As she listened to his voice, she was surprised how much her body relaxed at the sound of it. The year just past when they had seen each other at intervals no longer seemed a chimera. She had known better than to imagine a married man would leave his wife. Nor, most of the time, would she have wanted him to. She probably could not have handled it. Yet a large hole had existed since last she saw him that was no longer just about Jerry’s absence.
“Keep painting,” Hans’s message continued. “I have images of the work you are doing.”
Well, yes, that she would continue was now a given. She wondered about his life in the country, the farm with animals, and the place where he grew vegetables. If he lived in a house in downtown Toronto, she wondered if their affair would have happened. She supposed it would have, given the electricity of his piercing awareness.
“I’ve been lying here, trying to recover. And all I seem to be able to think about is you,” he said. “I’ll get in touch when I’m feeling better.”
As soon as that happened, he would probably be busy. Ever since he was interviewed about his psychic ability on a recent television show, she presumed that he would have become swamped with new clients. Just as he had been when the issue of Toronto Life gave him the plug that had led her to his office. Still, he had called. That surprised her. Looking at the telephone, she considered what she might say to him.
“I’ve missed you,” Sue said to his answering machine. “Get well quickly.”
So there it was. She thought his laughter and spontaneity were what she missed most. For a while, she had actually imagined he would arrive one day to tell her his wife had left him. The fantasy had continued with an invitation out to see his place in the country where she would meet his horses. Sue, meet Velvet. Meet London Fog.
Sue listened to his message again, aware there was every reason to back away, to dismiss him. Instead, she had already responded. She supposed both curiosity and loneliness motivated her. But it was more than longing. There was some magnetism between them. Why me? Why now? Such questions were now constant companions. She had thought men had affairs with younger women, not with someone the same age. All along, every time she thought about him, or saw him, there had been this intrigue. He had told her stories without revealing any personal information. Maybe he liked that she listened.
Once, he had said, “I like it that you always knew I’m just another person.”
She guessed he had forgotten that at first she had not. It was almost as if she fed a deep hunger in him, a hunger for contact with someone who was as mysterious and yet opaque as he was. She was of his own generation, too, even if from the comfort of small town Canada. She knew the music he knew, a song like, “Lili Marlene,” evoking something for her also.
At intervals after that message, she found his voice again on her answering machine and was reassured, but about what she was not sure. That he existed? That he was still out there? That one day he would come for her? Then came the moment he actually did reach her and she found herself fumbling for words. On the waves of memory came tumbling out all the long-ago times before she met Jerry when she had realized a relationship with a married man would reach some stagnant and rotten core that became insurmountable and backed away from it
“I’ve been waiting until I felt more settled to call,” he said. “There’s stuff. And I’m not sure I can deal with it.”
“Stuff,” she said, that word again. “What kind of stuff? Did your wife find out?”
“No, not that.”
“Well, what then?”
“I’ll call soon,” he said. “We’ll plan something.”
“All right.”
He did not say goodbye, nor did he hang up. Sue waited, imagining him sitting at his desk, looking up over the top of the reading glasses he sometimes wore on the end of his nose. She thought about his long, curly hair, of the intense blue of his eyes. She did not like the thought that theirs might be a tawdry affair, nor that his wife might be hurt by it.
“Listen,” he said. “I feel so dislocated somehow. I’ll call you soon. Okay?”
“Yes,” she said. “Okay. But please don’t take too long.”
When she went out the door onto the street, a slight breeze blew leaves around her feet. The oppressive heat of yet another summer had lifted. All around were signs of fall, a season that presaged the grey gloom of November and the first anniversary of Jerry’s death. She remembered him that last autumn when the leaves flamed crimson, when the grass needed to be raked, when the first gentle flakes of another winter began to fall. She had a jigsaw puzzle in which all the pieces were askew. In the worst way, she still missed Jerry. And yet, she had done what she had promised herself not to do. She shook her head in disbelief. A vision of Jerry’s gaunt face, eyes filled with pain, momentarily obscured her vision. And she recognized that she had fallen in love with a man she still scarcely knew and he had already been her lover. Such passion as she felt for Hans she had never expected to feel again. And, even if she could, she would not erase the memory of him. His exuberant gesture after the first time they had made love was still clear in her mind. A dozen pale peach roses he had sent, wrapped in transparent paper, tied with a bow. The sense of discovery that they had both acknowledged that had made them feel like teenagers. As she crossed Spadina and wound her way between the people on Bloor Street, she thought how little she knew of what was going on in Hans’s life. At the same time, she longed to see him.
Overhead, a plane flew across the city toward Pearson International Airport. Watching it begin its descent, Sue imagined herself on one leaving for the West Coast where at the furthest edge of land the Pacific pounded ceaselessly against the shore. Or she imagined crossing the Atlantic to a city in Europe. Anywhere where she could escape. But she knew there was no place where she would not think of her unexpected lover.
Climbing the steps of the porch, Sue felt a heaviness descend and an awareness that she was entering a house with memories that might cave in on her the moment she opened the door. Maybe I’ll move, she thought. She needed a place to be another woman, not a widow who watched her husband die of cancer, not a woman whose thoughts were consumed by a man who was married. This would be some other woman entirely. She did not know yet who that would be.
There was a pile of mail under the slot in the door. Sprawling across the sofa, she started to slit open envelopes and idly scan their contents. There was a flyer from the University of Toronto, only a few blocks away. She read it carefully and decided she would do something to distract her. A week later, after registering for a course on scientific illustrations she had come upon quite arbitrarily, she began to attend lectures. Looking around on the first evening, it seemed likely she was the oldest in the small group and she was glad when one of the younger men, a gay man she surmised, took the seat at the table next to her.
The next week, he sat beside her again.
“Hi,” he said. ‘Mind if I park here again?’”
Of course she did not.
Soon, she was immersed in the nerve impulses of a cockroach and discovered little spines emanating from its legs. Next, they were told to chop off the legs and stick electrodes into a spine to stimulate it. The young man flinched as she stuck the instrument into one insect and she felt her curiosity expose her cruelty. Her curiosity won as she watched the legs that were connected to an oscilloscope measure any reaction that was amplified by another machine so that the class could also hear it. She did not yet know what the point was unless they were about to be asked to do sketches of different stages in the torture of a cockroach.
“Your turn,” she said, turning to her colleague.
“Carry on,” he said. “I’ll watch.”
He was not at the next class, or the one after, but by then Sue was so engrossed she scarcely noticed. At home, she had begun to paint the insects. It was not long before she realized small, precise illustration
s did not interest her and suddenly a cockroach took over almost an entire canvas when she returned to her study in the house on Walken Avenue. It was at least three feet across and reminded her of a Magritte rock almost filling a large room. She was aware of following a dual path, the one of careful presentations on paper for the classes and another where she was creating huge bugs and animals in vivid colours. One was a spider in hues of purple, yellow, and red caught in a huge web on one canvas. There was also a cockroach in a leopard skin. One night, she had nightmares about hurting the cockroach.
The next weekend, she wondered if acrylics were really her medium. Her subject was an ant with rectangles making up its body. Maybe water colours? When she finished, it would become one of her Bug Series.
Hans, why don’t you call? she wondered. I need to know why. As time passed and she did not hear from him, it was not at all okay even though she thought she ought to give him the time he needed.
*
You have to see it, Maggie wrote about their new piece of land. High on a hill, overlooking the landing for the ferry from Vancouver Island, the view alone is magnificent. We haven’t decided what to build there yet so we’re going to rent a place nearby for Christmas. What about coming with us?
The enclosed photographs of yellow broom in bloom were beautiful. A piece of a dream. A dream Maggie had talked about of a road with trees on either side, winding upward on the edge of a steep incline over a harbour.
This invitation came at an opportune time, Sue thought. Otherwise, she would spend the whole season longing for Hans, the plight she supposed of any woman who became involved with a married man. And even more difficult when she did not know when or if she would hear from him. She had returned to teaching and would have a long enough break at Christmas to make the trip. The thought of moving there had vanished, but she still loved the beauty of her sister’s surroundings above the water in West Vancouver. And Saltspring Island intrigued her. Even though her sister’s world had always held endless fascination for her, they had not been close as children. When Maggie had gone away to university, Sue had actually been excited when she returned home and listened hungrily as Maggie and their mother talked, sitting together at the kitchen table. She remembered thinking that maybe now Maggie would see her as more than a little kid. But Maggie had acted as if nothing had changed and turned to ask her to get her slippers. It had made Sue feel like a dog asked to go and fetch. If she did go, she would not hear what Maggie and her mother said next, but if she did not Maggie might not ever tell her anything. Or she might have started to ask their little brother, Wally, who was five years younger than Sue. Then where would Sue have been?
Everything had changed when they were older. Sometimes, Maggie had been there for Sue, as she had been during Jerry’s illness and after. Or, she would call during a grey, wet spell in Vancouver. It had also been awhile since Sue had seen her nephew and two nieces. Or Vancouver. She recalled standing in Stanley Park, looking out over English Bay and up at the mountains on the north shore. Counting the ships in the harbour. She’d had time to wander or sit on a log or rock near the water, looking off into the distance. She had watched the sun set over mountains and had gone around the sea wall on a bicycle.
The prospect of spending the holiday season with Maggie and Angus and their family would be a way of celebrating some of what was going well in the world. Also she would know they would all honour Jerry’s absence. She thought also of telling her sister about what had turned into her good news about Thomas. She was not ready yet to tell Maggie about Hans.
So it was that Sue flew across the continent in record time on the Friday just before Christmas, glad to be away from Toronto and the endless waiting to hear from Hans. The hope that she would, but never knowing what to expect. As she descended on the escalator to the carousel in Vancouver where her baggage would soon appear, she could see Maggie standing off to the edge of the crowd. She waved and they moved toward each other, meeting in a warm hug.
After Sue had collected her suitcase off the conveyor belt, the two women walked out to the parking lot where it had started to snow lightly, not at all what Sue had anticipated in Vancouver.
“Surely this won’t last,” she said. “Doesn’t it melt between one day and the next?”
“Usually.”
Instead, it went on falling and on the morning they were to leave for Saltspring, the car was covered and the branches of surrounding trees were laden. After listening to endless weather forecasts and missing the early ferry to Nanaimo, they decided to make the trip in spite of the weather and set off with a frozen turkey in the trunk along with an array of tins, boxes, and wrapped presents. On Vancouver Island, they drove south to Crofton and took another ferry for the short ride to Saltspring. From there, Angus said, it was only a short drive to the cabin he had rented at a lodge a few miles from their piece of property.
“Across a body of water,” Hans had said. “There will be some unexpected occurrence and afterwards you’ll have a difficult time walking.”
Surely, this was not a significant body of water. Sue thought he had meant something like an ocean. Although the bodies of water that make up the British Columbia coast in and around all the various islands could be considered “significant,” she supposed. And if something was about to happen, at least Hans had also predicted that everything would be all right soon after. The thoughts of those words of his were fleeting. Even when she saw cars off to the side in the snow, two of them so twisted and damaged that it was hard to imagine anyone had survived, it did not occur to her that any harm would come to her here. After all, Angus had grown up in the north and was an experienced winter driver. Something she thought as she saw ambulances and police cars surrounding the accident scene.
At the dock in Crofton, after a short ferry ride across a thin strip of water, only a few miles on the road would separate them from the lodge. By this time, the snow had become so dense that they could scarcely see a foot or so ahead of them, but the ferry nonetheless pulled away from the shore. On the other side, Angus, followed by their son in their old red car, drove off the ferry. He turned gingerly out onto the road that wound its way upward out of the village. From her seat in the back, Sue’s shoulders relaxed as she watched the snowflakes. She hoped they would find a fireplace ready to light, with logs laid carefully across each other so they would burn easily.
“Oh no,” Angus said suddenly. “Oh, no.”
Swivelling her head to look, Sue saw a dark blue pickup truck sliding toward them and she cringed. Immediately after that came the impact and a loud crunch. As she was jolted forward, Sue could feel her whole body vibrate and their car slide toward the steep incline next to the road. Everything seemed to happen in slow motion and she was convinced the car would flip over. It was a surprise when it stopped moving, all of them still upright, the back end of the car almost hanging over the precipice. Sue waited for the drop to come, the final crash. When nothing happened, she dared to look around.
“The door won’t open,” Maggie said.
Sue looked down at the steep slope beside her, not keen to get out. Her door would not budge either, but after hearing a click when Angus released all the door locks, she tried again. Sliding out onto the snow, she realized she had landed precariously on a slight slope but that she was safe there if she was able to keep from slipping onto a steeper one that was so close she could not bear to look at it. Pulling herself to her knees, she reached for Maggie’s door. Sue’s purse and Maggie’s glasses lay on top of some luggage where if she leaned forward she could just grasp them.
“My face,” Maggie said. “My face.”
“It’s red,” Sue said.
“The air bag hit me in the face and knocked my glasses off,” Maggie said, her cheeks burning. “I can’t hear out of my right ear.” Gingerly, she too slid from her seat, landing next to Sue on the snowy slope.
Angus stood beside the other side o
f the car, watching anxiously to see that they were able to get out of the car safely. Then he moved toward a house close by where the driver of the pickup that had bumped into them was now trying to park.
“It doesn’t look as if anything is broken,” Sue said as she and Maggie carefully stood up.
Colin, Maggie’s son, inched carefully down beside them. Tall and lanky, he towered over them, his face ashen. “Are you all right?” he asked.
He took Maggie’s hand to help her up the bank while Sue scrambled along behind them. Colin said he and his two sisters, in Little Red, had watched helplessly, unable to do anything to stop the collision. The girls were standing at the top of the bank.
“Are you all right, Mum?”
Maggie nodded.
There was a dull ache down the middle of Sue’s chest. She could not figure out why because she had not hit anything. Colin reached his hand to her, but she was afraid if she took it the pain would increase.
Finally, she reached the top of the incline where they all stood, dazed, at the edge of the road. Near the house that Angus was now approaching, a young ponytailed woman in blue jeans and a heavy sweater struggled to get out of the pickup truck. She gestured wildly with her arms and spoke frantically to the man who came out the front door. They could hear her say it was the first snow she had ever driven through and she had put on her brakes the same way she would any other day.
“I was just about here,” she said. “I was just about home. And instead of the truck coming into the driveway, it slid the other way. It went out of control.” A little tow-headed boy hung onto her. “We weren’t hurt,” she kept saying.
“Thank heavens for that,” the man said, picking up the boy. “I’ll have to give you some lessons for driving in winter.”
Angus walked up to them. “I need to call the police,” he said. “And the insurance company.”
It was then that both the man and woman noticed the occupants of the other vehicle.
Would I Lie to You Page 16