Wilderness Tips (22 page)

I called this compromise. Molly called it cynicism.

Across the table, Charles is having another glass of wine. I think he’s deciding that I am a good sport. So necessary in a woman with
whom you’re considering what used to be called an illicit affair; because that’s what this lunch is really about. It’s a mutual interview, for positions vacant. I could have made my charity plea in Charles’s office and been turned down shortly and sweetly. We could have kept it formal.

Charles is good-looking, in the way such men are, although if you saw him on a street corner, lacking a shave and with his hand out, you might not think so. Such men always seem the same age. They were longing to be this age when they were twenty-five, and so they imitated it; and after they pass this age, they will try to imitate it again. The weightiness of authority is what they want, and enough youth left to enjoy it. It’s the age called
prime
, like beef. They all have that beefy thing about them. A meaty firmness. They all play something: they begin with squash, progress through tennis, end with golf. It keeps them in trim. Two hundred pounds of hot steak. I should know.

All of it swathed in expensive, dark blue suiting, with a thin stripe. A conservative tie down the front, maroon with a little design. This one has horses.

“Are you fond of horses, Charles?”

“What?”

“Your tie.”

“Oh. No. Not particularly. Gift from my wife.”

I’m putting off any renewed mention of Molly’s Place until dessert – never make the heavy pitch till then, says business etiquette, let the guy suck up a little protein first – although if my guess is right and Charles too is concerned with his weight, we’ll both skip dessert and settle for double espresso. Meanwhile I listen to Charles, as I dole out the leading questions. The ground rules are being quietly set forth: two mentions of the wife already, one of the son at college, one of the teenage daughter. Stable family is the message. It goes with the horse tie.

It’s the wife who interests me most, of course. If men like Charles did not have wives, they would have to invent them. So useful for fending off the other women, when they get too close. If I were a man, that’s what I’d do: invent a wife, put one together from bits and pieces – a ring from a pawnshop, a photo or two snuck out of someone else’s album, a three-minute sentimental drone about the kids. You could fake phone calls to yourself; you could send postcards to yourself, from Bermuda, or better, Tortuga. But men like Charles are not thorough in their deceptions. Their killer instincts are directed elsewhere. They get snarled up in their own lies or give themselves away by shifty eye movements. At heart, they are too sincere.

I, on the other hand, have a devious mind and little sense of guilt. My guilt is about other things.

I already suspect what his wife will look like: overtanned, over-exercised, with alert leathery eyes and too many tendons in her neck. I see these wives, packs of them, or pairs or teams, loping around in their tennis whites, over at the club. Smug, but jumpy. They know this is a polygamous country in all but name. I make them nervous.

But they should be grateful to me for helping them out. Who else has the time and expertise to smooth the egos of men like Charles, listen to their jokes, lie to them about their sexual prowess? The tending of such men is a fading art, like scrimshaw or the making of woollen rose mantelpiece decorations. The wives are too busy for it, and the younger women don’t know how. I know how. I learned in the old school, which was not the same as the one that gave out the ties.

Sometimes, when I have amassed yet another ugly wristwatch or brooch (they never give rings; if I want one of those, I buy it myself), when I’ve been left stranded on a weekend in favour of the kids and the Georgian Bay cottage, I think about what I could tell and I feel powerful. I think about dropping an acerbic, vengeful little note
through the mailbox of the wife in question, citing moles strategically placed, nicknames, the perverse habits of the family dog. Proofs of knowledge.

But then, I would lose power. Knowledge is power only as long as you keep your mouth shut.

Here’s one for you, Molly:
menopause
. A pause while you reconsider men.

At long last, here come the entrées, with a flashing of teeth and a winsome glance from the waiter. Veal scallopini for Charles, who has evidently not seen those sordid pictures of calves being bleached in the dark, seafood
en brochette
for me. I think: Now he’ll say “Cheers” again, and then he’ll make some comment about seafood being good for the sex drive. He’s had enough wine for that, by now. Next he’ll ask me why I’m not married.

“Cheers,” says Charles. “Any oysters in there?”

“No,” I say. “Not a one.”

“Too bad. Good for what ails you.”

Speak for yourself, I think. He gives a meditative chew or two. “How is it that you never got married – an attractive woman like you?”

I shrug my shoulder pads. What should I tell him? The dead fiancé story, lifted from the great-aunt of a friend? No. Too World War I. Should I say, “I was too choosy”? That might scare him: if I’m hard to please, how will he manage to please me?

I don’t really know why. Maybe I was waiting for the big romance. Maybe I wanted True Love, with the armpits airbrushed out and no bitter aftertaste. Maybe I wanted to keep my options open. In those days, I felt that anything could happen.

“I was married once,” I say, sadly, regretfully. I hope to convey that I did the right thing but it didn’t work out. Some jerk let me
down, in a way too horrible to go into. Charles is free to think he could have done better.

There’s something final about saying you were married once. It’s like saying you were dead once. It shuts them up.

It’s funny that Molly was the one who got married. You’d think it would have been me. I was the one who wanted the two children, the two-car garage, the antique dining table with the rose bowl in the centre. Well, at least I’ve got the table. Other women’s husbands sit at it, and I feed them omelets, while they surreptitiously consult their watches. But if they even hint at divorcing the wife, I heave them out the door so fast they can’t remember where they left their boxer shorts. I’ve never wanted to make the commitment. Or I’ve never wanted to take the risk. It amounts to the same thing.

There was a time when my married friends envied me my singleness, or said they did. I was having fun, ran the line, and they were not. Recently, though, they’ve revised this view. They tell me I ought to travel, since I have the freedom for it. They give me brochures with palm trees on them. What they have in mind is a sunshine cruise, a shipboard romance, an adventure. I can think of nothing worse: stuck on an overheated boat with a lot of wrinkly women, all bent on adventure too. So I stuff the brochures in behind the toaster oven, so convenient for solo dinners, where one of these days they will no doubt burst into flame.

I get enough adventure, right around here. It’s wearing me out.

Twenty years ago, I was just out of law school; in another twenty, I’ll be retired, and it will be the twenty-first century, for whoever’s counting. Once a month I wake in the night, slippery with terror. I’m afraid, not because there’s someone in the room, in the dark, in the bed, but because there isn’t. I’m afraid of the emptiness, which lies beside me like a corpse.

I think: What will become of me? I will be alone. Who will visit me in the old-age home? I think of the next man as an aging horse must think of a jump. Will I lose my nerve? Can I still pull it off? Should I get married? Do I have the choice?

In the daytime, I am fine. I lead a rich full life. There is, of course, my career. I shine away at it like an antique brass. I add on to it like a stamp collection. It props me up: a career like an underwired brassiere. Some days I hate it.

“Dessert?” says Charles.

“Will you?”

Charles pats his midriff. “Trying to cut down,” he says.

“Let’s just have a double espresso,” I say. I make it sound like a delicious conspiracy.

Double espresso
. A diabolical torture devised by the Spanish Inquisition, involving a sack of tacks, a silver bootjack, and two three-hundred-pound priests.

Molly, I let you down. I burned out early. I couldn’t take the pressure. I wanted security. Maybe I decided that the fastest way to improve the lot of women was to improve my own.

Molly kept on. She lost that baby-fat roundness; she developed a raw edge to her voice and took to chain-smoking. Her hair got dull and her skin looked abraded, and she paid no attention. She began to lecture me about my lack of seriousness, and also about my wardrobe, for which I overspent in her opinion. She began to use words like
patriarchy
. I began to find her strident.

“Molly,” I said. “Why don’t you give it up? You’re slamming your head against a big brick wall.” I felt like a traitor saying it. But I’d have felt like a traitor if I hadn’t said it, because Molly was knocking herself out, and for peanuts. The kind of women she represented never had any money.

“We’re making progress,” she’d say. Her face was getting that ropy look, like a missionary’s. “We’re accomplishing something.”

“Who is this
we?”
I’d say. “I don’t see a lot of people helping you out.”

“Oh, they do,” she said vaguely. “Some of them do. They do what they can, in their own way. It’s sort of like the widow’s mite, you know?”

“What widow?” I said. I knew but I was exasperated. She was trying to make me feel guilty. “Quit trying for sainthood, Molly. Enough is enough.”

That was before she married Curtis.

“Now,” says Charles. “Cards on the table, eh?”

“Right,” I say. “Well, I’ve explained the basic position to you already. In your office.”

“Yes,” he says. “As I told you, the company has already allocated its charitable donations budget for this year.”

“But you could make an exception,” I say. “You could draw on next year’s budget.”

“We could, if – well, the bottom line is that we like to think we’re getting something back for what we put in. Nothing blatant, just what you might call good associations. With hearts and kidneys, for instance, there’s no problem at all.”

“What’s wrong with battered women?”

“Well, there would be our company logo, and then right beside it these battered women. The public might get the wrong idea.”

“You mean they might think the company was doing the battering itself?”

“In a word, yes,” says Charles.

It’s like any negotiation. Always agree, then come at them from a different angle. “You have a point,” I say.

Battered women
. I can see it in lights, like a roadside fast-food
joint.
Get some fresh
. Sort of like onion rings and deep-fried chicken. A terrible pun. Would Molly have laughed? Yes. No. Yes.

Battered
. Covered in slime, then dipped into hell. Not so inappropriate, after all.

Molly was thirty when she married Curtis. He wasn’t the first man she’d lived with. I’ve often wondered why she did it. Why him? Possibly she just got tired.

Still, it was a strange choice. He was so dependent. He could hardly let her out of his sight. Was that the appeal? Probably not. Molly was a fixer. She thought she could fix things that were broken. Sometimes she could. Though Curtis was too broken even for her. He was so broken he thought the normal state of the world was broken. Maybe that’s why he tried to break Molly: to make her normal. When he couldn’t do it one way, he did it another.

He was plausible enough, at first. He was a lawyer, he had the proper suits. I could say I knew right away that he wasn’t totally glued together, but it wouldn’t be true. I didn’t know. I didn’t like him a lot, but I didn’t know.

For a while after the wedding I didn’t see that much of Molly. She was always busy doing something or other with Curtis, and then there were the children. A boy and a girl, just what I’d always expected, for myself. Sometimes, it seemed that Molly was leading the life I might have led, if it hadn’t been for caution and a certain fastidiousness. When it comes to the crunch, I have a dislike of other people’s bathtub rings. That’s the virtue in married men: someone else does the maintenance.

“Is everything all right?” asks the waiter, for the fourth time. Charles doesn’t answer. Perhaps he doesn’t hear. He’s the sort of man for whom waiters are a kind of warm-blooded tea trolley.

“Wonderful,” I say.

“Why don’t these battered women just get a good lawyer?” says Charles. He’s genuinely baffled. No use telling him they can’t afford it. For him, that’s not a concept.

“Charles,” I say. “Some of these guys
are
good lawyers.”

“Nobody I know,” says Charles.

“You’d be surprised,” I say. “Of course, we take personal donations too.”

“What?” says Charles, who has not followed me.

“Not just corporate ones. Bill Henry over at ConFrax gave two thousand dollars.” Bill Henry had to. I know all about his useful right-buttock birthmark, the one shaped like a rabbit. I know his snore pattern.

“Ah,” says Charles, caught unawares. But he will not be hooked without a struggle. “You know I like to put my money where it’s doing some real good. These women, you get them out, but I’ve been told they just go right back and get battered again.”

I’ve heard it before. They’re addicted. They can’t get enough of having their eyes punched in. “Give it to the Heart Foundation,” I say, “and those ungrateful triple bypasses will just croak anyway, sooner or later. It’s like they’re asking for it.”

“Touché,” says Charles. Oh, good. He knows some French. Not a complete oaf, unlike some. “How about I take you out for dinner on, say” – he consults his little book, the one they all carry around in the breast pocket – “Wednesday? Then you can convince me.”

“Charles,” I say, “that’s not fair. I would adore to have dinner with you but not as the price of your donation. Give first, and then we can have dinner with a clear conscience.”

Charles likes the idea of a clear conscience. He grins and reaches for his chequebook. He is not going to look cheaper than Bill Henry. Not at this stage of the game.