The Best Thing for You

by Annabel Lyon

  All right, he said, flushing darkly. All right.

  She took her notebook and a pen out of her purse and wrote down what she had said, then tore off the page and handed it to him.

  One must imagine Sisyphus happy, she said in English.

  He folded the note and put it in his shirt pocket. Cigarette? he asked, conjuring a pack.

  No, thank you, Stephen.

  He put the pack back in another pocket. The waitress set their cups in front of them and left. The coffee tasted smoked.

  Nietzsche says history is circular. Do you believe that? What’s your husband’s name?

  Buddy.

  Buddy? he said, laughing. Buddy?

  What did you think was going to happen here?

  His hands started trembling again, badly.

  Chicory, she said. I remember real coffee.

  You’re not so much older than me.

  I am, though.

  No, he said, for she had risen and was pulling her coat back around her. On his jaw, like a rash: sweets plus shaving.

  She said, I have to go.

  Jesus, you don’t.

  They were both standing. She thought: look at us, each with something big and clear and important to say, but he starts his in the middle and I manage nothing at all.

  Aren’t we the pair, she said.

  Anna. Anna!

  Coming.

  Here she is. Hello, love.

  What’s wrong with the car? Anna asked.

  – under the car. Let the men.

  This is new, Anna said, not quite touching her mother’s silk scarf.

  No.

  It is.

  No. Oh, sweetheart, his trousers.

  – the car.

  Let me hug you.

  Hello, Mummy.

  Aren’t his legs long.

  Buddy! she called, and one of his feet waggled where he lay in the street.

  Nothing major, sir, he said, pulling himself out from under the car and sitting up. His hands were black.

  I’m glad to hear it, sir, her father said.

  There followed the regular Sunday roast and talk of war, its stringencies and sacrifices. In this they were marshalled by her father.

  After they left her husband said, He never lets me forget, does he?

  He doesn’t mean it like that.

  It’s not my fault.

  Of course it isn’t.

  He thinks it is.

  They took it to bed with them, the bad feeling he had with her father.

  I want to fight.

  He knows that.

  No. He wonders how it is I can bang you every night and still claim a weak heart.

  She had wondered the same herself but said nothing. He was rarely crude. She was the one. At the dance the night they met he had asked her what she wanted from life. A mate and a litter, she had said, and felt herself in his gunsights from then on. He told her later she was like a coin toss: heads nine times running, but then came the tenth.

  It’s not my fault, he said again. All my father’s family have it.

  I know.

  It’s an inherited condition.

  I know.

  I know you know. I just wish someone would explain it to your father.

  She was imagining a coin toss, a spinning silver chip. It could fall this way or that way.

  I never asked about the show last night.

  I left early.

  She felt him go up on an elbow to look at her.

  You never do that. You get mad at me if I suggest that.

  I couldn’t concentrate.

  Why not?

  My life is with my husband, she said dramatically, striking her brow like an actress.

  She wrote in her notebook:

  I had the fault of being excessively timid and easily disconcerted; but far from being hindered by this weakness, I advanced on the mistress of my heart. … It was to spite her that they were sending her to the convent, to arrest no doubt her penchant for pleasure, which had declared itself early and which would cause, in what followed, all her sorrows and mine.

  She was at home, working from one of the books in her small library. Rain assaulted the windows like shot.

  Her spirit, her heart, her sweetness, and her beauty formed a chain so strong and so charming that I would have staked all my happiness on never escaping it. Terrible transformation! That which forms my despair could have fixed my happiness. I find myself the most unhappy of men, by that same constancy through which I should have expected the gentlest of all fates, and the most perfect rewards of love.

  Her mother had taught her to translate when she was still a girl, as a way of keeping herself intelligent. Together they had laboured over the fables of Aesop; with pains she had graduated to Voltaire and the other marble men. Then, in the first sweetness of marriage, she had struck out a little on her own and found a vein of classical indecency that, rich though it was, became her staple diet.

  I was to spend six whole months in my prison, during the first of which my condition changed little. All my feelings were but a perpetual alternation between hatred and love, hope, and despair, depending on how she appeared to my spirit. At times I saw her as the most attractive of women, and languished in my desire to see her again; at times I saw but a weak and perfidious mistress, and swore a thousand oaths not to seek her except to punish her.

  Downstairs the front door slammed and her husband called her name. She suppressed a flash of guilt and went down to the kitchen.

  Why’s it so dark in here? Don’t you want to see?

  The paper, he meant. He looked pale and a little ill with excitement, flicking on lights and spreading the paper across the table. You should have seen it down there. They had cordoned off the whole block and then all these flashbulbs going at once when she came out, if you had seen –

  Did you get near her?

  Pretty near. I had to be pretty aggressive.

  What was she like?

  Small, like you. I don’t know if I’d have done for her what he did, though.

  Why not?

  He didn’t answer, leafing through the big pages.

  Was I right about the veil?

  He grinned. Just about.

  Did you get her face?

  I don’t know. I just grabbed it and came straight home. Bonner trial, here.

  But that’s me, she said.

  White-faced, he made a phone call, then went out and brought back this Peretti, a brown-eyed American with more newspapers under his arm. Very nice, ha, he said as he shook her hand.

  The men took their sandwiches down to the basement. After a while she followed. They had the papers all laid out on the work table.

  Come, come, Peretti said, waving her over. What does she think of this?

  Obediently she went to his elbow.

  His thick finger touched one photo after another: the Daily Province, the Daily Colonist, the Globe. The pictures were similar.

  It’s raining in mine, she said, pointing. You can see the puddle. That silvery bit.

  Good girl.

  What happened?

  I’ll tell you, Peretti said. The excuse me cunt in the darkroom is what happened. You didn’t develop these, did you, Pass?

  No. I just gave in the roll.

  He just gave in the roll. Peretti spread his hands, appealing to her as to a judge. So there were some other shots on the roll.

  Do we call Tanner?

  Hell no we don’t call Tanner. We don’t call anyone. No one’s going to notice. But if anyone notices –

  The guy in the darkroom? her husband said hesitantly.

  The cunt in the darkroom, Peretti said. That is correct.

  She understood Tanner was one of the editors and Peretti, as well as a photographer, was a teacher.

  How’s she doing? Peretti asked, thumping his chest.

  Buddy –

  No, I’m fine. Better now.

  We don’t need casualties over a little thing like this, Peretti sa
id, watching him.

  It’s fine – but hand to heart, unthinking.

  To distract Peretti from her husband’s distress she turned back to the photographs. Her hat’s a tiny bit different too, she said. But you have to look really closely to notice.

  Peretti folded one of the pages, with a professional neatness, so he could lay the photographs side by side. Two women in the same alley doorway, big hat, dark coat, heels. Her own face was the clearer of the two though the focus was softened by the poor quality of the newsprint. Maybe it was enough. When she looked closely the differences mounted. But who would look closely?

  Our coats are almost identical.

  Peretti silently pointed to a piece of garbage that appeared in one shot but not the other. An intimate gesture – a secret from her husband under her husband’s nose, an acknowledgement of her strength to his weakness. Something he wanted her to know he knew, though he kept his eyes studiously on the page.

  Does this happen? her husband asked.

  All the time, Peretti lied. We got lucky.

  Her husband seemed consoled.

  Do your own developing next time though.

  Sure, sure I will.

  That’s me, she was thinking.

  Leave the wife at home next time, too.

  He grinned. Sure thing.

  Peretti started to read the story under the picture.

  That’s me, she said aloud, experimenting.

  And look what a bad girl you were, Peretti said, addressing her directly for the first time.

  As he was leaving, he clapped her husband on the shoulder and said, I guess you’re not a virgin any more, are you, Pass?

  The phone call came late that night. She felt herself dragged up from the salt depths of sleep, hooked and hauled by her husband’s voice saying: Hello? Hello?

  The clock on her night table had phosphorescent green arms that doubled and wavered in her sight, but after a sentence or two she got up and started to dress. She pulled out clothes for her husband too and laid them on the bed.

  No, he said, still on the phone, looking up at her in surprise. She’s right here with me.

  In the end they drove not to the hospital but to his mother’s house.

  I don’t blame you, her mother-in-law said, by way of greeting, on the doorstep. I don’t know what happened, but I don’t want you children to think it was your fault.

  Her husband took his mother’s arm and walked her into the living room. Make coffee, would you? he said over his shoulder.

  Driving through the empty streets, they had seemed buoyed in an obscene bubble of sound and motion and the sensation persisted even in the house – she felt the stylish white kitchen watching her as she moved through it, setting off ripples of disapproval that bounced off the hard surfaces and interfered with each other in silently crashing patterns. Her mother-in-law was a clean, cold woman and their mutual dislike, she knew well, was probably rooted in the fact that they were so similar. See the swept counters, the chrome fixtures polished to a liquid sheen! Only the table was heaped with dry husks of newspapers.

  A glass lay on the floor in the corner behind one chair and when she went to pick it up she stepped in water. She realized her father-in-law had collapsed here, died here. She looked down at the papers then and saw, with a shiver of pure physical pleasure, the photograph of herself.

  They looked up as she came in, looked away as she set the tray on the coffee table and began to serve.

  He always loved you like a daughter, her mother-in-law said.

  Cream?

  She’s in shock.

  Sit down, Anna.

  I’ve forgotten the sugar. No, please let me get the sugar, she said, hearing her own voice rise.

  She’s trying to look after us, she heard her husband say.

  In the kitchen she reversed the paper back along its spine and tucked it into the middle of the pile, leaving on top the cinema listings. He too had liked the pictures; they had even gone together, once or twice, just the two of them. Perhaps those afternoons had made it easier for his meek mind to make the leap to depravity. The things that woman had done!

  She had no doubt he had recognized her.

  She found the sugar bowl and took it back into the living room where her mother-in-law was saying: I’m frightened, Buddy. This big old house, the car, the funeral, I don’t know how I’ll manage a thing. Your father always took care of everything. I’m already frightened of you leaving and me being all alone in this house and not knowing where to put myself. I’m frightened of going to bed and waking up in a silent house and knowing I’m all alone. He’s dead, Buddy. How will I live?

  Her husband looked exhausted. She guessed it was the effort of not crying.

  I don’t know a thing about money, her mother-in-law said. I swear I don’t.

  But won’t you come stay with us?

  Her husband looked at her gratefully and she saw she had restored a derailed train. Talk of money was not appropriate but families closing ranks was appropriate. He had a child’s mind, schooled in right angles.

  You won’t stay on your own a minute, she added soothingly. Not if you don’t want to.

  Her mother-in-law was crying. You’re a lovely girl, she said. He was shouting something about you just before – oh, I’m sorry! But it’s weighing on me, I simply couldn’t understand it, he always, always loved you. Why would he say such things?

  About Anna? her husband said. You misheard.

  I don’t know, she wept. I just don’t know.

  Dawn came. They took her husband’s mother home with them and put her to bed in the little room that would one day be their baby’s room, down the hall from their own.

  Anna, he called.

  She found him by the bedroom window, staring into the branches of the neighbour’s maple.

  I want you to lie down too, she said.

  He didn’t resist, saying only: Call Peretti. His card’s in my wallet. He can let them know at the paper.

  She pulled the blankets back over him and touched his hair.

  You haven’t cried yet, he said.

  I can’t seem to.

  She sat and held his hand for a while, then kissed his cheek. Downstairs she sat at the kitchen table and began writing names on the pad she kept for grocery lists. It was five to eight.

  Hello? she said. Hello. This is Mrs. Pass. I have some sad news.

  She picked up the receiver and began to dial.

  After the funeral there was a tea. Funeral meats, she remembered: that was an expression. But her mother-in-law had wanted it catered. She watched the mourners greet her husband with a special tenderness, knowing as well as he did what he had beating in his chest, while a hired servant circulated with trays of tidbits. She herself was stationed on the sofa behind a silver tea service laid out on the coffee table. It was her mother-in-law’s service, brought over specially, her own being china – too frail and pretty.

  He was a wonderful man, they told her, and she responded feelingly, I’ll never forget him.

  Her parents came, and embraced her formally. Her mother exchanged pecks with her mother-in-law and even gave her husband a hug, their first. Her father shook hands all around, straightened his cuffs, and then they left.

  Peretti came. He kissed her mother-in-law on both cheeks and shook her husband’s hand and then he came for his tea. He sat beside her in his overcoat on the low sofa, stirring his tea with a tiny silver spoon, and told her in a low voice that the paper would be willing to give her husband some more assignments and maybe she could let him know at a time when she thought it might help, some time before his two weeks’ leave was up. They had been very impressed, Peretti said, with the Bonner assignment.

  But that was a misunderstanding.

  Peretti shrugged and said, predictably: No one noticed. It’s not as though he was passing off work that wasn’t his. Don’t you want him to have this break?

  Anna? her husband kept saying. He seemed dazed, but of course everyo
ne understood.

  After the last of the mourners had left and his mother had gone up for a lie-down he wanted to make love again and that, too, was predictable, life in the jaws of death, what have you.

  Her father-in-law had been a salesman in sporting goods and had died at a bad time. Young men bought sporting goods, but most of the young men were at war. As commissions dropped he had suckled down his savings and his pension too. The upshot was that Buddy’s mother would be staying with them indefinitely while her husband and the lawyers decided whether to put the house on the market. It all came out in the reading of the will.

  I will never leave you like that, he said that night, over and over in the dark.

  Bernard Pass?

  She and Buddy followed the secretary into an office.

  Now, the agent said when they were comfortably seated, life insurance is always an excellent investment, but particularly for a young couple such as yourselves.

  She had finished at the meat counter and was back in the aisles of canned goods when he caught up with her, in his butcher boy’s striped cap and apron, and said, I thought you’d started going someplace else.

  She told him about the funeral. We had all this food left over, she explained. Little pastries. It lasted days.

  Meet me.

  Don’t be silly.

  Meet me.

  I can’t.

  He began to speak in a low, fast voice, trailing her down the aisle. An old woman turned to look.

  When she got home, her mother-in-law was sitting at the kitchen table reading Candide. She had not realized her mother-in-law read French.

  Oh, yes, dear, she said, watching purchases emerge from the string bag. My parents had a bonne before the crash. I adored her. You’ve spent a lot today.

  There are three of us now.

  Oh, I eat like a bird. What’s that?

  Cake.

  In a tin, her mother-in-law said. Is it English? My goodness. Imported cake in a tin.

  It was a moist chocolate cake in a tin the size of a soup tin with so few nuts inside they were like mistakes. It had been her treat when she was a child.

  It’s not dear, she said. Just a little. She stopped, unable to say, just a little treat.

  Buddy never liked sweets, her mother-in-law said. Nor did his father. She bit her lip.