Mating for Life

by Marissa Stapley

She rolled her eyes. “You tell me! This was your idea, renting this place!”

  Now he unclenched and spoke quietly, ever mindful of the girls in a way that to her felt self-righteous. Another reason to be angry with him instead of at herself. “I rented it before I knew . . . about . . .” He could never say it, though. “And it was your idea to visit with the girls on weekends. Listen, Gill, I’m not saying we make the girls choose between us, but yes, it’s time to tell them, and we need to do it together, and we need to make them feel like they have at least some control over what’s going to happen to them next—Isabel, anyway. Bea probably won’t understand.” He sighed and stepped back. She hadn’t realized he’d been advancing. “After what happened with that damned fox, if you want to take them back to the city, you can, but they are coming back next weekend and the weekend after that. I can just come get them myself, if that’s what you need.”

  “So you’ve thought about it. Me leaving.” It sounded like an accusation, and she realized it was. We agreed to this.

  “Yes. I’ve thought about it. I’ve thought about it a lot. I think about it all the time, in fact. What do you think, Gill, that I like living a lie from Friday to Monday, that I don’t care at all?”

  “You act like you don’t care. Most of the time you act like this isn’t even real. Like, for example, when you accepted that neighbor’s, that Ilsa’s, dinner invitation, as though it would even be possible or probable for us to go into the home of strangers and pretend that everything was normal!”

  “I told you, I didn’t know what to say, and didn’t want to explain it all to a stranger, so I just . . . said yes.” But his face had started to color. “Besides, it didn’t happen, remember? She canceled, said something had come up and that she and her sister had to leave the island.”

  “They canceled. You would have gone through with it.”

  “When you come here, you walk around acting all wounded and pious. Do you actually think I don’t know what you’re doing, wandering around outside at all hours trying to get a cell phone signal so you can text him and tell him how bored you are? How horrible it is to be stuck on this island with your ‘husband’?” She winced. He tipped his beer bottle back and emptied it of its contents, then opened the fridge and took out another one.

  This was new. He had hardly been drinking at all, almost never joining her in a glass of wine before or during dinner. She had thought perhaps this was because he hadn’t wanted to share anything resembling festivity with her. But maybe he simply hadn’t wanted to be even slightly the way he was now: out of control. She knew it wasn’t for her that he hadn’t wanted to be this way, but for the girls. Except now that the girls were off balance because of the incident with the fox and that stupid and pathetic guinea pig that had been all her idea, and she wasn’t even quite certain the girls liked particularly, he was allowing himself to fall apart a little, too.

  He swallowed more beer. “I don’t want to upset the girls, either, but it’s going to happen eventually.”

  I know that! she wanted to shout. That’s exactly what I was thinking! But instead she opened the fridge, took out a bottle of white wine, and poured a glass.

  He turned away from her and walked toward the sliding doors, presumably to go and sit on the end of the dock again, either a laptop or a book holding all his attention.

  “This is your fault, too!” she shouted after him, not caring anymore what the girls heard or did not hear. But he didn’t turn, or even flinch. He just kept walking away.

  • • •

  Laurence and Gill met when she was in the midst of her postgraduate degree in medical genetics at Oxford. Her roommate, Louise, had been dating an English major from Toronto and he had come to visit for a week with a friend. “He’s a writer,” Louise had said. “Apparently he wants nothing more than to visit the Reading Room in the British Museum Great Court. Will you take him?”

  She still remembered that he had been wearing a blue button-down shirt and khaki pants the first time she met him—although, at the time, how could she have known that this would turn out to be his uniform, that the very things that had attracted her to him in the first place (his casual way of dressing, his constant five o’clock shadow, the way sometimes, when a story wasn’t going well, she would notice that some of his nails had been bitten down) would eventually repulse her?

  Back then, however, when he decided to stay in London, to be with her and write for a while, she would take those sore-looking fingers in her own, kiss them, and say, “It will work itself out; it always does. This block won’t last for long,” and he would smile and start to undress her and call her his muse.

  This had happened a lot during their heady first days together. Whether he legitimately needed a muse or did not, he would end up undressing her frequently. They had been together only five months when she discovered she was pregnant. Her secret: There was a small part of her, a very quiet part, that had insinuated the following: This wasn’t supposed to be forever. You weren’t going to marry a writer.

  When she told him about her pregnancy, he didn’t react (later, this habit of his, too, would annoy her) but instead watched her face and waited to see what she would say next. “I want to keep the baby,” she said, expecting her voice to sound more halting than it had. Instead, she had sounded very sure, and very grown-up—which had made her realize she officially was grown-up. This was an idea that did not immediately sit well with her, despite the fact that she had almost always been called “mature for your age.” “I just don’t think I can—” she continued, but he put his hand on her forearm and said, “You don’t have to explain.”

  It was different after that. She no longer felt like his muse. Her stomach distended and she hated it. He said she was gorgeous. An earth mother. Later, arabesque. She began to have strange dreams about leading a different life, about being in the pages of one of those Choose Your Own Adventure novels that had made her feel so uncomfortable as a child (Was it really okay to choose your own book ending? Perhaps this was why she had never been able to identify with Laurence’s need to write books) and simply deciding to go down another path that did not include Laurence. Then she’d wake up and realize she didn’t have a choice.

  Isabel arrived. Laurence was a perfect father, but Gillian suffered from what she realized now was postpartum depression. It took her months to connect with her daughter. She said that nursing hurt, but it didn’t. It was just that the close contact made her uncomfortable in the same way getting massages or facials at spas did. When she had tried to explain this to Laurence, he was incredulous. “But this is your child,” he had said. “You should be on my side!” she had shouted, and he had put his hand on her arm. “Please. Don’t shout. There aren’t sides here. We’re all on the same team now. Me, you, and Iz.” His private little name for her.

  She had eventually come out of the depression, but the feeling of being the “other” in the family had never dissipated, not even years later, when she decided they should have Beatrice in an attempt to grow their family unit to a size that would be big enough to include her, too. This had failed, of course. A child can’t save a marriage. Gillian should have known this. And poor Beatrice. She was a colicky baby and still cried more often than not, as though she knew the weight of the future of her parents’ marriage had always rested on shoulders too small to bear the load.

  • • •

  Daniel was a scientist. They met on an advisory panel. She had not immediately liked him. But when he asked her, later, if she had, she said, “Of course I did. I couldn’t stop watching you.”

  Jasmine, the divorce lawyer, had explained to Gill that it would take nearly a year for the divorce to be finalized. She was okay with the wait, but it made Daniel, who had already separated from his wife when they began their affair in earnest, edgy. It was as though he expected her to change her mind.

  It was difficult for her to explain to Daniel w
hy she wanted him—and she didn’t want to tell him that the very reasons she wanted him were so opposite from the reasons she had wanted Laurence (or that maybe it was because he was the opposite of Laurence that she wanted him at all). So she just told him that it was difficult but that she was working on it, trying her best, that she loved him, of course she did, for reasons that she found challenging to explain simply because she was so logically minded. This placated him. He liked it when she mentioned logic, especially in relation to her own mind. (There: a reason. Because he appreciated logic and especially hers. And also, secretly, because his achievements were never going to outshine her own.)

  She pushed Daniel from her mind and peeked in at the girls. Beatrice was still watching the movie. Isabel was tapping away at her iPhone, holding it up, searching for a signal the way her errant mother so often did. Gill forced herself to smile. Then she returned to the kitchen to make a salad and take out the fish she intended to parcel in foil and grill for dinner. Later: “Go get your father for dinner,” she instructed Isabel. And Isabel did, and Laurence, her “husband,” entered the cottage, did not drink any more beer, declined her offer of wine during the meal, chatted and laughed with the girls, and also offered to hold a special memorial service for Rolf the next day. The talk didn’t happen. She avoided looking at Laurence and could tell he was avoiding looking at her, too.

  Later, everyone went to bed, Gill in the master bedroom, Laurence on a futon in his upper-level study. As she climbed between the sheets, she had a sudden sense that all was as it should be, but this feeling didn’t last for long. It never had.

  • • •

  The next morning, Gill woke early, before Laurence—­although it didn’t especially matter, now that they weren’t in the same bed—and went for her daily run. The reality of what they had been doing now felt to Gill like the act of peeling a Band-Aid away slowly. And the dirty line around the Band-Aid is still going to be there when the Band-Aid is peeled away, and scrubbing that off is going to leave the skin raw and itchy. She tried to run away from this thought, but the pounding of her feet seemed to insist on the metaphor. I’ve been married to a writer for too long.

  Gill hadn’t brought her phone with her as she usually did when she ran. She hadn’t wanted to talk to Daniel, or anyone, that morning. The next time she spoke with Daniel, she had decided during her sleepless night, she would have something definitive to say. No more pretending. We told the girls. I’ll introduce you soon, but not yet.

  As she ran she thought about how, before the argument they had had in the kitchen after what had happened with Rolf, their only other argument had been about Laurence wanting to try counseling. Back in the city, back before all was revealed, he had said to her, “If we go, I’ll feel like at least then we’ll know we tried everything.”

  “But do you see the way you’re talking? Then we’ll know we tried everything. Past tense, as though our marriage is a dead thing. Because you know it isn’t going to work, and then we’ll have gone through the agony and embarrassment of sitting in front of someone we don’t know, airing our dirty laundry, secretly waiting for him or her to tell us we’re right and the other person is wrong. And besides, we did try everything: we tried having Bea. That was giving it our all, that was trying. If a child wasn’t going to bring us together . . .” There it was: the logic. Laurence didn’t like it as much as Daniel did, though.

  But actually, there was one other argument, wasn’t there? It had happened after she had told him about Daniel, referring to it as an “emotional” affair only, feeling slightly sick about the lie but also not wanting to take any chances. She remembered feeling angry at his lack of reaction. She remembered how she started to argue with him. “You’ve had countless emotional affairs, you know,” she had said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your characters. The perfect women you create because you aren’t with the perfect woman.”

  “Gill. You’ve got to be kidding. You can’t accuse someone of having an affair with a fictional character.”

  She remembered that she had lost all hold on her precious logic in that moment. “Oh, yeah!? Well, that’s exactly what I’m doing!” she had shouted, before storming from the room.

  For years she had pored over his manuscript drafts, or the typed, discarded pages she would find in odd places, but it was never, ever her, not even a single characteristic, and it never had been. Even that summer she hadn’t been able to quit the habit of snooping through his work, and one afternoon when he was swimming with the girls she’d found herself reading a short story about a red-haired woman. This one seemed more vivid than all the others, and awakened a jealousy in her she thought had gone dormant. She felt so vengeful, there in the attic of the old cottage, that she had very nearly deleted the story from his hard drive. But she hadn’t.

  Gill slowed her pace when she realized she was gasping. She turned and began to jog slowly back toward the cottage.

  Down the driveway, and the jogging stopped. Laurence, Beatrice, and Isabel were standing beside the water. Gill realized they were having the memorial service for Rolf and felt stung that Laurence hadn’t thought to wait.

  Laurence was holding a piece of paper, which he passed to Isabel, who started to read in her clear young voice. Gill realized it was a poem. Emily Dickinson.

  After great pain a formal feeling comes—

  The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—

  The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,

  And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

  The Feet, mechanical, go round—

  Of Ground, or Air, or Ought,

  A Wooden way

  Regardless grown,

  A Quartz contentment, like a stone—

  This is the Hour of Lead—

  Remembered, if outlived,

  As Freezing persons recollect the Snow—

  First Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—

  Gill looked down at the wedding ring she still wore on her left hand. It felt very heavy. She had lost weight that summer from the stress, and the ring slid off easily and landed in her other palm. She looked forward, at Isabel. Should she give the ring to her? Would she even want it? She closed her palm around the ring and walked toward her “husband” and daughters. “We should go inside and have a talk,” she said when she was close enough for them to hear her.

  She hated that this would be a moment Isabel was likely to always remember, that Beatrice would have a foggy awareness of. She squeezed the ring more tightly until she was sure it would leave a mark.

  7

  Eastern Gray Squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis)

  The eastern gray squirrel has two breeding seasons each year, the first in winter and the second in summer. Each of the mating periods lasts for about three weeks. Generally, only females over two years of age will breed in both seasons. Courtship behavior begins when a receptive female calls continuously from a treetop with ducklike sounds. Several males soon gather and often fight to determine the dominant animal. As they congregate, the female becomes agitated and begins to race through the trees, followed closely by all the males. When she is ready she will stop and allow the dominant male to mate with her.

  Liane almost didn’t see the short story that changed her life. She had considered canceling her subscription to the Malahat Review but had changed her mind about it at the last minute. Still, when the fall issue had arrived in the mail, she had ignored it in favor of the other things she had been reading lately, articles in magazines she had never thought she would buy but now did in an attempt to make her life more fun. Her new life, the one she now led alone.

  Liane had previously lived in a condo with Adam in High Park. They would regularly take their dog, Atticus, to the off-leash park, where the Labradoodle (Adam had insisted it was the perfect choice for them, because these types of dogs did not shed or produce allerg
ens; when he had first said the name of the breed she had thought it was a joke, but she hadn’t known the half of it—at the park, she met owners of schnoodles, whoodles, Jack-a-Bees, and Peke-a-Poos) would happily chase squirrels or other dogs, but mostly the squirrels.

  The proximity to the off-leash park was mostly why Adam had gained sole custody of the dog when Liane left, or at least that was how she had allowed it to be justified. The truth, though, was that Liane had liked Atticus but hadn’t ever really loved him. Perhaps the fact that she’d let him go so easily made this obvious, but she hoped Adam didn’t know. It felt like yet another failure, piled on top of her failure to stay with him.

  Either way, now she lived in a Queen Street West apartment, above a store that sold wool. When she had gone to see the apartment, she had stood on the street and looked up at the window box filled with red geraniums and felt certain that this was the place where she was going to start her brand-new, happier life. The wool store, the flowers, her standing on the sidewalk. She had closed her eyes for a moment and breathed through her nose. Yes. This is the place.

  She had considered calling her mother or one of her sisters, just to check. But she hadn’t. It was perhaps the first decision she had ever made in her life without checking it with someone else. Her life had always been defined by her roles: daughter, little sister, girlfriend, student. Now she wasn’t a girlfriend or a student. And while she was still a sister and a daughter, she was pulling back. Not forever, just for now. You need to be Liane. You need to find out who that is.

  But, just over two months later, the Indian summer the city was experiencing in late September had turned the geraniums brown and sorry-looking. And Liane was feeling lonely and suspected that she was probably a bit sorry-looking as well.

  It was morning, and she was on her way to work. She was early because she’d recently read an article, in one of those magazines she had never needed before because there had always been so many females in her life who gave advice, about not being late. One of the suggestions had been to add a half hour of time to any estimate. So Liane had started doing this, which meant that now, instead of being late, she was often early. For some reason, being early for things made her feel even lonelier. There was something about the rush from place to place, she realized, that had made her feel vital, necessary, part of something, not alone. So now she was dawdling at her front door instead of leaving.