The Virgin Spy

by Krista Bridge

  She felt their purity of purpose, the knowing that held firm beneath the labour of their distractions.

  WHEN ASHLEY COMES home from work, Daphne is at their kitchen table smoking for the first time. For weeks, she has been fantasizing about the inhale. At night, she dreams about smoke the way some people dream about sex. In the dreams, in some inappropriate connection between nicotine and nature, she is usually standing outdoors in the crisp October air, wearing her red fall coat with the big hood, and she tips her head back and takes in the smoke, feels its anaesthetic cool in her lungs. It’s as palpable as a wet dream, the smoke’s restorative hold. She never exhales, but prolongs the act of inhaling, drawing in again and again but never releasing. This cigarette, her first while awake, misses the point entirely. The taste is wrong. In her imaginings, smoke tastes the way she imagines warmed eucalyptus would taste. Instead, smoke tastes like smoke. Her first inhale is like an electric jolt in her throat. It catches, and it knocks her forward into a cough instead of rolling sweetly back.

  “Oh, no,” Ashley says as Daphne coughs hello. He picks up the pack of cigarettes and the lighter and stuffs them in his jacket pocket. “Oh, no. Smoking is bad for your health.”

  “Is that right?” she drawls. She is trying for a French accent, but lapses into the Southern.

  “Oh, no,” he states firmly. “I’m not living with any smoker.”

  She takes a deep inhale and coughs it out.

  “I’m not having this,” he says again. “There’s a certain understanding when you plan to marry that what you seem to be getting into is, in fact, what you’re getting into.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  She can tell that he takes her very seriously, that he is picturing life with an aging smoker, browning and lined. When they first met, she could see his inability to turn things like this into jokes, to turn anything into a joke. He liked it best when their dates were mellow and well planned. Energetic activities, such as hikes and squash games, had to be incorporated sparingly into their routine. Mostly, this pleases her; she has always welcomed the structure Ashley provides. But there are times when she has felt another need. She grew up in a loud house, a place where nothing could be done quietly, even whispering. When one of them had requested silence, the others would tiptoe across the creaky floors, telling each other to be quiet in stage whispers. Theirs was a house where all noise was held to a microphone, where dishes were constantly being washed and put away, where the dog barked if he was being ignored, where her mother screamed at the dog that if he didn’t be quiet, she would put him in the basement. The low volume of her life with Ashley sometimes disarms Daphne, even though she believes she values the repose, the soft steady surfaces, of her coupling. One day, she woke him up by turning all the lights on full and belting out “New York, New York,” slowing down dramatically at the end and ripping the covers off him by way of passionate finale.

  “Jesus Christ,” he’d said, pulling the covers back over his head. “Do you have to be so loud in the fucking morning?”

  Ashley liked to wake up to his clock radio, to the voices of the CBC. He has always preferred an ordered approach: smoking when one is a troubled teenager, yelling when one is fighting, singing at celebratory occasions, or in choirs. She knows this. It is one of the reasons she has stayed with him for almost two years instead of her usual two months.

  Waving smoke from the front of his face, Ashley holds up the pack of cigarettes, and says, “Look at me. I need you to look at me,” and he drops the offending instruments loudly to the bottom of the garbage can.

  “Did you see that? Are you with me?” He points to the cigarette in her hand. “That’s your last one.”

  She wonders what it says about them that moments like this are far more disruptive than any major fight they could have.

  “It’s just one pack,” she says.

  “That’s what they always say.”

  She is wearing a long necklace, which Ashley gave her on their fourth date. He scoops up the end of it with his index finger and twists it up to her chin. “Do we have an agreement?” he says, with a lopsided smile that makes her think of what his face looks like when he warbles Sinatra. The necklace is made up of small dark-blue spheres, each one imprinted with a gold flower swirling over its surface. It is a beautiful necklace, like none she has ever seen, and she always wonders when she looks at it how this man could have bought her the perfect thing.

  “Swear,” he says, nipping her lip.

  She notices a smell beneath the fresh laundering of his suit, beneath the deodorant and apple shampoo, a smell like garden dirt, a hearty day spent in the outdoors. And for a moment she believes herself when she leans in and whispers, “Anything you say.”

  BREATH HAS A trajectory. Daphne turns her head as Ashley climbs into bed. She can smell his breath even though he’s two feet away, and she can almost see it, the arc from his mouth to her nose. Buttery and tepid, a reminder of his body’s humility.

  “I want you,” Ashley says, warming his hands on the back of her knees.

  “I have to get up at six,” she answers. She is wearing striped pajamas to ward off such advances.

  She prefers feeling his desire to hearing his desire. She’d much rather he not express wanting so openly, with tender traps and flattery. If she could articulate what she wants, she would say that she’d like to be slammed down. He told her on their first date that he had only had one lover, a fifty-five-year-old woman named Celine. “Our relationship was really only about the sex,” he said apologetically. Celine was highly instructive, composing lists of the ground she wanted him to cover each session. After sex, she often laid a chessboard across her naked stomach and he played chess with himself, as both the black and the white pieces; he seemed truly ashamed when he confessed to Daphne that he always secretly made better moves for the white pieces. Sitting squarely in a busy Il Fornello eating pasta primavera, Daphne found it puzzling that he so frankly disclosed things he considered private. Unlike Yvonne, whose life overtly revolved around sex, Daphne had always been fascinated by sex in an underground, heavy-hearted sort of way. As a child, she listened to her parents having sex at night. Occasionally, she invented reasons to go to the bathroom down the hall and pause outside their closed door. Whereas Yvonne invested in earplugs and hid under her covers, Daphne was drawn to their door as to the scene of a car accident. She would even try to picture what their bodies looked like, contorted and elastic, bent into positions that couldn’t be natural.

  Sometimes, she would search their room under the pretence of cleaning, and pillage their night table for evidence, condoms or a diaphragm, but the only thing that looked remotely suspicious was a large tub of Vaseline. After what she heard at night—pleading and gasping, furniture moving, a glass bottle hitting the hardwood floor—she was shocked by her parents’ ordinary faces at the breakfast table the next morning as they drank their orange juice and exchanged sections of the newspaper. The whole situation repelled her, and she couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  When she first saw what a penis could do, at the age of fourteen, she became even more gripped by what went on in that room. A friend of her mother named Greg had been visiting, and Daphne had been giving him a fashion show of her new summer clothes while her mother went grocery shopping. After she tried on each outfit, she paused, making him assess what she looked like from each angle, then demanded to know whether she looked fat. “You look great,” he had said again and again, as she fished for compliments and accused him of lying. After she paraded into the room dressed in her final outfit, a knee-length linen skirt and a green stretchy T-shirt, she had put her hands on her hips and demanded, “Do you swear I don’t look fat?” At this, Greg had risen slowly from his chair and placed his hands slowly on his hips as he stood before her, looking down at the erection bulging from his pants. “Still think I’m lying?” he had asked matter-of-factly, as she looked away, tensely laughing. She’d heard of erections, but hadn’t considered what they looke
d like. She’d known the penis became larger, but she hadn’t realized it stood out, an insulting appendage that demanded attention. It had seemed to her unnatural and inconsiderate. She had wondered why anyone would want to come into contact with an erection, why women moaned hungrily even when they were just talking about sex.

  Three years after seeing Greg’s erection, Daphne had realized that the only way around her fear of penises was to be fucked, and fucked again. Not made love to—certainly not that. Fucked. So she pursued this course of action until penises became a normal part of life.

  When she first had sex with Ashley, Daphne had been pleasantly surprised by his competence. He had kissed her with the magnetic pressure of determination. There had even been glimmers of fierce wanting as he took off her clothes. Even though she has told Yvonne that it is only adequate, she has in fact always enjoyed sex with Ashley. Yvonne often says that there is nothing as intimate a man can get as what a woman can, being penetrated. And Daphne has begun to agree, she has come to see penetration as a necessary invasion, something taken masquerading as something given. She feels that sex in the context of a relationship is the sneakiest of violations. As the wedding comes closer, Daphne wants sex less, but as Ashley nestles into her, his moist breath on her neck, she takes him in a steady grip.

  “You’re a lovely man,” she says, looking at his forehead.

  And as he begins to rub himself in her hand, moaning “God, I love you so much, I want to make love to you,” she sees how her parents drank their orange juice with the straightest faces each morning. How sex can be all genital or all mind. She rests one arm across Ashley’s back and sees it there as if it is detached from her body. She raises her knees, lets them fall out a little, feels their give, their pliant flexibility. Ashley’s weight has a way of settling into her body. It has a heavy, unmoving quality, as if it belongs not to a person, but to an inanimate object, like a lead X-ray vest. She pictures her own body, caving to the pressure, and imagines that, when she stands up, there will be a long, deep indentation in her body from where he has been. She leans her head back and to the side, as if feebly submitting to a chain of events she has no power to stop, and she imagines how helpless and distressed she must look as she hooks her legs around his hips. The sensation of him working his way inside her, adjusting and readjusting for the most comfortable fit, is the most familiar feeling she has ever known. The way her body feels as if it is trying its hardest to lock him out, until the moment he is in, and her body clamps down upon him to keep him from retreating. There is a vigilant sameness about sex with Ashley, the simmering pressure, the cautious pacing. And yet each time feels somehow new. When she’s not having sex, she can’t think of what sex could possibly feel like. She loses the sense of it. It’s not something she can summon, like the taste of a grapefruit, or the sting of a paper cut. Her pajama top twists and tightens as Ashley clutches its material in his hands behind her back, and she looks over his shoulder to her pajama bottoms, thrown to the bottom of the bed.

  She thinks of orange juice and of her body, its faulty mechanics, the composition of fragments that won’t quite join.

  CAROL, YVONNE, AND Daphne convene for the fetching of the wedding dress. Yvonne is driving, and Daphne is in the back seat. She can see Yvonne’s eyes darting from the road to Daphne’s reflection in the rearview mirror. Carol taps Yvonne’s knee, and Yvonne turns onto a side street, parks the car under an oak tree.

  “Now,” Carol says, bracing her arm against the dashboard.

  “I have to tell you something,” Yvonne says, making eye contact with Daphne through the mirror. “Ashley has been spotted with another woman.”

  “Ashley?” Daphne asks skeptically. “Are you sure?”

  “Now this is not the end of the world. We all need to calm ourselves down.” Carol starts in. “We just have to put our heads together.”

  “Ashley?” Daphne repeats.

  Yvonne nods with solemnity.

  “Who saw him with another woman?” Daphne asks.

  “Now, I need you to keep an open mind.”

  “What was he doing? Who saw him?”

  Yvonne turns around to face Daphne. “An open mind.” She pauses. “Sylvia saw him.”

  “Sylvia?”

  “Sylvia, the psychic.” Yvonne pronounces psychic with a long i, so that it rhymes with sidekick.

  “The psychic?” Daphne says. “Where did she see him?”

  Carol and Yvonne look at each other.

  “The other night,” Yvonne begins, “Sylvia went home from one of my interactive seminars, and she fell asleep, obviously feeling very relaxed and open, and she dreamed that she was walking through a park with an ice cream cone and she saw Ashley having sex with another woman underneath a park bench.”

  Daphne looks at Carol, whose chin has receded into jowls of concern.

  “In her mind?” Daphne says. “She saw Ashley with another woman in her mind?” She gets out of the car and slams the door. Carol gets out on the passenger side and closes her door gingerly, as if she’s trying not to wake a baby.

  “Be reasonable,” Carol says.

  “You be reasonable.”

  Yvonne gets out of the car. “All we ask,” she says, “is that you go speak to Sylvia yourself.”

  Daphne feels strangely excited. She knows, of course, that Ashley is not having sex with someone else, but the suggestion of it, the brief twinkle of depravity that lights in the air just next to her tasteful engagement ring, is exhilarating. Undeniably so. Sometimes, during sex, she fantasizes about Ashley sleeping with other women, and the sex she imagines is vengeful and desperate. Along with the phone sex bill, these fantasies help her picture Ashley as a sexual person. If she opens her eyes during sex, all is ruined. What she sees there is loving and earnest, with the politeness Ashley feels is appropriate to love.

  Carol and Yvonne are pacing nervously, hoping for tears. How, Daphne wonders, could anyone could go so far wrong in interpretation? She looks up, laughing, at the trees, their branches stretched like hands across the autumn sky.

  ASHLEY IS FIXING the toilet, which is leaking from its base. So far, little progress has been made. It all started when the toilet began welling up with water every time it was flushed. After three days of intermittent plunging and holding his bladder until he got to work each morning, Ashley got fed up and decided to investigate by taking the toilet apart. Two hours after putting it back together and marvelling about how efficiently it flushed, he stepped into the bathroom to find great pools of cold water at the base of the toilet. Daphne is sitting in the kitchen when Ashley returns from the hardware store, makes straight for the bathroom, and closes the door with a tart, presidential authority. Shortly before going to the store, Ashley cross-examined her about what she knew of the toilet’s ills.

  “Have you been flushing Kleenex?” he asked suspiciously.

  “No,” she answered honestly, shaking her head.

  “Tampon applicators?”

  Another shake.

  In fact, from the beginning, she has known exactly what is ailing the toilet: it is suffering from her reluctance to put her hand in a bowl full of urine. Though to be fair to herself, she thinks, Ashley is equally culpable, since it was he who failed to flush. Two nights before, when she was getting ready for bed, she reached up to the cabinet above the toilet for her jar of moisturizer, and she knocked a large plastic hair clip into the toilet. She had been bracing herself to plunge her hand into the cold septic water, when she noticed that the toilet was in fact full of urine. She now thinks it unfortunate that the toilet has become such an inconvenience, but she does not truly feel guilty about her choice. She flushed the toilet, hoping the clip would sit at the bottom, waiting for a cleaner retrieval, but the clip disappeared and was now, she assumed, lodged in a pipe. She knows not to divulge this information to Ashley, who has been complaining all day about how much he hates wet feet.

  A minute after Ashley closes himself in the bathroom, Daphne hears a big ba
ng, the sound of Ashley’s toolbox hitting the floor, then the metallic scatter of tools across the tile. The bang is followed by silence, then a torrent of Italian swearing. Ashley only swears in Italian—a language he neither speaks nor understands— as if his inner angry soul is ethnic and unkempt, unrestrained by the niceties of Canadian culture. She walks to the bathroom, knocks lightly on the door.

  “Is everything okay?” she asks.

  She gets no answer, so she opens the door slowly and peers in. Ashley is on his hands and knees, gathering his tools into a circle in the centre of the bathroom. The toilet has been disassembled, and its parts are laid in an intricate webbing across the bathroom floor.

  “Ashley,” she says in alarm. “What if I have to go to the bathroom?”

  He sits up on his knees suddenly and whips his head around.

  “Never disturb a handyman!”

  “I’m not trying to bother you,” she says, “but I’m just wondering how long you’re planning to take. I might have to go to the bathroom at some point.”

  He stands up and steps towards her. In his face is a dry, self-righteous anger, the chafed fretfulness of someone who is brought to the brink many times, but always denied the explosion.

  “Never disturb a handyman!” he shouts in a turbulent voice, leaning into the plunger as if it were a cane. “A handyman is under a great deal of stress!”

  Daphne closes the door. She doesn’t know what to think of the indignant clarity in Ashley’s voice, of his sudden interest in manual labour and its accompanying impatience. When they first moved in together, he had tolerated question upon question, demand upon demand. The bathroom had been full of gnats, and she found their dead bodies on her toothbrush, embedded in the hair of her comb, swimming in water around the drain. It was the middle of the winter, and they came out of nowhere, but Ashley had willingly tried to kill them all when she asked.