by Joan Thomas
“Sylvie,” he said, “listen,” and his voice echoed. They stood still and she heard the dry whir of bats. Then she sensed him take a step closer, felt his hand on her waist, felt the recognition and welcome in the kiss that landed first beside her mouth and then slid over.
“Hey, Sparky!” she said when she got her mouth back.
At supper Kajri tries to get Sylvie to go down to the caf. “You’re turning into an agoraphobe,” she says. But in the end she carries dinner up to their room. It’s the green and purple casserole Sylvie hates, but it’s the only vegetarian option and she manages to eat it. Afterwards they work in silence at their separate desks, their computer screens the only lights in the room.
Somebody’s smoking a cigar in the lounge – Sylvie can smell it. The fire door at the end of the hall slams and Adam Moffat walks by laughing his crazy laugh, and in the next room Amy Winehouse starts to sing. Kajri turns her face, lit with pale blue light from her screen, and they share a sad smile. Oh, Kajri. She is as kind and lovely as her name.
When they’re ready for bed they watch the news but there’s no mention of the climate summit. Mostly it’s hockey. “Hockey ice is the only ice the media cares about,” Sylvie says. She surfs for a minute, pausing on the nature channel at footage of two big turtles lumbering along a narrow path. One’s ahead, the female, moving as if she wants to be alone. The male is chasing her, going ten percent faster than normal turtle speed. When he catches up with her, he just keeps on walking. Sylvie and Kajri watch in fascination as he climbs her back and the two shells start to clack together. The male’s mouth is wide open in an idiotic smile and you can see the red triangle of his tongue. Then the female pulls forward and he topples to the side and lies with his feet in the air.
“Reminds me of Seth,” Sylvie says, turning the TV off.
“He’d lie with his feet in the air?”
“No, but the minute it was over, he’d reach down to the floor for his shorts and then he’d get out of bed – well, not bed, we’d be on the couch in his parents’ basement with a blue plastic swordfish over our heads – and he’d go get a beer from the bar fridge and change the track on his iPod. Once he picked up this hair-zapper thing he ordered off TV and started running it over his pecs. I guess what I mean is he always wanted to have sex no matter how we were feeling with each other.”
For a year and a half Sylvie has been unable to resist acting like a wise older sister, taking every chance to enlighten Kajri. Kajri’s parents, who are both doctors and live in a town a hundred miles away, have asked her not to date until she has entirely finished her education. And she’s going along with it – truly complying, not just lying to them. So far virginity is still working for her, as you can see by her flawless, glowing skin and her perfect GPA. “I can date through you,” she used to say to Sylvie, although obviously she’s stopped saying that now.
She makes a pitying noise and Sylvie wishes she’d kept her mouth shut about Seth. It’s embarrassing to have people feeling sorry for her, although if she can take it from anyone, she can take it from Kajri.
“Noah was more sensitive?”
“He was shyer. But I mean, he didn’t have any experience.”
“Yeah, you said. That’s weird, because he’s older than you, and so hot. Well, except for his hair.”
“What’s wrong with his hair?”
“It’s not exactly even. It’s like shingles.”
“That’s ’cause he cuts it himself.”
“Why? Is he that poor?”
“No, he just wants to be self-sufficient. I think it’s very cool. The thing about Noah is he totally lacks the flirtation gene. Girls talk to him and they assume he’s married or something. Or gay. I might not have had the nerve, except that we were best friends when we were little. And he was the one who kissed me first, last summer when we met up again.”
“It’s so romantic. It could never happen to me. I never had boys as friends, for one thing.”
“Well, his mother was home-schooling, and when all the kids his age started school, he was alone on the street, so he had to play with me. I loved him then. He was such a neat kid. He taught me all kinds of stuff.”
“Like what?”
Sylvie sees them lying on the floor at Mary Magdalene’s, drawing an intricate city with tunnels and tepees in it. She sees them in the sun-baked back lane, the anthills they messed with, the dandelions exploding through cracks in the pavement. She was tiny then. All she has is still shots: she and Noah squatting in the thistles by Wendy’s garage, or hiding in the dark, spidery shed, peering out through a narrow crack as the kid who was It wandered around the yard calling their names. Memories like little slits into a dazzling world where everything is big and distinct, shining with light. She wants to protect it from scrutiny.
“I don’t know,” she says to Kajri. “Just stuff.” She lies back and pulls the duvet over her. “You know what’s making me feel really shitty now? Can I tell you, Kajri?”
“Sure, of course.”
“It’s my own fault I got pregnant. I told all the parents that I fell into the perfect use category, but it’s not true. I never missed a pill, but I didn’t wait long enough when I started. I was going up to Presley Point for the weekend, so I went to Shoppers and filled the prescription and I took the first pill that Friday. Like, just a few hours before we made love. I was stupid. I was so fucking stupid.” She’d been willing to be stupid because it was so sweet being able to say to Noah, We’re fine, I’m on the pill.
“Did the doctor tell you how long you had to wait for the pill to kick in?”
“I don’t think so. There was a sheet in tiny print in the box, but I didn’t read it. All he said was that it might make me feel a bit sick at first. ‘Your body will think it is pregnant’ – that’s what he said.”
Kajri’s face is tilted sympathetically. You don’t even have to ask Kajri to keep things confidential – that’s the sort of friend she is. “Have you told Noah?”
“No, I didn’t really have a chance. His mother made him go to Calgary.”
“She made him? Isn’t he, like, twenty-two?”
“Well, his grandmother lives there, and who knows – she’s really old and they think it might be her last Christmas. He’s a nice guy, what can I say.”
Kajri looks unconvinced. “But will you tell him,” she persists, “when you get a chance?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you afraid he’ll be mad?”
“It’s more that … Well, Noah is more or less perfect as he is.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s so … I don’t know … he has, like, perfect focus and concentration. He lives by his values. He doesn’t screw up. He’s happy in himself. He’s going to do good work in the world. I don’t want this to change things for him. It was my fault, and I don’t want his life to be trashed because of it.” She hasn’t answered the question, but she can tell from the look on Kajri’s face that she’s already thinking of something else.
“You know, you sound like Mileva Marić.”
“Who’s she?”
“Einstein’s girlfriend. Well, his wife, eventually. She had a baby when they were both students, and they were so afraid it would interrupt his brilliant career that they gave it away. Or maybe it died. No one knows for sure.” She leans over, picks up an emery board from her bedside table, and starts to work on a perfect nail. “So,” she says, “is that what you’re going to do? Put the baby up for adoption?”
For the first time ever, Sylvie senses something less than respectful in Kajri, and it hurts her. “If I put the baby up for adoption, it will be because it’s best for me,” she says. “And my brilliant career. And for the baby, of course.”
Kajri gives a little smile and goes to the bathroom to brush her teeth. When she comes back out, she flicks off the light. Sylvie watches her move through the dark in her white T-shirt and shorts. “Adoption would be pretty scary,” she says as she crawls into b
ed. “Like, you’d never know what sort of people your kid would end up with. Whether she would be abused or something.”
“It’s not that,” Sylvie says. “I’m pretty sure she would be loved. People who want a baby that badly would probably love it. It’s just … It’s a girl. So how will they love her? I mean, there’s ordinary consumerism, but with girls there’s the whole princess thing.”
“I know what you mean. The pink canopy bed, the plastic tiara.”
“Right! They’ll take her to Disneyland. And they’ll put her in beauty pageants. She might end up a cheerleader.”
Kajri doesn’t respond.
“Did you ever play The Sims?” Sylvie asks after a minute of lying in the dark.
“My parents wouldn’t let me play computer games.”
“Well, I played it a lot in high school. I had an amazing house and two kids. We all played it, all my friends. But we were all kind of getting into the environment and then suddenly we started thinking about The Sims – what it really was, the way it taught you to be a consumer. So then we all quit playing.”
Kajri doesn’t reply. The dorm quiets and Sylvie rolls to her side and watches the tangle of clothes she left on the floor gradually emerge from the darkness, lit up by the line of yellow light seeping in under the door. We thought we could decide who we were going to be, she thinks. We thought we could resist all that. And now, the thing is, she’s not a parent. Since she found out she’s pregnant she’s been feeling younger than she did before, as if the child she used to be is overtaking her. Thoughts she can’t quite lay hold of flicker on the edge of her mind, images just outside her memory, like outtakes of the real story. The faun crouching in the dim light of the forest, her golden eyes glowing. He’s not my brother, the faun says. My mother found him in a Dumpster. He’s a filthy little beast. She lifts a thin arm and wipes her nose. He only has one ball, you know, she says. Sylvie leans closer to listen, sinking into a carpet of leaves.
What a relief to be back in the office. No silky toss cushions here. No Mexican cut-tin figures, no chili-pepper Christmas lights, no Afghan prayer rugs made by the slender fingers of unschooled, war-traumatized children, no ornamental vases or dried flowers or alligator suitcases stacked up in urbane imitation of a side table. There is a freedom in having only what you need.
By the time Aiden set up this practice, he had a pretty good idea of how he wanted to conduct his life. The address by the park so he has a green space to run in, the two-hour break in the middle of the day. His shower and his little fridge. Purcell and Haydn and Erik Satie hanging a spotless curtain between him and the dens of commerce all around. His brave and questing clients. And his casual clinical style, with its streak of mordant humour (mordant from the French word for “biting,” because people in a state of unawareness need a sharp nip now and then).
Tuesday, nine o’clock. It’s Norman Orlikow’s hour, but no sign of the Badger. Aiden moves over to the couch, swings his legs up, and reads an article on self-harm and suicide among teenagers in Tonga after the introduction of television. Then he digs his nail clippers out of a tin in the bathroom cupboard and trims his fingernails, catching the clippings in a Kleenex.
Ten o’clock, Odette’s hour. He waits until 10:15, then calls her answering machine again. “Hope you got my message last week. I got yours. I heard you loud and clear. I’d like to encourage you to come in next week so we can work this out. I’ll keep your hour open until I hear back.” Then he tries Edith Wong again, still hoping for a consult. This time she’s got an out-of-office message on. Away until January 22.
Eleven o’clock, Christine Tolefson arrives. She’s a true holiday confection, Christine, grotesque and (he would guess) very expensive, although her hair is like the hair on a cheap doll.
“I typically ask patients for a history in the second session,” Aiden says when she’s settled on the couch, legs crossed in a silver miniskirt just adequate to requirements. “So, just like you’d tell a medical doctor about the illnesses and conditions your parents and grandparents had, I’d like to know about the emotional dynamics in your family.”
She’s staring at him blankly, so he talks a little more about what this might entail. He can’t read a thing in her face. She looks different today, as if her features have been subtly rearranged. “A history,” she says finally, as though she’s prepared to deny having such a thing. Her parents were “okay” (i.e., they left her alone); she was married at eighteen. No children – her husband never wanted children. She doesn’t have a job and never really has. “My husband has money coming out his ass-end,” she says. “Well, my ex.”
“Why did the marriage end?”
“What do you think? Somebody hotter came along. Younger.”
“You met somebody younger?”
She doesn’t bother to respond, just stares out of those elaborate eyes. Over Christmas he told Liz how strangely plastic his new client’s face seemed (or how not plastic, in the true sense of the word) and Liz said she must be using Botox. Maybe he’ll publish a paper: “The Clinical Implications of Cosmetic Nerve Paralyzers in Assessing Emotional Affect.”
“Tell me about your relationship with your ex.”
“He’s my bank machine. He’s paying for this. He wants you to fix me up so I’ll leave him alone.”
“And what do you think needs fixing?”
She shrugs. She won’t speculate. After a while they get to Christmas, which she spent with a single girlfriend who introduced her to a computer role-playing game. She’s happy to talk about her new cyberspace incarnation. “My name is Zara Foxtrot,” she says, telling him at length how you pick a name and build your avatar. “You have to know a lot about computers. Like, even to fly properly. Because you don’t walk there, you fly. I still haven’t made it off Help Island. A lot of guys hang around Help Island cruising the newbies. There’s one guy online every time I go on. He acts like he’s really into me. Although, how do you know who he really is?”
“You’re hoping to meet a real man through this game?”
Duh! the eyes in her frozen face say. She’s got a line of dark red drawn a few millimetres outside her natural lips. You keep this up, he wants to warn her, you’re going to look like Tammy Faye Bakker in no time.
“You know,” he says, “the end of a marriage can be a great chance to be on your own for a while. Get to know yourself better.”
She dismisses this with a little moue of her stretched-out-heart-shaped mouth.
“Christine, we all want love. We all need it. But romantic love can’t carry all the demands of life. It can’t be the only source of your happiness.” He’s back in the groove. Sort of. That last bit is word-for-word from Virginia Satir.
It’s mucky out but he dresses for his run at noon. He’s standing at a bench doing his stretches when the Badger appears on the asphalt path. Walks along turning his head from side to side with an impassive expression, as if he’s a foreman doing a routine factory inspection. As he approaches the bench he acknowledges Aiden with an unconvincing display of surprise.
Aiden wishes him a happy new year. “I was just about to drop you a line,” he says. “The window hasn’t been fixed yet because of the holiday, but the super shoved an estimate under my door. It’s $245.”
“Two hundred and forty-five dollars? That’s bullshit.”
“There’s a privacy glaze on the glass, so it’s more than it would be otherwise. I won’t bill you for this morning because I didn’t really expect you, but I think it would be fair for you to pay for the window as a condition of coming back.”
“Who says I want to come back?” Norman says sulkily.
“Just a guess,” Aiden says. “Based on your following me to the park. But suit yourself. You know where I am.”
His run is slippery and fractious. His iPod is full of melancholy crap. There’s a stink in the air – somewhere a heap of rotting factory waste is thawing. By the zoo, Aiden’s sweating like a pig. How do you dress for a temperate zone win
ter? He runs by the riverbank shack. Without snow on its roof, it sticks out like a sore thumb. The cops are going to notice and tear it down. The stink he’s been smelling gets worse as he goes along. The minute he gets into the narrow stretch through the trees, he realizes it’s him. It’s his shoes. It’s the fish emulsion fertilizer he spilled in the garage when he was putting the Christmas tree stand away.
He’s relieved to get back to the bridge. To see the iceberg on the other side of the river, a spectacular piece of public art sticking out of the ground like a tooth from a gum. Not that crazy iceberg blue – it’s some sort of metal, like dental amalgam. One day Defrag pointed out the obvious. “It’s a monument. For after the real icebergs are gone.”
Defrag came to Aiden with the psychiatric diagnosis of “eco-anxiety.” This is not a DSM-recognized diagnosis, at least not yet. It’s treated as GAD: generalized anxiety disorder. Defrag’s psychiatrist explained it as under-activation of the serotonergic system and over-activation of the noradrenergic system, for which they prescribe SSRIS. The psychiatrist was Peter Saurette, a man Aiden likes and admires. He first encountered Saurette at a professional conference, early in his training. A small man, homely and very attractive. He had a natural gravitas, a considered way of speaking that made Aiden want to listen to every word. Aiden used to fantasize about being his patient, opening up the murky depths to that revealing and judicious gaze. Of course, when they started consulting on a professional basis, Aiden discovered that the fifty-minute appointment was a thing of the past for Saurette; his patients dropped in at the rate of four an hour to get their prescriptions tweaked, and their counselling, if they got any, happened somewhere else.