Oh, My Darling
Page 13
He put his arm through Maya’s and glanced at her face. She looked pale, her jaw clenched.
“Always the central attraction.”
“Oh shut up, Nathan,” she said. “I feel—” She reached into her bag for her glasses.
“What do you feel, darling?”
“Never mind, never mind.” She put them on, thick things that covered her eyes. “Never mind,” she said a third time.
And they carried on, toward a bank of laurel bushes that would shield the lower part of their bodies from the sun.
At the entrance to the Sacred Way, Maya rested in the shade of a tree, while Nathan paid for their tickets. Calm temple dogs basked in the filtered sunshine. One with thick fur dislodged itself from the ground, shook itself and came to sniff her. Maya stroked its head, then Nathan joined her and they started together up the steps that led to the sanctuary.
The Sacred Way was eight feet wide, and paved in blocks of marble that had been broken here and there by ancient chariot wheels. Patches of dry grass poked through the breaks. Sun threw itself onto her neck and cicadas cried everywhere. A group of women in floral dresses came toward them, speaking something that sounded to Maya like Swedish. She stepped aside to let them pass.
“Maya—”
“Let’s be silent for a while.”
The marble of the road was so worn, the pieces gleamed like slabs of skull. Foot-sized grooves had been driven into the stone and Maya noticed that her sandalled feet fit into them perfectly. The resinous scent of pine wafted from the mountain, along with the brash voices of tourists.
They reached the first curve in the path, and before them stood a small marble building with three columns. The Treasury of the Athenians. They admired it for a moment then carried on, up the second level, into the full, afternoon sun. Maya swatted a bug on her cheek and her hand came away bloody.
What does it mean to be fifty?
No—that wasn’t it. But she was getting closer.
How should I live the rest of my life?
No. But closer still.
It had to do with life, and death, and mortality. She knew that. It had to do with an ancient ache in her bones. It had to do with dancing on the terrace, naked breasts bare, wanting to spin herself into another state, an ecstatic state, a “real” state, where she understood existence, but failing every time and instead preening and peacocking. The dark stare of her father. So much judgment. You should learn the value of being authentic.
I am authentic, she heard herself think, and yet all her life she had felt that there was, in fact, something artificial about her relationship to the world. There was a final level to descend to, an understanding to face. But what was it? She was closer now. She almost had it. With a final switchback of the path, the temple swung into view.
Nathan had felt calmer all the way up the hill. With pleasure he had stood beside Maya, watching her take in the symmetry of the Athenian Treasury. Now, seeing the temple ruins in front of them, Nathan reached out, found Maya’s forearm, and gripped it, while a small sigh of delight escaped his lips. Delight, yes, but awe too, at the sheer power of placement. My God, how the temple must have looked in ancient times, rounding that final corner. The startle factor. He could imagine the blast of marble, a priest bustling toward them, insisting they buy a goat to slaughter, the buzzing of voices beneath the parapets, the scream of the goat.
Maya looked at him. “Nathan, you’ve gone pink all over.”
He wanted to say he was fine, but his tongue felt large and strangely stuck in his mouth.
“You’re the colour of a lobster.” She led him to a piece of toppled marble the size of a bale of hay. He sat, then wiped his forehead and palms with his handkerchief.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m absolutely fine. I want you to go ask your question.”
“You’re soaked.”
“Go. I’ll cool off here.”
She looked at him sharply.
“It’s the altitude, that’s all,” Nathan said.
“You should be in the shade.”
“The sun’s at a slant. I’ll be all right. I want you to consult the oracle.”
Shadows lengthened from the columns of the temple—if indeed, Maya thought, you could call it a temple. The thing (Maya could not help smiling grimly to herself at the thought) was in ruins. A few cracked and mottled columns patched together and then re-erected by some patient archaeologists; a stone foundation and a surround of broken pillars piled about like logs. It was, like every single thing about being fifty, a disappointment, over which, with a masterful show of joie de vivre, it was up to Maya to throw a scrim of awe, and delight, and mystery. Her dance—and never had it seemed more clear to her—her lifelong dance had been to cover up the paucity of the world. This hit her with such force! It was a great, almost lustful surge of disappointment. It might have gathered in the four corners of the world and blown here, to this exact centre. And it was so terrible, so true and terrible, that her eyes filled with tears and she sat down on the marble bale in the sun, next to Nathan.
She had danced her heart out and it had all come to this: she was fifty, in a ridiculous costume-like dress, sitting on a rock with her husband, who had turned pink and was dressed head to foot in Tilley wear. And this place, this dreadful place, seemed to be saying, Yes, go on. See it all as bleakly as you need to. This is what you came for. See the smoke-and-mirrors dance. See the bones underneath.
It was then that her question came to her.
She stood quickly and gestured to a rocky outcropping that looked down on the temple ruins. “I’m going up there.”
She hurried across the stones.
The spangles cleared one by one from Nathan’s eyes, like fading stars, and the excitement that had clutched his heart on seeing the temple began to lessen. He took a breath and then, to safeguard against another implosion, he took a pill, swallowing it dry.
The restorative magic. It gave him the courage to look across the skull-like stones at the pillars of the temple. And then he heard, at the back of his brain, the hammering of horses’ hooves. The premonition he had kept at bay gathered at the corners of his brain. It flared; it flooded; a mineral taste filled his nostrils.
What he saw was this. Himself sitting, and Maya climbing onto the rocks above him. He wanted to call out to her, knowing he had done this before, and that the act of calling out would only push him closer to the centre of the déjà vu, clicking the shutter that caught doom in its lens.
But Maya was practically sprinting up the hill now, something new powering her joints. All the shadows were long, thrown down the valley from the temple pillars, and the shadow of every cypress tree was picked out shrewdly, as though to say, There is life and there is death, and look how closely they lie together in this landscape.
3.
That night, over dinner, when Nathan heard the question that Maya had asked the oracle, his first instinct was to tell her about his premonition, so that she could understand the danger. But it was too late, the question had been asked. And they were in fine moods, the olives so ripe and salty, full of oil, picked from the slopes beneath the restaurant. He let it pass. Perhaps he was wrong. He hoped he was wrong. Besides, everyone, he reasoned, had a path, and this was Maya’s, to hurl her question at the temple from the height of her stone pinnacle. Wherever it led her she would have to go, and see for herself.
And she would. Not too long after that memorable dinner, because she was fifty years old, and in fact so many parts of life, as yet unfelt and unexplored, were hurtling toward her, whether she wanted them to or not.
Nathan would gladly spare her all that. Just as he would spare her her dance of bravery, her dance in and out of doctors’ offices: blood tests, CAT scans, bone scans, PET scans. The tender way she reached for his hand in the waiting room.
(I want to really feel things.
/> That wasn’t exactly the question—but almost.)
Yes, the surprise would be his tenderness. That would be something worth feeling, when the time came. Worth feeling. Worth revealing. And to recognize, in certain moments of calm (afternoon sunlight streaking the wobbly panes, lighting the underside of the rhododendron leaves outside her bedroom window), that she might not give it up (meaning the cancer) if it meant giving up all she would come to recognize about the wild, terse nature of life, and about her marriage, and Nathan, yes, especially Nathan—it always came back to him. The depth of his eyes, both mysterious (how could he love her so?) and real. He shocked her with his love; and the fact that it had been there all this time, beneath the surface, growing so steadily, astounded her.
(How can I feel this dance, this dance of life and death, at my core?)
When Maya came down from the outcropping at last, Nathan looked carefully at her face. He worried that she might still be caught in the throes of dissatisfaction, their trip a failure, another disappointment; but no, she looked jubilant as she walked toward him, lit up in a way he rarely saw. She bit her lip as though she had done something naughty. And those eyes! Maya’s bright, hungry eyes. Would he ever get enough of them?
“Done!” she sang out.
“Really?”
“Got it. Can we eat early? I’m starving.”
“Me too.”
“I want to eat that honey dessert. At the Café Agora.”
“I want wine.”
“I want olives.”
“So you’re happy with your question?”
“Ecstatic. I’ll tell you over dinner.”
“Then let’s go, my darling.”
And they did. Down the hill, together.
Acknowledgments
Many people helped and supported me during the writing of this book. Caroline Adderson—critical reader extraordinaire—gave me a hundred insights and a sustaining friendship. This book owes so much to her. Eva Stachniak supported me at every stage, and I was fed by our talks about writing at Butler’s Pantry on Roncesvalles. My mother, author Barbara Lambert, provided editorial guidance (and guidance in general). My thanks also to Betsy Warland, Zen wizard of the arts, and to my brother, John, for sending news of the Ex’n’Pop bar in Berlin. My thanks as well to the editors who published these stories in their magazines, providing incisive feedback.
My deep thanks to Patrick Crean for championing this book of stories, and for wise editorial guidance. I am grateful for the enthusiastic response Patrick gave this book at HarperCollins, and to the publishing team that saw it into print, with special thanks to Alan Jones, designer, and Allyson Latta, copy editor.
My thanks to John Metcalf for supporting my work in Best Canadian Stories, and personally, and for beautiful handwritten letters, which now hang on my wall. So many writers have felt John’s influence and now so have I.
My agent, Anne McDermid, has been, from the beginning, a wonderful support and guide to the world of publishing. My thanks to her, and to Martha Magor Webb, Monica Pacheco and the other associates at Anne’s agency.
I am particularly thankful for my partner, Bob Penner, for all he does that makes life lovely, in good times and hard times. I could not have written this book without him. Peter and Lucy, you are amazing—and you make life wonderful. Wendy and Karen—dear friends. What would I do without you? Colette and Huong—thanks for beaming your love across the country. I’d also like to thank my parents, Barbara and Douglas; my brothers, John and Jamie, and their families; my mother-in-law, Norma Penner; and my aunt, Lorna Schwenk.
Last, but most importantly, I would like to thank Madeline Hope, friend and musician, to whom this book is dedicated. Every day, in small ways and big, you teach me how to live. And your music lights my life.
About the Author
Shaena Lambert is the author of Radiance, a novel, and The Falling Woman, a collection of stories. Nominated for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, her work has been published to critical acclaim in Canada, the UK, Germany and Australia. Shaena Lambert’s stories have been published in The Walrus, Ploughshares, Zoetrope: All Story and Best Canadian Stories. She lives in Vancouver with her family.
www.shaenalambert.com
Also by Shaena Lambert
The Falling Woman
Radiance
Copyright
Oh, My Darling © 2013 by Shaena Lambert.
A Patrick Crean Edition, published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
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E-Pub Edition: August 2013
ISBN: 978-1-44342-436-3
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