The wood flooring crackled and moaned beneath her footsteps to the window, where she had stopped to look outside. In the yard it was early spring, fruit trees in bloom, grass the green of limes, shadows short and edged abruptly. She crossed her arms over her chest and tried to rub some warmth into her sides. Galaxies of particles churned in a slat of light at her shins.
“Well? What do you think? It’s great, isn’t it? I was thinking . . .” he shifted his weight onto a joint in the wood strips that complained with a whine, “I was thinking about the time off we both have, coming up in June, and . . . I was thinking that we could . . . that it would be good for us if we . . . you know, spent some . . . time.”
Finally understanding what it was all about, and even appreciating it, she found she had little to say. Instead, she noticed the strand of a spiderweb hanging down from the top of the window frame. There was a tiny paint chip dangling from its tip, which was stirring, pivoting slightly, in miniscule degrees, as if of its own volition. A gleam of gesso clinging to the end of an invisible thread, like hope.
She sighed, leaning closer to the window as if tipping over with a towering weight, her forehead butting up softly against the glass, the sun shaving her cheekbones. She was thinking about the reality of his plan, thinking further afield than the reach of his good intentions, about what it would actually mean, the two of them being cooped up in a new and empty space for two weeks, where there were no familiar ambits to retreat across, no corners reconnaissanced for the hiding. Emily was no romantic. She knew that the kind of damage they’d inflicted by now was far beyond what could be held up to the most well-meaning lips and kissed better. Especially here, in the country of his youth, where they wouldn’t even be on equal ground to try, where he would have an obvious latitudinal advantage, passing oak trees with his infant memories swinging under the branches, walking along vineyard rows where he’d harvested grapes as a teen, their stunted vines stretching out into dramatic renditions of the crucifix, muscles of bark flexed and contorted tighter than two thousand years of martyrdom. They’d kill each other.
She was as surprised as he was to hear herself say it. “I want . . .” she hadn’t turned around, was still leaning against the window, “I want a divorce.” She spoke into the glass, her breath spray-painting a misty halo in front of her mouth. “A quick and painless divorce,” she added quietly.
She still hadn’t turned around. There was a long pause while he looked for words that he was incapable of finding. The ghouls stood still.
“That’s all,” she murmured at the flowering trees of his salad days, the pink of the magnolias rusting at the fringes, their enormous petals unfurling until they dropped, white cups of silk gathering at the base of the trees like clothes at the foot of a nuptial bed. “It’s all I want.”
Contrary to the nature of their marriage, their divorce was, in fact, quick and painless. The only hang-up was a transitional twelve days when Emily didn’t have an apartment; while waiting for one of the roommates to move out of a sober bungalow she’d found, she’d unwisely accepted an invitation from her parents to stay at their place.
She’d come from a large family, the middle child with five sisters and a brother. Both of her parents were school teachers, a profession, Emily held, that called to it only the most boring people. Her parents’ one binding commonality was the way they approached raising their kids. Above all else, they wanted to foster their children’s intellect, encourage them to be bold thinkers, to be analytical, critical, and, failing that, to at least become knowledgeable, cultivated, conversant. The manner in which they approached this was insisting that their children never be given chores or household duties: no cooking, cleaning, caring for younger siblings; so long as they were seen to be reading, studying, perfecting some sort of skill or art, they were exempt from everything they thought of as toilsome or menial. An approach that had Emily’s parents, particularly her mother, working several times the amount of the average person, as well as rendering Emily utterly useless in the kitchen later on in her life, inept at controlling textile-incinerating irons, and the owner of underwear that was all three to six shades away from its original colour. Even now, at thirty-seven, she couldn’t boil an egg without bungling it in some way, a fact she vehemently reproached her parents for whenever she saw them. Particularly her mother.
“I’m just worried about you,” her mother had begun on her second night in the house, after brewing Emily an evening cup of tea in the kitchen. “Is that so wrong?”
“Some other time, will you, Mom?”
“Well, it’s not going to get any easier, is it? At your age. To find a man. And this one was so clever. Certainly played well. Had a good job. Made it to the symphony.” She broke off to look thoughtfully at the refrigerator. “And, sweetie, I’m afraid your big bones aren’t getting any smaller.”
Emily gave an acerbic look that her mother managed to evade.
“You are going to audition for a position in the symphony again this year, aren’t you? You’re bound to get it one of these times, hon.”
Emily walked to the sink, poured her tea into it, clunked the cup into the steaming basin, and left the room.
Her mother’s apprehensions about her attractiveness were ill founded. After her divorce, Emily was tired but hungry, and enjoyed a phase of casual flings and easygoing affairs that came about with little effort and were based almost entirely on sex. She met Cedric two years after her divorce, following what had been a disastrous experiment with a woman, a possessive and clingy violist who tipped easily into hysteria, a woman who’d had the habit of asking comprehensive questions about past lovers, then calling Emily hard and cold and brusque for her responses, criticisms that became self-fulfilling realities. When they split up, a door’s trimming was damaged from the slamming, picture frames shattered. While one of her roommates helped her sweep up the mess, she told herself that this was the last of them, that what she needed now was some time alone, to plant a few shoots of calm in her life, however distractingly fruitful her soil happened to be.
When she was offered to play a gig for a retirement party at a golf course on the south shore of Lake Simcoe, she thought that getting out of the city and into the fresh air for an afternoon would do her good. The retiree was an insurance broker and classical aficionado whose company had splurged for an hour and a half of live Bruch and Dvorák at his reception. Emily’s quartet played on a sunken stage while his associates, allies, and adversaries filed into the hall and mingled with cocktails in their hands, standing around, nursing tumblers and champagne flutes, schooners, and seidels. She’d glimpsed some of them giving a nudge, wink, and gesture toward the musicians, a cluster of the men stepping closer for a better look. One of them was watching her closely, eyeing the way her knees protruded from the black of her dress on either side of her cello, which was almost the size of a human body. When she finally met his eyes—a shallow, watery blue, framed in wrinkles he’d won from sunny fairways—he’d smiled and pushed his drink out into the air between them, as if to indicate how impressed he was with her precision, or was it her bowing technique, her controlled and understated expression? She looked back at her music stand, half-smirking at the absurdity.
During a short break midway through the performance she retreated outside with a glass of wine, a non-smoker’s rendition of a cigarette break. Cedric had searched around until he’d found her there, on a terrace overlooking the wide green of the eighteenth hole. He accosted her with predictable compliments that progressed toward a predictable come-on. She sidestepped it by asking about him. He was, in fact, he’d instantly volunteered, recently divorced. (Likely the only thing they had in common, thought Emily, stepping out of her shoes to stretch the arches of her feet, toes splayed on the patio stones).
“So I guess you gotta practise a lot. Keep those hands in tip-top shape,” Cedric said, watching the bare skin of her feet in the sun.
“If you do it well, you use your whole body actually,” Emily
offered as if to no one in particular.
“Your whole body, eh?” Cedric looked the whole of her body over. “That is really . . . interesting, you know . . .”
Listening to him speak she found him to be conservative, prudish, coarse, and provincial. And besides being fourteen years her senior, Emily thought he was irritatingly sure of himself, standing in front of her with his glass of sparkling wine, searing with confidence, a womanizer who’d been forced to philander for decades with the careful discretion of a married man but had, at long last, been unleashed from it. There was nothing stopping him now. He was overweight, unread, unwise, and on top of the world with it, limping into middle age with the notion that he was infallible. It was embarrassing really.
What was more, she understood that he’d been drawn to her image alone, that he was talking to the charcoal dress he assumed she always wore, to her refined lipstick and the practised way she could hold a wineglass. Emily knew how far off that mark she was, considering the previous hours that had brought her there; from her morning coffee in her scruffy sweater, with its murky stains and ratty holes along the hem, the squabble in the car concerning gas money, which diplomatically eased into who was dating whom. Which was in turn interrupted when one of the violinists realized they were lost, having turned onto a road of cracked pavement that gave way to gravel, dogs running out from driveways to chase their car, a quick blur of teeth and hackles, manic barking receding into the dust behind them, until they’d found the right road and pulled into the golf course anxious that they were late, their one-thousand-dollar station wagon—with fifty thousand dollars’ worth of instruments crammed inside—the most rundown vehicle in the parking lot. And she knew what it would look like later, when they were finished playing, changing into jeans again, scoffing food from the posh mirrors of the caterer’s trays in a back room, catching glimpses of her saliva-filmed fingers between the crumbs and picked-through remains of bocconcini and cocktail shrimp, of baba ghanouj and prosciutto.
Emily heard him speaking, and heard herself responding to it, but was stunned to hear how receptive she sounded, offering him all the right cues, maintaining her distance, but also the flow, the measured trickle toward intimacy. Then, without even meaning to, she let him know of a concert that she would be playing at the following week. He said he’d be there, watching it, and waiting to buy her a drink when it was over.
“You know,” she’d responded, swirling her wine, holding it up to the afternoon clouds as if to check the vintage’s legs. She gave it a long sniff, her nose deep in the glass, then sipped from it delicately, putting it back in the cup of her other hand with a finality akin to placing it on a table. “The truth is: I’m not all that sure you could handle me.” She grinned mysteriously, looked away. As she surveyed an isolated curtain of rain in the distance, a watercolour smear in the sky drifting north, she could actually sense how smitten he was.
Emily intended on being more consistent with how she felt when she saw him next, more consequent. “You can’t possibly be that naive,” she’d said at one point. “I can’t believe,” her face in her hands, “that I’m actually sitting here with someone who could think something like that.” Then, “You, my friend, are positively Neolithic. The year is 1999. Join us. Please.” He had no idea how to respond, and seldom did. Instead he fished for compliments; there must have been something appealing about him. She gave him doubtful looks, sniggered randomly throughout the evening, as if to a string of amusing punchlines that rose from the occasion like gags from an improv, and when prompted to share these private jokes, she eluded the question, changed the subject, asked him to order another bottle. Which he did, perplexed, grasping at straws and ordering the second-to-last entry on the wine list, trying to impress, trying to get a handle on her, on the situation, on his complete powerlessness in it. Luckily the sex was great.
She insisted they not call “whatever it was they were doing” dating. They were doing what they were doing, she told him, and whatever it was, it didn’t need a name. They met mostly on weekends, ate out, went to the first non-Hollywood films that Cedric had seen in his life, and even ushered in the new millennium together, in a bar on the rooftop of the Westin, getting drunk on a Mondavi and watching the fireworks while he checked his cell for messages every four minutes, worried about the imminent Y2K computer crash. She told him he should lighten up, that a little cataclysm would do the world good.
Emily continued to date other people, and if she slept with one of them, she made sure to tell him about it, often the next day, casually, adding that honesty was one of her few principles, and one she wasn’t about to compromise in order to placate his soaring little ego. Then, in April, she made a sudden and capricious decision to cut off contact with him. She deleted his emails and answering machine messages for three weeks, after which he showed up at her doorstep uninvited, catching her with a bad book and bored to atrophy. She agreed to get some dinner with him, then went back to his place, where, in the morning, he’d said he was glad to have her back. She rolled out of bed and into her shoes, saying nothing.
It wasn’t sitting well with her. There were days she felt horrible about the way things were going, even guilty. As well as days where she noticed him looking worse for wear, physically; he was dishevelled, stubbled cheeks, forehead blanched and lined with glistening pink folds. He smelled of addled sweat, amoeba-shaped blotches starching the armpits of his dress shirts. He sometimes said he would do anything she wanted him to. Anything, he would listlessly reinforce, staring so intently into her retinas that he seemed to be looking past her, emptily, emptied. She found him pathetic, saw him as a kind of addict, who was addicted—in the way, she believed, all addicts were—to his own destruction. And that was something she didn’t want a role in, or implicated responsibility for. In fact the only thing she wanted was to ease him down gently, mercifully, to leave him behind, intact, just as he was before. Without so much as a trace that she’d been there.
Contrary to what everyone thought, Emily really was a compassionate woman, sensitive, perhaps even overly so. She’d never understood how others managed not to see her in that light. Sure she was outspoken, called a spade a spade, but that didn’t make her any less sympathetic; it only made her humanity seem a bit askance, as if it were projecting itself at an angle that was, in comparison to everyone else, somewhat obtuse. Beneath that, however, she was one of the most sensitive people she’d ever met.
She remembers the night on Twyn Rivers Drive, in her first year of university, nineteen and driving her parents’ car through a blind and moonless dark, two thumbs of light gliding over the road ahead of her, feeling their way along the mottles of the asphalt like brail. One of Emily’s best friends lived on the city limits while her boyfriend at the time was in Pickering, just beyond it. A back road connected the two, passing through the city’s largest natural area, the Rouge Valley, with its birch and hemlock stands, its migratory birds and swamps. And as Emily made the habit of never visiting one house without at least dropping by the other, she came to know the road quite well, had memorized its sequence of steep hills, blind corners, and single-lane bridges. She knew the straightaways where she could sink her foot low, knew the worst of the potholes, the places where you had to stray onto the other side of the road to miss them. There was very little traffic to worry about.
What she remembers best is the floating quiet just before the impact, the way her parents’ Chevrolet seemed to be hovering in one place, thick and slow at eighty-three kilometres per hour. The deer had sprung out from nowhere, in a leap that arced to a stop directly in front of her car, the headlights brightening its coat until it was awash with it, glaring white, and sinking just out of her view. Before she could even touch the brakes, a hollow explosion shuddered the car, seemed to lift the wheels from the tarmac.
She pulled over and turned the vehicle off but left the lights on, only one headlight working now, its beam delineating tracers of insects whirling above the ditch. When she stepp
ed outside she noticed that the hood was creased, a fender dented, the grill crushed with pieces missing from its centre, a silver smile with incisors knocked out. Then she heard the sound behind her, the deer on its side in the opposite ditch, running on the spot, kicking at the grass with all four of its legs, two of them broken. She could hear the terror in its breath, the wheezing panic. A hand over her mouth, Emily made her way toward the dying animal, her eyes slowly adjusting to what little light there was from the headlight still intact, pointing in the opposite direction and getting weaker the farther she walked. For reasons she can’t understand, she was trying to step quietly, easing onto the sides of her feet. The air smelled of wet leaves. There was a hesitant toad croaking to her right.
Farther along on the pavement, she noticed a spray of black streaks flowering out from the point of impact, a thicker rope of the same colour trailing into the ditch, stringing together the cause with the effect. She saw movement in the grass and approached it until she could make out the deer’s form, then the garbled kinks of its limbs, the way its ineffectual kicks were gradually slowing. She watched its eyes as they dimmed, massive and black, the bristles of its lashes fine-drawn and intricate but unblinking. Its mouth cracked open, some dark seeped out. Its tall ears became limp. With a last huff, it ran out of breath, the cold of the ground stiffening its joints, knotting its musculature, progressively stilling its movements. Until it stopped.
Emily’s hand was still over her mouth.
She found herself thinking about the span of the deer’s life, pictured it grazing on unseen slopes, twitching with attention, raising its head at anomalous sounds, always tentative, cautious, always wild, and living an entire life without having harmed anything but blades of grass. She contemplated whether something’s life should be weighed against the damage that that life causes to the world around it. Which led her to an unsettling thought, to one of those notions she would allow herself to think of only once: there were individuals she knew—people, human beings—whom she would rather see in this animal’s place, whom she would rather see die an untimely and unduly death in a ditch somewhere, like this, affecting things so little with their passing as to not even interrupt the amphibian-song in the surrounding grass. But it was a view that was quickly severed, plucked out, and quarantined, leaving her with nothing but a creaking toad and an ungulate that was beyond ever making a sound again.
Believing Cedric Page 21