26 Knots

by Bindu Suresh

  The second time Pénélope kissed Adrien—after their first dinner date, a few hours after he had come to on the sidewalk, in her arms—she had pressed her hand against his chest, flat-palmed, her lips moving toward him even as her body seemed to push him away.

  Later, Adrien came to see that these oft-conflicting signals were a pervasive feature of life with her. It was like having to learn a totally new language: a missed call from her aunt was always returned the same day, even though this aunt had been the scourge of her childhood; she only bought guidebooks for places she never intended to visit; she had a friend, Amélie, who, from the pressed childhood letters slid between the pages of Pénélope’s high school yearbooks, had seemed to be her closest, her dearest, even though Pénélope rarely spoke about her.

  It was a translation that, after a few months, he began to make automatically; a skill that, in a way, made him totally unfit to love anybody else.

  XI

  “It’s at Saint Laurent and René Lévesque,” Gabriel said.

  “That’s right downtown.”

  “But nobody will be there,” Gabriel pointed out. “Con-struction holiday, remember?”

  “I think you’re taking the name a bit too literally.”

  Gabriel paused.

  “You’re mad about yesterday.”

  “Having no father is better than a bad father,” Gabriel had said, the flat of his foot resting against a granite block, his fingers tracing the tan lines under her left breast. Pénélope lay against a fleece blanket, the bones of her lower back bruised from their hard bed of newly dried concrete.

  “Well, what you said wasn’t fair. He was a bad husband, not a bad father. They’re not the same thing,” Pénélope said. “Anyway, I’ll call you later. I’m almost at work.”

  Another pause. “Please come today.”

  Gabriel knew that he should already be on the train, head-ing toward Montmorency. Yet, since falling in love with Pénélope, he had lost all scale, all measure, and he now treasured these moments alone in the firm’s Mile End office, spent measuring the arc of a balcony down to a millimetre, conforming to the straight lead line of the ruler.

  All this because the daily arithmetic of life with her pro-vided no right answers. What did it mean that Pénélope had kissed his nose and not his lips? That she had made him wait an hour for her, alone at dinner—paranoid that she’d left him, paranoid that Adrien had found out, lost his temper, and hurt her in some way—because to call would have been suspicious?

  How was he supposed to know what a single action meant, if a kiss was both this is a lie and I love someone else and you are the only one for me?

  It was past eight when Gabriel left his office. Walking down Saint Laurent, he took a sharp left on Laurier, striding down into the metro station and taking the orange line in the wrong direction. He conformed to this, too, another of Pénélope’s panicked demands—that, leaving the offices of his architectural firm on Saint Viateur and Clark, he take the metro northwest first, before crossing the platform and heading downtown to the Old Port to meet her.

  Some days, he recognized that if they were caught, it would be unexpected: they would be on Crescent, laughing, happy, their fingertips brushing in lieu of holding hands, sauntering down the street as Adrien walked up it; or that Pénélope would misread Adrien’s schedule again, confusing the sixteenth for the fifteenth, and they would be making love in the apartment she shared with Adrien at precisely the moment he had been in a conference the day before. It was unrealistic, Gabriel knew, to think that Adrien would be sitting across from him in the same metro car, would know who he was, and would deduce the illicit nature of a direct Laurier-to-Square-Victoria trajectory.

  On most days, though, Gabriel kept an eye over his shoulder, having swallowed Pénélope’s terror at being caught whole; he screened numbers he didn’t recognize, and started to carry a small pocket knife, as if he were the one who should fear, he the one who had been wronged.

  They had just finished making love on Adrien’s couch. Gabriel held his weight on his forearms, on either side of Pénélope’s chest. She was breathing quietly now, with one leg bent against the stiff back of the sofa and the other stretched out, dangling over the edge. Gabriel kissed her collarbone, lifted himself up, and walked to the bathroom.

  When he came back, Pénélope was on her hands and knees, searching the crevices of the couch with scrambling fingers, as if she were blind. The sofa pillows were strewn around the living room. In a pile in the middle of the sofa frame he noticed bent paper clips, safety pins, a dead battery, the reddish-gold bobby pins she used. She stood to face him, her hair still wild from their lovemaking.

  “I’m sorry, it’s just that Adrien and I haven’t had sex on this couch for a while,” she said breathlessly, a half-dozen of the pins in her outstretched hand.

  For the first time, Gabriel wasn’t angry, didn’t mind that she’d substituted had sex for made love or that she’d used that voice, again—the tentative voice that emerged whenever she was forced to allude to her relationship with Adrien. Instead, he saw for the first time what her life had become, plunged in the murky water of constant deception—and, for a brief second, thought less of her.

  And so he told her, firmly, naturally, and easily this time, that she had to choose—knowing she had to do so before his new-found pity shrunk her so completely there was nothing left to love.

  What Pénélope grew to hate, during the course of her affair: realizing Adrien was home when she didn’t think he would be, his sudden hand on her shoulder, the apartment dark; surprises of any kind; or any of Adrien’s small loyalties, like the answering-machine message from his ex-girlfriend Stéphanie he had listened to and then immediately deleted, without even knowing Pénélope was in the next room.

  She also resented that everything new and beautiful had to be hidden: that, lying quietly in the darkness, Adrien panting desperately on top of her, it was impossible for her to suggest the position she and Gabriel had discovered—her legs spread out like the petals of a lotus and her ankles anchored down—that would bring her to orgasm within seconds; that, in the mornings now, she turned away from Adrien to get dressed, toward the window, slipping on an opaque bra that hid the tanned skin around her large nipples, bronzed from the afternoons of making love between the unfinished walls of half-built homes.

  She hated Adrien’s face when they had sex—he with his eyes fully open, the disquieting frankness of his surrender.

  It was a drowsy, near-silent afternoon. The rich yellow sunlight fell onto the bare wood of the balcony. “I need to read inside,” she said, one leg dangling over the other. “I’m going to suffocate out here.”

  The apartment was dark and musty. Pénélope walked over to the bookshelf and placed the novel she’d been reading, open and spine up, on top of a row of books. She took out another one; its blue jacket was faded and worn, almost white, and she had to flip through the first few pages to find a legible title: The Sound and the Fury. As she thumbed through the rest of the book, a twice-folded piece of paper, torn from a notebook and yellowed, fell out from between the pages. On it, Pénélope read, A woman, a love, that changes with the seasons? and a series of scrawled notes in Adrien’s hand.

  Then she noticed the two hearts in the margin, Pénélope et Adrien, and Adrien et Pénélope, and for a second saw his love as he saw it—and knew she couldn’t do as Gabriel had asked.

  XII

  The realization, when it arrived, was swift as an executioner’s blade. Adrien had said, when Araceli called from New York, the phone cradled between his shoulder and his ear: “My life has never been better.” These six words—and her discovery that he could, indeed, live without her—severed Araceli’s life in two.

  XIII

  After sharing the story of how Gabriel’s mother had fled Kingston, Jacob warned Gabriel that he was going to call her and let her know Gabriel was safe.

  Gabriel assented with relief;
he had already called home as soon as he’d hit Pembroke, and explained to her, even-toned, that he’d left, that he was too far away to follow, that he wasn’t coming back. He listened to her sob in gasps. He was shocked that he had managed to reach her at all; in his entire life, his mother had never taken a single day off of work. He had mumbled a few inanities: I promise to finish school this year, wherever I end up, I’ll get a job, I’ll be fine. His voice had wavered then and he’d hung up—and he’d wanted to hitchhike, steal, borrow a car, do anything, to get back to her.

  But Gabriel had another half, a half he understood better now, his father’s half that constantly battled with his mother’s—fighting, thrashing, kicking—and that day it was his father’s half that won as Gabriel stood red-eyed, waiting to reboard the bus toward Kingston.

  Gabriel enrolled at Bayridge Secondary School, not far fromwhere Jacob lived on Princess Street. He couldn’t believe that, in the time it had taken to move from one city to another, from one life into the next—in the time it had taken to call his mother’s bluff, discover that his father had been a prison guard, not a dead pilot, and, armed with the truth, feel suddenly sure-footed—he had only missed one full day of classes. It was as if he had been in outer space, for years, only to return to earth and find that only a few seconds had elapsed.

  In his years away from North Bay, Gabriel didn’t learn much more about his father. From Jacob, he learned that the man had been brilliant, a womanizer, violent. To his first-year roommate, a criminology major who’d needed to draw a police sketch for an assignment, he’d given the only other information he knew: that his father was a white male, likely in his mid-forties, of average height, broad-shouldered, French-Canadian. Gabriel had carried this poorly drawn rendition around for weeks, eyeing the vaguely handsome face.

  And so far, he had only told Caroline, his first girlfriend. Or half-told her. They had been in a fight, and he had said, “Come on, by now you must have figured out how I was born,” afraid she would no longer want him, seeing how he saw his own life as an abomination. But she had simply seemed confused. And then, when she realized what he meant, she gave him a kind of helpless that’s all? look before she said, “Well, my mother wanted an abortion. Just because they didn’t want us to exist, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t.” She went on, but his affection for her deepened—for that look she’d given him, which couldn’t conceive of his shame.

  With that confession, Gabriel had felt an enormous relief. He had been struggling upward, against the weight of fathoms of dark water, trying to be happy for three people: for his mother, to make up for the solitude his birth had reinforced; for himself; and to spite his father, always to spite his father. Now he realized: Someone else knows, and I am no less existent. And: I am no more imprisoned by who my parents are than is any other human on earth.

  And so the next time his mother called, Gabriel—who had managed for most of his university years to keep in touch with his mother through letters—actually answered, and made plans to go to North Bay to see her.

  XIV

  Under the table, Gabriel’s outstretched leg rested against Pénélope’s calf. Fall-red maples cast windblown shadows over his face. Not looking at her, he asked: “When are you going to tell him?”

  “Soon.”

  “You said soon a year ago. You said soon the first day we met.”

  “I just need a few more weeks,” she said. “He just asked me to marry him. I don’t want to be cruel.”

  “I can’t believe you said yes,” he said. “That would have been the time, if you were ever really planning on breaking up with him.”

  “That’s not fair,” she said. “This is easy for you.”

  “I don’t see that it is.” Pénélope felt the muscles in his legs tighten. “It’s not easy being in love with someone who’s fucking somebody else.”

  They were at a bar in Côte-des-Neiges, on the terrasse, far from work, far from their homes—one balconied and wood-floored with a sleeping man inside, the other a mostly empty studio with a rooftop terrace near Atwater—so far from the familiar streets where they practised their deceptions that each felt a bit lost, even from the other.

  But really, why the delay?

  A week earlier, on a crisp September morning two weeks into a late period, Pénélope realized that another type of knot—the kind that doubled, and then tripled over itself, the kind with the power to tie her to one man or the other forever—had woven itself into the thin thread of her life.

  How could she reconcile that this nascent love was com-pletely unrelated to the identity of the father, but that her entire happiness depended on who the father was?

  Pénélope felt like she was stabbing Adrien in the face with a white dagger. Worse, that she had sidled in, a leg between his legs, her tongue between his lips; she had tilted her breasts against his chest and felt his nipples harden, and as he moaned, she swept the cotton swab from the corner of his mouth over his lower lip.

  It had been worse, earlier that night, with Gabriel. Her knees straddling his hips, he fast asleep and open-mouthed beneath her, she had agreed with him suddenly; she felt ashamed of her two bedrooms, her two lingerie drawers, of having excited two men in one night.

  Later, Pénélope stood by the window, naked, the night mist gathered in droplets on the cold glass. She stepped onto the balcony, a blanket over her shoulders—unable to slide back into bed with Adrien, afraid of finding a real wound in his flesh.

  The moist Q-tip in a plastic bag labelled A, next to the one labelled G.

  Adrien stepped out into a cloudy Tuesday morning, his motorcycle helmet in hand. There was a mist in the air that dampened his skin as he followed the cat down the steps to the sidewalk. In the gutter, rainwater surged past like a muddy river.

  Swinging a leg over the seat, the weight of his left foot pressed into the footrest, Adrien noticed the garbage bags Pénélope had taken out the night before. They had been clawed and knocked over by raccoons; a trail of trash led into the gutter and flowed down the street with twists of yellow leaves. Near the edge of the sidewalk, he saw the fateful plastic tip, the white casing partly obscured by a damp fold of newspaper, and the screen with the two blue lines.

  Wiping the pregnancy test against his grey pants, he pulled the garbage bag upright, knotted the handles, and headed back inside.

  Adrien arrived breathless. Pénélope was still asleep on the balcony, her white blanket moist with dew and drawn around her body. He squeezed her arm, gently, until she awoke.

  “Nélo, were you waiting to tell me?” he asked.

  “I wanted it to be a surprise,” she murmured, still half-asleep, as he slid his arms under her thighs and her shoulders and carried her inside.

  When Pénélope awoke, the first thing she saw on the bed-side table was the pregnancy test she had thrown away herself, late yesterday night, the rest of the garbage clutched in her left fist as a decoy. How had Adrien found it?

  She heard the slow press of his weight against the creaking floorboards. He slid into bed beside her, stroking her stomach and resting one arm between her breasts.

  “Shouldn’t you be on your way to work?” Pénélope asked as lightly as possible, her face turning away from his, her cheeks reddening.

  “I found something incredible on the street today,” he said, kissing her collarbone, and then her neck. “I can’t believe you didn’t explode from wanting to tell me.”

  “I was going to tell you tomorrow.”

  Adrien turned her body toward his.

  “Nélo,” he said, smiling broadly, the flat of his palm against her cheek.

  She’d been drowsy and defenceless. Her prepared lies—it’s a friend’s test, it must be the neighbour’s garbage—had evaporated, unwittingly leaving her with the best lie of all, the prerogative of the hopeful mother: I wanted it to be a surprise.

  After dropping the two swabs off at the clinic where her sister’s best friend worked, Péné
lope returned to the apartment on des Érables to a fridge filled with her favourite foods—to strawberries and cream, chocolate, frozen yogourt—and to six tender, whispered messages on the answering machine, like the ones she and Adrien had traded in the first month after they’d met. And then, when Adrien came home from work, the devotion in his eyes with such finality.

  Pénélope thought of her mother, the stacks of rubber-band-bound twenty-dollar bills stuffed into a purse in her closet—in case the shared accounts were drained, in case she needed to leave suddenly with her daughters. She remembered the scattered evidence of her father’s other women, obvious even to her as a child.

  Guilt sat on her shoulders like a boulder. Because she knew she’d been a coward, that she had, until now, prized being locked up safe in Adrien’s guileless arms over her love for Gabriel, rough and unhewn, whole but slippery in her hands.

  XV

  Araceli finally returned to visit Montreal—a city she loved before she knew Adrien in it, as if she could tell in advance that only these acres of land would bring her happiness—to conduct interviews for the New York Times.