Mating for Life

by Marissa Stapley

  Iris handed Helen a piece of paper. It was folded in two. Helen opened it.

  I wish none of this had happened. I wish Tim and I could go back to the way things were, that Samira didn’t exist, that my life could return to the way it was. I wish to be happy again. She looked at Fiona. Her daughter’s eyes were wide with something that looked like fear. I asked that for you, she said silently to her daughter. Happiness, yours. That’s all I want. All this other stuff . . . you can talk to me. She said this internally and willed her daughter to hear her, but knew she didn’t. If you want her to know these things, you have to tell her. Fiona looked away, back down at the fire, and Helen struggled to focus on what she had been tasked with: desiring all this for her daughter, even though she didn’t quite understand it. It wasn’t hard, when she cleared her mind. Iris had asked them to want something for another person just as much as they would want it for themselves. But Helen knew she could never want anything for herself as much as she would want it for one of the girls.

  “Now put the papers in the fire,” Iris said. Helen and Fiona stepped toward the fire at the same moment. When Fiona put her page in the fire, Helen saw the word girls just before it burned. Then Fiona turned and strode away from the fire and toward the labyrinth. Helen did not hesitate. She followed.

  • • •

  After the weekend, Helen decided to go back to New York and ask Edie to lunch. She thought Edie would say no, but she accepted.

  Helen couldn’t sleep the night before.

  “Let’s order the antipasti for two,” Edie said, and just then, and only for then, the years were not between them, the passage of time and all that had happened was not sitting as an uninvited guest at the table. But then Helen looked up from the menu and saw again how Edie had changed, how sleek she was, how unfamiliar. The years had passed, and everything that had happened had indeed happened.

  Helen sipped white wine. (This was something that had changed about her: in the past, Helen would drink only red wine, believing white wine to be for women of a certain age only. Now she was of that certain age, and knew that a glass of red with lunch would give her a headache and a hangover by three o’clock in the afternoon.) “Exactly what I wanted,” she said to Edie, even though she had been considering the Salmone Dijon. She was ravenous after her weekend of spa food.

  “And a mixed salad,” Edie said to the waiter.

  “And plenty of that fantastic bread,” Helen added.

  The restaurant, Volare, on West Fourth, was where Helen and Edie used to go together once every few weeks when they were younger. (Much younger. All those years, they really had passed.) It was “their” place, or it had been. They had never taken men to the hideaway of a restaurant, even though it would have made sense, with all the candles and the romance. “I enjoy your company over a romantic dinner more than anyone’s,” Edie had once said to Helen. “If only you were a man.” And they had laughed. “Thank God I’m not,” Helen had replied.

  “We should get prosecco with our lunch,” Edie said in a conspiratorial whisper Helen recognized, but that seemed out of place. Her hair was in a chic twist and she was wearing a pantsuit with a scarf tied at her neck. Diamonds at her ears. An expensive-looking watch. It made Helen, in her long skirt, bangles, and woven top, feel dowdy and underdressed. It made her understand why Nate had wanted to be with Edie. This was the kind of woman you could mate for life with. She had an aura of mystery. Maybe he still didn’t know her, even now, because Helen certainly hadn’t ever.

  “Are you all right?” Edie asked. There was a lilt to her voice. As though she had taken on Nate’s accent. Helen hadn’t asked about him yet. But she would. She would do what she had come to do. She thought of Fiona, in the labyrinth, and the tears on her cheeks and the anguish in her voice. What a fool I was to think that these men would have no effect on our lives, just because I pretended we didn’t need them, Helen thought. “I’m great,” she said aloud, forcing a bright tone. “I just had a spa weekend with the girls, all three of them.”

  “Good. How nice for you.” A beat of silence. “You know,” Edie said, “we did what we said we’d never do. We let a man come between us.”

  “It was a bit more than a man,” Helen said. “And it wasn’t me, it was you.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. Like I said all those years ago, we can’t control who we love. You of all people should know that.”

  You of all people. What was that supposed to mean? Helen sat silent. Then she said, “How is Nate, anyway? Still touring? Still trying to pretend he’s twenty?”

  “Still doing what he loves to do,” Edie corrected her, and Helen felt reproached.

  “We’ve been married twenty years this spring, you know. Marriage isn’t easy. But it works for us. And we’re happy. And he’s well. He sends his regards.” All this came out in a rush, as if rehearsed, except it seemed she’d lost her nerve somewhat when she started speaking. Nerve. That was what Edie had. People would say that about her, “That girl has a lot of nerve.” Helen had once loved her for it.

  “Oh, come on. You didn’t tell him you were meeting me.”

  “You underestimate me, and him. It was all so long ago, Helen. Water under the bridge.”

  The waiter had returned and Helen felt a sense of relief at the sound of the cork being released from the bottle.

  “So. How are the girls?” Edie asked. “Your wonderful, wonderful girls. I’ve missed them.”

  “Ilsa has exhibitions in the city from time to time,” Helen said. “She’s a very talented artist. And Liane is in Toronto. She’s teaching at the University of Toronto now. And she’s in love with a writer, and very happy.”

  “A writer. And happy. Now, that might be an oxymoron.”

  Despite herself, Helen laughed.

  “What’s this writer’s name?” Edie asked.

  “Laurence . . . I forget his last name. He writes science fiction or something. A lovely man.”

  Edie smiled. “Don’t you remember how she loved Little Women, and how Ilsa used to tease her a little about having a crush on Laurie?” Helen nodded and felt surprised that Edie remembered such a detail. “Sounds like maybe Liane has her Laurie.” Edie played with the stem of her glass. “And Fiona?” she finally asked.

  “Wonderful. Great. Three boys, a big house in Rye—Ilsa lives near her, actually; their husbands are friends . . .” Helen breathed in. “We talked a lot this weekend, actually. More than we probably ever have. And she—” But the salad had arrived. The waiter asked if they wanted pepper. They both said no.

  “Three boys,” Edie said. “Wow, good for her.”

  “Yes.” Now Helen worked up some nerve of her own. “You should tell Nate. Tell him he has three grandsons.”

  Edie sipped the prosecco, pursed her lips. “We never had children, you know,” she said, ignoring Helen’s entreaty. “I did want to.” Helen wanted to hit her then, wanted to actually reach across the table and smack her, like they were two women in a daytime drama. “I tried, a little bit frantically, just after we got married. It was too late, though. I should have known that. I’m afraid my quest made the first few years of our marriage rather difficult. But he stuck with me.”

  Helen buttered a piece of bread and took a bite so she would have time to think before she spoke. She looked at Edie’s hands as she chewed. They seemed much older than the rest of her, papery, several rings, nail polish over deep vertical ridges. When Helen finished chewing, she picked up her glass and drained half of it. This was not going as planned. Edie was too smooth. She’d spent too many years with Nate.

  Finally, Helen was ready. She said, “Fiona was devastated that Nate rebuffed her when she tried to connect with him, and that you refused—refused—to help her. She’s never gotten over it. It affects her, affects every part of her life, has the potential to ruin it right now. Maybe Nate thought it was nothing to turn her away, maybe you
thought it was nothing to ultimately support him in it, but it hurt her. And for what reason? For you to keep him with you, back then, when you weren’t sure you’d be able to pull it off? And him—I just never understood it. How many other musicians have legions of illegitimate children? Why was it so important to Nate to have no ties whatsoever? Until you, of course. I do have to hand it to you. Twenty years is impressive. But why didn’t that change him, even a little? Why didn’t you use your role as wife to help bring some healing into the life of the closest thing to a daughter you ever had, ever will have?” Edie flinched, and Helen felt glad. Old wounds, and now a new one. She felt her heart pounding, realized she was out of breath from her speech.

  “Are we going to go back to this again, have the same old fight?” Edie’s voice had turned cold. No more relaxed lilt. She was angry. “I told you years ago, the only reason Nate and I ever connected in the first place is because I approached him about Fiona.”

  “Yes, but how long did you hold out, five minutes? And this is not the same old fight. This is not about me being angry with you for taking up with an old lover who was off-limits. I’m over that, was over it practically before the ink was dry on your marriage certificate. Nate doesn’t even go down as one of the great loves of my life. He just happened to get me pregnant. But what has always been difficult to get over is the fact that he hurt my daughter. That you both did. When Fiona and I talked this weekend, she told me she thought you and I ended our friendship because I was jealous about Nate. I imagine you’ve always thought that, too. But that wasn’t it at all.”

  “Is this why you asked me to have lunch? So you could confront me, shame me into begging Nate to come to his senses, have a paternity test, to acknowledge these grandchildren?”

  “A paternity test! Oh, please. We don’t want him in our lives, no. Definitely not.”

  The platter had arrived, and the waiter was asking again if they wanted pepper.

  “Not on a seafood platter,” Edie snapped.

  Helen stood. “I don’t think I have much of an appetite now,” she said, as the waiter backed away from them.

  “I really don’t understand what the point of all this was.”

  “My daughter asked me to do this,” Helen said. “And I would do anything for her.”

  “So it’s done. You obviously got some things off your chest about Nate. Now sit down.”

  Helen shook her head. “I never felt anything for him, Edie. It was you I wanted more from.”

  She paid the bill on her way out the door and finally felt like she had gotten the last word.

  part three

  What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?

  —GEORGE ELIOT, ADAM BEDE

  11

  Common Marmoset (Callithrix jacchus)

  The mating patterns of wild common marmosets, most prevalent in Vienna, are exceptionally complex and vary over time. Parenting behaviors of marmosets often vary, too, especially in fathers. In studies, marmoset males who were already experienced fathers were more motivated to respond to infants and infant stimuli than adult males who had yet to become fathers.

  Samira sat in the café and waited. What if he didn’t come? He might not come. She told herself this, over and over. And if he doesn’t, I will not be disappointed. I didn’t invite him here in the first place. Well, technically, she had invited him, she supposed, by sending that letter, by then calling his house in a move that was impulsive and driven by grief—and this despite the fact that her roommate and friend Romy had insisted it had the potential to be a huge mistake. “I’m sorry, Sam,” Romy had said. “I’m a Worst-Case Scenario kind of person.” They lived together in a small room with a hot plate and a coffeemaker and attended the dance program at the Konservatorium Wien University. “But no matter what happens, I’m here for you.”

  What if it was a huge mistake? If my mother had wanted him to be in my life, wouldn’t she have ensured that he was?

  What Samira did know was that her mother hadn’t done anything to protect her from the knowledge of her father’s identity, and that had to mean something. In fact, Marta had purposely left his name for her in a letter she wrote to Samira just before her death, the summer before, of ovarian cancer. Too late, Samira had decided to ask her if she thought it was a good idea to get in touch with her father. She had always asked her mother everything. But when Marta had become sick, Samira had tried to pull away a little. She had decided it was time to start to train herself not to ask her mother about every little thing. Because it had been clear very early that Marta’s time was limited and that Samira was going to have to figure it all out eventually by herself, with no mother.

  So Samira had read the letter, and thanked her mother for it, and kept it tucked in a drawer. She had focused on other things, like being with her mother, trying not to fall apart in front of her, even comforting Marta’s friends, who sometimes wept in front of Samira and said things like, “You poor little thing, now you’ll have no one.” She focused on trying to picture a world without her mother in it so that when the day came that the world actually didn’t have her mother in it, she wouldn’t be so shocked. But finally Samira decided she needed advice from her mother one more time.

  Except by then she was too late. When she reached for her mother’s hand in the hospital bed to ask her, it was already happening. She had started a descent that turned out to be meteoric. She only surfaced one more time, to say, “I love you, Samira, and you are going to be fine. Keep dancing.” At which point, Samira buried her face in her mother’s shoulder for the last time, hoping to catch her familiar scent but smelling nothing except illness and chemicals there.

  Samira looked down at her half-finished cappuccino and thought that she was probably about to start crying, because she always cried when she thought about how her mother had said, “Keep dancing.” She stood and walked out into the street. When she was no longer in the café, the feeling went away. She crossed the street and stood, watching the café entrance until a man who might have been him walked inside. She almost crossed the street, but instead she kept walking until she felt numb from the cold.

  After a few blocks, Samira stopped and checked her phone. Except I didn’t even give him my cell phone number, did I?

  She walked until she was even colder and her feet were wet. Eventually she was standing in front of her apartment building. She went upstairs.

  Romy was sitting cross-legged on the floor, reading a textbook and stretching her gorgeous limbs between paragraphs. “What happened?” Romy asked. “What’s going on? He called here. Well, I assume it was him. A man with a deep voice. He said to say Tim called. That’s his name, right? Tim?” Romy said “Tim” funny, trying to stretch it out into more than one syllable, give it more import.

  Samira took the piece of paper upon which Romy had written the message—Romy was very conscientious about taking messages—and looked down at it. Then she looked up at Romy. “I couldn’t,” she said. Romy unwound herself and sat down on the bed beside Samira.

  “Couldn’t what? Couldn’t . . . you mean you stood him up?”

  “Yes. It suddenly seemed very wrong. It seemed . . . staged. Meeting him there, at Café Central. As though he is some uncle visiting from overseas, and it is my duty to show him the highlights of my city. Café Central. Ugh!”

  “Why didn’t you ask him to go to that place you usually go to?”

  “I don’t know. It seemed too personal.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Nothing. He probably doesn’t ever want to speak to me again.”

  “I doubt that. He came all the way here.”

  “He’s probably really mad, tho
ugh.”

  “He didn’t sound mad. He actually sounded more worried. Very fatherlike, in fact. Like he thought maybe something had happened to you. I bet he’s still sitting there. I know I was against this initially, but he really did sound nice. You should go meet him.”

  “I can’t.” And it was true. Samira knew she couldn’t do it now. She wanted to, wanted to know if she had been right about who he was, about whether he was indeed the man in the dark trench coat with the gray hair and burgundy scarf who had paused outside the café and looked up at it for a moment, as if to make sure he was in the right place, before going inside. She had almost crossed the street and said, Come, don’t go in there. Let’s go somewhere else, and then taken him where she usually went, to Kaffee Alt Weine, at Bäckerstrasse 9.

  Samira thought for several moments. Then she said, “I should call him, shouldn’t I?” And she reached for the phone and dialed the number Romy had written down for her before she could think about it much more. A man answered, “Hello?” and Samira paused, but not for too long because she didn’t want him to hang up.

  “It’s Samira,” she said.

  “Hi! I’m sorry, did I go to the wrong place? I’m here at the Café Central but I don’t think I see you anywhere, although I have embarrassed myself by asking a few blond girls if they’re named Samira. One of them was, actually, but not you. Isn’t that funny? Maybe not.” He seemed very nervous. Romy had backed discreetly away and was doing a downward dog in the corner of the room.

  “I’m sorry,” Samira said. “Something came up and I can’t—I can’t come.”

  “Oh.” He was disappointed, she could tell. But not angry. Not at all.

  “I can see you tomorrow.” She glanced at Romy, at her ­upside-down face. “Tomorrow I’m going skating with my roommate.” Romy’s eyes widened and she fell into child’s pose. “In front of city hall. You could come with us.”