Packing up her things tonight, Lois thought of the hawk spitting hairballs in Corona. She took out her phone and typed a to-do list of things to achieve before she and Nick left for France the next day. She’d failed to get anything for her sister’s children, and wondered if there was something that could be procured without leaving the neighbourhood.
Last year, everyone had received a copy of her chapbook: Yelp Travel Plaza Review Poems, published by Incomprehensible Womb press. Her parents had been supportive in their own ways, that is to say, in ways that were diametrically opposed. Joan had said, ‘You’re so clever,’ and Frank had typed out a line-by-line critique of her work. Wim ordered copies at every bookstore in London, giving a fake name and phone number each time. Maya never said a thing. When she visited her sister in the spring, Lois found the chapbook in Gitsy’s room, covered in doodles and Frozen stickers. A further translation, she thought.
All writing – like all relationships – was a matter of combining. An arrangement. To hear the Historian speak, there was nothing left to his relationship when he met Lois but the reciprocal servicing of individual agendas. The working marriage was rolled out at the PTA fundraiser (her), at champagne receptions they pretended not to care about (he), but the brutal honesty was kept for lovers, girlfriends, workmates, and also for the creative and intellectual confessionals provided by their work (she was a dancer with a big New York company).
As she exited the building, Lois checked the Historian’s Twitter. She did that every now and again, searching for signs of domestic misery on social media, and feeling relieved when she found none.
‘She tells me she stopped all communication like she wants a medal,’ Nick told the marriage counsellor they had started seeing, back in the spring.
‘It’s common for spouses or partners to try and negate the attachment left over from the affair,’ said the counsellor. ‘There is usually a phase of abnegation.’
Lois kept her mouth mostly shut during those first sessions, for fear that more unnecessary truths would come dribbling out. The sessions provided an audience for her guilt and a witness to Nick’s magnanimity. They never quite got to the part where the cheating party considered why they’d had an affair in the first place. In fact, they stopped going to counselling the moment they regained a certain equality in their sessions – an equality Lois thought Nick was not ready to concede.
On her way home, Lois picked up a bottle of wine and a bag of peanuts, and stopped in at the Chinese dollar store. She bought a plastic Statue of Liberty with infra-red eyes for Gitsy and a cat clock that spoke the time in Chinese for Finn. She knew her sister would confiscate them, like she disposed of all carcinogenic plastics.
Nick was home, wrapping books at the kitchen table. He’d stopped at The Strand on his way home from work, like he did every year, and bought everyone two books. There was also a bag from the Natural History Museum, where Nick worked, which she imagined contained age-appropriate, non-toxic gifts for Gitsy and Finn.
Four years ago, Nick landed a job writing copy for the museum’s education department. He spent his days writing child-friendly descriptions of rock specimens, outer space, life groups and dinosaur bones. Once, when the Historian scoffed at this, Lois felt like slapping him. They had the same job, she and Nick. They rarely brought anything new into the world – they merely transformed what was already out there so that specific groups of people (say, francophones, or the six-to-fourteen-year-old demographic) could access it.
They had tried to bring something new into the world, once. But that particular collaboration flopped when the foetus gave up at three and a half months. This event ushered in a deep bout of depression for Lois, which only started to lift when the Historian approached her after her sloppy wedding karaoke rendition of ‘Kiss Off’. ‘I make it my business always to seek out the most interesting person in the room,’ he said.
Once, she asked him what would happen the day they walked into a room with a more interesting person than her in it. ‘Not going to happen,’ he said. He gave good answers to questions, the Historian. Other times, the things he said were disastrous. Like after their first kiss, one morning, by the charred stumps of Pier 56. By any measure it was a chaste kiss. It could still have been written off as an awkward brush caused by an overabundance of sunlight. Could still have been made not to count. But that wasn’t going to happen. To Lois, the kiss felt promising and dangerous – like tampering with history. ‘That wasn’t even a kiss,’ he texted her later that day. ‘Just two people catching their breath.’ What a lie. If anything, the kiss sent them both into a state of apnoea and panting want.
Lois dropped her bag and put her arms around Nick from behind, to feel him in any way she still could.
‘Don’t look,’ he said. ‘Your presents are in this pile, too.’
‘I won’t.’
She emptied the peanuts into a bowl and opened the bottle of wine. She poured two glasses and gave one to Nick.
‘I got offered some work over Christmas,’ she said.
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah. I got an email today about subtitling an old war film.’
‘Which war?’
‘The first one.’
‘You know World War One wasn’t actually the first war, right?’
That Nick could still joke about history was a good sign, she supposed.
The offer had come in from MoMA that morning. It involved translating into English the title cards of a 1928 silent docudrama called Verdun: Visions of History. The film had been discovered in some dusty, near-abandoned vault in Moscow, and was to be shown in the new year with a live cello accompaniment. Lois wondered whether the gig had anything to do with the Historian. Had he passed on her name? And if so, had he written it in an email or said it out loud? Had he used her full name or just Lois? And if so, how did that feel? Did it feel like regret, or like history?
They watched the first forty-five minutes of the film that night, in bed. After almost an hour of dead boys in trenches and black and white blasts tearing up the French countryside, Lois noticed that Nick was fast asleep. She closed the laptop, laid her body flat alongside his and shut her eyes.
*
‘You were grinding your teeth all night,’ Nick said the next morning.
‘It’s because we’re flying,’ said Lois, picking at the leftover peanuts while Nick made coffee.
‘You can do that thing where you pulverise my hand for seven hours to make yourself feel better if you want.’
‘I might just do that,’ she said. ‘I might also do that thing where I take a pill.’
After breakfast they each cleaned one side of the house, and Nick brought down two weeks of recycling. In the street, a taxi honked. Lois looked at their apartment, clean and quiet and pre-abandonment, and, as she closed the door on it for a fortnight, wondered how much longer she’d be living here, and in what capacity.
*
The interviews were numbered from one to twenty-two. One: militia men. Two: random soldiers. Three: Catholic priest. Four: bush militia. Five: MSF Six: general. Seven: more soldiers. Eight: medical student. Nine: paediatrics nurse Ten: Muslim kids at airport. And so on, all the way to twenty-two. Of the twenty-two, twelve were interviews of fighters. Men in battle fatigues with amulets and oxidised machetes, and lots of very young boys. Lois clicked on the first subtitle file, which bloomed open into three different windows. As she hit the export button, to keep only the column of words, with its timecode anchor, the plane groaned. Nick turned his head to her to remind her with his eyes that planes always groan before take-off.
Lois reached into her pocket and brought out the two-dose corner of Xanax she had cut off earlier. She popped open a blister and swallowed one of the pills. File one had finished loading, and her laptop whirred from the extenuation of the task. Nick squeezed her hand, which was sweet, but prevented her from opening file two. The titles from the first file occupied her screen in a tragic column:
Turn around.
/>
What is it you wanted to show us?
There was shouting everywhere.
They tried to cut us up.
We answer only to the people.
We are all volunteers.
We are all volunteers.
We have no representatives in government.
Lois hit Select All, changed the spacing to single and centred the words, turning the column into a pillar. A flight attendant asked her to put the laptop away for take-off. Soon the plane started its taxi down to the runway, making Lois wish she were on firm ground in Queens, anywhere out of the window, instead of in this unlikely machine. Nick opened his book. The plane was rushing down the runway, gathering speed. Lois closed her eyes and leaned her head back against her seat. Nick took her hand in his again without lifting his eyes from the paper. She heard the pages as he turned them. Each page sounded like: ‘Flying is a thing I, unlike you, can do without being devastated.’
The plane climbed up with the noise of a tin can whizzing down an airshaft until it reached an altitude it liked, and started purring like a good piece of equipment. Lois felt parts of herself unclenching. Soon, Nick fell asleep.
As the plane zoomed towards Nova Scotia, Lois turned the warlords into lovers. The fighters wore amulets, small wearable temples made of beads and string, to protect them from sharpened machetes and stolen bullets. Lois turned them into love talismans and gave them new powers. She’d started off by turning the militiamen and war strategists into men who wrote love poems; romantic aubades before the battle. Turning hate speech into declarations of love. Diplomacy into lovemaking.
Now she started listing the complications of love: missing, frustration, lying, impossible juncture. Cheating. She found that the words of these men lent themselves better to love’s red flags and dead ends, its dashed incitements and unfair power.
She wondered who would meet them at the airport. If her mother had volunteered her father for the job, he’d surely be late.
We are all volunteers.
We are all volunteers.
*
‘Isn’t there a hole I’m meant to be watching out for?’ asked Cole, as they came up the driveway.
‘Yes, it’s when you get to the maple.’
‘I think we passed the maple.’
‘No. I don’t think so. Just stick to the left.’
‘The civilised thing would be to have one of those lights that comes on automatically when you come up the driveway.’
‘It’s my parents, Cole. Just be thankful the hot water’s working.’
‘We don’t know the hot water’s working.’
‘You’re right,’ said Maya. ‘We don’t.’
After Cole got the job in Geneva, they moved in with Joan and Frank until they could get on their feet. Within six months they found a furnished one-bedroom apartment on the French side of the border. For those six months, having a fellow countryman in the house brought out an accent in Joan that was unrecognisable to Maya, and had been long forgotten by Frank. Overnight, Joan became indefatigable on the topics of England and her childhood. She made Sunday roast for weeks, until they all asked her to stop. Joan’s exhumation of her roots came as an utter surprise to Maya, who looked on it with some suspicion. Joan felt it, and for the first time ever enjoyed the sensation that she was different from them all. Perhaps to meddle with his wife’s new allyship, Frank put himself in charge of his son-in-law’s integration. Cole’s induction to the French Alps was historical, semantic, gustatory and unrelenting. Their shared interest in her new husband brought Maya and Frank closer than ever before, and during that time they achieved a peace unwitnessed before or since. Cole, however, was happy to stop touring cheese cellars every weekend, and when he and Maya moved into the new apartment they did not extend an invitation to Joan and Frank for two weeks. ‘You can be overbearing with your passions,’ said Joan. ‘Only to you, Saint Joan,’ said Frank, wondering if there was some truth in her vision of things.
Cole stopped the car by the curtain of bamboos, which even the headlights couldn’t pierce. Beyond them lay the gaping jaw of the swimming pool, empty but for a couple of feet of water that would turn fetid in the spring and be a-jump with toads.
‘Do you think there’s ice on the pool?’ asked Cole.
‘I don’t know,’ said Maya. ‘Can you carry Gitsy up the stairs?’
‘That thing is like the 9/11 memorial.’
‘I don’t feel like talking about the pool right now. Can you just get Gitsy upstairs?’
‘Yes. Jesus. Relax.’
Maya bristled at the word. It wasn’t that his instinct was wrong, it was just that when he told her to relax she felt as detached from him as a ledge does from the man who trips off it.
Cole opened the door on Gitsy’s side and extricated his daughter from the car seat, untangling her long brown hair from the seatbelt. Gitsy folded herself over his shoulder, gripping his jumper with her sleepy hands. Maya followed behind with Finn and the nappy bag.
‘Are we here, Papa?’ Gitsy asked.
‘Go back to sleep, darling.’
‘But I want to pet Simon.’
‘You can pet Simon in the morning. It’s very late. Everyone’s asleep.’
‘Is Simon asleep?’
‘I’m sure he is.’
Maya and Cole walked up the steps to the house with their floppy children. The house at night looked like a cross between a bunker and a Dutch canal house – all impossible angles and candlelit slits flickering in the dark. Maya stuck to the wall and away from her father’s vertical rock garden, which in the night, and without a guard rail, seemed like a bad joke.
Joan opened the front door. Maya knew she must have been looking out for them. Must have seen the light come up from behind the hills and snake in and out of the next hill, vanishing and reappearing between the barn conversions and new builds. Each one of them had looked out for someone that way: boyfriends, visiting cousins, Frank/Dad...
The living room was trembling from the fat church candles Joan had lit, and the heat from the wood stove carried a sappy smoke into the hallway. Maya kicked off her shoes. The light had always been butter-yellow in this house. No matter the bulb or the atmosphere, the lights here never burned cold white like they did in some houses. Maya mouthed ‘Hi’ to Joan, and nodded ‘Yes’ to her gestured question of ‘Tea?’. She walked up to Lois’s old bedroom, with its boat bed and cot, and laid Finn down.
‘Don’t pet Simon until I wake up,’ Gitsy ordered Cole, who was pulling off her shoes and socks.
‘I promise,’ he answered, tucking her fully clothed into her aunt’s childhood bed.
After Cole left to fetch the bags from the car, Maya crossed the corridor into her old bedroom and sat down on the bed. There was an envelope on the pillow with her name on it. In it were a bunch of photos of her as a child. She took her phone out of her purse and turned it on. The phone woke up and whirred a few times as it caught up with the time zone. A message from her phone provider telling her she was in France and six work emails she didn’t care to open showed up on the screen. She wondered what Liz was doing that was preventing her from writing. Probably sleeping.
Maya took off her socks and pressed her toes into the carpet. Outside, Cole triggered the light on the neighbour’s front porch, and the glare flooded the bedroom, painting Maya’s toes white, like boiled bones.
Maya looked for Liz in the shadows of the room. The children would wake up tonight because of jetlag, and she would have to deal with it. Stopping in Paris had been an absurd idea. Downstairs, in the kitchen, Cole laughed at something her mother said. Maya found Liz’s nose in the curtain pole, the back of her head in the shadow cast off a lampshade. She looked for Liz’s shoulder, which she liked to use as a shelf for her chin when they lay down next to each other in bed.
There had not been much sex since the birth of Finn, an enormous baby who had catapulted himself into the world with such speed and determination that taking something to allay the pa
in of his arrival was not an option. Cole had waited instinctively to touch his wife, and even then doled out caresses that were so gentle and unassuming that they passed quite unnoticed. Maya didn’t even notice they’d not started having sex again until months after the date at which they might reasonably have expected to want such a thing to resume.
Maya wasn’t sure when exactly she had lost the will to possess Cole. It could have been on that walk to the Georgetown waterfront, back in July, when they’d bought soft-scoop ice cream, and Cole had put his hand on her bare knee, and she’d thought how odd it looked there. It could have been a month later, when she called Liz a week after the workshop and asked if she would like to meet up for a drink. When Liz said yes, Maya realised she didn’t know where people went to have drinks. ‘Anywhere that’s easy for you,’ she said. ‘No, you choose. You’re the one with kids,’ Liz replied.
She’d invited Liz to their house the following week, wanting perhaps to lay it all out for her to see – the life she and Cole had built, with its modernist Danish furniture and school schedules, and just enough excess to feel like what you had sufficed.
It was a couple of weeks later that Liz kissed her. The kiss was like a question, beginning to end. In the next few weeks, Maya had seen her love-troops retreat. She stopped working on Cole and instead moved on to another fortress, one that looked like no other victory or collaboration before. But Cole thought of himself as still won over, was still in thrall to Maya’s hawkish perfection and will, and she had kept up the ruse, throwing a shadow army at him to keep things ticking along, but deploying her strategy on Liz.
Maya lay back on the bed and pushed her hand down into her jeans. She left the hand there, and Liz walked into the room with a cup of tea, her wet hair wrapped in a towel. All of Liz’s towels were those waffly cotton ones. She was one of those people who only ever washed whites with other whites. The towels always looked like they had just come from the shop. Maya sat up in bed and stretched her hand to take the cup of tea Liz had just made.
Stories We Tell Ourselves Page 7