It had been years since she had watched Cahal play, still longer since she had seen him do so in person. He was a blur of movement. Flexible, graceful, fluid. He anticipated nearly every puck that came in his direction. Those he did not anticipate, he twisted and lunged at impossible angles in order to deter. He was intimidating in the net; at six feet four inches, he was by any account a tall goaltender. He seemed to fill every possible open space, allowing for little leeway to oncoming players.
He was beautiful to watch. A wonderful marriage of strength and flexibility.
It was, Lila told herself, perfectly possible to admire a man without feeling anything for him. Even if that man was one to whom she had been married for nearly six years.
In spite of her avowed apathy, she was glad to see the ice surface empty and the men move back toward the dressing rooms. Practice was over and she would not have to face Cahal again. Perhaps never again.
Jack was one of the first players out of the locker room. Once they moved together toward the entrance of the arena, however, the two of them were swamped by bodies.
Some of the amassed crowd were merely autograph seekers hunting the latest Toronto acquisition. A goodly minority, however, were the journalists Lila had been hoping to avoid.
The shouting started as soon as her face became clear. Jack’s body could not hide her very well.
“Mrs. Wallace! Mrs. Wallace!”
Other reporters were more familiar. “Lila! Over here! Lila!”
Photographers snapped her picture, her face still half-obscured by Jack’s shielding figure.
None of the reporters were waiting for her to answer. They continued to shout their questions at her and Jack’s retreating figures.
“How does it feel to have your husband here in Toronto?”
“When’s the divorce, Lila?”
“Any plans for a wedding?”
It was only the steadiness of Jack’s hand over hers that kept her from sprinting to the car. That would have made a funny shot, her hair and scarf flying out behind her as she made like an Olympic athlete.
She hated to be made to look silly almost as much as she hated feeling so hunted by the press. The attempts at contact had been pretty constant since her relationship with Jack had been made public. Cahal’s superstar status, combined with the fact that his romantic rival was a fellow hockey player, had made an irresistible human interest piece. Sports fans ate up the innuendo as eagerly as soap opera fans might have done.
“God, I hate this,” Jack muttered, slipping into the driver’s seat of his sports car. With his aid, Lila was already seated in the passenger seat.
Lila looked at him, alerted by something in his tone. “Have they been hounding you a lot?”
Her companion nodded as he swung the car out of the parking space. “The reporters know that the divorce is coming up. We are local celebrities, you know.”
Lila, who considered herself a private citizen, did not appreciate this piece of news. She could understand how athletes attracted fame but she was not an athlete, she merely had the misfortune to have been married to one. And now she was dating another. Perhaps the press felt that she deserved to be hounded if only for her unfortunate choices in partners.
“The reporters loved Cahal and me,” she said, leaning her head back against the plush seat. “Our marriage made a good story, good publicity. High school sweethearts, childhood friends and all that. By the time we were married, Cahal was already the number one goalie in Chicago, already a star. Marrying the hometown girl was a good career move. I am sure that it sold a few more jerseys.”
Jack looked sideways at her but he said nothing. Probably, he had never heard that ugly note in her voice before. Lila hated to hear it.
“I’m sorry, Jack.” She felt she ought to apologize for that tone, if not the words themselves. “There is so much history between Cahal and me. I think I hate that most of all.”
“That’s understandable,” he replied. “Now it must feel as if you wasted so much time. He was the first guy you dated, wasn’t he?”
“Yes. The only one.”
“I know you knew each other since childhood,” Jack went on. “How old were you when you first met?”
It seemed odd to be raising the question now but Lila was unable to see the strangeness of the situation. Seeing the man must naturally bring up questions concerning him.
“We were six,” she said, smiling because she knew the entire story by heart. The times he had been traveling on the road, or playing on a different junior hockey team, she had repeated this story to herself like a nursery rhyme.
“We were in grade one at the time. Cahal had just moved to Toronto from Sudbury because his parents wanted him to have the best coaches and teams to play on. Even then, they had known that he was something special, a talented player. Anyway, we met in Mrs. Vaughn’s class that year and spent about ten more years in the same classes, more or less ignoring one another like boys and girls do at that age.”
That was not entirely true, of course. She had been unable to ignore him completely. Cahal Wallace was the little boy whom all the little girls had a crush on at one time or another. Lila had suffered through three of her own friends liking him. At the time, she had not seen the attraction. She had had fleeting crushes of her own, on Ricky Deen and Jesse Fernandez.
“I never even noticed Cahal during all those years,” she continued, “except to know that he was sort of famous for playing hockey. Even then he was getting a great deal of attention. Then, when we were fourteen, in the first year of high school, he asked me to dance at the Valentine’s Day dance. All throughout grades nine and ten, we danced at the dances and we became pretty good friends.”
Abruptly, her narrative broke off. She was coming to the part of the story that she loved best, and that her mind had recently begun to gloss over. The memories of those sweet first days were not the kind of recollections she wanted any longer. It stung her that they could still resurface and with such force.
“And then?” her companion prompted. He sounded an echo of her own thoughts.
And then what, Lila? And then, he gave you the happiest days of your life.
“In grade eleven,” she said, “he was traded to a junior hockey team up in northern Ontario. He had to move away from his parents, his friends, his school. Everything had to change.”
“I know about that,” Jack said. “I was traded a couple times in juniors.”
Lila paid this information no attention.
“He could only come back about once a month, and during the end of the school year and into the summers. When he did finally come back, it was hard to fit in. His friends had changed, the schoolwork was different. His parents were going through their separation around that time. Cahal was trying to keep them all together by playing as best as he could, studying for hours every night so that his playing would not affect his grades.”
Jack grimaced. “But he found time for you, didn’t he? In the middle of all that playing and studying, he managed to keep in touch with you, right?”
Lila was thinking of that first letter from him after he had gone up north. It had been five pages long and she still had it, preserved between the pages of a childhood book.
In between the lines of that letter, he had told her how much he had loved her. There had been no talk of love, of course. Not at sixteen or even at seventeen, but they had both known during those years. There had been a tacit agreement that Lila would not date any of the Toronto boys who asked her out and that Cahal would not look too hard at the girls at his new high school.
Their summers had been almost devoted to one another. They saw every new movie and listened to every new CD. They had held hands and kissed and groped a little in the back of his car. In those last three years of high school, Lila did not remember a single argument between the two of them.
“We wrote each other,” Lila answered. “And he came home as often as he could. By the time we were seventeen, we were boyfriend and girlfriend. Then, of course, he was drafted.”
“Third overall draft choice,” said Jack, who had been drafted one hundred and thirty-fourth.
“He went to Chicago and I stayed here. I wanted to go to university and get my degree, that had been my grandparents’ dream. Then, I finished my bachelor’s degree in English — ”
“And the superstar Chicago goaltender came back to marry you,” her companion finished. His hands were tight on the steering wheel. “How simple.”
Looking back, it had been simple. Cahal had made it so. The first contract he had signed as a professional hockey player had made him a millionaire. He bought modest houses and cars for his parents, then divorced from each other, and bought himself a flashier German sports car. He had been content to rent an apartment in Chicago at that time. Together, they had bought their first house and he had wanted it to be his first home as well so he had waited for her.
“He paid for my university studies,” Lila said. She had never told anyone that before and she said it now as if confessing a sin.
Jack turned to look at her and she met his gaze.
“My grandparents might have managed to pay for university,” she said, “but on their income that would have meant putting a mortgage on the house and that house was all that they really had. They would have done it, too, but when Cahal offered the money it was like a godsend.”
“So you took it.” There was a note of honest shock in Jack’s voice. She knew that this revelation jarred with his idea of her, the idea she had constructed for him of herself as a firmly independent woman. The truth was that her means had always come from Cahal.
“Rather than shackling my elderly grandparents with a mortgage? Yes, I took the money. If he had offered it differently, if his parents had objected even in the slightest, perhaps I would not have done it. But I did, because Cahal acted like it was the simplest thing in the world. He had the money and I did not. Rather than take out a mortgage on the house, which still meant that I would have had to work part-time and during the summers, I took the money. Not borrowed it. Took it.”
“But you paid him back, didn’t you?” Jack’s voice was tight, as if it were being stretched on the rack.
Lila was angry. “I didn’t marry him as a kind of repayment, if that’s what you mean.”
“No? But it must have been a lot of money. Twenty or thirty thousand at least.”
“It was almost a selfish act on his part,” Lila heard herself justifying. “If I had had to work during the summers, that would have meant seeing almost nothing of one another during those years. Paying for my tuition meant that he could have all of my time during the summer time or whenever he was in town.”
Somehow that still made it sound as if Cahal had purchased her. It had been nothing of the sort. It had been natural, almost inevitable, at the time. Cahal had been as proud of her studying as her grandparents. Maybe more so. His career had made it so that he couldn’t attend university.
“Well, you kept a home for him for six years,” Jack acceded. “It’s not as if you owe him for whatever he might have spent on your studies. A few thousand dollars is hardly a drain for a man who makes, what, six or seven million a year. More than that now, I guess.”
Lila knew exactly how much Cahal Wallace made; it was set out in the divorce papers. And it was substantially more than six million. She imagined Jack was pretending not to know the exact figure. Cahal’s salary in Chicago had been publicized.
Whatever the figure, Jack was right. Her tuition had hardly been a drain on his resources, even so many years ago. The drain, if any, was in the form of Cahal’s alcoholic mother and his father who now had three young children from his second marriage. Both older Wallaces had sacrificed in their early years to provide their son with the best of opportunities. In later years, they had come to remind Cahal of this fact at increasingly frequent intervals.
She said nothing of this to Jack because it was none of his business. Cahal’s personal life was just that, personal. The truth about her tuition and her degree was her own secret to tell. The truth about her marriage was another secret and someday, though she could not picture the occasion, she would feel comfortable enough with someone to share it. Someday.
Lila was tired by the end of the day, though she had done nothing of any merit. She had eaten lunch with Jack, making strained conversation and trying to avoid the gazes of the other diners. She came home and watched television for a while, had been depressed by the news, and finally settled down to reread one of her old books.
She knew very well the reason for her fatigue and it had everything to do with her husband. Her ex-husband, though Cahal no doubt would have denied that label.
How odd it was that he should be behaving in such a way now after all the time that had passed since the separation. Acting as if she were pig-headedly pursuing a divorce for the sake of capriciousness, as if she did not have very good reasons.
Perhaps, Lila reasoned, Cahal had simply been putting on a show for his new teammates. It appeased masculine pride to make a show of possessiveness and that was certainly what he had done. He had marked her as his own, even knowing that another man had a better claim to her nowadays.
But did Jack have any better a claim?
She had known Cahal most of her life and Jack only for a few months. Cahal had sometimes understood her better than she herself while Jack seemed to be in perpetual confusion regarding her motivations.
Admittedly, she had chosen Jack to be a contrast to her first husband and he was in everything except his career. Even that was not so terrible seeing as Jack worked most of the time in Toronto, just as she did. Chicago had been pleasant but it had never been her home.
The irony was that Cahal now lived in Toronto as well. In light of that fact, the arguments they had had in Chicago seemed stupid and pointless. Even then … well, Lila was willing to admit the arguments might have been pointless even at the time. As Cahal had told her a thousand times over, he could not help where he lived. That was simply a function of his job. Countless other careers possessed the same drawbacks.