Good to a Fault (9 page)

She counted to a hundred. Then she got up, slow and fluid. She glided Pearce down into his crib so that he didn’t wake, and got herself back into bed. Out in the hall Mrs. Pell’s door opened and closed, and the bathroom door. In a few minutes the toilet flushed, and Mrs. Pell stalked back down the hall to the kitchen, feet clomping on the tiles. Maybe her feet hurt. Some while later Mrs. Pell woke her again, shutting her bedroom door loudly, with who knows what in her hands, what mess. It didn’t matter. Clara turned over and shifted her pillow and went back to sleep for the last four hours of the night.

H
is car not being completely reliable, Paul took the bus to the Diocesan office in Regina to see the suffragan bishop. On the way down he read Stevie Smith (hardly a Christian poet, although presumably Anglican), her lines tramping through his head to the thrumming drone of the bus vibrating along the empty highway.
Can God, / Stone of man’s thoughts, be good? / Say rather it is enough / That the stuffed / Stone of man’s good, growing, / By man’s called God.

He had been leaving the church on Monday when the bishop’s secretary called to ask him to come in on Tuesday. Short notice.
Away, Melancholy, away with it, let it go.

The bus got in to Regina early, and Paul walked around the city aimlessly for an hour, dismayed as always by the number of street people, giving away all his change and two tens he happened to find in his pocket. When he arrived, on time, he still had to wait. The secretary gave him a plastic cone cup of coffee, the vessel he most despised. He fixed the cone more firmly in the holder and doled out cream powder, missing his own bad coffee. Bishop Vivian Porter, the first woman prelate in the diocese. Lisanne, suspicious, always waited to catch him in a compromising glance with Bishop Porter. He
should have had the courage to scotch her stupid jealousy, for her own sake as well as his comfort.

When she appeared, the bishop was wearing a purple wool dress, a nod to her position, and suede shoes so velvety-looking that Paul had to suppress a sudden desire to stroke them.

“You’re showing strain,” the bishop said. She held his hand for a minute.

He forced himself not to give an airy laugh, not to sally.

“Come in,” she said. “We’ll be quiet in here.”

Her office was a comfortable room. Much improved since her predecessor. (“
Much improved since her predecessor,
” he heard Clara repeat. He was stilted even in his thoughts.)

“What a good room,” he said. “You’ve made it very handsome.” (
Handsome
? Fine! He spoke as he spoke!)

Vivian Porter reached up and let her hand slide down the towering gold velvet drapes. “I love these, don’t you? My daughter did them up for me. And they have a secret, subversive side—look—” She turned back the ecclesiastical velvet to reveal the lining: cherry stripes on a lime green ground.

“Perfect,” he said. He sank into one of the leather chairs by her desk. His knees seemed too large together. He splayed them apart, but that looked clumsy. He put his jacket on his lap and tried to forget himself. No matter how kindly Vivian arranged things, this summons was a visit to the headmaster. There must be something very wrong.

She patted the drapes back, their sober sides out, and got down to it. “I received an awkward phone message yesterday from your warden. Rather than reply myself, I wanted to see if we could together come up with a response.” She leaned forward to the machine on her desk, the gold chain weighing down her bodice. She was fiftyish, young for a bishop, and intelligent. He admired and respected her.

A click, then the tape beginning.

“This is Candy Vincent calling, the people’s warden from St. Anne’s. I’m sorry to bother you with something so—
hm
. But I didn’t know whom to—to whom—to tell.” Candy Vincent’s familiar screechy voice filled the room, and filled the spaces inside his head. What was it going to be? His stomach was roiling. That
hm
of hers. The tape ran on, the voice ran on.

“Father Paul’s wife—Lisanne Tippett—” Paul laughed, he couldn’t
help himself. He had heard her say
Xanthippe
, rather than Lisanne Tippett. It struck him, sharp as a smack: he had married Socrates’ shrew of a wife. He had a moment of pure pleasure at the ludicrous joke of the world, and classical studies, and the joke of himself, his own ridiculous self.

Vivian Porter looked up at him, lines on her forehead as her eyebrows double-arched. He shook his head, which she took to be an answer of some kind.

Candy had gathered momentum. Paul could picture her holding one of the fundraising chocolates, at Tuesday’s vestry meeting, talking while the chocolate melted in her solid fingers.

“She has never been
involved
in the parish, but there’s no escaping the fact: she wrote an article on—” It would take her a moment to get that out, Paul thought. “On mastur
ba
tion.”

There was a pause, a quiet space on the tape. Chocolate on her hands.

Vivian Porter’s mouth had turned up at one corner. Possibly smiling, Paul thought. Difficult not to, at the word, at the word coming from Candy Vincent. “And other things—equipment.”

The bishop pressed the stop button. “That’s enough, I think.”

Paul was mainly conscious of relief that it had been something to do with Lisanne rather than himself. They sat comfortably enough, knowing one another to that limited degree that let them expect the best of each other. The bishop would not be unreasonable, Paul would not be defensive, and what Lisanne wrote was not the diocese’s business anyway.

“But it’s awkward,” Paul acknowledged. “Lisanne and I are—dissolving our—” He had sawdust, leafmould in his mouth. “She’s left me. We will probably divorce. I only say
probably
because I still hope for a better resolution. Lisanne has no such hope.”
Man, too, hurries, Eats, couples, buries, He is an animal also. With a hey ho melancholy, away with it, let it go…
“The article was written more than a year ago, a commission. It’s hardly a sex magazine, it’s
Women’s Fitness
. The swimsuit issue is sought after, I understand, but the general tone of the magazine is clinical.”

“How long have you been married?”

“I suppose a long time—nineteen years. We were married as students…”

“I’m sorry, Paul.”

Nothing more for her to say, and nothing for him to confide. Except
that Lisanne was making his life excruciating any way she could, exacting revenge for some sin he had not consciously committed—the sin of not caring enough that she was leaving him, perhaps.

“My wife may have drawn the article to Candy’s attention herself,” he told Vivian, suddenly filled with longing to tell her everything. She motioned with her hand, a closing gesture which he interpreted as distaste for tattling. Very well. He said no more.
Away with it, let it go.

Everything ends. The motion of the bus and his lack of responsibility for that motion were equally soothing, crossing the empty inland sea of prairie.

They had not slept together—Paul corrected himself, they had relentlessly continued to share a bed—had not made love since she missed a period eight years ago. For the first few days, because they thought Lisanne was pregnant; then because she was in mourning; then for a few months because they hated each other, or at least she hated him; then for nothing. Because they didn’t make love any more, that was not them.

She had told her sister, in his hearing, that she wouldn’t care if she never had sex again. Carol had bridled and whinnied, but Lisanne was set, something admirable in her unbreachable self-possession.
Admirable, implacable.
Words flittering in his head.

He had trapped her by agreeing with her, giving her no opportunity for rage. They had married too young, and he had not been careful enough to keep some dignity or authority or respect—which he could only have maintained by behaviour which he did not believe in: by coldness, or insistence on his own sovereignty. He had given over to her, and that was weak, and she hated him. Paul could not find it in his heart, not even in his brain, to blame her. But he deeply wanted not to be married to her any more. Maybe they had
let it drag out so long, so painfully, in order for the pain of the actual event to be lessened. Telephone poles clicked past the bus window, tallying the distance, the wires swooping him on from point to point, back to his empty house. She had not been a good wife, even at the beginning. He knew of one affair and suspected others. She was selfish and base, and he was a fool, and between them that had been the best that they could do.

His head hurt where he had bumped it on the bunk bed. He leaned the lump against the cool bus window.

B
ecause of the crowded schedule, Lorraine’s chemo couldn’t begin until Tuesday. Darwin wheeled her around the halls while they waited for her chemo training session. For an adventure they explored the fourth floor, the osteo ward: unfamiliar peach walls, and more art. This hospital was big on art.

“Can you believe the death pictures?” she asked. “Little plaques beside them:
in memory of Grampa, with thanks for the life of Myra
…They creep me out. There’s one on my floor where the boy is fishing with a ghostly grandfather beside him, all whited-out, smiling at the boy like he’s going to pat his head. Or maybe drink his blood.”

“I saw that one,” Darwin said. “It’s just a print. Must be thousands of them, hung around hospital wards all over depressing the hell out of everybody.”

They trundled past patients trying to walk, mostly old. A woman close to Lorraine’s age kept her eyes weirdly still, her whole face turning as she used her walker. She gave them a beautiful smile. Lorraine knew that same beauty hung in her own smile now, in her eyes. Bad trouble makes you feel loving,
she thought. Nine days ago she’d been crying in the Dart because she could not find Darwin.

Back in Lorraine’s room, a crop-haired, athletic nurse popped her head in the door.

“You’re here. Great. So! I’m going to go through what you can expect from chemotherapy,” she said brightly. Her nametag said Nola. She fanned a set of pamphlets on the rolling table and pulled over a straight chair.

Lorraine shut her eyes for a minute. She couldn’t stand to hear this. Darwin was listening, he would tell her about it later. Phrases fell through the air, names of chemicals, T-cell types, crashing around her like thin, thin glass, like the first film of ice on the puddles on a northern morning. Her boots crinkling through the delicate half-formed panes. Darwin was absolutely still beside her, the root of the world grown up through the floor.

The nurse was practical, not frightening. “Chemotherapy affects tissues with a high rate of cell division, like cancer cells: the lining of the mouth, the lining of the intestines, the skin, and the hair follicles. That’s why hair falls out with some kinds of chemotherapy, and why it grows back again very nicely.”

Lorraine felt her hair hanging heavy between her shoulder blades. She saw a quick flashing slide: Clayton turning her hair like a rope around his hand and wrist, on the porch in Trimalo, just before Trevor was born. She remembered the night sky, and her full belly pressing her down. Clayton’s hand with his bitten nails twining and catching her hair.

“We’ve made some real improvements in treatment for nausea,” the nurse said. “It’s possible to go through chemo nowadays without the violent reactions you’ve seen in movies.”

I bet, Lorraine thought. I bet it’ll be a fucking picnic.

The other patient in her room came back—a furious young woman in a wheelchair, maybe twenty-five, and bitter. Her husband or boyfriend rolled her in. She stared at the nurse with scorching eyes, hardly blinking, burned down to a bright coal of rage. Try not to be like that, Lorraine told herself.

The woman snapped, “Get me out of here.” The man dipped his head apologetically at the nurse and Lorraine as he swung the wheelchair around.

Maybe fury was a way of staying upright under this weight.

When they’d gone, the nurse said, “You don’t want to get into the trap
of blaming yourself for having brought this on by unhealthy thinking. But I’ve seen a lot of patients going through a lot of treatment, and here’s one true thing about attitude: you can make the process easier on yourself. If you are angry or in despair you’re going to have a harder time in the next few months. If you can manage to find some solace—whatever works, exercise or meditation or religion—and a sense of humour, the process will be easier. And we’ll make it as comfortable and understandable as we can.”

Comfortable and understandable. Lorraine’s head was drumming. She went deaf, she receded from the room. She could hear blood pouring and pulsing through her veins. Darwin put his hand on her neck, cupping the nape of her neck in his warm hand, and she breathed more calmly.

The nurse looked at the paper for some length of time, then up into Lorraine’s eyes. “Yours will be in-patient, twelve-hour drips, eight sessions.”

She paused.
Nola, Nola,
her nametag flashed, because her chest was moving with her breath. “My father had non-Hodgkins lymphoma last year.” She looked on the other side of the sheet, maybe needing the time to get her calm voice back. “It will be a long process.”

Lorraine nodded. No need to go on, the pale father hovering in the air all around them. Nola nodded back.

“Good,” she said.

She shoved her chair back and went off, no doubt to give the good news to others.

“That was good, what she said, making it easier on yourself,” Lorraine said. Trying.

“Cheerful attitude won’t change what they do to you,” Darwin said. “You’ll still have to do this.”

He smiled at her though, because he loved her, and that was a help. In a shaky place, she could see that.