by Jamie Zeppa
Halfway through the song, he turned to her, and she saw that the light had come back to his face. The hurt was still in his eyes, but it had shrunk to a splinter. When the band left the stage, they squeezed themselves through the crowd and out into the night, Dean talking a mile a minute. Had Laura noticed how the lighting made the musicians look like they were floating in the dark? Didn’t she love the circular bar? Laura nodded, thinking, Please kiss me again.
He stopped talking and did. Not even in the best Michael Pierce scenarios had she felt so cherished. He wound her hair around his hands, and his voice, silky and soft in her ear, said he was so glad to have found her, and she had to promise, promise, not to leave him or let him go. She promised. Then he sighed and said he should be getting her home now.
They took a taxi, and she wished they could drive through the night, side by side, their arms and hands entwined, her head on Dean’s shoulder, but the driver said, “Broadview and Mortimer,” and they had to climb out. They stopped between street lights to kiss in the shadows. Dean said he would call her in the morning and blew a kiss from the end of the driveway before turning and jogging into the darkness. Her mother yanked open the door, hissing furiously, but Laura, insulated by the warmth of Dean’s invisible arms and the imprint of his mouth on her lips and neck, hardly heard her. Upstairs in her room, she lay in some joyous state between dream and memory for the rest of the night. At last she understood why things had happened the way they did: why her mother’s new shoes had pinched on the way home from the hospital, why Dean had stood outside his mother’s house and decided not to knock, why Dean had been adopted and why Laura’s father was in the hospital in the first place. From the very beginning, their paths had been winding and striving towards each other. This was how happiness worked: it disguised itself as a series of accidents and disappointments, and then you looked up one day and there was the love of your life.
Except he didn’t call in the morning, and when she finally dialled the hotel, the clerk said Mr. Turner was no longer their guest. It was just like the day she had come home from school and her mother said, “Your father was taken by ambulance to the mental hospital.” They were like dream words that made no sense when you woke up.
Her mother made her take the shoes back.
She waited for him to call from wherever he was, and then she waited for him to write with the pen she had bought, and even though she didn’t like this twist in the plotline, she knew this was how the stories generally went. She wasn’t meant to understand until they came together again and everything was cleared up in a tumult of kisses and tears. She was supposed to sigh and fret and wander along the path near the Don River, pale and sick at heart, until he stepped out of the shade of the willow tree, as pale and feverish as she was, having risked everything and lost everything to find her again, or at least until he sent her a postcard from the hospital where he had been taken after being conked on the head or run over by a bus.
“It’s just like An Affair to Remember,” her friend Winnie sighed.
Everything happened for a reason. She just had to have faith.
After six months, her faith began to disintegrate: it seemed they were not meant to meet, fall in love, separate and reunite, get married and all the rest, happily ever after, the end, amen. Maybe there was no reason for the way the whole universe had liquefied itself and poured through her veins that night. It was not an affair to remember but a random encounter, without repeat or resonance.
Winnie said, “I guess it wasn’t meant to be, after all,” and Laura said, “I guess it wasn’t.” She could say it, but she couldn’t make herself believe it entirely.
Even three years later, when she was working at the bank and seeing a lot of her co-worker, Warren Haddon, she sometimes thought about Dean Turner. When Warren kissed her, he felt like a wooden block in her arms, and when he put his hands into her blouse or between her legs, his touch was faint, as if he were stroking her through a quilt. Her mother said Warren was a perfect gentleman, and he was. He always stopped after a moment or two and removed his hand and straightened up and said he guessed he should be getting her home now. He walked her to the door and kissed her good night under the porch light. Sometimes, terrible thoughts knifed their way into her mind and she imagined saying something shocking to him just at that moment, something cruel and obscene. She didn’t know what was wrong with her.
After years of on-and-off attempts and weekend visits, her father was home full-time. He wasn’t the father she had mourned as a child, but he wasn’t the stand-in either, and in truth, she hardly remembered that other father now, the one before Marcus Findley and the breakdown. They never talked about the hospital, but sometimes, in the middle of a sentence, her father’s face would go blank, and Laura would search her mind for something to say to bring him back. After a couple of seconds, he blinked and returned, whether she spoke or not. Still, it was alarming.
Laura asked her mother, “Do you ever notice how Dad disappears sometimes when you’re talking to him?”
Her mother said, “Why do you always have to see problems where there aren’t any?”
Laura didn’t know why. Her father was fine; he was working as a clerk (“assistant manager,” her mother said) at a hardware store. Her mother was fine; she continued to work at the doctor’s office because, she said, she had never been one of those women content to sit at home and polish the silverware; she had practically pioneered the way for married women to work. And Laura was fine. She had a steady boyfriend and a job, and her hope chest was filling up with tea towels and embroidered pillowcases. She had learned to sew and was putting together a grown-up woman’s wardrobe: a sky blue skirt and quilted jacket, a shimmering pale gold flapper-style party frock, a forest green suit. There was no reason whatsoever for the storm clouds to be gathering just out of the corner of her eye. There was no reason for her to drop her head and pray, Please let something happen, but she did, and that winter, Warren got down on one knee in her living room and opened a little black box and said, “Laura, will you marry me? Will you be my wife?”
It wasn’t the something she had meant. But then, what else could it have been? Dean Turner was not going to walk through the door singing “You Belong to Me.” This was what came next. At least it would mean her own house, away from her mother, who still told her to straighten up, smarten up, stop moping and daydreaming, and away from her father, who sometimes went somewhere in his head and someday might not come back.
They set the date for July 14 and booked the hall, and her friends at work threw her a shower, and she argued with her mother about the dress and the invitations and the flowers. Her mother said they couldn’t afford the kind of wedding Laura seemed to want, but Laura found a flaw with everything, expensive or not, and couldn’t decide on anything, and it was making her mother crazy. “You’re going to end up with no wedding at all,” her mother said, and Laura burst into tears and slammed her bedroom door.
In May, Warren called and said he had some very exciting news for her, something that would make her very happy, and could she be ready in fifteen minutes? At the Cherry Pie Diner, Warren told her he had been offered a promotion. “Manager,” he said gravely, but he couldn’t completely suppress his smile. The youngest manager in the bank! It was a small branch, but still, it was a tremendous opportunity, and Laura wouldn’t have to worry about a transfer because Warren didn’t expect her to work after they got married. As manager, his salary would be more than adequate.
“That’s wonderful,” Laura said.
“And I have a cousin up there, so we would have some family already,” Warren said. Laura didn’t know where “up there” was; she had missed that part. The position would start in August, Warren said, right after the honeymoon. He had negotiated that himself. They were sending him up at the beginning of June to meet the staff, and he would look for an apartment or house to rent. He leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Not many start their married lives in such a good position,” h
e said. “And Sault Ste. Marie is a nice place to raise a family.”
A bolt went through her. “Sault Ste. Marie?”
Warren looked irritated. “Laura. Haven’t you been listening?”
Everything inside her lifted and tilted precariously, and she had to clutch the bottom of her chair to keep herself from sliding off. Don’t be foolish, Laura, she told herself in her coldest, hardest mother-voice, but her heart had already galloped off.
Later that night, she called Warren. “I want to go with you when you go up.”
“Oh,” he said. “Well. That probably … They won’t—”
“If we’re going to live there,” Laura said, “I want to see it. I want to know what I’m getting myself into.”
“But it’s so close to the wedding,” Warren said. “You’ll have so much to do.”
“Everything’s mostly done,” Laura said. “And don’t you want me with you when you look for a place?”
So it was settled. Laura would have to pay for her own ticket, of course, and she would stay at a hotel while Warren stayed with his cousin. Her mother said it was a useless extravagance at a time when they should be saving money, but Laura barely heard her. She could barely think at all.
EVERYTHING TURNS OUT IN THE END
A door opened and a voice said, “Mommy? Are you waked up now?” Laura heard herself groan. Get up, Laura, another voice said sternly, but it was only in her head. That voice said all kinds of things: Get up; don’t move. You’re not to blame; this is all your fault. You’re on the right path; you took a wrong turn; you would have ended up here, no matter what. Everything is all wrong, but somehow it will work out for the best in the end.
The voice could not be trusted. She pulled the sheet over her head. At the bottom of the dark pool, the voice could not even be heard.
Sault Ste. Marie had made her eyes hurt. The ache began when they landed at the tiny, windy airport and deepened on the long ride into town, where she and Warren used her room to freshen up. At the bank, where Warren introduced her as his fiancée, her eyes kept darting off, left and right, and by the end of the day, she felt like she was separated from her body by a thick, transparent sheet of pain. Back at the hotel, Warren said, “Jeez, Laura, you look terrible,” and she said, “I know. Do you mind if I don’t come to your cousin’s? I have the most terrible headache.” Warren said he would explain to his cousin, kissed her forehead and told her to get a good night’s sleep. She watched from the window as he climbed into the taxi and disappeared.
There was no phone in her room, so she went down to the lobby. He might not even live here anymore. He might not remember her. He might be married. Even if he still lived here and remembered her and wasn’t married, he might merely say, “Well, have a good visit and thanks for calling.” Anyway, she was engaged. The wedding was two months away. The hall was paid for, and the gilt-edged invitations that she had fought for so ferociously had been sent out, and the dress was hanging in a plastic shroud in her closet.
She just wanted to make sure. Plus, if she was going to be living here, she didn’t want to run into him by chance and have to bumble through introductions and explanations.
The operator had only one listing, for Turner, Francis. She called, and a man answered on the first ring. “Wharton, for crying out loud, I said I’d be there.”
“Hello?” Laura said.
“Hello,” he said after a pause. “Who’s this?”
“Is this Dean Turner?” She knew it was him.
Another pause. “Well, now, that would depend on who’s asking,” he said. His voice had gone dark and silky.
“It’s Laura.”
“Hello, Laura,” he said warmly, but she could tell he didn’t know who she was.
“You probably don’t remember me,” she said, and her words slopped against each other, as if she were a little drunk. “We met a couple of years back. In Toronto.”
He didn’t say anything, so she took a breath and charged on. “We met in the cafeteria at Eaton’s, remember? We … we went shopping and then we had dinner—”
“Where are you calling me from, Laura?” She couldn’t read the tone of his voice.
“I’m in town. I’m with my—I work for the bank and I’m in town for a few days and I thought I would—”
“Where are you staying?”
“At the Algonquin Hotel. I just wanted to, you know, say hi. I remembered that you were from here, and I …” She couldn’t think how to finish. Why wasn’t he saying anything?
“Listen, Laura, I have to make a call, because some guys are expecting me, but—”
Her hand was trembling. “Yes, of course. I mean, I have to go now too because my—I just wanted to say hello. It was nice talking to you.”
She hung up and made it to the stairwell before the tears seeped out of her eyes. Oh god, she was a fool. What had she been hoping for? That he would say, “Laura! At last! I’ve been looking for you everywhere!” No, not that, but that he remembered her, at least. That a part of him was always wishing for her, the way a part of her was always hoping for him.
She knew what her mother would say to that. Why do you imagine these things? God, Laura, you remind me of your father before the hospital.
Her mother would have also said, What is wrong with you? You’re engaged to be married! Why are you calling men you don’t know?
She slumped into a chair in her room, hands dangling between her knees, too perplexed now for tears. She had everything a girl could want, and she didn’t want any of it. Something was wrong with her. She was like her father before the hospital: telling the same story over and over, crying over nothing, unable to let go. Constitutionally flawed. But from now on, no more. Enough was enough. She would marry Warren and settle down and be happy and stop going around with tears in her eyes and her head in the clouds.
She washed her face, brushed her teeth and went back downstairs to call Warren at his cousin’s.
Warren’s cousin lived in a shabby apartment on the third floor of a house. A secretary at the Sault Star, Deb McKenna was what Laura’s mother would have called homely: she had a broad face and big hands and dark, wiry hair straining against the wave it had been set into. They sat on Deb’s worn sofa and drank canned orange juice with a splash of rum and listened as Deb recounted her bad dates with reporters. “You’re lucky,” Deb said to Laura. “You’re lucky to have my cousin, that’s all I can say.” Laura linked her arm through Warren’s and agreed.
Deb’s roommate wandered in wearing a vivid yellow silk shirt over a pair of man’s pyjama bottoms, and waved at them on her way to the kitchen. Deb said Geraldine was waitressing at the Gold Room while she looked for a better job. Laura called out, “Do you have any clerical experience, Geraldine? Because Warren is going to be the manager at the Royal Bank.” Warren shot her a warning frown, but Geraldine said she was waiting for a call back from the steel plant. Warren said that a plant secretary probably made more than a bank teller, anyway. Geraldine came out of the kitchen, eating peas straight out of a can. “I might have to start off as a secretary,” she said, “but I’m going to end up in the plant.”
“Oh, don’t say that,” Laura said. “I’m sure you won’t end up in the plant.” But perhaps she had misunderstood, because Geraldine laughed and shovelled another spoonful of peas into her mouth. Laura looked at the mismatched chairs, the faded HAPPY NEW YEAR 1963 streamer still taped above a closet door, the egg-stained plate on the windowsill, and she thought, “This could be me. If it weren’t for Warren, I’d end up rooming with a homely girl and a weird girl who eats peas out of cans, hoping to be noticed by someone like Warren so that I could start the rest of my life. I am lucky.”
The next evening, Laura wore her flapper-style dress, the pale gold fringed sheath, to dinner with Deb and Warren and Warren’s new colleagues and then to the Cinnamon Lounge, where Warren discussed housing prices and neighbourhoods, and Deb told Laura about a guy she was seeing last fall who’d popped the quest
ion and then called her up the next day and said he’d changed his mind. Laura shook her head in disbelief. Warren said, “That’s a ridiculous price. Listen to this, Laura.” People at the next table got up to leave in a flurry of chairs, and on the other side of the room, Dean Turner put his arm around a girl whose red hair was falling out of its beehive. He was talking, and everyone at his table was laughing. Laura stood up suddenly, knocking over Warren’s drink, and excused herself.
In the bathroom, she dabbed at the Coke stain on her dress, her breath coming in spasms. She was trying to remember if that table had been empty when they came in, but her thoughts kept colliding with each other. The headache threatened to start up again, an ominous pulse above her left temple. She reapplied her lipstick, but it looked garish against her pale skin, so she wiped it off. I don’t know what to do, she thought. But there was nothing to do, except go back out and sit down with Warren.
Out in the corridor, she almost walked straight into him. He smiled at her and made a little bow. Her ears filled up with a thrashing noise, and her throat felt suddenly coated with ice. He didn’t recognize her.
And then he did. “Hey!” he said happily. “Laura! I called you at the hotel last night, but they said you’d gone out.” He leaned back and appraised her. “Wow. You look even more beautiful than I remembered.”