Here Until August

by Josephine Rowe

  Anyway, we never got away, winter held us close. We drank. We fucked. We downloaded old disaster movies from our childhoods and skipped straight to the quake, the volcano, the aftermath.

  Coming back from the SAQ one Sunday we met Madame Ayliffe taking on the outside world. Reaching her little lavender-gloved paw out to be guided down the last few ice-glazed steps at the front of our building, where snow had obliterated the hessian grip our landlord cheapskated in place of rubber. Jody passed me the rye and ran up ahead, crooked his arm into a wing for Madame to hold on to. He led her down step for step, all southern charm, delivering her to where the sidewalk was freshly gritty with rat-bait-green salt. She grazed me with eyes blank as coat buttons, in that moment possessing no special knowledge about me, perhaps not knowing me at all. Unconcerned by thermoses, missing or otherwise. To Jody she gave no thanks in any language, just nodded her tiny marzipan head and tottered down towards the avenue. We watched after her a while, to make sure she remained upright. Her solid black shoes planted definite as small hooves.

  By then I’d taken up Jody’s schedule, waking at ten or later, the sun already sliding through that colored glass. Hours too late for Kitchen Sink radio, though there would be other noises from Madame Ayliffe’s side of our shared wall, dish clatter or running water, sometimes wailing. I was alarmed at first, until I placed it: Cats. Cats in heat, whose yowlings always sound like maniacs doing bad impersonations of cats. Now and then a scrawny tabby appeared on Ayliffe’s windowsill, twitching its tail, ears flattened. I imagined the other cats huddled in a coven, at the apartment’s heart, gently rising and falling as one heap of multicolored fur.

  Spring crept up on us. Bird noise then insect noise then cheers from the bars on Mont Royal as the Habs beat the Bruins in the second overtime. Stray cats lounging on stoops like sleazy little drunks. Sticky fiddleheads nudging up through the earth, unfurling to bright fronds within seconds.

  Now: everything’s moving, everywhere you look. Squirrels rippling up telephone poles, laundry being cranked along antiquated pulley systems, someone flapping out a bright string hammock and anchoring it between railings. Down in the alleyway, winter’s hockey nets have been repurposed as soccer nets, and kids run back and forth between them, screaming a sweet patois. A woman in the building across from us is drying a load of dishes, bringing each cup, plate, bowl, fork to her back door and standing there half drunk with photosynthesis, rubbing meditatively with a nubby yellow tea towel.

  I finish with Jody’s hair. There you go, I tell him, spring coat. Ruffling my hands through what’s left of the shaggy brindle. It isn’t a great job, but if I go any further I’ll just make it worse. He won’t care anyway. Or if he does, he won’t say so. Released, he bounds inside for beers, comes back with them already popped and sweating.

  We’re just going to look at them a moment, he says, gone all reverent, laying them just out of reach. We’re just going to take a minute to appreciate that it’s really finally beer weather. Then he slides his icy fingers slow over my wrist, slow up to the inside of my elbow. Simple; like he’s undone a zipper. I could push him right off the balcony. But there are the voices next door, and I take my arm back, wanting to see her emerge: this woman whose radio I’ve stopped waking with. Her balcony door opens a crack and I wait for her to shuffle out, mentally polishing a few phrases I might use, witty responses to remarks about the weather—L’hiver ne nous a pas tué!

  From our kitchen McTell begins singing tinnily through laptop speakers, of cold wide waters and lonesome journeys, and it makes a strange matinee of the whole operation.

  They must’ve come through the front. We would have noticed them going in, otherwise. We guess it’s discretion they’re trying for now, discretion that has moved them to brave the spindly swizzle stick of the fire escape, instead of the straight-up-and-down of the front stairs. A couple of days ago, even yesterday, they might have gotten her out quietly, with no one but the stray cats to flick their ears at them. But now they have a whole amphitheater of us, gawking. That woman with the dishtowel holding it at limp half-mast. Down in the laneway the kids have stopped their game, are all shining the little moons of their faces up this way. By some kid instinct they know something’s up, and that it must be something wonderful, because a few of their parents are already trying and failing at calling them in.

  The bag that is holding Madame lies on a stretcher borne by a stocky man and a tall thin woman, whose trouble is kept hidden under a thick ledge of bangs. They must be work, those bangs. A lot of heat and product. An effort that seems both noble and impractical given her profession.

  I’m expecting the hand with its lavender glove, or perhaps a tuft of snowy hair, to be peeking out of the bag they’ve folded her into. Some confirmation that it’s her in there. But she’s zipped up tight, barely causing a crinkle in the stiff plastic strapped hard to the stretcher.

  They have her tilted at a ridiculous angle. It won’t work; she’s going to slide right out, feet first, go barreling down that staircase like a sled in a luge run. The neighboring balconies have all turned opera boxes, everybody’s hands over everybody’s mouths, as the paramedics reverse back up the stairs. They’re giving up, we think. But no, they swing around, swap places. They try at a different tilt. Headfirst, I guess, with the tall woman backing down gingerly, iron railings under her thin rubber soles. When they finally get the stretcher to ground level, someone gives three short claps that ricochet around the courtyards. Someone else joins in. An awkward, open-mic-night smatter. The stocky man looks up, smiling sheepish as though he really might bow. The woman just shakes her head. The bangs don’t move, sprayed solid. The kids do what we all want to, trailing them out to the street to watch the stretcher being packed into the ambulance.

  How long?

  I’m thinking of the runtish apple Jody left to wither, his experiment to show just how the heating leaches the moisture from everything. I get a flash of gums shrinking away from teeth, taste iron, push the image away.

  It’s only a few minutes later that the landlord emerges with a bulky orange tough bag. Sagging with cats—at least four or five of them, judging from the bulging sides of the bag, where you can see the knobby arcs of several spines showing though. And we realize: that long. It had let up weeks ago, all the yowling.

  The cats, like herself, are spirited away down the fire escape. We think the landlord might dump them in the garden to deal with later, but he swings the bag right into the back of his black BMW and drives them away, as if they are evidence of violent crime. We pull on our beers, watching him round the corner. All that time she just lay in there—did she just lie there? And the cats, did they …? I close my hand tight around a railing, my stomach pitching. Her kitchen window shows only clean white countertops, crockery stacked neatly on the draining board, a desiccated maidenhair fern on the sill.

  The ambulance pulls away, sans sirens. We stay outside another couple of hours, watching the kids carry each other up and down the fire escapes. Taking turns at being swung by their hands and feet, taking turns at being dead. Dead is the most coveted role. There are accidents, of course. More than one body is dropped, and forgetting it is a body, cries out. Nothing serious. I take one more swallow of beer, but it isn’t sitting right, and I let Jody have the rest.

  He accepts the bottle, attention still on the kids going through their rescue and recovery maneuvers. After a moment he brushes the back of his hand against my belly, where my shirt no longer hides the swell.

  He says, It’ll be easy, you know.

  What will?

  It’s just winter gain, he says, still not looking at me. It’ll drop off without you even trying.

  When I find no good way to answer, he takes a swig, embarrassed.

  Not that you’re not, you know, carrying it nicely, he assures me. What I mean is, you don’t have to go depriving yourself.

  I manage a nod, and he nods and knocks back the dregs.

  A parent calls down from a third-
floor window to shame the children for their disrespect, and they mug convincingly hangdog for at least a few minutes, before resuming their game.

  At five o’clock the pressure crashes, and the storm the radio promised boils towards us so fast it’s as if we are rushing to meet it, standing at the bow of a great ship. Banks of cloud like a mountain range rearing up to engulf the sky, blotting the light as in an eclipse. Leaf litter confettiing the air before the rain stamps it down in warm silver violence. The kids run circles around their yards, whooping and yelping, crazy as rain dogs.

  We go inside and turn all the lights on. Then we turn them off again and just lie down to listen. It rains us right into sleep, and when I wake hours later in the morning dark, it is still raining. Outside, the yellow haze of the city’s light is spread through the wet air like mustard gas, and I can see from the shape of Jody’s hair across the pillow how bad I’ve botched the cut. I’ll offer to try again, to fix it, it will seem excruciatingly important that I fix it. But he’ll say no, it’s no thing. He won’t get it. He’s what you’d call easy. They all are, these people you can have but not keep.

  In another room his laptop is still looping those five-hundred-dollar songs. McTell singing us down to hurricane season. Aluminum and wax. Fried food and petrichor. That’s what it sounds like. Creosote and damp, rotting wood. Things I want but will not ask for. I get up, shut the laptop off so there’s just the rain, and the radiators; the sound of doves and applause, like a magic show without the ahhhh.

  A few more weeks and the air here will fill with down from the poplars, tiny seeds riding in airships of white fluff. A different kind of snow. My lungs filling like wet goose-feather pillows as the swallows carry mud up to the eaves for nests. Homes built with pellets of mud and grass and shit and fur—that’s what’s holding everything together. That’s what’s holding everything together. I will watch this alone, shadows of the skis against the walls.

  In the kitchen I stand at the sink. I lean in, lower my head right into the stainless-steel basin, where everything is amplified. Feel the blood roll to my skull. Listen. For providence, or anything.

  Nothing, nothing.

  Just this warm, oceanic drift where language once was. Fathomless. I think of nostrils sealed over, eyelids near-translucent. Treading water: I was, I have been, but that’s done with. Here’s my foot brushing something slick and muscular, down there in the dark. I kick. We both kick.

  Anything Remarkable

  Certain days: it is easy to imagine this small, once-prosperous river town (barely distinct from many other small, once-prosperous river towns) as if you are only passing through it, shunpiking the thruways in favor of the scenic rural two-lanes on a road trip in your better, your best life. The life in which your formidable boxer-turned-human-rights-lawyer wife has simply pointed to this town on a much misfolded map and declared: Here, lunch. Possibly because of the town’s suggestive name, possibly because she is exactly twenty-eight miles from ravenous. You promise that after this town, from this town on, you will take over your share of the driving. Neither of you slept well last night, in a three-star last-minute in the town of Lake Whoever, but you’ve racked up several hours of passenger-side napping while your wife listened to the final chapters of Springsteen reading Springsteen, somehow keeping the rental car out of the loosestrife.

  Neither of you will have hoped for much from this town—sandwich, tank of fuel, leg stretch in view of water—so it is quick to outstrip expectation, quick to disarm you with sleek geometric shop-window typography and skeins of wild geese overhead (the geese, too, only passing through), with the ratios of porch swings to porches and tire swings to maples. The egalitarian yacht club with its yard of bright vessels (none of them yachts) wintered tight under blue-and-white ship wrap. The wood across the river a gentle riot of autumn leaves, the tree line a long, fire-feathered serpent outstretched along the bank, light breeze riffling its plumage.

  There is the occasional household stars-and-stripes, draped above doorways, between Neoclassical columns, but you don’t spy a single political sticker. In the spirit of cautious bipartisanship, one of you pronounces the town adorable, and the other agrees, True.

  Your wife parks beside the river. She has been your wife—you have been wives—for thirteen days, since a registry ceremony on the Ontario side of Niagara Falls, planned and paid for ten months in advance, because who could be fucked waiting for Australia to get its shit together? Since there and here you’ve compiled a mental list of fs that pluralise to v—life to lives, wolf to wolves, knife to knives—they all sound vital and gleaming. The river has been company since Tahawus, where it traveled under a different name. But it is freshly beautiful here, at this hour, in the cold gold ameliorating light that follows rough weather.

  As for the diner, it is patently ex-Brooklyn, and the menu is ex-Brooklyn, but the prices are ex-ex-Brooklyn. You order a vegetarian omelette, like a recuperating Alice Munro character. Your wife orders a turkey club that she will tear the crusts from like a child. And a quad Americano for the road (really for you).

  Okay? you ask, and she answers by taking a dessert spoon from the cutlery cradle and pressing its cold contours against one heavy eyelid, then the other. She lays the spoon on the Formica table and gets up without a word to look for the toilets.

  Is she still angry? Are you? Daybreak this morning, watching your wife’s face, too far from your face in the mealy motel light, recataloging and reapportioning all its trouble: the superior crease near-center of her brow, last night’s color stained into the deep grain of her lips. The thin, aquiline nose, twice broken; only once in the ring, only once by a woman. Your beautifully fierce, fiercely beautiful wife—what wouldn’t you do for her? You’re asking this now, in the ex-Brooklyn diner, asking it of the galactic melamine depths of the tabletop, fingertips seeking out the reassuring chips and divots in its surface. The server reappears with the coffee, in what looks like a soup container.

  Your friend, she begins—not blinking when you correct her; my wife—your wife, know if she’d prefer wholewheat, rye, sourdough, seven-grain …?

  Rye, you tell her with nascent authority, the deceased-estate-auction ring a ratifying weight on your finger.

  Your wife returns as the plates come down, heavy with home fries. You invite her into the game of wives-knives-wolves, and she ruins it.

  Rooves, she offers distractedly, tearing crusts away from her sandwich. Hooves. Loaves.

  The game is dead. She is still salty.

  Do you want a lover or a sparring partner? you asked her early on. You ask her again now.

  Both, she would have once answered. Today she says, I just want a good wife.

  Wifedom is new, but the arguments feel ancient. Inherited and irresolvable. Really there is only ever the one argument, for which the American hotel has provided optimal conditions. Every room seems purpose-lit. Recalling voyeuristic large-format photographs of intimate discontent, you close the blinds. It makes little difference. The sense of audience remains.

  It is not, has never been a question of Child vs. No Child. Only the interminable question of whose ovum, whose womb, whose body and vocabulary will be significantly reproportioned, whose career will take the harder spill.

  Is it marriage or the American hotel room that has thrown fuel at this argument? Possibly it has something to do with the ecliptic, all-consuming silences that enfold hotel-room rows, which you’ve come to suspect have something to do with the size of the mattresses. Could you pass all night in your own bed, in your own home, without speaking? Your own bed is simply not wide enough. How to resist, even when righteously furious, the warm skin of your lover? At home, atop your reasonably sized mattress, it might take as little as a sole of a foot pressed to the sole of a foot, as good as sorry, for the blame to be made deliquescent, divisible.

  The American obsession with vast mattresses—California King, Texas King—how to repair over such an expanse? It must have some bearing on the divorce rates in
this country. You’ve cracked it. You’ll write about it, for a Pacific magazine: the threat to intimacy posed by ostentatious furnishings, the correlation between acrimony and massive beds.

  Crushed into your coat pocket are some erratic notes written on hotel stationery, scratched out by clock-radio light at 4 a.m., while your wife was on the other side of a memory-foam tundra. She feels nearly as far away now, on the other side of the table, refusing your eye. Perhaps still upset, perhaps simply exhausted, hungry. Her orphaned crusts are piled into a kind of brush-fence. She has never been one to talk through a mouthful.

  In the hotel, you’d allowed her the last word. Or, from her perspective, had abandoned her with it, allowed it to poison the already voluminous silence:

  It’s not like you’re currently using your body for anything remarkable.

  Your body. Well. You use it to run around in sometimes. It has taken you almost thirty-five years to coax it towards a design you are almost happy with. Most days, nothing aches anymore. There is a dancer’s strength in your legs (satisfying, although you still cannot dance). Your back finally has that little furrow down the spine, instead of a devilish bony ridge. (Fuller, your wife calls this, meaning bloodgutter, meaning the groove swaged into a dagger.) In recent years, you’ve taken to wearing bold, striking garments, no longer made anxious by the unsolicited admiration of strangers, of being pulled up in the street to receive praise. But how much of this is your wife’s doing?