is way up on the thirtieth floor. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been in a building as tall as this,’ Aimee stares at all the floor numbers that light up as we ride the elevator. ‘Not very good if you’re scared of heights.’

  ‘I actually don’t care for heights,’ he tells her. ‘I just try not to look out of the window.’

  She blushes and looks at him curiously.

  As he swipes his door with a key-card, I am struck by how unreal it feels to be standing here anticipating walking into the place where Patrick lives.

  ‘Welcome,’ he says, pushing open the door for us.

  I walk in, surprised how magazine-interior it is. ‘It’s all white!’ I laugh.

  ‘Hey, not my doing. The person I’m renting from is an interior designer.’

  Renting? I think. I’d have imagined he’d have owned his own place.

  I am drawn to the massive windows behind the white leather couch that overlook a busy intersection of streets. ‘Cool!’ Aimee, says, coming to look too. High end stores like Tiffany right below, glass buildings that reflect the sky, broad avenues disappearing in all directions. ‘That’s Lake Ontario,’ he says, standing right behind us, pointing ahead as far as the eye can see. ‘And that is Yonge Street,’ he points left. ‘The longest street in the world.’

  ‘In the world or in Canada?’ Aimee quizzes him.

  ‘It used to be in the Guinness book of world records. It’s nearly twelve hundred miles long.’

  ‘Twelve hundred?’ Aimee gawps at him.

  He smiles. ‘We’ll walk it tomorrow.’

  ‘All of it?’

  He laughs now. ‘No. Just the bit that takes us from here down to the lakeshore. Maybe one mile of it.’

  ‘Phew!’ she says, looking to me. ‘Otherwise I really will need Elastoplasts.’

  ‘Hungry?’ He glances at his watch, after we’ve got our bearings in his place. ‘It’s just after five. We could go for an early dinner.’

  We are hungry, or at least, ready for a proper-sized, satisfying meal. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘It’ll be good to get some fresh air anyway. You can unpack when we come back. Let’s go hit a patio in Yorkville and soak up some last rays of sun.’

  We go back down in the elevator and walk for about ten minutes until we come to a lively area of bars, boutiques and outdoor restaurants that feels instantly European, set one block in from the main street. Patrick leads us down a narrow walkway, to one of the less busy patio restaurants in a tiled courtyard that is decked with plant pots spilling colours.

  We sit down at a chrome table in the sun. Patrick orders a bottle of Prosecco, and a cranberry and soda for Aimee, which he suggests after the waitress says they don’t serve ginger beer. I order chicken with linguine Alfredo, Aimee orders fish and chips, and Patrick, an Ahi tuna salad with a side of yam ries. The Prosecco is sparkly and refreshing. Aimee holds my flute up to the sun and peers at the pale golden bubbles. Patrick sits back in the seat, in his sunglasses that block me from seeing his eyes. His mouth twitching into a pleased smile every time I look at him. We are as much a novelty to him as all this is to us.

  When our food arrives, Aimee is so stunned by the portion size that she gets her camera out and takes a picture of each of our plates, which amuses Patrick. ‘Mum! That’s not a portion of pasta, it’s a whole box! What till Dad sees! Can I upload them to Facebook
?’

  I look at Patrick. ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘You can borrow my computer tomorrow.’

  It’s true about the size of the food. My enormous oval plate is loaded up with a heap of buttery noodles, and what appears to be two grilled chicken breasts on the top. ‘God, I’ll never eat all this,’ I tell Patrick, laughing. ‘My protein allowance for the week!’

  ‘Welcome to North America,’ he says.

  When we finish all we can manage, it’s after seven, which, with the five hour time difference, is into the next day for us. We walk back slowly, taking a slightly longer route along another narrow street that’s full of expensive boutiques, which leads onto a main, tree-lined thoroughfare. Aimee totters on ahead of us, in her new running shoes, white footless tights, and a brightly-coloured sundress over the top. And from time to time when she’s not looking, Patrick takes hold of my hand and squeezes it, before releasing me again.

  I spot his building on the corner. When we get upstairs I watch Aimee brush her teeth then she falls semi-clothed into bed. ‘Cool,’ she says, enthusiastically, when he shows her the view from her bedroom window. But she’s too tired to show much interest for long.

  With the blinds open and the city lights streaming in, Patrick and I stand there in his bedroom, illuminated in stripes of white light, kissing, joining foreheads and taking stock of the fact that, somehow, we’re together again.

  ~ * * * ~

  The next few days are a whirlwind through Patrick’s itinerary. A whisk up to the top of the CN Tower, one of the tallest buildings in the world, where we eat a very expensive lunch; the ferry across to Toronto Island, for sunbathing. Aimee’s shaky attempt to swim. Steaks on the park’s communal barbeque. An afternoon in Chinatown, where Aimee is repulsed by the sight of whole fish laying on the ‘sidewalk’ in the sunshine. We gravitate over the course of the days, from off-and-on hand holding, to an arm placed protectively around my back, until Patrick’s touches and our quiet passion for one another don’t need to be hidden so much any more. Aimee seems not to register it.

  And of course I can’t help but compare this to holidays with Mike. How, when we’d go to France or Italy, we would inevitably see lovey-dovey couples, and Mike would say, ‘Why aren’t we like that?’ And there was really no answer. None I could voice. Because the truth would hurt too much: I am not in love. And I can’t make myself be. As though by not feeling it, you were somehow forbidden from trying to fake it, in the hope that in-loveness might grow.

  Aimee is enthralled by the shops. We spend a pleasant morning in the Eaton Centre, relieved to escape the humidity and temperatures hitting over ninety. It is an oasis of new and different clothes shops from the ones we’ve got back home, and far less of a crowd than in the MetroCentre. When Patrick discovers Aimee’s interest in shoes, we end up ditching Black Creek Pioneer Village for the Bata Shoe Museum. When he tells her it houses over 12,000 exhibits, Aimee nearly dies. Four hours in there is clearly not Patrick’s idea of a great way to spend the morning, but Aimee’s fascination with the History of Western Fashion, and her rabid delight over a pair of leather platform Oxfords, circa 1973 is almost worth Patrick’s pain.

  ‘You can draw. You love shoes. Seems to me you should become a shoe designer,’ he tells her, looking through his rear view mirror, when we’re on our way home. Bringing his attention back to the road, he just misses the spark that arrives in her eyes.

  ‘Shoe designer?’ Aimee repeats, then catches my eye.

  All that, plus Greek food on the Danforth, and a rather romantic dinner for three in Toronto’s Historic Distillery District, we are almost worn out by the time Patrick hauls us to Niagara Falls. But Aimee’s excitement reaches new levels when we don ridiculous yellow plastic rainwear and take the Maid of the Mist boat ride to the foot of the falls to watch six million cubic feet of water fall over its crest, the equivalent of thirteen storeys above our heads. Patrick tells her the story of the woman and her cat who were the first to go over the falls in a barrel in 1901 and of other subsequent stunts that haven’t proven as successful, and Aimee looks at him, part disbelieving, part like she just might want to run out and try it herself.

  The photos I snap of Aimee this day show a girl who is as happy as I’ve ever seen her in a very long time. And I know that Aimee has had a rough time of things, but we have come through a little way. In the car going back, while I flick back through my digital camera, Aimee thrusts a sketch of ‘John Lennon’s “Beatle Boot” crossed with and English leather pump circa 1925’ over Patrick’s shoulder, and then she beams at him, pushing back her hair that’s still wet from the boat ride.

  ~ * * * ~

  On Tuesday Aimee phones Mike on my calling card, while we pull over for a snack on the drive to his cabin up at Muskoka. She chats animatedly on the payphone, while Patrick and I sit and watch her from a nearby picnic bench. When she gets off the phone, I recognized that slightly subdued look. It’s the homesick face, the very one I’m sure must have had that time my dad took me to Greece with his girlfriend.

  The cabin is far more impressive than Patrick has led us to believe. Right on the edge of Lake Muskoka, and a small sand beach, it sits in its own private jewel-sized hideaway among tall trees. We crunch gravel past a small storage shed and then a snowmobile shed, to a ‘change house’ as he calls it that’s as close to the lake as you can get without stepping in. ‘My dad built this for my sister and me to towel off in, and to dry the dog.’ He laughs. ‘My dad must have seen us as little animals in our own right, but for us, our time in this place was all we really wanted from summer. We’d look forward all year to coming here.’

  He unlocks the ‘change house’ to reveal not at all what I am expecting. A small room with a small bed in it, with a cream eiderdown. a pine side table, and a sink in the corner with a small, frameless cracked mirror above it. ‘The guest cabin,’ he says, looking at Aimee. ‘Your own private suite while you’re here, if you’d like it. Or you can stay in the main house; it’s up to you.’

  Aimee turns from Patrick to me. ‘Can I stay here?’ she asks. ‘But what about the bears though?’

  ‘No bears,’ Patrick says. ‘Except when you go to the toilet.’

  Aimee scowls and looks around her. ‘Where’s the toilet?’

  Patrick indicates a wooden shed right next door. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll teach you to use a gun before nightfall.’ He smiles at me, as Aimee’s jaw drops.

  ‘Here,’ he says, opening a tiny connecting door that I only just notice as he walks to it. ‘It seems my father thought of everything.’

  Aimee looks relieved to see a toilet.

  ~ * * * ~

  The three nights I’m with Patrick in his cabin with the pine walls, with Aimee sleeping just a glimpse away in the adjacent property, could easily be the happiest of my life. We don’t do much except go out on the lake by day, I swim while Aimee sits and draws more shoes, and only once do we go for a long drive looking for a bear or a wolf but disappointingly we don’t see any. Just plenty of white-tailed deer, that Aimee takes some good pictures of, and a couple of moose. With each day I wake up looking forward to those two or three hours we have just to ourselves once Aimee has gone to her cabin to sleep.

  Patrick tells me a lot more about the book he’s planning on writing—a foreign correspondent’s inside view of Iraq—and talks surprisingly little of his job. All I know is that he’s due to start it by Christmas. One night when we do actually put the telly on, he shows us the man he will be replacing.

  ‘Cool!’ Aimee says, well into the idea of Patrick being famous now. ‘Won’t you get to go abroad though and do those news reports from wars and things any more?’ she asks him.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he says. ‘I’ll do live news reports on location when the need arises.’ He looks at me. ‘Really, it was the right decision to take it.’

  I tell him that I’ve decided to throw a party for my clients. Perhaps a Christmas party, one that I can get Aimee to help me plan. I’m going to get every clien
t to invite two other single people. ‘A masked ball, actually!’ The idea suddenly comes to me.

  ‘That’s not bad,’ he says. ‘They can’t take their masks off. If they hit it off with someone, they can only see them when they go out on a date.’

  In the main cabin, about fifty feet away from Aimee’s, I don’t feel so bad about the noises I make when he makes love to me, because she won’t be able to hear us. As Patrick kisses my shoulder and writes letters on my bare back, he writes the same words he wrote with the tip of a dried-up leaf in the sand, while Aimee suntanned and read a book beside us. ‘I love you,’ he wrote, then once I’d read it, he smoothed it away with his hand, as though perhaps he’d never declared it.

  ‘I love you,’ he writes now, only this time he doesn’t rub it out.

  It’s our last night before we return to the city. So I am naturally gloomy. In two days time we will be flying home.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ I whisper. This is becoming our anthem.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says. For a second he stops touching me. Then he turns me onto my back, making me look at his face in the moonlight. ‘There is part of me, Celine, that says you should come live here. Aimee could go to school here, it’s not like you’d be moving to a country where they didn’t speak English. You could get a job, or try out your business here, or maybe be happy to not have to work for a while. I’d be earning enough.’ His three fingers do a rapid pitter-pat on my shoulder: still this nervous energy in him. ‘Aimee could go back to England as much as she wanted—you both could, any time.’

  His fingers stop moving and hover a couple of inches above my skin. ‘But it wouldn’t be reasonable to drag Aimee away from her father, would it? And well, even for my own reasons, I’m not sure I can have you come live here.’ He rolls onto his back and stares at the ceiling. His eyes look deeply set, and shadowed. ‘I did that with Anya, moved her away from her life. Dragged her off into the unknown. Made her put me and my career ahead of everything else.’ He turns to me now, with unfettered honesty written all over his face. ‘It wouldn’t be that much different would it? You’d be in the same position as she was in, and I have a feeling it would be doomed. And I just can have the responsibility of that on me. I just can’t, Celine.’