“Hey Yannick,” she says in the hallway.
“Lou. That was so fucking hot yesterday.”
“I’m at work.”
“You can’t talk for a minute?”
“No. What is it?”
“I’ve been thinking about it all morning. Yesterday, fucking awesome, wasn’t it?”
“Hm.”
“I wanna fuck you again.”
“Hm.”
“You want that, Lou?”
She scans her soul for the guilt she ought to be feeling over this affair. But as usual, she can’t locate it. Maybe it’s eclipsed by her guilt over a hundred other more severe transgressions—this career, for one. Still, each time with Yannick is supposed to be her last. But already she’s craving that singular pleasure he brings about, which spreads through her limbs, uniformly, no blockages in its path, a pervasive hum of pleasure that feels almost like health. “I do.”
“I got time next Friday.”
Her thirty-third birthday. At least she can count on him not to remember the occasion. He’s far too busy, with work and family and with what she suspects is a developing depression.
“Friday,” she agrees.
Through the window of Meeting Room 2, she can see that negotiations are underway. Next to the easel, Rob and Frank are deep into a dick-swinging contest, both brandishing puzzle pieces, chests puffed way out.
“Can’t wait, Lou,” says Yannick.
Louise detours to the washroom, splashes cold water on her face, sits in a stall for a while and reads a news article on her phone—just one quick item before it’s back to the perky pits of hell. An update to a story she’s been following about suicides at a Foxconn electronics factory in China. Suicide nets had to be erected around the whole building because workers kept throwing themselves off the roof. Now when these workers try to kill themselves, they just rebound off the nets, straight back into the factory, back to work making cell phones, so that these devices can be shipped across the world without delay, directly into Louise’s hand so that she can sit in a toilet stall in a billboard marketing office and read all about it. Globalism at work.
When she returns to the buzz of Meeting Room 2, the three puzzles have been assembled and the earlier expressions of consternation have been supplanted with triumph.
“So,” says Barbara, flashing a very encouraging smile, “what did this exercise require of you? What qualities did you have to draw on? Let’s discuss!” She’s holding a blue Sharpie at the ready in front of a crisp sheet of chart paper.
“Oh I think communication was key,” says Rob.
Barbara bounces on her toes. “Yes! Communication. Exactly. And we all know how important good communication is in a functioning team, don’t we? So let’s put that up here.” She writes out the word Communication on the chart paper in neat block letters, underlining the C, while Stephanie furiously scribbles down notes.
This debrief of critical success factors continues for an eternity until—under Barbara’s heavy-handed guidance—a list is compiled and committed to the chart paper in big blue letters.
Communication
Anticipation
Reciprocation
Engagement
“So let’s look at what we’ve come up with here,” she says, tapping her chin with the back of the Sharpie as she looks over her list. “You communicated with your teammates—that’s C. Communication.” She points at the word with one of her short fingers. “You anticipated their needs—that’s A. You reciprocated their energy and commitment. R. And you engaged with them, and with the exercise. E. Engagement. In a word …” she swivels on her heels to face them, “… you CARE-d.” Ta-da.
It’s at this point that Louise thinks seriously about throwing herself out the office window.
But! Salvation lies ahead. Because here’s one more secret she’s been keeping from Elliott: she’s on vacation next week. She booked it off months ago, planned it for the week of her birthday, a weak attempt at offsetting the doomsday anxiety. She’d have been happy to share news of a vacation with Elliott, except he’d have made her coordinate it with one of his destination weddings. And that’s just impossible.
She used to dream he’d ask her to come with him on his trips—but that was when he was travelling because there was news to report. Issues of global concern that he thought should be broadcast to wide audiences. Not that she’d have been any help to him. The destitute factory workers of Bangladesh probably don’t have much use for her stellar billboard marketing skills. But maybe they had no use for Elliott and his photographs either. It’s not like he actually accomplished anything with that work—his subjects remain where they’ve always been, their situation unchanged.
These destination weddings, though … a whole other shit-show. Louise can’t bear to watch Elliott snap shots of bubbly brides prancing across the Instagram-worthy beaches of a developing country, with perfectly pedicured toes, oblivious or indifferent to the impoverished children begging for pennies on the roadside or coerced into working on inland plantations. She’d spend her entire vacation in feverish distress, wondering why her once-crusading husband no longer cares about these perverse realities.
No, there was no telling Elliott. And now on Monday, when the week begins, she’ll simply have to pretend to go to work in the morning, then sneak home an hour later, once he’s gone off to the framing shop, so that she can spend the day in peaceful solitude, sitting on the back deck or in the kitchen or lying on the living room floor.
“I know some of you may think this is a bit cheesy,” Barbara is saying as she adjusts a fallen bra strap, “and I can see that. It is a little cheesy. But it’s also a handy-dandy mnemonic. So let’s try to apply the CARE strategy to some common problems you run into here. What are things that come to mind?”
Rob leans toward Louise, his breath on her neck as he whispers, “Bet you’re wishing you took that vacation a week sooner, eh?”
But before she can reply, he tosses up a hand, keen to get in on the group discussion. “One problem we’ve all been banging our heads against is how to market the new audio billboards. We’ve got a cutting edge service, but we need a killer strategy for the expansion. I’d say that’s our toppriority problem.”
A small chorus of affirmation breaks out across the room.
“Okay great! Great! Let’s see if we can CARE about that!”
7
MONDAY MORNING LOUISE wakes up with the rare spring and hop of a good mood. She cruises through her morning routine: quick shower, splash of perfume, blazer and silk blouse, solid breakfast of grapefruit, yogurt, and homemade granola. She waits for Elliott to kiss her goodbye, then zips over to the outdoor mall and sits on the patio at Aroma, the coffee shop, revelling in the start of her vacation.
She’s got about half an hour to kill at this coffee shop before she can be sure that Elliott has left for work himself. Forty minutes, to be safe. No problem. She’s great at killing time—a skill honed during her years of office work. In forty minutes, she’ll walk home, leaving the car here for the rest of the workday, just in case Mr. Fang or Mrs. Eisenberg or any of the other neighbours notice it in the driveway and, being “friendly,” remark on it to Elliott.
As Louise nurses her black coffee, she watches early shoppers criss-cross the Astroturfed “Town Square” at the centre of the outdoor mall. The coffee shop patio edges this faux-public space, which is owned and operated by corporate interests. 8:45 in the morning and already the mall is piping party anthems in through the outdoor speakers to keep people moving and shopping. No loiterers allowed. No vagrants, no drifters. Only shoppers. The square was built a few years ago when they redid the whole mall—part of the recent Don Mills boom.
Louise looks away from the garish Astroturf and into the depths of her purse, searching for the old pocket bible she packed this morning. When she cracked it open the other night, she had no idea where to start. She flipped through its pages, waiting for divine inspiration to guide her hand, but w
ound up reading a passage of endless genealogy, which was of no use whatsoever. Now she starts at the beginning, as she would with any book.
The first few chapters of Genesis are familiar: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood, the story of Babel. But she doesn’t know what personal moral lessons to draw from these stories; each is more ambiguous than the last.
On first read, the Babel story seems to be a cautionary tale, a story of divine punishment. God, upset that people are building a city and a tower, punishes them by mixing up their languages. Only it seems less like a punishment, more like a pre-emptive attack, like he’s frightened of them. Is God frightened of us?
At a loss, she turns to the internet for guidance, but the search results that pop up on her phone add confusion onto confusion, which causes a creeping irritability that threatens her good mood. Even the word—Babel—is unclear. Its etymology is Akkadian, meaning Gate of God. But then … in a Hebrew translation, the word Babel is identical to the word Babylon. So if she were reading the bible in Hebrew, there’d be no distinction at all between the Babel of Genesis and the historic Babylon. And in an early Greek translation … things are turned on their head again. The word Babel doesn’t even exist in that version. Instead, it’s translated as Confusion. The Tower of Confusion. But how can one word mean both Gate of God and Confusion? What holiness is to be found in being confused?
She reads the Babel story once more, and when she finishes this third read, she looks at her watch. It’s been almost an hour and she’s only on page ten.
“JESUS! IT’S LIKE a hotbox in here,” says Elliott, popping his head into the bathroom, where Louise is mid-soak in the avocado green tub.
She ashes her joint in the tray on the tub’s ledge and watches him push through the thick steam to take a seat on the matching green toilet. Already gone is her buoyant vacation mood. It disappeared sometime during her afternoon nap on the living room floor, which left her with a crick in the neck and aching shoulders. Her eye is still twitching intermittently and there’s a ghost of discomfort under her ribcage. Which of these flickers will mark the first sign of total system collapse?
“And what is this smell?” Leaning over the tub, he sniffs at the water blanketed in soapy bubbles. “Lavender?”
“Mountain lavender,” she says, picking up the small bottle of purple bubble bath, never before used—part of a gift set endowed to her at the office Secret Santa last year. She spotted it in the vanity drawer earlier, next to the toilet paper, and thought: why not indulge? She is, after all, on vacation.
“Why are you taking a bath?” Elliott plucks the joint from her hand and helps himself to a pull. “It’s a hundred degrees outside.”
“I’m all achy,” she says, which is true. She stretches out in the tub, filling it out like a coffin. “My office chair is shit.”
Elliott returns the joint to its perch between her fingers, and they sit in silence for a minute, listening to the erratic drip of the leaky faucet.
Drip … drip … drip, drip, driiiiiiip.
“So … the house?” he says, watching the droplets trickle from the tap. “You thought any more about selling?”
“What? No.” She shifts heavily in the tub, causing the water to slosh.
“You said you’d think about it.”
“Hm.” But Louise fixes her attention on the bubble bath bottle, reading the label intently. The listed ingredients reveal it to be palm oil–based. No surprise. This stuff is in everything. A few weeks ago, she read an article about how the palm oil industry is riddled with human rights abuses, full of trafficked workers who are carted off to palm plantations deep in remote jungles, where they’re hidden from sight, exposed to chemicals that slowly poison them and deform their unborn children, forced into gruelling labour for which they’re barely paid—but which does produce just the right constituent materials to create a beautiful mountain lavender bubble bath product, the crown jewel in the Serenity Spa Gift Set.
“Louie …?”
“Come on, Elliott.” With one long final pull, she polishes off the joint and stubs out the butt. “I had a tough day. I’m worn out.”
“You’re working too hard.”
“Yeah. Definitely.”
Elliott frowns at his fingers and picks at the nails, then he searches the medicine cabinet for the clippers. Once he’s found them, hidden among god knows what shit in there, he returns to the toilet and clips his nails over the countertop.
Clip, clip. Drip, drip … … … … … . . drip. CLIP.
Louise hates the sound of the nail clippers, each clip digs into her nervous system, like fingernails on a chalkboard—she’s told him so a thousand times.
“Oh hey,” he says, working on his ring finger, “were you at Aroma this morning?”
Louise jerks her head to look at him. “Me?”
“Mm.”
“Uh …” Her stomach tightens under the blanket of lavender bubbles. The heavy steam and lingering pot vapours make it hard to think. “This morning?”
“Yeah.”
“Of course not. I was at work.”
“Oh. Marguerite thought she saw you on the patio.”
“Marguerite’s a batty old loon,” says Louise, sinking low in the water, taking cover beneath the opaque foam. “Last week she confused me with Alice again.” Louise has been mistaken for Alice, the half-Chinese woman who lives on the other side of the block, more times than she can count. But not recently, not by Marguerite.
“No,” says Elliott. Clip, clip. “She was sure it was you. She said you were scowling.”
“Lots of people scowl. And when did you talk to Marguerite?”
“I ran into her earlier. Watering her plants.”
Louise fiddles with the ashtray, twirling it gently at first, then spinning it faster and faster. “I don’t know why you want to move, Elliott, when you’re so cozy with the neighbours. Always running into them. Chatting with them all the time.”
“So it wasn’t you?”
She drapes her upper body over the edge of the tub and looks him in the eye, forcing confidence. “Definitely not. I was at work.”
“Mm.” He squints at her for a moment. “Strange.” Then he shrugs and tosses the nail clippers onto the countertop. “Well … I got some editing to catch up on. You should hit the hay early tonight, Louie. You really are working too hard.”
And off he goes to his study for the evening, while Louise is left alone in the tub, her pulse thick and hot in her neck.
8
THE BIBLE IS unreadable. Day two of her vacation and Louise has been trying to make inroads with the book, but it’s impossible. In the living room, lying on the floor, working her way through a bowl of apricots, she’s still stuck in the story of Babel, when a car screeches into her driveway, triggering cat-like reflexes.
Fast as lightning, Louise dives for the foyer closet, swipes a baseball bat, and bounds up to her bedroom to assess the situation from a more secure vantage point. Since that series of midday break-ins on the street, Louise has been on extra high alert whenever she’s home alone. Crouched at the window, hands gripped tight around the bat, she peeks through the blinds.
Christ! Worse than an intruder! Elliott’s green Jetta is parked in the driveway.
Panic sends Louise flying across the narrow hall to her childhood room, where she rips open the small window, whips off the screen, and hurls it into the backyard. Her body is draped through the frame when she hears Elliott enter the house. Then a second set of footsteps, accompanied by a voice—a woman’s voice. What’s this? Who’s this? Louise stalls her getaway and worms back inside, slithers across the burnt-orange carpet, and hides under the twin bed.
“I’m so glad you called, Elliott,” says a bird-like voice that Louise recognizes, but can’t quite place. Blood pulses through her ears, making it hard to think. “I haven’t been up here in ages.”
“Lou’s at work. So we’ve got time.”
“You shouldn’t lie to your
wife, Elliott,” the bird screeches and Louise tightens her grip on the bat.
“Can’t be helped sometimes,” he says.
Oh, oh-ho-ho. Unbelievable! No wonder Elliott has stopped fucking her. The dick!
“So … how do you want to do this?” he asks.
“Oh, however you want. I’m game for anything. I don’t think I’ve been up here since Yannick’s parents moved.”
Karen? Oh, what a goddam joke. What is this? A retributive dalliance? But how did they find out? No way Elliott did any sleuthing. Fucking Karen. She’s the suspicious type, never confident in her hold on anything. Of course she’s the sort of woman who would go through his phone, check his emails. Yannick is careful, sure, and constantly wary of his wife, but probably not very attentive. How could he be? He’s emotionally checked out. It’s this exact quality that makes him a good lover … but a lousy husband.
Keeping perfectly still, Louise listens to things unfold. Where will Elliott fuck her? How much foreplay? They’re in the kitchen now, but on the move. She can hear the click-clack of Karen’s heels. Into the living room. Maybe on the leather couch? Her parents’ beautiful brown leather couch?
“Come on upstairs,” says Elliott. In their bedroom? The fucking dick!
“Why don’t we get started up there and work our way down?”
Wait a minute …
“Sure, sure—I just need a minute to drink in this view!” says Karen. “Major wow-factor.”
… this isn’t foreplay. This is real estate! Motherfucker! Ditching the bat, Louise log-rolls out from under the bed.
“—haven’t renovated much, as you can see,” says Elliott, his voice growing louder as he leads Karen out of the living room. “Lou is … uh … sentimental.”
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