by neetha Napew
“I know,” replied Mary, her heart heavy. “But an annulment seems so hypocritical.”
“I don’t want to leave the Church, Mary. I’ve lost enough stability in my life as it is.”
Mary frowned at the dig; she was the one who had left him, after all. Still, maybe he was right. Maybe she owed him that much. “But I don’t want to claim that our marriage never existed.”
That mollified Colm and for a moment Mary thought he was going to reach across the linen tablecloth and take her hand. “Is it anyone I know-this new guy of yours?”
Mary shook her head.
“Some American, I suppose,” Colm continued. “Swept you off your feet, did he?”
“He’s not American,” said Mary, defensively. “He’s a Canadian citizen.” Then, surprised by her own cruelty, she added, “But, yes, he quite literally swept me off my feet.”
“What’s his name?”
Mary knew why Colm was asking: not because he expected to recognize it, but because a surname could reveal much, in his view. If Colm had a failing, it was that he was his father’s son, a plain-talking, thickheaded man who compartmentalized the world based on ethnic groups. Doubtless Colm was already mentally thumbing through his lexicon of responses. If Mary were to mention an Italian name, Colm would dismiss him as a gigolo. If it were a Jewish name, Colm would assume he must have lots of money, and would say something about how Mary never really was happy with a humble academic as a husband.
“You don’t know him,” said Mary.
“You already said that. But I’d like to know his name.”
Mary closed her eyes. She’d hoped, naïvely, to avoid this issue altogether, but of course it was bound to come out eventually. She took a forkful of salad, buying time, then, looking down at her plate, unable to meet Colm’s eyes, she said, “Ponter Boddit.”
She heard his fork bang against his salad plate as he put it down sharply. “Oh, Christ, Mary. TheNeanderthal? “
Mary found herself defending Ponter, a reflex she immediately wished that she’d been able to suppress. “He’s a good man, Colm. Gentle, intelligent, loving.”
“So how does this work?” Colm asked, his tone not as mocking as his words. “Do you play Musical Names again? What’s it going to be this time, ‘Mary Boddit’? And are you going to live here, or are the two of you going to set up house in his world, and-“
Suddenly Colm fell silent, and his eyebrows shot up. “No-no, you can’t do that, can you? I’ve read some of the newspaper articles. Males and females don’t live together on his world. Jesus, Mary, what sort of bizarre midlife crisis is this?”
Responses warred in Mary’s head. She was only thirty-nine, for God’s sake-perhaps “midlife” mathematically, but certainly not emotionally. And it had been Colm, not her, who had first acquired a significant other after they’d stopped living together, although his relationship with Lynda had been over for more than a year. Mary settled on the refrain she’d used so often during their marriage. “You don’t understand.”
“You’re damn right I don’t understand,” said Colm, clearly fighting to keep his voice down so that the few other patrons wouldn’t hear. “This-this issick. He’s not even human.”
“Yes, he is,” said Mary, firmly.
“I saw the piece on CTV about your great breakthrough,” said Colm. “Neanderthals don’t even have the same number of chromosomes we do.”
“That doesn’t matter,” said Mary.
“The hell it doesn’t. I may only be an English professor, but I know that means they’re a separate species from us. And I know thatthat means you and he couldn’t have children.”
Children, thought Mary, her heart jumping. Sure, when she’d been younger, she’d wanted to be a mother. But by the time grad school was finished, and she and Colm finally had some money, the marriage had begun to look rocky. Mary had done some foolish things in her life, but she at least had known better than to have a child just to shore up a faltering relationship.
And now the big four-oh was looming; Christ, she’d be menopausal before she knew it. And, besides, Ponter already had two kids of his own.
Still...
Still, until this moment, until Colm had spelled it out, Mary hadn’t even thought about having a child with Ponter. But what Colm said was right. Romeo and Juliet were simply a Montague and a Capulet; the barriers between them werenothing compared with those between a Boddit and a Vaughan, a Neanderthal and a Gliksin. Star-crossed, indeed! She and he wereuniverse -crossed, timeline-crossed.
“We haven’t talked about having children,” said Mary. “Ponter already has two daughters-in fact, year after next, he’ll be a grandfather.”
Mary saw Colm narrow his gray eyes, perhaps wondering how anyone could possibly predict such a thing. “A marriage is supposed to produce children,” he said.
Mary closed her eyes. It had been her insistence that they wait until she’d finished her Ph.D.-that had been the reason she’d gone on the Pill, and to hell with the Pope’s injunction. Colm had never really understood that she needed to wait, that her studies would have suffered if she’d had to be mother and grad student simultaneously. But she knew him well enough even that early in their marriage to understand that the bulk of the work raising a child would have fallen to her.
“Neanderthals don’t have marriages like ours,” Mary said.
But that didn’t appease Colm. “Of course you want to marry him. You wouldn’t need a divorce from me unless you were going to do that.” But then his tone softened, and for a moment Mary remembered why she’d been drawn to Colm in the first place. “You must love him very much,” he said, “to contemplate excommunication just to be with him.”
“I do,” said Mary, and then, as if those two words had been an unfortunate echo of their own now-distant past, she rephrased the sentiment. “Yes, I love him very much.”
The server came and deposited their entrées. Mary looked at her fish, quite possibly the last meal she would ever have with the man who had been her husband. And suddenly she found herself wanting to give some amount of happiness to Colm. She’d intended to hold firm on her desire for a divorce, but he’d been right-itwould mean excommunication. “I’ll agree to an annulment,” said Mary, “if that’s what you want.”
“It is,” said Colm. “Thank you.” After a moment, he sliced into his steak. “I suppose there’s no point in delaying matters. We might as well get the ball rolling.”
“Thanks,” said Mary.
“I have just one request.”
Mary’s heart was pounding. “What?”
“Tell him-tell Ponter-that it wasn’t all my fault, our marriage breaking up. Tell him I was-Iam -a good guy.”
Mary reached over and did what she’d thought Colm was going to do earlier: she touched his hand. “Gladly,” she said.
Chapter Four
“Let me begin by noting this isn’t about us versus them. It isn’t about who is better,Homo sapiensor Homo neanderthalensis.It isn’t about who is brighter, Gliksin or Barast. Rather, it’s about finding our own strengths and our own best natures, and doing those things of which we can be most proud...”
As soon as her lunch with Colm was over, Mary picked up Ponter from her condo in Richmond Hill. He’d been contentedly watching a classicStar Trek rerun on Space: The Imagination Station. They were all new to Ponter, of course, but Mary recognized the episode at once, the histrionic classic “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” with guest stars Frank Gorshin and Lou Antonio chewing up the scenery with their faces made up to be precisely half black and half white.
They got into Mary’s car, and headed out on the five-hour drive up to Reuben Montego’s place-a journey that would get them there just in time for dinner.
As they motored along highway 400, Mary found herself pumping her horn and waving. Louise’s black Ford Explorer with the vanity plate D2O-the formula for heavy water-had just passed them. Louise waved through her rear window and sped on ahead.
“I believe she is exceeding the limitation imposed on velocity,” said Ponter.
Mary nodded. “But I bet she’s really good at talking her way out of tickets.”
Hours passed; kilometers rolled by. Shania Twain and Martina McBride had been replaced first by Faith Hill and then by Susan Aglukark.
“Perhaps I’m not the best spokesperson for Catholicism,” said Mary in response to a comment from Ponter. “Maybe I should introduce you to Father Caldicott.”
“What makes him a better spokesperson than you?” asked Ponter, taking his attention off the road-racing along highways was still very much a novel experience for him-to look at Mary.
“Well, he’s ordained.” Mary had developed a little hand signal-a slight lifting of her left hand-to forestall Hak, Ponter’s Companion, bleeping at words she knew he wasn’t familiar with. “He’s had holy orders conferred upon him; he’s been made a priest. That is, he’s clergy.”
“I am sorry,” said Ponter. “I am still not getting it.”
“There are two classes in a religion,” said Mary. “The clergy and the laity.”
Ponter smiled. “It surely is a coincidence that both of those are words I cannot pronounce.”
Mary smiled back at him; she’d gotten to quite like Ponter’s sense of the ironic. “Anyway,” she continued, “the clergy are those who are specially trained to perform religious functions. The laity are just regular people, like me.”
“But you have told me religion is a system of beliefs, ethics, and moral codes.”
“Yes.”
“Surely all members have equal access to those things.”
Mary blinked. “Sure, but, well, see, much of the-the source material is open to interpretation.”
“For instance?”
Mary frowned. “For instance, whether Mary-the biblical one, Jesus’ mother-remained a virgin for her entire life. See, there are references in the Bible to Jesus’ brethren-‘brethren’ is an old-fashioned word for brothers.”
Ponter nodded, although Mary suspected that if Hak had translated “brethren” at all, he’d already done it as “brothers,” so Ponter had probably heard her say something nonsensical like, “’Brothers’ is an old-fashioned word for brothers.”
“And this is an important question?”
“No, I suppose not. But there are other issues, matters of moral consequence, that are.”
They were passing Parry Sound now. “Like what?” asked Ponter.
“Abortion, for instance.”
“Abortion...the termination of a fetus?”
“Yes.”
“What are the moral issues?”
“Well, is it right to do that? To kill an unborn child?”
“Why would you want to?” asked Ponter.
“Well, if the pregnancy was accidental...”
“How can you accidentally get pregnant?”
“You know...” But she trailed off. “No, I guess youdon’t know. On your world, generations are born every ten years.”
Ponter nodded.
“And all your females have their menstrual cycles synchronized. So, when men and women come together for four days each month, it’s usually when the women can’t get pregnant.”
Again a nod.
“Well, it’s not like that here. Men and women live together all the time, and have sex throughout the month. Pregnancies happen that aren’t wanted.”
“You told me during my first visit that your people had techniques for preventing pregnancy.”
“We do. Barriers, creams, oral contraceptives.”
Ponter was looking past Mary now, out at Georgian Bay. “Do they not work?”
“Most of the time. But not everybody practices birth control, even if they don’t want a baby.”
“Why not?”
Mary shrugged. “The inconvenience. The expense. For those not using contraceptive drugs, the...ah, the breaking of the mood in order to deal with birth control.”
“Still, to conceive a life and then to discard it...”
“You see!” said Mary. “Even to you, it’s a moral issue.”
“Of course it is. Life is precious-because it is finite.” A pause. “So what does your religion say about abortion?”
“It’s a sin, and a mortal one at that.”
“Ah. Well, then, your religion must demand birth control, no?”
“No,” said Mary. “That’s a sin, too.”
“That is...I think the word you would use is ‘nuts.’ “
Mary lifted her shoulders. “God told us to be fruitful and multiply.”
“Is this why your world has such a vast population? Because your God ordered it?”
“I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.”
“But...but, forgive me, I do not understand. You had a man-mate for many tenmonths, no?”
“Colm, yes.”
“And I know you have no children.”
“Right.”
“But surely you and Colm had sex. Why were there no offspring?”
“Well, um, Ido practice birth control. I take a drug-a combination of synthetic estrogen and progesterone-so that I won’t conceive.”
“Is this not a sin?”
“Lots of Catholics do it. It’s a conflict for many of us-we want to be obedient, but thereare practical concerns. See, in 1968, when the whole Western world was getting very liberal about sexual matters, Pope Paul VI issued a decree. I remember hearing my parents talk about it in later years; even they had been surprised by it. It said that every instance of sex has to be open to the creation of children. Honestly, most Catholics expected a loosening, not a tightening, of restrictions.” Mary sighed. “To me, birth control makes sense.”
“It does seem preferable to abortion,” said Ponter. “But suppose youwere to get pregnant when you did not wish to. Suppose...”
Mary slowed to let another car pass. “What?”
“No. My apologies. Let us discuss something else.”
But Mary got it. “You were wondering about the rape, weren’t you?” Mary lifted her shoulders, acknowledging the difficulty of the subject. “You’re wondering what my Church would have wanted me to do had I become pregnant because of the rape.”
“I do not mean to make you dwell on unpleasant matters.”
“No, no, it’s all right. I’m the one who brought up the example of abortion.” Mary took a deep breath, let it out, and went on. “If I’d become pregnant, the Church would argue that I should have the baby, even if it was conceived through rape.”
“And would you have?”
“No,” said Mary. “No, I would have had an abortion.”
“Another time when you would not follow the rules of your religion?”
“I love the Catholic Church,” said Mary. “And I love being a Catholic. But I refuse to relinquish control of my conscience to anyone. Still...”
“Yes?”
“The current Pope is old and ailing. I don’t expect he will be around too much longer. His replacement may relax the rules.”
“Ah,” said Ponter.
They continued on. The highway had veered away from Georgian Bay. To their left and right were Canadian Shield outcroppings and stands of pine trees.
“Have you thought about the future?” asked Mary, after a time.
“I think about nothing else these days.”
“I meanour future,” said Mary.
“So do I.”
“I-please don’t be upset; but I think we should at least talk about this possibility: when it’s time for me to return home, maybe you could come back with me. You know: move permanently to my world.”
“Why?” asked Ponter.
“Well, here we could be together all the time, not just four days a month.”
“That is true,” said Ponter, “but...but I have a life in my world.” He raised a large hand. “I know you have a lifehere ,” he said at once. “But I have Adikor.”
“Maybe...I don’t know...maybe Adi
kor could come with us.”
Ponter’s one continuous eyebrow rolled up his browridge. “And what about Adikor’s woman-mate, Lurt Fradlo? Should she come with us, too?”
“Well, she-“
“And Dab, Adikor’s son, who is to move in with him and me the year after next? And, of course, there is Lurt’s woman-mate, and her woman-mate’s man-mate, and their children. And my minor daughter, Megameg.”
Mary blew out air. “I know. I know. It’s impractical, but...”
“Yes?”
She took one hand off the wheel, and squeezed his thigh. “But I love you so much, Ponter. To be limited to seeing you just four days a month...”
“Adikor very much loves Lurt, and that is all he sees of her. I very much loved Klast, but that was all I saw of her.” His face was impassive. “It is our way.”
“I know. I was just thinking.”
“And there are other problems. Your cities smell horribly. I doubt I could take that permanently.”
“We could live out in the country. Somewhere away from the cities, away from the cars. Somewhere where the air is clean. It wouldn’t matter to me where we were, so long as we are together.”
“I cannot abandon my culture,” said Ponter. “Or my family.”
Mary sighed. “I know.”
Ponter blinked several times. “I wish...I wish I could suggest a solution that would make you happy.”
“It’s not just about me,” said Mary. “What would makeyou happy?”
“Me?” said Ponter. “I would be content if you were in Saldak Center each time Two became One.”
“That would be enough for you? Four days a month?”
“You must understand, Mare, that I have difficulty conceiving of anything more than that. Yes, we have spent long stretches of days together here in your world, but my heart aches for Adikor while I am here.”
Mary’s face must have suggested that Ponter had said something insensitive. “I am sorry, Mare,” he went on, “but you cannot be jealous of Adikor. People in my world have two mates, one of each sex. To be resentful of my intimacy with Adikor is inappropriate.”