Eliza blew her nose and flushed the toilet. Enough! The past had served its purpose and diluted her anger at her husband. He was still downstairs, reasonable, alive. She washed her hands, splashed her face and leaned critically toward the mirror. Every day a new wrinkle appeared under her eyes or across her forehead. But she was red-cheeked and bright-eyed from crying.
7
Family Stuff
WHEN SHE CAME BACK INTO THE KITCHEN, ANDREW asked, “What were you doing up there? Masturbating?”
“Ha-ha,” she said, and turned away to hide her smile. She wasn’t ready to let go of the argument just yet. “I thought you might remember that relevant bit of my family history during the biggest snowstorm of the winter. On a day that I didn’t want you to drive to work.”
Andrew shook his head. He could never win. He knew she’d been crying upstairs and was now in a better mood—the air was soft from a sudden release of tension—but she was a woman who liked to turn the screws when she was pissed off. She kept mucking about at the sink. Housecleaning was another form of torture, obsessively performed by her, relentlessly inflicted upon him. Perpetually the loser (and the victor, because he knew how their arguments usually ended), he stood there, silently looking—really looking—at the profile of a tired, angry woman.
She was so beautiful. And not only that. He knew her beauty, had seen it grow and change over time. He knew how the shape of her body and her intractable mind fit together. He loved them both. He loved her as he had never loved anyone else in his life. He knew her inside out. Yet he did not understand her. His acceptance of this extraordinary fact—she confounded him—was the key to his happiness.
“Eliza.”
She continued scrubbing a pot that no longer appeared to be dirty. Because Martin came through Toronto so rarely, his unexpected arrival had wiped several things out of Andrew’s mind. He’d forgotten about Eliza’s anxieties around driving in bad weather. When the boys were babies, he hadn’t driven at all during heavy snowfalls or storms. She couldn’t stand it; she couldn’t control her fear, her conviction, even, that her husband was as vulnerable to death as her father had been. Which, of course, he was.
“Eliza, I’m sorry,” he said. “I knew that if I spoke to you in person you wouldn’t want me to drive out there to see him.”
“Because it was snowing.”
“Maybe. But for the usual reasons, too.”
Eliza disliked his famous brother, the anthropologist who wrote bestselling books about communication across cultures, languages, even species. Within five minutes of seeing Martin in her restaurant arguing with her front-of-house staff (he was demanding a table without a reservation) she had nicknamed him I’m-So-Big-and-Hungry. She claimed that she didn’t resent his accomplishments as a scientist, a writer, a spokesman for the U.N., even his extensive knowledge of food and wine. “How could I resent any of that? Okay, maybe I resent his food snobbery a little. But I get it—he spends a lot of time in New York. What I do resent is that everyone is supposed to be so impressed with him. Everyone should accommodate Martin because he’s such a genius.”
After meeting him a few times, she’d asked Andrew if Martin was lying about something. He’d stared at her, wide-eyed, and said, “Not again. Please don’t ask me if he’s a spy. Why do women always think my brother is a spy?”
She had made an impatient huffing sound. “I don’t think he’s a spy. I think he’s a jerk. He’s so mean to you. Disrespectful. Half the time, he talks to you like you’re a kid.”
Andrew laughed it off. “Ah, he doesn’t mean it. He’s just the older brother. He’s jealous that I’m so close to our parents. He went out into the world much earlier than I did. I stayed behind, the careful son. I’ve always known that someone would have to take care of them and it would not be him.” He kissed her. One of the things he’d found attractive about Eliza was her complete allergy to Martin, his charismatic woman-magnet brother. It attracted him still.
She wiped the water spilled on the island countertop back into the sink. “I wish I liked him, for your sake.”
“That’s kind of you.”
“I try to like him, but he makes it impossible.”
To this, Andrew had nothing to say.
“I hope you weren’t drinking on top of driving in the snow.”
“I had two glasses of wine. Small glasses. Martin drank most of the bottle.”
“Typical.”
“Eliza, he was flying to Brazil. He wanted to sleep on the flight.”
“So why didn’t he take a proper layover and come and have dinner with us? His family. Why didn’t he come and see his nephews, who adore him? I wouldn’t have minded that.”
“He probably has to be in São Paulo at a certain time. He promised he would take a day or two next time. We’ll take the boys and go visit Mom and Dad in Uxbridge.”
“It would be nice if he could think about you, too. Your life.” She hung the rag over the long neck of the faucet and carefully placed her hands on either side of the double sink. Gripped the granite edges. “And your mother’s Visa bills. Did you guys talk about that?”
“I had two hours to see him, and months to catch up on. Come on.”
“Come on, what? We cannot keep paying their bills. Your parents lost a ton of money. Your dad seems to get it, sort of, but your mother is living in a dream world. You and Martin have to deal with that. We cannot afford to foot three-thousand-dollar Visa bills for the rest of your mom’s life. You seem to forget that we’re trying to pay off the line of credit for the basement reno. And the flood cleanup. The weeping tiles installation, remember? We have a debt of eighty-seven thousand dollars. Sure, it’s my line of credit, but it’s money we owe to the bank. Instead of paying your mother’s Visa bill, I wish you would help me pay down that fucking debt.”
He exhaled, trying to keep calm. Was this a problem most women had, or was it just his wife? With her, one complaint led to another until he felt like he was drowning in a sea of discontent. If he told her not to be a nag, she’d be annoyed, but wasn’t this nagging? He said, “Eliza. Please. I don’t want to talk about this now.”
“You never want to talk about it.”
“Martin has given them money. He gives them money sometimes. He helps out.”
“How much money? Five hundred here and there. Does he even know how much they lost when the U.S. housing market tanked? Does he know that almost all of your dad’s investments were stuck in fucking Florida, foreclosure heaven?”
He laughed, cautiously. “Fucking this, fucking that. Language, cowgirl.”
“Don’t try to change the subject by shaming me for my western origins. It won’t work. We have our own credit card bills to pay. Martin doesn’t have kids. When he’s in Europe, he rents out his little flat in New York for god knows how much money. He works for the U.N. Plus all those speaker fees. Let him take care of your parents for a while.”
“You’re going to have to let me deal with this family stuff in my own way.”
“Okay. No problem. The family stuff I’d like you to deal with in your own way, then, is paying off the basement reno. That is your family stuff. You take it over.”
“But I’ve been paying for the roof repair and the new washer and dryer!”
“You should have paid those off already. The new roof was three years ago, Andrew.” She licked her lips, repeatedly, having nothing else in the immediate vicinity to clean.
Andrew glanced at the stove-top clock. Just after nine. He took a tiny step backwards, away from the island. “You know, I’m just gonna go upstairs—”
“And watch the news?”
“Well…”
“Paying their bills is not fair to us. This family.” She suddenly craved an enormous blowout. Screaming and yelling. Or at least—because Andrew almost never yelled, it was one of the best and most aggravating things about him, his essential unflappability—she wanted to keep at it until they were both spent from squabbling. It was so hard to draw hi
m into an argument. He preferred being passive-aggressive and forgetting to call and shrugging problems away. She reined in her voice and asked, almost nicely, “Where was Martin, anyway?”
“Borneo. He must have flown in from Jakarta.”
“Borneo!” She groaned. “I wish I had just flown in from Borneo! No, I wish I was just flying out to Borneo.”
A smile threw itself up on Andrew’s face—a crow-foot-eyed, lopsided grin that he knew she liked. See? He would even flirt with her, not to get her into bed, sadly, but to extricate himself from an argument.
“Go!” she said, waving her hand toward the staircase. “Go watch the news. I’m packing my bags and catching the first flight to Asia.”
Andrew allowed his smile to deepen, better crow’s feet and more eye-twinkle. Passing a hand through his thick mess of dirty blond hair, he turned around. “Bon voyage,” he said, and waved bye-bye.
She got the box of chocolate ice cream out of the freezer. She envied Martin his lack of responsibilities. He travelled all the time, often in high style. She even liked his books, goddammit. He’d been one of the earliest linguistic anthropologists to identify and research the link between the extinction of indigenous languages and cultures and the degradation of the habitats where they evolved. It had been a fascinating theory that was now a proven fact with far-reaching implications: the state of a human language could be an indicator of environmental health. Because of his books—adventure combined with high purpose—and his charm, he was an internationally popular speaker.
Though he’d never been popular with her.
Mr. I’m-So-Big-and-Hungry believed that the world owed him for loving it. Women especially were in his debt, because he was so sensitive to Mother Earth’s deep power and terrible fragility. Puke. A couple of years ago, at a black-tie fundraiser, Eliza had watched him use that script to seduce the only single woman at their table, a pretty biology student from York University, there because she had won a science competition. Unlucky girl. He seemed to have everything he could possibly want and still wanted more. As he satisfied his appetites, they expanded. She was sure that, in bed, if he came first, he would do nothing to help his lover have an orgasm. A no-fingers, no-tongue kind of man. She laughed, quietly, and ate the last of her ice cream. Quietly, because if Andrew heard her, he would ask what she was laughing about.
Should she lick the bowl? Listening to the broadcaster’s familiar voice from the second floor—it was that intrepid woman reporter they both liked—she applied her tongue to the convex glass. Licking chocolate out of a bowl reminded her of how horny she was. Instead of having an argument with her husband over his mother’s Visa bill, she had intended to tell him about the pool Amazon and seduce him with a naughty bedtime story.
Damn Martin. She was glad he hadn’t had a proper layover. He talked so much that he used up all the oxygen. She stood up abruptly and got herself one more scoop of ice cream.
—
When Andrew heard his wife snicker in the kitchen, he turned up the volume on the TV. The journalist Adele Tabrizi was reporting from the Iraqi border with Syria. The news segment was long and depressing. What Bashar al-Assad had not managed to destroy in his country was now being destroyed by increasingly violent groups of “rebels” and ISIS battalions. Andrew shook his head at the images of ancient cities ravaged by a fresh war. It could fall apart so easily, he thought, a country. A civilization.
He stared bleakly at the screen: women, men and children coughed and hacked, if they were lucky; if they were not, they lay motionless on the ground. Al-Assad had attacked his own people with chemical weapons. Many of the smaller bodies were already shrouded by thin blankets. The next report was about a homegrown war, local, historical, mostly ignored: the murdered and disappeared indigenous women of Canada, two thousand and counting.
Andrew listened to the end of that report, horrified and baffled. What to do with the world? He changed the channel. The remote control was a handy invention, and cable still a reliable opiate, despite the rise of the Internet, Netflix and smartphones. He landed on a popular family sitcom and watched in mild disgust as the TV parents engaged in a stupid argument in front of their mortified children. The laugh track aggravated him so much that he muted the sound and listened longingly for Eliza. The water was running again. He hoped she wasn’t going to wash the floor.
She did not understand his family. Fair enough. Who could untangle that knot of attraction and repulsion, love and duty, grievance and debt? He was bound to them; that was all. And enough. Each of them was flawed, as he was flawed; not one of them was monstrous. He acknowledged that Martin was difficult. Despite his charisma, he was adversarial with those closest to him, and still angry at his mother for various things that had happened when they were kids. But they were family. Andrew didn’t like to think of his brother changing planes in Toronto and not seeing anyone he was related to in the city. Andrew had made him promise to have a meal with their parents the next time he was in town. “They miss you,” Andrew said.
“Oh, please.” Martin made a sour face.
“Mom is your greatest fan. She tells everyone about her son, the famous anthropologist. She learned how to use Facebook and Twitter just to follow you.”
His brother laughed. “I know. She sends me private messages all the time.”
“Do you answer her?”
“Someone in the office does. I don’t post that stuff myself, you know.”
“Martin! She’s your mother.”
“Yes, but if we didn’t have the same last name, my receptionist would think she was a stalker.”
Andrew heard the light, crystalline chime of wineglasses from the dining room below and looked expectantly to the stairs, ready to get up and meet her. Then reconsidered; Eliza liked it better when he played hard to get. She liked to draw him out of something else, toward her. He switched the channel back to the news.
8
Bodies
WHEN SHE FINALLY APPEARED WITH AN OPEN BOTTLE of wine in one hand and two glasses in the other, he was half-asleep on the sofa. “I’m here to salvage the evening,” she said, and sat on the floor near him. Poured. She’d undone the top two buttons of her blouse.
“Salvage?” he replied, opening one eye wide and grinning. “Why ‘salvage’? I had a great visit with Martin.”
She handed him his glass. “Don’t say another word about it. I’ve almost forgiven you.”
He turned off the TV. They clinked glasses and drank. She settled back, cross-legged. “A young woman was flirting with me at the pool this morning.”
“Uh-oh,” he said.
“Beautiful woman. Black hair, big dark eyes. And tall. Tall and long. All long bones and muscles and the most gorgeous tits.”
“Eliza!” He didn’t like the word tits. It was a teenager’s word. Reminded him of teats. “Besides, that’s impossible. You have the most gorgeous breasts in the world.”
She undid another button and popped both breasts out of her bra; the cups and underwire pushed them plumply together. She looked down.
“Mmm, see what I mean? Look at those!”
“I am looking. Hers were different, though. Not voluptuous like this. The dewdrop kind. Big nipples.”
“You were really looking.”
“She was right in front of me! She almost had a six-pack. And a scrumptious round ass. She’s probably a personal trainer.”
Andrew shook his head; Eliza could tell that he thought she was making it up for his benefit. She took another sip of wine, then walked on her knees to the sofa. Slipped her finger into the pool of wine in the bottom of her mouth. Lifted a drop to her nipple. “Who should lick it off?” She arched her back toward Andrew.
He leaned toward her and said, “The woman from the pool.” He bent his head to lick. Eliza undid her trousers. He murmured, “Whoa, wild one. Let’s go upstairs.” He didn’t like fooling around on the second floor; the boys’ room was just a few steps away.
On the narrow flight u
p, he had his free hand on her hip, then the inside of her thigh. He shut their door; she put down the bottle and her glass and lit a candle. They undressed quickly. Two more swallows of wine, and they lay down, goose-fleshed, on the sheets, the duvet pulled away. It was pure delight for her, to be naked with sexual intent. She bit his shoulder. “Why don’t we do this more often?” she asked. “We have to do this more often!”
Andrew didn’t answer. He was above her, tonguing her nipple. He took the hard nub of it in his mouth, bit gently, licked again, bit harder, trying to get the reaction he wanted. A moan or a whimper. Instead she whispered, “It’s not just a story. She really was there. I think she was flirting with me.”
He squeezed her breasts, one after the other, and rubbed his penis between her legs, nudging. “Did she do this to you?”
“Well, she didn’t have a hard-on. But she had a shaved pussy.”
He misunderstood. “She shaved her pussy? Right in front of you?”
“Wow, that made you hard immediately. Maybe I should shave my pussy.”
“She shaved her pubic hair right there? In the shower? What’s going on at St. Anne’s these days?”
She giggled and took his cock in her hand, gave it a squeeze. Hurrah! she thought. And said out loud, “I’m so happy!” They kissed like teenagers, lots of wet mouth and tongue. “It was already shaved. She showed up that way. Smooth! But she did shave her legs, right across from me. Which was kind of shocking. Well, I was shocked. I was the only other person there. Just me and a beautiful naked woman bending down, sticking her butt in the air. As I said, a beautiful butt. Nice and round. I wish my ass were rounder.”
“Eliza, you have a lovely ass, what are you talking about? Turn over so I can look at it.”
The Change Room Page 5
