Fever (24 page)

“Oh, someone should have told me,” I whispered to the silent room. The magazine slipped off my knees and fell to the floor. “Someone should have.” But who else would have known who also knew me? Victor and Rose’s parents were dead and I never knew any of his other relatives, all of who lived in the East. And our divorce was more than a decade old, perhaps they had all forgotten me, although Victor was as alive to me as when we had been so much in love and married.

One night when we were lying side by side in bed reading—by this time we had graduated to an apartment with a real bedroom and a double bed instead of a fold-out couch—I remembered that I was supposed to do my breathing exercises. I was about five months pregnant and that afternoon Jim Hearne had given me the instructions for the ones I was to do during my labour and delivery.

I set my book on the floor by the bed, we didn’t have bedtables yet, I lay flat on my back and began to go through them. I don’t remember anymore how they went since this was all more than twenty years ago and I never had another child and so never repeated them, but they involved controlling my breathing in a strict way, while counting. I had to concentrate very hard to get them right, but I was enjoying working on them since I liked the novelty, and I did want very much to do everything, the pregnancy, the delivery, right.

Victor lay beside me, perfectly still, sunk in the book he was reading, while I breathed in slowly and counted, held my breath,
let it out, took so many short breaths, let them out to a count, and so on.

After a while I began to feel myself suspended, floating above the bed. It was a peculiar, pleasant feeling, and surprisingly, it didn’t scare me, I barely noticed it, or rather, it had happened so gradually as I concentrated, that it must have seemed normal and not strange at all.

But as I hovered, I knew something that I hadn’t known before, something I hadn’t even guessed at, that was at once so terrible that I didn’t see how I could live knowing it, and yet that had an inevitability about it, as well as a certainty so absolute that I didn’t, not even for a fraction of a second, doubt it. The knowledge came suddenly, whole, and irrevocable.

“Victor?” I said.

“Hmmm?” he said, turning a page. It was not even hard to say since I knew with such finality that it was true.

“You don’t love me,” I said. “You don’t want this baby.”

There was a long silence. I lay beside him, by this time I must have been back in myself, and I didn’t even wish that he would deny it.

“Well,” he said, in a resigned tone, then paused, and seemed not to know what to say next. I risked a glance at him. He lay staring straight ahead and the sadness in his eyes and in the lines around his mouth would have given me hope if I had been inclined to look for it.

“Why is it you haven’t left?” I asked.

“I’ve thought of it,” he said, and paused again. “But I didn’t think I should.” He closed his book and set it on the floor by the lamp. For a second I thought he was going to turn out the lamp and go to sleep.

A few moments passed during which we continued to lie side by side. Then he said, “I’m hungry. Are you?” as if nothing had
happened, or ever would. He got out of bed, dressed, and went out. An hour or so later he returned carrying some cartons of Chinese food, which we sat up in bed and ate in silence.

I knew also that night that he still might leave me. I thought of leaving him, despite how much I still loved him, but how could I? I was pregnant with his child, I would have rather died than return to my parents’ home. I felt I could only wait for whatever he might decide to do. The months lay ahead of me as if I would be pregnant forever and at the end, with the birth, lay only blackness, a falling off, a void.

I wanted to call Rose and tell her not to come, that we no longer had anything to say to each other, that we need not bother with any kind of pretence of being a family anymore, or that we were bound together in any way, but I had no idea where she was staying, and besides, she was probably already on her way. I was tempted to lock the front door and pretend I had gone away.

But now, strangely, I found I was eager to see her, not because I had ever liked her, or because we shared any memories I wanted to relive, but because I knew how hard it would be to go on not knowing about Victor’s death. I was sure she would be only too glad to answer any questions of mine: What had Victor died of? Where was he buried? Where was Julie? What did she know? Had Julie been at Victor’s funeral?

I looked at my watch. As nearly as I could tell, more than an hour had passed since Rose had called. Maybe she wouldn’t come at all, had changed her mind. Or maybe she had had a seizure and had forgotten her plan to come. I stood, parted the sheer curtains and looked out into the sunshine-drenched street. Rose was getting out of a taxi in front of the house.

I saw at once how thin she was. She had always been, not fat, but a big woman, and now she looked tall, bony and thin. As she came slowly up the sidewalk keeping her eyes on the path ahead
of her feet, I saw in the way she moved, slowly, a little unsteadily, that she had aged more than she should have for her years. She shifted the small shopping bag that I recognized as from a woman’s clothing store downtown, then rang the bell. I went to answer it.

We greeted each other, then went into the sitting room. She was wearing a neat grey linen summer suit with a gay yellow blouse under it. The frill at its neck was incongruous under her solemn, even sad face. She set her pink plastic shopping bag carefully on her lap and placed her feet in their neat white pumps side by side. This reminded me of her careful demeanour when she had first arrived for one of the visits that always ended so disastrously. She was facing the windows and in the afternoon sun that shone through muted by the white sheers, I could see clearly and was shocked by the lines of suffering in her face.

“How are you?” I asked, chastened.

“I’m never well,” she said. “I have to take more and more medication. It disturbs my sleep, it upsets my whole system, there are side effects I don’t dare tell anyone about.”

“How terrible for you,” I said.

“Yes,” she said seriously. “It is terrible. I wish my mother were alive to help me.” She had never married and Victor was her only sibling. He had, as long as I had known him, refused to take much responsibility for her. He claimed she had been favoured by their parents all through his childhood, that she had had tantrums if she didn’t get her way, he even claimed she used to fake seizures, though I doubted that. But the result was he couldn’t like her much, much less bring himself to care much about her plight which, during our marriage, wasn’t really a bad one, since both her parents were still alive.

“Victor is dead, too,” she said, and she rocked slowly forward and back once, as if in a dim memory of some ancient keening.

“Yes, I know,” I said, and realized that Rose thought I’d known, hadn’t thought of notifying me, but had assumed that I came to know things like that in the same way she did, because they hung in the air or one dreamt them and woke knowing.

We sat in silence for a moment, me not knowing what to say to her, Rose staring at a spot on the rug, her mouth working as if she might be talking to herself, although she made no sound.

“Where was he when he died?” I asked.

“Where?” Her head shot up and she stared at me so intently I was taken aback. “In Toronto where he lived, of course,” she said. “In the hospital. He had cancer. He hadn’t been sick very long.” She paused, then stared at the same spot on the rug and said, “Not as long as I have. All my life. As long as I can remember.” She lifted her head again. “It always starts with this,” she said to me, and I recognized that old, pained, intimate tone she had adopted when she told me of the wrongs she constantly suffered. “It always starts with this,” and she passed a hand slowly in front of her face, the fingers spread, fanlike.

Disconcerted, not knowing how to respond to her remark, I asked, “Where are you living now?” She drew in her breath slowly, not looking at me.

“With Victor, of course. But he’s gone now.”

I hesitated, hardly knowing how to go on. If Victor had been looking after her, where would she go now? The thought that she might want to live with me passed quickly through my mind, but I dismissed it at once. It would never occur to her.

“And … Julie?” I ventured, not sure she would remember who I meant.

Her face cleared, for a moment she looked almost young again, and the lines in her face melted as she smiled.

“Julie!” she said. “Of course, Julie!” Her voice wavered. “I
have trouble remembering, I …” She swallowed, then started again. “I came to ask you to tell Julie something.”

“Doesn’t … didn’t Victor know where she is?” I asked, trying not to show that my heart had begun to pound and that my breath wouldn’t come. I could feel my face turning red and perspiration was soaking my blouse. Menopause, I reminded myself, it was passing already.

I don’t think I blame Julie for loving her father more than me. It must sometimes happen that way in a family. He always had a love of adventure which Julie shared, while I have wanted above all things, assurances, routine, simplicity. I do not want things catching me by surprise, although it’s true that despite my efforts to strip my life to the simplest form, they seem to anyway. And I don’t think of Julie as troubled. She’s not a troubled girl, it’s just that she had this indifference that I can’t understand.

“Oh, yes,” Rose said in that same, bright tone. “She stayed with us until Victor died. And then she said she was coming out here to see you.”

“I haven’t seen her,” I said, relief swelling through me. She knew her father was dead, she had been there with him. Knowing she was all right and had been there made me feel as though I could go on living my life again.

After high school Julie went to Europe with two girlfriends. The girlfriends returned, one after six months and the other after eight or nine. Julie went to Australia instead of coming home, and then to New Zealand where she stayed a year. Then she went to Singapore, Bangkok and Hong Kong. Over two years passed before she returned and then I knew about it only because she phoned one night from Colorado where she was working.

Her letters always came infrequently, until finally they stopped altogether and she began to phone, but the phone calls
were even less frequent than the letters. I grew used to her absence and to the perpetual distance between us. It had its own kind of peace. And between us there was not enmity, but rather a restraint that we had come to cherish, that seemed to us—to me, anyway—the healthiest possibility.

“Well,” Rose said irresolutely, and reminded me abruptly of her brother, so like him was her intonation and the expression on her face. She fiddled with the plastic bag on her lap, smoothing it carefully, her lips moving again.

“Would you like some tea?” I asked, embarrassed because I had forgotten to offer her some, and fearing she would see it as another of the inevitable slights she found herself subject to each day. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think of it sooner. This has been a difficult day.” I thought she might ask me what had made it so difficult, but she said only, “No, no tea. I wanted to see Julie.”

“If she comes I’ll tell her to phone you,” I offered. “Does she know where to find you?”

“I’m still in Victor’s apartment,” she said. “Tell Julie that, and that she should come back and live with me.”

“She might not come here,” I suggested tentatively.

“She is on her way,” Rose said. “She is sure to be here soon.”

It wasn’t long after we sat up that night in bed and ate Chinese food, before our marriage began to deteriorate. He stayed out late, I didn’t know where he was. He had an affair, then ended it, we criticized each other, we were no longer happy together, yet I continued, despite everything, to love him. That long ago realization I no longer thought of. It was as though it had never happened, and I now expected to remain married to him forever. Still, our relationship grew worse and worse, he was away more, he ignored me when he was home, devoting himself to our daughter. We grew further and further apart till I could no longer reach him at all, and in fact, had stopped trying.

“I’ll tell her as soon as she comes,” I promised. “I’ll tell her to phone you at once.” It seemed that Rose had forgotten that Julie was my child, that there was any possibility that she might want to stay and live with me.

When my miscarriage was over I bled a little for a day or two, and that was it. Even today I feel no regret over losing that child, only regret that I was so unaware that I didn’t cry out from my bed of pain, “Husband, I am having a miscarriage. I am miscarrying our child.” I wish I had known. I wish I had lain there feeling the inexorable pull of the lunar tide in my womb, feeling the full weight of loss and death.

Rose stood up, bouncing the little plastic bag uncertainly against her skirt. The lines had settled back in her face and the darkness in her eyes.

“I’m taking the plane back at five o’clock,” she said, “so I can’t stay and wait, but it was nice to see you again, Jeanne.”

“I’m so glad to have seen you,” I said, thinking of all the things I would never know about Victor’s life and his death. Looking up into Rose’s face, I thought of her suffering, and I wanted to ask her if she was taking her pills. But the
distance
of her, the weight of her pain and the lightness of her
knowing
silenced me.

I called her a taxi and stood with her out on the sidewalk in the sun, where she insisted on waiting, until it came. She got into the car and didn’t so much as give me a backward glance as it moved away, even though I waved and called, “Good-bye, Rose, good-bye.”

Victor had a mistress, he barely spoke to me, nor I to him. Our daily life together, what little there was left of it, had become a horror of cold, silent anger. In the month which ended with his leaving me, I woke from a deep sleep into the blackness of our bedroom to find that I was being kissed. My first thought was that I must be dreaming since, although we still shared the same
bed, we never touched, and we had not made love in months. But I could feel his soft breath on my face, and the slight, warm pressure of his body against my arm and hip. Victor was touching my hair and shoulders gently and covering my face and neck with light kisses that were filled with tenderness.