Looking through the windshield of the bus, you saw your husband making his way back to you. Farther in the distance, you saw the comradely busload talking to the locals who had set up booths to sell sarongs and sun hats and wooden figurines with movable barrels over well-equipped groins. Your husband had his hands in his pockets and was walking unhurriedly, whistling. His head was cocked to one side, his chin lifted, and he seemed to be looking at the windshield of the bus, right at you, but there was no connection between his eyes and yours.
There was a moment in which he was not yours. And while that should have pulled you to him—before marrying, you had worried that his looks would be marred by familiarity, that you would never be able to conjure desperation without detachment—it did not. What you wanted to be dark about him was light, and what ought to have been light was dark. You had imagined your future husband dark-haired, the blackest brown, with pale blue eyes, but your true husband, the whistling man, has sandy hair and chocolate eyes. You had wanted pale thin lips, held tightly, almost primly, in perpetual reserve because to you such a mouth suggested a tense, discerning mind, a debilitating contempt for stupidity from which you, and few others, would be spared. Your true husband has full red lips, a gentle and sympathetic mouth, undiscerning, a mouth for the masses, its offerings appreciated by many women before you. You could hear him whistling as he approached, that strong whistle capable of carrying difficult tunes.
You noticed then what he was wearing—a chocolate brown T-shirt and shorts of a colour between mustard and brown. Two browns, absolutely wrong together. He ran a hand through his hair, another wrong shade of brown.
“No Gravol,” he said, climbing on the bus. “This is a sturdy group.”
“Have you seen what you’re wearing?” you asked.
“Well, yes, I’m wearing it, after all.”
“So it’s your opinion that you’ve made a decent choice, with those browns, mustard and chocolate, waging a war on your body.” You knew your voice was too cutting.
You had surprised him with this. He was in a good mood.
“It’s my opinion that we’re going to climb a waterfall, which will presumably make us wet, and it’s also my opinion that no one gives a shit what I’m wearing, except, perhaps, the woman I just married.”
“So now that we’re married, you’ve decided just to let it all hang out.”
He didn’t fight. He never did, but he left the bus and stopped speaking to you.
Every now and then, holding the hands of the woman and man on either side of you, you peered over the waterfall and saw him several levels down, bringing up the rear.
At the top, your hotel guide arranged your group of fifty tourists into several rows in a waist-high pool of water at the base of one of the mini waterfalls. He instructed everyone to jump up in the water at once and shout, “Irie, mon!” on the count of three. In the picture, which your husband bought a copy of, everyone is jumping at a different time, and the word “Irie” has turned out smiles that look more like grimaces. Your husband is lost in the picture, eclipsed by a crowd of German vacationers. You are standing on a plane of rock at the top of the waterfall, one level above the other tourists, with your hands on your hips.
This is not one of the pictures you sent to the girl who chose you.
YOUR FRIEND LESLIE was the first to have a baby. Leslie was lost now, good and gone.
She used to be a stand-up comedian. She used to live in an old unrenovated Victorian house in Parkdale and ride her bike everywhere. She used to say that her ideal marriage would be full of affairs on her side and impotence on his. She used to have long curly red hair. She told you, quite seriously, that she sang “Amazing Grace” while her hairdresser cut it off.
“Not for me, those blubbering babes,” she told you. “‘I can’t watch, I don’t think I can go through with it. Please make it quick, Hold my hand.’ Nope. I made him take his time. I wanted to savour it. I actually felt myself becoming lighter. ‘I once was lost, but now I’m found.’ He said, ‘Why can’t all women be like you?’”
Now Leslie is married to a man named Pat, and they live in Mississauga on a treeless street where all the houses are identical. Leslie believes joking confuses children and has concerned conversations about diaper content with her husband. Leslie will drive an extra hour to avoid going through Parkdale because she is afraid of getting shot. Leslie says to you, staring at her son in her lap, “Who cares about sex once you’ve finally met the true love of your life?” Leslie leaves a trail of used-to-bes.
Leslie named her baby Stan because that was both her father’s name and Pat’s grandfather’s name. “We’re interested in maintaining these family connections,” she said to you. “That’s all that matters now.”
You and your husband invited Leslie, Pat, and Stan to your house for a barbecue shortly after you moved in. Leslie looked around sympathetically at the dim pink walls and even more sympathetically at your tiny plot of sparse grass and weeds in the back. It had been raining for a week, and the yard was full of little muddy swamps.
“This is why we bought in Mississauga,” Pat said. “We thought it was important for kids to grow up with a big backyard and a neighbourhood full of kids to play with. All our decisions are about Stan now. You’ll see one day. My bet is you’ll sell this place within six months of having your first baby. We can put out real estate feelers in our neighbourhood if you like.”
“Look at all these weeds!” Leslie exclaimed.
“I think they’re pretty,” you said.
Leslie stepped off the porch and her sandaled foot sunk into a patch of mud.
“Ooh, oh, no,” she squealed.
Pat looked at you accusingly. “She just had a pedicure yesterday.”
Later, while your husband and Pat sat on the porch in the cooling night, you and Leslie went inside to the kitchen because Leslie was afraid of exposing Stan to the possibility of mosquito bites. She sat on the floor with the baby and tickled his stomach while he lay on his back. When he let out half a cry, she picked him up and started breastfeeding him while she gazed down into his eyes.
“Your mom gave me great advice when I started breastfeeding,” she said. “She gave me all the literature. She was so ahead of her time.”
“I don’t think I could breastfeed,” you said. Your mother breast-fed you for two and a half years. You avoid telling people this, but your mother considers her proudest moment to be the time you overturned a glass of milk at a crowded restaurant and climbed up onto her lap, screaming, “I don’t want cow’s milk, I want Mommy’s milk,” while you clawed at her blouse.
Leslie looked at you in horror. “You can’t be serious. These nine months have been the most fulfilling of my life.”
Stan reached his pudgy hands up towards her hair.
“No, no, my lovebug,” she said. “I’ve outwitted you.”
She looked up and said to you, “The worst agony of breastfeeding was not at the beginning, but when he developed enough motor control to reach up and pull my hair while I fed him.”
She lowered her head again, that fiery halo.
When you first met Leslie in university, she wore big black horn-rimmed glasses and heavy black motorcycle boots, and she celebrated everything she found ugly and impractical, but now she wears contact lenses so Stan can make closer eye contact with her.
When she was finished feeding him, she carried him around the kitchen, pointing out various objects and carefully enunciating their names, then explaining their functions.
“Blender,” she said. “Blen-Der. That’s what Mama uses in the morning to mash your carrots and your peas and your sweet potatoes and your apples and all that good stuff that’s making you a healthy boy. Blender.”
She held up the lid of the coffee tin and said, “Circle. This is a circle, Stan.”
She held the lid close to his face. “Can you say circle? Try to say it. Circle.”
The baby looked at her and spat out a word resembling badass.
“Yes, good. Good work, Stan. What else is a circle? Point out the circles to Mommy.”
She drew her finger around the rim of her water glass. “Circle.”
“What else is a circle?”
The baby pointed at the refrigerator, and Leslie walked excitedly over to it and searched the door. Her eyes zeroed in on a magnet of a seal balancing a ball on its nose.
“Good boy, Stan,” she said, pointing to the ball. “Yes, this is a circle.”
Sitting at the kitchen table, you asked Leslie, “Don’t you ever miss comedy?”
“You’re kidding me.”
“You used to love it. You thrived on that feeling of being in front of an audience. Sometimes you were on a high for a week after a good show.”
Leslie shook her head definitively. “Being a comedian was about having my heart closed. It made me cynical and I had to be cynical to do it properly. My heart is open now. I can’t do it any more. I don’t want to do it any more.”
She took Stan over to the kitchen window and held him up, “Look, Stan, it’s Daddy.”
“I couldn’t even be faithful before,” she said. “Now all that matters is the family. The only Other Man in my life now is Stan.”
Watching Leslie, you could see how the life people have chosen and found contentment in, learning how to make homemade soup with less salt, feeding children snacks of peanut butter and honey on crackers, reading long novels in twenty-page snatches before bedtime, becomes the thing they have to get out of.
She sat down across from you at the table and said, “I pity my old self. I can’t tell you what a relief it is to be rid of my libido.” This was before you knew that there is a hierarchy of women, those who can and those who can’t. This was back when you thought it was just a matter of choosing.
Later that night, you said to your husband, “Leslie is completely faithful now. No more other men. Can you believe that? She’s changed so much. It’s tragic.”
“You’re going to have to explain to me how this is a bad thing, that Leslie no longer wants other men.”
Your husband is less flexible on these issues than you are. To him, there is no such thing as degrees of fidelity.
In the beginning, you agreed with him, but lately you have thought that it isn’t so wrong to have a friend who is allowed to feel up your leg once in a while. Not when there are so many ways of being so much more wrong.
YOU MET YOUR FRIEND when you were in the process of being regularly serviced by your husband. Once a month for a year, you had been mired in what your husband called the Proceedings. Still intact were the romantic formalities, the ceremony and reverence that both of you considered essential to the conjuring of life. You lit scented candles and turned off the lights, drenched yourself in sugary bath gels and body lotions and draped yourself in lilac lingerie. Your husband kissed your neck gently and drew a finger along your cheek. You felt you were coaxing the spirit of the baby to enter your body. See how well behaved we are? We will attend to your life with the same care. The Proceedings were always long and ardent in a polite sort of way, in defiance of the merely functional, which you felt would be an insult to the miracle you were asking to attend you. Afterwards, you lay in bed and your husband sat next you on the side of the bed, as if hovering over an invalid, and he stroked your arms and your forehead.
You were a year into this when you met your friend, and you were getting over lighting candles and eating yams and soy milk. Doctors were involved.
You were jogging on the beach one Saturday after rushed morning Proceedings—no tub-soaking, no lotions or candles, but special doctor-prescribed vitamins served with your temperature-taking before, a quick cool shower together after—and that was how you met your friend. You were thinking about how you couldn’t believe your husband’s bottom would be yours forever, how you would know all its incarnations, the flattening and drooping, its gradual merging with the top of his thigh, how you would know it, better than your own, and see it on his every journey out of bed, his standing in the shower, his nightly teeth-brushing before the sink. You would see its genial slackness many more times, as you had seen it that morning when he jumped back out of bed to fetch a coaster after you placed your water glass directly on the unprotected night table. As you jogged along the beach, you thought about how you were locked with that ass in an animosity surprisingly like solidarity.
Someone called out behind you, “Awesome calves.”
You turned and said, “Excuse me?”
“You have incredible calves. I’ve been jogging behind you watching them. What exercises do you do?”
You watched him warily, searching for malice, casually disrobing. How slowly let go, that girlish cowering, the fear of being duped, duped and taunted. You have always hated your calves.
“They’re amazing,” he said. “No matter how hard I exercise, I can’t get calf definition.”
“They’re just that way naturally,” you said, still on guard. “I would never actually try for this.”
“Are you kidding me? People would pay for calves like that if they could. There’s nothing worse than piano legs.”
“Piano legs?”
“Legs that go straight down with no muscle definition. Just straight into the ankles.”
He had wavy brown hair that fell across his dark eyes when he jogged, and he barely sweated as you finished your run together. You sprinted for the last stretch, and you thought you almost beat him, but then you realized as you walked home how much he’d been hanging back, how obviously he wasn’t working his hardest. He was showing you the power of your calves.
“I don’t know many women who can run like that,” he had said.
You thought he probably knew many women.
You jogged with him the following day, then the following weekend, and the following. You started jogging on weekday evenings so you would be in better shape.
One evening when you were walking home from the subway, a black Jeep turned onto the side street ahead of you and pulled over. The window lowered slowly, and your friend was sitting there in a grey suit, one hand raised in salute.
“Your carriage awaits,” he said.
You got in and held your purse in your lap.
“So, in order not to seem creepy, I guess this is the part where I pretend not to know where you live,” he said.
“That’s probably the best idea.”
You worried that if he touched you, he would feel how damp your hands were. Not truly, though. You weren’t hoping something would happen, not truly.
He kept looking from the road to you, then back to the road.
“I have to confess I’ve become a little sweet on you,” he said.
He spoke with false shyness, pretending to be a little bit afraid of you as part of the seduction. Your husband isn’t this suave. On your third date, he stood at your front door looking at you nervously for twenty minutes and finally kissed you lightly after saying, “Firsts make me nervous.”
The Jeep was cool and clean.
“Sweet on me,” you said, rolling your eyes. “How sweet.”
It is important to you that he doesn’t think you fall for things.
You didn’t think about betrayal, not even as you let your new friend’s hand creep up your leg. What you thought was, I wonder if his sperm is strong.
“You know I have to get home to my husband,” you said.
Before you got out of the car, you agreed to give him your phone number, but you made a pact that if your husband answered the phone, he would pretend to be a telemarketer, the only people to whom your husband is dependably rude.
When you walked in the front door, your husband was standing there with a glass of chocolate milk for you. He had prepared dinner: baby peas, baby corn, baby carrots.
“Tonight’s the night,” he said. “I think it is.”
It was your husband who first suggested having a baby. Although he was your partner in life—you had married, obviously, with longevity i
n mind—you were startled to think that anyone would look at you and see the possibility of competence. You stalled, initially, evaded baby talk and worked longer hours. You didn’t know if you could handle the conversations motherhood required.
What colour is this, sweet pea?
Yes, blue.
What else is blue?
Your mother swore to you that it would be different with your own child—that every mangled word, every fussy cry, every boring moment of absolute anxious devotion, would leave you star-struck, clamouring for the baby book so you could write it all down, that every banality would become as grimly precious as things are when you know they won’t last. She pleaded with you to give motherhood a chance.
“I’m not saying I don’t want to,” you said. “I just can’t picture it.”
“A baby will complete you,” she replied. “A baby will make you happy. If you don’t listen to me about anything else, listen to me about this.”
A year and a half later, after your first doctor’s appointment, you told her about all the trying. You were on the phone, and in the background you could hear your father playing Clair de lune on their new baby grand piano.
“I’m your mother,” she said. “Couldn’t you have told me sooner?”
“I didn’t want to jinx anything.”
“You’re becoming so secretive.”
You told her what the doctor said, the testing he wanted to do, the procedures and drugs that would likely be necessary.
“So now you want to be a mother,” your mother said. “You see? It’s not always so easy. It’s not always a matter of, Okay, I want it now, Let’s get this show on the road. God, give me what I want.”
“God has nothing to do with it.”
Before she hung up, she said, “I hope you learned something.”
What is it? you yelled at the silent phone. What is it that I’m supposed to learn?
YOUR HEART RATE stays at 112 and you try to do biofeedback, thinking of waterfalls. When your phone rings, you will know you have come to the end of waiting. You also know that you will begin a different kind of waiting.
The Virgin Spy Page 5