We So Seldom Look on Love (25 page)

“No, thanks.”

“Still a saint, eh?” Cory said. “Well”—she smirked—”not exactly,” and she scanned around her, implying that Marion was a gold digger.

So Marion told her about Grace, about all the money she’d actually moved away from to move in here. “Believe it or not,” she said, “I’m really crazy about John.”

“Christ,” Cory said, flicking ashes on the carpet. “You know, I leave this shit-hole town to make some money, get a better life. I work my ass off …” She stopped and chewed on her bottom lip.

Marion didn’t know what to say. “At least you’re safe from Rick,” was all she could come up with.

“Rick the Prick.”

“I feel sorry for the lizards, though,” Marion said.

Cory snorted. “I feel sorry I didn’t flatten their warty little bodies with a hammer and put them in his cereal box.”

Driving back to the house, Cory had told Marion how she’d landed a job at Rick’s nightclub near the airport. A high-class place, she’d said. No nudity, strictly pasties and G-strings. Using her talents as an ex-cheerleader, she’d worked out an act in which she bounced on a little trampoline, doing somersaults and splits in the air, then cartwheeled over to a rail and performed a balance-beam routine. Within two weeks she was the headliner and had moved into Rick’s twenty-fifth-storey penthouse condo.

Rick had two aquariums in which he kept lizards that shot blood from their eyelids when they were scared. Cory hated them, although she got a kick out of poking at them with a pencil. Evidence of blood in the aquariums was the only thing she and Rick had fights over, for the first six months, that is. Then Rick admitted he had fantasies of cutting her face so that no other guy would want her. Cory thought he was kidding until one night at a party he went after her with a paring knife. She forgave him because he was drunk and he missed her by a mile. But two nights ago, after she gave the bartender an innocent little birthday kiss, Rick tried to burn her with his cigarette lighter. She got away and ran right out onto the street, wearing only her G-string and pasties, and took a cab back to the condo. The first thing she did was pick up the lizards with hotdog tongs and throw them out the window. Then she stole the money on Rick’s dresser—a couple of hundred bucks—and spent two nights in a hotel before taking the bus to Garvey. She’d told everybody she was from the West Coast, so she thought it would be a miracle if Rick found her.

“You know,” she said now, running a finger under her blackened eye, “this place is even nicer than the condo.”

“We’re just thrilled with it,” Marion said.

“I like it here,” Cory said. “I wouldn’t mind staying here forever.”

She did, she did stay forever. At first it was going to be for two weeks. Just to get her out of the house, John rehired her in the shoe store, the plan being she’d save her wages to rent an apartment, but she didn’t last three days. Selling shoes was too much of a comedown after being a nightclub headliner, she said. John let that pass. He just wanted her out. He thought she was a slut and was ruining their love life. No more bubble baths, no more sex all over the house, which Marion missed, too, but neither of them had the heart to tell Cory to leave. She had nobody else. She had nothing. John gave her some money for clothes to apply for jobs in, but she spent it on a black leather motorcycle jacket and black leather pants, claiming she didn’t know how to dress like a hick. Waitressing at one of the town’s two bars seemed to be the obvious solution, except that they were country-and-western and she said country-and-western music made her puke. John thought he’d finally found the solution when the hydro worker who rented the apartment behind the Esso station moved out.

“It’s yours,” he told Cory. “Rent-free until you get a job.”

“Oh, great,” Cory said, tears welling in her eyes. “A hole in the middle of nowhere where I can get raped by every grease-ball in the county. Thanks a lot.” And she ran into her bedroom and slammed the door.

Her insomnia had disappeared. She went to bed at nine or ten in the evening and slept until noon. Usually she was still in bed when Marion returned home from the pet store. She had long showers and watched
TV
and drove Marion’s car to the mall, where she pestered John for cigarette money. While Marion made supper, she smoked at the kitchen table and cut to shreds whoever she’d seen that day, either at the mall or on
TV
. It was like old times, except that once in a while she went after John or his sisters or Grace, and even though Marion
understood that this was just Cory trying to get her goat, she was nevertheless hurt and couldn’t help rising to their defence, which was like throwing tin cans at a sharpshooter.

With Grace and John’s sisters, her ruthlessness could take Marion’s breath away. With John, however, she showed some restraint. She allowed for the other side of the coin. Okay, she conceded, John was generous and handsome … a generous bullshitter, a handsome shrimp. One day she said, “I’ll bet he’s got one of those tuna-can cocks.”

“He does not!” Marion said. “It’s perfectly normal.”

“How would you know? Have you ever seen another cock?”

“I’ve seen them on animals.”

Cory burst out laughing. “Oh, right, you work in a pet store. Well, shit, I’m not saying that in a line-up of well-hung gerbils he couldn’t hold his own.”

Marion was furious. “I’m talking about horses,” she said wildly.

Silence. A forsythia branch tapped on the kitchen window.

“You’re kidding,” Cory said conversationally.

Not long after that the snow melted under the bushes, and the warm air blowing over the fields began to carry with it the smell of manure and mud. Cory started getting up earlier to sunbathe on the front lawn in her pink-sequined G-string and a tank top. “Owooo, Mama!” John howled at her on his way to or from the car. Suddenly he was always running off somewhere, never home long enough to worry about whether Cory was looking for a job. So Marion stopped worrying, too. In fact, with John away so much, she had to admit that she was grateful for Cory’s company.

Cory joined her now on her shopping trips for red and black things. She was an enormous help. “John will hate that,” she’d say confidently, and Marion would pause and realize that Cory was right. After shopping they’d drive to the Bluebird Café for lunch. “On John,” as Cory would point out, ordering dessert and
an Irish coffee. She was gaining weight, but Marion thought she could do with it. Her hair was growing back to its lovely peach colour. Her eyes had their old shiftiness. She seemed to be over Rick, and one afternoon Marion ventured to tell her as much.

“Over
him!” Cory said. “I hated that asshole from day one. You know, just because you live with some guy doesn’t mean you have to like him.”

“It does as far as I’m concerned,” Marion said.

“That’s
you,”
Cory said. She downed her glass of wine. She lit a cigarette and looked out the window. “Stupid people get everything they deserve,” she said fiercely. Marion assumed she was referring to Rick. “I have no pity for stupid people,” she said. “I can’t afford to.”

Two days later, during one of the rare suppers that John was eating with them, Cory interrupted a story he was telling about a man with a quadruple-E shoe size and bunions the size of eggs. “I’m sorry, John,” she said, “but she’s going to have to know sooner or later.” And she looked at Marion and said, “I’m pregnant and John’s the father.”

“Jesus Christ,” John said, dropping his knife onto the floor. A full confession.

Marion watched him pick the knife up. The back of his neck was the colour of beetroot. “Why do I feel as if I already know this?” she asked, genuinely curious. She looked at her lifeline. It was long but forked.

“Listen—” John said.

“I’m not having an abortion and I’m not giving it up for adoption,” Cory said.

John planted his hands flat on the table. “Okay—” he said. He took a deep breath.

“No way I’m giving it up,” Cory said. “Not this time.”

“Excuse me,” Marion said, pushing back her chair.

“Hey!” John said. “Where are you going?” He followed her into the front hall. “Come on. Jesus. Where are you going?”

“Let her go,” Cory said.

Marion never laid eyes on him again. He phoned her at the farmhouse three times that night, but she wouldn’t talk to him. The next morning, while she lay on her old bed and wept, only letting herself really wail whenever the electric saw started up (Grace was having the kitchen renovated), her father and Grace drove to see him at his gas station. They told her nothing she hadn’t figured out. John was confused. He still loved her. He wanted to do the right thing by the baby.

“How’s he know it’s
his,
that’s what I kept harping on,” Grace said.

“It’s his,” Marion said. Hadn’t she foreseen John and Cory’s children?

And yet she waited for him to knock the door down, to beg her to come back. When he phoned he said he loved her, then started crying and couldn’t speak. She hung up. One day she stayed on the line to ask, “Do you love Cory?”

“Not … not … not …,” he said.

She waited.

“Not as much as you.”

She dropped the phone and went into the bathroom and considered the bottle of codeine. It wasn’t worse than when her mother died. Her body didn’t have that thin, hollow sensation of being made of crêpe paper. And the pain wasn’t non-stop. There were hours at a time when she felt fine, even relieved. Compared to her mother dying it could feel like nothing, but it could also
remind
her of her mother dying. Force her—especially when she was falling asleep or just waking up—to see the piece of skin on the refrigerator and the skirts and blouses flattened in boxes for the Salvation Army. It was like being an alcoholic, and somebody gives you a drink.

What helped was going into work six days a week. She sat with the beagle puppies in her lap and tried not to pray it was John every time the bell on the door announced a customer.
When she finally let Mrs. Hodgson know what was wrong, Mrs. Hodgson said, “Here’s one that’ll cheer you up,” and told her about a woman who stole her best friend’s husband, moved into the marital house and a week later was fried to a crisp when the furnace exploded.

Thereafter Mrs. Hodgson’s idea of lifting Marion’s spirits was reporting on any sightings of Cory in town. Cory was seen at the liquor store “loading up.” At the drugstore buying a tube of lipstick with a hundred-dollar bill. One day Marion herself saw her. Cory walked in front of the car when Marion was stopped at a red light. She was wearing blue-jean shorts and Marion’s red-and-blue plaid shirt rolled up at the sleeves and knotted under the tender swell of her belly.

That evening Marion phoned John at the store, the first time she’d phoned him. She was crying. She didn’t know what she was going to say.

But Cory answered. “Is that you, Marion?” she shouted after saying hello three times.

Marion covered the mouthpiece with her hand.

“Listen, Marion,” Cory shouted. “You know, it’s not as if he wasn’t fucking half the jail bait in town!”

Suddenly another voice cried, “That’s a lie, and you know it!” It was Grace, on the extension. “You’re a liar and a home wrecker, that’s what you are!”

Marion hung up. A few minutes later Grace came pounding down the stairs. “I wasn’t eavesdropping,” she said. “I was just about to dial out.” She was panting and her face was startlingly red. “Holy mackerel, is she ever a stinker.”

“I want to go away,” Marion said. “I want to live somewhere else.”

“Oh,” Grace said. They looked at each other. “Where?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Far enough from here that nobody will know who I am.”

Grace pushed her glasses up her nose. “Well, I can’t say as I don’t know the feeling,” she said.

The night before Sam leaves to have his operation, Marion dreams about somebody who starts out being her mother but seems to change into John. Marion is embracing this person, melting with love, when she discovers a hole in the small of his or her back. She sticks her hand in, reaches up and withdraws the heart. It pulses and half-rolls in her palm like a newly hatched bird. It is so exposed! She puts it in her mouth and tries to get it down her throat into her ribcage without scraping its delicate membrane or stopping its beat. It catches on something though, a tooth-like thing in the area of her vocal cords, and tears in half. She lets go of it and it just slips away. She starts to cry. She wakes up crying.

She buries her face in the pillow so that Sam won’t hear. She wants her mother.
She
knows better, but year after year her heart goes on pumping out love as if all
it
knows is circulation, as if the beloved is right there in front of her to receive the love and purify it and send it back. She tries to envision her mother’s face, but she can’t. Instead she sees the heart she extracted in her dream. Then she sees an erect penis, a solid, ordinary thing, like a bird perch. Then a face—Sam’s face.

He’s standing in the doorway. She can feel him there. She opens her eyes but it’s so dark it doesn’t make any difference. He sits on the bed and begins to stroke her hair and her back. His hand draws the grief into his own hand, draws it in, lets it go. When she finally calms down, he slips under the sheet and lies beside her. Her bare back just touches his bare chest. She doesn’t move away. She is so grateful for the solid, living length of him.

Neither of them speaks. The room is pitch dark, and they breathe in unison. On her thigh his right hand rests lightly. His
fingers are cool and not quite still. He keeps the nails on his right hand long for playing the guitar. It used to excite her to see that hand on her breast, the thumb and forefinger plucking her nipple into hardness.

She has brought her own hand to her breast. She doesn’t fully realize it until she feels his fingers brushing her knuckles. Something just clears out of her mind, gives up. She turns over and kisses him on the mouth.

He jerks his head back.

“It’s all right,” she says, meaning that everything is. Meaning that her love is panoramic, racing like an ignited wick from the night of the wedding to this moment. She kisses him again. She pushes her tongue between his teeth. She licks his teeth, bites his bottom lip. She drops onto her back and pulls him on top of her.