by Carol Mason
I hug the binder to my chest. Is this Jonathan’s way of telling me that now I don’t have any excuses?
~ * * * ~
I can’t believe we’re already into August. I have Jonathan’s list of contacts in about one hundred of Vancouver’s mid-size to big businesses. Everything from software, which I know nothing about, (just like accounting firms, law firms, engineering firms), to marketing firms, which I do have a handle on, and a hot-house tomato-growing company; I’m the first to get excited over a lovely tomato.
I know what my costs will be if I do a direct-mailer. I know how much it is to run quarter to full-page ads in leading industry publications. It’s a fortune, really, or at least for me, but I’m not going to think of the downsides just yet. I know what my call-back strategy is. I’ve just forked out the fee and joined the Vancouver Board of Trade. I can wear the suit. I’m glad I never took it back.
And if all fails, U can join me in olive oil business. Georgios writes on MSN. Georgios and I have messaged a few times now.
U serious? I type furiously.
Very.
Tempting… Of course it’s not. Not really. Not now that Georgios is getting it on with my ma. Speaking of. I decide to be out with it. R U in luv with my mother?
His reply is a little slow.
She not in luv with me.
How do U know? I bang out.
Again, a pause or two. Ask Her.
~ * * * ~
‘I have something to tell you,’ Richard looks at me quite seriously across a small, trendy trattoria table.
‘Oh God, don’t tell me you’re moving away too!’
I never normally meet Richard for lunch. Today though, I was in the area where Richard’s (and formerly Jonathan’s) office is, and thought I’d pop in. I’ve only been up there once since Jonathan died. I remember how odd it was, at the time, walking into his once cluttered office that was bereft of files and papers. Only a lone, misshapen paper-clip on the clean surface. Jonathan had a habit of unbending them when he was stressed.
Going up there today was still strange for me. Jonathan’s office has been taken over by an articling student fresh out of the University of British Columbia. David is his name. There was a moment’s delay in my smile when he walked out of his door to greet me, and held out his hand. I looked past him, thinking maybe Jonathan has been working really really long hours; that’s why he hasn’t been home in two years… Maybe I’m going to look in there and see him.
Richard fidgets a lot—with the napkin, with a knife, picks up a bread bun, puts it down, pushes back the flop of chestnut-auburn hair from his forehead. ‘I’m not moving away, exactly. But I am moving out. Or at least, I’m thinking of it.’
I blink. ‘Out?’
‘I’m leaving Jessica.’
‘You’re leaving Jessica?’ The woman I never saw him with in the first place. Why am I thoroughly shocked and yet not at all surprised?
‘I don’t know what to say, Richard. God, this is a shock.’
‘I suppose why would be the obvious question… And the answer would be because I don’t love her. Maybe I never did. Not real love, like the kind I know Jonathan felt for you.’ He stops fiddling. ‘She doesn’t love me, either. I’ve asked myself if we were stripped of everything we owned, would she still want to be with me. And the answer I keep coming up with is no.’
‘But it can’t be about money. She’s making her own good money now.’
‘Yes, but if you take away all the trappings—it doesn’t matter who earned what…’ he indicates with a sweep of his hand to the table, to the wine and the finished off Cornish game hen and smoked sablefish he made us order, which I thought was a bit lavish for lunch; I almost got the feeling he was celebrating something. What? Surely not this? ‘There’s nothing there,’ he finishes. ‘Our marriage was founded on my ability to take care of her.’ He shrugs. ‘Of course I always knew that. She always knew she was pretty and she’d never marry a poor man, and she didn’t really have passion to stick it in a job back then. I’m sure she knew she’d go to the highest bidder. Only maybe right when she met me there weren’t all that many biding, for whatever reason, so somehow I won. She decided she’d do okay with me.’
He sees me smile. ‘Sorry,’ I tell him. ‘It’s just odd making it sound like a night out at the casino.’
‘Not kind, you mean?’
‘I suppose.’
He shrugs. ‘She once told me she was lazy, that’s why she never wanted to date lots of men; she just couldn’t be bothered. And I let her be lazy, certainly when it came to the idea of her working. I even encouraged her to do nothing, even though, I suppose I knew that she always looked bored, as though all her free time was a chore. I just thought that was her—she was just too well-off, and too ungrateful.’ He looks at me sadly. ‘I think we all might have underestimated her.’
‘Were you very much in love with her?’ He always seemed to be. From the moment I met them. They had met the summer before Jonathan and I did.
‘No. I thought I should be. I think, quite secretly, that I wanted to land her. And once I did, I tried to keep the myth alive.’
‘I’ve never heard you talk like this.’
He smiles. ‘I never wanted her to have her breasts done, you know.’
‘You didn’t?’ Jonathan and I had plenty to speculate on when the date for her surgery just happened to fall on Richard’s birthday.
‘I’m more of a legs man. Her breasts were fine as they were.’
‘But they look good.’ I remember her once telling me, quite seriously, how she’d rather be dead than ugly.
‘I don’t know. They irritate me. I don’t know why…’ His eyes very quickly go to my chest, as though he might be about to say something, although I can’t imagine what. But instead, he says, ‘Do you want a coffee? Or we could always go somewhere else and have one?’
‘Let’s have one here.’
He seems remarkably laid back. ‘Angie, our marriage is completely lacking in substance. There’s nothing fundamentally there. We’re like a big empty box. Just walls, sides, and packaging that keep us together.’
‘Does she feel like this too?’
‘Oh, I’m sure she does, without saying it. We don’t talk. We don’t share things with each other any more.’
I wonder if he’s worried that now she’s making her own money she might leave him. Does Richard need to be the provider? He certainly seems to like to try to take care of me.
He orders two cappuccinos for us, and a vanilla crème brulée.
‘What about Emma?’
He shakes his head. ‘I think without Emma, Jessica and I would have split up after about two years, once I’d got over being flattered that a woman as attractive as she would be interested in a plain guy like me.’ He looks off into the distance. ‘I mean, for God’s sakes, I’ve got red hair.’
I almost laugh. ‘It’s not red! It’s a sort of burnished chestnut!’
He smiles.
‘Sorry I’ve made you sound like a description on a hair colouring kit.’
He smiles again.
‘I like it,’ I tell him. ‘Your hair colour.’
‘Do you?’
‘Very much.’ And I like his hazel eyes. And I like him.
‘You know, we can’t even sit down and agree on a DVD to rent on a Friday night! That’s how polarised our interests are. That’s how intense and inflexible we’ve turned. I think when you’re not in love, you blame the other one; you start to get resentful, as though, rather than it being nobody’s fault in particular, it’s very pointedly theirs.’
Richard is quite a deep person, for a guy, I think. I wonder if he’d have talked to Jonathan like this. Whenever we’d get together as a foursome, he always seemed to gravitate to me for conversation. But then again, he did see Jonathan every day.
We don’t speak while the waiter puts our cups and dessert down. ‘Have you missed not being in love all these years?’ I ask him. I couldn’t i
magine staying in a loveless marriage. And I’m pretty sure Jonathan would have felt the same. If we’d have fallen out of love, that would have been it: over.
He sits back, stares at the single rosette of cream on top of the brulée. ‘Just because I wasn’t in love with her doesn’t mean I haven’t been in love with anybody in all these years.’
I don’t want to learn he’s had an affair, if this is what he’s getting at. For some reason, in spite of everything he’s just said, that would disappoint me. ‘What are you going to do?’ I ask instead.
He shakes his head, looks at me now. When I think he’s not going to answer that, he says, ‘I’m going to try to make some wrongs right before it’s too late for everybody.’ He takes a drink of his coffee. ‘Does that sound scary?’
I shrug. ‘Brave, maybe.’
Twenty One
Vancouver’s key players in the business community aren’t easy to reach. Especially when their secretaries think I’m selling something. Which, I suppose I am.
I’m just about to make my twentieth frustrating cold call of the day—that’s netted me one brief conversation with an actual CEO, who told me he doesn’t need my services at this time but he’ll keep me on file—well, up his bottom too, as my mother would probably say—when my phone rings.
‘Hi Angela, it’s Crystal Rae.’
It takes me a moment to place the name.
‘Epilepsy Canada.’
‘Oh! Crystal! Sorry!’ How embarrassing of me to forget who she is!
‘That’s all right,’ she says. ‘I’m glad I’ve caught you anyway. Sorry it’s taken a little while to get back to you… I was wondering if you’d like to meet with us again to discuss your role with us, and some of your ideas, a little further.’
I grab a note pad, and my diary/calendar, which is empty. I had dreamed that because I bought the thing, it might automatically fill itself with appointments. Or that, Jonathan, if he could swing it from up there, could land me a few interviews so I might open my appointments page every morning and find that it had magically filled itself up. But not so far. I’m trying hard to get excited at the thought of volunteer work for Epilepsy Canada, but the need for a paycheque is starting to get palpable.
‘I’d be thrilled to meet, Crystal! Just tell me when, and I can write up a bit of an agenda and email it to you if you think it might be helpful.’ My old habit of over-committing to clients.
‘That’s great news. How is next Wednesday night for you? Say six thirty? Dinner—or at least a sandwich and pop—will be on us. And an agenda sounds good. Send it through.’
‘Sounds good,’ I parrot back. ‘I’ll look forward to it.’
We hang up and I take stock. Okay… I’m going to get up to my eyes in work that’s probably the most worthwhile thing I’ve ever done, and will ensure me direct passage into heaven, but I’m doing it for free. I can just see myself—the only homeless person in Vancouver who sits in a doorway typing away marketing plans on their laptop.
Progress.
~ * * * ~
When I wake up on Sunday morning, I’ve had a very horny dream. It started out as a dream of Sean. We were in Vancouver and he and I were somehow together but we hadn’t yet kissed, and I was anticipating the moment when we would. And then we were kissing. And it was lovely. Only somehow during the kiss Sean became Richard. I was kissing Richard and enjoying it. It was so nice that my heart was throbbing; my stomach was tightening… Then I was telling Roger that this kind of thing can’t happen again.
I wake up feeling like I literally have just been in a hot snog. My lips even feel the imprint of another person’s mouth. The tingle is there in my pelvic region… yet I’m lying alone in bed, with a racing heart. I try to go back to sleep, to pick up where I left off, but I can’t. I’m just lying there staring at the ceiling when my phone rings.
‘It’s done. It’s up for sale.’
I feel a thud of panic. ‘Your condo?’ I thought she wouldn’t go through with it!
‘No. The Telus Building… Of course my condo!’ My friend lets out a blood-curdling squeal.
‘Are you thrilled, or has somebody set you on fire?’ I ask her.
‘I’m thrilled!’ She squeals again.
I wince and move the phone from my ear. ‘But your fabulous Coal Harbour condo! You’re selling it to move thousands of miles away to a godforsaken city that you don’t even know you’re going to like.’
‘I do like it! I’ve been there many times on business.’ She falls silent for a moment, then her tone changes. ‘You’re supposed to be my friend and be happy for me, Ange.’
I feel terrible. When I think how good she’s been to me... ‘I am happy for you! I’m happy for you being happy. But I’m sad for me. Does that make me a horrible person?’ It’s the God’s honest truth. Even when I thought she was serious, I still didn’t think she was serious. ‘I’m going to miss you! What am I going to do without you?’ A part of me is shamefully thinking if I can’t pay my rent here any more, moving into her condo is not going to be my fallback position if she’s sold it. What’s wrong with me? Why do I always need a fallback position?
‘But I’m never here to miss as it is, Ange! That’s the whole problem. I’m never anywhere half the time. I used to despise roots. But now I realise we need them, because they feed us, don’t they? Without them, we’ll, we’re just slowly starving ourselves.’
‘That’s poetic!’
‘I know. I’ve been working on it.’
When I sold our house, Sherrie offered for me to move in with her. I didn’t do it, because I didn’t want to be dependent on her, to be sat there waiting for her to come back from her travels to save me from my grief and depression, to make her my replacement Jonathan. But I realise I am dependent on her. We do depend on our friends. We start to put our rights to them ahead of their rights over themselves; we have a strange marriage with them.
But the thing is, and I only realise this now: it’s okay. If Sherrie goes I will miss her desperately. But there are a few other things on my priority list that will take precedence over missing her.
‘Have you given any more thought to what you’re going to do for work?’ I ask her.
‘Dunno. May go on the market side. Trade futures. I know some people who’ve made the move…Actually, you won’t believe the timing, I got headhunted for Lantic Sugar in Toronto. Just the other day.’
I instantly picture trips to sugar plantations in the far-flung exotic corners of Hawaii or the Caribbean. ‘That sounds fabulous!’
‘No it’s not though! I don’t want to trade sugar. That would just be same shit, different heap.’
‘So you turned it down, I take it. God I wish I had your luxury!’
‘I said, sling it, man. Just sling your sugar trading job. Angela dear girl, I’m very focussed on what I want. Or rather, I’m very certain of what I don’t want. A bit like you. You knew the minute your feet walked into that building that you didn’t want to work for a top ad agency any more.’
‘I’m flattered you think that makes us alike... But aren’t you apprehensive, even a little bit?’
‘Not in the way you mean. Not bad-apprehensive. Good-apprehensive. You know, the other night I was thinking about myself and my life, and I realised something interesting. I’m a lucky person because I’ve never really known what unhappiness is. I’ve had the best years of my life in this job. If I could have had the exotic job and the husband and family and a base I could feel was truly home… Or if I could have had the crazy career and all the fun and not grown a year older, then I could ditch it all, still be the same age, and be able to go out and get the husband and the kid and the house and the dog…. then it’d have been perfect. But life’s not like that, is it? It’s only now that I’m starting to feel unhappy with things—or maybe frustrated is a better word. And I don’t want to feel that. I want to move on to new happiness. Just like you’re doing.’
‘Is that how you see me? As moving on to new happiness?�
��
She seems to think about this. ‘Slowly. But yes, I think you are. And I think that even you yourself probably know it, deep down.’
‘I suppose I am Sherrie. I was thinking the other day that I’m starting to see Jonathan not as somebody I lost, but as somebody I gained… Does that make any sense?’
‘It makes more than sense,’ she says. ‘It makes music to my ears, my friend.’
When I hang up with her, I look around my floor that’s got pieces of paper, and lists, and phone directories, and letterheads, and attempted designs for my website all over the place. Argh… I put my head back and bite my bottom lip, and try to distance myself from the chaos.
I love what she said about me moving on to new happiness. I wish I could inscribe the very concept on black velvet, put it in a cute little picture frame, and hang it above my bed. Or above the loo: Angela is moving on to new happiness.
Am I really though?
I wish we could all have an inbuilt green light that would come on to show us that the choices we are making are right. But all we have is our hearts, and our hunches.
I suppose I have a good hunch.
~ * * * ~
‘Have you heard anything?’ I get up at six a.m to call my mam because she’s been on my mind all night.
‘Oh not this again!’
‘If you don’t want me to give a damn about you, I won’t.’
‘Can I have that in writing?’
Before I can reply, she says, ‘I have had the results, actually. I went this morning.’
I feel a sinking dread. ‘Yeah..? And?’
‘They’ve found some abnormality. They want to do the tests over.’
I want to press delete, and erase the words. ‘What’s an abnormality?’
‘Well it means something’s not quite right.’
I tut. ‘Yes I know that! I mean, didn’t he say what it was?’
‘No.’
‘Didn’t you ask?’ my volume climbs.
