On tiptoes, Louise darts back to the master bedroom, where she musses her hair and rumples the bed sheets. Then she pretend-stumbles out into the hall, and in a groggy voice, calls out: “Elliott?” She intercepts them at the base of the carpeted stairs, but keeps to the third step, maintaining higher ground.
“Lou,” Elliott says in a falling whistle. He positions himself in front of Karen, as though he might be able to conceal her presence with his narrow body. “Hey! What are you doing home?”
“I felt sick,” she says flatly, leaning against the wrought-iron banister. “What are you doing here?”
“Oh … well … uh … okay … I brought Karen by.”
“I see that. Why?”
“Hi Louise!” Karen’s perfectly symmetrical face pops out from behind Elliott’s shoulder.
“Karen.”
Karen looks like a real estate agent. In her tailored skirt suit and low heels and tasteful jewellery and shiny highlighted hair. Curvier than Louise—though since she had that baby, her curves have turned dumpy. There’s a numbness to her dark eyes, always outlined in the same modest makeup. A reluctance to laugh or smile. She’s attractive, but her well-formed features seem pinched in a permanent reproach. Cunty was the word that came to mind when Louise first met her. And although her interactions with Karen have been short and infrequent, Louise has never found much cause to amend the initial assessment.
“Ooh, great necklace,” chirps Karen, stepping out from behind Elliott. She trespasses right up onto the bottom step (the nerve of this bitch!), a pink gel-manicured finger wagging at Louise’s throat. “The copper is beautiful against your skin tone.”
Frequent as they are, Louise doesn’t care much for compliments about her skin tone. She keeps her eyes on Karen, forcing herself not to look down at the small pendant on her sternum. “Thank you, Karen, for validating my tastes. Why are you here?”
“Oh, Elliott asked me—”
“Elliott? Why is she here?”
“Well …” starts Elliott, who has become extremely interested in a water stain on the ceiling. “Karen’s agreed to give us a valuation of the house. Isn’t that nice of her?”
“It would be nice …” Louise pushes herself off the banister, broadening her stance on the staircase, blocking access to the upstairs, “if we had actually decided to sell the house.”
Karen nods several times, sharp little movements with her pointy chin, designed to convey her immense understanding for Louise’s sentimental position. “Elliott mentioned that you were reluctant.”
“I hope he did.” Louise breezes down into the living room, opening a path for herself between the two interlopers. “Because I am. Extremely reluctant. More like adamantly opposed.”
“That’s not true, Louie,” says Elliott, rushing to catch up with her. “You’re thinking about it, remember?”
Louise stops in front of the coffee table and looks down at her bowl of apricots, the pillow on the floor—just a few minutes ago this exact spot was her vacation paradise. Now this. This is seriously fucking with her holiday.
“In my experience,” explains Karen, waltzing into the living room after them, “one half of a couple is always unsure about selling.”
“Oh yeah? Is that your experience?” Louise perches herself onto the armrest of the brown leather couch. Elliott sets a firm hand on her shoulder—to keep her docile. “And what other great insights do you have for us, Karen?”
But Karen is too busy inspecting the living room to be offended by Louise’s bitchy tone. She’s travelling around the perimeters, past the wall unit, trailing her fingertips along its shelves. Looking up, looking down, assessing, picking out flaws.
“It’s natural to be attached to your first home,” says Karen when she arrives in front of Louise, smiling down at her with the practised condescension of a realtor.
“Thank you, Karen. For validating my feelings this time.”
Elliott’s fingertips dig into her shoulder.
“You might be underestimating what you can get for this lot, Louise. This view alone!” Karen raises both arms, conductor-like, before the picture window. “We’ll need to move some stuff around, of course.” She spins around for another survey of the room, crosses her arms, and allows a judgmental pucker. “Not that we can do much in the way of staging—the house the way it is. But there are some improvements we could make. You’d have a lot more room for entertaining if you moved the couch away from the window. Opposite the fireplace makes a lot more sense. Instead of that clunky sideboard, which, frankly, you could do without.”
Louise bolts up to a stand. “Elliott, can I talk to you for a second?”
“Sure, sure, you two talk things over,” offers Karen graciously. She points to the staircase with both index fingers. “I’ll just take a quick peek upstairs.”
Once she’s click-clacked out of sight, left to roam the house unchaperoned, Louise stares at Elliott, her feet drilled into the hardwood, staking a claim.
“It doesn’t commit us to anything,” Elliott says, fussing with the stacks of photographs on the superfluous sideboard, then realigning a few volumes on the wall unit. Next he gathers up a couple of mugs from the coffee table, the half-full ashtray, and the bowl of apricots and whisks everything off to the kitchen.
“Why not just get an appraisal?” he calls to her. “See what we’re dealing with.”
“You didn’t even ask her to take off her shoes.”
“What are you talking about?” he says, daring a bold step out of the kitchen in his shod foot. “We always walk around in shoes.”
“Not in heels. This is our home, Elliott. She’s click-clacking around the place like she owns it. Carving scratches into our floors.” Louise has started in on broad gestures with her arms, but her feet stay planted on the hardwood floor by the coffee table: her vacation spot.
“She’s doing us a favour, Lou,” Elliott says as he hurries back toward her, his voice noticeably quieter than hers.
“I don’t want any favours from her. I don’t want her involved in our house or our business or our lives at all.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t like her.”
“Would you keep your voice down?” he hisses, pointing his chin toward the staircase.
“Why? Fine with me if she knows I don’t like her.” But Louise drops her voice in spite of herself.
“Why don’t you like her? What’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t have to explain why I don’t like people, Elliott.”
Elliott’s forehead contracts, tugging up the skin around his eyes and highlighting his few well-placed wrinkles. She likes when his face gets like this, thought and focus etched into it. It makes him look competent. He chews at the inside of his cheek. “Where’s your car?” he asks.
“What?”
“Your car. It’s not in the driveway.”
“Oh. Right.” The car. Hidden away at the mall for the day. “Uh … it was making this weird … chugging sound.”
“Chugging?”
Louise’s heartbeat spikes and her feet come unglued. They get going on a nervous shuffle. “Chug-chug, chug-chug,” she says, shrugging her shoulders to help illustrate the point. “I brought it in.”
“Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.” He looks down at the floor, at the bible peeking out from under the coffee table. He nudges it with his sneaker. “What’s this? You’re reading the bible?”
“Of course not. I was … using it as a coaster.” She snatches the book and jams it into the bookshelf, where it rests at an irregular angle, conspicuous.
“Okay, look, Louie,” he says, stepping right up to her, setting both hands on top of her shoulders and looking down into her scowling face. “Your bitch factor is through the roof right now. So I’m gonna go ahead and show Karen the rest of the house. We’re just gonna see what she says. There’s nothing wrong with getting an opinion.” His hands slip down to her upper arms, which he squeezes firmly. He plants a kiss on her chee
k. “Deal with it.”
And off he rushes to track down the bird. A few seconds later, Louise hears his low-voiced apologies: “Lou hasn’t been feeling well lately,” soon followed by the groans of the basement stairs, punctuated by Karen’s guffaw: “Wow! Wood panelling! Wild!”
Louise huffs down on the brown couch, mis-positioned by the window. Fucking Karen. What does she know? This is where the couch goes. This is where Louise used to sit when she had trouble sleeping as a child, her head on Mother Mai’s lap, Mai stroking her forehead. It’s where, after Mai died, Louise used to sit alone and stare out the window and hope that miraculously Mai might reappear in the forest behind the house.
“—but let’s not kid ourselves,” Karen says a short while later, having completed her tour of the house and swanned back into the living room, Elliott in tow, to deliver her verdict. “There are a lot of problems with the house. No ensuite in the master. No main floor powder. Kitchen is cramped. Everything needs updating.”
Elliott half-sits on the sideboard, one foot on the ground, the other swinging nervously, awaiting a figure.
“We’ll need to market it as a fixer-upper. Maybe a teardown. An opportunity to customize.” Karen’s eyes roll upward as she performs a few mental calculations. “I think we can get … I’d say … 1.5, 1.6.”
“How ’bout that,” says Elliott, his smile triumphant. His leg stops swinging.
Even Louise perks up on the couch. 1.5 is a big number, bigger than she expected. Almost twice what they paid for the house. She could quit working with that kind of money … but only for a few years. Not long enough. Besides, most of that money would likely disappear into whatever new property they bought. Unless they left the city altogether. Moved somewhere else, far away from this endless festival of manic commerce.
“Have you actually sold anything in this neighbourhood, Karen? Aren’t you more downtown?”
“I sold Yannick’s parents house, and—” But her attention is diverted. She’s become mesmerized by one of Elliott’s wedding prints, neatly stacked now on the sideboard beside his thigh. “Wow, did you take this, Elliott?”
“Yeah yeah. A wedding at the Art Gallery,” says Elliott, plainly delighted by the interest. He leans over onto an elbow and spreads out the topmost images in the stack. “Great venue, huh?”
“Oh fantastic. Gorgeous, Elliott. Really. You have such a good eye.” Karen casts one more disappointed glance at the furniture arrangement in the living room, a glance that ends on Louise, who must be responsible for this poor aesthetic design.
The particular print that has hypnotized Karen is a close-up of a bride, all the wrinkles and blemishes edited from her face, a bride made vacant by Elliott’s compulsive Photoshopping.
“We should have had you do our wedding,” Karen says.
“There’s always next time,” Elliott says with a flirtatious shrug that makes Louise want to retch.
Karen tilts her head and affects a look of disapproval. Ugh. No wonder Yannick is so fucking unhappy.
“Industry joke,” says Elliott.
“I bet.” But her mouth tweaks into a rare smile. “Seriously, do you have any other prints lying around? I’d love to take a look.”
“’Course, sure.” He hops off the sideboard almost instantly and waves her toward the study.
Alone in the living room, Louise looks over the glossy spread they’ve left behind, the array of wedding guests, adorned and airbrushed—they all look exactly the same. Louise and Elliott used to make fun of lavish weddings. They mocked the unreasonable expense of them, the waste of resources, the unchecked vanity. Their own wedding was a city hall affair, a quick, impulsive melding of their lives. Anything grander would have seemed offensive and obscene. This kind of work should be making him miserable. So where is his goddamn misery?
The sound of their little conference carries through the house: Elliott’s low voice describing the wheres and whens of his photographs; Karen’s chirpy praise moving up in octaves each time she finds a new image to fawn over.
“Stunning!”
“Sensational!
“Just … Wow!”
God. Louise would prefer if he were just fucking the bird instead.
9
“IT HURTS!” Joly clutches a hot water bottle to her abdomen on the twin bed in Louise’s childhood bedroom. “They didn’t say it would hurt like this. They said cramping, period cramping. This is … it feels like something clawing up my insides.”
“I know, I know. It’ll pass, though,” says Louise from a crouch beside the bed.
After the abortion, Joly didn’t want to go home, to a house full of family members, and she didn’t want to go to Ben’s, to a house full of indifferent roommates, so Louise brought her home to Don Mills and installed her beneath the glow-in-the-dark stars, where they used to have sleepovers as kids.
“Why aren’t the drugs kicking in?”
“They will.”
“When?!”
Louise gets up to close the vertical blinds, but the strong afternoon light still sneaks in through the cracks. “Drugs can be mysterious beasts,” she says. “Give it a little longer. You’re already looking better.”
Joly grinds her palms against her cheekbones, dragging down the skin around her eye sockets and exposing the bottom of her bloodshot eyeballs. Her stringy hair falls between her fingers; the skin on her face and neck is blotched red. She cried the entire car ride home.
“They kept talking about Dancing with the Stars,” Joly says, reaching for the mug of camomile tea cooling on the nightstand.
“What?” Louise resumes her place on the floor by the bed, now resting her chin on the mattress.
“The doctor and the nurse. They just kept arguing about a foxtrot.”
“During the—”
“Yes! During it!” A rigidity in Joly’s facial muscles suggests she’s still working hard to keep her tears in check.
“What—”
“The nurse thought the dance was fantastic. But the doctor didn’t like the footwork. That’s gonna be my memory of this now, Lou. Dancing with the Stars. The foxtrot.”
“Should I call and complain? I can rip into them if you want. Contact the medical board?”
Joly shakes her head, then drops it directly over the mug, letting it steam her face. “I can stay the night?”
“’Course.” Louise reaches a hand out to pat Joly’s foot, which has snuck out from beneath the sheets.
“Maybe drop me off on your way to work tomorrow?”
“I can drop you off whenever. I’m not working. I’m, uh, on vacation this week.”
“Oh, but …” Joly gestures at Louise’s grey blazer, her matching pants.
“Elliott doesn’t know. Secret vacation.”
“Lou!”
“Ah, fuck him,” she says and Joly manages a short laugh. “We still haven’t had sex. It’s been over a month.”
“I wish I hadn’t had sex in months,” Joly says into her mug. “Never again. I’m never having sex again.”
“You don’t have to.”
“It’s a crazy thing to do!”
“Well … it has some perks.”
“It’s Russian roulette.”
Without having taken a sip of her tea, Joly sets the mug back on the nightstand. Her eyes squint shut then blast open as she works through a fresh wave of distress. She doubles over her crossed legs, jamming the hot water bottle into her pelvis. “He must have done something wrong, Lou.”
“I don’t—”
Joly lurches forward and grasps Louise’s wrist, her eyes flooded with terror. “Maybe he didn’t get it all,” she whispers. “I’m sure he did.”
“What if he didn’t, though? What if part of her is still in there … clawing?”
“I don’t think—”
“What if he botched it? Oh god, it’s botched!”
She moves around the bed frantically, and Louise can’t tell if this squirming is induced by the pain or by the conjured
thoughts of catastrophe. She stands up, her hands on her hips, and tries to puzzle out a way to be helpful.
“Should I call Ben? Want me to call him?” Ben was barred from coming with them to the clinic. No men were in the waiting room this afternoon. No men present when Louise was a patient either, certainly not the father of her own might-have-been child, one of her earliest lovers. Louise never told him. He, like many others, marched onwards through life blissfully oblivious to what he wrought.
“What’s Ben gonna do?” Joly has shuffled her way to the back corner of the bed, digging her shoulders into the wall. “Pad around the place, looking ashamed? That big bear is useless sometimes.”
But Louise is keenly aware of her own uselessness in this moment—as in most moments of any consequence. She’s never had much comfort to offer anyone. So she does the only thing she can think of: crawls into the bed and clasps Joly’s hand.
They lie side-by-side, looking up at the plastic stars, like they used to do when they were kids. Eventually Joly drifts off, but Louise stays awake, fixated on the ceiling, marvelling at the total lack of progress over the years. Decades have passed, but she’s still here, lying in this bed, beneath these stars: she’s a fossil.
“HOW’S SHE DOING?” Elliott asks over dinner. Whole wheat spaghetti tonight, done up with kale and white beans. A perfectly balanced meal, because Louise cooked—again.
“Bad,” says Louise, slouched over her mostly-empty plate, cheek propped up in a palm as she eats.
“I guess that’s normal.”
“Yeah—especially if you wanted to keep it.”
Louise’s post-abortion misery wasn’t quite this bleak. But she never entertained the idea of having a baby. How could she have? It would be unthinkable to pass on these defective genes, which even now are ratcheting up for premature destruction.
“She’ll be all right,” says Elliott, a pat response that, though probably true, irritates Louise. She pushes away her empty plate and lets him clear the table and wash the pots, making sure he leaves out a dish for Joly, in case she gets hungry later.
The Towers of Babylon Page 10