This Is Not My Life

by Diane Schoemperlen

  In our family, we have a tradition of opening one gift each on Christmas Eve. That night, Shane placed the box in my hands before I could even sit down on the couch. Usually a wrapping paper ripper, this time I peeled off each piece of tape very slowly as Shane hovered over me. Alex, I was glad to see, was occupied with opening his own present and paying no attention to mine.

  Nestled in layers of red and green tissue paper was a jacket. A gorgeous jacket. A black blazer decorated in a random pattern with bits of fabric, ribbon, seam binding, and rickrack. I gasped, not with horror as I was afraid I might, but with pleasure and relief. It was truly original and elegant. It fit me perfectly. Shane said he thought it was something I could wear for the upcoming readings when my new novel came out. He was right. And I did, receiving many compliments every time.

  OVER THE HOLIDAYS, SHANE CALLED BRANDY, now living in Windsor, to tell her he wanted a divorce. He still maintained that he had never really loved her, that it was only a marriage of convenience, not a question of love but merely a matter of drugs and sex. I knew this wasn’t true. I didn’t need it to be true. I knew he had loved her, and I had no problem with that.

  I still chuckled whenever I thought of the time he was in the flower section at Loblaws while I browsed through the nearby greeting card racks. Amazed to discover a bouquet of bright blue carnations, he turned to me and called, “Brandy! Come and look at this!” I snorted and, pretending to be mad, stalked off in the other direction. I found him later in the checkout line clutching the blue bouquet. He said the sales clerk told him he pretty much had to buy it in hopes of not getting killed for having called me by the wrong name. I tucked this incident too into our file box of happy memories.

  Shane seemed to feel he had to deny ever loving Brandy or anybody else before he met me. He expected the same from me. Thou shalt have no other loves before me.

  I have never been married, although I came close twice when I was young. In both cases, I was the one who backed out. I’ve had many other relationships, though. The truth is, I have loved often and obsessively, randomly and recklessly, never wisely or well. The truth is, I have frequently been a fool for love. The truth is, I have an abysmal rap sheet for romance.

  One of Shane’s favourite sayings was “This is the bottom line.” He was always delivering the bottom line about something. In this case, the bottom line for me was that I’d never had a good relationship in my life. Why did I think I could have one now? Was this one somehow the culmination of all the rest? Was I perversely trying to outdo myself in the “bad choice” department? Perhaps bad choices are like lies. Perhaps one invariably leads to another—until eventually you’re caught in such a knotted web of them that you can’t escape.

  Had I learned absolutely nothing from all my previous romantic disasters? Apparently. Shane was extremely proud of the fact that he had failed the psychopath test, but if there were a similar diagnostic tool to determine a person’s self-destructive romanticism, I would have earned a perfect score.

  IN JANUARY, SHANE BEGAN COMING HOME every weekend as planned. He took the bus home on Friday and back again on Sunday, usually on the last bus out at five-thirty. Months passed in this pattern, with some variations due to bad weather, long weekends, or work commitments on my part.

  With both Friday and Sunday being travel days, in fact we had only one full day at home each weekend. We still tended to keep to ourselves. Before Shane came along, I had seldom seen my friends on weekends anyway. They were always busy with their husbands and families then. If there happened to be a book launch or a reading scheduled on a Friday night or Saturday, Shane and I would usually attend. He grew comfortable at these events, and people seemed to like him. There would be time later, I imagined, to expand our social life and make some couple friends, but for now, this was a good beginning.

  Mostly on our weekends together, we did ordinary couple things like shopping, laundry, cooking, cleaning, yardwork. Of course, none of these was ordinary for Shane, and doing them as a couple was not ordinary for me. In retrospect, I think we were both working hard at pretending to be two normal people just going about their normal everyday lives. We wanted so much to be like everybody else. But we were not. We were like tourists exploring an exotic foreign land or maybe like aliens discovering the manifold joys of being human—one of which, of course, was sex.

  I like sex as much as the next person—unless the next person is a man who has been in prison for thirty years. Shane didn’t believe me when I told him that for almost the entire decade of my forties, I had been celibate by choice. He often said he was a physical person while I was more cerebral. He was probably right.

  He became fixated on a brief passage in my first novel, In the Language of Love, a single long sentence in which the main character ruminates about guilt, sin, and confession, especially “the sin of having fucked a married man, not once, not twice, but probably two hundred times, once seven times in a single day.”

  I reminded him that the book was a novel, and that although the main character did bear some resemblance to me, still it was a work of fiction and should not be read as autobiography. He was having none of that. I pointed out that if a person, any person, was going to have sex seven times in one day, it would likely be a person much younger than we were. I said that if we had actually done all the things in bed that he’d like to do, he would be dead by now. He was having none of that either—clearly he would have liked to take his chances and give it a try.

  While sex was always at the very top of his to-do list, it usually barely registered on mine. This became an ever-increasing problem between us. The more he insisted, the more I resisted. If we weren’t in bed within an hour after arriving home from Peterborough, he sank into what I called his “big bad mood.” This might well last the entire weekend. It seemed that no matter what sex we might have later, for him it was too little too late.

  Once back in Peterborough, he would call over and over again apologizing. He blamed his big bad mood on the weather. It was too cold. It was too hot. It was raining. It was windy. It was humid. But that wasn’t it. He was tired, he said. His stomach was upset, he was constipated, he had a headache, his leg hurt, a guy at the halfway house had eaten all the bacon and he didn’t get any. But that wasn’t it. None of that was ever it. It was simply that he didn’t get what he wanted the minute he wanted it. Throwing a temper tantrum over not getting one’s way is not charming in a five-year-old child, let alone in a fifty-eight-year-old man.

  Whatever he’d said to the halfway house supervisor and his parole officer about these arguments, we were soon required to have a meeting with them. We sat in the supervisor’s tiny office, me and three large men discussing our sexual problems. I was embarrassed and humiliated. By the end of the meeting, we had more or less reached the consensus that my sex drive was lower than his and that he would stop throwing what his parole officer called “a hissy fit” when he didn’t get what he wanted.

  If only it were that simple.

  Over and over again, I allowed myself to accept his apologies. Over and over again, I allowed myself to believe him when he promised he’d never act like that again. Over and over again, I believed him because I wanted to.

  FOR SIX MONTHS, Shane had been seeing the CSC psychologist, Dr. Quinn, once a month in Peterborough. He found these sessions helpful and asked if we could see Dr. Quinn together to receive some couples counselling. Dr. Quinn had an office in Belleville and another here in Kingston. Unfortunately his office here was located at KP, and Shane refused to go there. Dr. Quinn, rather obligingly, I thought, said he’d come to my house instead.

  We arranged our first meeting for a Monday afternoon in April. Shane had an extended pass that weekend. On Saturday he took the bus from Peterborough, I took the train from Kingston, and we met in Ottawa, where I was giving a reading that evening. Since the publication of my new novel two months earlier, he had been coming to as many of my book events as possible. He was now working at the recycling pl
ant, and they were quite flexible about giving him time off. The writing community seemed to be accepting of him, and apparently none of the many people he met at these events knew the meaning of that teardrop tattoo—or if they did, it didn’t faze them.

  We returned to Kingston together by train on Sunday afternoon. Shane couldn’t remember the last time he’d travelled by train, and as a special treat for both of us, I had upgraded our tickets to first class. We would be driving back to Peterborough on Tuesday.

  Dr. Quinn’s serious but gentle manner put me at ease immediately. I could see why Shane liked him so much. He seemed like the kind of person you could tell anything to, and he would understand: just what you want in a psychologist, I suppose, and not at all what I’d expected in one who dealt with violent criminals all day every day. After we got comfortable at the kitchen table, he went over what Shane had already told him about the difficulties of trying to maintain our long-distance relationship. He noted that as a long-term prisoner now reintegrating into society, Shane had a lot to deal with in addition to our relationship. I told Dr. Quinn that having been on my own for almost as long as Shane had been in prison, there was a great deal of adjustment required on my part as well.

  “We are open,” I said, “to any help you can give us.”

  Dr. Quinn said we both seemed to believe that Shane’s chances of getting full parole were dependent on us having a healthy relationship. Yes, we said, we did believe that. His release plan hinged entirely on our relationship. Plus we were both still haunted by what Janice Mackie had said when he left Frontenac: that if our relationship failed, he would be sent back to prison. Dr. Quinn said this was not true: we needed to keep the two issues separate.

  When he asked me what in particular I considered a significant problem between us, I told him I was having trouble balancing our relationship and my work. With Shane coming home every weekend, I was now trying to accomplish in four days what I used to in seven. I was more frazzled than ever. Much as Shane loved the fact that I was a writer and was proud of me, especially when we could attend literary events together as we’d done just that weekend in Ottawa, he seemed unwilling or unable to understand that the writing itself requires a lot of time and concentration, that writing a book is a lot harder and takes a lot longer than reading one. He was always excited about the having-written, not so much about the having-to-write.

  Dr. Quinn said, “I don’t read much myself, but my wife does.”

  I’ve heard this said by many men many times over the years. Dr. Quinn looked surprised when I laughed.

  I talked about the phone calls, how I couldn’t get my work done when I was constantly being interrupted. I told him that no matter how many times I explained this and no matter how many times we argued about it, still Shane did not respect my writing time and persisted in making it almost impossible for me to work.

  “I’ve been publishing books for over twenty years,” I said, “and it’s awfully late in the game for me to be fighting for time to write. I’m sure if I worked in an office, if I was a teacher or a doctor or even a sales clerk, Shane wouldn’t think it was okay to call me all the time when I was at work. I’m sure your wife doesn’t call you when you’re working.”

  By this point in our relationship, I had given up trying to make Shane understand how important my writing was to me personally. He could not comprehend the word passion in any context other than sexual. In fact, he had trouble understanding why we people out here do the things we do: what motivations could there possibly be besides sex, money, drugs, or revenge? Given where he’d been for the last thirty years, I could see why he thought this way. He hadn’t had the best cross-section of people upon which to base his knowledge of human nature in general or his judgments of people individually. I’d often pointed out to him that if I were as judgmental as he was, I wouldn’t be with him in the first place. He didn’t seem willing or able to try on a new way of thinking. He persisted in applying all he’d learned about people in the prison paradigm to the rest of the world—including me. I realize now that this was part of being institutionalized.

  Sitting at the table with Dr. Quinn that day, I thought maybe reducing my writing to a matter of dollars and cents, food in the fridge and a stove to cook it on, a car in the driveway and gas in the tank would make more sense to Shane. So I turned and waved my arms around to take in the whole kitchen, the entire house, the car outside too, and I said, “It’s my work that paid for all this. It’s my writing that makes it possible for us to live here.”

  I should have known that Shane would take this the wrong way. Of course he did. He took it to mean that I was saying he wasn’t contributing to the household. I tried to explain that that’s not what I meant at all. I was simply saying that my writing was how I made a living, that it was important financially, and for that reason alone, I should be “allowed” to do it. I suggested that maybe he, having been in prison for so long, didn’t understand about the importance of work in the so-called free world where nothing is actually free. “In prison, work is optional,” I said. “But out here, we people, we work.”

  This conversation went directly into that second file box, the one of unhappy memories. Later, years later, Shane would still bring up how much it had hurt him when I said he wasn’t contributing to the household. But I didn’t intend to hurt him, and that day I hoped Dr. Quinn was getting a good look at what I was grappling with.

  When our hour together was over, he suggested we continue meeting once a month. To make this easier, we could come to his Belleville office on our way from Peterborough back to Kingston on a Friday afternoon. The direct bus between our two cities had recently been cancelled. Because there was no indirect bus route that didn’t take at least eight hours, once again I was driving. We thought the monthly Friday meeting was an excellent idea.

  As we were saying our goodbyes at the door, Dr. Quinn’s cell phone rang. He took it out of his pocket and looked at it. Then he looked pointedly at me and said, “It’s my wife.”

  ON HIS WEEKENDS HOME, Shane sometimes called his mother, but we only stopped in to see her two or three times during the fall and winter, and then only for a few minutes. Over the spring, Vera’s health had declined steadily, and she was hospitalized several times. Shane would not visit her in the hospital, and he insisted that if she died, he would not go to her funeral.

  She died in the middle of June on a Sunday afternoon, of congestive heart failure. The funeral, a simple graveside ceremony at the Kenworth cemetery, would be held five days later, on Friday.

  In the face of the eventuality of Vera’s death becoming an actual event, Shane changed his mind and decided he should go to her funeral. She was his mother after all, so yes, of course it was right that he should go. It seemed right that I should go too, if only to give him moral support. His pass for that weekend was rearranged so he could come home on Thursday. He’d got his G1 licence just the week before, so now he could share the driving as long as there was a registered driver in the car. That would be me.

  I drove to Peterborough early that morning, and we were back in Kenworth in time to spend the afternoon helping two of his family members, Roy and Darlene, finish cleaning out Vera’s apartment. Every cupboard and closet was jammed with stuff, including, in the bedroom closet, not only the unopened package of washcloths I’d bought for her but many other unopened packages of washcloths, dishtowels, and pillowcases. All of these went into the pile to be donated to Vinnie’s. Throughout the apartment, we found items with pieces of masking tape on the bottom indicating who should get what. We found Shane’s name on the inside cover of a large dictionary that had belonged to his maternal grandparents and also on the bottom of two delicate china teacups. The dictionary made sense—but what use did she think he could possibly have for the teacups? There was no name on the bottom of the little wooden box containing Popeye’s ashes. Why can’t I remember what we did with it?

  Sometime during the afternoon, Darlene said that she and another
relative, Marsha, had had an altercation the day before, a vicious argument that ended with Marsha apparently threatening to kill Darlene for having turned the rest of the family against her. Whether this accusation was true or not, Shane and Roy were not taking Marsha’s alleged threat lightly. She was, in their opinion, quite capable of carrying it out or at least trying to. She had been on medication and under the care of a psychiatrist for many years, but it didn’t seem to be helping a whole lot. After much discussion, at Shane’s suggestion, he and Roy went to the OPP station and explained the situation and their fear that something terrible was going to happen at the funeral. The fact that it was Shane who insisted they go to the police made me realize how seriously worried he was. Any interaction with the police for any reason had to be reported to his parole officer and would be duly investigated and noted in his files.

  THERE WERE MORE PEOPLE AT THE graveside ceremony than I had expected. Vera had no friends and was estranged from her own siblings, but her extended family was large: nieces, nephews, cousins, all their spouses, children, and grandchildren. Even the minister who officiated was a relative.

  I had met Marsha only once before and didn’t immediately recognize her at the cemetery. Shane had to point her out to me. She didn’t stand out in a crowd, certainly not as someone who was said to have recently threatened murder.

  When she spotted Shane, Marsha rushed over and gave him a big hug, me too. As if nothing had happened, as if we were all one big happy family—or, in this instance, one big sad family, now grieving the regrettable loss of one of its own. She was the one who set up a portable CD player at the edge of the grave so there would be musical accompaniment. She was also the only one who cried, letting out intermittent choking sobs and howls as the minister said his piece, assuring us all that Vera had gone to a better place. Perhaps she was the one who wrote the newspaper obituary in which Vera was described as Loving Mother of.