Rachel just said his name, Lyle.
It made Lyle think of when he first got contact lenses. He had stepped out of the optometrist’s office on LeMarchant Road and looked up into the branches of a tree and saw, for the first time, individual leaves. Each leaf distinct from the next, rather than the loose weave of luminous, swimming colour he had always believed a tree to be. His own subjectivity, previously transparent, became opaque. He saw his mother’s dark tweed sleeve shot through with minute white seeds, shiny where worn, bristling microscopic hairs of wool. He’d just had time to grasp the sleeve in his fist before he hit the sidewalk. He had fainted.
Hearing Rachel say his name while standing in his own living room. The music of
Jeopardy
, a screech from the oven hinges as his mother took out the shepherd’s pie. The garburator eating a vibrant clot of carrot peelings — all of this was so altered by Rachel’s voice that he almost fainted for the second time in his life.
She said she wanted to talk to him
in person
. Who had put her up to this? He guessed the counsellor at school, a young feminist with burgeoning, aggressive-looking plants in her window and a box of wooden penises she dragged around the classrooms to show how a condom works. He couldn’t think how Rachel had gotten his number.
The city sifted through the fist of a snowstorm. Ribbed icicles dripped and shot sparkles. The snow was pink or buttery, blue in the scoops and caves. Shimmery veils flew in twisting sheets off the roofs and the lips of drifts. He knew what the call was about but tried to convince himself otherwise the whole way to the university. Perhaps she thought she could move the relationship to a different plane. As if a relationship were something you took into your own hands. He knew what was coming was big. And if this woman wanted to exert her will over him, such a thing might qualify as big. Maybe she was in love with him. Love might be enough to explain the portentous anxiety he felt.
Lyle had been sleeping with girls since he was thirteen. He’d been an altar boy early Sunday mornings, carrying smoking incense in an ornate silver and blood-dark glass container that hung from chains and banged against his red and white polyester robes as he walked, listening to guitar and folk hymns, and though he’d intuited the cloying menace, the oily funk of lust from a few older, eccentric men who somehow hung around the same places he did — behind the new Kmart on Topsail Road, the rectory, the pool at St. Augustine’s — he had managed to avoid overt unpleasantness. He’d developed a guiltless and generous sexuality.
For instance: he’d had sex in a mouldy rec room that had a black, vinyl-padded bachelor bar ordered from the Sears catalogue and a plaid couch with dangerous springs, while pressing a glass painted with hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs, grey with dope smoke, to his mouth, sucking it so the rim left a
white circle on his face when he pried the glass away. The girl had drawn a heart with his name in ballpoint pen beneath her white school blouse. Sex in a friend’s bedroom with a black light and black velvet KISS posters. The girl had green, greasy eyeliner and a bottle of Blue Nun, Donovan sang about the season of the witch, and his friends played Dungeons and Dragons in the next room. Sex in a pickup near a field full of fog and horses. He and the girl were washed in a bath of red light, and before he knew what was happening a cop rapped on the steamed-over window. When Lyle lowered it, the cop stuck a flashlight in and swivelled it around, catching the girl’s breast, her naked foot. In the field beside them, a white horse had tossed its head, snorted, and trotted away into the fog. Once he’d taken some acid with a friend and two sixteen-year-old twin girls in a prefab cabin just beyond the overpass. He and his friend were sitting on one bed and the girls were sitting opposite them, a case of beer at their feet, when the twins’ father crashed through the door with a rifle. The door hit the wall and the cabin shuddered, a watercolour of a moose in Bowring Park swung back and forth from the jolt. The moose’s jaw fell, and moss and water poured into the lake at his knees, gently rippling the surface. The pink wallpaper expanded like bubblegum, stretching until it was a concave membrane, semi-transparent. Lyle hallucinated the trees behind the wall and the path to the mini-golf castle and duck pond, and he was confident he could simply step through to the other side if the screaming father took aim.
So, up to this point, he’d had lots of sex but he knew
nothing about girls. Everything about them — the elaborate knowledge they had of each other’s emotional states, how whole oceans of thought could be traversed in a gesture, the sophisticated designs of cruelty they visited upon each other without prompting — he didn’t understand any of it. This ignorance gave him courage now, walking in the storm toward the university.
By the time he got to the campus it was deserted. Lyle thought Rachel probably wouldn’t show up. He promised himself that if he escaped this time he’d never take another chance, feeling in one moment that he meant it, promising God, his mother. Knowing in the next moment, watching his body wobble like the flame of a candle reflected in the chemistry building windows, that if he did escape, it was a promise he’d forget instantly.
Rachel was the only person in the cafeteria, except a janitor at the far end of the room putting the orange chairs upside down on the tables. The fluorescent lights thrummed. She was wearing a black T-shirt with a marijuana leaf on the front. There was a bran muffin in front of her on a Styrofoam plate. A plastic glass of juice with the foil lid folded back. She was wearing dark sunglasses, and when he saw them he knew she wasn’t in love.
He dragged out the chair beside her and the metal legs screeched like a bird caught in an engine. Before he sat down she said she was pregnant and she wouldn’t consider abortion. He said, Are you sure? By which he meant, Are you sure I’m the father. She knew what he meant and she was hurt by the
question, and that surprised him more than anything. Their sexual encounters had a different meaning for her. Perhaps every sexual encounter he’d ever had had meant something different to the girl. She had summoned him through a blizzard. He had implicated himself by showing up. He was there.
The child, a little girl, was three by the time Lyle met Anna. She stayed with Lyle for half the week until she was seven, and then he and Rachel agreed it was easier for everyone if she lived in one place. He paid child support, and drove her to hockey and ballet. She came for supper when she felt like it.
One day last March I went up to Lyle’s study on the third floor. I pushed Sic’um out of the armchair near the window. It had occurred to me that we might, after twelve years together, split up over this. I wondered what would happen to our house, the summer house in Conception Bay, the car. How would Alex feel. I was still wearing my winter coat. I held the bag from the pharmacy.
This is it, I said. I rattled the bag. Lyle swivelled in his chair to face me. He pressed his hands down the length of his thighs. I had wanted a second child more than anything in the world and Lyle hadn’t. I had wanted one with all my might. Alex was eleven.
Go to it, he had said. While I was in the bathroom reading the instructions I could hear him typing.
We had been vacationing in France. I was in the shower and I’d felt a sharp pinch and knew. It was like anything else without rhythm or beat. No way to be sure of it; I was sure. My
forehead tingled, I broke a light sweat. All the objects in the world brightened in a single synchronic pulse. If Lyle wanted to leave, he could leave. If there was a fight, I would hardly be able to pay attention. Nobody feels conception taking place; I felt it.
The wheels on Lyle’s office chair squeaked over my head. The test sat on the windowsill. The bathroom linoleum was cold underfoot and there was a flattened squiggle of blue toothpaste in the sink with some of Alex’s hair stuck in it, wavering under a thread of water from the leaking tap. On the floor above, Lyle was rolling toward the bookshelf. Dragging himself with the heels of his shoes. Then he kicked himself back to the computer and began typing again. Our luggage was still in the living room, though we’d been back a week. I wanted it put away. Beside the pregnancy test, an enamel soap dish, a brilliant white bar of soap smeared with two bleating red petals from the geranium. The faded pink cross on the plastic wand turned redder.
I called up the stairs, It’s positive.
Lyle rings the doorbell and we wait. Prissy Ivany swings the door wide open and grins at us. She’s wearing a long, clingy black dress with a greenish sheen and her hair is big and orange.
Your hair is beautiful, Prissy, I say. Charles Ivany comes up behind his wife.
She once hid some forks in there, Charles says.
That’s true, says Prissy, a whole place setting.
Where’s Alex, asks Charles.
A sleepover, I say.
Charles is smoking with an emerald cigarette holder and he’s wearing a tuxedo jacket with satin lapels and a red bow tie. He has a miniature set of antlers on his bald head.
So glad you could make it, he says. Let me take your coats.
Let’s get that baby settled away, says Prissy. Charles claps his hands once.
What will you have to drink? I’ve got a very good sherry.
I’ll try the sherry, Lyle says. He’s beaming happiness.
Good man, says Charles.
Prissy brings me to a bedroom upstairs and helps me with the folding playpen. She switches on a baby monitor and holds it to her ear. Then she gives it a shake.
Guess that thing works, she says. When we come back downstairs Charles is telling a story about Thomas Aquinas.
Just stopped writing. Charles pauses to grin at everyone.
He’d had a vision. Everything he’d written before was straw. Charles throws back his head and laughs.
Can you imagine,
straw
, it was all straw.
Blue diodes are the next thing, Joanne Barker announces. That’s all you’ll hear from now on, blue diodes.
What about pocket calculators, Lyle says, didn’t some calculator guy get the Nobel?
Don’t start with me, says Joanne. She raises her chin at Lyle, saucy and flirting.
I want to do what Diane McCarthy always does, says Prissy. Each man moves two chairs down before dessert. Men, desert your wives.
Listen, says Lyle. Everyone hushes at once. Pete has started to cry.
I walk out to the car, Pete in one arm, the folded playpen banging against my shin. I throw it into the trunk, strap Pete into the car seat. There’s a J. J. Cale tape in the stereo and it bursts honeyed and sweltering into the frosty air.
Magnolia, you sweet thing, you’re driving me mad
. Fat snowflakes drift onto the windshield. The steering wheel is too cold to hold. Somewhere in the world there are magnolias. There are men who love women, a particular woman, to the point of devotion. In that part of the world babies sleep under filmy mosquito nets while their parents drink iced tea or have sex in the hammock. The babies sleep because they are overcome with muggy, perfumed heat, or maybe there are no babies. I wonder if I am too drunk to drive. I wonder it even as I sail through a red light on Elizabeth Avenue. The man in a grey fedora whose car I nearly cream has a face of pinched putty. His mouth hangs open. Pete is wide awake, he’s watching the snow. When we were driving through an industrial park last week Alex had said, What if we’re all dead and we only think we’re alive?
This is what happened in France. This is how I got pregnant after eleven years of wanting nothing so much as to feel a child moving in my belly again. A medieval village with lace curtains in the windows and swirling cobbled streets, a castle built in a mountain pass. Isobel lost the car keys at the beach and took everything out of her knapsack, crusty socks, Don DeLillo, shaking away the sand. A goat with a chawed blue rope tied to
its neck leaped onto my chest, left cloven mud prints on my blouse. An elderly woman invited us into her home, gave us port. There were four weasels glued to tree stumps on her high shelves. They killed my rabbits, she said. We saw the Papal Palace. Far below the palace grounds there is a prison, the courtyard formed by the walls draped with a fine green netting. Once a prisoner escaped in a helicopter. A girl stood on the wall and screamed to her boyfriend in a dark prison window. Did you get my message? A tattoo of a skull peeked over the drawstring waist of her pants. A field that flashed emerald, lime, yellow, and blue as the clouds drifted. A double rainbow. A sky like cashmere shredded on the blades of the mountains. A pig farm with the wind blowing toward us. Run by only one man and several computers, Lucien said. Lucien on a zigzagging unicycle, the whites of his eyes showing under the iris as he watched the silver bowling pins he juggled. Sugar cubes wrapped in a paper that says Daddy. In Marseilles a haughty waiter rolled his eyes. Alex bought sunglasses with lenses like houseflies from a black man with cornrows who jiggled his leg madly and stared in the other direction while she tried every pair. We slept on a sailboat docked in the harbour, forest of white masts pricking the indigo sky. A woman in a far-off window looked over a square, a child sleeping against her shoulder. Lamb kabobs roared on a grill, hissing and spitting fat. We picked almonds off the ground. I had my thirty-seventh birthday. Lyle slapped the cake down and the plate spun in tight, tiny circles and I shouted, Why do you always get what you want?
Bernard grew up in Paris sitting around the gypsy campfires,
he tells us while he slices tomato. He is a friend of Lucien and Isobel, with whom we are staying.
I’m trying to find my parents, he says, on the computer. They have a program. He lays the tomato slices on a platter, layering them like limp dominoes.
Somewhere in Algeria, he says. I have a name.
His gut hangs over his belt and his teeth are yellow, some are missing. Sacks under his eyes. He’s short compared to Lyle, his skin is swarthy. He sticks a red pepper with the point of the knife and brings it to the stove. He lights the propane and lays the pepper on the blue flame. He takes a round of fresh mozzarella out of his knapsack and slices it. He turns the pepper and the skin is blackened and blistered. He argues about Picasso. Everything in French and I can’t follow, but he turns to me, pointing the tip of the knife.