A Good House (21 page)

Hearing it, Patrick realized he’d felt it coming, he had felt something coming. He was extremely careful to control his facial muscles, to hold them exactly as they’d been before the question was asked and answered. Mary liked to complain that he could do this in his sleep. “The Daphne I’m thinking of?” he asked. When Murray nodded, before he could stop it, he muttered a quick “God,” giving himself away. He could not have explained, not even to Mary, precisely why he did not want this to be true.

He thought he would like to ask Murray if he’d had contact with Daphne lately. It didn’t seem probable. She’d been at both funerals, as had they all, and she was her usual self as far as he could tell. She’d handled Murray the way she would be expected to handle him under the circumstances. She had talked to Charlotte, led her around the room to introduce her to the kids, the nieces and nephews.

Then he thought what he would really like to know was if they had been together when they were young, right under everyone’s nose, when Daphne was just a gullible, disfigured, innocent kid, taking all that shit from Roger Cooper. And what were the circumstances? Where, for instance? When? And where was he? And did anyone else know about this? And then he understood that there was a better-than-average chance he was going to get extremely pissed off if he allowed himself to go much further in that direction.

Murray felt the air thicken with Patrick’s anger, the particulars of which were unchanged. He recognized the economy of movement, the concentrated hold on the beer bottle, the way his eyes quickly located a horizon, in this instance the dark red garage door, and locked on it. There would be no outburst. The stillness was the outburst.

He reached over the trucks at his feet, across the space that separated them, to grip Patrick’s knee, hoping that this gesture might
break the connection to the garage door, that it might say what it was generally understood to mean in the world of men, which was, Come on, guy. Come on, friend. This can’t be such a big deal. And it worked, at least to the extent that Patrick looked at him.

“You can relax,” Murray said. “I have no reason to believe your sister has any particular feelings for me.”

This was not exactly true. It was, exactly, a lie. From the night of the big storm, the night in the shed behind the Casino, although there had been nothing since, not even the casual weight of her hand on his arm or his back or his shoulder, he had been able to imagine something tangible coming to him from Daphne. For the seven years since, whether he was with her at one of Margaret’s occasional suppers or much more usually not with her but in a plane crossing the Atlantic or sitting in a gritty hotel bathtub at two in the morning listening to rocket fire from the outskirts of a ravaged city, he had been able to imagine something tangible.

But he decided on the spot that friends could lie. The best of friends could tell the best of lies if they absolutely had to, to get themselves through something, intact.

O
N
Tuesday morning Daphne drove up to Murray’s parents’ house because standing beside her over his father’s open grave the week before he had asked her to come.

It was hot for late May, and dry. The lilacs that surrounded the wraparound porch were in full, droopy bloom. She knocked on the double oak door, distracted by their sickly scent.

Before she arrived Murray had gone up to the Blue Moon for two cups of coffee, graciously accepting the condolences offered by the young waitress who took his money and then by the owner who had come to the front immediately when he thought he recognized Murray.

He sat Daphne down at the small kitchen table and gave her a coffee, which was black and only lukewarm now. The table was still covered with one of his mother’s many embroidered cloths, which had been ironed, perhaps just ten days earlier, into neat creased squares. “How to start,” he said.

“Patrick said you’d offered Mary first crack at everything,” Daphne said. “That was good of you. She loves old stuff. She will appreciate anything you give her.”

“Patrick called you?” Murray asked.

“He’s taken to calling me once or twice a week,” she said. “He never has much to say so it’s usually a bit of a mystery why.”

“We had a good talk on Saturday,” Murray said.

“So I heard,” she said, her face implacable.

He didn’t want any part of this to be an ordinary game between a man and a woman. “Did he tell you I’m leaving Charlotte?”

“Oh,” she said. “No.” She covered her jaw with her hand as she always did when she found herself in a conversation that might make a difference to someone. “I didn’t realize there was that much trouble.”

“Oh, that much and more,” he said.

She lowered her hand and traced her finger along the ironed crease of the tablecloth, then lifted it from the crease to lightly circle a mauve pansy. “Imagine women sitting around all day doing this work. Or, I guess, doing it after the harder work was done. Think what it would be like to make all your own beautiful things. From plain cloth, from bits of coloured thread. From nothing.”

“You do know what’s coming,” he said.

“No,” she said, turning her face to the window above the huge old sink, away from what she could see coming.

“But if you had to guess…?” he said.

“I would have to guess you’re thinking about an unusually bad storm,” she said.

He nodded.

“You shouldn’t likely plan any kind of life around a storm,” she said.

“You hadn’t been with anyone,” he said.

She faced him again. “But I have since,” she said. “You gave me a taste for it,” she said, opening her eyes wide, trying to laugh, to make him laugh.

“Don’t ever tell me about any since,” he said. “It would sound obscene to me.”

“I wasn’t about to,” she said. “Believe me. And ‘obscene’ is a very strange word. Are you and Charlotte obscene?”

“We should leave that alone,” he said.

“I’m all grown up, Murray,” she said. “All grown up now.”

“If I leave her, will you come to Toronto with me?” He ran a hand back through his thinning hair, which was not a nervous but an absent gesture. “We should get married. I would like us to have kids.”

“If I say yes, you will leave your marriage, but if I don’t, you’ll stay?”

“You are the only really good reason to leave her,” he said. “This will hurt her. It will certainly upset her parents and maybe even Bill and Margaret.”

“You could try it alone,” she said. “Many people do. And successfully.”

“That wouldn’t be much of a change,” he said, although he did not want to go down that road. He’d decided standing at his father’s grave that he wouldn’t use that kind of thing to win her over. “Look,” he said. “It was a mistake. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it was a mistake.”

“You were so wild for her,” she said. “You were so obvious it was embarrassing.” She covered her jaw again. “You touched her all the time, more than you ever touched anyone. For the flimsiest reasons.”

“I realize that,” he said. “It was true.”

“What you’re looking at now is not a woman like Charlotte,” she said. “Although I guess you would realize that too.”

“Standard issue,” he said. “That’s one of the only things I could hear you saying the night behind the Casino.”

She stiffened. She wasn’t laughing now. “You don’t get to say that. I do, but you don’t.” She pushed her chair back from the table a little and crossed her better-than-average legs, smoothed her suede skirt. The skirt, like skirts everywhere now, was very short. “I’ve never had any complaints.”

“Don’t,” he said. “Come on.”

“I’ll confess that I’ve thought about this,” she said. “Imagined it.”

He reached over to touch her, to take her forearm in his hand, and she let him do this, although there was no change in the air to
suggest she was being touched. It moved just the one way, as if the nerve endings in her skin had been tripped to block a small, localized invasion. She knew the feeling, recognized the absence. Her skin had done this for her before. Healthy bodies do this all the time, she thought.

“You picked,” she said. “You chose. It wasn’t me.”

“You could have stopped it,” he said.

“And I would have done that how, exactly?” she asked. “I was twenty-two when you married her. I had no idea how I felt. I knew nothing, even less than I know now, if that can be believed. Except that you were so hot for her, so smitten, so gaga, so dumb-as-a-fence-post gone. I thought it must be love. Her perfection, your idiocy.”

“All that time you treated me like just some kind of dull old reliable friend and then the summer after I married her, you peeled off your bathing suit for me in the Casino shed.”

“But I did not feel that coming,” she said. “The Casino shed was a true surprise to me.” She finished her cold coffee. “Maybe I thought it wouldn’t matter then,” she said. “Because everything was decided. Nailed down. Locked up. I wanted what I wanted and maybe I was afraid to go to anyone else. Perhaps I thought you would understand that. And anyway,” she said, “although I was probably jumped-up and fairly hot with curiosity, and likely with need, with a particular need, I’ve tried to think of that episode as just a kind of very detailed hug.”

“I remember the details,” he said.

She took his empty coffee cup from his hand, dropped it down into her own empty cup. “Maybe something else had happened by then,” she said. “Which I didn’t understand until very recently.”

“What something else?” he asked.

“If I’d loved you,” she said, “after you’d decided on her, married her, I should have pined away in some kind of heartbroken agony. When I couldn’t have you, I should have wanted you more. But I didn’t. I wanted you almost not at all and that’s what allowed me to peel off my bathing suit.” She got up to pitch their empty paper cups into the garbage bag sitting beside the back door. “I don’t think
it’s supposed to work that way. Is it? It’s certainly not the way the story gets told. It’s not the way the song gets sung.”

“Songs and stories,” he said, “do not offer reliable guidance for life.”

“I can’t do it,” she said.

“Explain this to me,” he said.

“You were the one who should have known. And you didn’t. You didn’t take me into account. So why would I trust you now?”

Murray leaned back in his chair. Time, he thought, could be a major player here. And it’s all I’ve got. “What if things just stay the same for now and you think about our options,” he said. “I won’t do anything. I’ll wait as long as it takes for you to make up your mind.” He did not describe their possible lives, did not tell her that he was ready to hold her skinny little body every night of her life. He had imagined so much of what they could have so thoroughly it would have been easy to do but he didn’t.

“I would like kids,” she said, leaning against the sink. “And yours would be by far the best.”

“So you don’t anticipate marrying anyone else?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I do not.”

He was ready to start speaking in paragraphs, to force her into a corner with sound argument, with logic, but he shut it down, hard. She had just said part of what he wanted to hear and he believed if he opened his mouth, she might be prompted to take back what she’d said, and that would be far worse than never hearing it. He hated women most when they said a thing and then backtracked to kill it.

“What if we make love right now?” she asked. “What if I have us a baby? We could go that far.”

He had not wanted to hear this. He had not once imagined this. “An illegitimate baby?” he asked.

“The baby would be fine,” she said. “Later on maybe you could come back and see how you liked the looks of me.”

If she was going to start talking about her face, he was prepared to stop her in her tracks. He’d had the words ready for a while, from the time his guilt had finally, and almost without his noticing, transmogrified into the lesser sin of profound regret. And he did not see
it as a self-serving act, this ridding himself of guilt. He would never have hurt her deliberately, not in ten thousand years, and having seen in his travels mountains of deliberate, murderous harm, he now believed that guilt could not exist without intention. That guilt was starved without the nourishment of intention. This conviction freed the young man he’d been and it freed Patrick too, although Murray had never made the offer. He wasn’t a priest. Of course Daphne had never accused either of them, not then when she was a kid and not since. What she’d said when Bill ran under the water tower to gather and comfort her was what innocent people always said: “I’ve hurt myself.” This was wrong, of course. Worse than wrong.

“Not just small breasts but small slightly sagging breasts,” Daphne said. “Does that sound appealing?”

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“What I want is a child,” she said. “I’m lonely at the core and while some people would say this is the worst reason to have a child, a despicable, selfish reason, it must be the very best reason, or so it seems to me. I’ve seen women hold their babies as if they’ve been lonely for them all their lives. No one ever speaks up to say that’s suspect.”

He watched her small body, watched her cross her arms to protect it. The light from the window behind her framed her sandy hair, which she had lifted and pulled back from her forehead to expose the widow’s peak, Sylvia’s widow’s peak. “I’d make it as easy for you as I could,” he said. “I would give you money.”

“That sounds to me like a good deal,” she said. “I like money. It’s one of my favourite things.”

“So you’re saying now would be the right time?” he asked. “We’re going to go upstairs now?”

“When I was driving out from London,” she said, “I was thinking about this house. I was thinking in particular about the wraparound porch, about the lilac bushes and the low branches of the spruce trees along the side.”

“It’s the middle of the day,” he said. “There will be people on the street.” He waited for her to come around, to be sensible, but she wasn’t going to give an inch. “We will have to be quiet,” he said.

“This time quiet in the quiet.” She moved toward him, reached down to his lap, and urged him to his feet.