What We Hold In Our Hands

by Kim Aubrey

  When he returns, he sits opposite Patti, who has finished her sandwich and ordered dessert. The waitress brings him an omelet and coffee while Patti notices the other diners, secure in their booths—old couples as silent as she and Jeff, young couples laughing and flirting, a single older woman in an elegant straw hat, her back to Patti. The angle of the hat suggests that the woman is enjoying herself. Her shoulders look relaxed and easy inside her cotton blouse, as if they’ve shed some long burden they’ll never take up again. Patti thinks about the giant Buddhas, the elation the rebels must have felt when those old stones shifted and fell.

  “How are you feeling?” Jeff asks.

  “Tired and hot.”

  “Were you able to do any work?”

  She stares at him—his face damp with sweat, his forehead creased, as it always is when his back is aching. It’s been weeks since he last asked how she was. She discovers the anger rolled tight under her breastbone. “I think you should move out.”

  Jeff gazes at his empty plate. “How would you manage?”

  “The way I’m managing now. If you don’t want this baby, and you don’t want me, what are you hanging around for?”

  “I do want you, but you’re not making it easy.”

  “You don’t want the baby. And that’s how I come now. We’re a package.”

  His thick hair is stuck to his forehead, unbudged by the air from the fan. “I don’t know. Maybe it will be fine, and I’ll feel fatherly. I don’t know. Right now I can’t imagine it.” He reaches for the back of his neck.

  The waitress brings Patti’s rice pudding, which she consumes slowly, Jeff watching. She doesn’t look at him until she’s done.

  “Are you coming?” she asks.

  “Later,” he says.

  Lily hasn’t been out of the house in days. It’s been even longer since she’s driven her car, a ’97 Volvo station wagon. Now that she doesn’t need it to drive Beth and Emma, it sits in the ramshackle garage behind the house for weeks at a time. Their house is so close to shops and the subway that she hardly needs a car. The last time she took it out was to buy bulk packages of toilet paper and laundry detergent. But now she’s discovered Internet shopping.

  She doesn’t exactly lie to Max about this new activity, but she doesn’t tell him about it either, and he hasn’t mentioned the empty courier boxes. He’s overseeing three kitchen renos and the construction of a sushi restaurant, and Evan, his boss and business partner, has just promised to build a spa for a small in-town hotel.

  Most nights, Max and Lily sit silent over a late dinner of scrambled eggs, or he grabs a burger between worksites, arriving home to find her soaking in the tub while Leonard Cohen’s baritone rumbles like an earthquake through the house, and another courier box lies flattened in the recycle bin.

  This afternoon when the doorbell rings, Lily knows it will be more stuff—pants or shoes she’ll have to return because they don’t fit, embroidered silk pillows, yoga blocks, low-mercury canned tuna, new and used books, so many books she can’t read them all, so many she’s had to order a bamboo shelf to stack them on.

  “Sign here,” the courier says.

  Lily signs, accepting the white cardboard box. Inside layers of paper rest black stretch capris and a purple T-shirt with “Namaste” printed on the back in small white letters. Over the years, she has signed up for various summer activities—art workshops like the one their neighbour Jeff is teaching, a hiking group, a theatre club, yoga this year—but her attendance has never been good.

  Summers stall and stagnate without the regular work of teaching, Max always extra busy, and now her daughters gone too. Last summer they were home: Emma scooped ice cream a few blocks away while Beth answered the phone in Max’s office. Still Lily hadn’t seen much of them, since they’d spent most of their free time with friends, but there had been moments—midnight tea in the kitchen with Emma confiding her doubts about going away to Halifax, a Sunday afternoon watching The Wizard of Oz with Beth, who’d stretched out on the couch, resting her head on Lily’s lap.

  Lily hasn’t been to yoga in three weeks, but she could go this afternoon. The studio is just a ten-minute walk up the street. Maybe a shower will give her the momentum she needs.

  The warm water softens her pent shoulders, the gripped muscles of her scalp. As her jaw drops, tears mix with the water running down her face. She has missed two periods, hardly sleeps, has lost her appetite for food and sex, is losing herself, becoming someone else, someone older, old. But her usually thin body feels more solid, and she’s developed a small belly, which refuses to disappear even when she forgets to eat. It sits in front of her like a Buddha, ready to lead or accompany her somewhere. She places a hand on it. It is tender and tough. I love you, she says, to no one at all, an old habit. But who does she love? And what does it mean? How will it help her? I need help, she tells the showerhead.

  “You need to see a doctor,” Max had said.

  She’d promised to make an appointment, but that was last week. She won’t take hormones so what’s the point? It’s 2003. The latest research on HRT has shown that it increases the risk of heart disease, and having had to visit both her parents in the cardiac ward over the past few years, Lily has a rational fear of heart failure.

  She has already ordered ginseng, black cohosh, and chaste tree berry from the Internet, but they don’t seem to be working, except that she feels very chaste since she is too listless, and Max too busy, for sex. Maybe her yoga teacher knows something that will help. Lily has paid for ten classes, but has only been to one. They did four rounds of sun salutation, then balanced on their tailbones in the boat, which set every muscle in her body quivering. While the others stayed in the pose, she let her head, shoulders, and legs drop. The teacher’s repeated mantra, “Everything depends on the strength of your core,” made Lily feel undisciplined and weak.

  Patti is relieved to turn onto her shady street. The heat is a noisome burden like her desire for Jeff. If she didn’t have this life inside her, these hormones making her weepy and vulnerable, she could be happy alone, writing her dissertation. But the larger the baby grows, the smaller she feels—a tiny woman with a belly out to there. Staring down at its unavoidable roundness, she doesn’t notice the sparrows in the lilac bush until they flash in front of her. They seem to have burst from her belly like blackbirds from a pie. Just two years ago, she’d run a marathon, training with a group of runners who met in the ravine. Pure muscle and movement, she’d felt in control, invincible, her mind and senses invigorated. Now she is Thumbelina dodging the sharp beaks of birds.

  After their first few meetings, Lily and Becket switched from Fridays to Saturdays because Becket could no longer spare time from the office.

  One Saturday, Lily crawled out of bed, searching for a snack. She unearthed a red delicious from the pile of grapefruits in the fridge drawer, but it tasted pulpy. She threw it into the garbage under the sink. She’d told Max she was going to the movies with a friend and might stay out for an early dinner after the matinée. Now she felt the first tug of guilt as if a string had been looped and knotted around the muscle joining her neck and shoulders, trussing her like the Cornish hens she used to roast Saturday nights when Beth and Emma still went to bed early, allowing her and Max a peaceful late dinner. Now that they were in their teens, Friday and Saturday nights had become about driving them to friends’ houses, dances, or the movies, then watching videos and drinking black tea until it was time to fetch them home again.

  Lily held out both hands as if weighing on one the new and delicious thrill of eating pizza in bed with Becket, and on the other the known but heady pleasure of listening to her daughters gossip with their friends in the car, revealing secrets she would not otherwise hear, as the girls teased Beth about her crush on the drama teacher or Emma about her first kiss.

  Lily climbed back into bed, pressing her cool skin against Becket’s warm
body.

  He pulled her to him, murmuring, “Our children will have your eyes, your pony legs.”

  The muscles between her neck and shoulders squeezed tighter.

  “If you want children, why haven’t you married?” She was up on her elbow now.

  “I wasn’t ready.”

  “So when did you decide?”

  “Just now.” He was on his back, staring at the ceiling. “I dreamed we were in bed on a Sunday morning, you nursing the baby, me kissing the top of her head, our son dragging in a big stuffed rabbit.” He turned to face her. His smooth fingers reached for her arm.

  “It was just a dream,” she said.

  “It’s gone now,” he agreed. But the dream seemed to linger in the parched air like the vanilla scent of the cigars he smoked when she wasn’t there.

  Lily didn’t stay for dinner, but came back when she could. Telling Max she’d signed up for a Pilates class Saturday mornings, she was in Becket’s bed by nine thirty, home by noon. She tried not to ask why she needed Becket in her life, what kind of balance his love restored, because she could not imagine her weeks without him. She seemed to have become a new person, unruffled by her students’ fumbling, more patient and easy with her daughters, letting Emma go to a party at a boy’s house, as long as she didn’t stay too late, agreeing to take Beth clothes shopping Saturday afternoon, but not too early.

  Max said, “You look terrific in that dress. Must be those Pilates classes.”

  It was February, and they were on their way to a dinner party to celebrate Max’s sister’s twentieth anniversary.

  He lifted Lily’s hand, kissing it.

  Her skin felt warm and prickly. Max wasn’t one for compliments or hand kissing. His brusque manners were a family joke. At work, Evan was the front man, charming clients, making his rounds in a crimson SUV emblazoned with the company logo.

  “What do you want to do for our anniversary?” Max asked.

  “I’ll have to think about it,” she said.

  “I thought a trip. Maybe Italy or Eastern Europe. Terrific architecture in Prague.”

  Lily thought of Becket’s ears, how they clung to his bullet-shaped head beneath his cropped, lambs-wool hair, how she had never sat beside him in a car or on a plane, his head parallel to hers, listening to the silent percussion of each other’s eardrums.

  “I’ve started seeing a woman,” Becket said softly.

  So softly she could almost imagine he hadn’t said it. They’d just kissed goodbye at his door, his bare feet on one side of the threshold, her running shoes on the other.

  “What am I?” she asked.

  “You’re a wife. Someone else’s wife. I just wanted to let you know so you wouldn’t think you’re the only one.”

  “I know it’s not fair,” she whispered, index finger tapping the doorframe. “But I want to be the only one.”

  Another Saturday, when Becket started to reminisce about how they’d met, the nostalgia in his voice caused Lily to shiver and pull up the blanket. From the bed, she could see her white runners lined up beside the door.

  “Maybe I should take Pilates for real. Maybe that’s all this has been, exercise.”

  “Not for me.” He slipped one hand under the arch of her neck.

  “So, how are things going with what’s-her-name?”

  “Things are going, but I don’t want to talk about it. We never talk about Max.”

  “When you’re married, will you want a mistress?” she asked, searching his face for the real answer.

  “The tech bubble is going to burst,” he said. “The NASDAQ is already showing a decline. The writing’s on the wall. I think we should transfer all your money to the dividend fund.” His eyes had their urgent, steamroller look.

  “Okay,” she agreed, closing his lids with two gentle thumbs.

  Outside Becket’s condo, the March sun warmed Lily’s skin. The air smelled earthy and fresh. She couldn’t bring herself to follow the slick, muddy stairs into the subway, which would have taken her home in fifteen minutes. Instead she walked up Yonge, the longest street in the world, imagining Mrs. Santos on Monday, changing the sheets, washing away the dried evidence of Lily and Becket’s lovemaking, wiping Lily’s fingerprints off taps and doorknobs, vacuuming up all traces of her dead skin cells and hair. The invisible Mrs. Santos making Lily disappear.

  Lily dragged her sorry body past Beth and Emma’s high school, where both girls were practicing for the school play. The house would be quiet when she got home. She wanted to keep walking, to leave the city behind, but by the time she reached her street, her clothes were damp with sweat, and her hips and knees ached. Just as she lifted the latch of the iron fence, Max’s van pulled up to the sidewalk.

  He called out, “Must have been some exercise class.”

  Inside the house, he said, “We have to talk about our trip.” He was pinching his bottom lip between thumb and forefinger, a sure sign of stress.

  Max had been planning their anniversary trip for May, but now he didn’t know when he’d be able to go. “Evan’s lined up too many jobs for spring and summer,” he told her over the ham and cheese sandwiches he’d made while she was in the shower. “Don’t look so upset. I promise we’ll get there.”

  Lily picked the cheese out of her sandwich, abashed at her good luck in the timing of Max’s confession, but unable to stop her tears. She wept on and off for the next three days, Max’s sheepish attentions making her even sadder and more contrite. She’d failed at love, not only with Becket, but with Max, Beth, and Emma, stealing time from them, hoarding parts of herself away.

  That spring, she gave her students extra work, scribbled in their practice books with red marker, and pushed them to master their recital pieces to do well on the June exams. She flew at the piano, banging out Schubert and Beethoven, until Beth and Emma screamed at her to stop.

  In September, prices on the Toronto Stock Exchange began to tumble, technology stocks leading the way. Becket had transferred her money as promised, but even the dividend fund was losing ground. People were scrambling out of the market, but Lily remembered what he’d said about the fund, “The longer you hold it, the better it gets.”

  In October, Max and Lily finally went to Prague and Venice. Her sister Judith drove in from Kingston to stay with the girls.

  On the plane, she stared at the dark hairs sprouting from Max’s ears, then slipped a quilted eye mask over her face. She seemed to sleepwalk through the five days in Prague while he pointed out arched windows, spires, pilasters, and pediments. Jetlag, grief, or allergies made her face puffy, her ears crackle. But the first morning in Venice, she woke to see her skin reflected clear and golden in the ornately framed mirror. She and Max made love in the canopied bed. Later, they stepped down streets glistening with receding water and consumed fragrant linguine and rosé in a small room crowded by six white-cloaked tables. Across the canal, orange asters spilled from window boxes, a fresco was peeling from a yellow wall, and three doves sat on a shining roof.

  Wherever they turned, whichever alley they ventured down, they saw or heard something beautiful that made any ugliness around it beautiful too. “Look at that,” Max said. A painting of a saint with golden eyes and alabaster cheeks hung beside the broken exit sign at an art gallery. “And those,” she said. Dainty purple blossoms sprouted from mud in the cracks of the dirty sidewalk. They saw a glass and silver chalice fill with green light from the narrow stained-glass windows in a musty, sewer-smelling church, and heard a grey man caress a Puccini aria from a scratched and dingy violin while they watched the purple hole, where his nose should have been, open and close with his breath.

  On the plane home, Lily leaned in and traced the curves of Max’s ear, allowing her fingertip to brush the bristly hairs.

  Patti drags her fingers across the iron railings of her neighbour’s fence just as the piano teacher open
s the door and peers out. Patti says hello, wishing she could remember the woman’s name. For years, she managed to avoid the neighbours, but once her pregnancy became obvious, everyone on the street began to claim her. Even the reclusive piano teacher has asked when she’s due.

  Inside the apartment, Patti heads for Jeff’s studio, where she examines his empty easel, his cluttered desk, the canvases stacked and lined against the walls, the window facing the piano teacher’s like two eyes opening onto each other. The room across the way is empty except for a black upright piano, a few chairs, and a small desk. The piano isn’t furniture, Patti thinks. Or art. It’s an object used to make art, like a paintbrush, but it doesn’t require paint, only a musician to press her fingers to its keys. Unless someone makes a recording to capture its movement through time, no evidence of the music remains, nothing to admire or lust after, nothing to denigrate or destroy.

  She turns from the window and flips through the canvases, looking for her own image. She finds the piano teacher’s back, supple as a question mark in its close-fitting black sweater, posed beside a boy with a shock of golden hair, the white of his shirt split into vertical lines of grey, purple, and yellow. Under this painting is one of Patti in profile before she became pregnant. Her hair is a dark sheet of purple, black, and blue, lit with strokes of pure white, her face a swerving black line and pink smudge, her eye a white triangle edged on one side in brown and on the others with black. The predominance of white makes her eye appear to be looking away, at something the artist cannot see.

  Tomorrow will be the final day of Jeff’s weeklong workshop. Patti imagines the sunny weather giving way to drizzle halfway through the morning. When Jeff goes in search of his students, it will begin to pour. He’ll find everyone in their usual places, packing up their paints, trying to keep their just-begun paintings dry. He’ll direct them to a shelter at one end of the park while he searches for Rhonda and Janine, his shirt sticking to his chest, running shoes slipping on the muddy slope of the ravine. Thinking he hears voices in the woods, he’ll follow a path that snakes through the trees and find their thermos in a clearing beside the riverbank, along with their folded clothes. He’ll hear laughter, catch a glimpse of naked flesh swaying under water.