Then boots on the wooden porch. There might have been horses at the door. They burst in, instrument cases colliding, one of them letting loose a stream of really shocking invective. “I’m not fucking even going to call her,” Simon said, and I guessed the whole story, that all this emoting had to do with a girl. Joe Jr. shushed him, “She’s always home,” which could have been a reference to me or the love interest. During the valiant struggle to get their boots off, they didn’t speak at all.
It embarrasses Joe Jr. when I’m eager in front of his friends so I waited a few minutes before going out, six minutes by the clock on my computer screen, time enough for them to half-empty the fridge. Every container was out, all the lids confused, the diminishing smorg spread out between them as they sub-vocalized between mouthfuls. “Hello,” I said and they sprang back like startled carnivores off their quarry.
Joe Jr.: “Thanks for the heart attack.”
Simon was back to not seeing me, though I saw him because his acne glowed. Supposedly they have miracle cures now—gone the hell of tetracycline, the shame of the Ten-O-Six pad. But poor Simon is incurable. ( Joe Jr., luckily, hasn’t had to suffer the way his father did.) “How was school?” I asked.
Joe Jr. fed himself a chipful of salsa in lieu of a reply.
“Not too boring?” I asked.
“Mom.” He glanced at Simon, who had his neon chin tucked into his shoulder to avoid me.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
Vsyo normalno?
“Yes!” he snapped.
So much for the new mother-son communication. I’d promised to tell him the rest of my story but, apparently, he didn’t want to hear it any more. Slinking off, smarting despite how I had been dreading confessing to him, I left them to make chewing sounds at each other.
Earlier in the day, transcribing Chekhov’s letter, I read this one too: Nobody wants to understand me. Everybody is stupid and unjust. I’m in a bad temper and speak nonsense. My family breathes easier when I go out. Evidently it’s viral. Now they’ve got it too. It must be the wonderful weather, the scented air, the flouncy trees—enough to put anyone in a foul mood. Plus, I was getting no work done, which is fine when you have no work, but when you actually do, it’s frustrating.
I stumped back to the computer and just sat there.
Joe got home from the hospital a few hours later, just as my bad mood was peaking. He washed his hands in the kitchen, sliced the bread on the cutting board. Over at the stove, I manned the ladle. “Not so much,” I told him. “It’s just us.”
“Where’s Joey?”
“He went out somewhere with Simon.”
“Did he skip today?”
“How would I know?”
I set a bowl of soup in front of him. Before picking up his spoon, he paused to scratch all over his head with both hands, hair standing at attention, imagined flakes swirling and descending over his bowl. “Mmm,” he said, tucking in. “Good.”
After a few spoonfuls, he noticed my disgust. “What?” he asked.
“You just seasoned your soup with dandruff!”
His shoulders sagged, but he carried on—buttering his bread, dipping it in his bowl. Finally, he mustered his courage. “What’s wrong, Jane?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re presenting differently.” Then he looked around the room. If I hadn’t spent an hour concocting soup (after tracking down the blade of the food processor that Maria had secreted away), if I hadn’t undone Maria, he would have noticed right away. She leaves this vinegary miasma behind. I thought of her departure that afternoon, trudging out to the guzzler with her belongings in a half-dozen plastic bags—change of clothes, plastic shoes and wallet, even her own rags—while her pimp idled out front, ruining the climate.
“We should fire her,” Joe said.
“Finally,” I said. “Thanks for offering.”
He’s so kind, so sweet, so cowardly. He looked horrified. “How about we move to another city?” he said.
I sighed because here’s my problem with Maria, why, even though she only comes every second Tuesday, she exercises such power over me. She reminds me of my aunt Eva, who died twelve years ago. I was eighteen when I lived with my aunt, old enough to recognize what that basement repository of flattened cans stood for. The smelly balls of wool. The way she cooked for ten then froze the eight remaining portions, just in case. In case of what? I thought I was so smart. I thought I—I!—could prevent a war, but it never occurred to me that my aunt and father were so odd because they’d lived through one. I dipped my spoon in my bowl of guilt, lifted a bearable dose to my lips, sipped. Across from me, Joe ate heartily because he is a man with a clear conscience. The doctor’s conscience is a big glass room, shiny and full of light. I watched him bend over his bowl, dousing his bread, slurping like a Russian peasant, and it made me feel vengeful.
“So,” I said. “Last night Joe Jr. told me you go behind my back all the time.”
He tried avoidance. “Are we still on the newspaper? I left it out for you.”
I said, “That’s what he told me last night.”
“Last night when?”
“When I sat on him.”
“You sat on him?”
“By accident.”
Now, resignation. It doesn’t take much to bring on that state in Joe. I presume he’s very much in charge at work, but here he’s mostly resigned. He blinked wistfully at his bowl because sometimes he doesn’t have time for lunch. Why was I punishing him? “Eat,” I said, disgusted with myself now, and he did, with renewed diligence.
He served himself seconds, then asked if the manuscript had come.
“Yes.”
“Good. You’ll have something to do.” He hesitated. “Is it a good book?”
“I don’t know. Searching for errors spoils the effect.”
“Are there a lot?”
“No.” I explained how fewer errors actually made the work less enjoyable; you start nitpicking to justify your fee. He shook his head in genuine amazement and immediately, I felt lousier. How could he be impressed with that after how he’d spent his working day? Someone might have died, or been saved, yet he acts as though what he does is no more difficult than correcting lie and lay. Sometimes he’ll freeze in the middle of something and call out, “Jane! Help! Am I lying this down or am I laying it?”
“I’m so critical,” I moaned.
“It’s your job.”
“I’m so grumpy!”
“That’s part of your mystique!”
“Oh, you sweet darling,” I said, turning away and hating myself like in the old days.
Joe went down to The Lair after dinner. He keeps the volume low but I could hear the disquieting, irregular clank of the weights striking the concrete floor. Joe Jr. was still out with Simon and hadn’t called to say where he was. Maybe they’d gone over to the girl’s house, or arranged to meet her somewhere. Not, I prayed, on the infamous Granville Mall where hordes of teenagers hope to evade the ID checks in the clubs, where they loiter when they’ve been carded, vulnerable to pushers, to pimps, to peer pressure, to being in the wrong place at the wrong time, to et cetera, et cetera. I was too restless to work or read so I went out for a walk.
In Vancouver the streets are mainly laid out in a grid. The numbered avenues run east to west, the streets north to south from Burrard Inlet to the Fraser River, so although our neighbourhood is much farther south than Kitsilano, the street names are the same. I headed west and the first street I reached was Gandhi, a.k.a. Blenheim. Along it and on the avenue ahead, the trees were all in bloom. There were two different types, a stately white on Gandhi and a pale, confetti pink on 38th. I’d always thought they were cherries, but yesterday Rachel had said some were plums. Now it struck me that I’d lived for twenty-one years in this city famous for its parks, for its trees, for wearing green the whole year long and all these pastel shades in the spring, yet there was barely a tree I could name. I was trying not to worry needlessly abo
ut my son because, after all, it was only just after eight o’clock. I tried to enjoy the beauty of the plums (or cherries) instead, but the beauty of the plums (or cherries) reminded me again of that spring when I loved Sonia so much that I suffered physical pain, a dull throbbing in my chest that never let up. Occasionally stories appear in the paper about lovers separated, usually by war, who somehow reconnect decades later and fall in love again. I always wonder how they distinguish passion from angina. Was that what Joe Jr. and Simon were going through, that exquisite agony? I hoped they didn’t love the same girl. Me, Dieter, and Pascal—we were all in love with Sonia.
I got as far as Chomsky Street, then turned back in case Joe Jr. called.
Joe was in the shower. I checked for messages, but there were none so I put on my nightgown and got into bed where I lay willing the phone to ring. A few minutes later Joe came in.
“Did Joe Jr. phone while I was out?”
“Were you out?”
“I went for a walk.”
“That’s nice,” and he sat down on the bed and leaned over me with his wet hair dripping on my face. “Was it raining?” he asked.
“It just started.”
We kissed for a minute, though I wasn’t really concentrating. I can do it with my eyes closed, so to speak. He broke off to say, “So the kid’s out? That’s convenient.”
“Where do you think he is?”
“I have better things to think about.”
He was just trying to seize an opportunity. Tomorrow he was on call. He didn’t have to get up so early. Also, it’s very difficult to have uninhibited sex with an adolescent in the house. But I needed reassurance before I could get into the mood. “He has his cell. He’d call if there was trouble. Wouldn’t he?”
Joe: “He’d better not. We’re not answering.”
He kissed me again, forcing me to run through my list in mid-act. It’s different now from when he was in kindergarten; pedophile abduction, for example, has been updated to teenage prostitution. I’d never heard of crystal meth until last year. Some things never change: car accidents, random acts of violence, earthquakes, nuclear war. A cell going bad. That cell doubling, then trebling. Joe had no idea what was running through my mind during his caresses. Or maybe he did.
Then, in the middle of it, after I had peeled my nightgown off and tossed it on the floor, a wonderful thing happened. Several wonderful things, but one of them was that minutes went by, many minutes, when I stopped thinking about my son and the perils of being alive in this world, when I thought instead about my husband and what he was doing to me. And afterward, as we lay there breathing hard, Joe singing “Fucked Up Ronnie” under his breath, I realized this just might be the thing. Better than Chekhov even. Better than Xanax or Ativan or Tolstoy. Because pleasure is so distracting when you allow yourself to feel it.
Joe stopped singing. “I have an idea.”
“I do too.”
“You go first,” he said.
“I think we should go to a motel. Tell Joe Jr. we’re going to a movie, but go to a motel instead.”
He swelled. “Am I as good as that?”
“You are,” I said, lifting his hand off my breast to kiss his palm. “What’s your idea?”
Second thoughts crowded onto his face; I had to prod it out of him.
“Go and see her,” he said.
“Who?”
Who indeed. And how? All this time, as far as I knew, Sonia had been in Ontario. Or maybe they’d moved her again. I could have written, but I didn’t. I didn’t know what to say. She probably wasn’t even the same person. How could she be? How long can you stay earnest behind bars? Or idealistic? If it were me, I wouldn’t last a day.
“How would I find her?” I asked Joe. “Presuming I wanted to. She’ll hardly be in the phone book.”
“It’s not hard to track people down. Contact her lawyer.”
“How would I find out who her lawyer was?”
“Jane,” he said. “Jane. Here in the twenty-first century? We have this thing called Google.”
I rolled over. “Yes. I’ve heard of it.”
He went to sleep. I lay awake, fluttery and anxious. All those feelings forced into dormancy by trauma, stirred up again. I didn’t want to see her and, no doubt, she felt the same. Yet I couldn’t help wondering what she looked like now. Immediately I pictured her long hair white, which was ridiculous because we’re the same age, thirty-nine. But the very least thing prison probably did to you was age you prematurely. Maybe it had made Sonia the old woman she thought she’d never get the chance to be.
1984
I couldn’t sleep. All night I kept feeling that distorted ridge of bone under my palm. I sweated, tossed. Gulped water and got up to refill my glass. The next morning seemed like it would never come, but it did. It came much too soon with Sonia shaking my arm and asking, “You don’t have an exam, do you?”
“No. Do you?”
“I’m not going. Let’s take him to the Endowment Lands.” Pascal had not run away from us. He was still asleep on the chesterfield when I came down. During the night, one of the things I had fretted about was that the police would be looking for him. His picture had probably been in the newspaper. We didn’t normally get the paper because it was full of lies, but by sheer chance I’d picked it up yesterday for the classified ads. I went out on the deck where the recycling was piled and scanned the headlines. It was a beautiful spring morning and the sun made my headache sing. But there was nothing in the paper so I went back inside.
Sonia was making pancakes. “We’ll wake him in a minute,” she said.
And suddenly the solution came. I had confused it with my fear. “Let’s call the police.”
She turned to me, shocked. “We can’t have the police here, Jane. What about the action?”
“We’ll take him to the university and call them there. They’ll take him home.”
“You heard what he said last night. He’ll just run away again. We’ve got to make him change his mind.”
“How?”
“We have to convince him. We have to show him how wonderful it is to be alive.” When she said this, I sank down at the table with my head in my hands because there was no one, no one, less suited to this task than me.
Sonia went to rouse Pascal, who joined us, eating cheerfully and heartily. I stared at him. He had cancer. I had felt it myself, his tangible, bony death, not the hypothetical one I always felt for myself. Yet neither cancer nor our sombre mood affected his appetite, though that other symptom of our distress, our barely touched plates, got his attention right away. “All the More for Me” was apparently the motto he would die by.
The bus took us up Kropotkin Street. We transferred and got off where the Endowment Lands began, crossing a city street—two lanes in each direction separated by a meridian. From there we stepped directly into forest. Traffic noise ceased and it seemed we were already miles from human commerce or habitation, deep in a strata of green, leathery leaves underfoot, ferns waist-high, trunks and branches brightly furred with moss, overhead a cathedral span of boughs. “Holy shit,” said Pascal, craning to take in the full height of the trees. He turned a circle on the path. Sonia, she was brilliant. This was how we’d make our case for life, without even saying anything.
For a few minutes that’s what we did, walked in silence, then Pascal left the trail and set off bushwhacking in his white boots. We started to follow, but when too many branches whipped back and stung our faces, Sonia and I returned to the trail. Farther ahead, around a bend, Pascal leapt out from behind a tree and scared us. Apparently our screams were hilarious. Sonia glanced at me and, clearly worried that silliness was about to replace reverence, chose this moment to take his hand. He grinned and tried to kiss her. I was outraged, but he had cancer. He had cancer. I didn’t even know the word in Russian.
Sonia gently pushed him off. He walked over to a mossy trunk and began caressing it instead. “Isn’t it beautiful here?” she asked him. “
Wouldn’t you miss this?”
He said that he would. He said that was why he was determined to stay. The trees in Esterhazy were barely trees compared to these.
“I mean if you were—” She choked on the word.
Pascal: “Dead? We’ll all be dead in a few months anyway, right?”
“I hope not!”
“But that’s what the generals say.” And he put an arm around the tree that could not refuse him the way Sonia had and swung around it, smiling at his own cleverness. “Since they’re the ones with all the bombs, I guess they know what they’re talking about.”
Sonia glanced at me again, imploring. I just stood there. Because maybe he was right. It was our own logic flung back in our faces and it stung as much as the tree branches had.
She changed tack. “Don’t you want to see your squeeze one last time?”
Right away, he softened. “I said goodbye. They didn’t know it, but I did. I hugged them and said I loved them and then I snuck out in the night.”
“What do they do?” Sonia asked.
“My parents? My dad works at the plant. My mom’s just a mom.”
“She must be heartsick,” Sonia said.
“I called them from a payphone. I told them I was okay.” He walked on.
“You seem so nice,” Sonia said, following. “Would you really hurt her like that?”
Pascal turned. “You’re always asking me questions. Can I ask you one?”
“All right.”
“Why don’t you have a boyfriend?”
I waited for her answer too. “I couldn’t,” she said.
“Why not?”
“What if something happened to him?” she said, and the way Pascal shook his head, it was clear that he already subscribed to the wonders of being alive, that it was Sonia and I who, in our fear of dying, had turned our backs on life.
Sonia gave up on the subject after that. She dropped behind and walked with me, letting Pascal lead the way. Though he had no idea where he was going and chose each fork in the trail at random, eventually we emerged onto a paved road across from a row of duplex housing for students with families. We trudged across the campus. I hadn’t eaten anything, had barely slept the night before. The watery pressure of unshed tears was building up inside me.
Pleased to Meet You / The Sky is Falling Page 39