When he woke it was to a grey light erasing his dream, as though it had been floating in a tray of developing fluid. He was still in Annelie’s living room land-mined with baby toys. Pain tightened her barbed arms around him. All the different-coloured eyes of the sound system had watched and knew more about the night than he did.
In the hall, he frisked his coat for the Tylenol.
Michel slept on his stomach, Manfred saw when he’d finally scaled the stairs and was standing in the bedroom door. Annelie had her back to him, covers mounded over her so only the side of her face showed. She made a formidable hump in the bed.
He lowered himself on one knee and drew the covers to her shoulder. The weight of her head squashed her cheek against the pillow, puckering her lips. “Anneliebchen,” he whispered.
Her eyes flew open. She lifted herself onto an elbow and looked around. “Manfred? What are you still doing here? What time is it?”
“I used to love how the light caught on the fuzz on your cheeks.”
“What?”
He took her hand. “The world is going crazy, Annelie. You heard it yourself last night. No one even knows what day it is. Come away with me. We can go anywhere you want. You don’t have to worry about the baby. Michel is competent. Or, what the hell, let’s bring her. I’ve changed. I have no spleen. You’re the only woman I ever loved.”
“I’m the only woman you ever married. Oh, Manfred. This is how you get away with all you do. You can be so sweet when you want to.”
“Annelie.”
She rolled over, showing him the tangled brown back of her head. “Go home, Manfred.”
He waited. He gave her time to change her mind. Eventually a long, slow breath seeped out of her. His love deflating. Manfred got up cringing.
Was it always going to hurt this much?
Downstairs, he sat on the couch to put on his shoes and saw the tape recorder, repository and digitalizer of the night’s secrets, there on the flying saucer. Manfred tried staring it down then gave up and rewound the tape as much as he thought he could stand.
Man Ray said—this was at the end of his life. He was interviewed. Do you know the work of Man Ray?
A little. You brought the book.
What was I saying?
The interview.
That’s right. He was asked what had satisfied him the most in his life. What did he say?
I don’t know.
Did he say his art?
Did he?
No. No, he didn’t. No.
Do I have to keep guessing?
Women.
Of course.
He said women.
I should have guessed.
What would you say?
Air brakes.
What?
Or when the fridge motor shuts off.
Manfred pressed Stop.
NewYear’s Day. All across the city, the country, the continent, the world over at this very moment men were waking to their shame, nursing manifold wounds—hangovers, sprains, broken resolutions. Some had lasting retinal damage from the glitter ball, the Catherine wheel, the Roman candle. Ears rang on with midnight. Colds, herpes blisters, overdoses, rejection. They suffered. January 1, 2000, and Manfred was not alone except in this: that today was the first day of the last year of the old millennium.
He rewound the tape to the beginning and started recording again.
This year was a gift. Manfred felt lucky. On the porch, waiting for the taxi, he looked up and recognized the sky from À l’heure de l’observatoire, les amoureux, flocculent with cloud, minus the lips. Then the cab appeared at the end of the sleeping street and advanced toward him, the only coloured thing. He started slowly down the steps.
Inside the house, sleep would erase everything.
Knives
1
How badly the audition goes correlates with how late Shauna comes home afterward and how many boutique bags hang off her slender arms by string handles. Todd has pointed out that most people spend money when they get the job, not the other way around, but this was received with a shriek and a hurling of the bags, so he keeps his logic to himself now. He doesn’t want her to be unhappy. He thinks she’s brilliant. Only last week they watched her in a rerun of a Canadian cop show bleeding in a crunched car. She delivered her one and only line, “Save my baby,” so convincingly that Todd had wept even though he knew the baby was a sound effect in the back seat.
He glances at the kitchen clock and, shaking his head, pours a capful of vinegar down the drain. It reacts with the baking soda, erupting in a white froth that connects the decades: sandbox volcano, beginner’s chemistry set, drain maintenance.
The kitchen floor is already dry, the whole condo shining, Todd standing on the dining-room table in his socks DustBusting the light fixture, when Shauna arrives. Looking down on her, he’s elated not to see bracelets of bags. But why the quivering lip and where the perfect smile?
“How did it go?”
“You’ll never guess who I saw.”
“Did you get the part?”
“Yes.”
“That’s amazing!”
She wrings her hands—one of those gestures that throws Todd off every time. Is she truly distressed or does she just want him to think she is?
“Guess,” she wails.
“You said I won’t ever.”
“Darcy Roach. From the Dunbar house. Remember?”
Does he remember? Todd has scars. “Where? At the audition?”
“On the street. I recognized him right away.”
Easy for Todd to imagine this fateful meeting. He helps her rehearse scenes all the time. Shauna clipping beautifully along, berating herself, Darcy Roach intersecting her path, smiling a white slash. But Shauna and Todd are married now. Shouldn’t that fact have exterminated Darcy Roach?
Todd’s thoughts turn white and bubble over.
“I’m sure it was him,” says Shauna. “It looked just like him. I think.”
2
Danny moves out of the house on Dunbar Street in May to join a coffee-picking brigade in Nicaragua. This is 1984 when they’re students at the University of British Columbia. Adios, Shauna thinks. Good riddance! Never has she been so cruelly treated in all her nineteen years. Now she’s anxious for someone else to move in and displace her humiliation because, until then, Danny’s empty room enshrines it.
She approaches Abby first. “Shouldn’t we get another housemate?”
A pneumatic sigh—the bus pulling into the stop directly in front of the house—but it could easily be coming from Abby who shrugs and shuffles off with her plate of toast and p.b. to read the Bible in her room. Incapable of lifting her feet, Abby moves from bedroom to kitchen to bathroom like a plastic table-hockey player negotiating the slots. Shauna has never met a person less engaged with life, and it disgusts her. “If we don’t,” she calls after Abby, “we’ll have to divide the rent three ways instead of four.”
“As long as it’s a woman,” says Todd when Shauna puts the same question to him.
“It should be a man. So it’s equal—men and women.” She writes the ad and posts it on the notice board at Stong’s where she’s bagging groceries for the summer. Available immediately, bedroom in shared student house with three dynamic housemates. Close to transit, UBC . . .
Todd was jealous of Danny. This is the reason he wants another woman, but Shauna isn’t about to fill a harem for him.
Todd is the first to have contact. “Actually,” he says on the phone, “we’re looking for a woman.”
“The ad I’ve got here in my hand says man.”
The mallet of a shiver plays up Todd’s spine. “That’s funny.”
That evening the voice on the phone comes to the house. Shauna volunteered to show him around but Todd, in his room marking lab reports for the class he TAs, joins the tour when he hears the flirty tone Shauna puts on at the door. An aspiring actress, Shauna can assume any character she wants. With Abby she’s the cruel younger
sister, with Todd the puppeteer. This is closer to who she was with Danny, but with an edge to it. “Living room.” She sweeps a hand to take in their collegiate poverty: Sally Ann’s old couch, rabbity-eared black-and-white TV, carpet a slug-yellow, dirt-flecked shag.
“Here’s Todd.”
She doesn’t introduce him as her boyfriend! Todd’s chest constricts. According to the chore sheet it’s Shauna’s turn to vacuum. Then and there he decides not to cover for her this month.
“I’ll just go get Abby so you can meet her too.”
After Shauna leaves the room, Todd turns to Darcy. “Hi.”
Darcy glances through Todd. Darcys only see other Darcys. And Shaunas. Darcys have evolved retinas that make the breasts and genitals of Shaunas appear to glow bluely, like neon. Todds, however, can see Darcys and when they do, they usually swim to the other side of the tank. At the end of the summer, when the police ask for a description, Todd will be amazed by what the women say.
“Darcy,” Darcy says now, and Todd shudders, the way he did on the phone. It sounds like Darcy is speaking from the very bottom of a deep, deep hole. Though he extends a hand, he’s still looking beyond Todd, watching for Shauna to come back.
The handshake feels clammy to Todd, an eczema sufferer. He notices that the nasty cut across Darcy’s index finger doesn’t affect his manly clamp. Darcy’s T-shirt is tight, too, enough to snug a pack of cigarettes against his bicep. “We’re actually a non-smoking house,” says Todd.
Shauna drags in Abby dressed in a frilly pyjama top and shorts, her white legs thick and doughy, one side of her face hideously scarred with pillow creases. “He smokes,” Todd tells them.
“He can do that outside. What are you studying, Darcy?”
“I’m doing my MBA,” Darcy says, using his gaze and Shauna’s body to pull himself out of the hole. “But I started this job.”
“What kind of job?”
“Sales. It’s going to be hard to go back.”
“I’m in Theatre,” says Shauna with a curtsy.
Todd doesn’t believe in the MBA. He doubts Darcy’s name ever even appeared on a high school diploma. “We’re looking for a student,” he says.
Darcy turns to Abby. “I had a girlfriend named Abigail. She broke my heart.”
Abby stares at him like he’s just stepped out of the dream Shauna woke her from.
“Who’s at the door?” Shauna calls from her room.
“Sears,” the man in coveralls tells Todd. He X’s where Todd must sign, then returns with the clipboard to the truck parked in the bus stop. A second man gets out of the driver’s side.
Shauna joins Todd at the door and the two of them watch, speechless, as the mattress in its protective plastic is carried up the walk. Vince, according to the appliqué on his coveralls, whips a pair of cloth booties from his pocket to slip over his shoes. Shauna still hasn’t vacuumed. Staticky bits of dirt cling all over the cloth.
Brad puts on his booties. “Where to?”
“Upstairs,” Shauna says. “The room on the left.”
“Excuse me?” Todd calls after them. “You’re parked in the bus stop?”
He can’t believe his eyes when the two go back for a box spring.
That night Todd lies curled around Shauna, awake in the perfumery of her hair, thinking, defensively, how he likes to be lying close like this on his three-quarter futon. Abby has a futon too. Danny used to sleep on a bright blue Ensolite pad. Darcy’s room is just across the hall from Shauna’s and, though Shauna never sleeps there on her foamie, Todd worries about her proximity to a superior nest. Todd is personally acquainted with people who have nowhere to lay their heads but the couches at the Grad Centre. Someone under thirty owning a real bed? Just what is Darcy trying to prove?
Thud.
He sits up, listening. When he hears it again, he gets up and pulls on his shorts. Protecting Shauna is his first thought, that he’d like credit for it his second.
The sound is coming from the front of the house. He creeps down the unlit hall, grit prickling the soft soles of his feet. Whatever the time of night it’s always dawn in the living room, the street light a substitute sun. He peeks out the sheers. A car is parked in the bus stop, trunk open, a man leaning inside. Darcy straightens with a box in his arms.
But it’s only the eighteenth! thinks Todd.
Darcy comes up the walk and drops the box beside the others before going back to slam the trunk. Already sweating over the bus, Todd begins to sweat over Shauna waking up. Darcy hauls a duffle bag out of the back seat, throws it on the sidewalk, drags another from the front. All this is nightmarishly illuminated by the yellowy street light, amplified by the quiet of the night. An occasional car goes by. How long until the bus comes and what if it has to stop?
Darcy starts up the walk lugging both bags. The key violates the lock and Darcy steps inside and flicks on the hall light, exposing the furtive, bare-chested Todd. “Hey, Tom. Give me a hand with these boxes.”
“Todd. You’ll wake everyone up.”
“It’s not even midnight,” says Darcy, thudding up the stairs.
Todd hops to it, because he’ll do it quietly. The boxes are identical and unmarked and, though the size of the proverbial breadbox, they weigh the proverbial ton.
Upstairs, he finds Darcy lying long on the queen mattress, a pillow of arm muscles behind his head. “Thanks, Tom.”
“Todd.”
“Over there.” Darcy points where Todd should set the box.
Todd carries up two more before he starts to feel used. “You’re not supposed to move in until June first,” he says.
“I’m just dropping off some stuff. Is there a phone jack in this room? I forgot to check.”
“Your car’s in the bus stop. You should move it.”
“Are you by any chance a fag, Tom?”
Todd takes an affronted step back. “No! I’m not!”
Abby peels her cheek off The Bondage of the Will. The night before, she had been reading Luther. There are two kingdoms. In His, Satan rules by holding captive those not saved by the Spirit of Christ. And now Someone is in the kitchen opening and closing all the cupboards.
She actually likes living here when Shauna is at Stong’s and Todd at UBC. Every morning she gets down on her knees and scrubs out the bathtub, fills it, then lolls there until the water cools. She takes a breath and slides under, though the same old Abby resurfaces each time. Afterward, she eats breakfast in her little piece of Creation: pear tree scabbed with lichen, foot-long grass, bindweed holding together the rotten fence. No one else sets foot off the deck except to get to the laundry room.
Today, Someone is in the kitchen. Deprived of her routine, she forgoes the bath and slips to and from the bathroom.
“Abby?”
Her reaction is seismic. The whole house trembles with His voice.
“Is there any coffee?”
“Um.” The strength drains from her legs. She grips the door handle for support. “Todd has coffee. Check his cupboard.” She’s very careful not to look at Him this time.
“Which is that?”
She ducks her head, squeezes past and, in the kitchen, shows Him where Todd keeps his food. She opens Danny’s old cupboard—trail mix, brown rice, Inka. “You can use this one. Just throw out what you don’t want.”
She’s still in her pyjamas!
“Thanks, Abby,” Darcy calls after her, causing the framed paint-by-number picture of the racehorse to tilt on its nail in the hall.
She eats last night’s crusts off her plate. Also earlier crusts and the brown flesh left on the apple core. She shakes out the seeds and eats the cartilaginous inside of the core, washing it down with stale water. Just as she’s getting back into bed, He knocks.
What she will tell the police: He was so beautiful, I felt like throwing up. Eye colour? they’ll ask and she’ll start to weep.
Darcy looks in. “What do you take?”
“What?”
“Milk? Sugar
? Are you busy?”
“Kind of.”
“Well, if you can spare five minutes, Abby, I’d like to show you something.”
“Have you always shopped here?” Shauna asks because she can’t remember seeing Darcy at Stong’s before.
“This is where I saw the ad for the house.” He smiles.
He had prominent canines, Shauna will tell them. His hair was dark blond. No. Light brown.
She puts the steak in a smaller bag before tucking it in with the produce. A frisson passes through her as she squeezes the cold meat. The Dunbar house is vegetarian. Danny, a vegan, insisted on it so the dishes would not become contaminated. Abby lives on apples and feces on toast. Todd is too cheap to buy meat. Periodically Shauna suffers cravings.
When she gets home from work Darcy is in the kitchen. When did he move in? the officer will ask. She won’t know exactly. Technically the first of June, but they gave him the key in exchange for his cheque.
Shauna asks, “What’s that?”
Handles jut from the block. On the counter beside it is a cutting board made from the same reddish wood.
“Pull up a chair,” Darcy says.
One of the onions she bagged for him this morning waits on the board, stripped of its papery jacket. He draws a knife from the block, flashes both sides, scrapes his thumbprint across the blade. “Ooo, baby. This is seven and five-eighths inches of chef knife. Our Petit Chef. Recipient of the Cooking Club of the Americas’ Member Tested and Recommended Gold Seal-of-Approval. The blade—it’s stainless steel. The very highest chromium and carbon blend. Why? Let me tell you. To ensure both optimum corrosion resistance and—and!—a durable edge. Furthermore, Shauna, an extremely hard, thin coating of boron carbide gives it added protection.”
A silver arc. His hand blurs. The crisp whack causes Shauna to start. It happens a second and a third time while she blinks through the sparks.
Darcy steps back from the onion. “Damn.”
Pleased to Meet You / The Sky is Falling Page 8
