by Mark Sampson
“I wanted to let you know,” I began, “that I’ve decided to make a public statement, next week, about this situation.” Her emerald eyes flickered my way, a brief blast of curiosity. I went on: “My friend Raj — you know, the videography guy? — is going to film me on Wednesday, and we’re going to put it up on YouTube.”
I anticipated a flurry of questions. Like: What kind of statement, Philip? Are you going to apologize outright for what you said about those ODS executives? Or maybe: How are you going to share this video around, Mr. Forty-Six Friends? I suppose you’ll want me to put it on my Facebook page. Or even: Raj? Really? God, I hate that guy. (Which was true. Grace always considered him a bit of a sleaze. He’s essentially a deadbeat dad, right? she’d ask with revulsion whenever I brought him up. I mean, does he even see his kids? Does he ever talk to them?) Instead, she just said to me:
“You’ll do what you need to do, Philip. I have no doubt about that.” And she went back to absently drinking her wine.
“Grace —”
But then the pipes in the walls filled with the sound of flowing water, and she burst from her chair. Worried — rightly so — that her girls might still harm themselves via that goddamn tub.
I stayed behind to do the dishes — there were more than a day’s worth — and by the time I finished, Grace was calling from the stairs. “Are you coming up for storytime?” Almost an accusation. I obeyed, and the two of us read, rote-like, three short books to Naomi. After we got her settled, we returned to the living room. Simone was already there, inhaling Life of Pi. She was making excellent progress: I could see that she was more than a third of the way through. Grace took up her own book — something by Margaret Drabble — and I took up mine, a history of working-class education in Britain. The three of us read in silence, with Simone and Grace stopping occasionally to check in with their phones. At one point, Simone’s face flew up from her book and she turned to me. “Wait — he kills the orangutan?” She gave me a look of abject horror, of little-girl grief. “Philip, why didn’t you warn me?” With that, she got up and went to bed. Grace and I continued on in the quietude of her absence, perpetuating our testy charade, both of us sharpening a thousand unspoken barbs in our minds. I soon got absorbed in an erudite passage of my book, and by the time I looked up Grace had slinked off to bed. She hadn’t even said good night.
I read for a while longer, alone, and then slipped upstairs to my office. Waiting in my email were six more notifications from Facebook. I deleted them, then looked at the list of real emails. There, sitting atop department memos and Tom’s summons and all the rest, was yet another note from Rani.
I stared at it. My heart trembled like a tuning fork. I opened it.
Sharpe,
Are you going to respond to me? Or are you just going to leave me here, watching and re-watching this clip of you? I suppose you’re thinking turnaround is fair play, eh? Wink wink.
Love and rockets,
Rani
Oh cheeky fucking cheeky fucking cheek. I knew exactly what she was referring to. She was alluding to something that I had done years ago. It was the early aughts, and the BBC had assigned Rani a couple of her own radio pieces in the wake of 9/11. Online audio was just becoming mainstream then, and I stumbled upon one of these stories archived on the Beeb’s website. I remember sitting in my office at University College, the door closed, the computer speakers cranked up, and listening to that clip, over and over again. Listening to Rani’s voice, that chiming East Indian/East London mash-up — and missing her terribly. This had been during a particularly lonely period in my life, and the sound of her voice coming through my speakers from far-off England conjured all manner of memory from our time together at Oxford. I even found myself getting aroused — an unbendable, instinctive perking up — as I replayed that four-minute clip, over and over.
A couple years later, when Rani and I had the last of our hookups during one of my trips to the U.K., I confessed all this to her, and she mocked me appropriately. Wow, what an image, Sharpe, she’d said, you sitting there in your book-lined office, getting a big old boner listening to me on the radio.
Shaddap-shaddap-shaddap, I replied.
And now, was she pleading guilty to a similar stirring, in that email? Had she been sitting at some desk somewhere, replaying that abhorrent CBC clip of me, and thinking the same thoughts?
I hit REPLY.
Rani,
Sorry it’s taken me so long to respond. Things are catastrophic here, as you can imagine. This bilious outcry against me is unprecedented. Anyway, I’m glad to hear you’re enjoying the clip. Hope you’re not, erm, getting off on my misery.
Sincerely,
Philip
After I hit SEND, I went about moving aside the pages and notes from my new book on Christianity to make room for the video script I would start writing tomorrow. But just as I turned back to shut my computer down, a new email appeared in the inbox. Rani, forever the night owl, was up and had replied already.
I opened her message.
You really should give me a call. 07870 663 926.
And it amazed me, then, how quickly it could return — that springboard of longing, that sudden gas-fire flame. I felt it rise and stiffen within me. A thought, then, of the cordless phone downstairs, within easy reach, and the wife and kiddies already in bed. I wondered: Is this how it begins, for most men?
I swallowed. I blinked at the screen. Then I shut my computer down.
Scant minutes later, I arrived at the marital bed in a cloud of lust. I climbed in and moved upon my sleeping wife, whose back was to me. I was prepared to beg, to plead for whatever shred of forgiveness might still be possible. If I apologized enough, and abundantly enough, would she turn to me then? Turn and help me rid myself of this sour, awful yearning?
I touched her, and she pulled harshly away from me.
I thought about it for a while, all that I had done. All that I failed to do, to make things right. I was ready to skewer myself, if necessary.
I touched her again.
“Philip — fuck off!”
Her words hung there in the darkness. I rolled away, onto my back. We lay there in silence, with her fury pulsing between us in the bed. She was thinking her thoughts. And me? I was thinking about something — someone — else.
What did this remind me of? Hadn’t we been here once before?
Oh, right. Of course. How could I forget?
Victoria-by-the-Sea
Grace seemed more interested in the Confederation Bridge than she did in Prince Edward Island itself. Its figure had loomed in the long view of our GPS, which we occasionally flipped to as we made our two-day trek down from Toronto, the bridge’s shape like a thin, blunt pinky stretched out across a digital blue sea. Now, that massive, concrete wave appeared in front of us as we made our final approach at Cape Jourimain, no longer a pixelated abstraction but a spectacularly real and terrifying marvel of modern engineering. I could sense the excitement swell in my wife. She actually raised her bum off the driver’s seat of her little red Yaris (my wedding gift to her) as we entered the bridge’s maw, her knuckles squeezed white around the wheel, her green eyes wide and enthusiastic. “This is exciting,” she said as she tried to get a gander over the bridge’s tall cement sides, and I replied with a fretful, “Watch the road, Grace.” But then I, too, indulged, standing tall in my seat belt, looking out the passenger’s side at the wide, glittering expanse of the Northumberland Strait. We climbed above it, as if on a plane, sailing up and up, and then descended toward that long, red-soiled monolith, the island of my birth. It was anticlimactic, almost anti-orgasmic, coming down off the bridge and passing the plastic, touristy structures of Gateway Village. Grace, now flush, gave a soft, unsatiated sigh, then grew businesslike once more behind the wheel. There were still forty-five minutes between us and Charlottetown.
This trip happened in the summer o
f 2010, a year after our wedding, and was a kind of belated honeymoon. As such, Grace’s parents offered to take little Simone off our hands while we were gone, promising to run her to swim lessons and library visits and her weekend with Richguy. At first Grace was obdurately opposed: how could a mother spend ten days — ten days — apart from her eight-year-old daughter? But indulgence and possibility won out, and by the time we wrapped up a long, mithering goodbye to Simone and hit the road, it was as if Grace had unstrapped an invisible girdle and was now liberated to embrace some grown-up adventure. “Can’t wait to see that bridge,” she said as we raced eastward on the 401.
Still, I feared tiny Charlottetown might prove a disappointment to Grace. Being a native Torontonian, she couldn’t help but sense what other urban areas lacked. She put up a front of intrigue, I’ll give her that, during the two days we stayed in the city. (Even that term warranted a comment. “Wow,” she said, “it’s called the city of Charlottetown.) We visited the farmers’ market, sauntered the stone-piled boardwalk at Victoria Park, gorged on mussels and local beer at a patio restaurant on Victoria Row.
There were only two places I felt I needed to take Grace. One was out to the large cemetery across from the airport, where my father was buried. We stood together in front of Little Frankie’s gravestone and she held my hand as I had my little moment with him. “I did it, Pop,” I told his gravestone, my Island accent gurgling back up. “I got married. ’Magine that!” And Grace put her head on my shoulder and said, “I wish I could have met him.” The second place was the dog park downtown that had been the site of my father’s pub before it was demolished. As we stood on the grass, sun beaming, I told Grace about the Jugglers Arms and pointed at the place in the sky where Frankie’s signage had been. I said how the egregiously absent apostrophe in the pub’s name had driven me to distraction as a teenager, and she laughed and said, “You know, that’s not such a big deal,” and I replied with, “You are not my wife.” We wandered the neighbourhood after that, the streets of my childhood. It had been a number of years since I’d been back to Charlottetown, and I was jarred by the changes. On this stroll, I spotted a gastropub, an indie art gallery, a telephone pole advertising a Beckett play, no doubt staged as counterbalance to the tourism season’s corny musicals. I thought, Wow, this place is almost liveable now.
Still, two days were enough and we soon moved on to where we’d spend the bulk of our visit: the village of Victoria-by-the-Sea, on PEI’s south shore. This was what we really wanted: a cottage overlooking the water, an uncrowded red-mud beach, a quaint community to wander during the day, and the tide’s slow, sloshy pulse lulling us at night. From our Adirondack chairs on the cottage’s front lawn, we could see the bridge in the distance, a long, thin lifeline to the mainland out on the water’s hazy horizon. Grace was kicked back in full relaxation and plowing through a stack of books written by women novelists. Meanwhile, in my own chair, I sat hunched over the page proofs of my Stephen Harper biography, due out that November, maniacally hunting for typos that may have escaped the proofreader. Grace would look at me from beneath her sun hat and shades and say, “When are you going to start unwinding?” and I’d reply, “I am unwound,” before pounding the page with my fisted pen and cursing.
On our first full day in Victoria, we visited all of the village’s little landmarks: the long wharf at the small marina, the quaint bookshop, the store that sold chocolates handmade on site, and a shed-like structure that peddled a hodgepodge of artisanal knick-knacks. It was in that shed, among the dangling wind chimes and sheet-metal sculptures, where I found the driftwood plank that now hangs on my office door at University College. The shed was not crowded: besides us, there was an unsupervised preteen inspecting a box of handmade bracelets, and a man about my age browsing tie-dye vases with a woman in her early twenties who was clearly his girlfriend. I manoeuvred gingerly through the narrow aisles to show Grace the plank.
“Isn’t this grand?” I said. “Feel how smooth it is.”
“You should buy it,” she replied.
And that’s what I did. The clerk at the desk asked if I would like it embossed. “I can write pretty much anything on it,” she informed me.
I thought it over. “Yes, a Latin phrase, please,” I said. “Sapere aude.”
“Okay, you’re gonna have to spell that for me.”
At the sound of this axiom, the man at the tie-dye vases perked up. “Sapere aude,” he called over. “‘Dare to be wise.’” I turned, grinned, and we gave each other a knowing nod. After spelling the phrase for the clerk, who wrote it methodically onto a sticky note, I wandered over to the man.
“You know Latin,” I said.
“I do,” he replied. He gave a modest shrug. “What can I say? It comes with my job.”
“Oh, really? Which is?”
“I’m a classics prof at UT Austin, in Texas. And you?”
“Philosophy prof at the University of Toronto. Philip.”
“I’m Jacob,” he said, and extended his hand to me. Yes, he was about my age, and roughly my height, though much thinner. He had a short, wiry beard and thick, sandy hair, a pronounced Semitic nose, brown eyes under browner eyebrows. “This is Hilary,” he said. She came over with a sashay of confidence. Tall girl, taller than us, with long honey-blond hair and bright blue eyes. She wore a turquoise tank top that revealed angular collarbones.
“Yes, I’m his girlfriend,” she said, pre-empting a question I wasn’t about to ask. “And yes, I was his student. We’re a horrible cliché.”
“This is my wife, Grace,” I said, outstretching my arm, and she came over.
“I was not one of his students,” she grinned, and the four of us laughed. We chatted friendly-like for a couple of minutes, and then were interrupted when the clerk yelled, “Excuse me, please don’t touch those,” to the preteen, who was now molesting a display of blown glass ornaments, and the kid scampered out the door in her cut-offs. “Sir, your plank is ready.”
I collected my purchase and then Jacob and Hilary invited us to join them for tea at a tea room a couple blocks up the street, near the Orient Hotel where they were staying. We agreed, and the four of us spent a sunny hour together on the deck out front. To my surprise, Jacob knew PEI well: he’d been coming here every other summer for years to escape the Texas heat. “Couldn’t wait to bring Hilary up after we started dating two years ago,” he said, and she added, “I was skeptical at first, but I love PEI now.” Grace jumped in with “Philip grew up here!” and Jacob asked, “What was that like?” and I said something noncommittal about the Island being okay provided you weren’t here during winter. This led Jacob and me to talk about our educational trajectories, which then brought us back to the Latin phrase now scorched onto my plank. He, of course, knew of its Horacian origins (“Dimidium facti, qui coepit, habet; sapere aude, incipe”), and I chimed in about how pivotal the expression had been to Kant and the Enlightenment as a whole. The girls drifted away then, into a conversation about domesticity, and Grace took no time to praise the charms and existence of little Simone. Hilary said, “Oh, I would love to have a girl someday, even if,” and here nudged Jacob’s shoulder, “her dad would be an old fogey by then.” Grace smiled, glanced at me and said, “You know it’s not so terrible, having a fogey be a father to your child.” Meanwhile, I was telling Jacob about my Stephen Harper biography, and Hilary jumped in. “Oh my God, I read about that guy — he’s like your version of Bush!” She then dazzled us with an array of information she had retained from a profile of Harper she’d read in some magazine. It took me a few moments to clue in. “Oh, wait,” I said, “I wrote that article.” And she said, “Oh my God!” and the four of us cheered as if we’d scored a touchdown. Shortly thereafter, Jacob looked at his watch and said, “Shit, we have to be off. We’ve got reservations for deep-sea fishing up in Rustico.” We paid our bills and then shook hands, agreeing how delightful it was to meet. Too bad we didn’t hav
e more time together.
I was convinced we wouldn’t see them again. But then we did, two days later, on the beach not far from our cottage. We had spent an unhurried morning reading in our Adirondack chairs and were now soodling hand-in-hand across the coppery mudscape of low tide. I was shirtless and basted in sunscreen and Grace was in a floppy hat and sarong, her wrap opened at the front to reveal the gusset of her bathing suit. We had enjoyed these two days of solitude — the sex and the sleeping in, the long, slow meals cooked in our cabin’s kitchenette, the wine, and the endless, endless reading — but had reached that point in a vacation where Grace wanted some outside contact. Sure enough, about fifty yards ahead of us, we could see what were clearly Jacob and Hilary descending a wooden, wind-scorched stairway from the shore to the beach. Weirdly, Hilary was lugging what appeared to be a large silver briefcase, its corporate presence so incongruous against the lazy, fishboat-dotted vista spread out before us. The second Grace spotted the couple she let out a “Woo-oo!” and they looked up and waved. We walked toward each other and met in the middle.
“Oh, wow, we wondered if we were going to run into you again,” Jacob said.
“Us, too,” exclaimed Grace, though I had no recollection of discussing it.
I grew self-conscious, then, of my pale, doughy torso exposed to their eyes. Jacob, too, had gone topless, and I could see now what his shirt had hidden before: he was in good shape for a guy my age — his shoulders broad, his pecs pronounced, his belly flat. Meanwhile, Hilary’s lithe, twentysomething body looked perfectly at ease in its two-piece polka-dot bathing suit and flip-flops that revealed dainty toes painted green.
“Okay, I have to ask,” I said to her, trying not to gawk, “what’s in the briefcase?”