by Kim Aubrey
“Come in and join us,” Rhonda will call, popping up from the river to show her big white breasts, while Janine dives under. Rhonda, uncovered, is as pale and round as the mushrooms that will sprout there after the rain. Although Jeff has spent a week wanting to lose his face in her dense, springy red hair, and his hands under her body-hugging T-shirt, what he’ll want most now is to turn and run.
Later, he’ll come home, having forgotten his talk with Patti in the diner. He won’t expect to find a suitcase in the hallway or Patti’s mother in the kitchen, wrapping the dishes in newspaper and packing them into a cardboard box.
He’ll rush upstairs to Patti’s office, where she’ll be kneeling on the floor, sorting books and papers into a plastic bin, hair tucked behind one ear and falling over her shoulders. He has a sketch of her exactly like that, her profile with that same determined expression. He’ll tumble back into that time when he wanted to capture her every mood and pose, when he explored her with a seemingly endless curiosity.
“Don’t go,” he’ll say.
Patti pulls the painting from the stack, carries it to the bedroom where another portrait hangs over the bed. In this one, she gazes softly at the artist while holding three white-tipped fingers against her pink neck. An image can become oppressive, desire and possession holding the subject forever in check, stopping time, denying change. She’d read that Buddhist monks built elaborate sculptures out of sand to remind themselves of the impermanence of everything, knowing that soon the rising tide would wash their efforts away. So wasn’t it fitting for a tide of reactionaries to topple the Buddha statues?
Patti takes down the pink and white canvas. She doesn’t destroy it, simply replaces it with the purple and black painting, then turns the softly gazing Patti to the wall.
Lily doesn’t make it to yoga. Instead she looks at old photo albums, dragging them onto the shady front porch because the air-conditioner has conked out, and the house feels unbearable. Max has promised to send one of his men to fix it, but Lily knows not to expect anyone. They’re all too busy with paying jobs. She’s given up asking for a new kitchen or bathroom. For years Max has talked about knocking down this house and building a bigger, better place, while time has stolen by, asserting its own work order of changes.
In the first album, Beth is a thoughtful, shiny-haired toddler, Emma an awestruck, bald-headed baby. Both stare at the camera and the woman behind it.
Becket has a daughter. Lily saw them one Saturday afternoon a month and a half ago outside the Royal Conservatory of Music, where she’d been adjudicating piano exams. He was bent over a stroller giving the toddler a spoonful of ice cream, but she’d recognized his smooth woolly head, his small, close ears.
She’d placed a hand on his shoulder.
He’d turned, rising awkwardly, pulling her in for a hug.
He no longer smelled of cigars, but his hands still glided tough and smooth against her bare arms and the blouse covering her back. Lily shivered as his ear brushed hers. Max was so much taller.
“Who’s this?” she asked when they’d released each other.
“Rose.” He wiped ice cream from the toddler’s chin. “We’ve been to see the dinosaurs.”
“She looks like me,” Lily said.
Now, closing the album, she wonders if the baby she’d miscarried would have looked like Becket. She’d woken early one morning with gripping cramps and stumbled into the bathroom, locking the door. She’d sat on the toilet, arms folded over her knees, head down, struck numb by the metallic smell of her blood and the relentlessly regular pattern of the black and white floor tiles.
What Jeff had really wanted this morning was to lie flat on the grass to relieve his stiff, sore back, but instead he’d painted a brief, technical demo for his students, later making his rounds, giving pointers and praise, quelling the urge to rip their paintings in two. He knew that the rage gripping him was not about their efforts, or even their lack of self-consciousness, which he openly envied, but about his own fear and self-doubt. His failure to make a decent living, or to make a splash on the Toronto art scene, or even, lately, to make his wife happy seemed to foreshadow other failures—in marriage and fatherhood.
To shake off these thoughts and feelings he has to keep moving. Each day after class, he walks. Today, he walked homeward and stopped at the diner, but couldn’t bring himself to return with Patti, where he’d hear more about his shortcomings as husband and soon-to-be father.
Now he heads through a string of parks and ravines to the trail following the Don River downtown. At times the highway roars overhead. Other times he can hear the river like muffled music, like the piano teacher playing with her window closed. He walks for almost three hours until he finds himself on the beach skirting Lake Ontario.
The sun stands about two hours north of the horizon. He drops his backpack and crouches on the beach, hands cupping the sun-charged pebbles. Yesterday, Jeff had walked to the west end of the city and watched the ducks dive for food in Grenadier Pond, but this is better—the lake seems endless, the horizon a blur of washed-out cobalt and turquoise, the breeze a relief.
He hears the boardwalk shift under the feet of joggers, and a rustle and clatter further up the beach where a man stands by a tower of stones. One hand rests at shoulder height on his latest addition, waiting for it to settle. The stones are smooth and flattish, wider than the man’s head. Other stone towers rise here and there, improbable constructs that look like they might fall over at any moment. Each stone could be one of Jeff’s projects, ambitions, expectations—the juried shows, the artists’ collective, the scant reviews, enthusiastic at first, but later cooling to lukewarm. Painting is considered quaint; film is the thing now, or multi-media installations, or encaustic, which he loathes for its resemblance to snot, shit, and other primal acts of self-expression.
He’d expected his life to be stacked shoulder height by now or at least up to his diaphragm. Not only his career but his marriage—Patti’s life fitting perfectly with his, each of them clicking into place. Instead it feels like that messy pile of stones on the other side of the man’s tower, the failed result of an earlier attempt.
Jeff longs to run down the rocky waterfront, a force of destruction and renewal, all the towers toppling behind him, all the stones rejoining the big pile that makes up the beach. But he finds an empty bench and watches the artist add to his stack, picking up prospects and weighing them in both hands. The man feels along their edges and their flat and bumpy sides, rejects one after the other until he finds one that might fit.
Maybe Jeff has simply not been working hard enough, has relied too much on others to buoy him up and carry him along—old teachers, other artists, gallery owners, and critics—blaming them for his failures, as if they owed him his chance, carrying grudges like the one he’s been holding against Patti for getting pregnant, for refusing an abortion, for complicating his life, putting him in a position where he has to choose between boyhood and manhood, between going on as he has been with sporadic teaching jobs and the occasional show, or brushing up his resumé, trying for a more challenging position. Or working eight to ten hours a day in an art store or coffee shop while he comes up with a more inspired career plan. It might be a relief to pour lattes for a while, to watch the world wash up against his counter, its ebb and flow, its chatter and cravings. That would make a good subject—a series of paintings or photographs, image and text.
Jeff forgets about tipping over towers. Instead he pulls out his sketchbook, dashes off a few drawings, scribbles some notes. Looks up in awe as the beach rumbles and clatters to see the man’s stack burst apart, the round flat stones bounce off one another, searching for new places to rest, the man’s arm still held out at shoulder height, as if to measure everything he’s lost.
It is less than two years since 9/11, and Jeff remembers staring up into an empty sky, convinced that the world had stopped, that nothing could make i
t start again. But soon planes had begun to fly, new buildings had been planned and constructed, babies had been born.
As Patti opens the front door, the curly-haired screenwriter strolls past without his kids, laptop slung over one shoulder. In the morning, she’d watched him push the double stroller, stopping to straighten the older girl’s sun hat, bending to pick up the younger one’s dropped sippy cup. She tries to imagine Jeff as a careful father.
Lily sits on the front porch in her new yoga clothes. The purple T-shirt hangs from her shoulders, but the pants hug her thighs like a fresh velvety skin. The mail carrier has just dropped an envelope into her hands, a statement from Becket’s investment firm declaring that her money has doubled. She feels a sudden need to spend it, not on things but on travel, to move about in the world again. To stop sequestering herself.
She’s still holding the statement when Patti appears at the gate with a large package wrapped in newspaper. Lily rushes to lift the iron latch and take the parcel from her arms.
“What’s this?”
“It’s you,” Patti says. “Jeff painted it.”
Lily props the painting against the porch rail. “Can I get you some iced tea?”
“Milk would be better.”
Lily brings the milk. One day she might be a grandmother. It could happen quickly, shockingly. Will her daughters come back to her then, carting their babies, diaper bags, and bottles of expressed milk, expecting her to babysit, seeking her advice?
“Open it,” Patti urges.
Lily loosens the tape, slips the paper from the canvas. Even though its subject is a naked woman seated at a piano, the painting is full of colour and flux. Her cast-off clothes lie crumpled and sinewy on the floor. Long swirling strokes of orange and turquoise compose her back and bottom. Her hair is a tight yellow coil. Her arms vibrate with echoing shadows that make them look like wings, trembling with inaudible sound. Her long splayed fingers seem to caress the length of the keyboard, as the black and white piano engulfs her.
“It’s beautiful.” Lily sets it down for a better look. She loves the colours, the shapes, her long serpentine back. It is music without time, frozen, and dropped into her hand like a curl of white paper.
“It’s one of his best.”
“But he doesn’t want to give it away, does he?”
“He doesn’t know what he wants.”
Lily knows she should refuse the painting, but she doesn’t want to. Looking at it gives her the same gleeful jolt she’d felt when she first peered into Becket’s eyes—the heady, terrifying sense of being seen and known. Sometimes, playing the piano, she has felt that same recognition. Only then she was the one seeing and knowing herself, her naked emotions struck into sound, the air humming with her unashamed grief and joy.
“Thank you.” Lily touches Patti’s shoulder. “Let me know if there’s anything you need for the baby. I have some stuff left from the girls.”
As Patti walks away, Lily waves and keeps on waving, shaking out both hands. She hasn’t played all week. She doesn’t miss her students, but she misses the regular work of leading them through a piece. When she’s not committed to sharing her love for music, she forgets it. Like playing the piano, love is a practice, a discipline. But when does discipline become punishment? The piano in the painting looks like it’s about to cave in on Lily, and only the ceaseless movement of her arms and fingers can hold it back.
She couldn’t have kept on loving Becket for long, not if it had meant neglecting Beth and Emma just when they’d wanted her least, but needed her most. That winter and spring after Venice when Beth was starving herself, locking herself in the bathroom after meals, refusing to speak to Lily, only to Max and Judith, who didn’t ask questions. Or the next fall in the wake of 9/11, when Emma was breaking curfew with random boys, stumbling home numbed by cigarettes and beer, her lips red and swollen, bright eyes clouded. Lily had been unable to sleep then too, but most nights she’d managed not to yell at Emma, and sometimes even to listen to her stories.
Perhaps she hasn’t failed at love after all. Lately, Max brings her tea in bed before he leaves for work. When she makes room for him to sit on the covers, he talks about cutting back his hours and building their dream house in the country. Lily hasn’t dreamed in months. She wakes at three or four, damp with sweat, the night giving no clues to what she dreads or hopes for.
She has tried not to think about Emma’s e-mail because she misses her daughters with a dull ache that begins low in her belly and trills out into every cell, a pain with its own inexplicable music. What she should have learned from loving Becket was how to let go. Instead she has been trying to hold on to everything and everyone, her hands and heart, her very blood, sluggish with fear and regret.
For now Beth and Emma have chosen distance, but Lily doesn’t have to take that as a rejection. She doesn’t have to punish herself. She can keep in touch, admit that she’s learned more about love from her daughters than from anyone else. And when they happen to answer her calls, she can press the phone to her ear and listen, as if they were sitting right beside her.
Patti’s mother brings cannelloni, cucumber salad, and an extra fan, which she trains on them while they eat. Patti tunes out the hum of the fan and the drone of her mother’s voice, but she can’t ignore the heat rash that flares along her skin or the fly circling her plate. Are the Buddhists right? Is it her desire for permanence that’s making her unhappy? The stories she’s been told about parenthood? The stories she tells herself? She can’t confide in her mother, who would crow with delight, but she imagines telling her thesis advisor, Evelyn, about her longing for a stable marriage, a cozy traditional family for her son. She can almost see Evelyn’s old ideas of her toppling, along with the pink and white Patti in Jeff’s painting, and some of her own beliefs about Jeff and herself.
She doesn’t want him to be an icon of the errant lover, or even of the perfect father, but only a real and separate person who will go with her to prenatal classes and hold her sweaty hand when she’s in labour.
The story she will tell her growing son years later will unfold in his mind as a series of images—Patti washes the dinner dishes with her mother, the kitchen window wide open to catch the evening breeze. The fly buzzes out as Jeff calls her name. His footsteps pound up the stairs. The baby turns inside her belly, pushing his fists against her full stomach, starting a wave of nausea. Her hand flies for the windowsill to steady herself. The silver cup she may never have drank from tumbles off, skips down the roof of the first floor deck, and lands with a clatter below.
Acknowledgements
The following stories were previously published in magazines or anthologies:
“A Large Dark” in Best Canadian Stories
“Lemon Curl” in Event
“Unfinished” in poem memoir story
“Peloton” in Room
For assistance with these stories and support around their publication, I am grateful to Laurie Alberts, Mark and Meg Aubrey, Elaine Batcher, Shelly Catterson, Vivian Dorsel, Laurette Folk, Rilla Friesen, Abby Frucht, Jill Glass, Douglas Glover, Kristine Klement, Lisa Skoog de Lamas, Andrew Macrae, Dave Margoshes, K. D. Miller, Christopher Noel, Frank Tempone, Martha Wilson, and Eddy Yanofsky, with a special thank you to David Jauss for his generous and expert advice, and for his unwavering belief in these stories.
My literary communities have provided invaluable support and encouragement. Without them, the writing life would be much more lonely and a lot less fun. Thank you to the Summer Writers’ Group, the Literary Lobster, Red Claw Press, Numero Cinq, the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild, Writers’ Block West, Ve Shree, and to everyone who has taken part in Writers Workshop in Bermuda.
I am most grateful to the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Art, and to my workshop leaders and friends there.
A big thank you to all of my wonderful friends and family, and to Jos
eph, Kristine, and Kathryn, whose love continues to surprise and sustain me.
Kim Aubrey’s stories, essays, and poems have appeared in journals and anthologies, including Best Canadian Stories, Event, Numero Cinq, Room, The New Quarterly, upstreet, and How to Expect What You’re Not Expecting: An Anthology of Pregnancy, Parenthood and Loss. Kim has an MFA in Writing from Vermont College. She is Associate Fiction and Nonfiction Editor for Grain magazine, and a founding member and Editor of Red Claw Press. Kim grew up in Bermuda where she leads an annual writers’ retreat. She currently lives in Saskatoon.
