Mating for Life

by Marissa Stapley

  When she emerged, Ilsa was leaning against the wall.

  “I’m having trouble working up the nerve to introduce myself to him. Do you think you could do it for me?”

  “Since when have you had trouble introducing yourself to anyone?”

  “I’m feeling shy, I guess. He’s an incredible artist.” Ilsa shook her hair out of her eyes. “I once stood in front of one of his canvases and cried at the idea that no matter what I did, I would never be able to create anything so beautiful. He used to guest-lecture when I was in art school and I’d sit in the front row, starstruck.”

  “Well, I’d introduce you, but I can’t remember his wife’s name,” Fiona said.

  “I never said I wanted to meet his wife.” Ilsa sidled past Fiona and the bathroom door clicked shut. Fiona stood for a moment staring at the closed door, thinking that she should have said something else, that there was something a little unhinged about Ilsa that night. But instead she walked away. She had to ask Rita to broil the crostini now and put out the salted tomato wedges. She had other things to worry about.

  • • •

  Later, Fiona saw Ilsa go back outside and walk to the back of the yard, where she leaned against the fence and talked to Jane. Jane immediately started to laugh and so did Ilsa, and then they were leaning against each other and talking as though they had known each other forever. Fiona felt something like jealousy. Why was it so easy for Ilsa to make friends? Why was it so impossible for Fiona? A moment later, Jane moved away from Ilsa, waving her empty wineglass, heading for the bar table. And, as Fiona watched, suddenly feeling like her backyard was not her backyard but instead a stage with multiple players, she saw Lincoln end the conversation he was having with Bill and Allison Du Pont beside the blue spruce. He walked toward Ilsa. He touched her wrist, lifted it, said something to her while she smiled up at him. Eventually he examined her other wrist. He was reading the tattoo that was there, Fiona realized. She was unable to look away as he gently moved the bangles aside.

  Finally Fiona crossed the yard and approached, with the strange feeling that she was too late. “Lincoln, my apologies for being so rude and not greeting you and your wife.” She emphasized the words “your wife” and directed them at Ilsa. Then she lowered her voice. “But I have to tell you something. I am mortified, completely mortified, but I cannot remember your wife’s name. Please forgive me. And then remind me of her name and let’s never speak of this.”

  Lincoln didn’t move his gaze from Ilsa’s face. And Ilsa didn’t move hers from his, and Fiona wanted to slap them both back into reality. “Her name is Rebecca,” he said. “I promise I won’t tell her.” Still, his eyes were on Ilsa’s face. “I was just leaving, actually. Rebecca is already gone. Headache. It has been nice to meet you, Ilsa Bisette,” he said. “And, Fiona, lovely party.”

  Then he walked away.

  Fiona’s voice was cold. “Just because you respect him as an artist is no excuse to behave inappropriately,” she said. “You’re a married woman.”

  Ilsa laughed at her. “You’re such a prude. Behave inappropriately? Come on. We were just talking. For two minutes, maybe.”

  “He was looking at you like he wanted to eat you.”

  “Was he really?”

  “Ilsa,” Fiona said, hoping her tone contained a warning.

  “Relax, big sister. I won’t ruin your party by allowing him to fling me on the buffet table and—”

  “It’s not a buffet,” Fiona hissed.

  “You’re acting even more uptight than usual, you know.”

  “And you’re acting like a teenage girl.”

  “Which is far better than acting like an old lady.”

  Fiona turned and walked away from her sister. She pressed through a small group of people and wished that all of them would leave her home immediately. Ilsa with her seductive grace, Lincoln with his contrived charisma, all of them, everyone, gone.

  Tim, too, she realized. She didn’t want him to be there, either.

  So later, after the guests had finally departed—far too slowly—instead of sitting at the granite table with her husband, finishing the dregs of a bottle and dissecting the evening as she had envisioned doing earlier that afternoon, Fiona did something she never imagined she would do: she packed a bag for Tim (meticulously, of course) and told him to leave the house.

  But she didn’t feel any better after he was gone.

  3

  North American Black Bear (Ursus americanus)

  In spring and summer North American black bears abandon their usually solitary behavior to socialize and procreate. While the male copulates with as many females as possible, the female only mates once every two years and gives birth every two to four years. In the years when the mother bears are ready to mate, they force their yearling cubs to stop traveling with them. This is in part to protect the cubs from the aggressiveness of the male bears during mating season.

  Ilsa drove. She drove and she waited. Even as she moved fast, across pavement, along highway, she felt motionless and expectant. She would reach up and touch her bottom lip, which was slightly swollen from all the kissing, and she would think: Shouldn’t this at least hurt? I feel nothing.

  But then, about halfway to the cottage, just past Holland Marsh, where the farmers’ market Fiona always insisted they stop at every summer for fresh produce was, Ilsa did feel something: she felt pissed off at Fiona for not being there. How could she have left Ilsa that message saying “I’m not coming, I’ve called the rental company, your name is now on the insurance for the car, don’t forget your car seats” (as if she would forget the car seats for her own children!), and then turned off her phone? Ilsa had tried to call her sister several times afterward, growing angrier each time she pressed the call button. She hadn’t been sure what she was going to say. Probably something like, Come on, we’ve had fights worse than this, and you’ve never shirked a responsibility because of it, in the hopes that using the word responsibility would bring Fiona back to her senses.

  When Ilsa began to feel angry at her sister, she finally felt the pain she had expected to feel, a pain that now began to radiate into her heart, or the area where she assumed her heart was—her figurative heart, not the real one. Imagined pain, since there was really no such thing as a heart, not the way people talked about anyway. She looked in the rearview mirror at Ani and Xavier, both asleep, Xavier with his thumb in his mouth, hair in sweaty curls around his temples, Ani’s eyes closed, the dark sweep of lashes visible even from the front seat, and she thought of Michael. Then she thought of Lincoln. Then she tried to just focus on the road, but she couldn’t, so she pulled over and closed her eyes for a few minutes. She had never been good with long drives.

  Ilsa had really only been pretending to be too nervous to talk to Lincoln the night before. In truth, she was waiting for him to come to her. The moment she had seen him, she had wanted him, specifically and in a way she knew was wrong, and so she decided that there was little point in talking to him if he wasn’t a man who felt the same, if he wasn’t a man who was willing to do such things. It had been a while, but Ilsa was still familiar with the nuances of seduction: mainly, that a man like Lincoln wouldn’t want her to approach him. A man like Lincoln would want to hunt, and pounce.

  So she waited and she watched him, strategically holding his gaze every time their eyes met. Finally, Jane went to get another glass of wine and he began to move across the yard, keeping her in his sights. When he reached her he immediately touched her, taking her right wrist in his long fingers and holding it up.

  “You’re a painter, too,” he said. “Aren’t you? I see paint on your wrists.” Ilsa hadn’t noticed it, but it was true. On the wrist that wasn’t covered with bangles and ink (Ilsa had a French phrase tattooed on her left wrist) were streaks of dark purple paint, the color of bruises. “Maybe I’m just a house painter,” Ilsa had said, and Lincoln had laug
hed.

  “I can tell that you aren’t. I know an artist when I see one.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. What do you paint?”

  “Nothing of value.”

  “Tell me your name. I’ll find out if what you paint is of value.”

  “Ilsa Bisette.” Her hair was back in her eyes. She brushed it away; the bracelets jangled. He had out his phone, and she tried not to let this annoy her. He’s checking to make sure I’m someone, and not no one. He read his screen for a moment and then put his phone away and reached for her other wrist, his touch softer this time. He read the tattoo. “Gauguin’s words,” he said. Ilsa had been seventeen when she got the tattoo. Fiona had said, “You’re going to regret that one day, when you’re old and wrinkled and you have ink on your wrist,” and Ilsa had said, “I seriously doubt it,” and Fiona had said, “You seriously doubt you’ll regret it, or you seriously doubt you’ll ever be old and wrinkled?” Ilsa hadn’t answered her. The tattoo read: Je fermé les yeux afin de voir. (I shut my eyes so that I might see.) Ilsa was considering another one, but wasn’t sure which words to get.

  Lincoln had leaned against the fence, and Ilsa had, too. He had looked up at the chaos of stars in the navy sky, then back down at her, and she had felt like one of the stars he had just been looking at, suspended in anticipation, light-years away from her life as it was—but, perhaps, seconds away from implosion. She had, for just a moment, had a grasping hold on the beginnings of a painting. Star hanging in summer sky, about to fall. “When are you leaving? My wife is already gone.” Ilsa had cleared her throat. She had swallowed. She had tried not to feel disappointed. What did you want him to say? Something else. Something memorable. Something not quite so straightforward. And also, something that did not include the words “my wife.”

  Ilsa had not been planning to leave, but finally, when she found her voice again, she murmured, “Soon. Probably.” “Do you live near here?” he had asked. She had nodded, unable to find a word, not even Yes, not even Somewhat.

  “I’d like to walk you home,” he had said. “I’d like that, too,” she had finally managed, a proper sentence, because “I’d like to walk you home” sounded good to her. A little sweet, but a little suggestive. Still, when she spoke, her voice had sounded wrong, like it had been grated along something, smashed against the bricks. “I’ll wait for you on the sidewalk,” he had said. And then Fiona had rushed over, all blustering morality.

  After, Ilsa had gone inside to the powder room, where she had stared at herself in the mirror and said, “You don’t really want to do this.” It was a line she was about to cross, and there would be no crossing to the other side of it again. She would become who she had never wanted to be. But she still crushed a mint between her molars, rinsed her mouth with water, and smoothed her hair and dress. She felt like a drug addict might feel. Sweaty, elated, ready for a fix. She said goodbye to Tim but ignored Fiona, whose face was white and angry and whose lips were pressed together like she was holding something in. You’re too boring to have feelings like this, to yearn for something more than your suburban lifestyle. It probably doesn’t bother you that Tim doesn’t kiss you properly anymore. Or maybe he does. At this thought, Ilsa felt a twinge. Maybe you’re one of the lucky ones.

  As Ilsa had walked toward Lincoln, she thought of her days in art school. In particular, she remembered one afternoon when he had guest-lectured for her landscape drawing class. As she had listened to him speak, she remembered thinking about who he might be as a person, behind the talk about art, beneath the layers of clothing. (Clothing: She even remembered what he had been wearing. A jacket and shirt, just like tonight. The shirt had been dark gray.) Now he turned, and in the streetlamp glow she thought, Maybe I always knew he would come back into my life at some point, even just to . . . but she didn’t finish the thought because she wasn’t sure what his purpose was. As he advanced, he looked to her like a lion so pleased that the best part of the kill had been saved for him: the heart, the loin. Stop being so dramatic, she had said to herself. “Hello,” she had said to him. He had smiled, reached for her hand, pulled her to him until she was inches away (but neck craned, looking up because he was so tall, even with her in heels), and said, “Hello, gorgeous.” (Again, she had experienced disappointment in his words. “Hello, gorgeous”? It was predictable. She didn’t want predictable.) “Did you know,” she had said, playing the coquette, “that once you were my teacher?”

  • • •

  Ilsa was driving again. She turned onto an off-ramp. She was getting close. The crunch of gravel beneath her tires relaxed her. No more pavement. Trees on either side. She opened her window. She felt some of the tension give way to anticipation. But she felt something else, too: an intensification of the ache in her chest. Because as she drove into the scenery, instead of taking it all in to store away for later, to process and distill onto a canvas the way she once could, she simply . . . didn’t. She took another painful breath and then the feeling of nothing returned and she was back where she had started.

  Ani was stirring in the backseat. “Mama?” she said.

  “We’re close,” Ilsa said. “Really close.” She made eye contact with her daughter in the rearview mirror and smiled. “Shh. Try not to wake your little brother just yet.”

  Before he left for Copenhagen, Michael had suggested leaving the kids with Sylvie for the entire weekend rather than taking them to Muskoka. “Maybe you just need a break,” he had suggested, and she realized this was his way of acknowledging her distance from him. “Helen would be inconsolable,” Ilsa had said, unable to look him in the eye. And this had been before the party, before she had officially betrayed him instead of just fantasizing about betraying him. Now she was glad she had insisted. At least when she looked at Ani and Xavier she could always count on feeling something. Her paintings of them were the only ones that were good anymore. But no one wanted to host an art exhibition featuring nothing but dozens of paintings of a toddler boy and little girl.

  “How’s it going?” Michael had asked her recently. “I feel like you haven’t shown me any paintings for a long time.” Indeed. Almost a year. All I have is a canvas filled with dark purple strokes, a line for each day that has passed since I’ve painted, and now it’s only purple, there is no white. She had not said this to her husband, though. She had looked at him and felt angry with him. How could you have not noticed until now? And then she had lied and said she had an exhibition coming up.

  But the date had come and gone and he hadn’t mentioned it again. She felt relieved not to have to lie about it, but something had told her he knew and just chose not to say anything about it. There was a cruelty in this that he wasn’t capable of understanding, but she felt it keenly.

  Now Ilsa pulled the car into the marina parking lot. As usual, one of the indeterminate number of sons of Johnny, the owner of the marina and restaurant on the property—it was dilapidated-looking on the outside, with white and blue paint flaking from wooden boards and a sign that read FLIPPER’S SEAFOOD in uneven script; none of it (and especially the fact that fish don’t even have flippers) betrayed the cult status of the lake-caught fish dishes—walked toward the car.

  “How long are you staying?” he asked when she rolled down her window. She tried to remember his name. Was this one Benjamin or Conrad or Tom? They all looked nearly the same. Sun-bleached hair that probably went dark blond in winter, tanned skin, blue eyes. And there was another one, too, a younger one, and she had absolutely no recollection of his name but she thought it started with a J. She looked closely at the boy. Maybe this was the youngest one. There was something about the way he spoke, with a touch of pride in what he was doing that the other boys didn’t have, not because they were disrespectful, but because they’d probably been doing it long enough not to want to do it anymore.

  “Tuesday morning . . . I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name.”

  “
Jesse,” he said.

  “Right, Jesse.” She always tried to be kind to these boys because they were motherless—or at least their mothers weren’t present. Over the years, different women would pass through, vacuous blondes who all seemed the same to Ilsa. Inevitably, Johnny’s girlfriends would become pregnant. And, just as inevitably, it seemed, they would leave Johnny and the baby to go back to wherever they had come from. “You’d have to be pretty unhappy to want to leave your baby,” Helen had said once, and then had grown thoughtful and quiet before brightening up and saying, “I don’t understand it. Johnny is a darling. One day we’ll have to find him a proper woman. At least for a few seasons.” A few seasons had been all any of ­Helen’s relationships had ever lasted, and she never seemed to regret this.

  “Can you take me out to the island soon?” Ilsa asked. Helen had long refused to get a motorized boat, so they had to depend on Johnny and his boys to ferry them to and from the island, for a fee. The boy named Jesse nodded. “Probably in about ten minutes. I’ll carry your stuff down to the pier for you and then I have to go check in at the restaurant. If you go down to the store, Myra’ll ring you up.”

  “Thanks.” Myra. Perhaps, after all these years, Johnny had decided he needed another son. It struck Ilsa as a mean thought to have. But she still felt curious to see this Myra, the next in line. Would she be pregnant already? Ilsa opened the trunk for Jesse, then unbuckled Ani and lifted her out of her car seat and onto the gravel—“Check your sandal. Is it done up?”—before leaning back in and gently waking Xavier.