by Carol Mason
‘I’m all right! It’s only my thyroid. I mean, not only. It’s quite a serious thing if it’s not looked after. He said it’s called Graves’ Disease. My thyroid’s overactive, basically. Which explains a lot of things—why I’ve been so tired, not sleeping, going to the potty all the time, a few other things. You’d think he’d have checked it when I went up there to see him a few weeks ago. He said he thought it was irritable bowel syndrome when I said I was doing a lot of Barrys…’
‘Despite feeling at the end of my nerves, I have a titter. ‘Good God mam…’
‘I’ve got to go on some pills, which is the bad news. But the good news is the beautiful pretty pills must be working because my blood pressure’s gone down.’
‘It was high in Greece, when that doctor took it.’
‘He was gorgeous. I think he got me worked-up.’
I suddenly feel very impatient with her. ‘Mam, I’ve worried myself sick. Didn’t you think of ringing me to tell me all this before you swanned off to London to see Georgios?’
‘I forgot.’
‘You FORGOT? Ah! Your toyboy Georgios never mentioned he was going to London in his emails to me!’
‘We’ll remember to report to you first next time we plan anything spontaneous.’
‘You both need to grow up and start taking some responsibility! I thought you were dead!’
‘Stop saying that!’ she says, traces of a laugh behind the words.
I feel shattered, like I’ve been through the mill. ‘So now you’re going to run off with him into the sunset are you? Is that what you’re about to tell me?’
‘Yes, actually… we got married.’
I just about drop with shock. ‘What?’
There’s a pause, then she says, ‘I’m kidding.’
‘You’re kidding? You’re sick!’
‘Yes! Of you!’
‘Look…. can you be serious for a minute and tell me what’s really going on?’
‘Nothing’s going on. I mean, nothing very important. Because my dear, you might find this hard to believe, but Georgios is not The One. I went to London to give him one more chance, to see if he might be, but it just didn’t happen for me.’ She sighs, sounds like the very topic is tiresome. ‘I’m sorry but the earth hasn’t moved.’
I’m not quite sure what she’s getting at, and I don’t feel like asking. ‘What about him? I think he might be in love with you.’
‘Yes, because he thinks I’m playing hard to get. But the thing is, I’m not playing.’
Good God, she’s mental. ‘Look, can you just think about something, for a minute, before you write him off?’
‘Heh?’
‘Well, Mam, Georgios is a catch. I mean, I’d have had him. A lot of women would think you were very lucky.’
‘A lot of women would think I was lucky to get your dad. Angela, other people’s standards shouldn’t make you rethink your own.’
‘So Georgios doesn’t meet your standards, is that what you’re saying?’
‘He’s just… he’s just… It’s not him, Angela. It’s me. There’s something I’m not feeling. Something I want to feel. I suppose… I suppose I’d like to have what you and Jonathan had, if the truth be told.’
Isn’t it usually the other way round? The daughter wanting what her parents had?
This sweetens me up. ‘So would I,’ I tell her.
~ * * * ~
Today would have been Jonathan’s thirty-eighth birthday.
I have not yet learned to rationalise my emotions, and I’m not sure I want to. But I’ve prepared myself to have a very ‘down’ day. But, to tell the truth, it feels more like an exercise in faking sadness.
In my new house, I find myself sitting by the window, after breakfast, gazing across the street at our old home. So many memories come to me; but good ones, not sad ones. I realise I don’t have to look at the house where he once lived to feel he was ever there. Because he still is here. He’s moved over the street with me. He’d have followed me if I’d gone to the moon. That’s just the way death is. I don’t think I even believe in death any more. All death is, is living once or twice removed.
I go for a bit of a crazy boozy lunch with my new client—a very nice girl who works under Crystal—Sienna is her name. She and I hit it off really well. Next week I’m going to be giving two workshops at Zeit Media. One on a guide to effective report and proposal writing, and the other is a grammar refresher. It’s all very scary and very exciting. Sienna, though, is excited for another reason. Her boyfriend of just six months proposed, and she’s wearing a whopping one-carat diamond from Tiffany. She felt like celebrating, and I am a legitimate excuse for a fancy, expense-account lunch. We don’t speak one word of business the whole time. I ask her why they got engaged so quickly. Her answer was, ‘We knew. Why wait?’ I smiled softly, thinking, lucky her. It’s a lovely lunch. I come away feeling like I’ve acquired not just a client, but perhaps a new friend.
It strikes me that when I celebrated all of the firsts after Jonathan died, I’d focus on doing anything that would take my mind off what I might have been doing with him. But right now what I want most for his birthday is to do the very thing I’d have done with him if he’d been alive. I’m going to celebrate his life even if he’s not here to do it himself. As long as I’m around, Jonathan’s always going to have his birthdays.
I call in at the wine store and while I’m perusing the selection, I notice the Marilyn Merlot Napa Valley 2004 with Marilyn Munroe’s sexy pout all over the vinyl label. Jonathan loved her. He’d have bought it just for the novelty. It surely has to be the perfect choice then…
At home, I crack it open and pour myself a big glass, taking the bottle with me into the back garden. I’m back to thinking about Sienna and her boyfriend, and the idea of them getting engaged so quickly, because they knew it was right. I think of my mother knowing that Georgios isn’t right. Then I think of me. My Greek meander ring sparkles in the last of the evening sunshine. I move my thumb so that the white gold parts glint in the light, and seem to bring the ring alive. My Greek ring, symbolising the flow of life, eternal life, eternal love.
Just then, the phone rings and I hear Kye’s voice. I let the machine take it. I know I won’t see Kye again. I didn’t know it until about three seconds ago, but now I’m sure of it. I’ll see him at the Epilepsy Society meetings, which is going to be a bit weird no doubt, especially at first. But I won’t see him that way. The sex was nice and I’m glad I had it, but it feels good pulling out now. I can’t see him being too heartbroken. For a brief second it crosses my mind that Jonathan might have sent me Kye for a quick fling, but more importantly for me to remember that I’m only going to love the one who is right.
I sit there until it’s black dark and I’m chilly, then I go in the house, taking my glass and empty wine bottle.
I’ve got used to my bedroom, to sleeping under the skylight, with the moon shining right in my eyes when I open them. Tonight though, I’m restless. It’s a full moon, and I’m convinced the more I stare at it that I see life up there. It makes me think of Georgios, and his story about Selene, goddess of the moon, and what Georgios and I said that night at the restaurant about how there’s always one star that seems to shine brighter than the rest, that seems to twinkle just for us.
Is there really a star that’s guiding me? Sometimes I’m sure Jonathan’s up there, making something happen, and other times I don’t believe in anything other than what I know for a fact—that which can be proven.
‘Maybe you just couldn’t do it,’ I whisper into the dark, moonlit room. ‘I asked you to send me someone to love, Jonathan, but maybe that was hoping for the impossible.’
The idea that there is something my highly capable husband can’t do doesn’t make me feel good. And I know it wouldn’t make him feel good either. I don’t want to lose faith in him, even though he’s dead. It would feel like he no longer loves me. If you can still love from the other side: I like to believe you can.
; I hold my breath for a few moments, to see if he might say something, send me some sort of sign.
A sign though, when I’m asking for one, wouldn’t be Jonathan’s style.
Twenty Five
A couple of days later, the newspaper delivery lad—the same lad who used to come when I lived across the street—still has the same lazy habit of flinging the paper onto the lawn instead of the deck, so when it’s pouring down, like it is this morning, I have to get sopping wet, not to mention muddy feet, to go get it.
I catch him, though, this time. ‘Can you just make sure you put it on the deck please? All the way if it’s not too much trouble.’
He looks at me, recognition flooding his small, fat, freckly face. ‘You moved,’ he says. ‘You’re the cranky one from across the street!’ He looks almost pleased to see me.
‘You’ve definitely got the wrong person,’ I tell him.
He walks off, looking over his shoulder at me, grinning.
I walk back inside the house, feeling chilly. The weather has that crisp, early Fall feel to it now, and I wish we could fast-track through winter and months of rain, and have long, warm summer nights again.
The weekend edition is a thick one. I pull sections of the paper apart, randomly discarding all the ones I don’t care to read: sports, automotive, classified… I drop them on the floor beside the sofa, keen to find the one I enjoy the most: Arts and Life.
I’m just sitting down in the chair by the window, with my freshly brewed cup of Illy coffee, when the phone rings.
Who would phone this early on a weekend if not my mam checking up on me? I pick up. ‘Yeah, yeah. What d’you want Viv?’
I’m expecting her chuckle, but what I get is an, ‘Oh. Shit. Sorry to disappoint you. I’m not Viv.’
It doesn’t take long for the accent to sink in. The voice.
‘Is it really that early there though?’ he says. ‘I thought Vancouver and Seattle were in the same time zone?’
‘Sean?’
There’s another pause, where I feel his pleasure waft through the phone. ‘What gave the game away?’ he asks, with the sound of a smile in his voice. ‘Was it the Irish accent, or the bit about Seattle?’
Sean? Can it really be him? ‘Oh… it was just a wild guess.’
Now I remember him, in a way, as quickly as I’d almost forgotten him. Sean McConnell. The man I thought I’d never hear from again.
‘You moved,’ I say, nervously playing with my thumb ring.
‘I moved.’
‘So this means… I mean, what does this mean? It means you’ve left her?’ Thoughts of them dancing seem to pinch me back to reality and my guard creeps up.
‘No, actually. She’s sitting right here with me on the couch.’
I’m too astonished to speak.
‘She’s not,’ he says, again the smile in the voice. ‘As it happens, I don’t know what she’s doing and I don’t really care. I haven’t seen her in nearly two months.’
I stare at my ring, rotating it with a finger, memories of that holiday swimming around me now.
Sean McConnell—who left his wife—is here, only two hours away, in Seattle. This is impossible.
‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to say,’ I tell him honestly, because I really don’t.
‘You’re not supposed to say anything. I’m the one that rang you. I’m supposed to say things.’
‘Say something then.’
‘Shit. This is harder than I thought it was going to be.’
‘But… I mean, I don’t even know how you knew where I am… How did you?’ Did I give him my phone number? No, I definitely didn’t.
‘Oh… there aren’t that many Angela Chapmans in Vancouver who run a company called Write Strategies with a website with a photo on it that looks like you.’
‘No,’ I say, and grin broadly. ‘Just me and that other bitch.’
He laughs. ‘But you’re much better looking than her.’
I’m still smiling, sliding my ring up and down my thumb. ‘You’re making me nervous,’ I tell him.
‘I have that effect on people,’ he says, and then there’s a very awkward pause.
‘Well the reason for my call, in case you are wondering—which I reckon you probably are… is that I’ve found this fabulous little street vendor at the Pike Street Market who makes a mean gyros, and I was wondering if you’d like to come down here and have one with me some time.’
‘A gyros. Hang on…’ I fidget, moving the newspaper around with my feet as it sits on my rug. You want me to come all the way to Seattle for a gyros?’
‘Not just any gyros. A bloody big, honking, fantastic pork one, to be precise. With lots of shredded lettuce, thin disks of ripe tomato, and tzatziki. Lots of tzatziki slathered all over the place. And don’t get me started about the buns.’
‘You’re very persuasive when you get going.’
‘Don’t fall over yourself hurrying to answer,’ he says. ‘The suspense is killing me. How about if I say, there’s absolutely no strings attached. If you want, you can literally come down here, eat and leave. I won’t be offended. I’ll understand what the draw was.’
I can’t seem to form a sentence. I’m just about to try to get my tongue around the word ‘okay’ when something happens. My nervous fiddling with my ring sends it flying right off my thumb. It seems to travel through the air almost in slow motion, and lands with an audible plik onto the newspaper at my feet. Right onto the front page of the Lower Mainland section. Onto the picture of a man.
It’s a face I recognise instantly.
‘So what’s it going to be?’ Sean says.
‘Let me think about it,’ I tell him, only half seriously.
But I already think I know.
One Year Later
I take his craggy hand, as we walk out of the basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere, into one of the oldest piazzas in Rome. Our last of seven nights here, before we move onto the island of Capri tomorrow.
It’s the end of May, as yet not quite warm in the evenings, but my shiver vanishes when he puts his arm around me and I burrow into the softness of his navy sweatshirt.
The fountain in the centre of the piazza is floodlit and a throng of people sit on its steps. Two giant men on stilts, painted from head to toe in silver, perform daredevil acrobatics to a cheering crowd. From somewhere classical music plays, so full and uplifting it feels like it could raise the sky.
We sit at a pricey patio in the square. The restaurant, Sabatini, brims with smart Romans ordering the standard fare—drawn-out courses of antipasti, followed by overpriced pasta, followed by platters of bright-eyed whole fish twinkling here and there with olive oil and lemon, or hunks of roasted lamb on the bone, propped up by a cluster of potatoes. I read about this place in the guidebooks, then completely forgot about it. Yet by chance we’ve just stumbled upon it, as though we were somehow meant to find it for our last night in this fantastic city. We order two wood oven pizzas, because that’s exactly what we fancy, but we splurge on a good bottle of vino.
The pizza is perfect. The wine, a vibrant Chianti whose name I must write down, makes the meal and the moment thoroughly decadent. I get a rush of in-loveness with Rome, and my life, one of those I could live here with you forever moments. He sees it. Across the table, his mellow Harvey’s Bristol Cream eyes twinkle and flare, in response to the tears in my own. I’m too overcome with happiness to speak. He knows this. Even from the very first time we met, this Roger knew things without my having to tell him.
I never went to Seattle. As soon as my ring landed on that photo of him in my newspaper I knew. Roger Krieger, the controversial City planner opposing some garish new development that’s slated to impress the world when the 2010 Winter Olympics is hosted in Whistler, was the man I wanted to see again. I think I always knew from that first disastrous date. Only I wasn’t ready then. I’d gone to bed that night in my new house knowing I was ready to love again, but with a feeling in my bones that Jonathan h
ad somehow let me down, and that was so uncharacteristic of him. The fact that Sean phoned right the next morning felt uncanny. But when I saw Roger’s face on the page of that newspaper, it felt like fate.
I told Sean I wouldn’t be coming to Seattle, that I’d met somebody else. Then I found Roger Krieger’s email address. I said that while I knew he probably wouldn’t want to touch me with a barge pole, after how I’d behaved the last time we went out, I just wanted to write and tell him that I was feeling much better about myself now, and I was sorry how our two attempts at dates had turned out. I wrote that any time he wanted to take me to a movie about a kinky widow who went around peeing in bushes while spying on her neighbours having sex, he had only just to call. Although I added that I didn’t expect he would. I imagined he’d have some other woman in his life by now—it was, after all, not far off a year since I’d last seen him.
I got an out-of-office auto reply. He was out of town on business. The following Tuesday I got a real reply.
I hear they’re making a sequel
Roger.
PS. No other woman, as you asked.
I thought it was a bit short, and I didn’t know what to make of it. But then he rang me that night.
‘I’d rather do pizza again, than the movie,’ he said. ‘Last time, the waitress felt sorry for me and didn’t make me pay. I got to take your pizza home as leftovers. It made a great lunch. Maybe I might as get lucky again?’
I smiled down the phone. ‘But that assumes I’ll walk out on you again.’
‘Well, won’t you?’ he said quietly.
If he was as great as I had remembered him, I wasn’t going to let him get away twice. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll stick around at least as far as coffee.’
~ * * * ~
‘Can we give everything up and come live here?’ I ask him now. He told me I’d love Rome. He was right.
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘if you like.’
‘We can? Why do you always give in to me?’