Mating for Life

by Marissa Stapley

  He had walked toward her and they had started to talk. About the greens, at first: dandelion and chard, spinach and chicory, turnip leaves, rutabaga leaves, beet greens. “They’re the secret to longevity,” he had said. “Oh, good,” she had replied. “I was getting tired of goji berries, turmeric, and the ground-up bones of wayward children.” To her relief, he had laughed, but then they had stood in silence. She, searching for something else to keep the conversation going, had asked him if he had seen the two blue herons who were out on the lake most mornings. “Oh, yes,” he said, “all the time. Aren’t they a gorgeous pair?” Helen nodded and wondered what to say next, but then, thankfully, he had said, “Would you like to have dinner?” And she had said, “Yes, why don’t you come over to my place and cook me some of your youth-preserving greens and I’ll do the rest?” And he had said, “If you’re sure, because I can cook,” but she had shaken her head, wanting to have him come to her, although she wasn’t sure why.

  Iain came to dinner—to her relief, not bearing wildflowers or something equally trite, but instead two bottles of wine, one red, one white. “I wasn’t sure which one you liked,” he said. “What if I didn’t drink at all?” she had replied. “Then I would have had to have them both myself,” he said. “And besides, aren’t you Helen Sear?” She had nodded, for some reason embarrassed to admit this. “I’m sorry,” he said, sensing discomfort. “I didn’t mean . . .” “That just because I used to be a folksinger I’m also a complete alcoholic? It’s partially true.”

  She took the two bottles from him and stood looking at him and found she wanted to run her hands over his chest, to take off his glasses, to kiss him. Perhaps she would have done this, many years ago—in fact, this was exactly what the old not-old Helen would have done: put the bottles down and led him to her bedroom, taking her shirt off along the way, shrugging out of her skirt, no underwear, of course. However, it was one of the sad truths about aging that a person couldn’t just do things like that, that a woman couldn’t count on the fact that lifting one’s shirt over one’s head would render a man speechless—at least not in the right way. And that you needed to have at least a few glasses of wine, if not several, before the courage could be worked up to do any of it.

  “Used to be?” he said. “You mean you aren’t anymore?” “Well, it’s been a while since I performed, but I suppose the label is stamped on me forever.” That’s how she sometimes felt, stamped by her songs, by the things she used to say.

  Later, when the wine helped her lose inhibitions and she did lift her shirt over her head, he was sweet, said all the right things, made her feel good, maybe even great. And as time went on he also made her feel that none of the places she had gone to or the people she had been or the mistakes she had made in the past—many of these mistakes and much of this pain outlined in those songs she could never shake—mattered. She eventually came to feel that she could tell him everything.

  This had not turned out to be true in all cases.

  • • •

  The night he proposed was also the night they’d had their first fight.

  She had laughed before she had realized he was serious when he said, “Marry me.” Her next response had been to say, “But why?” Also a mistake.

  “Because I love you,” he had said. “Because I want to wake up with you beside me every morning for the rest of my life.”

  “Every morning? What if you go on a trip? What if I go on a trip?”

  “Come on, Helen, don’t get all technical on me.”

  “We can still do those things even if we’re not married. Also, don’t you want to know that every morning, when you wake up beside me, it’s because I want to be beside you—not because I have to be, not because of some piece of paper?”

  He had sighed and taken off his glasses and she had felt the first tingle of fear. You could lose him if you don’t do this. “I suppose that’s true. But . . . I want to be more to you than anyone else, than any of the others. Which I realize makes me sound incredibly insecure, and I’m not. It’s not insecurity. I’m not trying to stake my claim, so don’t suggest that, either. I just . . . I can’t help it. I want you to be my wife. I want you to marry me. And I’m a Catholic boy at heart. It’s how I raised my own kids. I’m not sure how comfortable I’d be living together if we didn’t marry.”

  “Let me get this straight. You actually think that marrying me will somehow keep you out of hell?” Helen was having trouble keeping a straight face but when she looked at him she realized he didn’t find any of this funny.

  And so she had composed herself and said yes, because how could she not have? Iain was the kind of man who pulled out her chair, held the door for her, gave his seat to women on buses and subways. (Which, yes, she sometimes did think perhaps reflected a belief in him that women were the weaker sex, but still, it was endearing.) Iain always, always kept his word, when it came to her and when it came to others, his family, his friends, strangers even. He was her best friend, truly, he was the person she wanted to be with all the time, the person she thought of and smiled about when she wasn’t with him. He made her feel like a better person, and this was no small feat. He was never threatened or frustrated when she became strident, never became annoyed with her when she jumped on a soapbox. “She’s a lot of work, isn’t she?” a friend had once said, and he had smiled and pulled Helen close and kissed her on the head and said, “An awful lot.”

  She also liked that he had his own life, too, and she knew he had been satisfied with it before she came along, that although he was a widower he had never been searching for a woman to fill a hole. He had been an agriculture museum curator before he retired. He sometimes seemed to come from another era, could make her feel as though the time and therefore her life was not in fact running through her fingers but was slowing down instead. He was humble. He was self-aware. He could be funny and goofy, but he could also be brilliant. And most of all, he loved her. “Worships you, more like,” Nina had said. “I don’t know how you do it, but you seem to have somehow landed yourself the last good one on the planet.”

  And the biggest fault she could find with him? That he wanted to marry her.

  • • •

  “I need to tell the girls first, before we set a date,” she had said the night he proposed. “I can’t just surprise them with wedding invitations in the mail. They don’t even know about you.”

  “So when are you going to tell them?”

  “Our annual cottage weekend.”

  “But that’s months away.”

  “Six weeks, not months.”

  “Why can’t you have them up sooner?”

  “Because that’s when we always do it.”

  “But maybe you could start a new tradition. A cottage weekend in May.”

  “The island is uninhabitable in May. All those bugs.”

  He had reached for her hand and she had felt relief at his touch.

  “I’m sorry. This didn’t exactly go the way I planned it,” he said.

  “You planned this?” This made her nervous. “It seemed so spontaneous.”

  “Well, it was. It was spontaneous, but I’d definitely been thinking about it. A lot. And planning it. And I was going to . . . well, I didn’t think getting down on one knee with a ring would be appropriate, but the next step was going to be for me to give you a ring.”

  “You have a ring?”

  “I have a ring.”

  “Oh, please, no.” Helen had said that accidentally. “Oh, no. I’m sorry. That didn’t sound right. It’s just that I—”

  “Don’t like to wear jewelry unless it’s costume. I know that. But I thought you might like this one. It’s simple.” He was pulling it out of his pocket. And it was a pretty ring. A square diamond—the words princess cut had popped into Helen’s mind, although she had no idea how she knew this term—with an antique scroll setting. If she had ever want
ed an engagement ring, this probably would have been the one. Although at that point even if she had despised it she would have pretended to adore it.

  When she put it on, the mood lightened a bit. They shared a toast to their future.

  But then time passed and she began to try to think of reasons not to marry him. That was why she had misplaced the ring. She had taken it off and placed it on the shelf and forgotten about it because she had read that line in the Martha Gellhorn book about how you should never marry a man who didn’t like his mother. He never speaks of his mother, she realized. And when he does, it’s dismissive, disparaging. She felt guilty about it later, knew he had his reasons—and very compelling ones, at that: his mother was an alcoholic who had hit him and his sisters regularly and eventually died of liver failure. But of course by then the ring was already destined to turn up on Liane’s finger.

  • • •

  Helen returned to the cottage from her walk. He was at the table with a notepad. She could sense that his annoyance had not dissipated.

  “Who do you think you might be inviting to the wedding?” Iain asked.

  “Who are you inviting?”

  “My kids. Some friends. Forty people, probably. You?”

  “Why do you need to know?” She had intended to make amends when she returned, but now she was feeling defensive again.

  “I’m just wondering how many we can expect. What to budget for this.”

  “I thought we agreed, something simple. And budget isn’t an issue. I’ll pay. Whatever you want.”

  “Of course I’m not letting you pay for our wedding.” He seemed seriously affronted. “And it would help to know how many guests.”

  She boiled water in the kettle, measured matcha powder, whisked it into hot water, slid a mug toward him with a bit too much force. (Green liquid that looked like pond scum spattered across the table, some onto his hand.)

  “Ouch,” he said.

  “I don’t know who I’m inviting yet,” she said. He said nothing, and she sat, watching him and feeling the anger begin to build.

  “You’re only hurting yourself with all this wedding business—and why?”

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “And why, I said. So you can have an official piece of paper with both of our names on it?”

  “It’s more than a piece of paper to me. Why are you sabotaging this?”

  “I’m not sabotaging anything. I want to be with you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. But . . .” She searched for one of her reasons. “Well, here’s the thing about committing to someone at our age: you actually mean it when you say you’re going to spend the rest of your life with a person. The ‘in sickness and in health’ part has less of a far-off-in-the-­distant-future ring to it. I just don’t want to have to say it aloud and think about my own mortality.”

  “That’s another one of your weak excuses. And we just won’t say that part. Did you really think I was going to make you recite traditional vows?”

  “Maybe I did, considering you want us to be traditional and get married.”

  “I can’t change who I am, Helen.”

  “And I can?” Except she could see why he thought her more malleable, more changeable. She was. How many times had she reinvented herself over the years? But what most people didn’t understand was that she had remained the same person inside. “Marriage, Iain. The very thing I always said I would never do for many reasons, but in part because . . . well, in part because I stood against it for so long!”

  “Don’t you think it’s time to grow up? The era is over. Women know they have choices now. And you definitely proved you could do it, Helen. No one’s going to fault you. Maybe no one will even notice.”

  She tried to ignore the fact that he had hinted that she didn’t matter anymore. “You think getting married is what makes you grow up? Please! I grew up long before I decided I was never going to need a man to complete me.”

  He left his tea and went out to his garden.

  “Your goddamn greens!” she shouted after him, and immediately wished she hadn’t. Especially when he turned and shouted back at her.

  “Fine, Helen, fine! If you don’t want to marry me, then don’t!”

  And then, yet again, the ring was abandoned on a countertop. Many times after, she wished she had kept it. But she didn’t. She left, went back to her cottage, and wandered from room to room. Eventually she opened the guest book and ripped out the page with Edie’s entry on it, the one Liane had mentioned. She crumpled it up and threw it in the garbage. She tried to calm down. She didn’t succeed. So she called Johnny and had him pick her up. She left without properly closing up the cottage and gave cash to have one of his sons do it. Who knew when she’d be back? She certainly wasn’t going to spend the summer on the island now. Maybe it was a place that was now forever ruined. And all because of a man, she thought mutinously.

  6

  Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes)

  Although red foxes will dig their own dens, they seem to prefer using dens that were made by other animals. Depressions under buildings are also favored den sites. While it is believed the red fox mates for life, pairs may separate for a few months and rejoin during the breeding season, or they might not rejoin at all.

  When the fox—which, it turned out, lived beneath the cottage—ate Rolf the guinea pig and the girls witnessed it, Gillian realized that she couldn’t shield her girls from everything.

  Afterward, when Isabel and Beatrice’s sobs had slowed, when they were blanketed on the couch, huddled together watching a Disney movie—even though Isabel was thirteen and had told them she was far too old for Disney movies of any sort, which was probably true—Gillian thought perhaps she should go talk to Laurence. She hadn’t had this thought in a while. She had been spending most of that summer so far trying to think of ways to avoid talking to him. But no. It was time. Something had to give. Somehow, the brutality of the fox had finally made her realize this.

  She left the living room and walked into the kitchen. Her “husband”—she put mental quotation marks around the word now—was facing the window, a bottle of beer in his hand. His laptop at close hand on the counter meant that he was probably planning to go and write, and this filled her with irritation. Always, the writing. His other wife. His mistress. And, as she did every time she thought of his writing this way, as an act of infidelity, she felt welcome self-justification.­ She had done what she had done because he had never loved her properly to begin with. Did it matter that Daniel, in general, wasn’t as passionate about life as Laurence, wasn’t quite as handsome, certainly wasn’t as intelligent? No, it did not. Because Laurence’s intelligence was useless to her. Like a cocktail party anecdote. “This is Gillian and her husband. He’s a novelist.” Now the person’s eyebrows would rise with interest. “His most recent book was short-listed for the Tamworth.” Eyebrows up even farther, combined with a slight turn away from her and toward Laurence. “It’s about what would happen if we knew exactly when the world was going to end—but not for a hundred years.” Sometimes people simply turned their backs on Gillian at this point. What about me? she had often found herself thinking. I’m a genetic researcher. One day I might save your daughter’s life. But no. That was not the sort of thing that mattered to anyone. Until they actually needed it.

  “I think it’s time we left the island,” Gillian said. Laurence just nodded absently and continued to look out the window. She felt herself become angry. “We as in I’d like to take the girls with me, back to the city. We as in not you. We as in us. I think we should all talk, and then I think the girls and I should leave.”

  Now he was paying attention. “I don’t want you to do that.”

  “I don’t think they want to stay. And I especially don’t think they’ll want to stay once they know.”

  “Did you think about asking them what they want?”

&nb
sp; “No. But I know them. And also, it’s what I want.”

  He ignored this. Of course he ignored this. When had he ever cared what she wanted? “Perhaps we should ask them together—after, as you suggest, we have the talk.”

  “Make them choose between us? Laurence, that’s monstrous.”

  He clenched his jaw and looked away again, and this show of anger, however benign, surprised her. He hadn’t displayed anger since it had all started. Mostly what he had done was spend time on the end of the dock reading, or upstairs in the tiny attic studio looking at the water (this was all she ever saw him doing) and writing (this was what he said he was doing). Oh, and of course he played with the girls, went for walks and canoe rides with Isabel, tickled Bea until she shrieked with laughter, read them their bedtime stories instead of Gillian because, according to Bea, “Daddy does the voices better and he snuggles longer than you do.”

  Meanwhile, Gillian, when the girls were otherwise occupied (with Laurence, or with television, or, in Isabel’s case, with her computer or phone), wandered up and down the property line trying to get a cellular signal so she could return Daniel’s numerous texts.

  “This was not how this summer was supposed to go,” Gillian said.

  “And how was it supposed to go?” he asked through teeth still clenched.