Send Me A Lover

by Carol Mason

  ‘Alright then,’ I say, feeling an idiot speaking to ghosts, especially as I don’t believe in them. It’s the wine, I tell myself. The wine.

  ‘Paging heaven…’ This really does sound mad, as though I’m a pointer short of a Ouija board. ‘If you’re listening up there, Jonathan, and if you’re so damned sure that you can really do this. Then do what you promised. Send me someone. Someone I can love.’

  My eyes search the ceiling.

  While I’m waiting to see if he’s going to answer, I fall asleep.

  Three

  When I open my door the next morning, I’m surprised to find Richard hovering there, looking as though he has landed from outer space.

  ‘So this is where you live,’ he says, gazing past me at the view. He’s being facetious. He knows where I live because he helped me move in here after I had to sell my house. What he means is, in the three months since I’ve been here, I’ve never asked Richard over here, even though Richard and Jessica still have me over to their place for dinner virtually every second Friday.

  ‘Neat view,’ he says, walking over to my window and standing with his back to me.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘You can see the mountains.’ He looks at me over his shoulder.

  ‘I can see where the mountains would be if they didn’t have a million high rises in their way.’

  He turns fully now, looking mildly entertained. ‘You love it here, really, don’t you?’

  ‘Love it’s not quite the word Richard.’ I used to love the home I shared with my husband.

  He stares at all the boxes piled in the corner. ‘You still haven’t unpacked!’

  ‘I’m in the process of unpacking. I emptied one yesterday. And I plan on doing another one today.’

  No I don’t. Because I hate this place and I’m moving out. I just have to work out where I’m going and how I can afford more rent.

  ‘How’s the neighbourhood treating you?’

  ‘Fine. I love living among gay men. I’ve discovered I’ve got a particular affection for transvestites. I love that there must be a male prostitute living upstairs because somebody up there has sex sixteen hours a day.’ When I had to sell our lovely home because I couldn’t afford the mortgage on my own, the gay district was about the only area of the city where I could find cheap rent. It’s really not that bad. Just makes me feel even lonelier sometimes.

  He smiles, as though he knows that under my bravado I’m a wounded bird. ‘You’ve got to unpack, Angie. Start making this place… comfortable.’ He looks caught-out because we both know he was going to say ‘home.’

  ‘Baby steps, Richard.’ I brush over his clanger. ‘Baby steps.’

  ‘Speaking of steps…’ he stares at my feet in my one red ladybird slipper, because the other one has been missing since the move.

  ‘You should try seeing what I look like when I go out in only one shoe.’

  Yet I know exactly where I keep Jonathan’s blue T-shirt that he’d go running in, Jonathan’s wedding ring and Tag watch that they gave me straight from his dead body, Jonathan’s well-worn sandals with his toe-prints on the leather of the sole.

  ‘I’ll make us a cup of tea. Just don’t expect a teapot.’ I fish in my cutlery drawer. ‘Actually, even a teaspoon could be stretching it.’

  ‘I have something for you,’ he says as he watches me put the kettle on. ‘Or rather we have something for you,’—meaning he and Jessica.

  Jessica is Richard’s ‘hot’ wife who disproves the myth that you can’t be blonde, beautiful, have size E breast implants and still have a brain. Although for a while I had wondered. For starters, she has never worked or gone to college. All she ever talks about is beauty and exercise. But two years ago she started up an Internet blogspot, called Goddess Girl. It was a hobby—just her blabbing on about beauty products she likes/dislikes. But now, much to everybody’s surprise, it has morphed into one of the biggest Internet sites of its kind, attracting several thousand hits a day. Aside from receiving free products to review that would fill a warehouse, she is now raking in dollars from businesses advertising on her site. Business in Canada magazine recently did a two-page feature on her, and her new spin-off charity, Powder Power, that helps underprivileged women get into the workforce by ‘making them up’ for their interviews. Yet when you talk to her you feel you’re talking to a moron. It’s very weird.

  Richard hands me a shiny, British Airways envelope, then he runs his hand through his dark auburn/chestnut hair, pushing back the piece that always tends to flop forward over his eyebrows. When Jonathan first introduced me to Richard at a house party, I thought he was quite attractive. Something about his eye-colour and his hair-colour being a close match. Not quite auburn-haired; he doesn’t have a single freckle. But warmer than light brown. Then I noticed his very odd habit: when he sits he wraps his feet around the front legs of the chair so his knees look primly glued together. This small detail made me realise I could never fancy Richard. But then again, I was so busy fancying Jonathan that Richard could have been Richard Gere and it probably wouldn’t have made one iota of difference.

  ‘A return ticket to the UK!’ I look at him rather confused. ‘Richard! What’s this?’

  ‘It’s for you.’

  I smile. This is obviously a joke of some sort.

  ‘I’m being serious. It’s time you went home.’

  ‘Really? You have? How do you know I’ve been thinking of going back a lot lately?’

  ‘Haven’t you been thinking of going back a lot for ten years?’

  ‘No—well, yes—but that’s a different story. But just yesterday I was actually thinking of going back to see my mother, but then I was wondering how I could possibly afford to go…’ And now Richard walks in bearing a ticket.

  In my low moments I’ve thought of going back for good. My mother is on her own over there. I’m on my own over here. We’re the only family each other has. But after living in Canada for so long, I don’t quite know where I belong any more. I’m not Canadian, because I constantly remind everybody I’m British. But I’m not quite British either. I don’t know the new names for the old institutions like British Gas and British Rail. I wouldn’t know who to ring to set up the Internet. I call a toilet a washroom, and I have an annoying habit of saying Hello to strangers and asking how they are. Going back would be a bit like moving to a foreign country, and that would be depressing, because I’d be expecting it to feel like going home.

  ‘I didn’t know you were seriously thinking of going back Angie. I just thought—Jessica and I thought—that it might be a good idea for you to get away from here. You haven’t had a vacation since…’

  Jonathan died. I drag my ponytail over my shoulder and look at my feet. I somehow can’t imagine this being Jessica’s idea. Not that I’ve anything against her, just we’ve never really clicked. Which only adds to the fact that I have to say, ‘I’m sorry Richard. It’s marvellous of you both, but I can’t accept this.’

  This isn’t the first time Richard has been a bit of a fairy godfather to me. When I was going into default on my mortgage, Richard bought Jonathan’s partnership interest in the law firm they’d started up together three years ago. I suspect that what he paid me was over-generous. But even so, I didn’t have a job at the time, because I’d recently got fired from the advertising agency where I was a senior executive, and I was taking time—Jonathan’s idea—to think what I might want to do next. Plus we had debts, and I’d discovered, much to my surprise, that Jonathan and I had very little saved. I knew we spent a lot, but I didn’t think we were that bad. Richard knew how much I didn’t want to lose our house—the fabulously dilapidated Cape Cod-style home Jonathan and I were renovating together, with its hazardous wrap-around deck overlooking the ocean, its springy floorboards, its mysterious musty smell in the airing cupboard, and the cathedral ceiling in the bedroom that somehow echoed all of our sexy moans and laughter, and every petty scrap we ever had. So much of Jonathan was in that ho
use, and I worried that maybe if you took me out of that house, you took Jonathan out of me. I wasn’t ready to lose the house as though it were a shell that contained Jonathan’s soul, even though his body had moved on somewhere else.

  But then again I wasn’t ready to have him die either, was I? So being ready for things really means very little in this life, I have found.

  I sat for hours calculating how much I’d have to earn to still keep our home if I went back to my high-flying career in another big agency, hoping each time I ran the numbers that they’d turn up a different figure. But it was hopeless. So the real estate agent dug the For Sale sign into the lawn. Old Ms Elmtree, our neighbour across the street, who Jonathan had helped out with a legal problem, even offered to loan me five thousand dollars. But I couldn’t take her money, not that five grand would have done any good.

  ‘You’ve got to take the ticket,’ he says now as I stand there in a fug of wanting to take the ticket, yet my pride having a problem with the whole idea. ‘You don’t have a choice in the matter. It’s in your name. It’s not much use to anybody else.’

  Some people will always feel they owe you something, even when they don’t.

  ‘But Richard… I have my job…’

  ‘That you don’t like, in an industry you hate, working for a goof. England or that… Hard choice.’

  ‘My mother or my boss… It might be.’

  Despite my saying I’d never work in another advertising agency, I am back doing just that. Only this one’s much smaller and run by a middle-aged British man who lost his wife to cancer six months ago. David hardly has any clients, which makes me wonder why he hired me. As a substitute for dealing with his grief, he sits for eight hours a day telling me all about how fantastic his career used to be. I see him as one of those helpless, befuddled Brits who fall apart when their wife isn’t there to give them a daily purpose, and they walk around with urine stains on their trousers, covered in their own drool.

  ‘It’s not the job. I could leave there tomorrow if I wanted.’ Even though I have developed a good bit of affection for my pathetic, entertainingly self-congratulating boss. ‘It’s… well, I’ve been thinking about Write Strategies again…’

  Thinking, not doing, Jonathan would have reminded me. And I’d have probably said back off, bossy clogs; I’ll get there in my own time.

  It was Jonathan’s idea that I start a business as a writing consultant. Originally I’d wanted to be the person in the advertising agency who wrote the clever adverts. But in an interview they asked me to come up with a tag-line for Imodium. The best I could say was Stop the Diarrhoea, which went down like a lead potato. Then when I came up with my other piece of brilliance: Walk don’t Run, I was quickly shown to the door. So I ended up as ‘a suit’, taking care of the clients. And the job somehow got under my skin as jobs do, and I grew the sort of goals that were expected of me. And for a while there, it felt like that thing called life. But it all boiled down to a career I gave my blood to, that wasn’t as loyal to me as I was to it.

  We decided I was going to farm myself out to corporations whose staff might need to improve how they communicated in proposals, reports, presentations and speeches. I’d do small groups, or one-on-one coaching. I’d put on seminars, whatever was needed. I was going to call my company Write Strategies. I even had the business cards designed.

  Then two policemen stood on my step in the sunshine, and told me that Jonathan had suffered an epileptic seizure at the wheel of his BMW Z4. And that was the end of any desire I might have had to move myself forward in some small way.

  But lately Write Strategies has been back on my mind again.

  ‘Can’t you think about all that career stuff after you have a vacation?’ Richard smiles at me. If Jonathan were the edgy, type ‘A’ lawyer, Richard is the patient, I’d like to say happy-go-lucky one, but Richard never looks deliriously happy about anything.

  ‘I’m getting desperate.’

  ‘For money?’

  ‘For a move forward.’

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’

  ‘You’ve already done so much. You probably wish you’d never met me.’

  He drops his eyes to the ground and stays like that for moments, and I think, what’s come over him? But then he looks up, smiles nicely, and says, ‘You might come back recharged. Go take your mother somewhere. Jonathan would have wanted…’

  Me to start living again. The things we don’t say. Because talking about my husband, even all this time later, might mean I will have to cry in front of people, and I don’t do tears. I am best off when I am not being hugged, made to feel better, or told I am loved. Not by anybody but Jonathan. From everybody else it just tends to embarrass me.

  ‘Anyway, I have to rush. I’m supposed to be taking Emma swimming…’ He looks like he badly has to get out of here all of a sudden. Emma is his lovely nine-year-old.

  I remember I’m still holding the ticket. ‘Oh God, Richard… I’m not good with charity.’

  He turns when he gets to the door, pushes back that mop of chestnut hair. ‘I’m not good with a lot of things myself,’ he says. He holds my eyes for some moments, then does a ‘leave-taking’ salute, and then he’s gone.

  ~ * * * ~

  Ms Elmtree’s house is directly across the street from where Jonathan and I used to live. It’s my first time in our old neighbourhood since I moved. Walking down the street makes me feel a bit like I’ve been regressed and I’m discovering I’ve lived a previous life.

  Ms Elmtree came with me in the taxi to the hospital the day I fancied comfort food and made mashed potatoes because I hadn’t eaten anything other than crackers in about a week after the news. Using my electric whisk I somehow managed to break my finger in two places. The doctor who saw me was young and handsome and kind and wore a wedding ring, and I ran out of the treatment room before I broke down in tears.

  ‘I’m sorry I’ve not been to see you in so long…’ I perch on the edge of her sofa, trying hard not to stare a couple of inches past her head at where I used to live. I’m curious what it looks like in there now, but I’d not take a million bucks and go in. Memories detonate in me like little land mines. I’d tread on them everywhere and they would shatter me.

  ‘It hasn’t been all that long, honey,’ she studies me, watchfully; she’s really not much of a talker and is a bit of an odd duck, but I’ve always felt sorry for her because she has no family. Ms Elmtree is from the Caribbean, a product of a Jamaican mother and British expatriate father. She never married, and her twin brother was suffocated when a cat went to sleep on him when he lay in his crib. You might call her eccentric, with her shocking pink lipstick and aquamarine eye-shadow, badly-applied, (my mother looks at her like she has two heads). And then there’s the other thing. Ms Elmtree has some weird theory about how she’s a direct descendent of the artist Paul Gauguin. I tend to believe people and was convinced she had to be. After all, she’s an artist herself (not a very successful one; she paints rip-off Gauguins—portraits done in feverishly tropical styles and colours.). But Jonathan said, well, if she is, where’s the money? I did a bit of research on the Net once, and Gauguin certainly didn’t die rich, but another thing Jonathan said: if the Vancouver art community doesn’t think she is who she says she is, then she probably isn’t. Fair point.

  Nevertheless, she was very fond of my husband. When a developer built a duplex next-door to her that sent all its drainage into her back yard, Jonathan sued for compensation on her behalf, and he didn’t take a penny when he won. Jonathan might have been driven to make money, but he was large-hearted and had a heightened sense of right and wrong.

  We chat for a while and then I ask her, ‘Are you working on any new paintings?’

  She smiles, hot-pink lips framing slightly yellowing teeth. She’s hard to age, given she hasn’t a single wrinkle, but I’m guessing early seventies. ‘I don’t paint any more,’ she says. ‘I haven’t painted in a long time.’

  ‘Oh?’ I look ar
ound the room at the garish portraits on her wall. ‘Why not? I thought you loved it.’

  She briefly moves her eyes to where I’ve just been looking. Then she says, ‘I saw him once.’ For a moment I worry we might be talking about Gauguin, but then she says, ‘Jonathan.’

  For some strange reason I think she’s meaning that she has seen a ghost. I feel sick. ‘Jonathan?’

  ‘Before he died,’ she adds, as though she senses clarification’s necessary. The shock passes. Of course before he died. What was I thinking? ‘He was sitting in his car, right there,’ she points across the street. ‘Just sitting, and sitting…As though he didn’t want to go inside that house.’

  I gaze across the street. ‘Our house? Why would he not want to come inside our house?’

  She doesn’t answer.

  ‘Well maybe he was listening to something on the radio…’

  ‘No. Something very bad was on his mind,’ she says. ‘I could see the demon in his face.’

  The word demon gives me the chills. I push away that disturbing image of him, wishing she’d never introduced it to me. ‘It was probably just his work. His mind was always on his work.’

  She doesn’t answer, just watches me closely again. The room has turned cold. An atmosphere surrounds us that I don’t like. It creeps me out. I wait for her to say more, but she doesn’t. I get out of there pretty fast.

  ~ * * * ~

  ‘Hello blossom.’

  It’s my mother’s bright little voice somewhere a world away in England.

  ‘Mam! I was just going to ring you after I put a load of laundry in.’

  Just yesterday I went into Safeway and there was an elderly lady lying on the floor. A checkout girl was holding her hand while the manager hovered, on the lookout for the ambulance. All I could think was, what if that were my mother, passed out on a supermarket floor in Sunderland, with a stranger, instead of her daughter, holding her hand? Sometimes I think morbidity’s been grafted onto my personality since Jonathan died.