Whirl Away

by Russell Wangersky

  They’re on the edge of adulthood, both of them—Eva sixteen and Sarah eighteen—and their heads should be full of summer jobs and university and the inevitable crushing crisis of lost or abandoned boyfriends. Or even girlfriends—I wouldn’t mind that either. They shouldn’t have to be trying to keep me cemented together and whole and on track, shouldn’t be virtual slave labour in their own personal house-flip show. They shouldn’t be cleaning and scrubbing and getting ready to start packing again.

  But tomorrow we have to paint, regardless. It takes two days for the smell of new paint to fade, even if I’ve got the dehumidifier going. Real estate agents know all about fresh paint; their noses bring them right to it, like a ferret to a rat, and that always leads to questions.

  There are showings scheduled for Thursday, and by then the house has to look like someplace else. It has to be the kind of dream that makes newlyweds grab each other’s shoulders and whisper that they have to have this place, even if I know that it’s all staged, like a specialized and carefully drawn lie.

  Hello fly, my name is spider.

  I’m outside having another angry cigarette, and I’ve got the portable phone out at the very edge of its technically possible universe. Even one foot more and the dial tone will just simply fade, leaving only my own voice ringing back at me through the handset, with a flat echoing sound like talking into a big empty cardboard box. Out here on the back deck, the phone is creating its own nimbus of sound, its own aural aurora borealis. It’s full of pops and snaps of static, random fugitive electricity, so it sounds like I’m calling him from Borneo, even though we’re only on different sides of St. John’s. The serene and temperate continent of Shaw Street is calling the distant island nation of Forest Road. Sometimes you want to be an island, your own whole continent, just so you can keep your coastlines clear, with someone always up high, marking the horizon for the arrival of unexpected strangers.

  Listening to the crackling phone, I imagine all the electricity leaking out of the houses around me through cracks and fissures—snatches of fights, recriminations, all of it sinking into me like microwaves; that someone will break in on the phone line at any moment and snarl “Go fuck yourself,” and I’ll have no idea who it is or whom they’re saying it to, but the tone will still make me shiver as if they’d said it directly to me.

  Michael’s probably downtown, probably on another bitter little kicked-out tear around the downtown bars. He’s raw right now. “Sometimes,” he said to me, “it just feels like I’ve pitched forward off a bike onto the pavement and ripped off every square inch of my skin, and now the salt truck’s going by.”

  I know that feeling too. I’ve had it more than once, recognize parts of it as if it were symptoms of a cold—headache first, then runny nose—but I don’t rub Michael’s nose in it. I think it’s probably better for him to work through it all himself.

  I see him every day because we work together, so it’s not like I can’t keep an eye on him and monitor all the symptoms. “Mary Wells, relationship nurse, understanding is our specialty.”

  Mary Wells Furneaux for eight years, Stan Pender’s “partner” for a few years after that, then Paul Reid’s long-time, long-suffering girlfriend—nothing else ever offered or, really, expected. Not from him.

  Just Mary Wells now.

  I tell myself I can stay on the phone for exactly as long as my cigarette lasts, and then it’s back to work.

  I know he’s on the run now, fugitive and hard to pin down. Intellectually, I know he’s got to get through a whole bunch of stuff on his own without me hanging on his shoulder. Problem is, I’m not always intellectual. Sometimes, emotional, human Mary just wants someone’s arms wrapped around her.

  I phone him again anyway. The machine again. “Leave a message.”

  I think of all the messages piling up in there like little pink electronic slips in a box, in careful chronological order. Like geological layers smacked down in the silt and then compressed, so some scientist could dispassionately look at them all later and chart the changes in tone, the elevating stress levels in my voice. I picture a graph projected on a screen, and a serious man in a lab coat aiming a pointer at an ever-increasing red line. “At this point, you can see the first signs of the real pathology developing . . .”

  “Michael.” I say it just like that. Full stop, like I’m a telegraph operator sending out a careful message in an obscure and little-known code. “I hope you’re all right. I hope you’re having fun. I’ve got the girls working like dogs in the bathroom, and I need some advice.”

  Much more formal, staccato this time, the lab coats would note, crabbed handwriting in small field notebooks whose pages take ink even in the pouring rain. Well, fuck all the scientists and their notes and their experiments too.

  Stop, inhale, not too hard, breathe out again, smoke up all around my face like my mouth has suddenly turned incandescent and any words that come out of it will scorch.

  “I’m thinking I should strip down the border around the living room, put a lighter one up.” I don’t know why I’m even talking to him about it, because things like this, he doesn’t have a clue. Family law he knows—but decorating? I might as well be talking to a post.

  Michael’s been a lawyer for twenty years or so, a partner now, and I work with him at the firm. “The firm”—that’s almost funny. Williams, Carter and Wright, Family Law, three lawyers in a downtown street-front walk-up, two secretaries and one dogsbody—me.

  “We’ve got the basement completely cleaned out now, and the driveway’s piled up with stuff. I don’t know if the garbage truck’s even going to take it all, so I was thinking—”

  Click. The machine dismisses me. I’ve overstayed my electronic welcome again. I could call back to finish the thought, but why bother? I’d just make it abundantly clear that I’m performing the desperation chorus, a song sung in many parts by one voice—and all of them are mine. The thought of it makes my throat clench, and I fumble another cigarette out of the pack, even though I’ve only just flicked the last butt out into the grass.

  I’ve got to remember that too, before Thursday: rake the yard. A forest of cigarette butts is an easy horror to fix. Not like bathroom taps that were installed badly and don’t come off as easily as they’re supposed to. That was three hours of work that I didn’t even have on my list, and it gave me bleeding knuckles, too.

  Later, I can’t find the phone. When I do, it’s on the railing outside, and it’s like a dead thing, completely cold to the touch.

  We haven’t slept together at his apartment yet. His office, yes, and in the hotel across the street, and even a few times at my house. But his apartment is sacrosanct, like a vestry or something, right now. I even called it that once, “the vestry,” just joking, but it went right past him, and he sat there blinking at me as if the words didn’t make any sense.

  He keeps saying he wants to invite me over there for dinner, but he hasn’t yet. I think he’s building it in his head into something more momentous than it should be, charging the event up with all kinds of impending expectations that are really only guaranteed to make it fail. It would be simpler if we just fell into his apartment, if we just drove by and he said, “Why don’t you come in?” but I think we’re past offhand and into that curious preserve where every single thing is suddenly fraught. He’s expecting perfect, trying almost to manufacture it through sheer force of will, and that’s exactly where things always start to crash and burn.

  The first time we slept together—okay, the first time we had sex—was almost by accident. You have to let things happen—just let them happen. Preparation? Lawyers call it mens rea, the guilty mind, the fact that you know something is wrong and make it happen, go ahead with it anyway. But it wasn’t something I was planning, even though I knew things between him and Beth were rocky. I really don’t think it was something he was expecting either.

  As trite as this sounds, we were working late, and in a romance novel it would be “and then we touched,
” and the fact is that we did, the outside of his left wrist on the inside of my arm as I put a case file in front of him, and that was all it really took. I can forget a lot of things, just let them slide out of my head, but I’ll never forget that touch, the way it shot right through me, an unexpected antidote to restraint, and an overdose at that.

  It was the kind of explosion where clothes get ripped and the tender, confused part is all in the afterwards—when the drugs wear off and you find that you’ve actually wound up in a different place. That all the math has changed, and it’s almost sad because, when you think about it, you realize that you liked the old math just fine too.

  We picked up the files we had knocked off the desk, and then we went at it again on the floor.

  There’s dignity for you.

  Carpet burns, legal files, and hard, fast, intense sex with someone else’s husband.

  Two in the morning, and the bars aren’t even closed, so I shouldn’t have to start worrying that he’s thrown it all in and gone back to her.

  I worry about it anyway. Repeatedly.

  What a mess that would be—my house already on the market, my job suddenly in limbo because there’s no way she’d have him back with me still hovering around his desk every day, asking him to sign things and ignore the proximity of my breasts. I mean, I’m good at what I do and there’s always work for good legal assistants, but this is a small town and the word gets out quick, especially in the legal fraternity. And a fraternity it is, too. A lot of old boys, and they run into each other at court and pass around all the good gossip: which criminal defence lawyer’s slipped into a coke addiction, who’s on the edge of being caught with their hands in their trust accounts, which member of the esteemed bar has developed a predilection for administering the estates of near-blind old ladies, and charging the old biddies creative fee scales too. And inevitably, who’s sleeping with whom.

  The day wouldn’t be complete without sharing that hot gossip, and I imagine Michael and I are pretty juicy conversation right about now.

  The girls have gone to bed, their eyes hollow with a full day of hard work, and I can’t imagine it will take them very long to fall asleep. After they’re asleep, there’s no one left to rein me in, no reason to keep my voice down or anything.

  “Leave a message . . .”

  I imagine Michael coming home and seeing the red light flashing, a bright little flash for every message, and I imagine him leaping straight through to crisis in his head. With the calls I’ve made and just hung up, there must be seven or eight flashes on the machine, visual Morse code for “helphelphelphelp.” At least, that’s the way it would seem to me. Maybe he’s already home. Maybe he’s picked them all up already. And maybe he’s out on his back deck, looking down into the valley over all those roofs and smoking, wondering how to disentangle himself from the arms of a girlfriend who’s clearly insane. Maybe he’s thinking that a cold, formal marriage is looking a hell of a lot better than someone who’s clutching at him all the time, someone who knows better but is doing her damnedest to smother him anyway.

  If I was a friend of his, hearing about me, I’d advise him to get away from me as quickly as possible.

  The house smells like caulking and I’ve broken a wineglass, frantically trying to rub shoe scuffs off the bottom of the outside front door. Sometimes the front door sticks at the bottom in the summer. When it’s humid, the casing swells, and then we just kick the bottom corner of the door when we turn the knob and push it open.

  I’ve been working out in the cold, the wine next to me, and when I knock the glass, I’m sure it’s landed in soft snow, but there it is, all in shards anyway, looking like some kind of special ice. The spilled red wine has left a small stain like piss from a tiny, critically ill dog. A small dog who’s lifted his leg in disdain and then disappeared again, too light and fleeting to even leave footprints in the soft, drifted snow.

  The door’s not sticking now, but the little black smears of rubber left by our shoes have defeated every single cleanser until, in frustration, I got out a can of paint thinner from the basement, and that took the marks off—but it took the paint off too, so now I have to repaint. And it’s hard to know how well the paint’s going to go on in the cold, whether it will even stick, when nothing else in my life ever seems able to. I think my neighbours must be used to seeing me sitting on the front stairs crying by now.

  On the phone again. It’s after three, and he really should be home. I count each ring with my hopes falling, because it’s a small place and he’s usually on the phone by the third ring. It gets to four and I’m ready for the machine again when Michael suddenly answers.

  He’s drunk. Really, really drunk. But that’s okay, because it’s that nuzzly, needy drunkenness, that warm-blanket, sloppy-kissing, maudlin kind of ardour that topples into snoring before anything really gets going. Luckily, not the screaming “You’ve destroyed my family, you bitch” kind of drunk, although I’m always waiting, always afraid that might be what I get when he eventually picks up the phone. Put it this way: I hope for “wish you were here” and almost always expect “wish you were gone.”

  I can hear how drunk he is right away, the way his voice has dropped a full note in the register, the way some of the words have softened at the ends, the consonants losing their shape or just their way. He’s got a mild St. John’s accent that creeps out when he’s had too much to drink. His words are louder too, like the liquor has made him slightly deaf.

  “You’ve had a night, then,” he says, the phone held crazily away from his mouth so that he sounds like he’s talking on the wall phone in a warehouse.

  “So you got all my messages,” I say.

  “I was going to call, but I was having trouble with my shoes. They seem to have developed a peculiar kind of knots all their own.”

  And then I hear it. That self-deprecating chuckle that’s as much him as his smell is; as much him as where he puts his hands to move me around when we’re making love, never speaking, as silent as if it was all as important as ritual.

  I don’t know why—I want to be angry with him for putting me through the evening, but all at once I feel the frustration vanish, like the dam’s burst and it’s all just run away right out of me.

  “Sounds like you had a night too,” I say, suddenly relieved. Everything I needed to talk to him about, well, I don’t need to hear about anymore. Security is like an anchor, and I can feel the bow of my ship turning up into the wind, everything safely in place again. “Get some sleep, love, and call me in the morning. When you can.”

  I know that he’s going to be hurting in the morning, that he’ll replay all the messages—if he hasn’t accidently erased them all—and then will spend the day trying to make amends for my panic. And that will be all right too, because it will be sweet and painful and magical.

  Beth’s lawyers served him with divorce papers a week after she found out, right after someone called her with one of those helpful anonymous “I just think you should know” calls.

  I can’t ever let it slip that I know exactly who called her—that it was actually me—and I can’t ever let it out, not even when I feel the words trying to bubble urgently up in my throat. Not even when Michael and I are drunk and naked and coiled up together on the bed, post-coital and confessional. I know those words are going to try to escape, no matter how diligently I try to keep them back, because part of me needs him to know how desperately I want him with me. I know that small act is always going to be something that’s caught there between us. That’s a hard way to start a relationship, with a dirty little secret wrapped up tight and hidden away, when you’re supposed to be just getting used to sharing everything. But for me, it’s a trade-off. Because I also know about what kind of bad behaviour you can defend and what kind you can’t. What you can explain and what you can’t. Because everything was down on paper, everything that we were going to do, all on that napkin and agreed to, even if it hadn’t been set in motion. I just hadn’t expected it
to be so hard.

  The front door is closed behind me, and I’m leaning my back against the cold metal that I’m absolutely sure will never take paint cleanly again, looking at the pile of garbage on the driveway and thinking about every single thing in there that’s made each of the last moves with me.

  I hadn’t expected that everything would feel like a stone dropped to the bottom of a very deep well.

  I’ll spend another day painting, and by the time we’re done, the girls and I will have the house spotless and as downright cute as we can, ready to make prospective buyers think about exactly what they can do with every room.

  I’ll make spice cake on the morning before the open house, and I’ll leave it to cool on the counter while we’re out.

  I hate spice cake.

  That’s a small—but necessary—secret.

  THE GASPER

  D AVE SIMPSON WAITED. It wouldn’t be long, he thought, and he tried to keep his breathing even and slow. That’s what they would expect him to do, that’s what they would tell him to do. “Just breathe slowly, sir,” they’d say, just like that, pumping up the blood pressure cuff and checking his pulse before they even asked his name.

  They’d ask his name even if they already knew it. Dave knew the drill—he’d heard it plenty of times before. Different paramedics, but the questions always the same order, the pattern set, Dave was sure, to cut the risk of mistakes. They’d ask a few questions, listen to the answers to try to make sure he was breathing properly, ask him if he was in any pain, where the pain was, and then they’d start the formal workup, one of them putting the details down in their notebook in quick shorthand, the other one with their hands travelling around his body, feeling here, looking there, like they were following a familiar road map.