One weekend, I said that I was going to leave her. She had a complete breakdown. She said that I might as well kill her. She could not live without me. She said she was sorry for everything that had happened. She said I could have her now if I wanted. I could have her any way I wanted. She would be my slave and consent to anything. She literally kissed my feet. She begged me not to go. She begged me to have sex with her. She said that even if she wasn’t ready, even if I hurt her, she would not mind.
But I realized that I no longer wanted sex with her. Not the way she was now.
Finally, after several days of ceaseless arguing and tears, I relented and I said that I would not leave her. I explained that the marriage would remain intact, but that the rules had forever changed. From now on, I would be free to have sex with other women. That is all it would be: sex. In every other respect, I would honour our marriage vows, and to the outside world, we would be man and wife, just as we had always been.
The very next day, I took the waitress out on a proper date. The following week, we made love. She was the first of several women. I never slept with a student. I was very careful about that. I wanted Stella to be able to present herself at university functions without fear of any potential complications. But around the city, there were many other places to find women. It was all purely pleasure seeking. That is, until I kissed you.
Maybe the arrangement I made with Stella sounds cold and impersonal. But it saved our marriage. This is a robust institution, Mary. It has to be. It can survive all sorts of accommodations, compromises, deal-making. It isn’t the noble institution that so many claim it to be. It is what it has to be.
I had read all of the messages. They were burning my eyes. I had sat in that room for five hours straight. I was like an over-zealous lawyer familiarizing himself with a case. I was still hungover and exhausted. And yet my mind was racing. It was time, I had decided, to pay another visit to the Brookfields.
29
I had a moment of panic. How was I going to drive out to New Sarepta? I had to go now. There was still daylight. It was three o’clock. I could not go at night. I didn’t want to be on that road after dusk — risking an encounter with another train stabbing the dark with its lights. It was an absurd fear. There was only the most remote chance of a train being on the tracks at exactly the same moment as me. But the very idea of that spot spooked me.
Then I figured out what I should do. I would take Julianne’s car. I bundled up against the cold and ran down the street, hoping that one of her roommates would be there. I prayed briefly. Half a minute later, Vicki answered. I said I had forgotten something in Julianne’s room. Could I go get it? She made a strange face at what she clearly considered a strange question.
I darted up the stairs, two at a time. In Julianne’s room, I pulled open the top drawer of the dresser. Thank God. There it was. The spare key to the Honda, next to her jewelry box.
“See you, Vicki!” I called out as I slammed the door shut.
She couldn’t see me back out of the garage at the end of the yard. It would not even have stopped me if she could.
I drove out of the city. The roads were nearly empty. I could drive over one hundred and twenty kilometres an hour. There were serpentine eddies of snow that slithered onto the blacktop from the ditches, but nothing impeded my view.
I cruised past the old woman’s house after crossing the train tracks. A total stranger, someone whose name I didn’t even know, had been the last person to see my parents alive. I should have talked to her long ago. Is that not something you should do?
But I kept on going. It was as if I had no more volition than an arrow shot from a bow. I did not consider what I was going to do or say. I simply heeded the streaking white lines and the trajectory of my car in relation to them. I had temporarily become mechanical, compelled by a function and nothing more.
When I arrived at the Brookfields’, I felt satisfaction to see their solitary car parked at the side of the house. I walked to the door, clenched my fist, and rapped three times. When I had left Edmonton, the faint breeze had been bearable. Now it had a razor’s edge to it.
Stella came to the door. This is what I had expected. She had been the one to open the door for years — as if it were beneath Jacob’s dignity to do it. She had clearly already peered out the window to see who was there because she showed no surprise.
“Luke — what a delight,” she said. “Come in.”
She tried to embrace me, but I stayed stiff and inert in her arms.
“Jacob’s here?”
“Yes. He doesn’t teach today.”
“Good,” I said.
She led me into the living room and pointed to the chair where I was to sit.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
I shrugged off her question. I could hear the creaking of floorboards of someone’s approach. It was Jacob. He stopped when he saw me. His entry from the bedroom had a theatrical aspect to it. He made a slight bow.
“We’re honoured to have your company again so soon,” he said. “Boring old people like us aren’t used to being such a draw to the young.”
Condescension stuck to his every sentence. The couple stood in front of me, two feet apart, like sentries — armoured with smiles, but clearly, underneath all that, slightly discomfited. I was not going to waste time.
“Oh, I don’t think you’re boring old people at all,” I said.
Jacob strained his already fatigued smile.
“That’s kind of you to say.”
He sat down with the same air of ceremony, pulling on the fabric of the knees of his pants slightly as he did so. Stella quickly blurted out something about tea or coffee. I ignored her.
“I didn’t come here to flatter you,” I said.
“Well, of course not,” said Jacob. “What is there to flatter, after all?”
This was the battle of wits that we had waited all our lives to engage in.
“I couldn’t have said it better myself,” I retorted.
Stella, looking scared, retreated to the kitchen. Jacob shifted heavily in his chair.
“If I didn’t know you better, Luke, I’d say you were trying to give offense.”
“If I haven’t made that clear, I guess I’m going to have to try harder.”
He turned his head aside for a moment, unable to hold my stare. I heard a cupboard door clanging shut in the kitchen. My heart was unmoored and bobbing around as if at the mercy of rapids. It was difficult even to breathe.
Jacob sighed and forced himself to look at me.
“All right, then,” he said. “Tell me what this is about.”
“What do you think it’s about?”
“I have my suspicions,” he replied, affecting a world-weary air.
“You have your suspicions?”
“Luke, I’m not going to have some kind of word-fight with you. Say what you’ve got to say.”
Stella drifted weakly into the room again. She took a place on the couch, on the side furthest from me. We now made a triangle, with the coffee table inside it.
“You look sick,” said Stella. “Are you okay?”
“He does look sick,” said Jacob. “He looks almost green, in fact. Have you had any sleep, Luke?”
He seemed to derive some kind of added strength from having his wife with him. His huge body seemed compressed in the chair that he sat in, as if it were spring-loaded and ready to launch at me at any second.
“I’m not sick,” I said.
“You shouldn’t be driving,” said Jacob, as if I hadn’t breathed a syllable. “It’s going to start blizzarding this afternoon and no one should be out in it — least of all a sick person.”
“Do you want to check Environment Canada for driving conditions?” said Stella. “Maybe you’d be best off staying here.”
They were ganging up on me. They were a sham couple, a pair of imposters, but they could make the marriage work for the purpose of taking on a common enemy.
“I’ll
bet you hardly slept last night,” said Jacob. “Your eyes have got a glassy, bloodshot tinge to them.”
“Maybe coffee wasn’t such a good idea after all,” said Stella. “It’ll keep you up. You need sleep. You should lie down for a few hours and wait for the blizzard to blow over.”
Where was the blizzard they were predicting? I looked out of the window, but nothing had changed since my arrival. The firs at the end of their property were wavering slightly, and the sky was overburdened, but not a flake of snow had yet fallen.
“Don’t worry about me,” I said.
“I know we can be overbearing,” said Jacob, “but it’s only human to worry.”
When he said this, I immediately recalled one of his messages. It was the one where he had told my mother that it was okay to feel conflicted about adultery — that it was, in fact, a good thing to feel conflicted — because this was the very thing that made her human. He might as well have spit in my face. It would have been just as contemptuous. He didn’t mean a damn word he said. To talk of being human was, to him, a license to do whatever the fuck you wanted, fuck whoever you wanted, and to hell with whoever stood in your way.
I had been unable to understand the deep loathing I had for him until this moment, but now I more than understood it, I felt it in my blood. He had created the miserable world I lived in. He and his generation sought no higher goal than emancipating yourself. Being yourself, expressing yourself, loving yourself and finding yourself were the sum total of their moral code — but this wasn’t freedom, it was repression of the worst kind, because it enslaved everyone to their desires. What was my father supposed to do with this kind of freedom? Shouldn’t he have had the freedom not to be fucked over by his friend and colleague? Fuck being only human.
“I don’t think your concern for me is human,” I said, and then flushed, because I was confused, and this is not what I had meant to say. “I mean… I mean, it may be human, but it definitely isn’t humane. There isn’t going to be a blizzard. You want to get rid of me.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” said Jacob, pretending to be indignant.
“You can’t talk your way out of this,” I said. “You’ve already written the whole case against yourself. I’ve got the messages at home. My mother printed out practically every last one. The last one was sent not even a month ago.”
“What messages?” said Stella, but her voice was quiet, and now the kettle was whistling in the next room, and she jumped up as if she were frightened of being attacked.
“I’m equally lost,” said Jacob. “You’re ranting, man. Do you hear yourself?”
I wished at that moment that I had the papers to throw at his feet, but I had not brought them. I had felt unsafe at the prospect of his seeing them. I had worried they would be destroyed and the evidence would get lost. But why the hell had I been so concerned about evidence? So long as I alluded to the emails’ contents, I had proof of the affair, and Jacob was to be found guilty in the only court of law that mattered.
“I know that you lied to me about the affair. My parents never had an open relationship. You slept with my mother and my father didn’t know a thing about it. You worked alongside him — were friends with him for how long? And this is how you treated him. You wanted to fuck his wife all along. I remember you from when I was a kid. I knew you were a lecherous fuck. I wasn’t fooled by it then. But my father was so naïve. So devoted to his work and so trusting. He was—”
Suddenly, Jacob was shouting me down.
“He was willfully blind!” he bellowed. He stood up. Oh, the bull was angry now. He was pacing as if his paddock were too small. “Don’t be an idiot, Luke. I don’t know what missives you’ve found, but I was there and I know what happened. Your father didn’t want to know what was going on. He was a cripple. He couldn’t emote, couldn’t feel, couldn’t articulate what he wanted. He couldn’t be a full human being, and he knew it. He had given up. The evidence was all there… He could have found out at any time.”
“That’s shit,” I said, too enraged to articulate anything more intelligent.
“You’re shit,” said Jacob, turning on me and trying yet again to stare me down. I was stunned by how quickly all illusions had crumbled. The situation had entirely boiled down to its essence: two men who utterly despised one another standing face to face in the living room, and Stella hovering like some kind of referee.
“What did you say to me?”
“You heard me, Luke. I said you’re shit. How long have you even spent in the city since you were eighteen? Two months? You abandoned your parents after making their lives hell for the first half of your life. You fly in every five years as if you are some kind of aristocrat because you live on the West Coast and mix with some famous people. You want to tell me now that you have found compassion toward them — toward, of all people, your father? You’re just as stunted as him. You two wouldn’t have talked even if you were the last ones left alone on a desert island. You have no idea what was going on while you were strutting around on film sets with sycophants and groupies. You’re clueless, Luke. You’re as ignorant as a newborn. You’re as vacuous as a tabloid paper. Don’t dare to claim any knowledge of what was going on while you were a thousand miles away. Don’t dare tell me that you ever — for a moment — gave a brass nickel about what your parents were up to back here in Hicksville, Alberta. You’re a fucking fraud, Luke — barging in here with your accusations and your trumped-up evidence and your air of righteousness. We were consenting adults, Luke, and your father would have said something if he had a pair of balls, but that’s not what he wanted because all he really wanted was a nice, comfortable life and nothing emotionally taxing.”
We were going to fight. There was no other way because we hated each other too much. But suddenly, Stella screamed, ran into the diminishing gap that separated us, and pushed me away with such force that I tripped and almost fell.
“You’ll kill him,” she said.
Jacob’s face was red and his breathing had suddenly become laboured. He was making wheezing noises.
“You’ll kill him,” she repeated, shrieking.
“I hope so,” I said.
She guided Jacob back to his chair. He was like a boxer being dragged reluctantly out of the ring. They were pathetic. She said, “Where’s your inhaler?”
She stuffed her hand in his shirt pocket, then his pants pocket, and Jacob said, “No, no. In the kitchen.” She rushed to the kitchen, and while she was gone Jacob put his head back and struggled to get his breathing under control. He was sweating. He looked like he’d done ten rounds already, but he hadn’t even lifted a finger. Stella rushed back with the inhaler. He put it to his mouth and started sucking on it violently. I might as well not have existed. They were going on without me. Stella darted away again. She came back with a glass of water.
“Incredible that you can even fuck,” I said to Jacob. “That should have been what killed you.”
30
Jacob looked ashamed of himself as his wife fussed over him — fetching him another glass of water, checking his pulse, dabbing his brow with a handkerchief. I would never have imagined how pathetic he could become. He was like a big, drugged bear at the zoo. Both of them asked me to leave, but I refused.
“I want to know what happened,” I said.
“What do you mean, what happened?” Stella retorted, angrily. She had taken up position behind Jacob and rested her hands on his shoulders.
“The night that they died,” I said.
Jacob pushed away one of Stella’s hands. He leaned forward, but he was still visibly suffering. It was evident that I had beaten him without lifting a finger. Ten years ago, I might not have fared so well, but in his aging years, he was a man who did not know his own strength — did not know how much of it had so abruptly abandoned him.
“What do you want to know about that night?” he asked. “What are you hoping for?”
“I just want the truth.”
&nbs
p; “They dined with us. They left in their car. They crashed.”
“There’s more than that…”
“There isn’t anything more than that.”
Suddenly, Stella intervened.
“Tell him, Jacob,” she said. “He knows everything else, anyway.”
I have never seen a face so marked by despair as I saw then. Jacob had been intent on still fighting, but Stella’s expression was one of grim resignation, even disgust. I imagined briefly the beautiful woman she would have once been. It was in those large eyes that contained only sadness and regret. She had no pride left. That is what was most shocking. There is nothing as tragic as a woman without pride. I cannot begin to fathom how empty these years had been for her. As if, since the loss of her baby twenty-six years ago, she had been doing nothing more than slowly dying… slowly letting go of each and every last shred of hope.
“You want me to tell him,” said Jacob, not as a question. More like an echo.
“You might as well,” she said bitterly.
“What exactly am I supposed to tell him?”
She sighed heavily, angrily, and dropped the other hand from his shoulder. She stepped away and moved to the couch where she slumped. Although I could no longer see her face, I sensed that she was staring at him. His eyes would dart from her to me and back again.
When the story started to leave his lips, it had none of the usual flow of his speech. It was awkward, clumsy, and ineloquent.
My parents arrived late for dinner. Immediately, Jacob could tell his colleague was distracted. He didn’t smile, barely talked, and when everyone sat down to eat, he devoured the contents of his plate without any seeming pleasure, as if he just wanted to get it over and done with.
There was to be a major geology conference in Edmonton the following month. It was no small feat for Leonard to have enticed such a prestigious event to the university, but the resulting workload, in Jacob’s opinion, was slowly burying him. He wasn’t getting much help. And whenever help was offered, Leonard typically refused it.
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