Real Life (2 page)

“It doesn’t help to sanctify her,” I told him, resorting to briskness. There it was again, as if all these years hadn’t passed at all. She was just pretty, she was just—sweet, while I—“She was pretty ordinary, actually,” I said, testing him. I suddenly wondered if I’d said that before, when all of it was happening. Knowing me, probably.

“She wasn’t ordinary,” he said, although mildly, as if he couldn’t be bothered to argue. “Or if she was, it was in a way that had nothing to do with why I loved her.”

For an instant after Dan and Willie had left, I’d been stung, my pride was hurt, but then, I thought how I had John, that
John was mine now, and I saw that what had started out as a game, a distraction from that boring little city full of boring, provincial people, had turned into something else: it had turned into my deepest desire. I remembered that then I did not regret this in the least, and for the first time in a long time I knew I would cry if I let go, even a little.

“All these years have passed, nearly thirty years,” I said. I didn’t know what it was I wanted to say, I was struggling with something that refused to form itself into a question I could ask, or something I could say, like, maybe,
I suffered too, you don’t know how bad it was.
“Hard to believe we once loved each other,” I said finally, and I looked at him, afraid of what he might say, and yearning for his agreement in a naked way that shamed and puzzled me.

“We didn’t love each other!” He sounded more surprised than angry. “We were just both so screwed up. We clung to each other like limpets cling to rocks. That’s not love.” I took my cigarettes and lighter out of my bag and, fumbling a little, lit up. I wanted to remind him of how good we’d been in bed, but I could see that he’d deny that too, and I knew that, even now, I’d do anything to avoid hearing that denial. I smiled carefully at him through my cigarette smoke.

“You’re destroying my most cherished memories,” I said. He spoke over my voice, abruptly, as if he could no longer hold it back.

“We killed her.”

I wasn’t sure, for an instant, that I’d heard him right. But then I knew I had, and I was suddenly very tired. So tired I could have put my head down on the table and gone to sleep.

“No,” I said, as if I’d never, not once, thought of this myself. “Her decision to kill herself was hers alone.”

I’d always wanted to paint her, nude, of course: she had a long-legged graceful body, her skin was pale and of the finest
grain—but John would never allow such a thing. And I had no interest in doing the Madonna-with-children that he wanted, so I never painted her, or even drew her, not once. I would have questioned that beauty, I would have searched out the darkness in her—but Dan went on as if he hadn’t heard my denial.

“John because he wouldn’t leave her alone after she was gone, me because … I took her away, I put her in a position she wasn’t strong enough to cope with, you because—”

“Because why.”

“You started the whole thing.” There was no accusation in Dan’s voice, just a heaviness, as if he’d always known this and knew that I knew it, too. That we all did. That there was no point in histrionics any more, not even from me. “Willie and I would never have gotten together, she would never have—if you hadn’t decided you wanted to sleep with her husband.”

I wondered what would happen if I stood up and left. I imagined myself at home, pouring a stiff Scotch, turning on the television, letting Rosie, my cat, curl up on my lap. Nothing, I supposed. Nothing at all, but then I would never be finished with it, either.

“If it makes you feel any better, the moment you two left John dropped me,” I said. “He never stopped loving his wife or wanting his marriage or his children. Maybe he was the only one who took it all in the right spirit.” I paused, feeling heat rising in my face. “It was only supposed to be a diversion—” Then I said, “You were part of it too.” I was becoming angry. “Nobody forced you. Or Willie.”

Dan swung his head to gaze out the big plate-glass window through the ferns and various other potted plants, to the street where it had begun to rain harder. He shrugged, a barely perceptible acknowledgement of what I’d just said.

‘And then we fell in love,” he said and laughed briefly, quietly. “Joy seemed stunned and hurt and baffled all at once. Such a
pale, shapeless little person she grew up to be. And Kate—” He shook his head. “Such hate, such rage. Maybe I deserve it.” Funny how I hadn’t thought of them, as if what happened to them, or how they felt about what had happened, belonged to a different universe than the one the four of us inhabited.

“Stop it,” I said. “You can’t change anything.” Everything was coming back to me, all of it, and I hated him for finding me, hated myself for needing this meeting.

“You were ruthless,” he said, “in those days. I always supposed it was that upbringing you had.”

“I wanted what I wanted,” I admitted, smiling faintly at him, as if his attacking me were nothing. I’d been cured of my ruthlessness, or at least I’d learned to look both ways, to consider, before I went after something.

“And you got off scot-free,” he told me. “You’re the only one of us who did.” Now I had to turn my head away from him, as if I were just checking out the window to see if it was still raining or not. I’d stumbled after John, pulling at his clothes, falling as he jerked away from me; Dan hadn’t seen me on my knees weeping when John was gone.

Years later, when I had a show in Halifax, I’d found John’s address and written to him to say I needed to talk to him. I’d thought it best to prepare him, but he wrote back only,
Stay away from me!
I got up the courage on my next to last day there to phone him. I said,
John, talk to me, I’m afraid, I can’t go on, I have to tell you
—and he hung up on me. My palms against my coffee mug were damp, as if the rain outside were spreading and all of us, sooner or later, would drown in it.

Dan and I were leaning across the restaurant table so that our heads were close together, each of us looking, not at each other, but at our reflections in its glossy plastic finish.

John and I had lain in each other’s arms on the sofa, watching Willie mount the stairs with Dan as if she were drifting in
a dream, as if none of what was happening were real. I suppose Dan believed he could make her real, make all of it real. I remember I’d closed John’s eyes with my lips—in the lamplight and the night their blue-grey had deepened, it frightened me—I didn’t dare let him watch his wife go up the stairs with another man. And I wanted him to remember that now he had me.

And what else had I wanted? Besides John? I wasn’t sure I could remember. To shed my history, I suppose. To defy it, to pull myself free into some world where people didn’t enslave you and call it love or duty or necessity, where beauty and even joy were possible.

While we’d been talking the lunch crowd had started to come into the café. If we didn’t order lunch ourselves, we’d probably have to leave as more people gathered to wait for tables. I sat back then, knowing now I would never see Dan again.

“Who would ever have thought it would end this way,” I murmured.

“What way has it ended?” Dan asked. “It hasn’t ended.”

The waitress arrived then and pointedly put our bill down on the table, neatly halfway between us. Dan reached into his pocket and threw a couple of coins onto the table. He pushed away the chair beside him with his foot, rose, and began to walk away. I followed, the crowd at the door moving aside to let us through.

Outside on the sidewalk we stood facing each other in the light patter of rain. The lunch-hour crowd parted and went around us, tilting their umbrellas away.

“I’m thinking of marrying again,” he said. “A young woman—she thinks I’m a god,” and he had the grace to laugh, although in a faintly sardonic way. “I don’t want to be alone any more.” He said this quietly, so I barely heard it.
This
was
finally the reason he’d wanted to talk to me. For a moment, I couldn’t speak.

“There is not much demand for old women,” I said, my voice harsh.

The light at the end of the block changed and cars hissed by on the wet pavement, creating a cold wind that made Dan hunch and me pull up my collar. A woman hurried by, a spoke of her umbrella poking my head as she passed. She kept going.

“I wonder, is everyone’s life like this?” Dan asked.

We looked at each other then, into each other’s eyes, deeply, and in his, or in that moment, I saw what I had always known and denied. That this was real, had always been real, that long ago, the four of us, stranded in that snowy little city far from the capitals of the world, by doing what we did, met, or made, a fate that would keep us firmly tied to the earth until the gods took pity on us, and finally let us go.

        The memo from her department head asking her to teach the fall semester in one of the university’s satellite programs lay on her desk. If she agreed, besides her regular teaching load, she’d be driving once a week to the monastery an hour from the city to fill in for Dr. Chomska, who’d had a heart attack. She saw the request at once as a chance to earn extra money and, Aaron uppermost in her mind, dismissed all her misgivings as quickly as they presented themselves: asking her mother to babysit yet again, the condition of her car, Chomska’s course that she’d have to teach. She hesitated an instant, but then she was punching numbers on the phone and the department head’s assistant was saying “Dr. Russell’s office.”

When she set down the phone, Christine found she was trembling: if it was with joy that she saw her fund for Aaron taking an unexpected leap, she was also, suddenly, picturing herself in the middle of the night stuck in a snowbank on a deserted country road. She might have changed her mind even then, but the phone rang, startling her out of her train of thought.

“Christine?”

“Yes,” she said crisply, as if she were talking to a colleague or a workman she was thinking of hiring, instead of her husband
who, as she told everyone, had abandoned his family and run off to Montreal as soon as the going got tough. She never said it, though, without experiencing a stab of guilt.

“I’m thinking about you and the kids.” She imagined him seated at his desk in some chilly, grimly neat office, still wearing his bulky tweed overcoat, his mouth glum, his dark eyes magnified behind his thick glasses.

“Oh?” she said, mustering coldness, although far behind her eyes heat was rising that meant she might cry.

“Talk to me, Christine.” She began to shove papers around on her desk.

“Things are fine,” she told him. “Meagan has a cold, Mother is staying with her until she’s better. Aaron …” She hesitated.

“Aaron is as usual?”

Involuntarily she placed her fingertips on her chest, over her heart. She said, “Yes, the same.” He started to speak, but she spoke over his voice, hurried, her own strained and too high-pitched. “I found—there’s a new program—it’s there, in Montreal—”

“Public or private?”

“Private, but really—”

He made an exasperated sound. “It’s hopeless, Christine.”

She pulled the phone away from her ear, almost dropped it into its cradle, but at the last instant held back. “I’m determined to try this, Graeme.” She paused. “Last hope,” she said, she could give him this much, and made a sound meant to be a laugh. “I’m teaching a night class to help pay for it. I’m writing to ask for government funding; I’m going to write to that big telethon. I’m not going to give up until—”

“Until what?” Graeme asked. “Until your mother’s dead from the stress? Until Meagan is destroyed? Until there’s no one left but you and Aaron, and not even Aaron because he doesn’t know where the hell he is—”

She dropped the phone into its cradle and stood, blinking, her hands pressed against the heat in her cheeks. Immediately the phone rang again and she picked it up without quite realizing she had.

“I’m sorry,” Graeme said.

“There’s nothing left to say. We’ve said everything.”

“I’m waiting for you to get it, Chris,” he said quietly. “It isn’t that I don’t love you. You know I only went this far away because this was the only job I could get.”

“Two years,” she said.

“Not quite eighteen months,” he answered her, and laughed softly, whether at her, their situation, or something she didn’t know about, she couldn’t tell. He must have a woman, she thought. Of course he has a woman. There was another long silence, but it seemed to her it buzzed with all the arguments, all the things each of them had said over and over again, and her palm grew damp against the plastic of the phone.

“I
will
come back,” he said then. “If …”

“If I give my child away, if I hand him over to some institution, just pretend he never happened.”

“More or less,” Graeme said. His voice was flat, and she noted defiantly that he no longer bothered to qualify this or argue with her. “I can’t wait forever,” he said. Another silence, while she pressed her hand against the grimace she could feel beginning to distend her mouth.

“I have to go now, I’m due in class. I’m sending money,” he said and hung up the phone so quietly that she was for a second not sure he had.

The road to the monastery was a narrow secondary highway that wound between grass-covered, yellow hills and past copses of trees radiant in their fall golds and oranges. It was early evening and the shadows were long, the golden light of
late day turning the dull countryside into a strange, unearthly kingdom. She hadn’t done any country driving in a long time, and she found herself slowing so that she could enjoy the landscape which she found unexpectedly lovely. Maybe in the coming summer she could find a way to take the children to a lake for a week or two. They were growing up without ever seeing nature, she thought, and it was as if a whole new dimension of life entered her thinking for the first time in a long time, and she wondered if this meant that finally she was getting over Graeme.

For a moment, she even forgot the long winter ahead of her of travelling by herself down this road. In this gentle beauty it was hard to worry about winter. And there was Chomska’s course that she’d agreed to teach: Introduction to Postmodernist Literary Theory. A ton of work, texts to read she’d so far mostly managed to avoid, she’d found them so objectionable. She who had been raised on books, the pure, sumptuous world they opened for her, the passion. “It’s this course or nothing,” her department head had told her in his fake-jolly manner, when she’d timidly suggested they change it to one she was used to teaching. As if he didn’t know that despite her relative youth—she was twenty years younger than Chomska—she was the last old-fashioned humanist in the English department.