Mating for Life

by Marissa Stapley

  She looked over at the window and decided she was going to water the sad brown geraniums one last time. Perhaps when she returned home from work later that day a miracle would have occurred: they would be restored to their former crimson glory and she would be as happy as she thought she was going to be when she signed the lease for the apartment.

  After she opened the window and watered the flowers, she closed it again, latched it, picked up her bag containing her laptop, novel, and lunch, considered bringing the Malahat Review with her but didn’t, and left the apartment, walking down the stairs with their weathered black treads and out onto the sidewalk. As usual, she stopped at the coffee shop at the corner to have her porcelain travel mug filled with light roast. A squeeze of agave syrup, several dashes of cinnamon because yet another article had touted cinnamon as the cure for all ailments.

  She looked down at her watch and found she was still twenty minutes ahead of schedule. But she could see a streetcar pulling closer and so, out of habit, she rushed toward it, feeling a sudden and unexplainable urgency rise within her: I must catch this particular streetcar now.

  She was out of breath when she boarded, fumbling for her transit pass, juggling her coffee and her bag. Her novel fell out at her feet, a beat-up copy of Cat’s Cradle she’d purchased at a secondhand shop nearby and thought that for $1.75 why not? The streetcar was crowded and she clung to a pole and wondered, Why did I do this? I’m not even late. She thought about reading the now even more battered Vonnegut novel, but hated to read standing up. So she looked at her own reflection in the window as the streetcar passed through a tunnel of tall buildings, and soon she was nearly at the subway.

  She was pushing through the crowded streetcar to get to the door when she saw a man standing a few poles over, reading. And she was sure of it, immediately. It was him. His hair was the same color, his nose the same shape, his lips curved in the same way.

  She was filled with elation. There was purpose to the watering of the dead geraniums, the pointless rush for the streetcar.

  She had gained confidence in the weeks since she had started standing in front of classrooms full of students on a daily basis and acting like she was in charge. She had even found she liked it, much more than she thought she would, and even without Adam standing on the sidelines, prodding her in the direction he wanted her to go in. So she bravely walked toward the man on the streetcar, determined to introduce herself. He turned his head and looked up from his book. She read the title. How Do We Fix This Mess? It was about the global financial meltdown. He would never read that. She didn’t know him well, or at all, but she knew that much.

  She felt foolish. It was because of the dream, probably. Her stop arrived and she exited the streetcar, thinking about it as she walked down the steps, out onto the street, and down into the subway. It had been one of those dreams you wake up from but then want to fall back into again. Only, when you close your eyes and try to redream it, it isn’t quite the same. The dream was very simple—unlike her others, which made her feel confused when she woke up. She had been on a streetcar, just like the one she had been riding moments before, but this one was practically empty. And then she saw him, standing even though there were seats all around him, reading a book. He had looked up and seen her and she had taken three steps and stood before him. He had put his book down on a seat and opened his arms and said, “Come here,” and she had done just that, stood right up against him, her chest perfectly aligned with his chest, her heart perfectly aligned with his heart, their two hearts beating against one another while the streetcar moved through the city for miles and miles and miles. When she had woken, she had closed her eyes, but the feeling had already disappeared. What had the feeling been? Absolute calm. Perfect rightness. And a little bit of sadness, too, but maybe that had just come from the waking up and realizing it wasn’t real.

  So here you are, pining after a man you never even really met. Tears blurred her vision. She looked down at the floor. What is wrong with me? Because of the tears and the way she was squinting, for a moment the floor of the subway platform bubbled and wavered below her. The floor appeared so insubstantial that she had the thought that if she stepped onto the blurry, wavy spot, she would disappear. She would have finally found her door in a tree, her portal to another world. What would she feel, she wondered, if she did find herself standing in another world, one that existed below the subway platform, one that only a select few people knew about?

  Relief, she realized. Relief that this is not all there is. And in that moment Liane understood why people needed religion so much: mysticism, the concept of another realm just beyond the fingertips of humanity, was very soothing. Of course, Liane was an academic and a realist (she tried to believe in magical worlds the way her father had told her to, but could never truly), and she wasn’t religious. It was just nice to finally understand it. She blinked away the tears and the subway floor became solid again.

  • • •

  “Liane, why aren’t you married? You’re intelligent, attractive . . . ?” It was Grace Arnold, who taught Marriage, Reproduction, and Kinship 302, and she was speaking in the leading tone Liane recognized to mean she was making a point. But Liane hadn’t been paying attention to the conversation between Grace and Tansy, the professor whom she assisted (who knew Liane was recently disengaged and shot her a sympathetic glance). She had instead been eating an apple for breakfast and reading a copy of The Walrus she’d picked up from a table (secretly and guiltily wishing it was Women’s Health) because she had been early for work, of course, but not early enough to actually accomplish anything.

  Now a piece of apple caught in her throat and she started to choke.

  “I’m sorry, what’s stopping you from marrying?” Grace prompted.

  Liane wondered if she would die, right there in the anthropology faculty lounge. Someone would shout, Is there a doctor in the house? and all her colleagues would say, Yes! But no one would be able to save her, and they’d all be forced to admit that they weren’t really doctors, but, rather, academics. The timeless argument would ensue. Rigor mortis would set in.

  “Perhaps it’s that the biological urge is weakening, generation by generation?” Grace continued.

  Another cough. Liane swallowed the now vile-textured chunk, cleared her throat, and said, possibly because she was light-headed from the choking, “Actually, I used to be engaged, but . . .” But what? Why would you say that? “It didn’t work out.”

  After Liane spoke, a few of the others in the lounge looked up before returning to books or reports or research or lecture notes or other conversations. That’s right. I used to be engaged to the dean’s son. It’s how I got this job. And I still have it. Because in this particular day and age, you can’t fire or not hire someone for breaking an engagement.

  “How long?” Grace asked.

  “How long what?”

  “How long were you engaged?”

  “Oh. I . . . don’t really know.” About a minute? Never officially? I stole a ring I found in my mother’s cottage and pretended it was mine?

  “And would you do it again?”

  Liane thought about this. “No,” she said, and knew she was being honest. No, I would never wear a fake engagement ring and pretend everything was fine and alienate myself from my sister, never again.

  Grace nodded, then turned back to Tansy.

  Liane sat for a moment, unsure of what to do, then looked back down at her magazine and pretended to read as she listened to Grace continue to argue about whether, in a few thousand years (presuming the world made it that far; Liane thought this, but didn’t say it, the current trend in the lounge being optimism), the concept of marriage would be seen as an ancient ritual, or would still be one of the vital constructs of society, however unattainable and unrealistic it had become for almost everyone. Tansy was arguing, slightly less vociferously, for marriage.

  “We’ve evolve
d,” she was saying. “We may not be monogamous by nature, but people need companionship, especially as they grow older. It just makes sense.”

  “Does it? More and more people are choosing not to marry, though,” Grace declared. “We all know this. We have an example of this right here in our own faculty lounge.” Who, me? Liane turned her head from side to side. Everyone was looking at her. She realized that she had made it sound like she was against marriage, and she hadn’t intended to convey this.

  “So it might be evolution. Yes?”

  This was a habit of Grace’s. Yes? she would say, and people would nod (or at least Liane would, because she had a habit of nodding when people said, Yes?) and then realize they had unwittingly supported her point. “We might be evolving away from monogamy rather than toward it. Simply wanting a companion when you’re old is not a sign of an evolution, Tansy. Plus, the instances of remarriage are going down. Yes?” Now Liane did find herself nodding without wanting to, even though she, technically, was not part of the conversation but rather an unwilling illustration. “Some people are trying it out once, realizing it’s not for them, and moving on with definitive absolution. Look at your mother, Liane!” Now Grace clapped her hands, and Liane blushed. “Wasn’t she a pioneer of all of it?”

  “Um. All of what?”

  “You know, the beginning of the shift away from the idea that women needed men. The whole a-woman-needs-a-man-like-a-fish-needs-a-bicycle movement?”

  “There was an a-woman-needs-a-man-like-a-fish-needs-a-bicycle movement?”

  “But you’re only talking about it in terms of women and men,” Tansy butted in, seeing her opening. “What about gay marriage? Why has it been such a hard-won fight, then, if no one cares about marriage anymore? Why is it that gay men and lesbians are fighting to be recognized as married couples?”

  “For the financial benefits,” Grace said dismissively. “And probably because they want to be able to have a party and get gifts and money, just like all the straight people have been doing for years.” Now Grace glanced at Liane, and Liane felt like she’d been caught at something. “How old are you, Liane? Thirty-five?”

  “I’m thirty.” Liane liked her job but suddenly wished she worked at a regular office, where the staff gathered in the lunchroom to talk about So You Think You Can Dance, or some other show she had never watched but had seen listed in the online grid she searched regularly for documentaries. Liane didn’t know from experience, never really having worked anywhere but at a university, but she imagined people at places of work not solely focused on intellectual development understood, among other things, that you never overestimated a person’s age, that you always erred on the side of extreme caution when guessing at it. Perhaps these imaginary coworkers wouldn’t be book-smart, but they’d have a different kind of intelligence. They’d notice if you wore new cowboy boots, for example. Or seemed to be making an effort to eat more salads after reading that carbohydrates were the prime culprit of abdominal fat—because although you were admittedly not ancient (not compared to most of the other professors, but definitely compared to the students), you had still started to notice a few changes, a metabolic slowdown that left you wondering whether, on top of being alone for the rest of your life, you were also going to end up with one of those stomachs that could only be described as a “front bum.”

  Indeed, this was not the kind of discussion that could be had in the anthropology faculty lounge.

  “Sorry,” Grace, who wore masculine button-up shirts every day (possibly for the very purpose of concealing a front bum, Liane thought, and then felt guilty about it) and likely cared nothing about what age people thought she was (if Liane were to guess aloud, she’d say forty-five, but in reality Grace seemed at least fifty), said. “I always forget how young you are. Our faculty wunderkind, teaching and about to be published already.” She said it warmly; some of the other professors weren’t as kind, were in fact unkind, in subtle, insidious ways. But Grace did not appear to be prone to envy. Liane always, when meeting a person for the first time, gauged the level of envy he or she was capable of.

  “No worries,” Liane said, being sure to smile and make eye contact. She had learned a lot about human interaction in the faculty lounge. Then she looked down again, hoping that Grace would somehow forget about the line of questioning—why did she need to know how old Liane was, anyway?—and turned a page of the magazine, pretending she was very engaged in the article she could no longer remember the topic of. She read the first few sentences of a paragraph in the middle of the page: “In principle, the advent of a highly capable artificial intelligence that can take over the cognitive burden of running the world sounds quite nice. As British mathematician I. J. Good wrote in an influential paper in 1965, ‘The first ultra-intelligent machine [is] the last invention that man need make.’”

  The sentence made Liane feel dread, both because of its content—she was understandably threatened by the idea of artificial intelligence—and because she had somehow made it nearly halfway through an article without absorbing its topic. She had thought she was reading an article on polar bears interbreeding with grizzlies. That was last week. You read that article last week. This made her think about another article she had recently read, about the importance of flossing your teeth. Apparently not flossing your teeth could increase your risk of dementia, even lead to early-onset Alzheimer’s. Oh, great. Maybe that’s what I have.

  She flipped backward, away from the image of robots running the world and the idea that she was becoming demented, but couldn’t settle on anything. Then she realized Grace was saying something else to her. “Pardon me?”

  “I’ve been thinking of holding a panel discussion on marriage for my postgraduate class, and I was wondering if you might be willing to be on the panel. The students will likely be able to relate to you. And they might find your situation interesting. Engaged once, and now certain that marriage is not for you.” Grace paused. “We won’t, of course, get into any private details. Just a brief overview of your situation, followed by a discussion that will be largely academic, not personal. Yes?”

  “Well, I mean, it’s not exactly what I said, that marriage isn’t for me. I just said . . . you know, that I wouldn’t . . .” She wished for a moment that the apple chunk had done its job. She stood. “I have a tutorial, which I am about to be late for.” Her voice was strange, too bright. She gathered her belongings before crossing the room to check her mailbox.

  Tansy and Grace moved on after a brief, awkward moment to the subject of procreation, and what would change about the practice (“practice,” that’s what they called it, as though it, sex, especially for procreation, was not something they themselves engaged in) without the tenet of marriage to sanctify it. Would it be like The Handmaid’s Tale, but without the strange sex scenes? Yes? No? Maybe? Liane stood with her head bent toward her mailbox and continued to listen, counting to ten in her head. Then she would leave. After she got to ten.

  “Will men be unnecessary, will sex be for pleasure only, is sex already for pleasure only, for almost everyone except Catholics and Mormons, and those unlucky people currently in the throes of ‘trying’ to have a baby?” (Grace was truly on a roll.)

  What if Liane had not stood to leave? What if she had stayed in her seat, and Grace had asked her, Do you want to have children, Liane? You don’t need a husband to do that anymore. So? Yes?

  Maybe. But it would have to be with the right person. And I don’t think he exists, except in my imagination, Liane would have answered, without being able to stop herself. And then everyone would have known absolutely everything there was to know about her.

  Time’s up.

  • • •

  Outside, Liane turned down St. George and began to walk toward the King’s College building, one of her favorites on campus. She slowed. She had been exaggerating about being late for her tutorial and now, yet again, she was going to be early.
She looked across the field in front of the building, with its soaring central tower, and thought of what she knew about the field: that below it was a buried pond. During the cholera epidemic in the 1800s, this pond had been found to be teeming with cholera and had been subsequently buried. Liane had always wondered how it was even possible to bury an entire pond, and felt strange when she walked over this area of the campus, especially during damp weather when the ground yielding beneath her feet made her imagine sinking down into the ancient and still-infested waters. She usually skirted the buried pond, even though it took her longer to get to class.

  Now she saw a young man crossing the field and slowed further. There was a woman jogging after him across the field, calling out something. Both of them looked familiar. “Jesse!” The woman called, and the boy stopped walking and turned. She was holding a textbook, which she handed to him. “You forgot it, and I knew you needed it,” Liane heard the woman say. The boy was Jesse, Johnny-at-the-marina’s son. And the woman was the one who had been at the marina in the summer. She handed Jesse the textbook. It was so out of context that Liane had stopped walking altogether and was simply watching them both. “I was coming this way anyway, and I knew where your class was, so . . . I’m glad I caught you,” the woman said. “Your phone was off.” The boy smiled. “Thanks,” he said. “I usually turn it off during lectures. Sorry. I’ll see you later.” “See you later.” The woman turned and started walking away. She didn’t see Liane.

  Liane had just assumed she wasn’t his mother, that the mother of this boy had been one of those blond women who had lived with Johnny for a time, but now realized she had been wrong. She thought about catching up with the boy and saying hello, welcoming him to campus, telling him she taught there, but she didn’t really know him. Instead, she continued walking along the perimeter of the field, keeping to the edge of the buried pond.