This Side of Sad

by Karen Smythe

  ***

  I left James alone at the farm for longer and longer periods of time, skipping one or two weekend visits in a row. But I didn’t leave him. Our marriage had not derailed. We were still together, moving in the same direction, but we were no longer sitting together on the train; we’d each moved to the window seats on opposite sides of the car. I couldn’t tell James this, but I didn’t want to go to him — over there, to the worried side he favoured, where he wanted me to join him. I hadn’t become despondent over my own medical crisis, and I wasn’t going to overreact to his invented one. Surely he knew me well enough to understand that?

  The distance between us gradually lengthened as the days and nights came and went, came and went. The gap grew wider without my noticing.

  ***

  My double mastectomy was two years ago, come August. I recuperated quickly, but James didn’t seem able to accept that. At the time I wondered if he had hoped to take a few weeks’ leave from the classroom to nurse me, if he’d imagined I’d need him in that way. When I watched him put lesson plans into his knapsack and go out the door, I had the strange feeling that he was disappointed in me for recovering so well.

  Some weeks later, James became convinced there was something wrong with him, with his lungs. He’d never been a hypochondriac, so our doctor took his complaints seriously, but all of his test results were negative. The CT scan, MRI, chest x-ray, stress test, blood work: all normal. Still, in the evenings at home he’d choke up suddenly, gasping for air and clutching at his neck; and then it started happening in the middle of the day, more and more often. Eventually the doctor concluded that James must be burned out from teaching. His father’s deterioration and my illness could have been triggers that pushed James over the limit. The doctor encouraged him to take it easy, recommended early retirement, and put him on Valium.

  ***

  A doctor put me on Valium the day after Ted left me shattered. That’s exactly how it felt, too — I was in a million pieces, worse than Humpty Dumpty; I was paralyzed, catatonic. My boss, Nancy, arranged an emergency house call from my family doctor; before she returned to the school, she picked up my prescription and came back to put the first dose at the back of my tongue. “Maslen, come on, please,” she said, after I gagged on the sourness and spit the tablet out. “It’s easier to get my cat to swallow a pill! Open up, okay? You’ll feel better, I promise.” She took the bottle with her and left me two days’ worth at a time. I was too numb to understand I was on a suicide watch.

  After a month I was able to accomplish one or two things each day, like washing my hair or buying peanut butter; but I was still fairly doped up and not ready to go back to work. During one of Nancy’s daily calls, she reminded me about an education fair that I was supposed to attend; I told her it would be impossible.

  “Maslen, my girl, you have to get over him. You’re an independent woman with a job to do, right? A job you need to do.” I didn’t say anything. “This isn’t the nineteenth century, you know — you can’t sue Ted for breach of promise, like some Jane Austen character!” I didn’t answer. “That was supposed to make you laugh.” Nancy had been married to Oscar for two decades by then. Oscar was a friend of the cousin who sponsored Nancy to emigrate from Egypt; she wasn’t in love, that would come later, but she knew the marriage would help her application to stay in Canada. “Maslen. No man is worth what you are doing to yourself.”

  That was over thirteen years ago. No, fifteen.

  ***

  Semi-conscious in the recovery room after surgery, I was kept so sedated that I began to hallucinate and, I was told, to talk out loud. I imagined I was speaking to Ted. I told him that this time, it wasn’t benign, and this time, I really did lose body parts — two of them! I heard him say, “I still love you, Mazzie! I’d love you even if you were just a head!” But that wasn’t true; Ted did stop loving me, though exactly when that happened I’m still not sure. And long before that day when I embarrassed myself with drug-induced antics, I’d lost track of him.

  That’s not true, either — Ted disappeared, that’s what happened. He left the city for his internship without telling me where he was going. Without thinking about what that would do to me. The impact it would have.

  How did “impact” become a verb? It doesn’t even make sense, to claim something’s “impacted” you — unless you need a dentist. Or an enema. James always laughed when I said things like this, at least until I had the surgery.

  Making James laugh had been so easy. And Tony, too; it was easy for me to be relaxed with the two of them. After James and I had been dating for a month or two, I realized I had my sense of humour back. Laughing felt so good. Ted had been so moody and unresponsive in our last year together that I’d stopped attempting to joke with him; after he left me, I came to doubt that I’d ever been funny at all. With James, all we did when we weren’t in bed together was laugh. Sometimes we laughed in bed, too. There were no early lovers’ spats; in fact we never argued, not even after we’d been married for years.

  So it was strange when James became irritable. It started sometime before my operation. He’d be annoyed at me for not putting the lid on the jam jar properly, for instance, or for leaving the light on in the basement. But I wasn’t concerned. He annoyed me, too, when he put the lids on jars so tightly that I had to ask him to open them, or when he turned the light off while I was still in the basement laundry room, and I’d have to climb the stairs blind. I noticed the change in him, yes, but I thought it was probably about time we got on each other’s nerves, now and then.

  I didn’t argue with Ted, either, but for different reasons. If we’d stayed together, though — if I’d had the nerve to push back — I imagine there would have been some serious, nail-scratches-down-his-back kind of fighting. I remember thinking shortly before marrying James that if I were to see Ted somewhere — on the subway, say, or in a lineup at the LCBO — I might need to be physically restrained from pounding my fists on his chest and shrieking like a cat in heat.

  I often did go back to Ted, in my mind — to the scenes I replayed like movie clips — until I married James, and vowed to forget. I had to, to give James a fighting chance. And me, too. To give me a chance to love James as I should. Did. As I did.

  three

  Early in our relationship, when our bodies were new to each other, James was keen to find out what I liked best in bed. And out. He was an explorer, and his discoveries delighted him, while some even surprised me. I liked walking down the street holding his hand, wearing no panties under my dress, wondering if a breeze might lift it, if I’d let that happen; I liked his fingers probing my vagina in the dark at the movies, even when someone was seated on my other side; and I liked standing in front of my kitchen window facing the parking lot, holding a vibrating dildo against James’s glans, then putting it, sperm-covered, inside of me until I came.

  We sometimes imagined Tony was back there in the parking lot, astride one of his motorbikes, watching us. James would whisper in my ear, “Of course, you’ll need to do something for him, too…” and I’d say yes and we’d come at the same time. After a few months, to prolong the pleasure before I answered James’s question, I whispered, “When? When are we going have Tony out there, for real?” and we exploded: our orgasms were so powerful, the lingering so persistent that we couldn’t separate from each other for half an hour afterward.

  I’m not sure if James ever told Tony we’d included him in that sex scenario, but I liked to think he had. He probably did. After divorcing their first wives, James and Tony competed over women, and one way they did this was to tell each other what their dates had said during and after sex. Tony won first prize with this classic, according to James: “Some people have greatness thrust upon them; others have greatness thrust into them.” I don’t remember what I might have said along those lines for James to report, but whatever it was, it added a buzz to seeing Tony socially. For a while he’d smile and look askance at me on greeting; and if we happene
d to sit next to each other on a sofa or in a bar booth, his left thigh touching my right, neither of us would budge.

  Toward the end of the intimate life I shared with James, I played a game he didn’t know about. I would lightly guide his hand, slide it across my face, from my cheekbone to my jaw and the tip of my chin, then slide his fingers down my left side, over ribs he called speed bumps, teasing us both by slowing him down on the way to my hip bone. Then I’d put the pad of his middle finger at the top of my clit and slide it down to my cunt, and start tapping, slapping his finger against it until two of his fingers plunged in and out and continued to pleasure me there.

  I’d close my eyes and remember lying with Ted, both of us so slender our hips would bruise each other’s flesh. I’d think of the day he skipped an Obstetrics lecture and found me reading in the campus medical library, where I was waiting for him, and took me home to his apartment — and what I liked to remember was the moment I realized, with Ted inside of me, that his roommate was standing in the dim doorway, barely visible, watching. James, without knowing it, would take me all the way to that exact moment when the warming wave started, and it would course through my body and move up and out through my arms, my legs, my ebullient toes.

  ***

  I met Ted in the final year of my BA, when I took a required Introduction to Modern Literature course. Ted, thinking it would be an easy A, was taking it to raise his grade point average. When he walked into the classroom, he immediately stood out from those pale, puffy, sexless boys who found solace in books. What would Ted need solace for? He wore his hair side-parted in a classic cut, short at the sides and longer on top, and he had a craggy, working-class profile with smile-lines by his eyes that gave him a look of permanent happiness. He wore beat-up cowboy boots and an old, beltless black trench coat. Tucked into Levi’s, his button-down shirt was as white as a new lab coat.

  Most university students still carried knapsacks in those days, though a few sad souls carted around hard-shell briefcases they probably received as high-school graduation gifts. My carpet-bag purse suited the low-couture, vintage style I cultivated, and it was large enough to hold my course books and notepads, while Ted carried a World War II–era case I later learned was a Gladstone. He’d bought it at a pawn shop because it reminded him of an oversized doctor’s bag. It was hard not to notice Ted, but after he’d walk by I wouldn’t look over to see where he sat, or with whom. That might have been why he noticed me — because I didn’t pay much attention to him.

  Partway through September, he walked straight toward me and slid his bag under my desk, bumping my feet, interrupting a conversation I was having with the person beside me. Then he leaned his elbows on the desk, facing me, and asked me to help him with the course. “We can be study buddies,” he said, smiling. “You can tell me what it all means.” His deep-set dark-brown eyes seemed to sparkle, but really, they were devouring black holes, sucking everything in.

  We were having a dripping-hot Indian summer that fall. I knew Ted had a girlfriend, a blond Business major named Barb, but I also knew that they were seeing other people — at least that was what Ted told me. He was quick to flirt and just as quick to walk away, and I could pretend to be like that, too, when I wanted to. So I called him — maybe I even called his bluff. The ruse I used was that we could talk about our first assignment, an analysis of the last stanza of Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour.” But when Ted arrived, I was wearing a black one-piece bathing suit with denim cut-offs over it, to hide my skinny thighs. “I’m going out to sit in the sun,” I said. “You coming?”

  We were both olive-skinned and tanned quickly. I had taped aluminum foil over one of my Springsteen double-album covers to intensify the rays of the sun, and though I faithfully used sunscreen as Josh insisted I do, I could feel my skin cells sizzling. The redness was a welcome camouflage for the nervous blushing I was prone to. Ted asked me if I ever went topless, and when I said, “Only in France,” he seemed to believe that I’d been there.

  We talked non-stop, about music, friends and family, religion, our ambitions; I behaved as though I knew myself through and through. I told Ted I’d taken a left turn away from a life of science and was more interested in pursuing a life of the mind. I said this so confidently that he didn’t dare ask me what that meant, which was a relief because I had no idea. On the way inside to get a cold drink, we passed the mirror in the lobby of my building; he put his hand on my shoulder to stop me, and held it there. “We look really good together,” he said, “don’t you think?” I took his wrist, led him down the corridor to the door of my apartment.

  In the bathroom I threw a man-sized blue-and-white striped shirt over my bathing suit, then pushed its straps off my shoulders. “Oh, you got dressed,” Ted said when he saw me, but he cheered up when I asked him for one of his famous back rubs; Tanis, my roommate, had heard from her Biology classmates that Ted bragged about his skill to entice girls to undress. Face down on the sofa, I rested my chin on my folded arms and said, “Knead me, you fool,” so Ted slid his hands up under the shirt-tail. I let him massage my muscles for a while before I slowly rotated onto my back. His feather-light fingertips brushed my skin, glided along my turning torso and onto my breasts; his surprise at this windfall turned to a smile of pleasure when he felt my nipples pushing against his hands.

  Nearly a year later, I graduated from Western and moved back to Toronto to work. I took a lease on a small studio apartment, because Ted was supposed to stay on in London, to study for yet another year and then try again to gain admission to medical school. He blamed me for the last round of rejections. It was because he’d fallen in love with me, he said, that he didn’t work hard enough. He fell and he failed. No — I’d pulled him down, that was how he put it; I’d felled him, as if he were a tree.

  ***

  Using a diaphragm for birth control was awkward. I could never time it right or get used to the interruption, so I wore it every day. When I became itchy and uncomfortable, I had to stop using the spermicide for a few months. By the time Ted started medical school in Toronto (he got an offer of late admission, in late September), I’d missed a period and was sick to my stomach most mornings. The stick in the kit from the drug store turned blue.

  I was both panicked and excited: the timing was not what Ted and I had planned, but we were going to have children someday anyway, so why not start our family now? I called my sister first, to talk — to hear her say that it was okay, that it was great if I had my first baby while I was still living close to her, so that the child would become her kids’ favourite cousin before Ted and I moved away.

  But Gina was annoyed. She said times were different now, that “it” could be taken care of. “You have no idea, Mazz, how much work kids are. Think about it, you know how Anna drains me! And sex? Forget about it. For a long time after, it ain’t going to happen. Besides, Ted just started medical school. You can’t do this now. Don’t be stupid, just call that clinic on Harbord. Okay?” A couple of days went by, and I hadn’t yet told Ted about the test. I planned to call him when I got home from work the next night.

  The cramping began before my stop, and I could barely squeeze through the doors of the subway car as they closed. When I reached street level I doubled over, clinging to the turnstile, breathing hard until the pain subsided. People pushed against me, cursing that I was in their way.

  It was early October and unusually cold, and a little bit of light snow like goose-down floated in the air, melting on my skin. I inhaled and blew my breath out slowly through my lips, the way I’d seen actresses do on TV when their pregnant characters went into labour. Once home, I found that a thick fluid the colour of beets had flooded my panties; my body was flushing it out of me with wave after wave of pain. Later, the globular clots that fell into the toilet were deep, deep garnet, almost black, and it seemed a long time passed before it was over. I called Ted, not right away, and I told him only that I’d had some stomach cramps.

  When I told him the truth the
next time I saw him, I expected he’d embrace me, tell me not to worry, we had lots of time — cry with me, even. I knew it was better to prepare and plan for children, but to me the miscarriage was still a loss. I thought Ted would understand this, when I confessed what had happened, but he barely blinked. “Why should I be upset about something that I didn’t even know had happened?”

  ***

  After many months of thinking, of wondering what really happened to James and why, I am not any wiser. But I have decided this: if James caused it, if he had hidden himself in the woods and waited for the right moment to move, to rustle dry leaves underfoot so the gun’s sight would swing toward him, then I’d forgive him.

  I know what it’s like to think the day might come — is near, even — when there’ll be no other option. I did. At fifteen, midway through grade nine — my last year of junior high — my closest girlfriends made new friends and began spending time with boys I didn’t want to know. I felt abandoned, no longer known, and a strange shame settled itself deep inside me. It infiltrated and spread itself through me like a controlling parasite, pulling us both down below the lowest depths where, welded together, we hovered, holding each other tight in the dark. My core had otherwise emptied out. I knew there was something missing in me, and I awoke each day feeling that my shell, my carapace, was hollow, hollow and echoic, and that I was only a partial person. Some dark beast had become my master. My own cold heart hated me.