Even an affair with a woman in a penthouse condo had become a dull creep toward the inevitable. And now, that woman is at the edge of a glass railing and she says she wants peace.
“Nancy?”
“Yes, Ray?” Nancy lights a cigarette. Ray can hear the lighter, a puffing sound, and her exhalation.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” he says.
“I quit a couple years ago.”
“And yet you are smoking right now.”
She sighs. “It is because I don’t give a shit, Ray. What’s a couple cigarettes?” She’d only managed to quit because of the two packages of cigarettes, in a Ziplock baggie in the freezer. Those packs were her escape, her parachute, and her desperate recourse. For two years, she’d resisted because in the back of her mind, she knew she could smoke any time she wanted. A cigarette was just there, under the frozen pizza and behind the cans of frozen orange juice.
“What’s really going on?” Ray says.
“I’m tired,” she says. “I’m tired of not being important.”
“You are important…”
“…Not to you. Not anymore. Not to anyone, really.”
“I’m going to come back up there…”
“…No! No. You can’t come back up. I don’t want you up here. Just stay where you are.” But she does want him to come back up. She wants him to hold her and tell her everything is going to be fine. She wants him in her apartment, and in her bedroom and in her. She knows this about herself and she knows if she allows this to happen she will lose all power. Right now, she has power.
“You don’t believe me, do you?”
He hesitates. What are the consequences of him saying he does not believe her? “I believe you are serious,” he says finally. “I believe you’re upset. And angry.”
“You don’t think I can do it, do you?”
“I think you can do anything you put your mind to.”
“Good, I’m glad. Now we’re making progress.”
“Look, we’re going to have a talk and then you’re going to have a drink and go to bed.”
“Do you think you have any power right now, Ray? Is that why you’re telling me what I’m going to do?”
“Not about power,” he says. “It was a wish.”
“It sounded more like an order, and anyway, I’m already having a glass of your scotch.”
“You’re drinking scotch?”
“I thought I might like to taste it, other than through you.”
He thinks about kissing her and a frisson twitches in his back. “And do you like the taste of it?”
“Yes. It’s delicious,” she says. “But it wasn’t delicious at first. Only after three sips – three big sips.”
His phone cuts out as another call pops up. It’s Tulah’s number and he declines the call.
“What was that?”
“I had another call. Another call beeped in. I’m here.”
“Who was it?”
“It was work. We’re in the middle of a project right now. They think I’m in a meeting.”
“It was your wife, wasn’t it?”
She’s guessing. She couldn’t know for sure. Really, it’s none of her business. “It was Joe, from work,” he says. “I’ve been trying to set up a meeting with him.” He thinks about this lie. It would make no difference if she knew the truth. Wives call husbands all the time. It’s normal. So why is he lying?
Tulah sends him a text message: You must be in a meeting. Call me when you’re out.
“Shall we call your wife and have a chat? We could ask her how she feels about your being with me. We could ask her if she just called, or not.”
“You know that’s not going to happen.”
“You mean the truth is not going to happen. Because we don’t like the truth. We live in the shadows of the truth.”
“You’re right.”
“So it was your wife?”
“No, the part about living a lie. That’s true.”
“I didn’t say we were living a lie. I said we lived in the shadow of the truth. That’s different.”
Chapter 20
Tulah at 15
Tulah’s Snow Journal
Friday, September 14, 1990 #1
The snow is falling straight down. It’s heavy and wet. It makes everything innocent and new. It falls everywhere. It falls on the rich and the poor with a perfect equality. The happy and the sad. Men and women. Cats and dogs. It’s so nice to walk in it – to not worry about getting my shoes wet. Because trying to avoid getting them wet would result in the same wet shoes that I have now, from just walking. To just walk and feel it touching my face and my hands is cool. I’ve never really thought about how much I love snow before.
I do not know if I will continue to write about snow, but I did put a number on this entry. I called it #1, but I don’t know what this is.
This snow is early. Everyone is freaked out because it’s barely fall and here is winter. The leaves aren’t even turned yet. Not all of them anyway. Everyone is saying it won’t stay but it feels cold enough that it could. It could last right into October and November and through Christmas, January, and February and all the way to the end of March. It could also be gone by the end of the week. It doesn’t matter. It’s here now and it’s beautiful. Mom and Dad are fighting again. They’re downstairs going at it. They’re screaming at each other about summer vacation, and money. To fight about summer in the midst of a snowstorm is kinda funny. At least I think so.
The snow is soft. It’s falling straight down but it’s gentle. It muffles everything. The traffic sounds disappear. And I guess it muffles me too. I am made gentler by this falling snow. I wonder if it will always be like this.
Mr. Johnson – he’s my English teacher – read a poem by this poet Rumi, called Like This. It was beautiful. If you ever doubt my love for snow, if you ever doubt its cold complexity, if you ever doubt its soft beauty – stand in the falling snow with me, hold my hand, and look up, like this.
* * *
Tulah is fifteen. She adjusts her headphones and turns the music up. She’s listening to Mahler’s fifth symphony, again. There’s a skip around the halfway point of this record, so she’ll have to get up and move the needle. She doesn’t really like the music of the day. She knows it but she prefers the complexity of the ‘70s, R&B, jazz and folk. Classical music was new to her. This was a gift from her father, who had more than 3,000 albums of classical music and jazz. She was exploring this collection, leaping from piece to piece, randomly gathering her favourites. She’d jumped in because of the movie Pretty Woman and La Traviata, and found she liked classical music. And her father was up late one night watching a movie called Heaven. He did not tell her to go back to bed when she came downstairs and curled up with him on the couch. He simply put his arm around her and they watched together. There was a scene on a train, and Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel was playing. Tulah fell in love with that piece of music, and Cate Blanchett’s desolate face.
“Arvo Pärt is over there,” her father says, pointing at the wall of albums. “Far right, one shelf down, in the middle somewhere. It’s called Spiegel im Spiegel. Translates as – mirror in mirror.”
They did not have to talk. It was something Tulah had been doing with her dad since she was ten. She would sneak downstairs and find him with a glass of scotch, watching a movie. He would always smile and make room. He was never drunk. He seemed only to be interested in sipping his drink for a few hours and reading, or watching a movie.
She’s not sure if she wants to keep numbering her journal entries. It seems like a good idea but what’s the point? It was a new journal, and it was the first time she’d written about snow but it was a bold stroke to put the number one there at the top of the page, as if there would be a number two, and a number three, and so on. Maybe she’ll keep writing about
snow. Whenever and wherever it happens, she’ll write it.
This snow drew attention to itself by arriving so early.
She’s done with Mahler for now. She presses play on the tape deck and Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U plays. She knows Bryan Adams’s Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman? is next, and then Bon Jovi’s Blaze of Glory.
Of all the songs from the ‘70s that she loves, she loves Janis Ian’s At Seventeen the best. She holds this song close because her face has broken out and it seems no matter what she does, it’s not going to clear up. Each pimple is a body punch to her barely emerging self-esteem. She can’t imagine a boy liking her. She doesn’t even like her. She is not beautiful, not like the girls who hang out at Lisa Campbell’s locker between classes. Add to this, the fact Tulah is fifteen and she still does not trust her own bladder. In the past few months, she had a couple nights in which she’d woken up to a wet bed. She thought she was out of the woods with the bed-wetting, but her bladder had other ideas. She was only happy that it was not every night.
It would be devastating to be at a sleepover and have something happen, which is why she avoided sleepovers. Her mom took the blame as an overprotective parent – she was happy to be the scapegoat, the reason Tulah couldn’t sleep over, the reason she was being picked up at midnight. For Tulah, her uncontrollable bladder was humbling and terrifying.
For grade 10, she pretty much keeps her head down and hopes nobody is talking about her – she wants to be grey, or beige – she hopes she’s not so weird that she will draw attention and scorn. Tulah’s strategy is to become almost invisible and slide through high school mostly undamaged.
Her plan works fairly well. In the first couple of months, Tulah focuses on school. She wears nothing colourful. She never raises her hand in class. She manages to develop a few friends who are equally invisible.
It was second-term language arts when the wheels of her plan fell off. In the dead of winter, Mr. Johnson saw what she was doing and told her to stop it. “Ms. Roberts? Tulah?” he said, in the third week, and in the middle of the period, actually, in the middle of a sentence. They’d been talking about Orwell’s Animal Farm. He looked up, looked at her and tilted his head a bit – as if he’d just figured something out. “Please see me after class,” he said.
She had no idea what this was about but she stayed in her seat and when everyone was gone, Mr. Johnson looked at her and smiled kindly. “You’re not being honest with me, and I find that annoying.”
“What? I…”
“…You are smarter than everyone in this class and yet you pretend you’re average.”
“I don’t see how…”
“…let me finish. Last week, when I was giving my brilliant synopsis of Animal Farm and stopped to ask if anyone knew what literary trick Orwell was using to make his point, nobody in the room said anything. Nobody made eye contact and nobody answered. You, however, mouthed the word ‘satire’ as you were looking away.”
“So?”
“So, you knew the answer. I think you know most of the answers to most of my questions. Sometimes it feels like you know the answers to my questions before I ask them.”
“I like Orwell,” she said.
“When did you read this book? When did you read Animal Farm?”
“Two years ago, the first time,” she said.
“You’re precocious,” he said. “I use this word because I know you know what it means.”
Tulah looked up at Mr. Johnson and smiled. She had no idea a teacher could be this direct, and honest.
* * *
She starts to crawl out of the land of beige. She starts to speak up in Mr. Johnson’s class, which pleases him, and in all her other classes too. Her grades, which were hovering above average, ascended to where they belonged – which was in the ‘honours with distinction’ range. Her face does not clear up. In fact, it gets a little worse. Her doctor says she has a new drug that is “very effective” but she’s a little worried about the side effects. And, she has to be on birth control to take it. They’re going to talk about it in a couple months. In early December, she realizes she hasn’t had a bad night – her parents call the nights she wets the bed, ‘the bad nights’ – for months. She starts to get invitations to parties from a different group of friends. Not the nerds. Not the indescribable group of boys who play a complex card game that is so convoluted it’s absurd. And not the pretty-pretty girls. But rather, the reasonably good-looking kids who realized being cool in high school was less important than being smart. These were the kids who valued the idea of being intelligent. To them, smart was cool.
Then there was the awful night of the talk. The talk is sad and painful. One night, about a week before Christmas, her parents sit Tulah and her sister, Alesha, down and tell them they’d tried everything but they could not seem to work out a way to live with each other. Things were going to change.
Alesha stood up. “Try fucking harder,” she said and then ran down the hall to her room. The sound of a slamming door, and then silence. Her parents looked at her and waited. Tulah knew. She knew two years ago. She was not entirely surprised by this announcement. She’d noticed when her parents stopped touching. And they no longer kissed in the morning. And the presents they gave each other were less romantic and more utilitarian. Her mom gave her dad a toaster for his birthday. He gave her an espresso maker – Italian and expensive and more for himself than for her.
Inside she was a swirling storm of emotion. Her brain could not reconcile her parents not together. This was her mom and dad. They were there, together, for her entire life. It was as if she was falling down in slow motion. She couldn’t stop falling and she couldn’t speed it up. She just had to live with that falling feeling. She didn’t understand. Even though the signs and symptoms were neatly lined up, she could not make it stay in one place. She wanted to step away, into a world she understood, a world in which the water was calm and warm. She wanted to scream and freak out and run away, but her sister had already grabbed that set of reactions. Instead, she gave her parents something that made both their mouths fall open.
“Okay,” Tulah said. “I believe you tried. Now what?”
Chapter 19
“My brother is big”
“God gives to those who get up early”
– Zhanna Petya
After her father died, Nancy’s brother, Slava, went away and a few months later the money started to arrive. The first Wednesday of every month, a package containing a bundle of roubles would be delivered. It was a time of great opportunity in Russia. The Soviet Union was breaking apart and new alliances were being formed. New forms of corruption were being organized inside the guise of glasnost and perestroika. For three years the money came from cities in Russia: Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Kazan, and then Moscow again. The fourth year, the money was wired from New York.
Their mother knew, of course, but she would not speak about it. Her son was working in America. He was successful enough to send a little money each month. He was a good boy. Her friends knew better than to ask what exactly Slava was doing in America. Working in New York was the end of the conversation, not the beginning. As the monthly deposits grew in size, Zhanna Petya knew her son was moving up in the ranks of the Russian Bratva. When they talked on the phone, her first question for him was always, “Are you safe?” And he would answer: “I am surrounded by trusted and loyal men. Yes. I am safe.”
By the time Nancy told her brother about the hockey player, Slava had been in New York for five years. She needed his approval before she would agree to leave with Dmitri. It took Slava a week to get back to her. “He’s a good boy,” he said. “A good family. If you need anything, you call me, and I will arrange it.” She does not know what kind of a check he performed but she trusts her brother. “And when Dmitri has money, you tell him to call me. I have some investment funds that are low risk, and high reward.”
“Hallo, Nensi,” he would say. “It is good to hear from you. How are you?” He never used her North-Americanized name. He preferred the name she grew up with.
“So, I am coming to America. Dmitri has signed with the Montréal Canadiens.”
“You know that Montréal is in Canada, right?”
“Of course,” she said. But she didn’t know. She’d assumed it was in the United States. She hadn’t really thought about it. All Dmitri’s other options – Chicago, New York, and Florida – were clearly American.
“When do you leave?”
“Three weeks, Slava. They want Dmitri at training camp.”
“I am happy for you, Nensi. You will like Montréal. It is not as old as Kursk, but it is much older than the rest of the country. Now, tell me about the twins, and how is our mother? How is she dealing with your leaving?”
Nancy fills him in. The twins are in the ninth grade. Their mother is stoic about Nancy’s leaving. She is fretting but accepting. She would have preferred that Nancy and Dmitri were married before going on this adventure, but she sighed and offered one of her nuggets of wisdom – “Not all who make love make marriages,” she said.
Nancy lasts two years with Dmitri. He is driven to be the best National Hockey League hockey player he can be and his hard work comes with the reward of a hefty contract. When Montréal is eliminated from the playoffs in the spring of the second year, Dmitri eliminates Nancy from his life.
They were at a restaurant on St. Catherine Street.
“I think we are done,” he said.
But Nancy was not about to make it easy on him. She knew this was coming. They hadn’t made love in months and he was rarely home, except to sleep. And the other hockey wives had turned cold and distant on her a couple months back, as if they knew something she didn’t. “But I’ve just started my meal,” she said. “Are you not feeling well?”
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