Stories We Tell Ourselves
Page 19
On the subway home, he imagined a conversation in which Lois said she wouldn’t be coming back. Then he imagined a conversation in which she came home, but it was he who asked her to find somewhere else to live. He also imagined himself repainting the kitchen to surprise her, and leaving white carnations in a vase on the table for when she arrived. He couldn’t tell if this Christmas was to be racked up with the good ones or not. He had felt close to Lois, yes, but that could have been familiarity. Seeing Lois and Frank together had sobered him. Lois sometimes joked that she’d grow into her mum, but what if she grew into her dad?
He still didn’t know if she’d told Frank and Joan about her affair. He hoped not. The way they were so protective of her, and tolerant – it would have angered him to think they knew and hadn’t given her hell. Hadn’t submitted her to the adult version of a grounding. Reminded her that even unconditional love is a deal, that they were all married to Nick, in a way. He’d not told his parents. ‘I don’t want them to think any less of you,’ he told Lois. The truth is, he was scared it made him look like a sap.
Was he a sap?
People got on and off the subway. Perhaps they knew a thing or two about rocks. Perhaps they didn’t. All these strangers were like geodes – crystallised around bubbling emotions that left their core unfilled.
When he got home he opened his suitcase and found a draft of Lois’s lovelords manuscript. There was a Post-it note on it that said, ‘I love you’. He poured himself a whisky and sat on the bed. He opened it to the first page. It was dedicated to Frank.
Still, it was only love.
*
‘Like dogs’, from A Battleground Is Love, by Lois Lemaire (Incomprehensible Womb Press, t.b.a.)
I am 9
I am 14
I am 17, 18 and 22
I am 33
they treat us like dogs
like less than dogs
like volunteers and
can I have 5 minutes
to hold
you
close?
you’ve asked me, like,
6 times
yes, but
if I had asked
for 30 minutes
you would have
said
no.
*
‘Let’s go to the Monument,’ Joan said at breakfast. Maya, Cole and the kids were flying back to DC tomorrow. The snow from last night had set into a thick white coat that elevated everything several feet up from the ground. Lois was cutting and pasting words on her laptop, and Frank was ensconced in the hefty dictionary of ancient geography he’d left under the tree for himself. He didn’t know what to do with himself in the wake of the latest interdiction – this one doled out to preserve not his, but Joan’s heart. Joan suspected that if she could only get them walking in the snow and expending energy, by this evening they would all be too tired to be themselves, and to have any arguments.
After breakfast, Maya helped Joan rummage through the boxes in the hall closet for old hats and gloves. The kids’ gloves had stayed un-lost at the end of elastic that had long lost its bounce. The children sometimes used them as skipping ropes or weapons. Lois filled all the thermoses she could find with tea, except for one, which she filled with instant hot chocolate for Gitsy. Frank put his fat book and a handful of dog treats together in a plastic bag.
Joan, Cole and the kids piled into the rental car. Frank, Maya and Lois got into Frank’s garbage car. Simon lay down in the boot, on top of the gloves and hats. On the drive to the Monument, Lois and Maya resuscitated the memory of a meteor shower they had observed there one year. There were fireballs in the sky that night, and orange embers in the stony pit at their feet. Lois had more or less ruined the night by prodding Maya’s hair with a melted marshmallow. That was the thing about bad behaviour – it ruined the moment but made for a better memory. Frank looked at Lois in the rear-view mirror and wondered if Joan had finally said something about H. He felt sure Joan had told Maya, although it was unlike Maya not to say anything.
In the car park, Gitsy ran over to Frank’s car. ‘Daddy said that Grandpa made the toilet. It’s open, you can even go inside.’
Frank had won the commission almost thirty years ago. It had been his first public contract. He went on to design more public amenities – starting with rotaries and bus shelters, and working his way up to low-income housing and the municipal conservatory. The public toilet was one of the more stressful assignments he’d ever had to deliver. To come up with a space that was discreet yet functional, and was somehow in conversation with the values underpinning a monument to fallen war heroes. The monument, a V-shaped symbol made of poured concrete, towered over the forest to be remembered.
As she rummaged around in the boot for the children’s hats and gloves and scarves, Maya spied Frank trying to slip his fingers through Joan’s, and Joan retracting her hand.
Cole was explaining to Gitsy that during World War Two, men had hidden up in this forest to fight.
‘Are there still men fighting in the forest?’ asked Gitsy. A couple of cross-country skiers emerged from the trees and glided into the white clearing.
‘No,’ said Cole.
‘Did they use Grandpa’s toilet?’ she asked. Trapped in the Baby Björn, Finn was nodding off against Cole’s chest, oblivious to anything but his warm suspension.
Lois thought of the men in the woods, afraid to die and even more afraid of life as it was panning out. She thought of the dead boy in the video. She wondered what the boy’s mother was doing at this exact moment in time. Was she hanging out clothes on a washing line, thinking of her dead son? Was she lying on her bed, convulsed with grief, still, because her eyes had perhaps stopped on a picture of him graduating high school?
What Lois was doing – all the snipping, the collaging – suddenly seemed futile. The words had meant something, once. Words that came through a radio, words that were carried by hand through a valley and up a cliff, words that had informed one person of the arrival of troops, another of a humanitarian convoy. Her de-naturing was pointless, pretentious. The love poems existed for no one but her. She had no lovers, she would have no readers. The project was just another file that got saved and opened and closed like a front door by the wind.
She would call Nick, tell him not to bother reading it. Tell him it needed another pass. Tell him the last thing it needed was her touch. The last thing he needed was her touch. He still hadn’t called.
Real truth came from the silences. From the lack of words. Simon rolled in the snow at her feet and she squatted down to reach his belly. There were no questions between her and Simon. There was no intimacy and yet there were intimations that got solved by a walk, a scratch, or a bowl of food. There was no need to sustain and even less need to create. In fact, there was no need at all – just a mutual, needless assistance.
They followed a trail up to the ledge where they had once watched a celestial shower. Snow covered the grassy platform they remembered, and the flat rocks they’d once sat on revealed only a few inches of themselves today. Gitsy started to pile up snow at the adults’ feet. Soon the pile looked like a snowy sausage link.
‘What is it?’ asked Frank.
‘It’s your sleeping lady,’ she said.
Joan took a mouthful of tea from the thermos and spat it out in the snow.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Maya.
‘Someone put salt in the tea instead of sugar.’
*
Frank walked into the café and took his usual table by the window. He watched the cars zoom past in the early morning, to the sound of the coffee machine and the clink of euro centimes on the counter. He opened the paper and stared into it like a view. The waitress brought over his espresso and made the customary enquiries about Christmas and family, to which Frank gave the customary answers about health and luck.
Under the table, Simon licked up the lost crumbs from a croissant and wondered whether Lois would take him for a walk that afternoon, and
if so, where they would go. To the kayak dock, he hoped. Yesterday, at the monument, Simon had struggled in the snow. Eventually he evicted Gitsy from the sled and Frank dragged him back to the car. Gitsy had a giant snow-angel tantrum, and wouldn’t stop until Lois gave her a piggyback.
Frank found nothing he wanted to read in the paper this morning and folded it back up. He drank up and brought the empty coffee cup to the bar. ‘Can I buy a scratch card?’ he asked, dropping coins onto the bar.
‘Which one?’
‘I don’t know the difference.’
‘Well, I sometimes get this one. I’ve won two euros before.’
‘Ok, I’ll take ten of those.’
‘Why don’t you do one of each? You don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket.’
‘No,’ said Frank. ‘I don’t.’
The bartender put the scratch cards in one of the little paper bags they used for postcards and handed it to Frank. He would give them to Joan. A late Christmas present. Maybe she would win the lottery. Maybe she would be happy again with him, then.
At home he sat in his office and opened up the computer. There was an email from one of his clients with questions about the counter top for a kitchen island and an issue with the wet room. ‘Bathroom,’ he said out loud. ‘It’s a bathroom, for God’s sake.’ He answered the client and unblocked Heide. He blocked her again. He did this several times, clicking and unclicking. It was as simple as that. In. Out. In. Out. Having someone in your life or not was just a click of a finger.
Frank took a large sheet of paper and went down to the dining room. He taped the paper to the table and drew a jaggy mountain at the top of the page. He drew another hill in the foreground and populated it with a cluster of A-frame chalets. He added a stream and a footpath. At the top of the first mountain he pencilled in a tiny refuge.
‘Gitsy, do you want to draw with me?’
Gitsy came over to the table and sat down next to Frank. He pushed the box of coloured pencils in her direction and instructed her to add some bloom to the meadows. Gitsy ignored this, instead tracing a string of curlicues along the edge of the page. Maya observed this interaction from the kitchen.
‘Why did they build it so close to the cliff?’ asked Gitsy, pointing to the chalet.
‘Well, they were on the edge of the world,’ replied Frank.
‘Where’s the edge of the world?’
‘It’s just before the end.’
Gitsy pointed to the paper envelope on the table.
‘What’s that?’ she asked.
‘Scratch cards. You scratch them and sometimes you win a million euros.’
‘Can I scratch one?’
‘Sure.’
Gitsy found a coin and furiously scraped the silver carbon coating off each of the ten cards. She revealed numbers, dozens of them, fat with zeros. ‘I won a million dollars!’ she cried, running to show her mum the scratch cards. Frank continued to colour in the path, and to imagine a world beyond the one that was already there on the page.
13. In Love and War
IT WAS THE last day of battle. One more day to attack before he could put this strange year to rest. There were still a few offensives left to squeeze out of his troops. What was a new year if not a change of strategy? Frank had on his warsuit, the frayed bathrobe Lois had given him over a decade ago. He should have euthanized it years ago, but its familiar softness every morning was the bridge into the day, with all its setbacks and rationing. Maybe he would get rid of the bathrobe today. Buy a new one. A new bathrobe for a new year.
Maya and family had left for the airport earlier that morning. Lois was still here and was now talking of accompanying William back to London for a few days. He had called last night from Asti to say he’d be home that evening.
In a couple more days it would be Thursday, thought Frank, who was missing his heart.
Frank looked down on men who needed routine, or didn’t know any better than to appreciate the same things day in day out. And yet, the change he embraced intellectually he found tedious in practice. He saw himself getting into his dirty car with the dog and the laptop, driving to Josée’s and sitting down at his usual spot. He hoped they hadn’t changed the menu.
Yes, he’d enjoyed seeing the kids, but he’d be happy once things got back to normal. The most annoying thing about the holiday had been losing Simon’s walks to the others. The children had co-opted his habit, particularly Lois, who turned into a dog lover overnight. He saw how the others, like Maya, used Simon as a get-out-of-jail card – to escape the house and its leaden warmth and reliable web of interactions. Simon had caught on to the transaction and parcelled out his affection like capital. Still, Frank knew that once the children left, once Joan had spent all the cheer the kids had given her, Simon would come trotting back to him, because he’d be the only one left. Being a dog in the world was a bit like being stranded on a desert island with just the one other person.
The house was quiet, and since no one was up to judge, Frank went to his office and opened his laptop. He’d stayed up late last night and published the latest instalment of his CDF blog – the one about Joan and the branches. Seventeen people had liked it. One of them was Heide, who had commented a lone ‘schön’ under the alias Lorelei59. He had omitted to block her in the comments section. He did so now. As he looked at the computer screen and the standard template he’d customised all those months ago, his gaze pierced right through the hardware, into the abyss.
He saw Joan, in the future, in an apartment inside a converted barn that cost under a million because it was in the shade of the lying lady. He saw his own house crumbling. Slowly at first, a piece of stone architrave here, a tile there, until hairline cracks snaked down the wall and dug deep trenches under the foundations. He saw himself, several Christmases from now, in the same tattered bathrobe. He knew it was a Christmas vision because he was painfully aware of the absence of all things Christmas. He saw future Christmases without the Nativity scene. Without a poinsettia. He knew the children came home for those things. For the garden-themed ornaments fastened to the tree with brown twine, for the turkey or capon or whatever the hell it was, for the mince pies. They wouldn’t come for him.
He clicked his way back to the dashboard and took his blog offline. But the vision remained, glued to the back of his eyes like a motivational poster. Joan in the future was exactly like Joan now, only without him. Joan would take the Nativity scene and the ornaments from Bavaria. He saw oysters, and someone else shucking them.
Frank looked down at his fist and saw that it was clenched. He tried to open it, to extend his fingers and unwhiten his knuckles, but he couldn’t. It occurred to him that he was perhaps holding something vital in the centre of it, and that if he opened his hand that something might shoot out and lose itself in the room, in the world. As long as his fist was clenched, he kept whatever it was contained, in his body, in his arm, shooting up and down and banging up against the nerves to be let out.
He could hear his heart beating, only he couldn’t be sure it was his heart. It could just as well have an invisible arrow, bouncing through his arm from palm to chest. Whatever it was, it was loud, like a generator.
Frank fell to his knees, still clenching his fist. The frayed bathrobe, barely there in places, felt like a straitjacket.
He crawled with difficulty from the desk to Simon’s cushion, carrying that great lump of tightness at the end of his hand. He lay down on the bed, which smelled like wet dog, but also like braised heart. He thought he could hear Lois in the kitchen, but it could have been the television. They’d been invited to their friends’ house tonight. He didn’t want to go. Maybe now he could get out of it. Now what. Now what, Frank? What exactly was going on that might constitute an acceptable excuse to skip an invitation negotiated by Joan?
Frank looked up at the ceiling. His arm, limp on the bed, felt as if it were pinned to a corkboard with a dagger.
It was the last day of the battle.
Frank looked up at the ceiling and thought of his heart. His tiny, old-man, purple, diseased heart. He thought of his heart and how it always came with a garnish of lambs’ lettuce.
*
From the window by Frank’s hospital bed, Joan could see the mountain they sometimes climbed with the kids, back when they were young and starting out, and lived in the apartment in the old town. From this angle, the mountain looked like a dark-green jaw with five grey teeth pointing upwards. They had scaled it with the children from the side, up a gentle path most of the way. The last hour was a steep climb, and there was a via ferrata in the rocks to help with the ascent. At the top of the mountain was a snack bar that opened in late spring and stayed open until October. It sold sodas, sandwiches and souvenirs. They used to go there. They used to go to Italy for the weekend. Stock up on tins of clams and medlars. Sleep in hotel rooms and leave the beds unmade in the morning. But somewhere down the line, Frank had taken those hours and days and weekends and given them over to his stupid maps. He’d spent so much time searching for ‘bors’, he’d become one himself.
Frank’s eyes opened. The first thing he noticed was the white poinsettia Joan had put on the bedside table. It was one of the two poinsettias from the living-room coffee table. The second thing he noticed was that Joan had opened the blinds. In the cold-day sunlight she looked much younger, had an almost holy glow. Joan was looking out at the other side of the lake, the side where they should have bought the land for the house, all those years ago. Back in the time of possibility.
‘What did you think would happen, Frank?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Nothing.’
Next door a machine started beeping, slowly at first, and then faster and faster.