by Karen Smythe
James took on my emotions, not as his own, exactly, but as his responsibility. He didn’t dwell or delve, as I did, but he believed it was his job to make me happy, to keep me happy. On days when I turned inward more than usual, when I veered, even slightly, toward sadness, he didn’t absorb my downturned mood or worry that he might have had a role to play in bringing it about. To harbour concern about his place in my heart wouldn’t have occurred to him. James’s approach, always, was to pull me out of myself with laughter.
Our sick day, the day James pulled me off of the mattress and into his embrace, might have been the last time he was himself, completely himself. It was mid-May and too cool for bathing suits, so after we made love and showered we took the subway down to Queen, and an eastbound streetcar to the Beaches. We walked to the Fox and considered taking in a matinee, but the day was too beautiful to sit in a dark theatre. After perusing the goods in second-hand bookstores and funky consignment shops filled with antiques painted turquoise and purple, we had sweet-and-sour chicken balls and wonton soup at the diner known as the Goof, and then we strolled, arm in arm, along the windy boardwalk, which — other than a few dog walkers — we had to ourselves.
James kissed my forehead or my cheek every few yards, and once, when he dipped me a little as if we were in a ballroom, we lingered in the kiss like a couple captured in a still from a black-and-white movie. Before we went home that day, James stood on a promontory and shouted part of Hamlet’s “to be” soliloquy at the seagulls. It was the only speech he remembered from high school, and he called it out like a celebratory song. As I watched and listened, and remembered how much I’d loved that play from the first time I read it, I became filled with joy. James, for years, had always seemed to know how to show me where the joy was.
It was only a few days later that I had to tell him the news my doctor called me about: this time, the lump in my breast was malignant. When James didn’t say anything, I added, “It’s fine, hon. I’ll just have it removed.” James, eyes narrowed, said, “Why? Why you?” and I said, “Why not me?”
I’m lucky, that was my first thought. It was a small, contained tumour that could be completely excised; I’d not been randomly hit with something worse, like ovarian or pancreatic cancer. Some of our friends and acquaintances had faced brain tumours and coronary disease, others had children with frightening problems like juvenile diabetes and debilitating developmental abnormalities. My mother died of acute leukemia before she was fifty, and all I had to deal with at forty-three was a little lump! “Things happen to people,” I told James, “horrible things that can ruin your life, even if you don’t die right away. That’s not me. I’m going to be fine!” But he wasn’t fine, and I didn’t get it. “James, come on. It’s not like I’m losing an arm or a leg.”
“I’d love you even then,” he said, but that wasn’t my point. I just couldn’t get him to see my point, and he couldn’t get me to see his — I still don’t know what his was. My diagnosis, it seemed, had shunted us to parallax positions, as if suddenly we saw our future, our coupledom, through very different lenses.
***
“To Maslen and James, and to your future!” Tony toasted for the third or fourth time, holding up his refilled goblet, and we all clinked glasses again. We were at a restaurant, celebrating our marriage with Tony and my best friend, Nancy, who had stood for me; Tony was James’s best man. They had been friends since they were kids; they travelled to Europe after teachers’ college, and then spent a semester teaching Business English to employees of a large corporation in Kyoto before taking permanent positions at the school where they still taught, in the north end of the city.
Tony was my competition, in a way, so I was relieved, when James introduced us, that we hit it off. Tony was as important to James as a brother; dislike on either of our parts would have stirred up an untenable tension that I knew James and I wouldn’t be able to surmount or survive. But we did survive; we thrived, even, our little group. It was just the three of us for years and years, because while Tony was always dating, he made sure it never lasted long.
One night he and his date were over for dinner, and James served a risotto with baked yams and Cuban chicken, simmered in orange juice with pan-fried onions and cumin seeds. The garlic was the coup. Using a scalpel he brought home from the lab at the high school where he taught Biology, James had made several incisions in each breast, dissecting the skin from the flesh. Then he’d inserted whole garlic cloves into these pockets, clamping the edges of the skin together with those tiny-toothed clips that come with Tensor bandages, before adding the chicken to the pot.
I don’t remember Tony’s girl’s name; she barely said a word all night. As we ate, Tony thought up medically related titles for cookbooks that James could make a killing on. Cooking with Needles; Flavour Emergencies; Kitchen Operations. The three of us were drinking the bottles of red Tony had brought, getting louder and trying to outdo one another, while the girlfriend sipped at sparkling water so she could drive Tony home. I know it wasn’t fair of us, and it wasn’t like me to be so inconsiderate, but it was fun to exclude her. I know the need to be part of a group is normal, and I’ve always been aberrant that way; but after that night I thought I understood why those in a circle can be cruel to those outside of it: it’s not the thrill of power, primarily, but the fear of a shake-up, of instability, of loss. I liked being the sole female, playing that role in our trio. You can trust the structure of a triad, I thought then, the way you are supposed to be able to trust a family.
***
Not being a part of Ted’s crowd was fine with me. By the time Ted graduated from medical school, he’d spent a lot more time with people I didn’t know than he spent with me. Maybe that was my first mistake, not wanting to hang out with them more often. No, not mistake — it was probably the first significant difference between us that I should have paid attention to. The person Ted became in the end wasn’t drastically different from the man I’d fallen in love with five years before, but different he was.
In the beginning, Ted and I talked as if we had to get caught up after some grievous separation during which time we’d done our growing up. One day when we were still silly with new love for each other, Ted jumped into a grocery cart that was abandoned outside of my building, and I pushed it back to the store across the street. A woman heading to her car in the parking lot smiled at us and said, “It must be love!” After that day, we’d go to the store at night, grab a cart, and I’d push Ted through the empty parking lot while we took turns making up “if” questions: Would you love me if I was bald? If I was a midget? Would you love me if I was a quadriplegic? If I had no arms? We always said, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”— which was so easy to do, because at that age you never expect disaster will strike, do you? You think you’re immortal when you’re in your twenties; you think you’re both immortal when you’re in love. And you think that that love is permanent, too — and that you have all the time in the world to keep it alive.
Our first picture together was taken in the curtained booth at the mall. Ted liked posing for photographs. He was always seeking the admiring lens; being camera-ready was part of his persona. We crammed ourselves in to get a strip of four black-and-white snaps of our pressed-together faces. There was a blinding flash with each click, so we forced our eyes to stay wide open as if we had toothpicks between the lids. It made us look both amazed and afraid at the same time.
***
When I started sleeping with Ted, who thought condoms were so high school, I asked a student-clinic doctor who looked to be about seventy-five years old for an IUD. I couldn’t go on the pill because it would make my debilitating migraines more frequent, and because I was prone to breast cysts — a double whammy for side effects; but the doctor I saw wouldn’t abide my request. He said young women my age tended to have many partners, and that there were many bugs out there that cling to the device’s wires “and lead to god-knows-what down the road,” meaning infertility. I didn’t particularly
like the idea of having an object embedded inside of me, the way a working desert camel has stones shoved through its cervix, so I didn’t argue with him, but Ted was ticked. He insisted I get a diaphragm.
Ted came with me to the campus clinic for “the fitting.” We joked that it sounded like I was buying a wedding dress or a custom-made bra. I filled in a form in the waiting room, and Ted asked me if he had to sign anything, to declare that it was his dick that was involved. “Not unless I’m going to have to prove paternity down the road,” I said; he laughed and turned my face to him, cupping my chin, and we kissed.
Ted and I had planned out the next decade of our lives, the first year we were together. He’d finish medical school while I worked, doing “something interesting,” and then we’d go wherever his career took him, and we’d travel as much as we could until we settled somewhere to raise our children. He had all kinds of ideas about what he wanted to accomplish in the world, from making cancer-research discoveries at the Mayo Clinic to going on space missions as an astronaut to building a clinic for the poor in South America while living in a yurt. Grandiose? Sure. But Ted’s excitement was contagious, and I had no trouble imagining us living any one of those lives. I would have gone anywhere with him.
Falling for Ted, falling with him, was so tender. We fell, but it felt like we were rising. I expected to stay up there, well above the line between sadness and happiness, forever — I’d just stay where I’d landed that first day. And I did. For five years, I barely looked down.
***
A year after we met in university, at Western in London, I moved back to Toronto, and Ted followed a few months later. I’d started working as an international recruitment officer for an ESL school, a job that took me to countries I might otherwise not get to, and I loved it — the travel, the bonds I developed with students and their families. For the next couple of years, Ted would pout for a few days before each of my trips, and he’d be upset if I didn’t have time to call him from a pay phone before I boarded the plane for wherever I was headed. Later, though, he’d grow impatient during the calls I did make, and we didn’t have much to say to each other. I thought that was normal; we’d been together for over four years by then, long enough, it seemed, for the novelty to have worn off a little. Surely that happens, I thought, even if you are very much in love. When I’d ask him if he’d miss me, he’d say he wouldn’t have time for that, he had clinical rotations to get through.
On some of those long flights, though, I worried that Ted was flirting with nurses or spending too much time studying with a certain female classmate he occasionally talked about. At those times I tried to remember what it was about me that Ted had fallen in love with. Who was I when our being together felt, for both of us, like being alive in a completely new way? I’d forgotten who I’d been, at the beginning of us.
Toward the end, I’d started to ask Ted only if he’d be thinking of me while I was away. Not missing, per se, just thinking about. “Yeah, sure,” he’d mumble. Finally, I stopped asking; I just told him to think of me. “Think hard,” I once added, but either he didn’t get it or he wasn’t listening.
two
“Maslen, you are everything to me.” James had written this on the last anniversary card he gave to me, the September before he died. It had upset me, this confession from James — James, who’d needed no one, when we met; self-sufficient and wholly satisfied James, who’d seduced me into a comfortable zone we inhabited — cohabited, I thought. Ours was a plateau of contentedness that had been difficult to reach, for me. Years in the making, in fact. And then, suddenly, he’d shifted ground on me. How had we come to this?
I couldn’t lift my face to look at James after I read his message. Some of the words he’d penned in ink began to dissolve, blue streaks trailing behind the drops that splashed and spread across the paper. James must have thought he’d touched me then, reached me, broken through the calm he’d loved, at first, but gradually came to resent. It was my strength that he resented, I think, after I was diagnosed and did not collapse. And then, weeks later, he became despondent. I didn’t know why, but he was despondent for a few months, at least until we hit upon the hobby farm as an answer to his needs.
We’d been married for thirteen years, that September. He died in October.
***
I waited until after Christmas to go back to work. But when I walked through the doors each morning of that first week, I was unsteady on my feet and shaky in my limbs, and I had the urge to keep going around the revolving door until it deposited me out to the sidewalk again. It seemed to me that I wasn’t supposed to be there. The decision to end my career early was easy to make.
Some months before my diagnosis, I’d been thinking about retiring anyway. James encouraged it; I hadn’t enjoyed my job very much since the corporate takeover, and we had paid off our house, so we’d be able to live comfortably on James’s salary as long as he kept his teaching position. His pension would be decent enough to live on for a while, too, and money from the sale of our house later on would carry us through old age.
As it turned out, James retired before I did. I hoped the country property we’d found — a farmhouse with some acreage —would be a distraction for him after he left teaching. I was fairly certain that it would reconnect him with the outdoors, with the physicality he used to enjoy when he jogged and lifted weights — when he cared about keeping his body conditioned, when he was proud of being more fit than I was, almost twelve years his junior.
James immediately took to the field behind the farmhouse, to the shaggy wildness that ran all the way back to the woods at the edge of our land. He grew up in a rural area outside of Barrie, just south of the farm, so the area was familiar to him; but I’ve always been a city girl, and the vastness of the view behind the house unnerved me. I didn’t want to deprive James of the peace it seemed to give him, though, so we adjusted to my being in the city while James stayed on the farm, and I visited on weekends. “Conjugals,” we called them, before our marriage began to suffer. How odd that sounds — the marriage suffering, I mean, as if it were a person.
***
We bought this house a few months before we got married. It has a certain ease; the yard is low-maintenance, which suits me, though James would have preferred greenery to the rocks and pebbles in our small patch of front yard. It was probably a typical-size house for a small family when it was built in the late forties or early fifties, with one bathroom for two adults and two or even three children, who’d share the second bedroom. We kept the retro feel — the pelmet above the picture window, the checkerboard black and white tiles on the kitchen floor, the rounded arches between the living and dining rooms. These days they call tiny homes like ours “tear-downs,” because most of them get replaced by two-storey mausoleum-like structures, with footprints stretching to the lot lines. For years, realtors have been putting letters in our mailbox, asking if we’d like to put our home on the market, but we were never tempted. Neither of us needed or wanted any more than what we already had.
At the farm, we had four bedrooms upstairs, a living room, a room with a woodstove, a dining room, and a sunroom; James joked that we needed walkie-talkies so we didn’t lose each other. We furnished two bedrooms and bought some second-hand furniture at an auction in a town nearby. The kitchen came with a harvest table that could have seated a family of ten. I imagined a tired, plump, practical woman who spent hours making bread and serving meat and potato midday meals to her brood — a husband, several brawny boys and, if she was lucky, a girl or two to help with housework. A woman with little choice in her life. Her home had become a “hobby” property for us, city people I’m sure she would have disliked.
I didn’t like being there. With all that land and open sky, I couldn’t relax enough to fall sleep until the wee hours. It was too dark, too quiet.
***
When James’s health got worse, when he’d gasp himself awake three or four times each night, I moved to the guest room across th
e hall. James was exhausted all the time, so we saw our family doctor.
“It could be sleep apnea,” he said. “It’s a disorder where you stop breathing, for no reason at all. Your body becomes oxygen-deprived and wakes you up. To make sure you inhale.” James wouldn’t see a sleep specialist, though. He refused to spend the night away from me in a lab, hooked up to equipment and watched over by strangers. I didn’t blame him for that; there was something humiliating about the procedure, the relinquishing of control. I didn’t think that apnea was the problem, anyway. James wouldn’t tell the doctor about his nightmares, at least not in front of me.
***
After I’d been with James for about a year but was still living in my own apartment, Ted called one night at two a.m. I was still awake because James had left only a few minutes before; he had an early-morning squash game and had forgotten his racquet at home, so he wasn’t sleeping over that night. I assumed it was him calling to say goodnight one more time.
Ted was surprised I didn’t sound sleepy, so I told him my boyfriend had kept me up. How good it felt to say that. But Ted didn’t react at all; the call was all about him, about my failure to acknowledge something important. “This is the first time you didn’t wish me a happy birthday,” he said. “No card, no mesh— no message.” He wouldn’t remember talking to me the next day, that much was clear. I reminded him I didn’t have his address or phone number. There was a long pause and I could hear him breathing. I knew that laboured sound well; after Ted spent a night out drinking, he’d breathe through his mouth when he fell asleep, drawing in gulps of air as if the alcohol hadn’t left enough room in his blood for oxygen. I said, “What is it, Ted, what do you want?” and finally he said something that sounded like, “Why aren’t you here with me Mazz I’m here do you hear me?”