by Karen Smythe
I moved back home soon after that conversation, to do temp work before my last year at Western. By the next summer, when I was back in Toronto for good, I heard Prof. L. had married a graduate student. I sent a card and a small gift, and he sent back a note to thank me. So began our friendly correspondence.
In one of his letters, years later, Prof. L. told me his doctor had found a melanoma, on his back this time, and he was taking two semesters off to recover from surgery and chemotherapy. This time. When I realized what it was he’d tried to tell me that night several years before, I felt ashamed, and childish.
I didn’t let myself examine my feelings then, but I am still ashamed when I think about that last evening out with Prof. L. I’d thought, while I was seeing him, that I was so sophisticated, but what I’d really been was judgmental and cold and wrong: I’d distanced myself from a man who’d tried to talk to me about being sick and surviving. Was his need to tell me a test, a means of measuring, through my reaction, how attached I’d become to him? Or was he trying to make sure I knew what I might be getting myself into, if we moved into a romantic relationship? I don’t know. I stopped that conversation without understanding what it was about, because I’d taken a hunch for truth. Worse yet, thinking I knew the truth — that Prof. L. was too needy for me — I turned away. That might not have mattered in the long run, because I really was not the right person for him, nor him for me.
But it did matter, that misjudgment. It mattered so much that I couldn’t tell Ted about the news in Prof. L.’s latest letter without a fistful of Kleenex. Ted interpreted my tears as sorrow over the sickness of a friend, but it wasn’t that. It wasn’t only that.
***
I am beginning to suspect that James’s anxieties had nothing to do with his hypochondria or fear of death. I think it was something else entirely, something deeper. Had James responded to something he’d seen in me, something that I hadn’t recognized — something, perhaps, that he couldn’t reconcile with the person he thought I’d always been?
James and I didn’t fall in love at a hundred miles an hour, then gradually slow down over the years; emotionally, we started in stasis, in contentment. We landed where we wanted to be. And it was fine, that place. It was where love existed without worry that there would be turmoil ahead. But James didn’t stay there. He slid into a state, without me knowing why, where space and time were fraught with friction, with long days passing, with diminishment.
***
When I turned forty, I felt I’d reached a peak: I thought I could see the shape of my life behind me. It was a physical sense of place and time, up there, and breathing the air at the height of it was invigorating. I’d stored volumes of my inner self — the people I’d been between ages twenty and forty — in secure, leak-proof vaults.
When James died I was forty-four, nearly forty-five, and I realized that seeing the past is not the same as understanding it, and that the shape of your life is always changing. Your past lengthens and flattens out, as you move forward; the amplitude of major events shrinks the farther away you get from them, like lines on the ECG of a patient with a failing heart.
***
When James and I had been seeing each other for two months, I handed him a key.
“What’s this, the key to your heart?”
“No. Just to my body. For now.”
“Okay. I’m a patient man.”
***
Tony’s eleven-year-old golden Lab had a tumour on the side of his neck, and in just a few weeks’ time it had grown to the size of a golf ball. James was at the farm when Tony called and asked me to take Zed to the veterinary clinic with him. The vet said the cancer was aggressive and inoperable but chemotherapy was an option to extend Zed’s life. I didn’t blame Tony for saying no.
After Zed was sedated and semi-conscious, the veterinarian shaved some fur from his hind leg and asked Tony if he wanted to stay while the barbiturate was administered intravenously. Tony couldn’t speak, so he left to wait in the car alone.
I patted Zed’s head and sat with him for a few moments before the final shot took effect. When he stopped breathing the vet donned her stethoscope and confirmed there was no heartbeat, but Zed’s eyes were still open, and I was sure I’d seen his chest rising and falling. “It’s just the air conditioning,” she said. “The current is moving his fur a little.” Zed had been breathing, blinking, panting, and then he was not. It was the humane thing to do, to take his life, but it was also a decision that would be difficult for Tony to live with.
The volume of Tony’s radio was turned up so high that I could hear Mick Jagger’s near-falsetto voice from the clinic door. It was the title song from Emotional Rescue, an album Josh and I had listened to on tape as we drove around Toronto the summer it was released. I smiled as I walked to the passenger side of Tony’s car, but not with nostalgia. I felt an unexpected surge of strength. I suddenly felt wise, aware of how much people are capable of giving to one another. I was grateful for the chance to support Tony in his grief; I was hopeful that he would visit James more often; and I was optimistic about my husband’s new-found pleasure, working with stone at the farm.
***
When James was at the farm and I was in the city, a glance at the bookshelf where my pottery book sat could bring early times with him back in an instant. I missed the energy that he’d brought into my life. The contrast between then and now struck me hard in these moments, but I believed I’d accepted what was left. I’d adjusted to the new James. He wasn’t feeling great, but he was so much better, and that was enough. I thought it would be enough.
***
It’s true that before James died, an old loneliness was creeping back in. Slowly, a little bit at a time. I began to think about close friends who had been important to me at different times in my life, and then not. About how I’d been Auntie Mazz to Gina’s kids, but when they hit their teens, I became their mother’s sister. About how time alters the nature of human bonds, but so gradually that you might not notice it’s happening until they’re gone.
***
Uncle Mark, my mother’s older brother, didn’t have children. He lived in the US and didn’t visit, so Gina and I didn’t know him at all, but Mom adored him. She talked about how clever and charming he was, as if he were an old boyfriend. When she called him at Christmas and on his birthday, she’d make herself sound perky, even when she was so sick from the chemo that she could hardly hold her head up. She’d summarize our family news for him, as if Uncle Mark had been dying to know every detail of our lives — as if she could conjure and transfer the intimacy that comes from the dull soup of dailiness by sharing pared-down anecdotes over the phone once or twice a year.
I listened to her talking to her brother, having conversations that could have been with any acquaintance, and I remember thinking, How can she be so distant from him, after growing up in the same house? At that time it was unimaginable that my sister and I wouldn’t speak to each other at least once a week.
When my mother died, she’d not seen her brother for decades. He came to the funeral but stayed in a hotel, not at the house with Dad. They didn’t know each other well enough to have breakfast in their pajamas, as my father put it.
Later, when Uncle Mark packed up his house in Kansas and retired to a condo in Florida, he sent Gina some pictures from his childhood: wee Mom standing two steps above Uncle Mark on the front porch, her arms around his neck; Uncle Mark with his football friends, Mom chasing a ball they’d tossed her way; brother and sister walking the family dog, an Irish setter named Billy, with Mom holding Billy’s leash and Uncle Mark her hand. She was looking up at her brother in that one, grinning as though he’d promised her the moon.
She had the same look on her face in another photograph he included in the packet — a wrinkled clipping from the newspaper of the small northern Ontario town where they grew up: “Local girl marries Toronto executive.” Mom was seated, her veil pulled back and resting on top of her bouffant hair-do; he
was standing at her side, reaching over to sign the register on the table before them. The long description of every detail — who her bridesmaids had been, who their dates were, the professions of several named male guests, the wedding dress (down to the pearl-trimmed neckline) — it was astonishing, that so much attention was paid to a relatively ordinary event. My sister and I used to laugh at our parents’ conventional fifties wedding, but when Gina and Ben decided to marry, she had her own gown custom-made to match Mom’s design. She took Ben’s name, too. She’d been practising her married signature for years.
***
Tony remarried in October, a few days before James died. His new wife works in marketing, for a corporation that trades in commodities of some kind or other. She likes to entertain, though I’d not received any invitation from her before the one for Tony’s birthday party. By then it had been months since I’d seen Tony — we did meet for coffee one Sunday before Christmas, when he was still a newlywed and I was filled with dread, thinking of the holidays I’d be spending with Gina for the first time in years.
Tony and Kathleen had unplugged themselves from the Internet while on their honeymoon, so I didn’t send an email when James died; I left a message on their voicemail, instead. Recording words that I knew Tony would not hear for several days might have been an easy out, but I didn’t do it to avoid the pain that his bereavement would inflict on me. I left Tony a message instead of waiting to tell him in person because his bond with James had weakened, of late, and I was afraid that the weight of his sorrow would not be enough.
James and I hadn’t seen Tony for weeks when he drove up to the farm last September, to tell us about his engagement to Kathleen. We’d not met her yet, because they house-hunted every weekend that July, and they spent all of August at her family’s cottage on Georgian Bay. Tony hoped we would come to the Jack and Jill shower that Kathleen’s friends were giving them before the wedding in October. They were going to be married in Hawaii, which was not like Tony at all — Tony, who had flown to Vietnam, Honduras, and Africa on summer vacations, and backpacked through Europe with James after university. A “destination wedding” was not something James or I thought Tony would agree to. We didn’t go to the shower.
***
The birthday party was in May. I was already an hour late when the subway was evacuated due to a medical emergency, so I hailed a cab. The driver told me that when the TTC says there is a medical emergency, it usually means someone has committed suicide. “A jumper, you know?” I hadn’t known; I’d been taking the subway for more than two decades, and I always believed that those messages meant someone had fainted, or thrown up, or had a heart attack.
A familiar fluttering in my chest reminded me that it had been a long time since I’d gone to a party. I’d never liked parties, which James had understood about me. In my life with Ted, I’d had to force myself to go to his official class gatherings and pub nights, to try to fit in with the other girlfriends. I went to the drinking sessions that followed every exam period throughout his four years of medical school, and then got Ted safely home. Before one of these evenings out, I said, “Stay with me tonight! My nerves are bad tonight!” — joking, but not really. Whenever I complained after that, Ted would imitate my paraphrase of Eliot. I can still hear his imitation of a high-pitched woman’s voice, and the sneer in it.
The celebration for Tony was held in the hotel where one of our favourite restaurants used to be — where James and I had held our small wedding-reception dinner. Renovated over the years, it was now swanky, modernized to meet “boutique hotel” standards — grey leather benches instead of armchairs in the lobby, side tables adorned by bamboo shoots in vases with glass pebbles on the bottom, and a clean white counter behind which well-dressed and made-up men and women stood, ready to serve. It had lost the casual, retro feel I had liked so much when James and I celebrated our marriage there. Tony would remember what it had been like; he’d celebrated with us that night. But that was a long time ago. Now Tony was married to Kathleen, and Kathleen was hosting this party for Tony’s birthday, and James was dead, and I wanted desperately to leave.
I climbed the wide, curved staircase to the second floor, where the celebration was taking place. Inside the party room, posters dangled mid-air from strings clipped to temporary hooks in the ceiling. These enlarged snapshots of Tony taken at various ages and stages of his life were scattered around the room in no particular order. I recognized the shot of Tony on his restored Norton motorcycle in the parking lot behind my apartment, that day James introduced us. Tony had brought his camera with him and asked James to take the picture, so he could send it to some woman he was wooing; he still had his full head of hair, then. And there he was in childhood, his blond hair cropped in a buzz cut, standing in front of a garage with his older brother and sister.
There were many photographs that James had taken on trips the two had taken before I met James: Tony in a white T-shirt that glowed in a windowless bar in the Mississippi delta, cigarette dangling, empty jugs of beer on the table; leaning against the wall outside the courthouse in Barcelona, where he’d been caught hot-wiring a Peugeot (the judge believed him when he said thought it belonged to a friend who’d lost his keys — had his bride heard about that?). In these Tony was looking straight at James; I was looking at a moment as seen through James’s eyes.
James hated to have his own picture taken, though, and I didn’t have very many of either of us. I outgrew the need I had in my twenties to capture memories on film. The day I went to collect the oak box at the funeral home, I saw a brochure about a new trend: emblazoning the tombstone with a glass-sealed, colourized picture of the person buried below. Buried alive, I thought, looking at the sample photographs. Perhaps it would be tolerable if an older picture, one taken long before a person’s death, were used. At least it would show the person who was already lost to you at a time that you’d accepted was well past. I was glad Kathleen had not displayed any photographs that had James in them.
Tall waiters in tuxes were circulating with silver trays of tiny samosas, grilled tiger shrimp topped with mango tapenade, and Thai tofu sliders. Scores of the stylish chatted in small groups around bar-height candlelit conversation tables. Most of the female guests (who were as thin as young girls, really) were wearing wiggle-dresses, sheaths that a retro television series had made popular again. Tony’s running with a younger crowd now, I thought, but of course he was — Kathleen was only thirty-four years old.
I noticed a bassinet covered with blue ribbons and bows, next to the gift table, and I was embarrassed that I hadn’t known. I was hurt that Tony hadn’t told me his news himself, before this. I saw him standing near the bar, his recently shaved head easy to spot above the sea of shorter people with their carefully styled hair. Tony had gained weight since James’s retirement last fall; he must have stopped jogging when James did. I had a card for him, with a certificate inside stating I’d donated $560, ten per year of his life, to the Humane Society in his name. I kissed Tony’s cheek as he bent down to greet me. “I guess this is a double celebration,” I said, trying to keep my voice from rising.
“Birthday, birth — it’s all good!” I’d never heard Tony use an expression like that before. Then Kathleen waved him over to a group of friends, and Tony excused himself, and I went home.
***
Kathleen had selected most of the soundtrack for the party and geared it toward her friends’ tastes, but she threw in a few oldies for Tony, including the Stones. When I got home, I played a CD with their greatest hits, and thought of Josh driving us somewhere in his car. Suddenly his sister’s name popped into my head: Leah. Why hadn’t I thought of looking for her before, as a route to finding Josh? When I googled her name, I found an article it appeared in; it was in a newsletter from the synagogue where Josh’s mother’s family had long been members.
The blurb was Leah’s wedding announcement from many years before. Leah’s husband’s surname was inserted before her own, not after,
which was a new twist. There was no hyphen, either. I liked that about her; she’d used her husband’s name to complement her own, not to replace it. In a later issue of the newsletter, I found a birth announcement for Leah’s first baby, a girl whose middle name is Josh. She’d be a teenager herself by now.
I’d noticed Leah’s mother-in-law’s name elsewhere in the same newsletter, so when I googled Josh after that, I included Leah and her mother-in-law in the search, in case I might catch news about him through Leah’s extended family. Leah would lead me to her brother.
***
Cities I travelled to after losing track of Josh:
– Beijing
– Guadalajara
– Seoul
– Tokyo
– Dalian
– Dhaka
– Chengdu
– Harbin
– Caracas
– New York
New York and Tokyo aside, I didn’t expect that Josh would have gone to any of the places I did, so I didn’t think of him when I was travelling. This surprises me now — now that I’ve had so much distance from Ted, who had my whole heart in those days. And now that James, who did not, has released me from his.
***
I’m sure Josh has aged well. I can imagine his mature handsomeness based on the face I knew so well, the way police artists can sketch a present-day likeness of people who were kidnapped years before as children: he’d have greying curly hair, like James’s, though Josh might colour it — men do that now; and he would have taken exceptional care of his skin, his physique — his assets. Was I up to seeing him, though? Was I up to him seeing me?
In June I was reading a members’ newsletter from the AGO, when Josh’s sister popped up by proxy again. Her in-laws had donated a small Picasso sketch to the permanent collection, and a public reception was to be held in July, to thank them for the gift. I marked it on my calendar, though I knew it would be hard for me to speak to Leah if she were to attend. I’d seen her just the once, when we were both teenagers, and we’d not been easy with each other — I’d not been easy with her. Maybe Leah would not want to help.