Mating for Life

by Marissa Stapley

  • • •

  Inside the classroom, she shuffled her notes. She would be discussing Norwegians, and how they believed envy to be the enemy of happiness. The Norwegian term skadefryd (otherwise known as schadenfreude) related to modern superstitions about the potential to do damage with thoughts, mainly because the word, literally translated, meant “to harm joy.”

  She felt the nervous flutters in her stomach, but they weren’t anywhere near as debilitating as they had been during her first few classes, when her cheeks had been embarrassingly blotchy and she’d heard a few titters spread around the room as she cleared her throat repeatedly. She had retreated to her office and signed up for an online course in public speaking, practiced in front of her mirror at home at night, thinking this was one of the good things about living alone. The lecturing got better. (Later, also while online, she had checked out her rating on a site called RateMyProfessor.com and noticed, with guilty pleasure, that in addition to good reviews from her students, she had also gotten a chili pepper in the “hotness” column.)

  Now Liane stood before the students gathered for her class and started to speak. The students bent their heads, taking notes by clicking keyboards on mini-laptops or tapping iPad screens. When Liane remembered her own years in university, the sounds of pens scratching, papers rustling, the interaction involved with borrowing someone’s notes, making a copy, returning them reverently, she always felt nostalgic.

  Eventually it was eleven o’clock. As usual, a small group of students waited to ask Liane questions about the lecture, and she patiently answered them. You couldn’t know whether you were going to be a good teacher until you actually became one, and Liane was. This made her feel proud of herself. She had a calling, a vocation. It hadn’t all been for nothing. When the students were gone, she left the room. She opened the heavy doors to go outside and felt the wind on her face and realized there was a hint of coolness there. Perhaps summer was finally retreating. This made her feel wistful for the kind of summer she had thought she was going to have but hadn’t. A small knot of students brushed past her, talking, laughing (“What do you want to do now?” “I don’t know. Coffee?” “Frisbee!”), and Liane felt the jealous knot form. She looked away from them.

  • • •

  Later, when Liane got home, she made tea and decided sadness and loneliness had won over hope: she threw the geraniums into the trash. Then she decided to take a bath in the claw-foot tub. And she picked up the Malahat Review.

  The magazine was in her hands, getting slightly wet, and the neroli-oil-scented water was nearly up to her chin. She flicked through the pages until a title caught her attention: “The Snapping Turtle.” By Laurence Gibbons.

  It was a short story about a man who was an intelligence investigative specialist for the Ministry of Natural Resources. He was spending a summer month at a cottage so he could keep an eye on a group of men believed to be illegally harvesting turtles from the wild, but ended up spending the time he was supposed to be spending performing reconnaissance on the men watching a redheaded woman swim in the lake each morning and read on the end of the dock each afternoon. He started leaving books for her on the end of the dock, secured by rocks.

  The story ended with the man wracked by guilt—he had failed to find out if the men were indeed poaching turtles illegally, and also, one day, the woman simply never returned to the dock and he was left with a sense of longing, both for the woman with the red hair (Red hair! Liane dropped the magazine into the tub when she read this, then picked it up and continued to read the story from the soggy pages) and the life he had always hoped to lead, one he felt slip away from him that summer. “Life is full of what-ifs. And should-haves. And did-nots,” she read. “And he was afraid of what it meant that these what-ifs seemed to be growing further and further apart in his life. Eventually they would run out completely, like the turtles whose numbers were dwindling because people like him were supposed to be doing something about it but weren’t. Eventually they would disappear forever, and all he would have would be his regrets and the memory of the color of her hair.”

  She wrapped herself in a towel, spent a few minutes attempting to dry the magazine with her hair dryer, and left the bathroom, turning on her laptop and sitting down damply on the couch, waiting impatiently for the laptop to boot up. Her hand shook as she typed the name into Google.

  She read his bio, but it was only the final sentence that registered, and that she repeated, over and over. “Laurence Gibbons lives in Toronto with his wife and two daughters.”

  But still.

  At one point, she put the magazine—one of the pages had been scorched by the hair dryer and she’d given up trying to dry it, so it was still damp and resembled in some places ­papier-mâché—into the trash with the dead flowers.

  Later still, she picked it out and shoved it to the back of a drawer. It was starting to disintegrate.

  Finally, hours later, she made a decision. She took the magazine out of the drawer. She called Helen. “How are you?” Helen asked in the way that she always asked it, even though Liane hadn’t called her back in weeks, even though she had hardly explained any of what was happening in her life to her mother. There was no accusation about any of that in ­Helen’s tone. There was just the expectation that Liane would tell Helen how she really was. Helen never expected people, especially not her daughters, to just say Fine or Good or Okay when she asked how they were.

  “I’m . . .” Liane couldn’t explain how she was to any degree of satisfaction, so she avoided it. “I’m wondering if you have Iain’s phone number,” she said, as casually as possible. “You know, that man who now owns the old Bachman place? The guy with the greens.” “Oh, I know who he is,” Helen replied, her tone different now, less inviting. “May I ask why you need it?” “It’s . . . I have a question about greens.” “A question about greens,” Helen repeated, but Liane didn’t elaborate. “Well, I do have his number. This is his cell, so wherever he is, you should be able to reach him.” Liane wrote down the number. “Thanks, Helen. I’m sorry I can’t talk. This is kind of important. But I’ll call you back, okay?” “Please do. I miss you. I worry about you. And . . . could you please tell Iain I said hello?”

  “Sure.”

  “Actually, no. Don’t. Don’t, okay?”

  “Oh-kay. ’Bye.”

  Iain picked up right away. She felt embarrassed and shy and also realized she had no plan. What exactly was she going to ask him? How was she going to explain this? “Hello, Iain, it’s Liane here,” she said, realizing if she didn’t say something he was going to hang up. “Liane, Helen’s daughter, we met this summer?”

  “Of course I remember you,” he said, his tone warm. “How are you?”

  “Good. Fine. Yeah. So, thank you. It’s just . . . that you seemed to have a pretty good handle on island goings-on and I was . . .” She trailed off. What? I have a crush on a married man and am wondering if you think there’s any chance he has marriage problems?

  “Hello?”

  “Hi. Sorry. Hi. Okay. So you know that couple who rented out the Castersens’ place this summer? That man you said was a writer?” She thought quickly, and found a place to start. “I wanted to buy his book, the one you were talking about, about the end of the world . . . and I was wondering if you could just confirm his name for me.”

  “Laurence Gibbons.”

  “Laurence Gibbons. And is he . . . are they still renting the cottage, or . . . I guess they’ve gone back to the city by now, right . . . ?”

  “Actually, no. It appears Laurence has moved into the cottage. I have no idea when he plans to leave, but I keep telling him the lake will freeze eventually and he’ll have to take a snowmobile out to the mainland if he wants to leave.”

  “He’s still there?”

  “Oh, yes. And all by himself, for the most part. We’ve taken to having coffee from time to time, and it turns
out we’re both bachelors. His girls are still coming up some weekends, and he goes back to the city, but the wife—well, apparently she’s no longer his wife.”

  Liane’s mouth had gone completely dry. “Oh,” she finally managed. “And he’s still there?”

  “Yes. Still here.”

  “On the island.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I have to go,” she said. “Thank you for this information. I’m . . . I’m really looking forward to buying his book.”

  He cleared his throat. “Could you . . . tell your mother I said hello?”

  “Definitely. She says hi, too,” Liane said, figuring it would probably be okay to tell him that now that he had asked her to extend a greeting to Helen. Strange behavior on both of their parts, but Liane didn’t have time to think about it.

  She hung up. She looked around her lonely apartment and back down at the burnt and waterlogged magazine in her hand.

  And she made another decision without consulting anyone.

  part two

  Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.

  —ANAÏS NIN, DELTA OF VENUS

  8

  Barn Owl (Tyto alba)

  The barn owl does not have a specific breeding season; it mainly depends on food supply. To attract the female, the male barn owl uses a special call. He also hovers in front of the female to show off his chest and belly. This is called the moth flight. During courtship, the male and female hoot and chase each other while in flight. Though some owls are monogamous, the barn owl may have different partners to produce several broods.

  Him: “Fiona. This can’t go on forever. You won’t speak to me, except when the boys are around. And you think this pretending is fooling them but it isn’t. No one in this house is happy. We have to talk about this.”

  Her: “You lied to me. You’ve been lying to me our entire lives.”

  Him: “I told you . . . I told you I had my reasons. I told you I was sorry.”

  Her: “And having your reasons and being sorry doesn’t change anything. Yet somehow you expect me to be fine with it, to forgive you and allow you to—let this situation become a normal part of our lives.”

  Him: “Please stop referring to this as a ‘situation.’ Please stop refusing to say her name. She’s a person.”

  Her: “I still don’t understand why you won’t fly over there and insist on a paternity test. Then maybe we could finally put all this behind us.”

  Him: “You’re being incredibly cruel.”

  Her (beginning to retreat): “Oh, yes. That’s right, why would you need a paternity test? You’ve always known. You just decided not to tell me. Please, just go away. I can’t talk to you. I don’t want to talk to you.”

  Him: “You can’t shut me out forever.”

  Her: Slams door.

  Fiona had lost count of how many times Tim had said, “You can’t shut me out forever,” to her in the preceding five months. And she was beginning to believe he was very wrong—she probably could shut him out forever. Some things just became habit. But then, the day before, he had told her he was no longer going to stand for it. He had said that to her. It made her realize it was what she should have said in the first place, if it was how she really felt. She should have said, You have made my life into something I never wanted it to be. You have brought into my life the very thing I have always avoided. Everything was supposed to be perfect, and now it’s not, and I can’t forgive you.

  She was in her office, sitting at her desk, staring at the list on her blotter. Read book for book club was the first item.

  The book club meeting was tonight, at Angela Tanner’s house. Seven years in the club and she had never failed to read the book. But she had only been able to manage a few chapters of this one. The protagonist was vapid, and although the book was set in Morocco, Fiona got the feeling the author had never been there. This bothered her inordinately. The idea of spending the rest of the afternoon reading the book was unfathomable. So she crossed the item off her list, tapped at her iPad, and called up the title of the book on Amazon, then read the synopsis and a few reviews. Most of them were favorable. “People are sheep,” she said aloud. She had been talking to herself aloud a lot lately. She hated to admit she had no one else to talk to.

  There was a time when book club meetings had been one of her favorite social events. She had loved when it was her turn to host, had made it a point to outdo herself every time. The previous year, her hostessing duties had landed in the winter months and she built a fire, mulled wine and cider, braised rabbit and tucked it into phyllo cups, roasted grapes and served them with pillows of carefully selected cheese and chewy bread from the most well-known chef in town.

  “It still just tastes like bread to me,” Tim had joked with her later, after everyone was gone and he had emerged from hiding in his study. She remembered that even though she valued her association with these women she had been relieved to see his familiar face at the end of the night. She could finally relax, sitting with him, discussing the night over the remains of the wine and the bread with his favorite sweet churned butter.

  Fiona steeled herself against the good memories of Tim and decided to call Angela, the book club meeting hostess that evening. “I just wanted to ask if I could bring anything,” she said. “Dessert?”

  “Oh, no. I’ve got it all under control.”

  “Perfect, then.” Fiona paused and wondered what it would be like to say to Angela, Could you meet me for a coffee? I need someone to talk to. Instead, there were a few beats of silence. In the yard she heard the owl, hooting softly the way it did. (“Aren’t owls nocturnal?” Eliot had once asked, after he learned the word in school. “Not ours, apparently,” Fiona had said.) “See you tonight, Angela,” she said, and hung up the phone.

  Our owl.

  Our house.

  Our life.

  All ruined.

  • • •

  That night, Fiona sat on Angela’s couch in her walk-out basement with its salmon-colored walls and fawn-colored rug and plush, Moroccan-style cushions everywhere, some of them covered in tiny little mirrors, gilt mirrors on the walls, vast geometric paintings. Won’t Tim laugh when I tell him it appears she actually redecorated in the theme of the book, she thought, and then experienced that familiar drop in her spirits. She imagined what she was experiencing was similar to bereavement, the way a person who has lost someone picks up the phone to call them, then realizes they’re gone and experiences the loss afresh. Perhaps she and Tim hadn’t been as close as they once were—all the traveling, the long absences had taken their toll—but he had still been her confidant, the person she told those petty details to, the ones that didn’t matter especially but that you had to tell someone.

  The food was set out on a low table before the women, dates and almonds and figs and goat cheese rolled in something and doused in oil, tiny hollowed-out pumpkins filled with spiced and roasted seeds, spiced meats threaded onto skewers with mint yogurt dipping sauce. Later, Angela was bringing out tagines, she had said. Lamb and apricot and spicy vegetarian. “She doesn’t make any of the food herself, you know,” whispered Nancy Wells, on Fiona’s left. “The nanny does it, and Angie takes the credit.”

  “Isn’t that what you pay people for? To do things and let you take the credit?” Fiona said, surprised by the harsh sound of her voice. She decided to ignore Nancy and the food and focus on her wine. But eventually her glass was empty, so she looked around.

  Who are these women? She felt isolated from all of them, even though she was literally rubbing elbows with both Nancy and Johanna Edwards. I don’t even think I like most of them. She refilled her wineglass, thinking she’d have more than her normally self-allotted two gl
asses. Perhaps she’d have three glasses. Or had she already had three? Well, maybe she’d have four. And what was more—

  “What’s more,” she said aloud, realizing it was a complete non sequitur. She sounded crazy. What’s more what? “What’s more, I hated this book.” That’s what.

  Jane raised an eyebrow. “Really? Hated it?” There was a hint of admiration in her voice.

  “Yes. Hated it.”

  “That’s not a very constructive criticism,” said Nancy, moving her elbow away from Fiona’s.

  “No. I suppose not,” Fiona said. “I shouldn’t say I hated all of it. I just hated the few chapters of it I actually managed to read.”

  There was silence. No one had admitted to not reading the book before.

  “I liked the way she accepted herself,” said Carole Huntziger. “I liked the way she didn’t try to be someone she wasn’t. You just knew that if she’d lived in our age, she wouldn’t be running out and getting . . . you know, Botox or something like that. Those fillers, the ones that are supposed to plump you up but really make you look like a clown.”

  “What’s so wrong about getting Botox?” Fiona asked. And don’t pretend you don’t know what those fillers are called. Everyone knows you had your lips done last year and pretended it was some special lipstick you bought.

  “First off, it’s poison. It paralyzes the muscles in your face so you can’t smile,” said Nancy. Her husband was a doctor and that made her the group’s resident medical expert. “There are potentially devastating side effects. Did you hear about the doctor couple who injected each other and ended up paralyzed?”