Lovers Fall Back to the Earth

by Cecelia Frey

  LOVERS FALL BACK TO EARTH

  Copyright © 2018 Cecelia Frey

  Except for the use of short passages for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced, in part or in whole, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or any information or storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Collective Agency (Access Copyright).

  We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  Cover design: Val Fullard

  eBook: tikaebooks.com

  Lovers Fall Back to Earth is a work of fiction. All the characters and situations portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Frey, Cecelia, author

  Lovers fall back to the earth / Cecelia Frey.

  (Inanna poetry & fiction series)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77133-481-5 (softcover).— ISBN 978-1-77133-484-6 (pdf).—

  ISBN 978-1-77133-483-9 (Kindle).— ISBN 978-1-77133-482-2 (epub)

  I. Title. II. Series: Inanna poetry and fiction series

  PS8561.R48L68 2018 C813’.54 C2018-901519-5

  C2018-901520-9

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Inanna Publications and Education Inc.

  210 Founders College, York University

  4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3

  Telephone: (416) 736-5356 Fax: (416) 736-5765

  Email: inanna.publications@inanna.ca Website: www.inanna.ca

  LOVERS FALL BACK TO EARTH

  a novel

  CECELIA FREY

  INANNA PUBLICATIONS AND EDUCATION INC.

  TORONTO, CANADA

  … and there, eloping skyward

  with the wistfully-fragrant

  tree branches dipping

  farewell

  although they too

  must know

  the lovers will fall

  back

  to earth given

  the time and the

  temptations looming

  ruby-eyed

  in the imagination

  —Pat Allan, “Collage”

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  I. THREE SCENES FROM A STORMY NOVEMBER NIGHT

  1. On the Island

  2. A Prairie City

  3. Across Town

  II. WHAT HAPPENED AFTER

  1. A Winter Morning

  2. A Morning in Early Spring

  3. A Series of Events in Late Spring

  4. Two Years Later

  I.

  Three Scenes from a Stormy November Night

  1. On the Island

  THE SLICK WET PAVEMENT held the tires tight on a course that led smack into the cement barrier. Helena turned the wheel as hard as she could, away from the embankment, away from the ocean. Beside her, Amanda clutched at her throat. Human sound was suspended. The car’s motor, the squeal of brakes, the storm — that was all there was.

  At the time of the accident, the sisters were fighting. They were returning from Amanda’s bingo night out with the girls, activities that Helena regarded as an excruciating waste of time and that Amanda enjoyed immensely. Wasting time always put Helena into a foul mood. Besides, the lack of oxygen in the smoky hall had caused a raging headache that was further intensified by the beer.

  It was nearly midnight when they left Cha Cha’s Bar & Grille. Needles of sleety rain driven by a fierce wind pinned them for a moment to the door that banged shut behind them. Helena held up an umbrella and under its protection they struggled their way to the car and climbed inside.

  “Jesus, I don’t know how you can stand that smoke.” Helena’s low flat tone was punctuated by dramatic emphasis of certain words. “Think of what it does to your lungs.” She shook the umbrella out the driver’s door, folded it down, and tossed it into the back seat. “And your clothes and your hair. And your complexion! I feel positively grey.”

  “We should have done something else.” Amanda’s tone was apologetic. “Or you could’ve stayed at home. Reuben would’ve liked the company.”

  I wanted to be with you, Helena could have said. I didn’t want to share you with those other women. “Don’t worry about it,” she said instead. “It wasn’t a total failure. I got some material for my thesis.” Through the windshield, there was only the blackness of rain against the brick wall of the building they had just left. She turned the key in the ignition and switched on the headlights. “I should have known better than to drink beer,” she said. “I hate beer.”

  “You used to like beer.”

  “Since when?”

  “Back in the Cave days. We used to drink pitchers of it. You used to smoke, too.”

  “That was when I didn’t know any better, like a lot of other things I did in those days.” Helena looked up at the rear-view mirror. There, too, her eyes came up against a black wall, alleviated only by the red blur of tail lights that barely penetrated the thick gusting rain.

  “Twenty years ago. The Philosopher’s Circle. Remember how they named a table after us. The six of us. The things we used to talk about! We had such good times.”

  There was something in Amanda’s voice, something damply melancholic that Helena did not want to encourage. “That was when we were crazy students,” she said. “Another life. I like to think I’ve matured since then.”

  “My first year of university,” Amanda went on as though she had not noticed Helena’s inference. “I was so impressed. You and Esther. My big sisters. And George a professor! And Ben a real live draft dodger! I admired him so much for his rebel stance. So like Reuben’s when you think of it. You were all so sophisticated. The way you smoked and drank and used bad language.”

  “Don’t remind me.” Helena was attempting to jiggle the gear stick into reverse. An oversight at the rental agency had resulted in the car having a manual transmission.

  “Aren’t you going to do up your seat belt?”

  Amanda’s voice was soft, her delivery tentative. What Helena heard was criticism and instruction. “I never do up my seat belt,” she snapped. “I don’t like to be strapped into anything.”

  “If you saw the cases I used to see in Emergency, you’d do it up.”

  “I’d guess in overall statistics, smoking’s a worse health hazard than not doing up one’s seat belt.” Why am I such a bitch, thought Helena. It’s this head. It’s not being able to see. “You wouldn’t,” she started to back up the car between a power pole and a garbage bin, “happen to have something for a headache?”

  Amanda rummaged in her bag. The scrabbling sound made Helena think of gerbils in a cage. Amanda’s horde of children kept gerbils as pets, along with three dogs and countless cats. Sometimes, the gerbils got out and were eaten by the dogs or cats.

  “No. Sorry, dear. Nothing. I never get headaches. Oh, I so wanted everything to be nice this evening!” Amanda shut her bag and settled it on her lap with a plunking motion. “Your first visit in four years. I wanted you to have a good time. I wanted us to have a good time together.”

  “Look, it was great, okay? I had a great time. Apart from the smoke. And the beer.” Helena’s neck was twisted, her face straine
d, as she tried to see out the rear window. In the dim glow cast by dash lights and headlights, her hair stood out around her head like a black halo.

  “You have lots of room on this side,” Amanda called, her face turned away to look through the rain-splattered rear side window. Her fair hair was short, which had caused a volt of shock in Helena two days before at the ferry landing. She had scarcely recognized the clipped head. Amanda had always had long hair, below her shoulders the last time the sisters had seen each other. That had been nearly a year ago, when Amanda had visited Helena on the mainland. But in her visions of Amanda, Helena always saw her little sister with the waist-length hair of her flower-child days. She’s put on weight, too, Helena had thought as they hugged. The weight had not been immediately apparent because of the loose long skirt and baggy top that Amanda had been wearing. Amanda had always worn those types of garments — smocks strung about with long strands of beads, sloppy rope sandals — the hippy uniform. Helena had always preferred clothes that did not interfere with brisk movement, like jeans and joggers. But, ah, yes, the face has scarcely changed at all, Helena had noted with approval when she’d stepped back and looked into her sister’s clear grey eyes.

  When they were safely into the alley, Helena shifted gears from reverse into first and looked forward. It wasn’t until then that she became fully aware of the situation. Sheets of water lashed the windshield. The wipers, despite their frenzied whipping back and forth, were useless against the barrage, and the headlights could barely penetrate the dark tunnel ahead of them. “Jesus!” she said, pressing her right foot down gently on the gas pedal while raising her left foot carefully off the clutch. At the end of the alley she made a right turn into the street, then attempted second gear. The car jerked and threatened to stall. She stepped too strongly on the gas while letting her foot too suddenly off the clutch. The car jetted forward.

  “Maybe you should let me drive.”

  That note again, what Helena thought of as passive aggressive, aggressively critical in its seemingly humble suggestion, which gave her reply a shortness she couldn’t control. “I’m okay.”

  “I’m used to a manual.”

  “I said I’m okay.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. I rented the damn thing. I’ll drive.”

  “I think we drank quite a lot.”

  “I didn’t.”

  Through the sheeting rain, a hexagonal black shape on a pole appeared abruptly at the corner of the road. Helena kept going. There wasn’t time to stop before they were past it and, besides, she didn’t want to go through all the clutch business again. No cars were coming, at least she couldn’t see any headlights, the rain made it difficult to see much of anything. Just in case, as soon as she completed her turn onto the main street, she stepped on the gas and geared up into third.

  Amanda let out her breath. “This rain is awful,” she said “We should’ve stayed home. But I wanted you to meet my friends. They’re such a good group. Extremely supportive.”

  Helena, too, had let out her breath, quietly, so Amanda would not know. She felt that she could now manage conversation. “That Trudy what’s-her-name, the one I was sitting beside, she says you’re a saint.”

  “Does she? She’s been a good friend.”

  “She says she was ready to put her head in the oven. You talked her out of it.”

  “She’s going through a bad time.”

  “She can sure toss them back.”

  “It’s her husband. He drives her to drink.”

  “So she said. Seven times. I found myself counting them. God, I can’t help myself,” Helena sighed. “A walking stats compiler. That’s what higher education does to you. But … apparently he’s seeing someone else.”

  “I know. Poor Trudy. It’s someone he met at an AA meeting.”

  “It all sounds so sordid, but that’s the flower child syndrome for you. So many of them failed to make any coherent sense of their lives.”

  “Sometimes I think they all ended up on this island.”

  “Lotus land, the land of milk and honey.”

  “I suppose that’s the reason, one of the reasons, we came here. We were so idealistic. We were going to save the world. At least change it. Reuben with his protest songs. He never liked The Man telling him what to do. He had to do things his way.”

  “I’ve got a chapter in my thesis about that. Not Reuben specifically. But I address the possibility that the movement was an excuse for people who didn’t want to accept responsibility, who bristled under any authority, perhaps relating back to parental authority. They weren’t out to save the world so much as to find an excuse for self-indulgence. I found Trudy’s description of her husband quite fascinating in view of that chapter.”

  “Reuben was quite willing to take responsibility. He just didn’t want the government telling him what to do.”

  “Don’t remind me, the way he used to go on about fascist states.”

  Both sides of the four-lane street were a wet blur of neon: Harvey’s, McDonald’s, Esso, Chubby Chicken, Shell, The Captain’s Fish & Chips, Landmark Insurance. The strip, locals called this corridor of colourful lights, some flashing, some glowing steadily. It was also the main island highway running north/south.

  Helena’s face was close to the windshield. Her eyes narrowed as she tried to see through the water flaying the glass.

  “Why won’t you let me drive?” Amanda raised her voice to be heard above the clacking of the wipers. “I know the road.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “I’d know where we’re going.”

  “Are you implying I don’t?”

  “I live here.”

  “I stay on the highway until your turn-off. I should be able to handle that.”

  “It’s just that every road has certain dips and bumps and shadows. You get to know them after a while.”

  They had left the lights of the city behind and were driving along a lonely stretch of ocean embankment. A steel and cement barrier separated the highway from a steep drop that ended directly in the water. The road was slick and black. The headlights were on “low” because Helena couldn’t find the “high” switch.

  Suddenly, the car swerved.

  “What was that?” gasped Amanda.

  “I saw something.”

  “What?”

  “Something. An animal maybe.”

  “We have lots of deer on the island. But I doubt they’d be out tonight.”

  “I should know what I saw.”

  “You’re driving pretty fast,” Amanda ventured.

  “Do you think I don’t know how to drive?”

  “Of course you can drive. But you can’t see.”

  “My vision is perfect.”

  “Since your operation, you can’t see at night. Your eyes can’t take glare. When headlights come up suddenly you’re blind.”

  “Whose eyes are they anyway? I should know whether or not I can see.”

  “I’m just trying to be helpful. Why can’t you accept help? I feel like crying for you. I cried the day they lasered your eyes.”

  “Your tears don’t mean much. You cry all the time. Over the smallest thing. Dogs and horses in the movies.”

  “You never cry.”

  “Crying is a waste of time.”

  “I cry for what leaving Ben did to you.”

  “What do you mean by that crack?”

  “You’ve gotten so hard.”

  “Not hard. Tough, maybe. You have to be to survive in this world.”

  “Do you still care for him?”

  “Caring for a person doesn’t mean you can live with him. God knows I tried.”

  “What did you try?”

  “Everything. Getting angry, not getting angry, probing, leaving him alone. Nothing worked.”


  “Did you try loving him?”

  “That remark just goes to show how little you understand. You try living with a person who thinks we live a meaningless existence and where suicide is the only rational choice.”

  “That was his just his existential period. But in that idea was also the idea that we have to find an alternative to suicide.”

  “Whatever the theory, Ben is a person who can’t receive love. Or give it, for that matter. Believe it or not, there are such people in this world. And those people are impossible to live with.”

  Amanda shook her head. “I don’t believe it, not about Ben. Anyway, he’s changed since four years ago. He’s learned something from that experience.”

  “If he has, he hasn’t let me know.”

  “But you’re the one who left him. To go back to university.”

  “In the first place, I didn’t leave him to go to university. He was impossible to live with. The two elements coincided. In the second place, he left me long before I left him. After that thing with his mother, he withdrew completely. He focused on his pain. He fell in love with it. It was like I had a rival. He didn’t see me anymore. He didn’t care about us; he didn’t care about anything. I stay. I go. It was the same to him. He forced me to leave him. I stayed longer than most women would have. And I don’t see him making any moves in my direction.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t matter who makes the first move. So long as somebody does.”

  “Well, it isn’t going to be me. Why should I? I didn’t desert him. He deserted me. I wasn’t the cause of his downfall. He’d fallen long before I left. Anyway, likely by now he’s found another victim to torture with his mind games. There should be a clause in the divorce act for intellectual abuse.”

  “Are you still married to him?”

  “Oh yes. Neither one of us can be bothered getting a divorce, I suppose. It takes time and money.”

  For a few moments the storm gained prominence of sound. Visibility was becoming more and more of a problem. Helena had to focus on the road ahead. When she was able to speak, her voice was a little less belligerent. “What makes you think he’s changed?”