Cadillac Couches (13 page)

I could tell by the look of glee on Isobel's face that she was proud of her war story: it was when she got her stripes.

“‘Now stand up. Turn around,' he told me. He grabbed my hips, bent me over at the waist on Table 12. I was eye level with the salt and pepper shakers. He put himself in to me. I wasn't quite ready.

“He thrust.

“He waited.

“He thrust.

“He paused.

“He thrust.

“My lower back was cramping up a bit. He was breathing heavily. Every time he withdrew, I exhaled. And then he thrust again and this time the salt and pepper fell over!

“‘Don't vorry, I had a vasectomy. Have another strawberry.'

“He walked away. I heard running water and the sound of him washing his hands as I stood up and straightened myself. I was sore and sticky.

“‘Vee have to go, the cleaners will be coming soon. Come see me this week, ve'll talk about your performance. You did well.'

“I got dressed and left. He didn't call me a taxi. I walked up Jasper Avenue. It was 10:00
PM
and Edmonton looked like a ghost town. It hurt a bit to walk, and I felt foolish in my high heels. I imagined I knew what it felt like to be a hooker. A glamorous movie hooker, though. On 105th Street, some rednecks driving one of those cheese-ball Trans-Ams with customized monster-sized tires rolled down a window to yell, ‘Hey, wanna fuck?'

“I went home and drew a bath. I finally felt like une vraie femme.”

I remember the key parts of the Isobel-Hubert saga that followed the big night because I was there. After the Salt and Pepper evening, later that week, Isobel and I were out for a late-night cheese fondue at Café Select. Inspired by its Parisian namesake, it had the best atmosphere of any Edmonton restaurant and was open until well into the wee hours of the morning. You could show up after a gig at two in the morning and still have a croque monsieur or crème caramel and a Kir Royale, our all-time favourite drink. We loved it there, especially the lighting—the main room was lit entirely by candles in little glasses on each table. So romantically dark. And they accepted our student-issue MasterCards!

We skewered little pieces of French bread and swirled them around in the Swiss cheese and kirsch fondue while Billie Holiday sang soulfully. All the good-looking waiters with their great hair and silver jewellery wore black and carried trays high on their fingertips as they manoeuvred like Latin dancers between the tightly packed tables and chairs.

That night I watched the hostess with the dog collar and nose-ring greeting two new customers at the door. They were an elegant couple; he was wearing a trench coat and she had cropped blond short hair and red lipstick. The hostess led them past us. Isobel looked up just in time to see Hubert with his hand cradling the woman's back. He passed inches away from our table, looked right at us, right into Isobel's eyes, and said nothing. Smirked a seedy smirk. They sat a few tables away. We could hear them speaking Czech.

Clutching a fondue skewer, Isobel looked like she wasn't breathing. “Look at that,” she hissed.

“What?”

“He's wearing a wedding ring! He never wore it at Bistro Praha, the slimy bastard, jerkoff asshole jackass fucker!”

Hubert sat there, out of earshot, looking blasé and unconcerned. He and the woman were drinking champagne, the real stuff, Veuve Clicquot with the orange label. After the waiter took their food order, his wife got up to go to the bathroom. He elegantly tossed his fork on the floor. When he got up to retrieve it, he walked over to Isobel: “Come see me on Tuesday.”

She was too stunned to respond. She looked down at the bill on the table, paid it, and rushed us out of the restaurant.

“Isobel, you're not going to go see him, are you?” I asked.

“Vat did you expect? Don't be so naive. How old are you, twelve?” Hubert said on Tuesday.

He made her feel so stupid she gave him a blowjob to prove she was no child.

I felt raindrops on my forehead. Such a novelty added to our plight, almost making it an adventure. Isobel pulled out her pack of smokes and gave us each one. It kept raining. I loved it. So romantic to smoke in the rain, who could resist? Not me. We didn't get so much of it back in Alberta. A lot of snow but not a lot of rain.

As the sky continued to spit lovingly down on us, we puffed away in silence, contemplating the past. For weeks she had kept going back to Bistro Praha. I tried to get her to give him up, but apparently he was addictive. He unwittingly gave her an arsenal of tricks to please a man; twenty ways to make a man follow you around town. It was mainly an attitude thing. From him, she learned the art of aloof. The more blasé he was, the more she craved him; like a good student she incorporated aloof into her makeup. Isobel was now, as a matter of ingrained habit, always elusive. It did seem to come rather naturally to her, though.

Since Hubert, she said she'd rather that boyfriends left her apartment immediately after sex. He had eroded her
A Room with a View
idealism into hard-hearted realism. She was now more La Femme Nikita than Lucy Honeychurch.

From what I could make out, her dismissal served to fuel men's desire. Like Finn, for example—he seemed to want to keep running into the brick wall. I knew the lure of powerlessness. I had tried so hard to inspire Sullivan back, long after his feelings for me had atrophied, long after I knew it was hopeless and I was shaming myself. I deliberately stayed in a purgatory of yearning just for the sweet masochistic sake of it.

The hotel was in sight when Isobel let out a long sigh and said: “But you're not going to believe the really, really, really, really, really messed up thing about this all, Annie. I've got to tell you something else: the sequel.

“We had a reunion for old time's sake, about six weeks ago. It could be the worst, stupidest most
con
thing I ever did. Long-term repercussions . . .”

“What are you talking about?” Dark scenarios clouded my mind. I imagined his wife found out, her heart got broken. Divorce. Traumatized kids, the works. Or no, did she catch something from him? No condom usage, that was awful. “Fuuuuuck!” I said.

“I haven't had my period in four weeks. It's true I can be irregular, but this is definitely out of the ordinary irregularness. What am I going to do? My parents will kill me. I'm only twenty-four, I've got no income. I'm Catholic. And besides that, I'm not ready for a child. I want to travel. I need to pursue decadence and a career, and champagne consumption would have to go way way down. Chriss . . . Osti de Tabernak!” She always swore in Québécois when she was really worried.

“Whoa, Iz. Calm down. We don't have the facts here. First of all, you're not really Catholic, c'mon now. What we need to do is get you to a doctor and get you a test, you've got to know for sure. Didn't he have a vasectomy?”

“I thought so, but I don't think it's the kind of thing a girl can check. There are no visible vasectomy signs, are there, like strange wrinkles? Fuck fuck fuck. Listen, I have a pregnancy test in my purse that I've been carrying around for two weeks. I keep going to the toilet but not doing it. I can't actually bear it . . . finding out that I'm pregnant . . .”

“But you can't not know. You've got to know. You have to make decisions. It might be Finn's.”

“Do the math, Annie,” Isobel said. We'd both failed Math 30 in high shool. It was hard to see her expression in the dark.

“Do you have any symptoms? Morning sickness. Sore boobs?”

“I'm not sure, I might have just wound myself up so much that I'm convinced I'm queasy. And I've been drinking and smoking and worried sick about fetal alcohol syndrome. And, Jesus, how would I support a baby? I am a baby. My credit cards are all full . . . maybe I could get some department store cards . . .”

“Don't talk crazy, Isobel, you don't know yet. You're very irregular.” Four weeks late, what are the chances? Man oh man.

“Remember when I had sex with that sleazy guy by accident. And how I freaked right out and thought I had to get an
AIDS
test? That was the scariest day of my life, waiting in the waiting room. You came with me that day and waited with me. And we survived that whole scene. We're going to go through this together!”

If Isobel was pregnant, our whole lives would change. Could we still chase Hawksley? My mind wandered selfish terrain. If she was pregnant, might that possibly put her into a less sexy category and might I be elevated? Horrible, selfish, bad Annie thoughts. I reprimanded myself.

Just then a car passed us before we could even think to stick out our thumbs for a ride. Luckily the orange neon sign for Chateau WaWa loomed on the horizon.

“All right, I'll do it. I'll take the test,” said Isobel.

The hotel had a vacancy. It was no palace, no charming pensione, but it was warm and friendly. And it offered forty-buck rooms—good for budget warriors. It was the kind of place where tired and lonely sales reps stay after a day on the road covering their rural territories, schlepping dental floss products or microbrewery beer or whatever. The lounge was open until 2:00
AM.
In the lobby, there was a flip-chart advertising KaRa-O-Ke and Hot Buffalo Chicken Wings (twenty-five cents each)! Isobel looked twitchy under the fluorescent lighting. I saw sweat above her upper lip. I wasn't used to her being the nervous one. Now that she had finally let out her secret, the anxiety was contagious. I took care of the credit card stuff while she carried our bags up to the room. I felt sick thinking,
PREGNANT
, she's pregnant, she's definitely pregnant. She shouldn't be carrying suitcases, she's pregnant!

We settled ourselves into the room. It had thin, beige carpet, a small double bed with a golden chenille bedspread, beige curtains, and some bad nature art: a squirrel eating an acorn with a helpful heading that said,
NEVER PUT OFF TIL TOMORROW WHAT YOU CAN DO TODAY
. Isobel surveyed the mini-bar for supplies. I cranked up the radio for some acceptable tunes. Pulled the end table drawer open and the Gideon was there like it always was. Opened the blinds to see what kind of view we had: a parking lot with two long-haul trucks, big rigs with the engines left running.

Leading up to the test, we didn't speak. Isobel drank four glasses of water, and we waited until she needed to pee. I thought about baby prams and car seats, baby hats and shoes. The logistics of it all. I racked my movie brain, running through any relevant and helpful baby plots.
Three Men and a Baby
was the only thing I could think of, and Tom Selleck was hardly helpful to us now. I imagined a baby Hubert and a feeling of horror washed over me. He was a chubby baby wearing a lime green tennis shirt with a sweater tied around his neck, the way only Europeans or serious preppies do. His baby hairdo was Brylcreemed like his father's and he looked askance at me, pursing his puffy baby lips. “Of course jou can't have vater!”

“What?” Isobel asked.

“What do you mean, what?”

“Why are you in spasm?”

“It's nothing, I just got a chill, that's all. Are you ready?”

“Guess so.”

We pulled out the instructions. Isobel lit a cigarette for courage. Pretty straightforward stuff. She was to pee on the stick. Red meant no and blue meant yes.

“This is like diving into a cold ocean. Just gotta plunge, Iz, plunge.”

“Technically, it isn't plunging, Annie. I gotta splash on it.”

“You can do it. I'm right here.”

I climbed into the bathtub for moral support. She shook as she pulled down her underwear to sit on the porcelain. A cigarette hung out of her mouth. I handed her the white plastic strip.

“Go for it. It's gonna be fine . . . You'll see . . . We'll deal with it . . .”

“Geronimo,” she said as she peed a big stream, deluging the stick.

“Jesus, it didn't say piss like Niagara Falls . . . but that oughta do it! Give it to me.”

She gave me the stick, and I sat in the bath holding it, staring at it, willing it to be red. Isobel got up, went over to the sink, splashed water on her face, and then started tweezing her eyebrows overzealously.

I stared at the miniature well in the plastic.

It was supposed to take a few minutes to turn colours.

“Stop tweezing!”

I stared at the stick. The first hue was faint violet.

“Do you see anything?” she asked, still tweezing. Her eyebrows were getting thinner and thinner.

“Not really.” I scrutinized the violet. “Take it easy on your poor eyebrows.”

“What do you mean, not really, what the hell is it?”

“Well, the first hint of colour is a bit violet. I'm not sure what it means. Isn't violet what you get when you mix purple and blue? Maybe it means maybe. But anyways, we're supposed to wait five minutes, I think it's only been two point five minutes.”

Isobel scrambled for the instructions, puffing on her smoke.

Three minutes could change everything in such a massive way. So many problems. The Proclaimers' song “500 Miles” started playing on the radio, and we sang out loud, pledging our love to each other in thick Scottish accents, trying to drown out the problem, knowing that when the song ended the stick would have a verdict. Tears streamed down Iz's face. Tears of the last days of freedom.

The song ended and morphed into the
DJ
's voice booming chatter.

I looked down at the stick. It was a red cross. It meant no. But, no, wait, didn't red mean alarm, emergency? “It's
RED
,” I yelled before I could process what it meant for sure; stress had wiped out my short-term memory.

“Red?”

“Red!”

Isobel whooped and flapped her arms like she was a great crested crane.

“That's
NO
, right, red?”