by Joan Barfoot
Alix and, at least theoretically, Jamie went to spend the weekend with Madeleine. Isla went off with Lyle to fall in love, at the turn at the top of the lane, with his home. He put her bag in the guest bedroom, which she thought was unusual, even possibly strange, but he said, “We can just take it easy, okay?”
He led her outside, back to the porch and its deep chairs, him with a beer and in bare feet (high arch, long toes, she noticed) up on the railing, her with white wine, bare feet (flattish, stubby-toed) beside his. “Over there,” he was pointing, “there’s a creek. Pretty aggressive this time of year, but not even close on its best days to being a river. Out there’s the shed, the old barn was falling down so I saved as much of the wood as I could and put up something a lot smaller. The main part of the land is twenty acres, just from the road in, and this around here. The other fifty, back up behind that little hill, I rent out to a neighbour. I’m no farmer, but I didn’t want it going to waste. Bad enough, I figure, people like me buy up these places, without letting them go to waste.”
“Why is it bad? What do you mean, people like you?” There were daffodils blooming around the base of the porch, tulips in bud, tiny blue flowers running wild in the grass. This man beside her maybe planted those bulbs and blooms, crouched down, fingers digging into the earth, hoping for future beauty, planning for it.
“Guys who wouldn’t know a real day’s work if it rose up and bit their ass. Guys like me, from the neighbours’ point of view. I figure it’s a reasonable enough attitude. It takes a while to get comfortable here, though, or at least get other people comfortable enough they don’t resent you too much. But a latecomer never really belongs. Which is okay. I never intended to. Wouldn’t know how, and I don’t have the time. Still, people like it, I think, that I’ve shown some respect for the place, made it better, shaped it up. So it’s obviously not just a hobby, it’s my home. I’m not romantic about it, either, it’s not some stupid goat-farming, back-to-the-land dream, people around here have been through that and it really pisses them off. And I’m not a weekend gent, verandah cocktail parties, that sort of crap. There’s a few of those around, too. This is where I live, and it’s something I’ve hammered out for myself.” He suddenly grinned. “Every. Fucking. Nail.”
There was a breeze. The air smelled odd to her, and sounded odd, too. “Not everyone likes it out here,” he said. “Being in the middle of nowhere isn’t to everyone’s taste. Too quiet, some say, too out of it.” Who were these everyones and these somes? Not a question she could ask.
“Quiet,” she said instead, “in this racket?” Rampageous birds, mainly, ducks and crows but also smaller bold black ones Lyle said were grackles, bright jays and cardinals, a few robins, red-winged blackbirds, whole clouds of other, duller, brown flocks sweeping and clattering and soaring over them and away. He identified a raw sweet chorus, which unlike the birds would continue far into the night, as frogs. “Jesus,” she said, “how many frogs?”
“Thousands,” he smiled. “Millions, maybe.”
It’s possible that without him, all this could have felt creepy; but without him, she’d have had no reason to be there herself. She was accustomed to cars, trucks, ambulances, taxis, screaming brakes and sirens, all those urban bells and whistles, the great human racket, most of it, if occasionally dangerous, at least somewhat predictable. Hordes of birds, “millions” of frogs — in their masses, she couldn’t see much reason they mightn’t gang up on human intruders, dive, swoop, hop, and crawl through the air and the grass, onto porches, under doors, through window screens, tormenting and pursuing and driving them out.
“No,” he said seriously. “That’s more what humans would do. Animals, and I include birds and frogs, are more generous.”
His mistrust of humans reassured her. She thought she might be able to lean, just a little, on his wariness; although it was too early to tell.
He was still working on the interior, he said: repairing floors and doors, sanding them down to the original oak, gradually finding colours, one room at a time being papered and painted. “When I see things, I know them,” he said. “So I wait till I see something right.” Nothing he said sounded random to her, or insignificant.
“Also, I like my comforts. It meant updating all the wiring and plumbing, but I’m not into inconvenience or hardship. I keep an office here, too, so I’m wired to the world. I couldn’t do it, otherwise.” He liked wood, it seemed, glowing true oak panels in that office, for instance, and nothing cheap, or cheaply done. Also she’d seen nothing fluttery in any part of the house as they’d passed through, no flowery wallpaper patterns, not much in the way of pastels. The kitchen and its cupboards were downright stark, contrasting black and white against hard maple floors, the living room painted a deep burgundy with high ivory ceiling, the bold yellow sofa and matching wing chairs reeking of ease. She could see why a tall, narrow-built man without much spare flesh might go looking for excess comfort, furniture he could sink into without bone hitting structure.
Perhaps for a similar reason her own plusher body, not unlike his furniture, would appeal to him, who could say?
“It was pretty neglected when I bought it,” he said. “An old couple left it to their kids, they couldn’t agree what to do with it, so it sat empty a while. Property goes wild fast, grows up out of control, and inside, things start to collapse. Mice, squirrels, things like that you kind of take for granted. Other things, well, I opened the door of the second bathroom when I was still just thinking of buying, and there were huge bells of fungus growing out of the walls. Giant pinkish ones, not even little mushroomy things.” He shook his head. “I’m prepared to see beauty in a lot of unexpected places, but that wasn’t one of them. I almost threw up. Did close the door fast, tried to put it out of my mind for a while. It was the most disgusting thing I had to do, fixing that bathroom. Knocked a few grand off the price, though.”
“How long have you owned it?”
“Three years now. After everything.”
After his wife, Sandra, died, of course. “Tough times,” he said. “She was home, mostly. It was hard, but also in a lot of ways good.”
Either he was a man lacking words to describe large experience, or he had faith Isla was sufficiently wise to fill in the gaps. She could not be sure which it was, but hoped for the latter. Certainly he’d been through events foreign to her — she might have wished James dead, but that was just bitterness, and anyway, he didn’t die. She thought it might be possible to seriously admire Lyle, a man who emerged from horror with hard-won, hard-thought-through grace. If that turned out to be what he was.
“The dining room’s last on my list, and a few more touches in the bedrooms and bathrooms. Then it’ll probably be time to start over again. Do one thing, something else immediately starts falling apart.” Well, yes. “I used to figure if I could get things how I wanted them, they’d stay that way, that was the deal. Also that I’d go on wanting more or less the same things. Not true, either one. I should have known better, but we have to find things out for ourselves, don’t we?”
Evidently. She’d nodded. “Funny,” she offered, because in some way this followed, “how sorrow always seems more powerful than joy. Joy just kind of jogs along, but grief, that really throws a person off the track, onto a new one.”
He thought for a moment. “It’s how it looks, all right. I’m not sure, though. Maybe what comes from joy just doesn’t leap out, there’s nothing sore-thumb about it. But grief’s nothing but pain. It makes the lessons learned more noticeable, for sure, but I don’t want to think they’re bigger than what we get from a good run of pleasure.” Looked at that way — well, she saw she could stand to rethink a few things. It was nice, what he said, a nice way of seeing.
“But on the other hand, such a rage I fell into when Sandy got ill, I can’t tell you.” No, and did Isla especially want to hear? “I wasn’t much help to her for a while, when
she could have used something better from me, but that anger, it took me over, like I’d gone blind. Just staggering, nothing-else-mattered blind. I actually put my fist through a wall. And it felt good. Everything I’d planned and assumed, you see: good family, good career, a good life ahead as far as I could see, and then. The end of everything.” Isla found herself nodding. She couldn’t have put it better herself.
“The worst thing — for me, I mean, not for Sandy — was growing apart for a little while. She was on a journey I wasn’t going on, but it still disrupted every part of my life, small to large. I probably blamed her for that. I don’t know if she knew or not. I imagine some people come closer in a situation like that, but we fell apart for a time. As if we could find less and less in common to talk about, that could be spoken out loud. I knew I was failing her badly, which made me even angrier, but I couldn’t seem to find a way to do better. Be better.
“Then, it sounds strange, but we got past all that when what was going to happen finally became obvious and inevitable. I guess we were both exhausted from trying to be brave or whatever, and we both just gave up, broke down. It was,” he said, looking away, far from Isla, seeing pictures she couldn’t and didn’t particularly want to imagine, “a strange time. Strangely good, in its way.”
“And then?” Stupid; she’d just wanted him to haul himself out of history, away from old pain.
“Then she died,” he said flatly. Back indeed. “We all knew it would happen, but even so, when it did, the boys needed a whole lot of help and that got me through the worst. In a funny way Sandy did, too. She died with as much grace as she could muster, and it would have been shabby to let her down. But you don’t want to hear all this.”
Not really; but also yes, of course. This was the early stage of their acquaintance, when much information had to be exchanged swiftly, facts of various levels and sorts flying back and forth, establishing a scale of compatibility, possibility. Her turn would come and what would she say, exactly how would she recount her own history? As flatly and sufficiently as Lyle, or in some more incoherent or jumbled or dramatic fashion? And if style reflected content, did it mean Lyle was a flat and sufficient man?
“Of course,” she said, and touched his hand.
The trouble, one trouble, with middle age was that while there were prospects for the future, there was also a good deal of past. An awful lot to catch up with, imagine, try to picture and fail to picture. The entire scent and sensation of someone’s life, perfectly familiar to him and maybe even to a very few others, had to be strange, foreign, irretrievable territory to anyone recently met.
That this worked both ways was not exactly a comfort.
So was one supposed to try to fill in all those blanks, sketch word-pictures of all the multiple joys of half a lifetime, as well as the griefs, the greatest of which he was now recounting in his spare way? Or should one better just recite the facts, the chronology of events, leaving emotion where it perhaps ought to be for people like them: all in the future, in their own hands?
Naturally it was important that she know how he’d cared for and about his dead wife. Because that was a whole large lost part of his life, and also because if he hadn’t, what would that say about him? She wouldn’t have wanted to find herself in the country for an isolated weekend with a man with a cold, easy-come, easy-go heart.
At least they were just into their forties, not their seventies or sixties or even their fifties. That much less to have to outline, describe, explain. God knew what people did who met up in nursing homes, although perhaps they had an unusual amount of patience and spare time for recounting.
She rearranged her features along, she hoped, the lines of solemn attentiveness. What did Lyle see in her face as he spoke of his dying, dead wife, his two grieving sons whom Isla hadn’t yet met, as he hadn’t yet met Jamie and Alix, the ups and final down of his own personal, particular crisis? Warmth, she tried to adjust for. Empathy. Sympathy. All that was real enough, perfectly genuine, but having to attend to a display of reality, she noticed, rather took the silky edge off true sentiments.
“One thing about death,” he went on, popping open another beer, “it really hauls you up short.” Isla imagined it would, for sure, although death was by no means the only event that could do that. “I didn’t think I was in the wrong life, exactly, I like being a lawyer a lot, and I love my boys, and I was proud how they got through everything, even those tough years when teenagers can go off the rails in the best situation, which we were not in, the three of us, anyway, obviously I wasn’t going to give up any of that. At the same time, the boys would be leaving and moving into their own lives. Sandy and I’d had a sort of picture of a future when that happened, and it wasn’t that it didn’t suit me, too, as long as she was going to be the other part of it, but once she wasn’t, it was out of the question. It wasn’t me, just on my own.”
He paused. So Isla had to say, “What was it that turned out not to be you? What had your plans been?” Honestly, she was happy to ask. These were clues, as well as distant lost dreams.
“Oh, we’d figured that as soon as the boys were settled in university, we’d both take a year off from work and hit the road. We talked about places we’d travelled to and wanted to see again, like, I don’t know, Paris for me, and some awful little hotel in some awful little country in Africa for Sandy, and places neither of us had ever been but wanted to go to, like maybe India, China. We were going to take a year and a whack of our money doing that, and then we figured we could do it again every few years.
“But you know, to be honest I’d have liked travelling with Sandy, I think, because she was pretty adventurous and curious and damn near fearless as well, so it would have been a new way of seeing for me, I figured, even the places I’d already been. But without her, I’d only have been thinking about how much better it’d have been with her, and I’d have been miserable for a whole lot of reasons, not least that I’m not, myself, a happy traveller.”
This surprised Isla. For some reason she’d assumed that a man who looked like her picture of a cowboy, at least at that moment, which was to say a lanky sort of fellow in blue jeans, might have cowboy-like qualities. A range-traveller, a roamer, and perhaps, just to complete the picture, even a laconic one. It was also disorienting that his dead wife was coming to life in ways that did not reflect her notion of someone named Sandy, someone safely unmysterious, which Isla had maybe mistaken for safely unremarkable.
Imagine being a person of whom it was said that she died with all the grace she could muster. Isla imagined desperate resistance, a distinct and helpless shortage of anything remotely like grace.
At the late end of that first day, warming up in the living room from the chill of the evening, Lyle stroked Isla’s neck, her arms, her throat. Her fingers were tentatively on the bones of his stranger’s spine. She was the one who said, “Let’s go to bed,” and he nodded.
What she remembers most vividly from those earliest days is her surprised, startling pleasure. She thought then it had to be rooted in the freedom of knowing nothing depended on this, because nothing was required or would come of it. Some weeks later, though, she realized if that were ever true, it no longer was. Familiarity was breeding delights she had not previously imagined herself capable of. Playfulness, the notion of letting go, romping. Simple enjoyment, it turned out, was serious business.
When he said, finally, very quietly, “Tell me about your husband,” they were in bed. Her bed this time, the kids once again with Madeleine. He’d waited a long time to ask this. Perhaps the thought of her former husband had entered his head now because he supposed he was lying between sheets she had previously shared with James. This was not the case, of course. All that bedding was long gone; into the trash, not to the poor, because she’d felt strongly at the time that no one so poor they needed charity sheets deserved the additional corrosion of James’s presence in them, however fai
nt. His impression remained; like the Shroud of Turin, only not.
“It’s not a nice story.”
“That’s okay. At our ages, we have lots of not-nice stories.”
Not like that one. She had her hand on his chest, and felt his breathing and heartbeat speed up, then slow, then speed and then slow. It was a good story to tell lying down in dim light and not looking at him. “I see,” he said at last. “That’s pretty bad. Now it makes more sense why you don’t trust me. It’d be strange if you did trust me, after all that.”
At which point, of course, and after all that, she began trusting him.
He seemed, extraordinary man, to adapt himself to her history. He has made a point of being a man who phones if he’s going to be late, who doesn’t make plans he won’t keep, who as far as she can see takes care not to tell lies; who is cautious about any possible interpretations of betrayal, except for that one time: sitting in the truck, waiting for her outside Goldie’s.
Who rescues her son, as best he can, and would no doubt rescue her daughter, too, if anyone could figure out how to do that.
Jamie, released from six terrible weeks of very expensive rehabilitation, hung around more, and sometimes had conversations, serious-looking ones, with Lyle, the two of them sitting stretched out on lawn chairs, Isla’s side-by-side men, a beer each between them. She didn’t ask what they talked about; Lyle didn’t say. Another demonstration of rectitude.
But Jamie slipped away. Began going out more and more often, came in late, grew grey-skinned again. “He’s using,” she said to Lyle, not as a question.
“I expect so.”
“I’m not going back into rehab,” Jamie said flatly when she confronted him. “I’m fine, honest. I learned a good lesson, believe me. I’m not using, I swear.” Little liar, pants on fire. She was investigating other programs and possibilities, seeking more expert advice when the phone rang and when she answered it was Jamie, with the smallest of voices. Charged with trafficking. Asking for help.