The Journey Prize Stories 27 (9 page)

She throws her arms around me and we embrace in the dark as she weeps on my shoulder. And there in the darkness, she clutches me close. Her fingers reach around my front and she touches my breast, smoothing it with her palm, like it was the most natural thing to do right there in the righteous dark in the middle of a crowded restaurant after near-electrocution. Steve, flashlight in hand, finds the breaker panel and Stacey-Jane jumps back to earth as the fluorescent lights blind us momentarily. The magic moment is over, and Steve orders the bus boys out of the dish-room to clean up the mess.

T
he news arrived with the fanfare of the last tiny float in a very small parade, the one nobody wants to see, the one that fell behind and never caught up. He told me he had cancer, the worst kind, and that it had spread to so many corners of his body that there wasn’t any hope. That got me. No hope. Who says that to his wife? We were having dinner, this was before he got really bad, sharing one of those little plates where they poured balsamic vinegar and olive oil, the vinegar slipping around in bubbles. The bread stick had been torn in half. I looked down and saw that it was in my hands.

I put my piece of bread back on the plate and asked my husband, “What do you mean, no hope?”

“Exactly what it sounds like.” He drank some carbonated water, sucking it through his teeth. By the face he made, I could tell he had trouble getting it down his throat, as if it hadn’t gone all the way to his stomach and had chosen his Adam’s apple as its home instead.

This was our Cancer Dinner—what we’d call it over the next few months, when the endlessly multiplying cells really started ransacking his body. I would come to grow fond of this moment, the way Eve must have grown fond of the split second before she bit into the apple and damned us all. It’s rare in life you can point definitively to The Moment Everything Changed. We could do that.

Palming a piece of bread into a tiny ball, I threw it across the table and at his chest. I pretended his chest was the universe, that the ball of bread was a missile with such potential for catastrophe that it would end all moments. The bread ball bounced into his glass of water. We both looked at it sadly as the water molecules slowly pulled it apart, the bread falling open like a strange underwater flower you needed grief to discover.

After a few tests, a few rounds of chemotherapy, the oncologists sent my husband home. The reasoning was that if he was going to die, he might as well do it somewhere comfortable. It was a deadly beast, the cancer, and it was beyond reproach. So I went about trying to make him comfortable, starting with the purchase of an ounce of the highest quality marijuana I could find. The dealer, a college student from the apartment complex across the street, said to take it easy, that a gram of the stuff would take me to outer space. Good, I told him. The rings of Saturn sounded very hospitable at that moment.

In the early stages of our courtship, my husband and I would smoke a bit of pot on the porch and watch for patterns in the stars to announce themselves to our scrambled minds. Since then, he had gotten a job teaching at a private high school and couldn’t find room in his life for drugs.

“You’re smoking it,” I said handing him the joint. “We’ll go back in time to four years ago when we first met.”

He saluted grimly. “Then as now, you’re the boss.”

I wrapped his shawl tight around his body and lit the joint where it dangled, between his chapped lips. His eyelids fluttered when he sucked in and he coughed out a cloud that hung in the air like a fist. “Goddamn,” he said. “That hits you right in the brain.”

“If you could have one wish,” I said, sucking in my own lungful of smoke, “other than having more wishes, what would it be?”

“More genies.”

“That’s addressed in the contract, section one B. No extra genies.” I replaced the joint on his waiting lips. Its glowing tip lit him up in a pleasant way, like a wet drawing of a sunset, near translucent, patted down over the contours of his face. It was a calm, safe thing. His eyes got milky, the lids at half-mast.

“You really want to know?”

“What kind of a wife would I be if I didn’t want to know?”

So my husband said to me, “I wouldn’t mind getting laid.”

“Your wish,” I said, putting my hand on his leg, “is my command.”

Which ended up being a natural transition to my husband telling me that he meant he wanted to sleep with a man.

There are pictures you have of people you love, a kind of X-ray that you think reveals their inner lives and shines it bright on the wall like a kabuki shadow puppet play. And then, when the curtain is pulled back and the puppets behind it look nothing like the images you had imagined, you’re forced to pick up the Lego blocks of reality and rebuild them in a manner you can live with.

He saw my expression and let the joint fall out of his mouth. It landed on the shawl and sparked until we both frantically patted it out. Our hands met a few times, violent with slapping sounds. Once we’d beaten the joint into a stubbly mess, I took out a spare I’d rolled in case the first one suffered a premature death.

I handed him the replacement joint and asked him, the way you’d talk to someone hard of hearing, “Repeat what you just said.”

“What did I just say?”

“That you want to sleep with a man. Is that what you said? Did I hear you right?”

He frowned. “I thought you knew.”

Did I know? I might have known. There were signs. Then again, if you told me my husband had been a closet uni-bomber, I could have found signs supporting that claim as well. He was anti-social sometimes. He was the only person I knew who liked licking the glue on envelopes. If I’m not mistaken, the uni-bomber liked doing that, too.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m stoned. Very, irredeemably stoned.”

I considered the joint. It still lit up his face like the wet sunset thing. “Did you ever find me attractive?”

He stopped to think and he did so in a way that I found terribly honest, as if I’d just put him in charge of ending all the genocides going on around the world and he had to confront the way that we as Westerners fit into that sort of thing. “I do find you attractive,” he said finally. “Kind of the way you can tell a piece of art is beautiful without actually, you know, necessarily wanting to sleep with it.”

“So that’s it, then,” I said to him. “You want me to seek out a male partner who can be with you in ways I can’t.”

Had you given me a card and asked me to briefly describe what intercourse looked and felt like, I would’ve said, “Earnest and Fairly Fulfilling.” Past lovers had been more passionate, more acutely attuned to the power of friction on the clusters of nerve in the sexual parts of my body. But my husband did his best, and his best manifested itself nearly every time we slept together, which amounted to twice a week. Children hadn’t been possible on account of my uterus. According to the doctor, it had the warped shape of one of Dali’s clocks. A part of me felt ashamed that I couldn’t give him children and assumed my infertility accounted for our subpar sex life. I explained that to him.

“Fuck my disfigured uterus,” I said.

My husband sighed. “When have I ever talked about having kids?”

“When have you ever talked about putting a penis inside your mouth?”

Digging himself deeper into his shawl, my husband conceded that it was a good point.

The man I was considering had dark hair, very short with a swoop of bangs. In the picture my co-worker Hattie showed me, he almost looked like a woman. He modelled for a hair product company, she told me. You wouldn’t call him handsome or beautiful. More like striking. Hattie described him this way: “Looking at him in person makes you feel like you’ve been hit by something very sharp.”

“And this is a good thing?”

“This is a good thing.”

Hattie was the only one so far who had agreed to help me find a man for my husband. Most people said very bad things
to me about the status of our marriage. These were the kinds of people who exchanged crystal swans and called it love, while simultaneously thinking up elaborate ways to inflict harm on one another. My mother believed in traditional marriage norms, even when one-half of the marriage was dying of cancer, as my husband was.

“What you’re doing will crush you,” she said.

“I’m already being crushed,” I said, referring to the cancer and the crushing weight of its metastasization.

“But this one will crush you more,” my mother said.

When I told him about the conversation, my husband said, “Maybe she’s right,” and that was the only time since he got cancer that I couldn’t stand him.

I’d tried some other things before deciding to find him a man to sleep with. For a week I bound my breasts with tensor bandages left over from the time I sprained my ankle. Little hairs sprouted on my legs and under my arms, and I stopped waxing the fine thin line of down that stretched thin as dental floss just above my upper lip. I even bought a wig. Wearing it transformed me into one of the Beatles. When I tried it on and approached my husband and said in my deepest voice, “You need your plumbing fixed?” he blinked twice. Only one blink would have done.

You wonder: What kind of man should my husband sleep with? I thought of me, but as a man, and realized maybe that was the point, that he wanted a “not me.” Which in some lights, might seem horrible. In the light I chose, it meant that his attraction to men could only be an inversion of his attraction, or lack thereof, to me, such that in loving men, according to some curious physics, he was also loving me, too.

—

The plan was for Alex and Hattie to show up to our apartment in tandem. From there, Hattie and I would gradually fade away as my husband and Alex interacted. My husband was having one of his good nights, and even though I don’t believe in God, I thanked Him or Her or It for small graces. I’d preemptively gotten the bed ready, washing the sheets so when the time came things would be in place. Pillows were fluffed. Scented candles and condoms placed at convenient locations throughout the room. Anticipating a night on the couch, I made sure to have an old sleeping bag curled up behind our television set in the living room, ready for retrieval.

Things started poorly when Alex showed up minus Hattie. “Food poisoning,” he said apologetically. He handed over a bottle of shiraz. “I wasn’t going to come, but she made me promise I would anyway.”

“And a good thing you did,” I said, modulating my voice to sound cheery and absolutely comfortable with Alex’s presence. I took his coat and called my husband over. “Would be a shame for all the food I made to go to waste.”

My husband introduced himself. I searched his face for evidence of enchantment. They shook hands and I tried to determine the nature of that handshake. Was it gentle and sensual? Firm and flirty? Thirty pounds lighter than he usually was, my husband practically swam in his collared shirt. His pants didn’t fit him well, but he smelled nice and I’d shaved him, so his face had the glow of a nice stone zapped by a laser beam.

“I was just thinking,” I said, engaging in damage control by leading them to the kitchen, “that you two could talk. It’s my understanding that you’ve been out of the closet for a long time. My husband here could probably use a few pointers.”

“Jesus Christ,” my husband sighed. He touched his temple. To Alex he said, “You’ll have to excuse her,” which I took to be a good sign, since it implied collusion on their part, a gendered taking of sides.

I’d prepared a dinner of salmon and coleslaw and mashed potatoes, knowing my husband could get portions of each down. Their talk amounted to a lot of polite, empty banter. Hattie had simply told Alex that my husband recently came out, on account of an unspecified illness that was not, Hattie made sure to make clear, HIV. Since he didn’t know he was on a date, being test-driven by both of us (or just me—I later learned that my husband thought I was joking about setting him up with men), Alex didn’t pick up a lot of the cues a person on a date would normally pick up on. Twice I encouraged my husband to compliment him. Twice my compliments evaporated into the ether.

Occasionally I tried to raise the stakes by introducing sexuality into the conversation. “What’s your favourite sexual position?” I said. “How do you feel about pornography?”

“I don’t watch it much,” Alex said, eyes lowered to the food on his plate.

“Us neither,” I said, though I added that my husband might, since prior to this point, it was probably the only way he’d been able to experience gay sex.

I waited for Alex’s good looks to stab my husband’s heart sharply the way Hattie said. My husband asked me to help him to the washroom. I wasn’t sure I wanted to leave Alex alone in the kitchen, where he might steal the nice forks and knives my grandmother left me when she died. It turned out my husband didn’t need my help. He squeezed my upper arm until it ached. “You can’t do what you’re doing, Abby.”

“What am I doing?”

“You can’t force someone to want to have sex with me.”

“Pardon me for thinking that the rest of the world would find you as pretty as I find you.”

“It’s not that.” He let go of me and looked into his hands. “I shouldn’t have said what I said to you. It wasn’t fair.”

I took a deep breath. “How many times have I done something very bad and you forgave me?” I said, touching his face up near the sideburns, where his skin was slightly more pale. “You’ve got cancer. If that’s not grounds for getting something you want, I don’t know what is.”

My mother had actually been the one to put it in my head that a man could smell when a woman couldn’t give birth. Despite having only one child, she thought of herself as kind of like that stone Venus from Willendorf, hips rounded with fertility. In her mind, all roads to motherhood and relationships led to her.

Even though it was ten at night, long past her bed time, we rang my mother up. My husband and my mother never got along, but only because he hated her because she acted like she hated me. Who knows, maybe she did hate me. We lit another one of the joints. My husband dialled since, after a few hits, I couldn’t translate the symbols on the phone’s dial pad. He handed me the phone. We were in the outer space of marijuana intoxication.