by Annabel Lyon
“No.”
He tosses me a satin bra, baby blue. “Fucking hell, that’s mine,” I say, and he laughs. He comes over and sits beside me on the bed. “It’s the desperate age,” he says. He takes the bra out of my hands and gives it a wry look.
“What do I do about Ty?”
“Believe him.” He gets up and leaves the room and for a moment I think he isn’t coming back. Then I realize he’s gone to throw the bra on the laundry pile. On his way back in he turns off the overhead but leaves the door open so we’ve got the hall light to see by, a bright triangle that just touches the bedpost. “Give it up. From all you’ve told me, the lawyer, the therapist – have you seriously considered he might be telling the truth?”
“Not for a while,” I admit.
“This is very bad for me, just being here,” Calvin says.
“But how do I do that, decide to believe or disbelieve? You don’t decide a thing like that. You have feelings and instincts. It’s like the choice is made before you have a chance to think about it.”
“I guess lawyers do it all the time. Presumption of innocence, right? Acting in your client’s interests? Maybe you have to act like you believe him, and eventually the acting takes over and becomes the true thing. You start to believe your own performance.”
I think about that. “So pretend you hate me.”
He shakes his head. “Tried.” He leans over in the dark to kiss my cheek but misses and gets my ear instead. We sit like that for a moment.
“You know I have to kick you out now?”
He sighs. “I know.”
I walk him down to the front step, watch him walk away down my street. Like a movie star, he doesn’t look back.
May and Jupiter rent the top floor of a house owned by a retired couple who used to have something to do with the film industry. The vanity plate on the couple’s BMW, parked out front, says 2REEL. Last week the postman accidentally left one of their Christmas cards, from someone named Lauren Bacall, in May and Jupiter’s box. We argue about that one for a while.
“I bet you there are at least ten people in the United States right now named Lauren Bacall,” I say.
“Ten? A hundred,” May says. “I would bet. Maybe more.”
“O ye of little faith,” Jupiter says.
The walls, painted sunny blues and yellows, slant with the roof. The resulting spaces are awkward, interesting, nooks and corners. Small. A skylight sloping over the kitchen table lets an open grey light onto our dinner: a stringy lasagne, Safeway garlic bread, and an indifferent salad. I wonder why they didn’t cook Asian. Maybe, like me, they were trying to do ethnic.
“Did you see the return address?”
“LA,” Jupiter says.
“Proves nothing,” May says. Jupiter sticks his tongue out at her and she kicks him under the table. They are less inhibited in their own house, more physical, jostling and affectionate, squabbling like – squabs. When I arrived they each hugged me gently, me with my tender new girth. May asked, girl or boy.
“Boy,” I said. “You could see his package on the ultrasound.”
Jupiter asked after Liam and Ty while May put my hothouse designer daisies in a vase.
“Coming home day after tomorrow,” I told him, trying to sound brisk, pepped.
“May says there’ve been some issues.” She turned from the sink and threw a leaf at his head. It stuck. “I was bringing it out into the open!” he protested.
“No,” I said. “It’s all right. We decided, Liam and I decided, Ty needed some time in another – milieu. To think about –”
There was a space I couldn’t seem to fill.
“– things,” Jupiter offered.
“The house must be so quiet,” May said.
I used that as a cue to ask for a tour of their place. From the kitchen you stepped off the lino onto carpet and then you were in the office: desk, ergonomic chair, computer, reading lamp, and melamine bookcase of texts and files, presumably Jupiter’s. The bathroom was white and immaculate, with a lot of fruity products from The Body Shop in a basket on the counter next to an inhaler and a sealed hypodermic, part of an allergy kit. “Mine,” Jupiter said, seeing my glance, holding up his hand like I’d asked him a question in school. “Shellfish.”
“He cramps my style,” May said.
The single bedroom was dominated by the bed, covered by a faded quilt with a watermelon pattern, and the TV, a seventies model complete with rabbit ears. I guessed those two were socking their savings away and would be retiring – cleverly, quietly, without fuss – at forty-five.
“Liam would know,” I say now. “Whether she lives in LA, the real Lauren Bacall, I mean. He’s full of trivia like that.”
Jupiter starts to clear the table. May, to my surprise, doesn’t even gesture toward helping. I wonder if this is some standing arrangement between them. She cooks, he cleans?
“How long have they been away, now?” she says in her soft voice. For the first time I notice the trace of an accent, a lingering on the “o” in “long,” a brusque clipping of the final “a” in “away.”
“Just a week.”
Jupiter is speeding up, stacking plates precariously and trying to carry everything at once over to the sink, to absent himself from this conversation. I’m beginning to understand.
“Have you spoken to Liam?” May asks. “Does this trip seem to be helping Ty?”
“He’s got his homework. It’s not hurting him.”
“You’ve spoken to Liam?”
“May,” I say, reaching for her hand. “Thank you. But we’re not separating. It’s been just one week.”
Blushes upon blushes, predictably; as usual, I have been too blunt. Jupiter smiles apologetically and goes into the bedroom, closing the door behind him. I hear the TV go on, the groan of bedsprings. He’s done his bit for the evening, then. May is apologizing for her concern, which she calls her rudeness. “Only you haven’t seemed well, lately,” she said.
How much to tell her, without corrupting her just by making her listen? “You have to understand, with Liam and me,” I say. “It’s always been this way. We go through these cycles. Would you believe me if I told you this was the eighth time in fourteen years he’s gone home to his family when we weren’t getting along?”
“I, too, am very close to my mother,” May says.
She gets up to fill the kettle and I pray for a Chinese dessert, sweet rice dumplings, maybe, or lychee nuts in syrup.
While she makes coffee our talk drifts to work, scheduling and such. “How long has Calvin been at the clinic?”
“Longer than me.” She brings milk and sugar to the table. The coffee gurgles. “I’ve been there three years. I think for him it’s closer to five. Are you getting along better with him now? I know at first there were some problems.”
I’m caught off guard. “No, no problems,” I say. “Just a misunderstanding.”
She sits back down beside me, hesitates, then says, “What you have to understand about Calvin is he’s the same with everyone. Before you, it was me. It’s sort of a joke. The other nurses told me. He used to write me letters and leave gifts in my coat pockets. One very nice Jascha Heifetz CD after I told him I used to play the violin. After you came he started all over again. After you, it’ll be someone else. That’s just the way he is.”
“Oh,” I say.
“No, it’s nice,” she says. “Don’t be hurt. It’s flattering.” She laughs again and I feel ashamed. I thought I had been swimming in water where I could stand up if I chose, when really it just goes down and down. Of course I’m also thinking about Ty.
She brings the coffee to the table, also cups, spoons, and a pastry box – biscotti, custard tarts, a few chocolate truffles in tiny foil cups. “Jupiter, sweets,” she calls.
Ty, I’m thinking, but what I say is, “Yummy.”
At the airport, as Liam and Ty wait for their luggage on the carousel, I tell them I’ve put on six pounds.
“So, run
,” Ty says.
“No, six pounds is good,” I say, and we finally tell him about the baby, there in the airport.
Us: You’re getting a sibling.
Him (dully): That’s great.
I insist on hugging him until he hugs me back a little. “Missed you,” I say, then turn away – I tell myself – so he won’t have to respond.
This is my new son, the revised Ty, the reserved Ty, the Ty who treats his parents with a kind of delayed formality, as though we are communicating across a vast distance where words travel slower than meaning. This is the Ty who wakes one morning with a spray of acne on his forehead, disappointing me terribly. This is the Ty who defiantly cancels his last few appointments with Dr. Gross and routinely bolts his dinner to go out in the dark and play three-on-three with his new basketball buddies, including, I strongly suspect, Carl the vandal.
“Carl the vandal,” I tell Ty.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he says. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.”
Probably the clippings and graffiti were some kind of rite of passage, something he feels he has survived, something he now has no intention of discussing with his mere mother. Probably Carl the vandal was a sweet child who loved milk and shared his toys.
When the Nova Scotia cousins send a crop of photographs from their visit, he and his dad sit on the sofa going through them, trading names and reminiscences like a couple of old women. They demand lobster and roll their eyes at each other when I object to the cost. Liam even takes to asking after Carl in a fake German accent, which the two of them seem to find hilarious. I wonder if Liam’s star is ascending in Ty’s little galaxy, even as my own falls. I wonder if I shouldn’t be more grateful for small mercies. Brill, for instance, still won’t speak to us, but Mrs. Lindstrom from across the road brought us a stollen at Christmas so we knew his hold was slipping. Now, early January, a For Sale by Owner sign appears on his front lawn. We see couples unlatch his gate and trundle up the path, often pausing to point at our house, as though to say: wish it were that one. I get a kick out of this.
We start to use the dining room again, the night our shy lawyer friend Isobel comes for dinner. We talk about careers, vanilla talk; Isobel asks Ty what he wants to do. “Law,” he says.
We gape. He takes his plate into the kitchen for seconds.
“Picked your school?” Isobel asks.
“Dal,” he calls from the kitchen. Dalhousie.
While he’s out of earshot she asks us about the thing. Liam says, “It blew over.”
Before dinner Liam put on the Bach Solo Cello Suites for background music. Now I say, “I always think people who love the cello aren’t getting any. The vibration, you know?”
Isobel says, “Well, I’m glad to hear that.”
My husband looks weary.
“I’m just so sick of this reverence for the cello,” I say.
The dining room, I am seeing now, could in fact use some work. The walls are a blended hue, ochres and umbers we sponge-painted six years ago, that looked subtle and Mediterranean, hot-cool at the time, but now seem effortful, amateurish. Ty returns from the kitchen with a plateful of treats: rice crisped brown from the bottom of the pot, blackened rinds from the roast, a puddle of sweet meat gravy, and, because I have taught him to eat in groups, a single sarcastic bean. I watch him slice and fork his meat, grind his molars, and after a while he becomes aware.
“What,” he says.
“No, not what,” I say.
The evening swoops along like this, conversation blossoming and curling back on itself, arabesques of good feeling tipped with tiny barbs. I ask Isobel about her experience at law school, earning an earnest account of her love for competitive moots and a scowl from my son, who I can tell is wishing he himself had never confessed to anything so earnest as an ambition. Liam serves dessert and talks about his own collegiate passion, film noir, discovered one rainy undergraduate night at the Cinematheque, during a James Cagney / Aldo Ray double bill. He does his Cagney impersonation, which I find particularly endearing when he’s wearing his glasses, as now. Isobel and I laugh. Ty murmurs, “Fucking bullshit cunt crap,” I’m pretty certain, and gives me a smile like a seraph. I see Liam has heard too but he won’t bite because we’re in company.
“I was a chemistry major at the time,” he tells Isobel, looking at Ty’s head bent studiously over his plate. “I was very discontent. It was my eureka moment. I thought, you love this! Do what you love!”
Ty snorts.
“Chew nicely,” I say.
Even Isobel catches a scratch, as Liam helps her into her coat and we gather at the door for goodbyes. She invites Ty to spend a day at her office, to see what a law firm is all about.
“I’m not really interested in tax law,” he says to this good, gentle woman who has known him since he was a baby. Her mouth twists briefly, laughter or hurt, or both.
After Liam closes the door he gives me a look as though to say, do you want to do it or should I?
“Come for a walk?” I ask Ty.
He says no.
Liam takes his glasses off.
“Fine,” Ty says. When he knows he must obey us it pleases him, lately, to act as though he does it under coercion, if not the threat of outright physical harm. Whereas it pleases Liam and me, we agreed the other night, that we are both still ever so slightly taller than our son.
January in Vancouver is not so bad. It’s a balmy eight degrees or so, raining lightly from a nine-o’clock sky. Black sky, slick black street, babbling in the gutters, German metal in the driveways, windows of buttery light. Trees, reaching nudes. What it is to be safe again.
“Where are we going?” Ty wants to know.
“I feel like a movie.”
Our footsteps neither ring nor crunch, but are simply themselves on the wet pavement. Ty shoves his hands in his pockets like he wants to pop the linings. Liam turns his face up to the sky and walks a few steps ahead of us, leaving me to it. I pull the zipper of my jacket up over the blob of my belly, five months’ worth. Five months, I’m thinking, is long enough. I expect Ty to object and he does take a single breath deeper than the others, a mouthful of fuel for speech, but nothing comes out. I chafe the pad of my index finger against the corner of the laminated Silver Video card in my pocket. I know he’s also expecting a dressing-down after his performance at supper tonight, and pick my words thoughtfully.
“Isobel wears too much lace and tax law is very boring,” I say. “But she means well.”
“Fine,” Ty says.
“Look at me. She is a dear old friend and you are going to phone her and apologize.”
“I said fine.”
Up ahead, at the crest of the hill, we can see Silver Video, between the cheesecake place and the dry cleaner.
“You want to know what is not fine?” The baby flutters. I say, “Ho!”
“What?”
“Baby’s moving.” I grab his hand and clamp it to my belly. “Feel that?”
He angles his head, listening. After a moment sullenness melts into curiosity and he lets his fist relax into an open palm. He lets me move it around.
“That,” I say, and something flickers on his face. He felt it. He leans down and I can hear him breathe.
“Helloooo,” he says, stretching the word out like someone trying to make an echo.
“Baby,” I say. He takes his hand back, but nicely.
We catch up to Liam at the top of the hill, across the street from our destination. It’s a raw moment – awkward, intimate – with a few sparse raindrops pegging us on the head and shoulders like something personal. Silver Video, from this vantage point, is a fish tank. Through the glass wall I see a lone customer bopping one video off his thigh while he reads the back of another. Then he sets both cases down and limps over to the Used / For Sale rack. Outside, the parking lot is empty, shiny black, the parking spaces delineated by yellow lines worn pale and grainy as fingerprints.
We cross the street. I walk over to a ga
rbage can by the bushes where it happened, pretending to empty the crud from my pockets – a couple of tissues, peel from a roll of breath mints – half expecting a change in temperature or a whirring like insects, but it’s cool and damp and unremarkable, a blank page again. Ty and Liam hang back, waiting for me by the doors. Liam has one foot up on the concrete barrier meant to stop cars from rolling through the plate glass windows. Ty, leaning his bum against the window, with his hood up and his hands still in his pockets, is shaking his head at something his father is saying, shaking his head and then smiling, grudgingly, as Liam punctuates his monologue with a duck-like waddle, one hand on his belly. Now they’re both laughing, smirking a bit, glancing to check where I am. Out of earshot, is where; they’re safe from me.
In a perfect world, I would look down at this moment and see a winking twist – my son’s MedicAlert bracelet, say – half-buried at my feet. Instead there’s a new-looking, extra-large drink cup from a local convenience store, complete with lid and straw, abandoned on the lip of the asphalt. I kick it into the bushes and turn back to rejoin my men, but there is only Ty, standing by the doors.
“Dad’s inside,” Ty calls, and we both roll our eyes and smile a little because he couldn’t wait.
“Poor Dad,” I say, and I’m conscious, as I cross the last few metres separating us, of my walk, of my hand on my belly. “He can’t help himself.”
We don’t go in yet. We watch Liam through the windows for a while, Liam the scholar, frowning and tapping his fingers against his lips while the overhead TVS blare their silent promotional dreck. We watch him pick up one video, put it down. We watch him drift to the DVDS. Working hard.
“Are you okay?” I ask Ty.
He says, “I’m good.”
We look at each other for a second, have to look away.
“Is this too weird?” I ask. “Being here?”
A car pulls into the parking lot, a navy Mini, a new one. My verdict on these cars is I would like them more if everyone else liked them less. Ty and I step apart to let the driver and his passenger, a tall, thin man with an expression of long-suffering good humour and a woman whose hair is a voguish rat’s nest of streaks and straws, into the store. “You’ve seen everything!” the woman is saying.