by Karen Smythe
No one, other than James and my mother, called me Maslen. Josh favoured Mazzie, which I liked too, because it reminded me of a name out of As I Lay Dying; James thought Mazzie was too close to Bessie, like a nickname for a car. Mazz was also out of the question for James, because it sounded like an insect, to him. I think my husband took me far too seriously sometimes.
***
As Ted became ever more serious about his studies, I missed seeing his silly side. And I missed seeing him. When he was accepted at U of T and moved to Toronto a few months after I did, he said he couldn’t live at my place — not because it was too small (which it was), but because he needed to be near classmates, study groups, hospitals. I didn’t pretend that I wasn’t disappointed, and he told me I was being selfish. “I finally get into med school, and you want me to flunk out, Mazz? Is that what you want?”
There were other clues I might have picked up earlier. We’d stopped telling each other everything after our second year together, but he wasn’t secretive, and when we did spend time together — to the last day — I didn’t doubt that we were still in love. I didn’t want — no, I refused — to doubt. By then I’d become so good at managing my reactions to Ted that I could have rationalized anything.
***
Something inside me shifted, when I met James. I felt a twinge of optimism at the glimpse of possibility, a slight lessening of the suffocating load of loneliness I’d been carrying for the six months since Ted left. A tiny bright beam let me see, briefly, another way to be, and a quiet, gentle voice said just one word: perhaps.
That voice had been right. I heard it again, the day James and I offered on the farm and we talked about what he might do with the land. I hoped James could hear it, too, and that it would keep talking to him. I suppose I was counting on that happening, because I didn’t seem to have any sway of my own with James by then.
***
A woman from the accounting department at work, someone I didn’t like very much, told a story in the lunch room that I couldn’t shake for a long time. It was about an accident she’d come across on Highway 400. She might have made some of it up, this woman. She didn’t like me much, either — she was heavy-set and mannish, and was sarcastic about my coordinated outfits and earrings (“Oh, aren’t we matchy-matchy today!”); she knew that James and I were the new owners of a property up that way, that soon we’d be driving that road all the time.
This woman was driving north to a friend’s cottage the afternoon she saw the crash scene. There were no flashing lights, since no police or ambulance had arrived yet, so she thought she should do something. She pulled over and walked toward the vehicles, a car and a transport hauling tires, and as she approached the truck she saw the driver sitting in his cab, trembling and sweaty. He’d hit the compact car that was lying in the ditch, pointing in the wrong direction. Half the windshield was gone, she said, and the other half was a shattered haze, so she couldn’t see the person at the wheel until she got closer. The body, which was still strapped in, was missing its head.
I thought of this headless driver from then on, whenever James and I were on the highway going to the farm. I drove on these trips; though James had been retired for a few months by then, he was still having anxiety attacks, debilitating episodes that would have put us in danger if he’d had control of the car. I didn’t tell him the story, for both of our sakes.
***
Gina, at fifteen, took our dad’s car out on Sunday nights after he was asleep, and drove her friends around. One Monday morning, Dad went out to the garage as usual but came back into the house before he’d started the engine. “Who moved the mirror and the driver’s seat? Motormouth, get down here!” Motormouth — that’s what our father used to call Gina when he was angry at her. But it had become an endearment, really, because he knew that Gina found it funny, so he kept on saying it.
Gina and I were in the bathroom upstairs, getting ready for school. “Learn from the master,” she whispered to me, before leaning over the banister to answer. “It was me, Dad! I wanted to find out what it felt like to sit behind the wheel. I can’t wait for our driving lessons this summer, that’s all. Sorry.” Her little finger, indeed. When Dad left, Gina told me that if I said anything to either parent, I’d live to regret it. She grabbed onto my skinny upper arm as she spoke, to make her point, and it took days for the pinch-marks to fade.
***
The action you perform with your fingers on a clay body when making a pot by hand is called a “pinch-bite.” The vocabulary for a potter’s material is anatomical. Chunks of it are called clay bodies. You take a clay body, my book said, and you make a vessel out of it: a pot with a belly, or a vase with a neck. Slip is the blood, which is just a watered-down bit of the clay it is taken from. Slip joins parts together by drying out, pulling a cup and a han dle, or a foo ting and a bowl toward each other until they are one. The piece is glazed, with or without colour, and this coating is the skin. Out of the kiln, twice baked into final form, it has bones. The vessel is something new made from something old, which itself came from nothing, if you go back far enough.
I paid close attention to the pages on pinch potting in Finding One’s Way. I learned what clay is made of — it comes from minerals and decaying animals and plants in the earth, the silt settling by accretion into beds next to or below the surface of water — and how its elements interact and are transformed. Moulding clay, for me, was like meditating without a mantra. I couldn’t help but ponder time and being and physical presence while I worked with it. Perhaps it had something to do with James, with meeting James at that time, or with a need to find some new meaning, or to become a new person.
***
Why Josh wanted to become someone new, I couldn’t say. But he used to talk about a Transcendental Meditation class he enrolled in, when he moved to New York City, to help him find his way. He hesitated to sign up, he said, because of his mother: she was enmeshed in the Far East meditation movement in the sixties and was on a manic bender when she fled to India, four-year-old son in hand. Josh watched her give birth to her guru’s child, down on the mat she and Josh shared in their cell at the ashram. He said his half-sister — what was her name? — was the ugliest wriggling little thing he’d ever seen, when she emerged from between his mother’s legs. He was five, by then.
But she was a pretty child, with a light Kashmiri complexion and black curly hair. By the time his father went to India to take the kids home, Josh’s hair had grown past his shoulders and his dad told him he looked like the baby’s older sister. The girl went to live in New York with an aunt, spending some time each summer with Josh, his grandmother, and his dad in Toronto.
***
I remember Josh liked to play the big brother when his sister visited, driving her wherever she needed to go, buying clothes for her and taking her to concerts. I met her once, when the three of us went to hear Genesis at the CNE grounds, the year that “Follow You Follow Me” was a hit. As we sat on the ground with Josh in the middle, I remember worrying that the sun would liquefy my makeup before the set was over. I hadn’t wanted Josh’s sister to come with us, but I was glad that she was there to distract Josh, so he wouldn’t be looking at my face the whole time.
***
When I was in university, I always put on my “face,” my full makeup, before I dialed Josh’s number. I didn’t realize how strange that was, until now.
When we spoke Josh told me what he was reading —Isherwood, Baldwin — and I told him what I was writing for class. My assignments were “representations of female consciousness” in Woolf, “birthing imagery in Surfacing” — that kind of thing. It was the heyday of feminist literary theory, and my professors told me I had nailed the critical approach, that I should do graduate work on women writers. “If you do, you’ll be studying the same thing as Rachel,” Josh said in passing. I knew Rachel was at U of T doing a Ph.D., but Josh hadn’t spoken of her for a couple of years. “What a couple of mensches.”
Be
tween calls, I wrote to Josh — long, well-scripted letters about my thoughts and memories and impressions. I turned nearly every experience I had into a story for him. Sometimes I was writing letters in my head about the things I was doing at the same time I was doing them — pouring solvents into beakers in the chemistry lab, when I was still in the Biology program; eating campus-cafeteria broccoli covered with melted Cheez Whiz; or seeing an exhibit at the gallery in downtown London with Aldo, a guy I dated for a while. My present life was over there, at a remove from myself, lived as it was for the purpose of entertaining Josh, of drawing him to me, of forcing him to think about me — at least for the time it took him to read the handwritten missives from the smart girl back home.
***
With James, there was no posing. Our being together felt natural; that was how I described our fledgling relationship, when I called Gina to talk about it. James had arrived, and our connection simply existed, on its own terms, without any need to draw him closer or to imagine what might happen in the future. I suspected, in the beginning, that if we continued as a couple, if our pairing lasted, I might eventually understand what contentment felt like. Perhaps, I thought, I could learn how to be. Just be.
***
Early on, when I was at Ted’s apartment in London for the first time, I heard the kettle boiling in his galley kitchen. He was going to make instant coffee, all he ever had, but he didn’t get up to pour the water when I nudged him. Instead he looked me in the eyes and said, “I’m falling, Mazz. And I don’t mean off the couch.” I smiled and kissed him, or tried to, because we both were smiling. When I pulled back, I said, “Bear? I’m already down on the ground.” Later in the evening, he gave me an exquisite piece of glazed pottery he shouldn’t have splurged on. It was a tall, slim coffee pot, pale blue with yellow lines that swirled in an abstract pattern, made in Turkey. He’d bought it at the international craft fair in the student centre, he said. “It’s for us, but I want you to hang on to it. As a symbol.” Of domesticity, I assumed, or perhaps of adventure. Either way, it was a start.
***
It took James many visits to the pottery studio where he’d first seen me before I would agree to have a coffee with him. Then, one night, I let James walk me home. I asked him in for a drink, and that was it — we became a couple.
***
I’ve always liked older men, and I was surprisingly confident talking with male professors. I spent time chatting with them during office hours, which led to on-campus lunches with a couple, and off-campus dinners with one in particular. It was mostly innocent. The married biblical scholar with silver-speckled hair swept back from his forehead reminded me of an actor I couldn’t place; in class he spoke directly to me, as if no one else were in the room, and after my art trip to New York City we had several extended conversations about the Cloisters while the forty other students waited for his lecture to begin. I changed my mind about the political scientist after a few conversations that took too much effort to keep going, which made it awkward when he asked if I’d be his date at the department’s reception for a visiting diplomat. I said I had to study for an exam early the next morning and was relieved when he ignored me for the rest of the semester.
I was most interested in Prof. L., who was Jewish, and who’d given me permission to take his advanced literature course without having the prerequisite. We shared an addiction to Woody Allen films and Indian food, neither of which were easy to find in London in the eighties. He’d been a business major headed for law school before he’d discovered he could apply his analytical bent to literature, and teach.
I liked Professor L.’s voice, its intonations. If he called before going to get takeout, he’d ask, “Do you want to come with?” — the phrase Jennifer used to ask me, for example, to her skating club; Josh used it, too, when he’d invite me to run errands for his grandmother with him.
I told Josh about Prof. L. on the phone one night, and after a long pause he said, “I always knew you’d end up with a professor, Mazzie.” Even though this happened after the Letter, Josh sounded sad to me, so I told him I hadn’t ended up with anyone, not yet. “I’m only twenty-four. Everything is still ahead!”
I was still new to literary studies then — I really didn’t know much at all — but I was trying to look intelligent — in a vintage sort of way, like Virginia Woolf or Simone de Beauvoir — by wearing my now-longer hair pinned in a loose topknot. Gina said I looked like a light bulb, with my hair piled up on my head that way, but Prof. L. said it was classic, and he liked it on me. (He put this and a few other complimentary observations in a note tucked into a graded paper he was returning to me, a few weeks into the term. Reading it in my apartment that night, I thought, Wow, you really shouldn’t have put that in writing.)
Prof. L. didn’t act like a world-renowned scholar or show off his knowledge the way some of my other professors did. He thought we should keep our relationship platonic (I remember trying to make a joke out of that, saying something stupid about Aristotle) until his course was over; he didn’t want anyone to accuse him of unethical behaviour at that stage of his career. He made sure that couldn’t happen: when I received my results for the year, my mark in Prof. L.’s course had gone down by two percentage points.
***
Soon after Ted graduated with his MD — on a day that was already hazy and grimy, the worst kind of weather for migrainous me — he woke me up and said he had something to tell me.
The first time he said that, we’d been together only a few weeks, and I’d said I had something to tell him, too. We were celebrating the end of mid-terms with a night in at his place. We splurged on Chinese takeout and, because it was cheap, a bottle of the only Canadian white wine you could get in the eighties — not Baby Duck, but close. We’d spread a blanket out on the living-room floor as if we were on a picnic, and Ted pulled a single rose out from behind his back. I kept it for the rest of that year, despite my aversion to dried flowers.
What he said that night on the blanket was this: “You’re so beautiful. And it’s natural to love beautiful things. Maybe that’s why I love you.” I said that was exactly what I was going to tell him. “That I’m beautiful?” “No, that I love you.” “Phew!” he said, “I thought you were going to tell me you were pregnant!” We rolled around on the floor in each other’s arms, laughing.
What Ted needed to tell me on that hot, sticky Toronto morning five years later was this: he wanted a break. He wasn’t ready for the next step. He needed another few years, he said, before he’d be ready for the future we’d been talking about since the day we met.
I was on my side and Ted was lying behind me, one arm flung over my waist as he spoke. I didn’t say anything and the minutes went by. I gripped his wrist, hard, to prove to myself that he was still there. But he wasn’t, not really. He’d already let me go.
six
There was no big bang when I met James, no magic, no map to each other. Our life was built of layer after layer of time, the two of us standing next to each other. It was a matter of collusion instead of collision, decisions instead of chances, deliberate satisfaction instead of unattainable desire. It was a good life, one that I’d expected would end in our old age, James going first only because he had an nearly twelve-year head start on living.
***
I needed to make room for some of James’s things in my tiny apartment. I threw away some items I’d stashed in the linen cupboard, including a failed plate I’d made in my beginners’ pottery class — a heavy slab, thick with glazes that bled into each other and produced unnameable, ugly colours. But James rescued it from the trash. “It reminds me of our first conversation, and how we met.” I thought I heard a slight whine in his voice; it was the first inkling I had that James might be more sentimental than he let on, and I wasn’t sure I liked it. But I’d kept the Turkish coffee pot from Ted for all those years, after all.
The next year, when James helped me pack up for our move into this bungalow, I put the pot
tery plate in a box destined for the Salvation Army. Again James found it, and said he wanted to keep it. “James,” I said, “we can’t hang on to every object we’ve ever owned for the rest of our lives.” But he insisted. “I don’t want to keep every object, Maslen. I just want to keep the plate, okay?”
I don’t know where that plate ended up. I don’t remember throwing it away, but I can’t recall seeing it again, either, after I moved out of my apartment.
I’d taken that place six years before, when I moved back to Toronto to start my job. I took the Yonge subway from Lawrence Station to the ESL school south of Dundas every morning. From the first day en route, I thought of Josh when the train stopped at Eglinton Station, where I used to catch the bus to go to his house. It had been well over a year since I’d heard from Josh by then, and I hadn’t been thinking much about him — not since I met Ted, in fact. But for a while, twice a day at that stop, I’d feel a weight settle in my chest, and I’d sink momentarily beneath a little bit of sadness. Sometimes I’d forget to inhale for a few seconds and then suddenly suck in a lot of air, as if surfacing after being underwater for too long. I was embarrassed at making a noise like that in public, so I’d fake a cough and wonder where I’d ever gotten the gall, back then, to spend afternoons with that beautiful boy.
The last address I had for Josh was in Oslo, where his then-girlfriend, Ingrid, was from. They’d met on a shoot for Vogue and stayed with her family between assignments — I knew that much; he told me about her in his last two letters. I assumed it wouldn’t last, that he wouldn’t stay overseas permanently, because of her. “No attachments, Mazz, you know me,” he’d say, and I was always relieved to hear it. He’d always had lots of women, stunningly beautiful women, in his life, but none of his affairs lasted very long.