“Are you very sore?”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, his body was so stocky and immovable. He had a bit of an erection, and I couldn’t help thinking how different he was from Angus. There seemed something so childish and uncouth about having an erection while I was in the bath, something offensively predictable about that link between arousal and nudity. I felt that Angus’s sexuality would be so much more dignified, somehow compartmentalized from the rest of him.
“We’ve been having a lot of problems like this lately,” Stephen said.
He tended to overuse the word we.
“We should assess this logically. Maybe you have low estrogen. Or maybe you need a multivitamin.”
“It’s gone beyond everything,” I said. “Can’t you see it on me?”
I stepped out of the bath, and he came into the bathroom, pulling the door closed behind him, and we stood next to each other, looking in the mirror, the long oval mirror on the back of the door.
“Look at my skin,” I said. “These dark circles, I can’t get rid of them. It’s not just the lighting. They’re just as bad in all the mirrors.”
Standing there with him, I noticed the changes even more. My problem had gone beyond dirty-looking skin. My breasts hung a little lower, a little more out to the side. There was a taint, a bluish pallor, on my skin that wouldn’t wash off with good hard soap. My body looked as if it had aged, and my skin was covered in tiny, colourless bumps.
“Feel this,” I said, placing his hand under my breast. “Doesn’t it feel slack to you? Almost like it’s detaching itself from my body?”
“It feels exactly the same,” he said.
He was watching me with a gunman’s gaze—wild yet exacting. We stood in silence looking at my body. The mirror was old, bought by my grandmother in the early days of her marriage, and there was a distortion—a cloudy long curve like a river—along its centre. This made the distance between our bodies seem even greater. In the reflection, my body looked like it was straining away from Stephen’s body, leaning precariously in the other direction, as if rejecting proximity to other bodies, rejecting the fingers and tongues and penises that had been inside it over the years. I got into the bath again and leaned back.
“You’re beautiful,” Stephen said. “Your body is beautiful.”
THE SHIFT FROM FRIEND to competitor was sudden and surprised even me. Julie was on my mind constantly. One morning, I awoke at dawn in the middle of a dream because a branch was scratching the window next to my cheek. I opened my eyes with a start because I imagined, in the lazy tension of half-sleep, that men with long fingernails were trying to climb into my apartment through the window. I could hear the pull and creak of streetcars outside. Stephen was not moving beside me.
I had dreamed that I was standing in the greenhouse with Angus. My hair was wet, and had frozen in the cold air. He went over to his desk and sat down, then opened the top, pulled out a piece of paper, and handed it to me. The writing was neat, in clear black ink: “Love is for others.”
“You feel that way, don’t you?” he asked. His voice sounded slender and relaxed, cigarette-tipped.
He undressed me slowly and held me. His body was nearly hairless, but it had the kind of masculinity that doesn’t need to announce itself. Then my high school math teacher came to the door and said, “But you haven’t done your homework,” and I turned from Angus and noticed that the plants were actually car parts.
I wouldn’t have called it longing, what I felt in the dream. It was more of a solemn, furtive feeling. At that time in my life, I thought there was something sort of obscene about longing anyway: it made me think of musty motel rooms and too many lit candles, of booming bass and cars with tinted windows, Stephen’s hot breath in my face. It was not something you could feel with a quiet man in a greenhouse mid morning. It was not something you could feel as you rose slowly from the ground with that man, as he took off your coat with a pure sadness like the sadness of childhood, as he pulled your sweater over your head and unhooked your bra, as he unbuttoned your pants and let them drop around your ankles. It was not something you could feel when he reached out his hands, when your breasts felt firm in his grip.
But, oh, the longing did come later, when Julie called before breakfast and I heard Angus in the background asking her about strawberry jam. She wanted to make plans and I found that I was trying to contrive something that would require him to be there. The longing came when I lay in bed every night for a week, falling back into my dream every time I closed my eyes, wondering whether Julie and Angus were in their bedroom, talking in intimate spousal voices. It came with a smacking vengeance that made me vile to anyone who dared speak to me.
Does it matter whether we create these feelings or whether they have grounding in something substantial? No, I think not. I found ways to support my beliefs, as people often will when they are working from nothing.
One Saturday afternoon, Julie and I went for a walk. It was an unusually warm February day, and we walked by the river through
the Rosedale golf course. Our jackets were open, and we were sipping tall coffees Julie had bought for us. There was relief in the air, the kind that comes with spring.
“Angus is in a depression,” she said.
She said it just that way several times—in a depression—rather than saying that he was depressed. I pictured Angus sitting in a groove dug out of the ground, just sitting there calmly. I imagined his face the way it was when he found me going through the kitchen cupboards: bemused, allowing, detached in an affectionate way. I already imagined that his face often carried this expression to some degree, so he could conceal what he was truly thinking. And I believed that this was the face of someone I could finally love, someone who kept things hidden, unlike Stephen, who showed whatever he happened to be feeling.
“Again,” she said. “He is in a depression again, I should say.”
“This happens often?” I asked casually, sympathetically, not wanting to show how interested I was. I wanted to know everything about him, the worst things first.
“At least four times a year, maybe for a month at a time. You have no idea what it’s like living with someone who’s like that.”
Abiding depression, submerging then surfacing, only made him more attractive to me. She told me that several years before, he had had a near-death experience and he had not fully recovered from its impact. He had gone into the hospital to have his gall bladder removed by laparoscopic surgery, and was allergic to the anaesthetic. His blood pressure dropped and he went into cardiac arrest. In the end, he was fine, but he told Julie afterwards that he had been dead for a moment. For the rest of his stay in the hospital, he had acted strange, quiet and punished. She attributed his behaviour to nerves. Then he told her when they got home that something had happened when he was hovering near death. Julie drew out these words with relish—hovering near death—as if she was proud of Angus for such an accomplishment, impressed by his ability to almost die when the rest of us landed squarely in one extreme or the other. He had announced in the middle of the kitchen that almost dying was like having an extended orgasm.
“In the middle of the morning!” she said. “I was drinking orange juice!”
He had encouraged Julie to imagine the most intense orgasm she had ever had, one that went on and on, the kind that made you feel, for a few minutes anyway, that everything in the world is fine, anything could happen. He had never experienced bliss quite like that, he said, and knew he wouldn’t again, not until he really died.
“Imagine telling this to your new wife,” she shrieked. “That you’ve never felt happiness like almost dying.”
Then she said that once, after he got out of the hospital, he took too many Tylenols, a fraction of him hoping to die, a fraction hoping not to, just so he could have that feeling again, that ringing physical bliss, even in his forehead and his fingertips.
“Dr. Stillman and I have analyzed it,” she added. “It’s w
hy he still gets depressed sometimes. It’s a death wish mixed with guilt and love. And he doesn’t really want to die.”
I didn’t say much while she was talking. I was afraid that any comment on my part would steer her off course, and I would get less information. And Julie had always been someone who could talk on and on and get no response. The more I heard about Angus, the more I believed I was bound to him beyond all reason. When I was three, I had run headfirst into a wide concrete pillar in a neighbour’s basement, and I had never forgotten the feeling I had at the exact moment of impact. A wonderful numbing had come before the pain, before I was carted upstairs and given a squeaky orange teddy bear, before my forehead split from the swelling and bled down my nose, long before the neighbour jarred me with her acrid breath and tried to lull me to sleep (tempting death by concussion, my mother later accused). I had never forgotten that moment of impact, my head banged so hard that my entire body catapulted into a state of deep relaxation. When something was quite close upon you, it felt like anything but the thing it was.
I believed that not only was Angus’s sexuality concealed and resplendent, but in fact made more brilliant and forceful by its removal from the public view. You would not know his desire until it was upon you. He would stand by what did not make good sense, by a sensation that had occurred when he was too compromised to confirm it lucidly. Never would I have guessed such things about him at our first meeting. Stephen would roll his eyes at such musings. He would make jokes. “I went to the car wash today. It was like skydiving from a plane up in the clouds.”
The more Julie spoke, the more I began to think it was only right that I should feel the way I did about Angus. I felt that, although she was his wife, she was clearly not an authority on his character and in fact knew nothing about him that really mattered. She might know his toothpaste brand and the colour of his underwear. She might know the sound of his breathing in the dark. But these things couldn’t matter if they weren’t attached to a more important, resonant knowledge, if they weren’t attached to a silent connection of wills, to a cloistering of affection.
The language of obsession and reason are often alike: arguments are measured out carefully, with passion that restrains itself, with a bite of superiority.
To anyone looking at us, Julie and I would have looked like the same kind of woman: responsible and educated, domestic and well-groomed, pretty enough, wives, future mothers. In our black woolen coats, almost identical, we looked like women who would be friends. But there was a difference. It was as obvious to me as anything. Julie looked as though she had always been loved. I sat by the river, and swept my fingers through the current. Julie knelt beside and put her arm around me.
“Anyway,” she said, “I just can’t stand it when he gets this way. He’s just black black black.”
“Look on the bright side,” I said. “If he were happy, you’d have nothing to complain about.”
She didn’t take her arm off my shoulder, and she showed no surprise, but I saw her face steady itself as she looked towards the ground. I could tell she was making her way back from me.
AS I LAY IN BED at night, two scenes came to me again and again. Not dreams exactly, but deliberate conjurings, my personal theatre. One scene was real, the other not, though they seemed to have switched places in my mind, with the real masquerading as fantasy, the fantasy posing as reality. The real scene loitered in my head in a lazy way, in the washed-out grey of distant imaginings, so that I had to remind myself that it had happened:
Stephen is at work on his computer when I get home from a walk, but he gets up energetically when I come in. I turn my back to him as I close the door and hang up my coat, and he comes up behind me and grabs me around the waist. He presses himself into me and rocks me from side to side in his arms.
“How was your walk?” He speaks directly into my ear and I can feel his breath deep in my ear canal. He smells of wet wool and apples. He keeps rocking me and I resist. “Come on. Won’t you dance with me?”
I wrench his arms loose enough to turn around, and he bends his knees and slings me over his shoulder in a fireman’s grip, laughing uproariously, as if we are two university students who have been drunkenly flirting and touching and sidling our way towards sex all night.
“Ouch,” I say, pushing at his head. “Your shoulder is digging into my stomach.”
He half-runs across the living room into the bedroom and throws me down on the bed. He descends on me quickly and straddles my legs so I can’t move. He looks down into my face.
“Get off me,” I say, squirming.
He holds his hand above my stomach, soaring it back and forth like an airplane. “This is the hand,” he says with dramatic menace. “This is the hand that has come to discipline you.”
He pulls up my shirt and starts tickling my stomach and underarms and the back of my neck. I bat him away until he grabs both of my wrists in one of his hands and holds them against the mattress above my head, all the while tickling me with his other hand. I try to move my legs, but he has me pinned firmly.
“Stop it.”
“Oh, no,” he laughs. “The discipline has just begun.”
I squirm up enough to flip over onto my stomach, and I start to crawl away. I kick at him and he grabs my ankle. Then he catches hold of my waist and twists me again onto my back. He moves his hand up to the side of my cheek and kisses the length of my neck. Long wet kisses broken up by tiny nips at my ear.
“Ah ha,” he whispers. “Submission at last.”
Separating truth from imagining can be like devising a list of pros and cons. I had to puzzle things out, focus hard to determine which was which. The more I entertained my fantasies about Angus, the more real they became, while the truth of my moments with Stephen faded the more I considered them—with playing and replaying they became as tepid and irrelevant as childhood nightmares. I could not fathom that these dreams about Angus had not happened:
A gift arrives in a cardboard box wrapped in plain kraft paper. My name and address are printed across the top in black marker. I set it on the bed and begin to unwrap, carefully peeling back the tape so I won’t rip the thick brown paper. Inside is a long flannel Victorian nightgown with yellowing antique lace trim. I hold it out in front of me, and the hem dangles to the ground. I glance back to the box and a handwritten note is lying at the bottom. I know it is Angus’s handwriting. “Wear this sometimes, and think of me,” is all it says. I slip the nightgown over my head, and it makes me feel generous and untroubled, like a woman from another era. A woman with a softened imperial dignity, an innate nobility that doesn’t think itself noble. I feel this so strongly I can’t conceive of it not being real.
Letters arriving under cover of night, sealed with a stamp of dark red wax. Being lifted as he lifted me that day from the counter in his kitchen, as if I weigh nothing. He holds me, as in my first dream about him, and the air in his greenhouse is so humid it coats us with dampness. He is always naked and never naked. Wherever we have been is a spasm of silence in the air, the silence of allowing. No laughter, sharp like the taste of scotch. No shrieks of abandon, promises and retractions.
For two weeks, I even checked my drawers for the nightgown.
WANTING ANGUS made me secretive and strong. It allowed me to escape from the dependence and irritation and lethargy that had been my everyday life for so long. I tried out different roles that kept me feeling light and powerful when I was with Julie. Concerned supporter, analyzer of therapeutic intentions. Deliverer of ribald stories about the mania of sex. Devotee of yoga and all secular spirituality. Long-suffering girlfriend, stoic while being taken for granted by the man to whom she gives everything. I told her about the fights with Stephen. I made them sound more dazzling and tragic than they were. I told her we yelled so loudly that the neighbours pounded on the walls. In truth, we hardly raised our voices. The fights had a kind of opacity to them, unfolding in gestures like the disgusted turning of a head. Gritty voices punctuated by long bou
ts of awkward silence. I told how he resented me for refusing to make eye contact, and how he forcefully turned my head to his and pushed my eyelids back. I made this moment sound desperate and dangerous, when it had actually made both of us laugh. Even in the thick of the fights, that pungent cauldron of accusations and door slamming, our hearts didn’t seem to be in it. Our words and gestures had a certain spent quality, as if we knew we should be doing better but couldn’t dredge up the energy.
All this allowed me to feel that I was on a level playing field with Julie. I served myself up as someone with a teeming and exotic life, a person worthy of shock and concern. By this time, I had noticed a trademark tone of voice when Julie spoke of Angus. She talked about everything from his desire to invest their money unwisely to the way he poured chocolate soy milk on his Cheerios. There was always a conceited contempt in her voice, as if she was gratified to have a husband about whom she could complain. I was careful to show nothing. I asked no questions when it came to him.
Later, I would rant to Stephen.
“This is why we couldn’t stay friends in high school,” I said. “Julie is a woman who has everything and thinks she has nothing.”
“Is that why you couldn’t stay friends?”
“Absolutely! I tried but it became too much.”
He pointed out that I had never kept any friend for more than two years.
“Well, she’s always been this great complainer. But an outward complainer only. I can assure you Julie doesn’t cry herself to sleep at night.”
“Maybe she’s going through something. It’s temporary.”
“And she has this terrific husband,” I said. “Terrific.”
“Terrific?” he asked. Terrific was not a word I ever used.
“Terrific,” I said again emphatically.
Stephen said something about how he was glad men weren’t friends the way women were. He had known all his closest friends since high school, and they spoke an intimate code, full of nicknames and short forms, like lovers almost. He said female friendships were a process of dissection, but a dissection performed without a scalpel or a clear knowledge of what you were supposed to remove.
The Virgin Spy Page 10