Mating for Life

by Marissa Stapley

  “Hi, Iain, I’m Liane,” she said, trying not to sound disappointed.

  “Your mother told me.” He seemed oddly nervous. “Anyway, I have a cottage up the road, and a big garden full of spring greens I can’t possibly eat, so I let your mother know I’d drop some by for you and she thought it was a good idea.”

  “Thank you very much; I’ll put them to good use. I love salads.” He handed her the bag and they stood looking at each other.

  “Would you like to come in for a coffee or tea?” Liane asked, because she felt certain he was waiting for some sort of offer, or at least that he didn’t want to go. He seemed to be studying her carefully, taking in her face.

  “Tea would be perfect.”

  She led him inside. In the kitchen, she poured water from the cooler into the rusty-topped kettle, making a mental note to get Helen a new one, even though she knew Helen would say that despite the rust it was a good kettle and there was no sense in throwing it away. She found herself sharing this with Iain, her observation about Helen and the kettle, and he said, “Absolutely, that’s Helen to a tee, and then she’ll either start using your new kettle as a planter or a watering can, or give it to someone else. Anything to save the old one from the landfill—because she doesn’t believe they actually recycle anything, you know.”

  “Oh, yes, I know. Would you like to sit on the side porch?”

  “Sure. You should wrap those greens in a towel and put them in the fridge, though. They’re very delicate.”

  She examined him again. Well-groomed, face weathered in an appealing way, eyes crinkled at the sides. He was looking at her, too, with that same surprising intensity, as though he had met her somewhere before and was trying to place her. She felt self-conscious and lifted a hand to scratch a nonexistent itch on her face.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “You’re wearing . . . an engagement ring.”

  “Oh. Right. Yes. It’s . . .” The true explanation was too ridiculous, so she said the thing that made the most sense and was technically true. “I’m engaged. To my boyfriend, Adam. My fiancé. My fiancé, Adam.” Fiancé. My fiancé, Adam. Did it or did it not fit?

  No. It does not.

  “Wow. Well. That’s . . .” He cleared his throat. He was still looking at the ring. “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you.” The kettle had started to screech. She opened the cupboard above the stove that held the spices and teas. “Green, mint, rooibos, chai, Earl Grey, English Breakfast, or something called Youthful Detox?” she asked.

  “Oh, the detox, please. Perfect.”

  She put two bags in the chipped green pot, grabbed two mugs, and headed toward the porch.

  “So,” she said when they were seated across from each other on the black iron bistro set with the faded red and gold cushions. “Have you had a cottage here long?” Then she sipped the tea and grimaced. “Geez. This stuff is terrible.”

  “You get used to it. And I’ve been here since last summer. Two places down from here. I’m in the Bachmans’ old place. They retired and moved to Mallorca.”

  Liane nodded as though she knew this. Then she leaned in, tried to be subtle. “What about the cottage on the other side of us? The one next door. The Castersen place. Did they sell, too?”

  Iain shook his head. “They just started renting the place out. For this June and July, to the same people. The man there now is named Laurence Something-or-other. He’s a writer. He’s working on something. Although he told me he’s a bit blocked, so he’s been doing a lot of reading, trying to spur himself into action, I suppose. I brought him some greens last week and he told me a little about it. Apparently it’s his third novel and he’s afraid of having a midcareer slump.”

  “Oh. A writer?”

  “I haven’t heard of his books. He says he doesn’t write sci-fi, but it sounds like it to me. His first book was short stories and his last book was . . . let me try to remember . . . something about the end of the world being in a hundred years and everyone knowing about it, the exact date of it and everything.”

  She looked down at the ring on her finger. “Well, I guess that doesn’t have to be sci-fi. Maybe more just a study of human nature. It is pretty interesting. What would you do if you knew the world was going to end in a hundred years? Would that change anything for you?”

  Iain looked thoughtful. “I really don’t know. Selfishly, probably it would change nothing for me. But then again, for my daughters and sons it would. Not much point in having kids, right? Or more of them, in my one daughter’s case. Maybe that would be liberating.”

  As he spoke, she wished for a moment that Iain was Helen’s type. It would be nice to have someone like him around. “Liane’s mother is a free spirit,” Adam had once said to his own parents, employing his usual tact. “You know how it is in show business.” “She’s not in show business, she used to be a folksinger,” Liane had said to him later. She wasn’t sure why Adam’s words had made her feel so angry. Maybe because he’d said what he’d said in the same way a person might say Liane’s mother is a mental patient. But he was right, of course: the reality of this free-spiritedness was that Ilsa’s father was an ex-lover of Helen’s who lived in Paris and whom she had met while on tour; Wesley had stumbled into her life during a visit to an ashram in India (Fiona and Ilsa had stayed with Edie, and Helen had been away for weeks because she was experiencing some sort of career/existential crisis); and Fiona’s father—well, no one was exactly certain who he was, least of all Helen.

  She realized Iain appeared to be waiting for her to say something.

  “Which could be good for people who didn’t want to have kids at all,” Liane said. “Then they could stop having to explain themselves. Liberating, I think that’s exactly it. Because you feel this sense of obligation to procreate.” She thought maybe she was now talking about herself, and hadn’t meant to be. Do I not want kids? Or do I just not want them with Adam?

  “True,” Iain said. “It would be as good a reason as any. Better than the reasons most people come up with these days: ‘I’m too selfish. I need more me time.’ What else do you think might happen? A hundred years . . . would people riot, do everything and everyone in before the hundred-year mark hit, do you think?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe nothing would change at all. Maybe we all think the world could end at any second anyway, so what would change in the knowing? Maybe it would be nice to know.”

  “Sounds like we’re going to have to read this book,” said Iain. Then he sipped his tea and said, “I’m afraid I don’t have a creative bone in my body, and I don’t understand the life of a writer. I wouldn’t like to be alone as much as he is, I don’t think. Although his wife and two girls join him on weekends.”

  Wife and two girls.

  You’re engaged, she told herself. You’re even wearing a ring. She looked down at it again and a nervous giggle escaped from her lips. She covered her mouth. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m feeling a bit weird. It turns out I’m not used to being alone, so I guess I wouldn’t make a very good writer, either. I’m supposed to be working on my thesis, but I haven’t gotten much done at all and I think I just . . . I’m feeling a little odd.” She covered the ring with her other hand and looked up at Iain.

  He had a concerned expression on his face. She felt guilty then for behaving so strangely in front of a person she didn’t know. So she said, “Would you like to stay for lunch?” and then felt needy and embarrassed.

  But he said, “Why don’t I take you to the marina for fish and chips? I bet all you need is to reconnect with civilization for a bit and you’ll be right as rain.”

  Right as rain. She found his presence comforting. She said, “I think you’re on to something. I need to leave the island, just for a few hours. Do you have a boat?”

  He nodded. “A small one, but yes,” he said, as though asha
med of this fact.

  • • •

  Later that day, when she returned to the cottage, she didn’t feel as alone. Lunch off the island and in Iain’s company, their conversations about books, about the fact that he’d been a museum curator before retiring, his interest in her thesis, had officially broken the spell. (Wife, girls. That had helped, too. Although not in a good way.) She put away all the books she didn’t need for research, ate all the greens in several giant salads, and finished the last page of her thesis by Friday morning.

  Also: she went to the shed. She hesitated, then dragged the kayak out to the dock and spent a morning washing it carefully with lake water. She did not cottage-wave to the Reading Man during this time. She put on a life jacket. She wore it until the sun was about to set. Finally she got in the kayak and paddled away. The lake was like a garage-sale mirror, smooth but mottled. She stopped paddling, closed her eyes, and pictured the inside cover of that book she believed her father had given her. She remembered the orange of the endpapers, the vaguely musty scent trapped between the pages; he always shopped at secondhand bookstores. She saw the words,

  To Liane, don’t ever stop believing in the possibility of secret magical worlds. Love, Dad

  She said aloud, “I’ll try. Goodbye, Dad. I love you.”

  It didn’t change anything, but it was something rather than nothing. A start, maybe.

  2

  Swan (Cygnus)

  Swans are famed for forming monogamous pair bonds, but the idea that they mate for life may be a myth. While swan “divorces” were thought to occasionally happen, mostly due to nesting failure, scientists have now witnessed a high enough number of swan partings to suggest that swans may not be as loyal as originally thought.

  Something was going to happen. Looking back on the day later, from the distance that would grow between Fiona and everyone who mattered in her life, she realized she had known this.

  This coming Thing had woken her in the night and she had taken one of her pills: they were hidden at the bottom of her nearly empty makeup case. (Fiona only wore makeup on special occasions. She prided herself on her barefaced look.) Ativan, mostly. Some Xanax. She rationed the pills because she was not going to become one of those people who thought no one could tell that she constantly seemed a little too fast or a little too slow or a little too happy. Every time she took a pill, she wished she had succeeded at making her life perfect enough not to need them.

  Next, Fiona looked in on the boys: Cole and Beckett, the twins, had just turned fourteen, and Eliot, the baby (not a baby anymore at all, she had to keep reminding herself), was eleven. Fiona and Tim’s three sons were named after authors, even though she and Tim were not authors themselves, or even particularly voracious readers. Fiona had wanted a theme, that was all. Tim preferred the newspaper or weighty biographies, and Fiona kept up with her book club reading, or whatever Oprah was endorsing at the moment. But when Tim was away she read self-help books (most recently: How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie)—but only when Tim was away because the books embarrassed her. She didn’t want her husband to think she needed help. (And anyway, she didn’t need help. She just liked to have backup for the other twenty-eight to thirty days of the month she didn’t allow herself to take pills.)

  Lately, because of work demands, Tim had been away more than ever. She had grown used to it, and now found she was having trouble sleeping when he was home. When his cold feet sought hers, she rolled away. This bothered her, but she wasn’t sure what to do about it. It’s probably normal.

  Fiona looked down at Eliot, her no-longer-baby, and felt a twinge. It had been a while since she had felt one of these. She had dispatched Tim to the hospital shortly after Eliot’s birth, and once they had double-checked she could be firm when people asked if they were going to have any more children. She could smile and say, “Oh, Tim’s been taken care of”—or, if she’d had a glass of wine, she might lower her voice to a mock-whisper and use the word snipped.

  But even as the boys grew to impossible sizes (she now avoided looking at baby pictures of them because the idea that they had once been small and so entirely hers filled her with an ache), Fiona couldn’t seem to let go of those nighttime moments. If she leaned down to kiss their cheeks, Cole and Beckett would stir but Eliot wouldn’t move. She could kiss him over and over, and often had. A secret: lately, when Tim’s being home caused her to be wakeful, she might climb into Eliot’s bed to curl around him, feeling a sort of shame as she did so, but unable to stop herself from seeking this closeness. A few times Eliot had half woken, kissed the air beside her cheek, and said, “Love you, Mommy. Night,” in the same way he had when he was five. (Each instance had caused the ache to become an exquisite starburst of pain and she had risen from the bed and returned to her room.)

  On the night the Thing woke Fiona and she took a pill, she tried climbing into bed with Eliot but he squirmed away. So she went back to her room, where she hesitated, then slid her own now-cold feet toward her husband’s calves. She was remembering nights, long past now, when they would both be awake, perhaps because one of the children had been up with a bad dream or he had been working late. On these nights, the moonlight would shine on their bedspread as they touched feet and talked about things that seemed special and secret because of the silence and darkness. But this night, Tim didn’t respond to the invitation of her cold feet, and Fiona didn’t roll toward him and rest her face against his shoulder the way she had before she grew used to him being away. She just closed her eyes and tried to breathe steadily, hoping she could trick herself into falling asleep.

  • • •

  The next morning, a mild headache was all that remained of her unrest the night before. The day ahead, a Friday, was a busy one. Fiona was going to her family cottage the following day, which meant flying with Ilsa, her middle sister—she lived in Rye, too, with her husband, who was Tim’s business ­partner—from the White Plains airport to Toronto, then renting a car and driving north until the walls of rock appeared and she had to remind herself to focus on the road and not drift to the shoulder of childhood memory. The annual late June cottage visit was the only time Fiona left the boys each year, and one of the few times she saw Helen. But this year she was feeling anxious about it for different reasons than normal. (The normal reasons: the undercurrent of animosity always at play between her and Ilsa; the sadness she sometimes felt because she thought she and Liane weren’t as close as they could be or should be; and everything with Helen, all of it, nameless things, mother-daughter things that weighed on Fiona and forced her to strive harder in her own life to become bigger, and, perhaps most importantly, better than all of it.) This year, it wasn’t all that, though. She simply didn’t want to leave. She felt nervous. She felt like staying put, playing sick, crawling into bed, and waking up when the weekend was over and the threat had passed.

  Something is going to happen.

  For distraction, Fiona turned her attention to her list of things to do. Rita, the nanny-turned-housekeeper, would be around that weekend, but Fiona still wanted to prepare a few meals and label them with reheating instructions. (She would try to remember to write, I’ll miss you, Tim. See you in a few days, at the end of the note she would leave on the counter.) And, importantly, she also had a cocktail party to finish preparing for. She always hosted one this time of year, inviting a few of Tim’s colleagues and some key neighbors. She had said this once to Tim, and he had tilted his head and smiled and said, “Key neighbors? What, are you planning to launch me into a political career? Are we strategizing socially?”

  Perhaps it was one of the good things about Tim that he didn’t understand the importance of social strategy, that he wasn’t aware of all she did to make sure things in their lives were just so. Didn’t a good wife, a good homemaker, the kind of person she was, make it all look effortless?

  When really it was all so contrived it was almost always at risk of
breaking apart.

  Fiona realized she had been holding on to the counter so tightly her knuckles had turned white. She released her grip. Cocktail party. Where was her list? It was always a challenge to manage hosting the cocktail party and departing for the cottage, but it was important to get it done before July, when everyone would be away and the regrets would outnumber the acceptances of her invitations, which were generally delivered in person or, at the very least, by telephone. And if she did it too early in June, there was too much of a risk for a cool or rainy evening.

  Fiona found her list and then went to the front hall, where she stood, head bent, rifling through her purse, making sure she had keys, wallet, sunglasses. But when she heard footsteps on the porch, she paused. The mail carrier lifted her hand and waved through the beveled glass of the front door as she mounted the steps. Fiona waved back, zipped her handbag shut, and went out to the porch to fetch the mail. She was on her way out, yes, but she was still going to sort it, put aside what needed to be dealt with, recycle what needed to be recycled, and pass along what needed to be passed along. It wouldn’t take long. The boys almost never got mail and anything to do with the household she handled herself.

  Today: the regular assortment of flyers, a few bills, and a yellow envelope with wildflower seeds embedded in it that contained a thank-you card. She ran a thumb across the rough paper and found herself remembering the blue envelope that had arrived in the mail a few weeks before. It had been similar in texture: pockmarked, rough, and gritty, as though made from recycled material. It had arrived on a day similar to this one, when she had been on her way to do things that felt important, but had paused to deal with the mail. She hadn’t recognized the handwriting and had taken the envelope up to her office (she had needed her letter opener; she had forgotten to take off her shoes), and realized almost too late: the letter wasn’t addressed to her. She had stood at her desk, letter opener gripped like a weapon aimed at the heart of the envelope. A letter from Vienna. For Tim. Who did they know in Vienna? She had a sudden impulse to shred it. But, no. You’re being silly.