The man in the backhoe halts the movement of the bucket in midair, but he does not look to Ray – he looks at the Transportation foreman, who is standing behind Ray.
Ray turns around. “Look Joe,” he says. “You’re going to kill this tree. If you go any deeper you’re going to cut through those roots. You’ve already damaged them.”
“New sidewalks gotta go in,” Joe says. “I have a schedule. All the sidewalks in this neighbourhood have to be lowered, re-graded and they all get rounded curbs.”
“It’s seventy, maybe eighty years old, Joe. Can’t you build a smaller sidewalk?”
“There’s only one way to build a sidewalk. It’s gotta have a gravel bed. And for that, I have to dig, and it has to be flat. The engineers were here yesterday. Talk to them.”
“I will.”
Ray walks over to where the backhoe bucket is stopped. “These roots are called buttress roots and there are delicate feeder roots attached. This tree is fifteen metres and it probably weighs ten tonnes. If you cut through those roots you risk killing it.”
Joe smiles. He does not want to come up with a different way to do his job. He is not interested in trees. He doesn’t get paid enough to care about trees. He works with concrete.
“Do you like trees, Joe?”
“I never really think about them,” he says.
“Do you have trees in your back yard?”
“What? Yes. There are trees in my yard.”
“Would you miss them if they were suddenly not there?”
“I don’t know. I guess so.”
Ray sighs. “Here’s what I need you to do, Joe. I need you to stop this section of your work right now. I will write a stop-work order so you can show your boss, and then I’ll try and straighten this out.”
“You want me to stop work?”
“I want you to go work somewhere else – away from any trees – while we sort this out.”
“Because of a tree?”
“Yes. Because of this eighty-year-old elm. Because most of its roots are within a couple feet of the ground and that’s where you’re digging.”
“The engineers aren’t going to like this. They say it has to be flat for this sidewalk. We have to make it lower at the corner so wheelchairs can…”
“…fuck the engineers, Joe. And fuck the handicapped. Don’t you think this tree is more important than wheelchair accessibility?” He looks at Joe, who has still not moved. “Let the handicapped roll, or walk, or move on the other side of the goddamned street.”
Joe has already moved on. He is thinking it is almost time for a mid-morning coffee break, and a cigarette. He could really use a smoke.
* * *
“I don’t think it was,” Ray says.
“You don’t think it was what?”
“Enough,” he says. “For months I was torn in two by my feelings for you. It wasn’t enough. It was never enough.”
“It was something other than nothing.”
“Yes. It was something,” he says. Ray looks out through the front window. The tree nearest to his car is a Green Ash. These trees are drought and alkali resistant. They grow quickly and they turn a pale, creamy yellow colour in the fall. This tree is tinged with yellow – it’s ready to turn. And once it turns, it doesn’t last long.
“I don’t want to talk about us anymore. Can we talk about something else?” She’s fidgety – she can’t decide what to do with her hands. She doesn’t know if she wants to stay seated, or stand up and walk around. Despite her aversion to all things Afghan, there are three extravagant Afghan rugs in her condo – two in the living room and one outside on the balcony. She likes having these carpets because she doesn’t care about them. And the more she doesn’t care, the more durable they seem. They are stained, weather-worn and compressed, and still, they are beautiful.
“I think it’s going to snow today,” he says.
* * *
Once, two months after Ray starts meeting Nancy in her condo, she comes to the door and says she just wants to talk. She does not say, ‘we need to talk.’ She has watched enough television to know the clichéd overtones of this phrase. She says she would like it if they just talked.
“Okay,” Ray says. “What would you like to talk about?”
“Everything,” Nancy says. “But mostly us. I want to know this is more than just sex.”
“You want to talk about how this isn’t just about sex while you’re wearing that?” She is wearing a black bra and matching panties.
“It’s how I dress in my own home. I always dress like this.”
They sit at the kitchen table. Nancy makes coffee in silence. She puts a kettle on to boil and grinds beans. She pulls two mugs and the press from the cupboard and places them on the counter. Ray could sit and enjoy her company, watch her moving around the kitchen and not say a thing. Nancy does not like the quiet gaps. She wants something in there. Inane, or profound, or whimsical – she does not like silence.
Nancy turns around and looks at him. “We make love, right?” Her face is serious and concerned – furrows between her eyes. She barely blinks.
If Ray were honest, he’d probably say he wasn’t sure if it was making love or fumbling around in a field of desire. The whole thing was so part-time, he did not trust his own feelings. He used to think love came from a limitless well, and there was plenty for everybody in his life. He does not believe this now. His feelings for Nancy are diminished because she is an extra woman and there is only so much of this particular kind of love. All his feelings for her were sliced in two. All of them except desire. Desire was not diminished. Ray doesn’t really care what she calls it – making love, screwing, copulating, coitus, intercourse, having sex…it doesn’t matter to him. But he senses she wants to know he thinks it was making love. He realizes Nancy is still waiting for an answer, so he gives her a hopeful one.
“We make love,” he says. “I wish we were making love right now.”
“If you’re a good boy, you may get your wish,” she says.
“How, exactly, can I be good?”
The kettle starts to whistle and she lets it go. It grows to a steady, piercing scream. She observes the billowing steam as if it’s a new thing. As if the frantic whistling does not exist.
“When you get there, I’ll let you know. Tell me how you feel about me right now.”
Irritated, he thinks. Impatient. And a little frightened. The ice of this conversation is thin. “I adore you,” he says.
Nancy presses the plunger and pours the coffee. She wants him to tell her he’s dropping his wife and starting a new life with her. She does not want to admit she is the clichéd mistress. This idea disgusts her. She has friends who have slept with married men and it always ended badly. So she has decided not to define what is going on between her and Ray. She’ll leave it open-ended and she will try not to invest too much of her heart. She wants him to say he loves her. Maybe he is saying it when he is inside her. But she wants to hear him say it.
“So you think being flippant is going to get you somewhere?”
“But I do adore you.”
She is suddenly exhausted. “Come and make love to me,” she says inside a sigh.
“No. Let’s finish our coffee. Tell me what you did today.”
“I’m sorry? You want to talk? Instead of making love, you want to talk?” He is inviting her to be normal and now she is not sure she wants it. She wants normal but she knows this sort of temporary normal will disappear and then it will hurt. She’s afraid she might fall into the hole of this normal and the sides will be slippery, and it will be impossible to climb back out.
In the elevator, Ray will circle around and remember she said ‘come and make love to me,’ not ‘come and make love with me.’ As if lovemaking is having something done to you, not doing something together. This bothers him. But English is a secon
d language for Nancy. He’s probably overthinking it.
* * *
For Ray, sex with Nancy was all lust and abandoned constraints, but once he was done, he found he quickly lost interest in her. And a wave of guilt would wash through him. There was no time to drift in the aftermath of delight. He would instantly be fighting his guilt, pushing it back.
He always made sure she was taken care of and he loved making her happy in this way, but he really didn’t care. He would have preferred it if she’d leaned up and said something like “That was really nice but you probably want to go now, so you should.” While she was all doe-eyed and needy, and wanting to cuddle, he was wishing to be anywhere but with her. It helped when they drank before sex, or during sex, and it definitely helped Ray if they drank after sex. Only when he was away from Nancy, moving through the rituals of daily life, did thoughts of love enter his mind. These flirtations with the idea of love were suspect in his mind, because they never came when he was with her. How can you only love someone when you are away from them?
Chapter 16
Tulah at 20
Tulah’s Snow Journal
Friday, November 3, 1995 #79(a)
It’s a wet snow, but it won’t last. It has a ‘best before morning’ stamp. This makes it more beautiful than the kind of snow that falls and stays around for a whole winter. It’s not for sure, but this snow probably won’t last past noon tomorrow... I’ve just made tea – I do not know how old these tea bags are but the tea smells okay. Am I a horrible person for coming up here with Robert? Even though I know it’s not going to last? Well, I don’t know that for sure but I have this feeling in my gut that it’s not him. There’s someone out there who is going to be phenomenal. Not true love. Not that. But a big love. The kind of love that will be unshakeable. Better, unstoppable. It will be like an avalanche. Once it starts, you’re going to wind up at the bottom of the mountain. Maybe that’s a dumb metaphor. If you’re swept up in an avalanche, you usually die. Is it stupid and romantic to think this way? Probably. I give myself permission to think about the quality of love. I give myself permission to ponder, ruminate, question the quality of love. I give myself permission to love. I give myself permission. I stop myself there. Everything else is stupid. I do not dream of frilly weddings or expensive, gossamer wedding dresses. I’m no princess. I want no fairy tale. I dream about a kind of massive, mysterious love. Robert is not that love. He’s nice but I’m not feeling it. I had to see, though, so I could be sure. And I love the mountains. Maybe I will marry the mountains.
She wants to be standing naked in this snow. They are staying at a cabin up a twisting road on the side of a mountain, a few kilometres outside of Nelson, British Columbia. The cabin belongs to a friend of her mother’s. It is off the grid. There’s a generator somewhere out back and a chain of solar panels on the roof that power the lights, and they have been using the fireplace to keep the cabin warm. The cabin is small enough that the fireplace is enough. There’s a cook stove in the kitchen but lighting two fires would have been overkill. The black-velvet picture of Elvis above the mantle has to be a joke. The rest of the cabin is decorated with a measure of good taste – the colours work, the furniture is classically comfortable, and the art on the walls consists of obscure prints from Modigliani, Picasso and Chagall. Tulah is drawn to the Chagall instantly. A little white card under this print reads – The Poet with the Birds, 1911. Tulah decides she loves Marc Chagall. She will seek out his art – see if the rest of it moves her this much. The beauty of this print stands in sharp contrast to the velvet Elvis and it was probably meant to.
The curious thing is, she doesn’t wake Robert and tell him she is about to go outside and stand naked in the snow. He likely would have wanted to join her but she lets him sleep. She leaves him alone because it was a long drive up to the cabin and he’d earned a good sleep. She would bet a thousand dollars that Robert would not have come up with the idea to go naked out into the snow. He would not have thought of it himself. He wasn’t creative that way. Maybe that’s the real reason. And maybe it’s also because he was going in for his Bachelor of Commerce and Tulah didn’t know what to make of that choice.
Is it weird to want to stand on the veranda naked? If it’s weird, then she’s okay with that. Even if it’s completely bat-shit crazy, she’s fine with it.
Just after midnight, Tulah steps out onto the deck. She stops thinking about the reasons she’s doing it, and the reasons she’s doing it alone, and she opens herself to the snow.
On the deck the silence is shocking. It is deathly quiet at first, but it transforms into a kind of negative silence – as if sound is being withdrawn by the snow. As if each flake of snow gathers sound and silently sends it to ground. She feels small on the deck, with the light from the kitchen behind her and nothing but mountains and pine and the steady snow in front.
Tulah makes a deal with herself to stay there on the deck until she’s too cold. She will push beyond discomfort. When her feet are burning cold she will go inside.
Will you marry me, mountains? she thinks.
Tulah’s Snow Journal
November 3, 1995 #79(b)
Still snowing. It’s 4 a.m. and it’s coming down hard and fast. It’s socked in and it seems endless.
Her footprints are covered. There’s a foot of snow covering the spot where she was standing. She still thinks of it as a foot or twelve inches, not, about thirty centimetres. Robert is still asleep. When he wakes up, she probably won’t tell him about her whimsy. She thinks she might want to keep it for herself.
She does not feel tired. Tulah peeks into the second bedroom, which is the main bedroom. There are white sheets covering the bed and the furniture. The woman who owns the cabin is in Arizona and only stays at this cabin in the summer months. There are three large windows along the down-mountain wall that probably make for an incredible view. The curtains are a sheer periwinkle colour. A dresser against the wall at the foot of the bed does not have a sheet over it. Tulah entertains her own curiosity. She pulls the top drawer out to find neatly stacked sheets. The second drawer is socks and a few T-shirts. The third drawer is all lingerie, silk stockings and panties and garters. Tulah pokes around in the lingerie. She can’t help herself. She thinks it may be high-quality stuff. The tags seem expensive – Guia La Bruna, Fox and Rose, and two bras tagged Christies, and made in Italy. Underneath a lacy cream-coloured corset there are sex toys. Several small whips and an assortment of dildos in all sizes and colours. There are a couple metal contraptions that Tulah can’t identify. She’s intrigued by the contents of this drawer. She knows about sex toys, of course – her mother had a dildo and children all snoop through drawers – but she’s never gone through the awkwardness of walking into a shop and buying one.
She picks up a cream-coloured dildo. It has a squishy feel to it – it’s soft and firm at the same time. She wraps her fingers around it. Tulah hears a sound in the main room – it sounds like something has dropped. She squeaks – fumbles with the rubbery dildo and drops it onto the floor. It makes a soft thumping sound. She stands still and waits. Nothing. She tiptoes into the main room and there is only the fire crackling and she can feel the heat. Something must have shifted in the stove. She pours a drink. They brought vodka and beer. She’s drinking vodka. It’s after four in the morning. She pours another drink. When she is finished her second drink, Tulah stands up and decides she’s a little bit drunk but she’s also a little bit aroused. Just looking at the sex toys has started a slow burn inside her. The cabin is quiet except for the fire. She’s going to play. She will steal the batteries from the flashlight in the kitchen and she will see. She’s going to put on some expensive lingerie – she’s going to wear a stranger’s lingerie and see what happens.
Tulah’s Snow Journal
November 3, 1995 #79(c)
I was so wrong about this snow. It’s not bloody ephemeral. It’s a constant. It’s 5:30 a.m. and I have no
t slept yet. I should. We’re supposed to ski today. I’d rather find a spa and get a massage. I’m starting to wonder if we’ll be able to get out of this cabin. We could always ski down the road to the main highway but what then? I need to sleep, but I really should record this experience. The toys in the bedroom drawer, standing naked in the snow, and, did I mention the lingerie and toys in the drawer? I’m going to have one more drink and then bed. I don’t mind drinking alone, especially on nights like this when it’s a steady snow. The snow is with me so I am not alone. Tonight, I discovered I really, really like the feel of lingerie on my skin. I love lingerie. I felt so sexy. I will acknowledge the fact I was wearing someone else’s lingerie – someone else’s underwear – and this could have played a part in my level of excitement. And the toys. The toys were someone else’s toys. And whoa!!! I can’t say that I am going to go and buy my own toys, but I will certainly look at investing in some good lingerie when I get home. I love the way it makes me feel. I had no idea about lingerie.
It’s as if this snow is in a hurry to reach the ground – it’s still falling hard and heavy and constantly. On the deck, I thought I could smell pine scent, but maybe I wanted to smell pine. Is there a word for the smell of freshly fallen snow? I know there’s a word for the smell just after it rains. It’s petrichor, which is a noun. And that is the extent of my knowledge about rain. I only know this word because of Mr. Johnson. Why did he believe in me? What did he see in me? He caused me to believe in me. He’s the reason I’m going into teaching. But what’s the word for new snow smell? There ought to be a word for the scent of new-fallen snow. I should invent one – mash some Latin and Inuit words together, but I am too tired to think. Okay, I really have to sleep.
Tulah slips into bed. The crinkling sound of the down quilt, the cool sheets, the dim blue light. Robert rolls toward her. He does not open his eyes.
This Is All a Lie Page 11