“What the hell,” Ray said.
At the dinner table, it was Ray who brought the subject to the fore. “I suppose we shouldn’t let too much time go by before dealing with the elephant.”
He smiled and Effie put her fork down, refilled her wineglass and reached for Cassie’s glass, but Cassie stopped her.
“Well,” she said. “The elephant, eh?”
“I’m sure it’s on your mind. It’s a question I get a lot.”
“Right,” she said. “It really doesn’t mean anything anymore …”
“Exactly,” he said. “So when I’m asked by some nosy person, ‘How come you aren’t married at your age?’ I just laugh.”
“There seems to be an assumption,” said Cassie, “that if you aren’t married at a certain age there’s something wrong with you.”
Effie’s eyes darted from one to the other, waiting. “Okay,” she said.
“Fact is, I’ve been married twice,” Ray said.
Effie exhaled. “Is that all?”
Ray laughed. “Thank you. Twice is a lot, to some people. Like my parents.”
“I mean, is that the elephant you had in mind?” said Effie.
“Well … What else do you want to know?”
She paused for a moment, then asked, “How old are you, Ray?”
He seemed surprised. “Fifty-eight.”
“Fifty-eight,” she repeated. “I must say, you don’t look it.”
“I get that a lot. But that’s my age. I have proof.” His smile made him look half that.
“You have family?”
“Boy and a girl. We spent Christmas together.”
“I’m assuming they live with their mother,” Effie said.
He laughed. His daughter worked in public relations for Inco. The boy was in his third year at med school. Following in the old man’s footsteps. The daughter was the elder. Her mother died when she was only three. Ray remarried, a family friend, mostly because he needed help. Then the boy came along. When his son started university, Ray and his second wife had a long chat about life in general. Talked about their time together and concluded that, with the boy gone, the marriage had lost its rationale. That was the word he used, “rationale.” They agreed to live apart and to actively consider restarting their lives, with other people—an unlikely prospect, they thought, considering their ages.
She was remarried within a year. He lost himself in work. No regrets. Then Cassie came along. His daughter had introduced them, as a matter of fact. Cassie was writing something about Inco and had met Inco’s PR lady in a restaurant. Ray walked in. The Inco PR lady introduced her dad.
As the narrative unfolded, Cassie watched him, smiling.
It was all so goddamned orderly. All so rational. Effie looked toward her glass, picked it up and swirled. She could see John’s ravaged face. She felt cold again remembering his pain. Just a flash of memory, but it conjured John and Sextus and the demons. Loud voices. Flight. Guilt. Slow recovery.
“Well,” she said at last. “I’d like to propose a toast.”
Later, at the door, she asked, “So, Cassie, dear, when do you plan to tell your father?”
“We’re seeing him for lunch tomorrow.”
Once she had asked JC straight out, “Back then, how much did you and the others know about what I was putting up with?”
“It was the seventies,” he replied. “Everyone was kind of haywire.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Sextus and the women, you mean?”
She nodded. “You were different. I knew you weren’t like the rest of them. There was a time when I thought that you were gay.”
“I was considered kind of slow around the girls, I guess.”
“How bad was he?”
“You mean Sextus?”
“Who do you think I mean?”
“It’s ancient history.”
“I want to know how big a fool I was.”
“You were never a fool. We all thought you were a saint.”
“Great. You all pitied me.”
“We admired you,” he said, teeth clenched slightly. “And never more than when you threw the bugger out. The only mystery for us was how you got mixed up with him in the first place.”
She walked to work on Monday morning, feet crunching on the salted sidewalks along Bloor Street. It was cold, the sunlight sharp and brittle, the city still limping from the battering of the storm. A wild beginning for the last year of a wretched century, she thought. Hard to believe it’s 1999.
She recalled how unsettling it once was to think ahead to 1984, the Orwellian year, and realize that the harsh dystopia imagined by the pessimistic author was not entirely fanciful. Pessimism, she recalled, was very stylish at the time. Channelling Hobbes, not Orwell, she told someone. Benevolent dictatorship could be the answer. Clans and chiefs. People thought she was odd. That Effie, there she goes again. Now 1984 was fifteen years ago and the world was more or less the same. Except that people listened to her now.
After Cassie and Ray had gone, she’d sat for a long time in semi-darkness, her mind adrift in the uncertainty their visit had created. It seemed they would be married in the spring, but there were no specifics. It was unlikely that there would be children, considering Ray’s history and his age. Cassie was, in a very real way, the end of a biological limb on a family tree about which Effie knew very little. Duncan, as far as she could tell, was celibate and seemed inclined to stay that way. Their father had no siblings, barely knew his mother, had no knowledge of his father. And Effie had no concrete memory of the mother who had died when she was three.
Until now, the unlikelihood of grandchildren had seemed a sort of comfort. The century ahead was an uninviting place, offering a more extreme version of the century behind—unimaginable progress in technology, miracles in human health and comfort, all offset by epic self-annihilation. A gruesome prospect, shattered peoples and their cultures, vanished nations, the relentless devastation of the human habitat. Not the kind of world that any moral person should ever wish on progeny.
And yet, the prospect of biological extinction was unsettling now that it was real. It was irrational, she knew. But it was there. She frowned at fuming, mindless, hissing cars as they passed by.
At ten that morning she had a seminar on the songs of an eighteenth-century bard whose nature poetry became immortal despite the fact that he couldn’t read or write.
At noon she lunched with a doctoral candidate who was bogged down on a thesis about feminism in tribal societies.
After lunch there was a message in her mailbox to call a certain Mr. Gillis, who claimed to be her former husband.
The hospital was only a short walk from her office. JC’s mood was improved when she visited him mid-afternoon.
“I’m getting out in the morning,” he told her. “Do you think you could pick me up?”
“Sure,” she said. “You should come and stay at my place for the first few days.”
He smiled. “Thanks. But what about his nibs?”
“Sorley too. The cat hair didn’t bother me as long as I kept him off the bed. Maybe it was just a passing thing.”
“Ah well,” he said, looking away. “I think I need to be in my own space for a while. Maybe you could come to Walden?”
She noticed that he’d gone unusually pale. “Sure,” she said. “What’s the doctor saying?”
“He says I’m ready to go home, but that I should have someone with me.” He smiled. “I’m not used to this.”
“Consider yourself lucky.”
“I had a dream last night. I was standing on a roof, and down on the street a bunch of guys were putting the boots to somebody. And I was standing there, trying to shout at them to make them stop. But there was no sound coming out of me.”
“I’ve had it too, being on a roof,” she said. “I usually end up falling off the roof, but I always wake up before I hit the ground.”
She grasped his hand.
�
��It was the silence,” he said. “Nobody noticing. About becoming invisible.”
“Tell me about it,” she said, then smiled. “You’re talking to a middle-aged woman. What time do you want to be picked up?”
“Ten-ish,” he said. “Have you talked to himself since yesterday?” he asked. “He was a bit uptight when he was here. I guess about meeting the new man in Cassie’s life.”
“He left a message. I haven’t called him back yet.”
“He seems to think everybody’s keeping something from him. He was interrogating me to find out how much I knew about this Ray.”
“He’s a doctor,” she said.
“Great. Just what we need. So you met him, finally?”
“I did,” she said.
“So?”
“Well, the good news is that he’ll make us all feel young again.”
“And the bad news is?”
“I didn’t say there was bad news. You didn’t ask what it is about him that makes me feel young.”
He shrugged.
“He’s older than all of us,” she said. “Practically a senior citizen. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
“So how old is he, anyway?”
“He says he’s fifty-eight. I told him he looks younger. But he actually looks more like he’s in his sixties.”
JC shook his head. “How will Sextus take it?”
“Jesus Christ, you could have told me. I nearly fuckin’ dropped—”
“Calm down, for God’s sake,” she said.
She hadn’t intended to talk to him at all, but he called her again from the airport.
“It’s ridiculous. He’s older than I am.”
She decided to say nothing.
“And did he tell you what kind of doctor he is, for Christ’s sake?”
“It didn’t come up.”
“Ob-gyn. He’s a gynecologist, is what he is.”
“I don’t think that should—”
“It’s disgusting. I have half a mind to complain to the licensing authorities.”
“Complain about what?”
“She probably went to him with some female problem and he took advantage.”
“You’re sick.”
“Me? Sick?”
“In any case, you’d better get used to him; they’ll be married by the summer.”
“Married, my arse.”
“Your arse won’t have anything to do with it.”
“They’ll be married over my dead body.”
The phone was suddenly dead.
4
Tuesday was overcast and cold. She drove to Walden first, let herself in. Fed the cat. Cleaned the litter box. Found a warm coat and stocking cap in a closet, then headed for the hospital.
JC was sitting on the side of his bed, obviously impatient.
“What a waste of time this was,” he said, as he struggled into the coat. He stuffed the stocking cap into a pocket. “I won’t need that,” he said.
On the drive home he chuckled briefly as she described Sextus’s furious reaction to Ray.
Then, minutes later, he said, “I can see where he’s coming from.”
“You can?”
He shrugged and looked out the window. Cars crept, trailed by clouds of vapour. Barely upright people minced gingerly through narrow gaps in mounds of dirty sidewalk snow, cringing at the filthy splashing of the passing cars.
“Winter,” he grunted. “To think I used to miss this.”
At home he sat silently on the chesterfield, the cat curled beside him, purring gently with his eyes closed as JC explored his neck and the space between his ears. “I suppose you’ve got lots on today,” he said eventually.
“Meetings most of the afternoon. You’ll be okay?”
“A hundred percent,” he said.
Just before she left, the telephone rang. “Let it ring,” he said.
Then there was a voice from the answering machine. “Hi. It’s Sandra. Call me when you can.”
She smiled at him. “Sandra?”
“Sam’s lawyer,” he said. “I’ll call her later.”
“So Sam’s into poetry,” she said.
“Poetry?”
“I read the card. I didn’t think you’d mind. He thanked you for the poems.”
“Ahh,” he said. “ ‘Burnt Norton.’ T.S. Eliot.”
“ ‘Burnt Norton’?”
“ ‘What might have been is an abstraction / Remaining a perpetual possibility / Only in a world of speculation.’ ”
“I didn’t know you were into poetry.”
“I had to look it up. Sam quoted it the second time we met. I photocopied the whole thing for him, and another one of the quartets. He impresses you like that, Sam does.”
From the office she called Duncan.
“Why don’t you drop by JC’s place for dinner,” she said. “He needs some cheering up.” Then she braced herself for the parade of needy students.
Normally, she’d have been intrigued. The doctoral student was attempting to explain how Queen Maeve of Connacht could have been the prototype for Wonder Woman, but how, on a closer reading of the Táin, it becomes obvious that the ancient Celtic icon was a nymphomaniac. The scholar needed guidance. Was the link between the two a product of sly humour on the part of some druidic storyteller? Did Dr. Effie think of nymphomania as an assertion or a contradiction of feminist empowerment? And how could it be that Wonder Woman, if a nymphomaniac, has become a lesbian archetype? And where does this leave Queen Maeve?
Dr. Effie, the advisor, fought the urge to yawn.
Suddenly they all seemed so young. She found herself distracted by the taut clarity of their faces, the sheen of their hair, the fussy carelessness of their dress. Expensive clothing cleverly designed to look fashionably cheap.
It wasn’t the simple self-consciousness of age. She’d been through all that, back just before her fiftieth. That was also, maybe not coincidentally, when she’d come to terms with the hormonal changes. The letting go, she called it. At that point she’d felt something almost like hostility in the way she responded to them, along with the textbook biological resentment, the longing and waves of sadness as she remembered her own stumbling transitions, the youthful struggles she’d endured.
This was different. She now felt sorry for the younger women—a deep compassion. She felt the need to warn them, but she would have had no idea where to start. And even if she did, they wouldn’t listen. The more generous would have heard their mothers in her voice, and the more shallow would have spread the word that Dr. Effie had become a bore.
She knew that it was all about JC. The sudden manifestation of his fragility was a challenge to the image she had nurtured. She knew the image was a product of her needs, but she had considered it sustainable. He’d materialized at precisely the right time in her life, when her sense of personal irrelevance had been exacerbated by betrayal. Stella Fortune wasn’t all that much younger than she was. Maybe a few years. Maybe more attractive. That wasn’t the point. The brief reconciliation with Sextus had represented a recovery. Of what, she wasn’t sure. But for those months of harmony she’d felt on top of things.
When he’d betrayed her again, she had slipped into the limbo that her nagging inner voice called middle age. A euphemism. In reality she was over the hill and halfway down the other side. And then there was JC, as if out of nowhere. Handsome, funny, youthful, seasoned JC Campbell, an undiscovered treasure from the past, unburdened by whatever baggage he’d accumulated in what had apparently been a hectic journey. Now JC, through no fault of his own, was weakened and suffering. She didn’t have a clue what she could do to help.
“According to The Book of Leinster, Queen Maeve needed seven men to satisfy her. Only Fergus could do it for her all by himself,” the student said.
They both laughed.
“What’s become of all the Ferguses?” the fresh-faced younger woman wondered.
What, Effie thought, becomes of Maeve and women like her?
Duncan had a small crescent bruise on his cheekbone, just below the eye. She noticed it the minute he came through the door. First he lied, said he’d slipped in snow, bumped his head on a parking meter.
“Those parking meters—you gotta keep an eye on them,” JC said.
“That’s what I did,” Duncan said. “That’s why the eye is black. I had my eye on a parking meter.”
JC clucked his tongue. “Good thing the parking meter was wearing mittens.”
“What do you mean?”
Gingerly, he brushed at Duncan’s cheekbone. “A little hash mark here. Looks like it’s from a knitted mitten.”
Duncan blushed, went to a hallway mirror to look at his face. “You’re observant,” he said. “Actually, it was some big guy, just off the reserve. Took a poke at me. He was wearing homemade mitts, and they were wet from crawling around in the snow.”
He touched the eye cautiously. Laughed.
“So what really happened?” Effie asked.
“We had a little rassle. Then the cops came and tried to make a big deal out of it. Wanted to charge the guy. ‘Charge him with what?’ I asked. ‘Unless you want to charge him with pissing on me.’ And it was true. When he was on top of me, he pissed his pants. The cops thought that was a scream and let the poor fellow go. Said I was lucky. Said the last time they tried taking someone out of the shelter, the guy shat himself, then threw up in the back of the cop car. They said I got off easy.”
“Christ,” Effie said. “I can’t imagine you in that place. At the very least, you should wear the collar, let them know—”
“You think they’d respect the collar?” Duncan was smiling. “Half of them blame their shit on people like me, men in collars.”
“Give me a frigging break,” Effie said.
“Actually, I’m considering moving in.”
“Into what?” Effie asked. “The shelter?”
“The board thinks it would be a good idea. I’d be a stabilizing influence.”
“You’re out of your mind,” Effie said. “I mean, if you’re stuck for a place to live …”
Duncan stared at her, but the look was gentle. “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice—”
“Blessed are the peacemakers,” JC interrupted.
Why Men Lie Page 7
