Vital Signs (9 page)

“Anna! Do you still love me?” I am shocked by myself. She looks over at me for a moment.

“Of course, yes,” she says, sounding puzzled. I see the fingers in her lap fly up in succession. One. Two. Three.

“I’m sorry,” I say. I want to take it back. I want to say instead, “What is love?” I want her to know about the tinny chiming in me that wants her to die, so that I no longer have to feel.

“There were crows out again,” she says, and this is real. True. She places her forefinger over her lips as she gets
up from the chair and stands in front of me. She crouches down and is on her knees and reaching for my feet. She grabs my running shoe at the heel and is pulling it off. My right foot is now bare, and she reaches for the other shoe. She takes my left foot in her hand and starts to massage it, beginning at the heel, moving up through the arch and finally to the base of my big toe.

Her name was Christine. An ordinary name, an ordinary woman I saw at least three times a week and melted into like an extraordinary man would
.

As Anna massages my feet, I can see insects land on her neck, her arms. She doesn’t flinch or take her hands away to swat at them. I cannot move to help her, but it could be now, here, that I tell her about the three years that it carried on, that blondeness and that sheer, blunt access to the tiniest parts of myself accessible through my cock. And perhaps it will be this revelation that will burst the bubble in my wife’s brain. Disgust and love are similar, easily confused; they both burn up the heart and make you weak.

I lean over and take Anna’s hands. I pull her towards me. She is on her knees between my legs, and I hold her shoulders and bring them tightly towards my belly. Her head rests on my chest.

“Please don’t,” I whisper.

“Don’t worry, please,” she whispers back.

“Let’s go for a walk,” I say and release her shoulders.

We both stand. I put my shoes back on. Anna heads towards the back field leading to the woods that line the river. I follow her like a man who has never known a single thing about life.

“You make a sound I’ve never heard before,” Christine said once, having grown bolder with me after the first six months of coyness—her modesty overcome only during sex.

“What sound? When?” I adjusted my position and propped my head up on my hand.

“You know, just in that second … at the end.” She turned to face me. We lay naked on her bed, which had a view of Rosedale Valley. She’d brought wine and set out outrageously priced snacks from a Yorkville deli on the sheets. “Do you share genes with, say, a cricket?” she said, giggling, which was infectious.

Giggling was something we did well. That and sex. And the dreaming—the what-ifs that filled our conversations over dinner.

“What if we woke up one day to find that there were no vegetables?”

“We’d be very upset.”

“Some people would like it.”

“Those some people would be under the age of five.”

And we would giggle.

“What if I went in and quit tomorrow, hitchhiked to California to make it big?” Christine’s parents had been born in Sweden, but the only Scandinavian thing about her was her looks—in other ways she was born to live in California. She was a clerk in a large insurance company, but she had a dream of becoming a singer. She always sang around her apartment, and although at first I had cringed at the thought that she imagined that at thirty-five she still could be discovered, I grew to like the songs, the notes she hit, the lyrics she knew flawlessly. She’d stop what she was doing and ask me to name a song, any song. I’d think hard, trying to make it difficult for her with “So Long, Marianne” or “Like a Hurricane” or anything that came to mind that I thought she wouldn’t know or would never be able to sing. She’d pause for a moment then start, slowly, with an intro beat—I could see her counting in, two three four—and she’d sing, “Once I thought I saw you, in a crowded hazy bar …”

Things with Christine were in my control. She liked what I did, and was intrigued by my work. I showed her
my drawings, talked about the business. She let me decide everything—the song, where to eat dinner, when to turn up, when to leave—and it was probably this, this simple, acquiescent arrangement, as my abs tightened and the love handles shrank, that kept me going back, until I realized we’d formed a team of some kind. Not exactly a partnership, but a duet. At home I would watch as Anna became more and more immersed in Charlotte’s homework, Fred’s university applications, Sasha’s dance lessons.

And then, a year and a half in, Christine said, “What if I got pregnant?”

I was silent.

“I’ve stopped talking the pill.”

My panic felt orange in colour.

“What if?” she said.

“Why would you?”

“It’s what women do.” Her answer was tinged with contempt.

“What about your singing?”

And I had become wretched now.

“You’re never going to leave them, are you?”

I should have ended it in that moment, but the loyal man that I believed myself to be did not want to let her down. I didn’t want her to think I wasn’t the man she had fallen for. What if I could manage both lives? I would let things ride. I would keep everyone happy, I told myself.

“We can see about a baby,” I muttered, and poured us both more wine. The fact that I had got away with something gave me new momentum. I began to tease myself
with the new what ifs. Then and there I soldered the links of my new chains.

Charlotte had been on the debating team at her high school, already arguing at sixteen for free-market values. Her skills were most clearly employed in opposition to her parents. She was a stroppy teenager, but not a stereotype. She could turn on the charm, help about the house, and show compassion and generosity at one moment, then, wham, a door would slam, her temper flare and an argument erupt. She’d confront me on the restrictions I’d implement—no television on school nights, a curfew of eleven o’clock on the weekend—by planting herself in front of me and not moving. She was like a cowboy in a western, standing her ground, hands in her pockets as though poised over holsters. I usually held my own, insisting, for example, that attending a party in a town an hour’s drive away was out of the question, but at times I capitulated merely on account of her physical presence—the woman emerging from the child, the unfeminine woman I had not expected; the commanding, demanding woman who made everyone else, including her mother and her older brother, seem so much weaker.

On one October afternoon, I had come home from work early, the commute from the city to Stayner easier than normal, so I decided to pick Charlotte and Sasha up from school to save them the bus ride.

“Can I drive?” Charlotte asked me, coming around to my side of the car as I pulled up to the curb where they
had been waiting for the bus. Seventeen, she had recently got her beginner’s licence.

“Not today, get in the other side,” I said, in a cheerful enough tone.

“Dad …” she whined and stood her ground. “Why not?”

“Because I said so,” I snapped, sounding the gong on my parenting skills. “You haven’t done much on the highway; there’s too much traffic today,” I added, trying harder.

“I’ve done highway,” she said, with a smirk that told me she’d driven on it with others. “All my friends in Toronto have been driving for a year. They do the Don Valley, the 401, all of it. We’re complete hicks up here, Dad.” She continued to stand at my door, waiting for me to back down.

“Nope,” I said, and started to roll up the window. Defeated, Charlotte turned on her heels in a huff and got in the back seat, letting Sasha, for once, ride shotgun.

“I’m moving back to Toronto,” Charlotte said, as she pulled the back door shut.

Sasha was giddy with her day’s activities: drama class, the soccer team, and the upcoming auditions for the musical. She talked without breathing for the next ten minutes, as though this exceptional placement up front gave her a unique chance to get it all out, and as if, since the episode with the ecstasy, she was still trying to make up for disappointing us.

“Dad!” Charlotte called out from the back seat, just as I was preparing to change lanes to turn off the highway.

“What?” I asked, slowing down and looking in my rear-view mirror, worried that something was wrong.

“Since when do you go to Fallucci’s?”

A spike ran up my chest.

“What are you talking about?” I could see Charlotte in the mirror looking down at something in her hands. My throat went tight. She looked up, caught my eye in the mirror and sat forward.

“Matches?” she asked, all Valley-girl squawky.

“What?” I said stupidly, looking back at the road, changing a lane and signalling to turn right.

“Fancy place, Fallucci’s. Rick’s parents go to Toronto once a month especially. His uncle owns it.”

I pulled onto the two-lane highway that would take us to our sideroad. I felt sick.

“You been there?” she said in a way that wasn’t a question. A subtle debating team tactic.

“No.”

“Where did these matches come from then?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.” That tone of voice again. I looked into the rear-view mirror and caught her glare.

“Maybe they’re Mom’s,” Sasha said, her thin legs squirming beneath the skirt she hated wearing.

“I don’t know,” I said and sped the car up a little, then rolled down my window, hoping the wind would shush my elder daughter.

“Mom has never been there. I told her about Rick’s parents going. She said she wanted to go too.”

“Maybe Fred …” I said, like a pitiable fool. Fred had rarely been in our car since he’d got his licence and saved up for his own run-down Toyota.

“Mmmmph,” Charlotte grunted, and for a moment I hoped she would let the matter drop. “Why would Fred leave them in your back seat?”

“I don’t know, Charlotte. Just stop this inane conversation,” I said, exploding now with the aggression of guilt. “You’ve barely said hello to me, and certainly haven’t thanked me for the fact that you don’t have to sit on a hot bus that takes three times as long to get home,” I was ranting. “And not a word about your day. What’s gotten into you?” I didn’t look in the rear-view as I turned right onto our concession road, but I knew that Charlotte’s face was full of loathing.

I spent the rest of the day swallowing discomfort, wondering if Christine had dropped the matches in the back seat on purpose. I was on the verge of confessing everything to Anna that night, wanting to waylay Charlotte raising the topic, but she never said another word about it.

Christine stayed awake each night after I left, she told me. Over and over again, she blamed me for the insomnia she said was aging her. And for her childlessness. After the hunger, the fumbling, the mad excavation to the centre of her, I would pull out and come somewhere on her body, in my hand or on the sheets. And each night after I left, she’d stay awake alone, aging with an empty womb.

I was playing a perilous game with myself. With her.

“I love my family,” I would say, toying with them, too.

“Then what are you doing here wasting my time?” she finally asked one night.

“Well, I love you too,” I said, believing in the cliché of the man I had become.

“Go home,” she said, and thus it began: the slow attrition of pride and lust. She threatened never to see me again, telling me that at thirty-eight she was now too old to be playing this game. When I called the next day, wracked that she might now hate me, she had softened, and our routine of dinner, sex and songs began again, and at first seemed as spontaneous and erotic as in the beginning. But over the next few months I turned into an observer of myself, wondering how I had come to this, how I could have these conversations, or listen to this pathetic singing. I watched when we fucked, too, wanting someone else to see me, wanting to perform this for an audience, feeling my leg muscles swell, my arms bulge with effort that I wanted documented. I’d do my little show for myself, and then I’d pull out at the very last second.

Charlotte is helping Anna make more piles. They are in our bedroom, and I have come to stand in the doorway to watch. Charlotte has delicately trimmed Anna’s hair to an ear-length bob, which will facilitate the clipping and shaving that will take place before they carve open her skull. This small act of vanity in the face of the operation’s brutality is something I believe is only possible among women: my daughter is anointing her mother’s body in preparation for its mutilation.

“Look at this!” Charlotte yelps, coming across a plaid skirt in Anna’s closet. She hauls the skirt out and holds it up to her waist, drawing attention to its extravagant length and bulk. “Good grief, Mom, how could you?”

Anna smiles and puts down the other clothes she has been sorting. She crosses the room to Charlotte. “Ah, I love this skirt; it’s so old,” she says, fondling the woollen pleats, and both Charlotte and I are drawn in by her perfect syntax.

“You do?” Charlotte says through laughter.

“I do.”

“But Mom, it’s hideous. It has to go. I’ll buy you a new one, after. Shorter, funkier. You’d look great in Vivienne Westwood.”

“No, this one,” Anna says, without taking her eyes or hands off the plaid, “this one he made in the poppies.” Charlotte and I don’t even bother to look at one another.

“The tail in the squares makes the bones dance … it was that time when all the bones danced.” She pulls the skirt tightly against herself and I wonder if this statement is indeed true and not a confabulation.

I have noticed that, but for brief snatches of clarity, Anna’s language has changed in the last few days. It feels not so much like a sluicing of random words, but rather a controlled, matter-of-fact absurdity. I imagine that it’s not just memories she has confabulated; she is constructing the future now. The moment when all the bones will dance.

“They waste stuff,” she says in three controlled words, waving her hand at Charlotte, who smiles in sheepish
acknowledgement. “They have loads,” Anna continues. Another three. “You’ve spoiled them,” she says as she turns to me.