by Joan Thomas
When the fish are counted and the boat is gone, Sylvie and Noah step back onto the sandy path, the baby hanging face-out in the sling on her front. She’s a quiet weight on Sylvie’s chest and they’re almost back at the cabin. If they can get her out of the sling without waking her up, they’ll have a couple of hours to themselves.
“Are her eyes closed?” Sylvie asks Noah.
“Yeah. She looks pissed off.”
“Her expressions are funny.” She tells him what happened on Main Street that morning, when a cop car pulled up right beside them at a stoplight. “I was really scared. ‘Play it cool, baby,’ I said, and I looked in the back and she was staring straight ahead, looking totally innocent.”
That’s a mistake. The penny drops for Noah – she can see it drop. He takes a step away from her as if he needs some distance to see her clearly, and then he’s silhouetted against the lake and she can hardly see his face. “You haven’t taken your road test. You don’t have your licence!”
She gives him an oh, well shrug. “I was fine,” she says. “What difference does it make? My driving is the same, with that little piece of paper or without it.” She was fine once she got up to speed, that part is true. Once she got up into the lake country there were almost no other cars on the road, and she felt as if she were on one of those rides at the Ex, where your little red car whizzes along a track and you rotate a big plastic steering wheel and you couldn’t go off the road if you tried.
She rips open the Velcro fastener of the sling. “Take her. If you pick her up gently, we can get her to bed without waking her up.”
But he just stands there. “Sylvie, you’re not insured without a licence. I just assumed you’d taken your test. If you hit somebody, if they end up paralyzed, they’ll sue you. For millions of dollars!”
“Good luck,” she says, “trying to get money from me.”
His whole body reacts to this. “Christ! What about your kid? What about keeping her safe?”
“My kid?” She sees his face go red. She’s shaken by the way they’re staring at each other, how far their eyes have stabbed into their real and baffled selves. “My kid,” she says again fiercely. “Take her. She’s yours. You can look after her from now on.”
He takes the baby, pries her out of the sling, and lifts her awkwardly to his chest. He’s at the cabin door, he reaches out his free hand to yank it open. Sylvie hears its spring complain and she turns and walks in the other direction. Everything’s moving around her, the leaves trembling in the wind and the water pixellated in the light and dark grey clouds racing towards the lake as if they’re in a stop-motion film. She lets out a howl of fury. “We were fine!” she yells.
On the overlook there’s a crude bench made from a split tree trunk. She walks out to it and sits down. From here she can’t hear a thing going on in the cabin. Nothing in front of her except water and sky – she’s out on the rim of the known world. She lowers herself onto the bench and lies with her knees up, watching the clouds jostle high above her. Feeling the wind lick at her front where the baby was lying, snatching up the feel of her and carrying it coolly away.
We’ll have the day to ourselves. That was code, of course. When they fall onto the bed in the loft, Liz knows she wants it, but her lust is … elusive. At first she won’t let him take off her panties – sometimes that’s best. Then, almost as soon as he’s inside her, she feels an orgasm gathering like storm clouds in the distance. When it overtakes her, it’s not about sex, it’s about Aiden, how hungry his mouth feels, how taken over he seems, and tears spring out of the corners of her eyes as she comes. Afterwards she lies sloped along Aiden’s warm side, the tears still tickling in her ears and his long, freckled arm holding her. Sex is a miracle, she thinks. “Sex is a fucking miracle,” she says, and he lets out a little snort of appreciation.
Although actually she’s becoming less and less a fan of daytime sex. Partly because of the skylight, through which the sun pours, gloating at the fishy whiteness of their skin and the way the flesh on the inside of her upper arms has started to crinkle. “Why the hell did we put in that skylight?” she asks.
His shoulder moves under her cheek. “It was a trend at the time.”
“Well, it was our one big mistake.” The Plexiglas has yellowed; it looks like a window in a trashy mobile home. “I think it was your bright idea, Aiden.”
“Mine? I’ve never had an idea in my life. Not about home renos.”
He has an arm up, studying his bent elbow. “You know, I was lying here thinking about my old friend the poet G. M. Hopkins. He used to keep a list of his sins in his journal. They were pretty funny. ‘I was strangely aroused by an etching of a crucified arm’ – that was one of them. Poor guy. Poor, tormented bastard. Picture the priest on the other side listening to that. Say his confessor was gay. Wouldn’t it make a great screenplay?”
“It’s been done,” Liz says. “The straight version. I’ve seen it.” She pulls up the light duvet. He reaches over and pushes it down.
“You know, Aiden, you were right into decorating in those days. You were. You replaced the baseboards. You took off all those layers of wallpaper. I was slaving away with a little scraper and you walked in with that great big steamer. I couldn’t believe it.” She runs her hand along his ribs. “And it’s a good thing,” she says. “Other people have engagement rings. They put a notice in the paper and they rent a hall. They send out invitations. All I had to go by was this house. He’s doing it, I kept telling myself. He must be in. The day you installed the crown moulding in the dining room, I ran over to Charlotte’s and said to her, ‘It’s official.’ ”
“Crown moulding. I don’t even know what that is.” He pinches her upper arm softly. “I was just trying to score another blow job in the pantry.”
She tips her head up and gives him a long kiss. “You can’t pretend with me,” she says. “Look what happened to Charlotte and Roger. Once their house was gone, it was over.” It’s true. Charlotte and Roger had a big scheme: they were going to take their kids out of school and travel around Europe until their money ran out. They sold the house and put all their stuff in storage, and then the two of them were standing in the backyard at Charlotte’s mom’s, arguing about whether to buy their caravan in England or on the Continent, and suddenly they looked at each other and realized there was no reason to bother. All they had to do at that point was pick up their backpacks and walk away. Well, they had to sort the kids out as well. But this is Liz’s point about a house – it anchors you. Such a huge joint investment, you can’t do anything crazy and impulsive when you hit a bad patch.
Aiden reaches up and yanks at his pillow. “That’s one version of things,” he says. “But I often wonder what really happened.”
“To Charlotte and Roger?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, I’m not sure they were ever that good together. I think they dreamed up the trip to distract themselves from how bad it was. For one thing, Roger could never last longer than a minute. It was always like having sex with a teenage boy.”
“God, Liz, how could you possibly know that?”
“I’m just going by the way he was with me.”
“No, seriously.”
“Charlotte told me, of course.”
“She shouldn’t have told you. It’s not respectful.”
“Aiden, we’ve been best friends for twenty-five years.”
“All the same.” He pinches her arm again, this time in rebuke. “It’s a female thing. I hear it all the time. Women plunder their partner’s privacy, they don’t give a shit. You share confidences like … like they’re your currency. Men don’t operate that way.”
“No? So what do guys use as currency? With their friends.”
He thinks for a minute. “They share their drugs.”
“Ah.”
And then his head rolls in the other direction, and she props herself up on an elbow and watches sleep overtake him. That’s the thing about Aiden: you never know what
he’s thinking. The main miracle of sex is what it does to him – the needy look it brings out on the face of a guy who never really needs anything from anybody. She nestles against him, still savouring the afterglow. Enjoy it. Because, odds are, tomorrow or the day after, he’s going to stage one of his big withdrawals. Poor guy, she always says to herself, he’s scared of me. I might suck out all his juices, like a lady spider.
She rolls to the side and the granite cotton of the sheet fills her vision. The way she put her hand on Aiden’s arm in the backyard just now – was it sex she was wanting? Truthfully? Not exactly. She was in a strangely worked-up state, but it wasn’t lust. It was just the fitting thing to do, staging a bit of afternoon delight when the house is empty. Marriage is made up of fitting gestures. If you always do what you feel like doing, you’ll never make a relationship work. Of course, you can take that too far. Like Liz’s mother, who was, you might say, a perfect collection of fitting gestures. But suddenly Liz feels a rare pulse of sympathy for her mother. Somebody has to pick up the slack, given that men pretty much do what they want. And then she’s on a daybed in a house of wood and glass furnished entirely by the forest, with Krzysztof over her. The moment comes back to her whole. Not his perfection (though no doubt he was perfect) but the perfection of her desire, her desire to be made real. What are you supposed to do in such moments?
Aiden sinks into a different plane of sleep. She hears his breathing change and she’s hit with a new understanding, a most painful thought: that the way she felt and acted when she wandered into that party on the river was entirely ordinary. She was like somebody out of Desperate Housewives. There was nothing profound about it, just her glimpsing the possibility that all she was – all the energy and life and longing (which she sees now like the water in those thin silver cups, fresh and cold, that you get in a Thai restaurant) – that all of that would just dribble away and vanish into the dusty ground.
After Sylvie’s fed the baby, somebody thumps on the front wall of the cabin. A skinny guy in a Goldeyes cap grins in the doorway. “Sylvie, hey!” He steps into the cabin hauling a twelve of Kokanee. She’s friendly in a cautious way because she doesn’t have a clue who he is. He has a friend with him, a large older man in a plaid shirt.
The baby’s in her car seat on the table, awake and in her contented phase. The skinny guy spies her. “Hey, Sylvie!” he shouts. “What the fuck? You been busy!” He sets the beer on the table and walks around, looking at the baby from all angles. “Cute. Boy or girl?”
They pull out chairs and sit down. “Gilles,” the guy says to his friend, “give the lady a beer,” and they all crack cans and lift them over the baby. “Cheers,” Sylvie says. “Go, Jets!” says the skinny guy, and Gilles lifts his can silently. He has a broad chest and a kind, alert face, like a woodcutter in a fairy tale. He’s taken off his cap and hooked it onto his kneecap, and his thick grey hair is dented in a line all around his big head.
Noah’s at the station doing his checks. “We’ll talk when I get back, okay?” he said when he was leaving, but he’s been gone more than an hour. This is the first beer Sylvie’s had in six months, and it tastes fantastic. She asks how the summer’s going. “Work sucks,” the skinny guy says. “I’d rather be on EI.” He was on EI all winter and he got to go ice fishing every day after freeze-up. And he went to Fargo for a Garth Brooks concert and ended up sleeping in his truck. In February. “No shit,” Sylvie says.
Noah comes in, looking unimpressed to see them here.
“Hey, Burb!” Sylvie’s new best friend yells. “You been busy.” He raises his can in Noah’s direction.
“You betcha,” Noah says. He reaches for a beer.
Tyrone, Sylvie thinks. She met him when she was here last summer. They played horseshoes, and he was wearing the same T-shirt: DON’T HUNT WHAT YOU CAN’T KILL.
“What’s with the shorts?” Tyrone says. “It’s fuckin’ cold! And they try to say it’s getting warmer. They must think we’re stupid.”
Noah ignores him. He pulls out the fourth chair and sits down. Tyrone goes back to studying the baby, who is sucking on a plastic pot scraper from the kitchen drawer.
The cabin fills with the yellowish grey of daytime darkness. Rain starts to come down, hard. “Shit,” Noah says. He gets up and runs outside.
Tyrone hands Sylvie another beer. The shutters on the front of the cabin drop with a bang and the darkness deepens. Noah comes back in and takes his chair again; she can sense the damp coming off him. They sit and listen to the rain, the four of them around the little square table the way Sylvie’s nana used to sit with her bridge friends. The wind is all from the lake, so Noah has lowered only the front shutters. On either side of them rain falls like a heavy curtain, they can hear it pounding wetly on the ground.
The baby gleams in her white onesie, as if all the light in the dim room is coming from her. Gilles’s big face fills with pleasure. He leans over and puts out an index finger, and she wraps her fingers around it and tries to pull it to her mouth. Gilles grins silently and shakes her tiny fist.
Tyrone has shifted from checking out the baby to checking out Sylvie. She takes a long pull on her beer and swings her legs up to the arm of the couch, which is in her corner. She’s had to change because the baby puked on her favourite top, but this one is fine, cut low over her breasts – her new, spectacular breasts. The beer is amazing; she feels herself coming back with every swallow. Her parents have been puritans about her having a drink, but alcohol is actually good for nursing mothers, it makes their milk flow.
And here she is at the lake with the guy they call Burb, who almost glows with the intelligence he brings into this tiny cabin. She’s amazed by him, as if she’s seeing him for the first time, and she longs to know him, to penetrate the secret of his composure. How neat he is – his long cyclist’s leg muscles and his T-shirt that looks as though it’s been ironed. His fingernails on the beer can clean and trimmed. He looks after himself as a matter of course. He believes that rules have a purpose; he doesn’t see them as a challenge or an attack on his freedom. They are part of the systematic way things work. He’s been like this since he was little. When he showed her the mimosa plant, he didn’t feel awe at the way it curled its leaves up over your finger. From what she can remember, he knew what was happening, based on plant chemistry. Possibly hydraulics were involved, like a male erection. And he was seven. Think what an amazing scientist he will be! But, she thinks, he is somebody who can be broadsided, because there will always be phenomena outside what your systems predict.
Pheno-mena. She takes a long pull on her beer. Phena Mina.
“So, you two go to school together?” Tyrone is looking at Noah.
“No, we met last summer.”
“Where’d ya meet?”
“At Zach’s cottage.”
“Well, actually,” Sylvie says to Tyrone, “Noah and I were best friends when we were little. We played together all the time. I almost killed him once. We were at the park, we were swinging really high on these huge swings, and I dared him to jump off. He did it, and the swing came up and smashed him in the face.”
He swivels his head and looks at her out of that exact face.
“What,” she says. “You don’t remember?”
“I had a concussion. I got my nose broken. Of course I remember. I just didn’t remember it was you.”
“Who did you think it was?”
“I don’t know … that kid who lived behind the store.” He’s just pretending, because he’s mad at her. He remembers everything.
The baby lies with the pot scraper on her chest. They sit with their eyes fixed on her and listen to the rain. She’s getting sleepy. Her eyelids start to slide.
“Hey,” Tyrone says. “Your kid looks drunk.”
Noah’s laptop is on the counter behind him. He reaches for it and pulls it down to his lap. He opens a spreadsheet and starts entering data from a little notebook, stroking and tapping the touch pad expertly.
�
��Hey, Burb,” Tyrone says. “Don’t you watch the news? You’re not supposed to sit with a laptop on your junk. It’s bad for you – you’re gonna fry your sperm. Ha! Guess it doesn’t matter now. Your boys already did their swimming. Your boys already won the goddamn Olympics!”
Noah closes the laptop and puts it on the table. He gets up and goes over to the counter, where his iPod is docked. The clanging of Sister Machine Gun fills the cabin. “Fuck, Burb,” Tyrone says. “You trying to drive us out with that shit? You don’t got no Garth Brooks?” Thunder rumbles over the music. Gilles crushes his beer can and opens another.
Noah sits back at the table. His face is absolutely blank.
“So,” Sylvie says, opening herself another beer. “What’s the ‘Burb’ all about?”
“You can probably figure it out,” Noah says.
It seems the rain has mostly stopped. Tyrone stands up. “Well, we’ll leave you two lovebirds to it,” he says. “We’re gonna go see what Wheeler’s up to. You can keep the cans. I owe you anyways.”
The screen door slams. This startles the baby, who slept through Sister Machine Gun but now starts to fuss. Noah goes to the counter and turns off his iPod. It’s colder than ever, and Sylvie puts on her hoodie and sits cross-legged on the couch.
Noah walks restlessly around the cabin. “What’s that smell?”
She doesn’t answer. He finally discovers the diaper from home that she dropped by the couch earlier. He doesn’t say a word, just puts a plastic bag over his hand, picks up the diaper the way you pick up dog poop, and heads for the door.
“By the way,” Sylvie calls as the door slams, “I’m starving.”
In a minute he comes back in and goes to the sink to wash his hands. “I’ll get us some pizza,” he says. The grocery store at the end of the lane has takeout. He puts on his cap and sets off, still in his T-shirt and shorts.
The baby is winding up to throw a real fit. Sylvie picks her up and goes to the screen door and watches Noah make his way down the cabin line, head straight up in spite of the wind and the rain. It’s only two weeks since she saw him in the city, but he seems taller. He is taller, she realizes with a pang – he’s still growing.