He brushed my hair back from my forehead in a restful rhythm and murmured softly words I couldn’t hear.
“I’m ready now,” I said. “You can do it now.”
I think I looked at him not kindly.
“No, no,” he said. “We’ll take our time.”
He stretched his legs out and lay on top of me, and started kissing my neck again, this time with a sluggish methodical tempo meant to prove that he knew how to be luxurious with time, that laziness and decadence were the same. He kept one hand on my neck, on top of my pulse, while he kissed the outline of my face, down to my chin, then over to my ear. I could smell his saliva on my face.
“I’m ready,” I said again. “We can go ahead any time now.”
He got up. “The condoms are in the bedroom. Back in a second.”
He took another long look at me and shook his head, then turned away. I watched his naked body retreat down the hall. His wide torso and narrow bottom. His small white calves and broad back. His eager trot, tiptoeing with speed and stealth down the hall to Linda’s bedroom.
That was the last time I ever really looked at him.
I suppose we came together with the relative ease of two people who are inappropriate together. I had wanted to be done with something and had no intention of leaving until it was accomplished, and I felt it fine to go about that in whatever manner was necessary. He returned with the condom and asked me to put it on him. He spoke of making love, words which did not conjure sex but made me imagine a potion being concocted in a lab, then formally presented on a cushion of crisp white linen while I stood by stiffly. He said the word pussy over and over, and I wanted to laugh because I couldn’t hear it as anything other than an innocent, pink-ribboned word, though he growled it at me in a tone of passion and menace. The whole incident had been like that: every word or gesture made me think of something else. I did not know there was something there to hold on to.
I thought of the empty coffee mug in the next room. I thought about how I no longer had to picture myself at sixty-five with hair bleached to straw and cut short in a perm, tan pantyhose sagging on my thin, unused legs. I thought about how I had made the whole act remarkable. I thought it initiated me into the extraordinary, bestowed upon me a kind of damaged splendour that no other circumstances could produce. I did not think about the condom, its wet rubber slide against my thigh. I did not think about the man who wouldn’t stop looking at me. I did not think about the drop of sweat trickling down my temple, the sweat that could have been his or mine.
As Professor Albertson stood on the steps of Convocation Hall with his hands on his hips, surveying the groups on the lawn like a worried father, my group made plans for coffee the next day.
Of course, I didn’t know this at the time, as I tried my best to make my body pliable and careless. I pieced it all together the following week while a sorority girl named Marilyn told me what I had missed, sighing at the difficulty of fitting me in when the group had already broken down into comfortable pairs and the work had been evenly distributed. Nor did I know that Carl was sleeping on the couch because of unemployment, not Jewish beauties. I did not know that Linda had told him to get out and that he had pleaded with her, promised a complete turnaround, an earnest job search, university courses by night. I did not know that he had said, “There’s nothing but you, I have nothing but you,” and that he had stood naked before her, wedged between tears and fight, saying, “Look at me, I’m pathetic. You’re the best thing of my life.”
Nor did I know that ten years later, a week after I gave birth to my first child, I would see his picture in the newspaper and read of his body being found in a dumpster, asphyxiated by garbage, and that the fact of his death would become less real to me, and less appalling, than the moment just before death, that impotent fight as he clawed at nothing like a dog on its back, gasping for air, for the one thing that he had always taken for granted, before sinking back into tomato soup cans and orange juice cartons and bread scraps as he reached for what would never come again, for the air that would never be enough.
I did not know that for months and years before that, he would call me every three or four months, that he would confess to sitting on the steps of the Royal Ontario Museum all afternoon hoping I would walk by. I did not know that he would beg me not to hang up, that he would say, “I love you, kid, I’ll love you for the rest of my life. You’re the Great One,” again and again until I would finally put down the phone, turn to my mother, and laugh and say, “He’s just drunk again,” as we stood in the kitchen on an autumn or summer afternoon.
I did not know any of this as he looked at me with fear and ambition. I was already in the bathroom scrubbing the smell of latex off my hands. I was already breathing the air outside, the damp cheer post-rain.
COCKNEY sunday
Marriage is not for the women of Daphne’s family. There is no end to the tales of wifely woe that Carol, Daphne’s mother, parades before her. Even Daphne’s grandmother would have preferred to remain single, if her traditional British parents had allowed it: she had a husband who would announce his desire for sex by returning from the bathroom at night and shutting all the curtains. Eyes closed, he would stand at the foot of the bed, his expression hungry and loathing and his back slightly arched, as if trying to transcend his body through his pelvis.
“Then he would climb aboard,” Carol says.
Carol carries a bottle of lubricant in her purse, keeps a bottle in her night table, and another in the glove compartment of her car. She, at least, is prepared. Since beginning menopause, she has become increasingly preoccupied with vaginal health. She claims she is so dry that it plagues her even when she is just walking down the street. Once, when she and Daphne were shopping, Carol pretended she wanted to try on a blouse at Banana Republic so she could lubricate herself in the fitting room. She insists that thirty years of marriage have dried her up. Marriage is also to blame, she announced one year during Thanksgiving dinner, for her hypochondria. Just a week after the wedding, she became convinced she had breast cancer coming on. In the shower each morning, she cried as she rubbed soap over her breasts, kneading herself until her skin was red. She checked her body for lumps morning and night, commissioned a dermatologist to examine her back for melanomas at monthly appointments, called a neurologist she had met at a party to ask if two headaches in one week could be a symptom of something.
“It was marriage,” she tells Daphne. “I never worried a day in my life until I got married.”
Yvonne, Daphne’s sister, believes the body’s aversion to marriage is a generational curse and she is certain it started with her great-grandmother, whose much older husband sent her to finishing school in Switzerland for a year so she could achieve refinement and learn how to entertain properly. Responding to a contentious inner dialogue, Yvonne randomly remembers this injustice and starts to pace around the room, muttering to herself, “A wife is a partner, not an employee.”
Yvonne is self-righteous about sex. “Pleasure is there for the taking,” she suggests at opportune moments. She cannot tolerate sad-sacked women intent on depriving themselves of the ecstasies of the female body. In the gym of her old high school, she performs strident evening lectures on a woman’s pleasure. These lectures involve detailed instructions on how to achieve orgasm, a process she calls Finding the Climax. Her tips are phrased as extended mountain-hiking analogies.
“You’re trudging up there, huffing a little, moving real slow. You’ve got all the equipment. Why wouldn’t you make it to the top?” Here, she holds up her right hand and licks her index finger, then moves it in the air in a circular motion. “If he can’t take you there, use your own feet, ladies.”
When Daphne characterized her sex life with Ashley as adequate, Yvonne offered her services as a coach, or at least as a consultant. Through semi-weekly e-mails, she requests updates. Sometimes, she calls Daphne at midnight, whispering earnestly, “I just had an epiphany about the relationship.” Yvonne freque
ntly has dreams and insights about Daphne’s relationship, which she pronounces reelationship.
“I think you might be a lesbian,” she tells Daphne. “It would explain your dissatisfaction in the reelationship.”
Daphne, however, is determined to get married. Specifically, she is determined to marry Ashley. When she first met him two years ago, she thought he lacked something essential—a wry, confessional sadness in his eyes, that reserved lewdness and wandering smile. Where she had been hoping for witty cynicism, she got shrugging optimism. A constant dull glow where she wanted flashes of midnight and radiance. Ashley is padded with good cheer and never fails to be eminently supportive of himself. “Well, we’re all human,” is what he often says when he forgets to take out the garbage or when he misuses a word. In the end, though, what surprises Daphne is how pleased she is by his insufficiency. She immensely enjoys her clean deception—watching him sleep, her face doting and tender, glazed with affection, while her mind considers how much better she can do. She finds it far more invigorating than pursuing ideals, this foreboding sense that she is throwing herself away.
Still, the drudgery of dailiness can creep up, and in an effort to combat it, Daphne came up with the idea of accents. On Saturdays, they speak in Southern voices. Jolly twangs, slack and unrefined. Theirs are not the lilting voices of the genteel South, of debutantes and Tennessee Williams, but of marrying cousins and dropped g’s. In Daphne’s mind is a good-natured South, a place of promiscuous greenery, a leafy resort for cheerful incest. Every time Ashley forgets to use his Southern tone, Daphne makes him put a dollar in a large Mason jar on the kitchen counter.
“Deposit,” she says, her finger rigid and directive.
She used to spend Saturday nights feeling pitiable and discouraged, unproductive, as if she’d spent all day having sex and was surprised to discover she had nothing to show for it. Southern Saturdays have renewed her, as if she has uncovered debauchery in the middle of her kitchen. Ashley has taken to the change too, and returned recently from a business trip to England with an idea for Cockney Sundays, a day devoted to loopy accents and Benny Hill, to fish and chips and other food they never eat. At one point, Daphne considered making an appointment with a dialect coach so they could get their accents just right, but she realized, flipping through the Yellow Pages, that she wasn’t looking for accuracy. She was looking for what she already had: zesty stereotypes, games that took themselves seriously, disinterest in her own incorrectness. She wanted different voices in her kitchen.
Her leg stretching across the kitchen table, she leans forward and rests her chin against her knee. “I hates these here hairy legs,” she says. One unspoken rule on Southern Saturdays is that subjects and verbs must never agree.
Ashley assures her frequently that he prefers her legs unshaven. He also encourages her not to shave her underarms. Ashley is not a tree-planting, tofu-eating sort of man, but a Bay Street financial consultant who matches his socks to his ties and enjoys devising time-management strategies. Daphne suspects that he encourages her to let her body hair grow, not because he finds beauty in a woman’s naturalness, but because he feels a secret charge, a prickly dance in his thighs, whenever he is confronted with things that revolt him.
“I like this new camera,” Ashley says in his plain voice, snapping a picture of Daphne.
“Deposit,” she says, jabbing her finger at the jar.
Daphne guesses that Ashley is worried, sometimes, by his desire to marry a woman given to such adamance, a woman with such a rule-bound sense of fun. For her part, Daphne worries frequently about the fact that she finds her future husband’s voice sexy only when it’s not his own.
FOR THE PAST THREE years, Daphne has worked as a high school economics teacher. What excites her most about her job is not explaining supply and demand or Keynesian ideology. She finds economics irredeemably dull, a discipline she fell into at the urging of her fiscally preoccupied father, but the minute she is faced with the disinterest of her students, everything changes. What she loves is the act of distortion, making things appear as the opposite of what they are. An unwilling audience is the best kind, providing the platform upon which she feels most powerful. She knows just how to distort the surface of the material so that economics seems worth learning, mysterious and flexible instead of stodgy and controlled. Her students’ interest is incidental. It is the stylishness of trickery that matters: bending textbook material while appearing to maintain an almost forensic accuracy.
She first met Ashley in a psychic’s waiting room. She had been sent there by Yvonne, who taught a seminar entitled “Lover, Know Thyself” that the psychic had attended. On the morning of her appointment, Yvonne instructed Daphne to appear receptive to insight and to use the phrase intuitive reader rather than psychic. Daphne had agreed to go because she lacked the energy to resist Yvonne—it seemed to her that passivity and compliance were subversive in their own satisfying ways—but she found the whole process distasteful. She had no patience for the messy, whispered predictions and revelatory moans of a psychic who managed to be simultaneously vague and emphatic. While she was still waiting for her appointment, Ashley had entered the room with a fleet of noises: extensive rustles while he hung up his coat on a creaky rack, several cosy sighs as he eased down into the vinyl chair, eager beeps at his cellphone, a comically impatient sigh when his coat fell off the rack and he replaced it, another stab at the cellphone, lint needing to be brushed off his pants, a punctuating throat clear when seated again, a final contented sigh. He began talking to Daphne straightaway. He confessed that he believed in the reader’s powers wholeheartedly, if reluctantly.
“I’m half an hour early for my appointment,” he said. “Intuition or what?” Then he winked.
He had worn a tailored charcoal suit, a royal blue shirt, and a matching, slightly iridescent, blue tie. She liked the way he kept burping noiselessly while they spoke. It seemed to her that each burp, a little swallow of air, punctuated a thought to which she couldn’t have access. In many ways, he reminded her of the way Carol ordered coffee—“I’ll have a medium medium.” Height, weight, hair colour, complexion—all medium. She couldn’t imagine what a person like this was all about, with his tidy business surface and his hope for the blessing of a psychic. His nose was long and serious, and there was a hapless downward turn at the corner of his lips. Nothing about him matched. The suit and the burps, the mouth and the nose. There was a kind of canine honesty in his eyes, but also a gentle worry around his lips that promised a half-swallowed sadness. Every few minutes, he looked at his watch with a sensible frown and said that he should really be getting back to the office, he had many clients depending on his constant surveillance of the stock market. Then he’d pull his cell-phone from the clip at his waist and look at it, press a few buttons, and put it back. Things like this that would ordinarily have irritated Daphne flipped her into attraction. When the psychic finally emerged from the other room, Ashley stood up and gave a small bow. Then he asked her how she was feeling that day, each word tentative and cajoling, a voice for trying to trick a baby into a laugh.
“I’m sorry that I’m so early. I know I’m not until one thirty. Luckily, this lovely young lady has been gracious enough to entertain me.” He gestured towards Daphne.
“You must be quiet while you’re waiting for your appointment,” said the psychic. “I cannot tolerate distractions when I’m with a new client.”
“Of course.” He nodded and stepped back with a small reverential burp.
The following day, they ran into each other on King Street, and Ashley asked for her phone number. He called her the next day, breathing asthmatically into the receiver for a moment before identifying himself.
“Did you enjoy being read?” he asked.
“Of course!” Daphne cried. “What a seer she is!” She had actually cut her appointment short and left through the back door. The psychic had fondled Daphne’s leather glove for ten minutes, and then informed her that she had a visio
n of a tropical storm, a sure sign of a barren womb, and that she heard a children’s choir, which meant that Daphne should be careful when crossing the street.
“You’ll go again, then?”
“Certainly.”
She did not feel that she was being unfair or dishonest. She felt that this was how things should begin, with relative truths and warm evasions. He suggested that they go to Il Fornello for dinner.
“Il Fornello?” she said, with an electric flick of laughter.
“A lot of people like Il Fornello,” he replied, sounding wounded.
What an unlikely moment it was for her to divine that she might marry him. In that moment of certain disappointment, to be pleased. To spot in unsettling differences the very things that would settle her. And not just to divine, but to decide. For that is what she did.
Daphne remembers this moment with the strictest clarity—the moment she knew she would marry him. Such a union seemed appropriate. She had come to believe that marriage was the highest and most sophisticated form of distortion. As often as possible, she tried to use the phrase the institution of marriage. What, after all, could be more ordered, more unwaveringly accurate, than an institution? To give herself away, to be bound by moral rules as well as clear legalities, while at the heart of it all was a love somewhat lacking—this struck her as thrillingly dishonest. It guaranteed that her life would always be shaped by a certain magic and cunning, a sleight-of-hand artistry.
Single life had been formless, blatantly disorganized, and how could she pretend otherwise, dating one man one weekend, another the next? She had been embarrassed for herself as a single woman. Shortly after the dinner at Il Fornello, she had worried that the downward turn of Ashley’s lips was strictly physical, that there was no beautiful distress lingering there. She suspected that he might not want to trick and be tricked, that he might want to sit on the edge of the bed pouring out his insecurities while she massaged his shoulders, that he might be looking to discard propriety and live in a world of soulmates and coy romance. Then one day, after their ballroom dancing class, she found in his study a crumpled phone bill. It came to five hundred dollars, all owing to a phone sex company in Burlington, Ontario. She put it back in the garbage and patted the back of his chair. He was in.
The Virgin Spy Page 14