Bitter Sweet (47 page)

‘Well, why didn’t you -‘ She bit off the sentence. ‘Say so.‘

They both knew he had.

‘We had friends in
Chicago
.’

‘When we were first married, yes, but not after you took the selling job.’

‘But my time was so limited then.’

‘That’s what I’m telling you- not that what you want is wrong, or what I want is wrong, but that what we want is wrong for each other. And what about pastimes? Yours is work, and mine - well, hell, we both know you’ve always considered my pastimes too unsophisticated to suit you. To ride a snowmobile you’d have to mess your hair. Fishing is too unrefined for an Orlane rep. And you’d as soon have a root canal as walk in the woods. What do we share anymore,
Nancy
, what?’

‘When we started out we wanted the same things. It was you who changed. Not me.’

He considered, then admitted forlornly, ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe it was me who changed. I tried the city life, the art galleries, the orchestra halls, but I found it more satisfying to look at a real wildflower than a painting of one.

And I think there’s more music at the Ridges Nature Sanctuary than in all the orchestra halls in the world. I was miserable trying to be a yuppie.’

‘So you forced me to move here. Well, what about me? What about what I wanted and needed? I loved those galleries and orchestra halls!’

‘What you’re saying is what I’m saying: Our needs and wants are too different to make this marriage work, and it’s time we admitted it.’

She rested her forehead on eight fingertips and stared at her bowl of chilli.

“People change,
Nancy
,’ he explained. ‘I changed. You changed. You weren’t a sales rep then, you were a fashion merchandiser, and I didn’t know my father would die and Mike would ask me to come back here and run the charter service. I admit, I thought back then that I wanted to be a corporate executive, but it took some years of experiencing corporate life before I found out it wasn’t what I thought it would be. We changed,
Nancy
, it’s as simple as that.’

She looked up with fresh tears in her eyes. ‘But I still love you. I can’t just.., just turn away from that.’

The sight of her tears grieved him and he looked away.

They sat for some moments in silence before
Nancy
spoke once more.

‘I’ve said I’d consider having a baby, too.”

‘It’s too late for that,’ he said.

“Why?’ She leaned across the table and clutched the back of his hand. He let it lie lifelessly beneath hers.

‘Because it would be a desperation move, and it’s not right to bring a child into a marriage to hold it together.

What I did that night was unforgivable, and I want to apologize again.’

‘Eric...’ she appealed, still appropriating his hand.

He withdrew it and said quietly, ‘Give me a divorce,
Nancy
.’

After a lengthy stretch of consideration, she replied, ‘So she can have you? Never.’

‘
Nancy
...’

‘The answer is no,’ she said firmly and slipped from her chair and began gathering the wooden fruit from the floor.

‘I didn’t want this to turn into a fight.’

She dropped four teakwood pears into the bowl. Tm afraid it’s going to. I may not like this place, but I’ve got an investment in it, too, and I’m staying.’

‘All right.’ He rose. ‘I’ll go to Ma’s for the time being.’

Abruptly she softened. ‘Don’t go,’ she pleaded. ‘Stay and let’s try to work it out.’ - ‘I can’t do that,’ he said.

‘But Eric... eighteen years.’

‘I can’t,’ he repeated in a choked voice and left her, with the pleading look on her face, to go upstairs and pack.

Ma’s house was empty when he reached it. The light was on over the kitchen sink, spotlighting a dirty mixing bowl, a pair of beaters and two discoloured, dented cookie sheets.

‘Ma?’ he called, expecting no answer, getting none.

In the living room the television was black, her crocheting lay in a pile on the davenport with the hook projecting from the ball of thread. He carried his suitcases on through, up the creaky stairs to his old room under the eaves. It was a bleak room, by most people’s standards, with faded scatter rugs on a linoleum floor and worn chenille spreads on its two beds. It smelled faintly of bat droppings; brown bats had lived under the eaves and behind the shutters for as long as he could remember. Occasionally one would get in and they’d bring it to the ground with a landing net. But even as children they’d never been afraid of the animals. Ma had always insisted they put them out instead of killing them.

Bats eat mosquitoes, she’d said, so treat them gentle.

The dry, aged-attic smell of the bats was distinctly nostalgic, comforting.

He switched on a dim lamp in the ‘boys’ room’, wandered through into ‘Ruth’s room’ - the two arranged shotgun fashion so that Ruth had always had to pass through the boys’ barracks to reach her own. Back then a flowered cotton curtain had served as a door between the two sections; it had since been replaced by a wooden door.

In Ruth’s room he wandered aimlessly to the window.

Through the naked trees, from his high vantage point he could see the lighted windows of Mike and Barb’s house, undoubtedly where Ma was. She went over sometimes for supper. He had no desire to join them tonight. Instead he returned to the boys’ room and flopped onto his back on one of the beds.

There in the gloom, he mourned the marriage that had for years seemed vacant; the mistakes he himself had made during it; his childlessness; the investment of years that had tallied only disappointment and regret;
Nancy
’s refusal to end the relationship that had no future; the turbulence that lay ahead.

He reminisced about moments when he and Nancy had been wholly happy. Reflections flashed in his mind as vignettes upon a screen, each sterling in its clarity. The time they’d bought their first piece of furniture- a stereo, which they’d purchased on time. Certainly not the most practical first piece, but the one they both wanted most. They’d hauled it into the apartment together, then lain on their backs on the floor, listening to the two albums they’d chosen - Gordon Lightfoot for him, the Beatles for her.

Those old albums were still around somewhere; he wondered if they’d each take their own when they parted.

They’d lain on the apartment floor, feeling the music vibrate through them, and they’d talked about the future. Someday they’d have a whole houseful of furniture, all the best, and a house to put it in, too - all glass and redwood, in some affluent suburb of
Chicago
, probably. She was right. He’d let her down there.

Another time when they’d impetuously flown to
San Diego
- counted their money and derided on a Friday
noon
(via telephone between their two offices) and by ten that night were checking into a hotel in LaJolla. They had walked its hilly streets holding hands, and drunk cocktails in open-air lounges while watching the sun set over the Pacific, and had eaten famous split-pea soup at some restaurant in a windmill, and had explored Capistrano Mission, and made love in broad daylight in a hidden cove on the beach near Oceanside, and had promised one another they would never grow predictable, but would fly away often that way, at the drop of a hat. Now their lives were as predictable as the lunar cycle and
Nancy
travelled so much there was no incentive for impromptu weekends away.

Another memory came. It was their second year of marriage when
Nancy
fell one day on an icy sidewalk and sustained a concussion. He recalled his sick fear while waiting in the emergency room for the results of her X rays, the emptiness of their bed during the night she’d remained in hospital for observation, and the relief he’d felt at her return, in those days a single night apart had been a trial for both of them. Now, five days apart was the accepted norm.

He should have worked harder at finding a compromise that would have kept them together more of the time.

He should have built her a glass and redwood house.

They should have talked about children before they were married.

Lying on his boyhood bed, he found his eyes stung by tears.

He heard Ma come in downstairs, her footsteps pausing in the living room.

‘Eric?’ She’d seen his truck parked outside.

‘Yeah, I’m up here. I’ll be right down.’

He knuckle-dried his eyes and rose, blew his nose on his bloody handkerchief and clumped down the steep, wooden stairs, breaking his headlong plunge with both hands on the wall above which seemed permanently soiled from the thousands of descents it had slowed.

She was waiting at the bottom, dressed in a quilted nylon jacket of Halloween orange and a cotton scarf covered with dreadful purple cabbage roses, tied tightly beneath her chin.

Her glasses were steamed. She raised them onto her forehead and peered at him curiously. ‘What the devil were you doing up there?’

‘Smelling the bat shit. Remembering.’

‘You all right?’

‘I’ve been crying a little, if that’s what you’re asking.”

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I’m leaving
Nancy
.’

‘Ah, that’s it.’ She studied him silently while he realized how little she’d cared for his wife and wondered what she felt. She opened her arms and said, ‘Come here, son.’

He walked against her, took her short, stubby body against his much taller one, breathed the smell of late winter from her jacket, and the faint scent of fuel oil from her scarf and whatever Barb had cooked for supper from her hair.

‘I’ll need to stay awhile, Ma.’

‘As long as you want.’

 
‘I’ll probably be a little grouchy.’

She pulled back and looked up at him. ‘That’s your right.’

He felt better after the hug. ‘What happens to people, Ma? They change.’

‘That’s part of life.’

‘But you and the old man didn’t. You made it straight through.’

‘Why of course we changed. Everybody changes. But we didn’t have as many complications in them days. You young people now, you got two dozen different experts telling you how you ought to think and feel and act and how you ought to find yourself.’ Long-lipped, she stretched the word. ‘Stupid expression.., find yourself. Give each other space.’ Again she made mockery of the word. ‘In my day, a man’s space was beside his wife, and a wife’s was beside her man, and what you gave each other was a helping hand and a little bit of loving if you weren’t too tired at the end of the day. But nowadays they’d have you believing that if you don’t come first you’re doing it wrong, only marriage don’t work that way. Oh, I’m not blaming you, son, I’m saying you were born in a time that was tough on marriages.’

‘We always got along, Nancy and I. On the surface things seemed okay, but underneath we’ve been at odds for years about the most important stuff-jobs, kids, where we lived, what we lived in.’

‘Well, sometimes that happens, I guess.’

He’d expected her to show maternal favouritism and was surprised by her neutrality, though he respected her for it, realizing again that she’d never warmed to
Nancy
.

She heaved a sigh and glanced toward the kitchen. ‘Have you eaten yet?’

‘No, Ma, I’m really not hungry.’

Again she surprised him by not nagging. ‘Yeah, sometimes strife dulls the appetite. Well, I’d best get upstairs and change them sheets. They’ve been on since Grade and Dan slept in ‘em at Christmas.’

‘I can do that, Ma. I don’t want to be any trouble to you.’ ‘Since when was any of my kids a trouble to me?’

He went over and got her in an affectionate headlock, appreciating her with a freshness that healed.

‘Y’know, the world could use a few more like you, Ma.’

For good measure he gave her skull a knuckle-rub, the way they all had when they were boys.

“Let me go, brat!’ she blustered.

He released her, and they went upstairs together to change the bed.

They’d put on the bottom sheet when he told her, ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be here, Ma.’

She snapped the second sheet in the air with two deft flicks and replied, ‘I didn’t ask, did I?’

He went by Maggie’s the next day at midmorning.

“Hi,’ he said, looking forlorn.

‘What happened to your face?’

“
Nancy
.’

‘You told her?’

He nodded resignedly. ‘Come here,’ he said. “I need to hold you.’

Against him, she whispered, ‘I need to hold you, too, while you tell me.’

Each rime he came to her their moods seemed a reflection of one another, as if a chord ran through both their hearts.

Today. they came together for reassurance. Passion had no place in their embrace.