Mating for Life

by Marissa Stapley

  Then, two mornings ago, Helen had woken and gone downstairs to make coffee. In the kitchen, she had discovered the butter dish open, finger-shaped gouges in it, and the ring in a juice glass filled with soapy water. There’s a chance I could have just dumped it down the drain, Helen thought. Then Iain would really have had something to be angry about. But she hadn’t dumped it. She’d taken it out of the glass and cleaned it with care, and when Ilsa came downstairs later that morning, Helen told her it belonged to a friend who had stayed at the cottage.

  “Then why was Liane wearing it?” Ilsa had asked. “Is she not really engaged?”

  “I don’t know, I didn’t get the chance to ask her. She left.” Without telling me anything.

  Ilsa had rubbed her head as though it hurt. “It’s my fault she left. She got really mad at me yesterday because I went over and started talking to the neighbors and invited them for dinner today. We argued after you went to bed.”

  Helen wasn’t blind. She had seen the man next door watching Liane, and Liane watching him. But, as usual, she hadn’t said anything. “Ilsa—”

  “I was just being friendly,” Ilsa had said, defending herself against the things Helen hadn’t said yet. “They’re our new neighbors. We should get to know them.”

  “They’re just renters.”

  “Renters don’t count?” Ilsa was now storming around the kitchen in a way she hadn’t since her more tempestuous teen years. Morning light streamed in through the big kitchen window and Helen knew that it probably made her look old, especially first thing in the morning. And I’m the one who’s supposed to be getting married.

  “Why did Liane get so upset?”

  “Because she thought I was interfering, trying to bring her and that neighbor man together, in an attempt to prove she doesn’t really want to marry Adam.”

  “Were you?”

  “No! I just thought it might be fun for her. The amount of lustful glances they were shooting each other from across the lake, Jesus! I thought it might help her to know that all marriages aren’t sacrosanct, that maybe none of them are.”

  “Help her in what way?”

  Upstairs, Xavier had called out, “Mama?” The day before, his nose had started to run and he had gone to bed with a slight fever.

  Ilsa had stopped moving around so frantically, brought back to herself by the sound of her son’s voice. “You know, we might just head home early, too,” she said. She stood still, looking down at the butter dish. “I’m sorry. We had an off year, but there will be others. There always are.”

  “An off year,” Helen had repeated.

  “Maybe I’ll come back later in the summer,” Ilsa had offered.

  “You’re always welcome,” Helen had said, surprised by how badly she wanted Ilsa to return, or not to go in the first place. But instead of trying to convince Ilsa to stay, she had walked down to the dock with her coffee to watch the sun finish its ascent. She felt lonely. Even though she had Iain, just a few cottages over, and a daughter and two grandchildren still in the cottage, she felt completely alone. What she wanted, she realized, was someone to talk to. A friend.

  She thought about something Liane had said the day before. She had mentioned that she had been flipping through the cottage guest book that week. “And I saw an entry from Edie. What happened with you two, anyway?”

  Helen had stopped what she had been doing—salting and peppering fish fillets she had thawed—and looked up at Liane, thoughtful. Well, let’s see. What happened? She ran off with Fiona’s father, that’s what happened. She turned out to be more envious of me than anyone else. “I don’t remember anymore,” Helen had finally said. “Something silly. I think she lives in California. Or maybe New York City. I don’t know. She got married.” Helen had squeezed lemon on the fish and then rubbed the lemon over her hands before washing them.

  “I went out in the kayak,” Liane said next. “I don’t know if you noticed.”

  “I did,” Helen said carefully. “I’m proud of you.” She covered the fish with a pot lid. She cleared her throat and waited. Maybe now Liane would explain about the ring. But she didn’t. The conversation appeared to be over.

  And then both girls had left and Helen was alone on the island with nothing to do but walk over to Iain’s and admit to him that she had failed at her mission. She had spent the day and night with him, but now needed to go back to her place for more stuff. He was reading the paper, his reading glasses down his nose. She stepped in front of him, sandals in hand.

  “I’m going for a walk,” she said. “I need a few things from my place.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” he replied, without looking up. He was upset with her still, she could tell. Perhaps she couldn’t blame him. It probably hadn’t felt very good to arrive at her cottage and discover her daughter wearing the ring, as though playing dress-up with some discarded trinket.

  Helen put on her sandals, walked out the front door, and couldn’t help but think the old Helen—or, perhaps more correctly, the young Helen—would keep walking away from this place and never return. And although she still felt like the same person (sometimes that didn’t seem fair, mostly because of the crow’s-feet), at sixty-four Helen was finally grown-up enough to know that walking away from a man like Iain, a strong, solid, intelligent, passionate, and, yes, traditional man like Iain, would be a mistake she’d regret, always.

  • • •

  Meeting Iain had happened for a lot of reasons and in a roundabout way. Mainly, the events that had set it into ­motion—or at least that had preceded it, had helped her identify her need—had happened because Helen had finally grown tired, one day, of eating dinner alone.

  After an early morning spent doing yoga back in the rural village where she lived during the year, after her daily walk, after tending to her vast garden of herbs, the smells of which brought back so many different memories and made her feel a little sorry that every summer she would give the house to a house sitter (almost always an actor or painter or some other form of artist friend who needed somewhere to be) and spend most of the time on the island, after a visit to the library in town for a new crop of literary thrillers, after lunch with her friend Nina (wheat germ burgers at the Carrot Top Café), after a nap in the solarium, from which she woke, slightly disoriented, dreaming she was about to go on at Massey Hall, after realizing it was not in fact 1975 and feeling that perhaps she had slept too long (she had, and she’d never get to sleep that night), after watching the sun fade on the horizon from where she lay, after feeling hungry, moving to the kitchen, and beginning to prepare a meal—her idea had been kamut pasta, fresh tomatoes, basil, olive oil, a glass of wine, but instead she had put toast in the oven, sliced tomatoes, ground pepper, felt tired of cooking for one—after carrying it outside and turning on CBC radio to keep the silence at bay, after all this, she had had the following thought: I am tired of eating alone. I don’t want to become a woman who eats cereal over the sink, who ceases to care about her meals, or who constantly invites friends in for dinner, bustles around the kitchen, all the while thinking, If you weren’t here I’d go insane with loneliness. I never used to be that woman, but I am getting lonely. My days I can fill fine. But at night, in the evening . . . well, I want someone to eat with. I want someone to cook for who isn’t a friend. And, to be frank, postmenopausal or not, I wouldn’t mind a good lay once in a while, and none of the men in this town seem up for the task.

  And so she stood and fetched her laptop, left her toasted tomato sandwich, and drank her red wine instead—one glass, then another—while she set up a profile on MatchedSilver.com, a website that Nina had mentioned that day at lunch. The name of the site had caused her to cringe, but she still went on. Gracefully Aging Flower Child Seeks Dinner Companion, she wrote, and immediately felt embarrassed. Still, she continued with a jumble of words that described her completely and would likely put most men off.

  She fa
ltered for a moment—surely she would be recognized; or perhaps not; it was indeed no longer 1975—then uploaded a picture a friend had taken of her at a party. In the picture Helen was laughing while facing slightly away from the camera. In the soft light of the photo, the white streaks in her hair looked blond and her laugh lines were still visible but softened.

  She got a lot of messages. Some of them memorable because they were bizarre, some of them memorable because they were pathetic, a few memorable because she was indeed recognized (the “folksinging goddess of my not so illustrious youth,” as one man put it), but none of them memorable because they were memorable. She began to grow frustrated. This isn’t going to work. If I’m going to meet someone, I’m going to meet him in a different way than this. I always did before, didn’t I?

  Except in the life she had led before, it had been somewhat easier to meet men.

  • • •

  Helen had left her hometown of Mulmur, Ontario, at seventeen. When interviewers asked her why, she always said, “Have you been to Mulmur?” and left it at that. But in truth, it was a pretty little farm town she wished she could tell idyllic stories about. Stories other than: “My mother, Abigail, did all the things in her life because she had to, not because she wanted to, and sometimes I would see her looking out across our fields of potatoes with an expression of longing so fierce I wanted to take her hand and run away. But I knew if I suggested it her face would return to normal and she would smile and say, ‘Why on earth would I ever want to do that?’” Stories other than: “My brother, Ellis, was ‘not right in the head.’ That was how the townspeople put it, but no one ever sought to figure out what the problem was, exactly. Then one night he came into my room, covered my mouth with his hand, and climbed on top of me, but I bit him and he screamed and my father came running.”

  Helen’s father, Angus, didn’t speak of what he had seen happening that night because he almost never spoke of anything. But he also didn’t argue with Helen when she said two days later she was leaving, didn’t have a response when Abigail cried and said, “But she was going to marry Beacan Wilson.” (Later, though, when the cottage was put in her name, she recognized the small piece of property they had visited each summer, for quiet vacations during which Helen once swam the entire perimeter of the island and thought she might die from exhaustion, as an act of contrition. So she fought Ellis hard for it in court when he attempted to prove that their father was going senile and was not in his right mind when he bequeathed the property to her, then paid him what would have been his share to make sure he never came around, and gave him her share of the farm, too.)

  It was 1968 when Helen escaped to Toronto and ended up flopping in an apartment with a group of Vietnam draft dodgers. At night she sang them the Irish folk songs she remembered her mother singing while cleaning, mending, or cooking, and one of the group told her she needed to learn how to play a guitar. “I already do know how,” she said. “I just don’t have one.” So they pooled their money and bought her one.

  Later, she moved into a Yorkville apartment with three other girls, all of whom wanted to be folksingers, too. They started busking on street corners and trying to think of a name for the group they were going to form. Then Helen was approached by the owner of a bar. “What about my friends?” Helen asked. “Can they come sing, too?” But the man had said no, just her. The bar was called the Purple Onion. It was the same place where Buffy Sainte-Marie wrote “Universal Soldier.” Helen went back to the apartment and packed her things into a bag before her friends could tell her to move out.

  The record executive who discovered her was a kingmaker, and also her first lover, and journalists would always ask about him, but she would refuse to say his name. “It was the first and last heartbreak for me,” she would say, trying to sound cavalier. Closer to the truth would probably have been something like, The first cut is the deepest, but that line was already taken. Soon, though, it became her trademark to sing songs that were anti-love, to preach, through her music, about how women didn’t need men at all. She had been raised by a woman who thought the greatest thing Helen could aspire to was to marry Beacan Wilson. She had never once seen her father kiss her mother. Her brother had tried to rape her. “I’m not a huge fan of men,” she would say in interviews. Of course, there were rumors that she was a lesbian, but Helen didn’t care. (Abigail did, though. This was apparently the final straw. She stood up in church and publicly denounced her daughter. A childhood friend wrote Helen a letter to tell her about it.)

  “Down with Love, Says Helen Sear,” read her Rolling Stone cover line.

  Success made her life a blur, until she turned twenty-five and walked into a party and met a man named Nate, the guitarist of one of the most successful rock bands of the era. He spilled his glass of red wine on her, then gave her his shirt to wear. She had wandered the party smelling like him until she believed at the end of the night that she knew him. (She never really did.) She went with him back to his hotel room.

  Weeks later, when he went back out on tour, she discovered she was pregnant. She wrote him a letter. He didn’t reply. She considered her options and decided that although she could exercise her choice not to keep the baby, she could also exercise her choice to keep the baby. She could purposefully raise him or her without a father—and maybe that would be even more controversial than anything she had done so far.

  By this time she had been befriended by Edie, a trust-fund child (Helen had recently heard the term “trustafarian” and thought of her old friend, always with a twinge of bitterness) who wasn’t musically talented but was intelligent and spontaneous and the perfect accomplice, with her long dark curls and aristocratic good looks in stark and appealing contrast to Helen’s blond hair and wide-set blue eyes. “We can raise the baby together,” Edie said. “Who needs a man?” That was how it had started.

  Fiona was born, and she grew a little older, and then the seventies drew to a close and Helen passed thirty and tried not to notice. The songs she was writing were different, more offbeat and jazzy and not so popular with the North Americans, but the Europeans loved them, so she decided to go on an extended tour over there. On the night she met Claude, she had decided to procure a bike and ride it through the city, pretending to be a Parisian girl without a care. She wore a hat and sunglasses so no one would recognize her, but this made it difficult for her to see and she fell off the bike. Claude was standing on the street corner and he picked up the baguette and cheese that had fallen from her basket and said, “This won’t do, will it?” and took her first to dinner and then to meet his delighted artist friends.

  Her pregnancy was purposeful, although she didn’t quite explain this to Claude. Still, he seemed pleased about it, in his vague way. He even tried to live with them back in Toronto, when Ilsa was a baby. But he couldn’t. He missed Paris. He thought Toronto dismal in winter, repressed in summer. He loved Ilsa, though, and Helen promised never to keep her from him. It was when Claude was living with her that she and Edie began to drift apart, ever so slightly. A man sharing their space changed things.

  The eighties weren’t kind to Helen’s career. She had been warned to expect it, but still, it stung. Her record sales were plummeting, both at home and abroad, and no one seemed to understand that she needed to evolve, that she couldn’t just be the same girl, singing the same songs. She got restless and left the girls with Edie. She went to India for a month, because it seemed like the thing to do. She met Wes at an ashram when she was sitting on a cold floor trying to meditate. She had been unable to focus and had opened her eyes. He was watching her, his green eyes (the same as Liane’s) bright. I want you, she had begun to say, over and over again in her head. I want you, I want you. And as they sat, wordlessly staring at each other, she had become positive that he was saying the same thing in his mind. Not in the base, physical sense, not I want you as in I want to sleep with you (although of course there had been that), but as in I want all of you
, inside, outside, all of it.

  She thought she had loved him most, when she did allow herself to think of him. And she wondered why that had done nothing to pull him back from the edge. “We can’t choose who we love,” she had said after he died. “I still would have wanted to love him, even if I had known there was no curing him.”

  It was this line, “We can’t choose who we love,” that Edie had thrown back at her when she had eventually confessed to Helen that she had seen Nate at a party—and had only approached him to confront him about Fiona, she had insisted—and ended up falling into a headlong affair with him that had somehow turned into a marriage at city hall. “Are you pregnant?” Helen had asked, incredulous. Edie was younger than her by a few years, but still. It seemed unlikely. “We might try,” Edie had said softly, and Helen had thought, This might be all my fault. She had allowed Edie to live in her shadow, had many times treated her like a nanny—and then Edie, whether on purpose or not, had managed to attain the one thing Helen had never been able to. “I don’t want to see you again,” Helen had said. This banishing of Edie had been the worst heartbreak, though, because theirs had been her longest relationship, even if it wasn’t sexual.

  After all this, you’re not going to find great love on a cheesy website, Helen had thought. And maybe not ever again. That part of your life is over. Move on. It was June and just about time to pack up and go to the cottage, so she deleted her profile before leaving town.

  • • •

  But then: On her first day at the cottage that year, the day before the girls arrived, Helen had gone for a walk. She had stopped when she had seen Iain in his garden and stood watching him, mostly because he was strange to behold. All those greens, in bushel baskets around him. He was wearing some sort of apron and carrying a basket but there was nothing unmasculine about him. He stood up and looked at her and she smiled and said, “Hi,” and was about to make an excuse about why she had been standing there staring at him when he smiled back and said, in a voice that made her go weak at the knees (literally, they knocked together a little and she had to steady herself; she was such a sucker for a Scottish accent), “Would you like some greens? I have tons. Literally, I think.” Greens. Honestly. Iain and his greens. But it was yet another of the little things she loved about him that added up to a larger sum: the way that he was so relentlessly himself. (Except, of course, when him being relentlessly himself meant him being relentless about the topic of marriage.)