by Joan Thomas
Noah shrugs. “So, you call yourself a cynic?” he says.
“I never said that. Either way. Listen, forget I raised it. I want to ask you about something else. As a scientist. It’s been eating at me for a long time. I’ve been hoping for a chance to talk to somebody who knows this kind of thing.” But that’s as far as he gets with that line of thought. He’s hearing a swishing in his ears, the sound of blood being pumped, up or down.
The security light on the garage is back on, despoiling the darkness. “I really have to go,” Noah says. But he pauses on the way to his bike and looks back at Aiden. “Don’t feel too guilty,” he says. “You might not sell high.”
Aiden sits on in the darkness, thinking about ladders and rope and his friend in an iron cage. About Gerard Manley Hopkins and his friend – what was that guy’s name? – a brilliant scholar who managed to off himself while enacting the hanging of Trollope. He had a terrific group of intimates at Oxford, Hopkins did, and one by one they died.
Then he’s on his feet, walking across the lawn. Between two piles of sawdust he locates his spot, assumes a wide-legged stance, and unzips, and when his stream starts up, he tips his head back to the sky, murky with artificial light and smoke from the fires in the north. Finished, he gives his dick a shake and packs it away, swipes his hands on his shorts. Turns back towards the house, a monolith looming in the dark. A foot catches, and he almost falls.
Ah, who do you wish you were, Aiden? That man, the old man you saw beside a road in Portugal. Spring before last, it was south of Coimbra. You and Liz were driving back to your hotel and a man was on the edge of the narrow, ancient, tree-lined road. An old man in a black jacket and cap. Standing in the evening light, soaking his donkey’s sore foot in a bucket.
17
The Base Coat
FRIDAY MORNING, LIZ IS UP AND PROWLING THE house before seven o’clock. She discovers a full can of latex primer in the basement and takes it as a sign, so she carries it upstairs along with an armful of drop sheets. Aiden accuses her of being obsessed with home decor, but they’ve been in the house for twenty-five years and this is only the third time she’s painted this room. She did it during their bad summer, when she was all nerves and prickly heat. It was the era of the faux finishes, and in a decorating magazine she spied the mural of an open window with billowing curtains. Trompe l’oeil. She’s never called it that, because she can’t pronounce it.
Liz hitches the stepladder along the baseboard. The first time she painted this room, she felt so much joy at the prospect of making this house her own. She’d lived before that in rented apartments, and then with Denis Fontaine, who owned a condo on Grant Avenue but was religious about beige. She pours primer into the tray, and in her mind she’s schlepping her stuff out of Denis’s condo. That last ride down in the elevator after he ditched her, she’s carrying an open box with her red kettle in it, and a lampshade and a stupid clock with cartoon hands that she snatched at the last minute because it was one of his particular treasures. She steps out of the doors of the building with the box in her arms, and on the wintry street a shameful truth is waiting for her – that she cannot make her own life. The job thing you can do by yourself, and the house thing, and even the kid thing if you really have guts, but the man – he has to fall into your lap. All her friends were walking around in T-shirts that said: A WOMAN NEEDS A MAN LIKE A FISH NEEDS A BICYCLE, but in that moment Liz knew: there is nothing else.
She touches the roller to the primer, trying to take on just the right amount of paint for one strip. She hears Aiden tramp down the stairs. She senses him in the doorway but she doesn’t look up. “Bye, Liz,” he says, and leaves without waiting for an answer. To cycle, hungover, across town to the little room where he’ll sit all this long, hot day, listening to other people’s troubles. Aiden, with his wonky ideals, not quite designed for the real world.
She’s just made the first bite into the mural when Sylvie appears, moving with more energy than she’s shown in months. She’s got a bowl of cereal in one hand and the milk carton in the other.
“You’re up early.”
“I’m going for a ride with Noah. Before we go see the baby.”
“That’s good, honey.” She flips the drop sheet off one end of the table so Sylvie can eat there. Then she gets back to her painting, hoping for silence. She hasn’t had breakfast or coffee, and she’s well on her way to a full-blown headache. She bends over the paint tray again. Under the uplifted roller, her eyes are caught by the milk carton. It’s standing on the oak table in a little pool of milk. “You need to wipe up that milk,” she says. “It will take the finish off the table in no time.”
“Okay, I will.”
When she looks up, Sylvie has finished her cereal and is sitting watching her. Balancing inside the bubble of her precarious composure, her shins pressed against a rung of the stepladder, Liz sees that this morning her daughter is not going to leave her alone. “What, honey?”
“I want to ask you a question. Why did you take me with you when you hooked up with Krzysztof?”
Liz stands still with the roller in her hand. Sweat trickles down below the underwires of her bra. Her eyes are caught by the miasma of fine hairs around Sylvie’s head in the sun from the curtainless window. Sylvie is watching her intently. When she doesn’t get an answer, she frowns and gets up and goes out through the kitchen, leaving the milk and her cereal bowl on the table.
She’s in the garage, over by the bikes, when Liz ducks under the half-open door.
“Sylvie,” Liz says, “you’re going to see your baby today. Whether or not you get her back will depend on what happens this afternoon and in the next few weeks. You are in a real fix here. Don’t make this about me.” She’s standing still because she can’t see for the ivy growing over the windows. Then her eyes are used to the dark, and she notices the vines that have wormed their way into the garage through cracks in the foundation. They’re bolting across the concrete floor in their desperation to reach the light. Sylvie lifts her head. “Child and Family Services will insist on getting to the bottom of things.” Liz says. “You need to talk. Talk to your dad if you don’t want to talk to me.”
Sylvie’s fiddling with the bike pump. “To Dad? Sure.” She laughs. “Dad, come and sit down. Apparently we’re supposed to get to the bottom of things. You think I’m nuts for leaving my baby in the car? Well, here’s what it is, Dad. That little boy who drowned? When we were in the States? It was my fault. He was really upset and his mother was dying, and instead of trying to help him, I called him a loser. I hit him. It was because of me he went out on the lake.”
“Oh. Oh. I had no idea.” Liz steps over the broken concrete towards her daughter. “Oh, honey.”
“Yeah, well,” Sylvie says, shrugging. She squats beside her bike and fumbles with the valve stem of her back tire.
“You know,” Liz says, “kids do that kind of thing. You were acting the way kids act. I’m not trying to minimize it – it sounds like you were really mean to him – but the fact that he drowned right after … Well, that was bad luck. For everybody concerned.”
“You think that’s what it was?”
“Yes, I do!” All this time, she thinks. She’s carried this since she was eleven.
When Sylvie doesn’t answer, Liz steps closer to the bike.
“Honey, maybe you blew it out of proportion at the time. And brooding over it now will change nothing. You are punishing yourself unnecessarily. You are choosing to be unhappy for no purpose whatsoever.”
“I get it,” Sylvie says, her head bent. “I totally get it, Mom. Nothing causes anything. We’re not the kind of people who are ever guilty of anything.”
Liz wants to stamp her feet in frustration. “You haven’t listened to a word I’ve said.”
“Anyway,” Sylvie continues, still not looking at Liz, “I saw him out on the water when you were in the studio with Krzysztof and I didn’t go for help.” She starts to work the pump and the garage is filled wi
th the sound of its distress.
Liz has to clamp her arms hard against her chest to stop her sudden shaking. She has to raise her voice. “This was all a really long time ago,” she says. “Why are you thinking about it now? When you’ve got so many other problems.”
“It’s one of the problems I have right now.” Her voice over the laboured panting of the pump is calm. “It’s not that easy to live as a fake. Mom, I can’t talk about this anymore, because Noah is riding over to pick me up and I don’t want him to come in and hear what we’re saying. As he seems to respect his stepfather.”
Emotion rises like steam in Liz’s eyes. She tries hard to focus, tries to pick out the salient thing among all the things pressing on her. And there is her tall and beautiful daughter, so troubled, so resolute, bent over and rhythmically working the bike pump, her persimmon hair glowing in the low light. How lovely she is, and how alien – a human being whose heart and mind Liz will never really comprehend. This is what her years of parenting have come to, she sees, this moment standing in greenish light, being asked to put into words the deepest truth she has, a truth she’s foraged by herself, with only her hunger to guide her.
“Sylvie,” she says, and something about her voice makes Sylvie stop pumping and lift her eyes. “Sylvie, listen to me. I understand what it is to live with something you really regret. Because I do regret it, more than you can imagine. But things are not black-and-white. You lose a part of yourself if you constantly repress your impulses, if you say no all the time. It’s hard enough for us to be true to ourselves – for women, I mean, the way we’re constantly expected to please other people and make everything run smoothly. You have to honour what you feel and what you want. And if you do, sometimes there will be a cost.”
Sylvie takes this in expressionlessly, and then she drops her eyes and turns back to her bike. She presses her thumb and fingers into the tire to test it. Liz hears the dog barking – Noah must be in the yard. Sylvie feels along the garage floor for the tiny black cap and deftly screws it onto the stem. Then she scrambles to her feet and without a word starts wheeling her bike towards the door. Liz is losing her, she has lost her.
She steps in Sylvie’s way and grabs the handlebars. “Well, then, think about this,” she cries. “Was it just because of you? Don’t you think the people who took that little boy to the lake bear some responsibility? Or that girl who was supposed to be minding him? Or me? You could blame it on me.”
But Sylvie does not leap on this. Instead, her face under the helmet assumes the passionate shape it had in childhood. “If a lot of people are responsible then nobody is responsible?” she says with sudden emotion. “Is that better? Is that easier? To think that nobody is responsible?”
They stand looking at each other, and then Sylvie ducks under the door and she’s gone.
After a minute Liz steps out too, into the blazing yard. She’s alone: Sylvie and Noah have ridden away. She walks towards the deck over a lawn so uneven she could be crossing a field of rocks. At the door she kicks off her shoes and crosses the kitchen to the sink, where she gets two J-Cloths, a damp one and a dry one. She’s shaky, her wrists and elbows and knees are weak. But she wipes up the milk Sylvie spilt on the dining room table and thoroughly dries the wood. Then she drops the J-Cloths in the sink and picks up her roller and goes back to painting.
She paints methodically, noting the gauzy effect of the primer, the texture of tiny tufts the nap of her roller pulls up. It is strangely beautiful. Art could be anything. You could frame a square of what she’s just done, the pattern of which is totally due to happenstance, and it would be just as much art as anything else.
Soon the painted window is a ghostly allusion to what it once was and the dining room is simple and utilitarian. A church rectory, Liz thinks. She’ll do the finishing coat white as well. To please Aiden, who likes simple things. Her mind veers to the lake – she sees it vividly, Aiden’s paradise of inky water edged with rock. Aiden is trotting down from the cabin in his blue swimming trunks, barefoot on the path. He pounds the length of the dock and dives in clumsily. Surfaces, shaking the water out of his hair, and begins to work his way towards her in the strange vertical motion he calls his breaststroke, with his head half out. He’s a dark animal moving through luminous water – she will never be that free. Her love for him flounders in her chest. Speak your heart, she says to herself.
He clambers up onto the dock, water pouring off his thighs and blackening the wood, and she hands him a towel. “Aiden,” she says.
18
White Crane Spreads Wings
THE OLD GARAGE WILL ALWAYS BE A SPECIAL place to Sylvie: the dense smells of motor oil and dirt and sheep manure, the windows overgrown with Virginia creeper, her father’s motorcycle shrouded by a tarp. They were in a grotto, as if they’d stepped down into it on moss-covered stones. It’s not the actual things they said to each other, although she’ll always remember what they said. It’s that her mother followed her out to the garage. That they met there, in dim green light, and passed secret tokens to each other. This is who I am. This is who I am.
The question that started it all – Sylvie had carried that question for years, with no expectation of ever asking it. But then a social worker came to the house and gave her a lesson in the power of questions. She came in the afternoon, the day before they were to go and see the baby, a hot, hot afternoon building towards rain. She was young herself, probably no more than twenty-five or twenty-six. She was wearing a grey skirt and a white blouse and she had a formal way of talking even during the casual part of the visit, as if she was still drawing on her course materials. She wanted to interview Sylvie alone, so Liz poured them tall glasses of iced tea and they carried them out to the deck.
“Tell me about your baby,” the social worker said when they were settled in their chairs. “I know that even tiny babies have personalities. What sort of infant is Faun?” By then a white haze had settled over the baby in Sylvie’s mind, so there was really nothing she could recall and describe. “She seemed different at different times,” she said finally.
The social worker gazed across the yard to where clouds were growing in the west, and then she turned her eyes back on Sylvie. “What’s your experience been like as a mom?” she asked. What came forcefully back to Sylvie was being touched, constantly touched, on every square inch of her body, inside and out, the baby’s sucking mouth always on her. Then she remembered the way the baby would sometimes lift a tiny hand and lay it lightly on her breast, and grief shook her. How long would her baby have to wait to be loved?
A lawnmower roared to life nearby, and the chance to answer was past. The social worker picked up her iced tea. “I wonder if you feel a bit of relief now, not to have to look after her. It would only be natural. You must feel as though you have your life back.”
“No,” Sylvie said. “Not really.”
The social worker was small and neat and serious. Sylvie loomed beside her, exposed in all her pain to the young woman’s thoughtful eyes, and she understood that the guise of childhood that had been draped over her these past few weeks in her parents’ house had fallen away.
“Here’s the address where you’ll go for the visit with your baby,” the worker said finally, pulling a card out of her bag. “I won’t be the one handling the visit. It will be one of my colleagues, Valerie – this is her card. Will Noah be going with you?”
She stood up to go into the house, and then she turned and said simply, “You know, you just need to tell the truth.”
After supper Noah appeared in her bedroom doorway. He was sweaty from his ride over. Sylvie got up and tossed over a flannel baby blanket for him to wipe his face with. He looked different. “Hey, you’re trying to grow a beard.”
“I’m not trying. It’s doing it all on its own.”
“I like it.”
“Gracias.” He threw the blanket into the hamper.
The ceiling fan was on its lowest setting, and the dolphins in the baby’s m
obile circled slowly in the breeze. “Are my parents outside?”
“Yeah, they’re smoking a joint on the deck.”
“What time did you get into the city?”
“Around two. Alison’s boyfriend was up at the lake and he gave me a ride. He was going to the Eco-Network, so I hung out there for a while. I ran into a lot of people.”
Alison’s boyfriend, she thought, and one little strand of her anguish snapped, like an elastic breaking.
“Jason Stryker – I ran into him. Do you know him? I got the impression he knows you. He’s working on protection for the Seine River. They’re doing a public awareness campaign and they need people to write trail guides. I said I’d see if you were interested.”
“I might be. I’m not exactly busy at the moment.” Under that dark stubble, the planes of his face seemed to be in higher relief. It struck her that this might make it easier to know what he was thinking and feeling. “Is this what we’re doing now?” she asked.
“What?”
“Acting like it never happened.”
He reached up and waggled one of the little stuffed dolphins, and the rest of the pod leapt around it. “I think people with babies still work as activists,” he said. “When they can make the time.”
“Are you a person with a baby? Is that the way you see yourself?”
“I’m trying. I’m trying to figure out how to do this. It’s hard having so much of your life laid out for you. But I guess you know that. And I guess it’s like that for almost everybody.” He walked over to the bed and sat down. He never had trouble meeting her eyes. She had made a lot of mistakes, but loving him the way she did was not one of them. “So,” he said. “Tomorrow we go to see her. What time?”