Late Breaking

by K. D. Miller

  Once she moved into the co-op, Miranda began to change. The changes had a driven feeling to them, as if they were not quite voluntary. Sometimes, catching sight of her reflection in a store window, she would think, Who is that?

  She grew her hair out, just enough to let it frame her face, and asked her hairdresser to cover the grey with a paler shade of the original auburn. She gave away her dull suits and began to costume herself in pinks and reds, yellows and greens.

  She brought none of the dark old furniture with her from her parents’ house. Everything, she was suddenly convinced, had to be brand new and entirely different. Light woods. Pale fabrics. Chrome and glass. When the last piece was delivered and put in place, her apartment looked like the apartment of a stranger.

  She dusts and sweeps and polishes every day, feeling compelled to keep the place forever guest-ready. Not that she has any guests. But she catches herself starting conversations with neighbours in the elevator and laundry room. She has signed up to answer the co-op office phone two mornings a week, to water the plants on the terrace and to keep the donated books in order on the shelves in the lounge. She has even ventured out into her new neighbourhood, inquiring at the local library about book clubs. When a librarian gave her the name and number of a woman who ran such a club and lived nearby, she went home and picked up the phone.

  It’s all so strange. Is she turning into a different person? Most disconcerting is her new habit of walking past the police station. It would be so easy to go another route when she’s out running errands. Why does she practically have to pull herself away from the station door? What is she daring herself to do?

  *

  Fiona had always hated her name. Fiona McFee. Fifi, as she was called all through school. When she was in her third year of university, she met Leo Van de Veld and mentally claimed his name as hers.

  Fiona Van de Veld.

  Leo was a recent graduate who had stood out on campus because of his height and his reputation as an aspiring writer. In his final year his short story, “The Verging Virgin,” had come first in Scribbler’s literary contest. Fiona remembered reading about it in the campus newspaper, which interviewed him. The Scribbler people are urging me to develop the story into a novel, he was quoted as saying.

  Hello, I’m Fiona Van de Veld. Why, yes. My husband is the novelist Leo Van de Veld.

  They met at a party in one of the residences. Leo had been asked back to campus to present that year’s Scribbler prize. In the weeks that followed, as they became lovers, Fiona imagined a new life to go with the new name.

  I’m so glad you enjoyed his latest book. I’ll be sure to pass your compliment on to him.

  She never confided any of this to her housemates. She knew it made her look ridiculously old-fashioned. But she didn’t care. She was living in a communal house full of girls and cats. The first night Leo stayed over, they sneaked naked together out to the kitchen for a midnight snack. In the white light of the opened fridge, as Leo drank Fiona’s share and more of the milk, the cats came and twined around their legs. One of them propped her front paws on Leo’s thigh and sniffed delicately at his penis.

  “What if somebody gets out of bed and finds us?” Fiona whispered, shivering. The shrug of Leo’s bare, beautiful shoulder thrilled her. This was it. The extraordinary thing she had always known was going to happen—had to happen—to Fiona McFee. Her B-plus average, her okay looks, her being neither a loner nor especially popular—it all added up to an ordinariness that felt like a mistake. The wrong skin. So that night, once they went back to bed and Leo Van de Veld gasped out a marriage proposal seconds before ejaculating, she worked in a quick “Yes!”

  Once officially Fiona Van de Veld, she had a mission. She would be Leo’s muse, his amanuensis, his facilitator and chatelaine. She would inflate a delicate bubble of peace and solitude for him to inhabit, and would fiercely guard its fragile walls. On a more practical level, she would work full-time at a job she hated but which paid enough for the two-bedroom apartment they needed if Leo was to have a room of his own.

  Every morning for the first three years of her marriage, Fiona would stand for a moment in the doorway of the master bedroom Leo had claimed as his study. It only made sense to cram their marital bed into the smaller room, and their clothes into its inadequate closet. A big man needed a big desk. Also a big window through which to gaze as he took his necessary breaks in his big reclining chair. So as not to disturb him as he hunched over his papers and dictionary and thesaurus, she would mouth, Goodbye, my love. Write well. Then she would turn and tiptoe away to put on her shoes and her coat and go to work.

  During the second three years, Fiona would still pause in the doorway of Leo’s study every morning. But now she would remind him that they needed milk and bread, and that he mustn’t forget to pick up her blue jacket from the cleaner’s. She had started to have a few expectations. Well, why not? A little take, to balance all the give.

  These last three years, Fiona has insisted on some changes. Leo’s desk is now in the smaller bedroom. There isn’t enough space in there for his reclining chair, and anyway nothing much to gaze at through the smaller window. Their once joint bank account is now in her name only, and Leo given a weekly cash allowance. She has delegated almost all the housework and cooking to him. And she has started asking questions about what he does all day.

  The women in her book club have told her she’s doing the right thing and should be proud of sticking up for herself, getting some payback for all the support she’s given him. But the truth is, she hated kicking him out of the bigger room. Handing him his money for the week each Monday morning makes her feel like a ball-breaker. And though she’s the breadwinner, she feels guilty about doing nothing around the house.

  Not nearly as guilty as she feels about the letter, though. And not just the fact that she read it. There’s also the way she has turned it into that little stone of resentment she caresses and caresses. She wishes she could go back in time two weeks, to the moment she saw Scribbler’s return address on an envelope whose flap was not glued down.

  Picking up the mail when she comes home from work and delivering anything with just Leo’s name on it to his desk is one of the few amanuensis tasks she has hung onto. She so wants to be the bearer of the good news she still tries to believe will come—must come—some day soon.

  So the open flap was like an omen. Surely, after all her labours all these years, she had the right to be the first to learn the good news. Maybe some book publisher contacted Scribbler because they wanted to get in touch with Leo. They had been going through back issues of the magazine, had found his winning story and—

  Or maybe Scribbler wanted Leo back as an editor. Paid, this time. Part of his prize had been a chance to intern. So this might be—

  The letter was open in her hands. She read it. Once. Twice. Then again. There simply had to be more to it. More words on the page. Better words.

  It was a form letter, rejecting Leo’s latest submission … not without merit; however it does not meet our needs at this time. The one and only magazine that had ever published anything by her husband was now sending him form rejection letters.

  Her hands shook so badly she could hardly refold the single sheet of paper and get it back inside the envelope. Nine years. Nine years at the Cred. By now it should be adding up to something. She should be accompanying Leo on book tours. Listening to him being interviewed on radio. Reading his reviews. But all it’s likely to add up to now is another nine years at the Cred.

  How much of a damned fool has she been? Does she really want to know? Leo keeps his novel manuscript locked up, but she knows where he hides the key. She wishes she didn’t. She is so afraid that one night she will slide out of bed while he snores on. Tiptoe into the smaller bedroom. Sneak the manuscript out of its hiding place. Turn on the light. Start to read.

  *

  Leo has taken to wa
ndering the neighbourhood for hours each day, ducking into stores and businesses on some pretext, but actually just observing people doing jobs. Soon, he knows, he will be one of them—a person doing a job. If he can get used to the idea, habituate himself to it a bit each day, maybe some of the terror will abate.

  Aside from that editorial internship of his student days, Leo has never worked. His parents—a low-paid United Church minister and a housewife—managed somehow to send him to university without his having to pitch in with after-school and summer jobs. They regarded school as his job. And Leo, they devoutly believed, would prove to be exceptional. “We’re just waiting,” he overheard his father say to a parishioner who had congratulated him on his son’s Scribbler win, mention of which had been made in the parish newsletter. “And watching. And praying.”

  They were still waiting and watching and praying when Leo finished his degree and moved back home. Just until he had had a chance to rest from his academic labours, he assured them. And until he found himself.

  What he found was Fiona McFee. And what he saw in her eyes was all the hope and expectation that had just started to fade from the parental gaze being turned on him every morning at the breakfast table.

  Given the number of courses and workshops he’s taken over the years, he probably knows enough about writing, in theory, to teach it. But a potential student would only have to Google his name to discover that theory is all he possesses. That, and eighty-seven heavily annotated manuscript pages. Weighed in the balance. The judgement he has avoided pronouncing on himself all this time with his Daily Writing Practice and his pursuit of The Writing Life now whispers in the back of his mind, its diction Biblical. And found wanting.

  He is going to have to get a job. He is going to have to do the thing he most fears—be the big, overeducated oaf who has to be shown how to do every little thing.

  This afternoon he sidled into a shoe store and pretended to be looking at a rack of loafers and deck shoes while in fact cocking an ear to an argument two employees were having behind the cash counter. The older one—Leo supposed he was the boss—was berating the younger one for having allowed some woman to return a pair of shoes she claimed never to have worn. “There’s gravel embedded in the soles! Look!” The older man sprayed something from a bottle on the bottom of a shoe and rubbed it with a cloth. “And there’s—holy shit, is that gum?”

  “She said she only—”

  “She said she said she said. Jesus. Bring up the sku and make it an exchange.”

  “But there was no—”

  “I said, bring up the sku.”

  Bring up the sku, Leo thought, still pretending to examine a pair of navy dockers. I would have to learn to bring up the sku. Whatever that is. And I would be on my feet all day. But with my back the way it is, I can’t—

  “May I help you?” It was the boss. A short man with a greasy comb-over. Leo looked down at him in horror, imagining having to address him as sir.

  “Just looking, thanks.” Then he stumbled out the door onto the street.

  *

  We had shared a candy back and forth that day. Our fingers were sticky from it. Maude said that since I had had the candy last and had gotten to swallow it, she got to hide first. That was the rule for the day. It always was, one way or another. Maude always got to hide first. And second. And third. It was just as well, because I could not hide from Maude. I had tried, but I always gave myself away by moving or coughing. That was one reason I was forever It. The other reason was that I could not bring myself to find Maude. I usually knew where she was hiding. But I wanted her to win. So I would walk past her and pretend not to see her. It was worth it to hear her carol, Olly olly oxenfree! and to see her, all flushed and happy, ready to hide again.

  I clung to the rock, counting over and over to one hundred. The seekers had to pry my arms away from it, yelling, “We found one of them! We found one of them!” Wrapping me in a blanket. Passing me from one embrace to the next.

  But soon the embraces became questions. “Did you see anything? Did you hear anything? Was anyone there?”

  I could have answered. I could feel the answers on my tongue, just like the candy I had shared with Maude. I went over and over them, feeling their shape. But I just looked down and made my mouth a straight line.

  When she worked at the funeral home Miranda saw men cry all the time. They aren’t very good at it, she decided early on. They hold back and hold back, then explode in a wet, spluttering mess that is likely far more humiliating than it would have been to simply let the tears flow in the first place.

  Leo keeps gasping out apologies, his thick fingers digging into his red forehead. He is sitting in the middle of Miranda’s new couch, managing to make it look small. His elbow and knee have stopped bleeding, thanks to all the crumpled Kleenexes dotting the coffee table. Once he settles down, Miranda will help him apply the antiseptic and Band-aids she fetched from her medicine cabinet.

  She had been setting out to pick up her spring coat from the dry cleaner’s. It was mid-April and as usual she was getting her lighter clothes in order. Just in time, too, because a freak heatwave had the city digging out its shorts and T-shirts weeks early. She had just stepped onto the sidewalk outside the co-op when a large, vaguely familiar man coming toward her met her eyes.

  She froze. Was it—

  No. It was just—

  Right then the man tripped on a crack in the sidewalk and landed in a sprawl at her feet. She went and helped him up. “Leo? You’re Leo, aren’t you? I’m Miranda. From Fiona’s book club.”

  The last meeting had been held at the Van de Velds’ apartment. Leo had greeted the group and chatted briefly before retreating to his study. To work on my novel. She remembers him making a point of telling them that. She also remembers Fiona not exactly rolling her eyes, but looking as if she had just stopped herself from doing so.

  Fiona intrigues her. She’s a bit scuffed and worn-looking compared to the rest. And she has a secret. Yes. Miranda knows the signs.

  Now Leo plucks another Kleenex from the box on the coffee table, wipes his face with it, and blows his nose. His hands are huge. Miranda imagines them stroking the length of Fiona’s body, one pausing to cup a breast, the other sliding lower to prise open and enter.

  “Sorry,” he says one last time. “I’m so clumsy. And this always happens whenever I fall down. I’m told it’s just shock. Your blood-sugar level drops, apparently, when you fall. It affects some people more than others. That’s all. But still. It’s embarrassing. Crying like a kid.”

  “Here.” Miranda tilts the opened bottle of antiseptic into a wadded Kleenex, which she presses to the raw scrape on Leo’s elbow. He draws a sharp breath. She applies a band-aid. “You do your knee,” she says, pushing the Kleenex box and bottle toward him. “I’ll make us some tea.” She gathers up the bloody tissues and takes them into the kitchen.

  While she waits for the kettle to boil, she is very aware of Leo’s presence in her living room. Her first guest. And a man. The only other man who has ever been here is the super, once or twice, to fix things. Has she ever touched a man before this? She wanted to clean and bandage his knee, too. But the thought of being that close to the fleshy thigh below the hem of his shorts, the hairy calf—

  She knows that the next time she reaches down to her own wetness, she will be thinking of Leo. What if she took her clothes off here in the kitchen and emerged naked, carrying the tea tray?

  The things that go through a person’s mind. The kettle boils. Cookies. A cookie would get Leo’s blood-sugar level back up. And she has that unopened package she felt oddly compelled to buy the last time she shopped for groceries.

  “You’re being so kind to me,” he says when she puts the tray with the pot and mugs and a plate of chocolate-coated digestives in front of him.

  “Where were you going when—”

  “When I fel
l flat on my face in front of you? I wasn’t going anywhere. I was running away. From a shoe store.”

  Miranda says nothing. She pours tea into a mug and passes it to Leo. She’s a good listener. It may be the best thing she does. And she has guessed that Leo is one of those men who like to tell a woman all about themselves. She met a few of them at the Melville Staines Funeral Home. After depleting her Kleenex box and telling her the story of their lives, sometimes they would ask her to have dinner with them. This with their wives encoffined in the next room. Always, she would smile and change the subject.

  Leo has been talking all this time. About his parents. His marriage. Now he is summing up. “I’m a failed writer with a useless degree. I’ve wasted nine years on a book that nobody’s going to read. I’ve just been rejected by the one magazine that’s ever accepted me. And if I don’t get a job selling shoes or some damned thing, my wife’s going to throw me out on the street.”

  Miranda does not say, What would be so bad about selling shoes? Another lesson she has learned is that everyone wants to be extraordinary. Be careful what you wish for, she would like to tell them. I became the found girl at the age of eight. And that was quite extraordinary enough. How would you like to see your parents’ faces twist into imagined grief every time they meet your eyes? To hear your Sunday School teacher tell the class to bow their heads while she thanks God aloud for your safe return? To suspect the motive behind each new apparent friendship, waiting for morbid curiosity to assert itself? (“You must have seen something. Something must have happened to you.”) To know that it was already all over—that you had ascended the peak of experience, had seen all you would ever see, knew all you were going to know, and now the rest of your life would be one long descent?

  Leo slurps tea and takes a cookie from the plate. “Anyway, that’s the story of Leo. So what’s the story of Miranda?” He asks the question so casually. Probably expects her to look at her lap and say, “Oh, I don’t really have a story. There’s nothing special about me.”