How Happy to Be (28 page)

Then he fishes around in his pocket, pulls out a small black box. “Happy birthday.” And my limbs go numb, because here it is, right? Here comes the long haul, the decisions are getting made and I’m drowning in a white taffeta dress and I’m carrying a baby around in some yuppie papoose and I’m not having sex or fun and I never go dancing – and I open the box and it’s a pocket watch, antique with no strap.

“You don’t have to use it, but just in case. You know.” He shrugs.

I mean to say “Thank you” but instead I say, “I’m pregnant,” and then I mean to say “What do you think?” but I say, “I’d like to have it.” And then I add in a jokey voice: “It’s yours, by the way. Hahaha.”

And once something like that is said, it’s just said, that’s it. No going back, and you’re just naked out there at the end of that long pier in the wind, the French Lieutenant’s woman with fewer shawls.

There’s a lot I don’t know about Theo, but people have made dumber decisions based on less. I start talking: I tell him how I don’t really know what family looks like and that I’m okay without the walk down the aisle, the ring, and I don’t even know if we need to live together or be on the same continent if he has things to pursue, and I don’t know if this baby will be accessorized with flippers and claws but I’m excited, I’m excited to learn something again and I’m feeling something at least I think I am and I’d like it if we could do it together but if he needs to go that’s okay I don’t expect –

Theo McArdle kisses me, like you’re supposed to when you want to shut people up. How do we learn that kind of thing? We learn it from movies, of course.

“Give me the watch,” he says.

Backfire, backfire. I give it to him. He takes my hands, opens the palms, and lays the watch inside. “Now it means something different,” he says.

“What?” I ask. “And please don’t say ‘commitment watch’ because I might have to leave you.”

He clasps my hand around the watch. “I can’t wait for all of this, Max,” he says, and he’s sort of giddy, goofy, hitting his head on the low ceiling. “I can’t wait.”

Theo McArdle is not what I expected, when I let myself expect. He’s calm, like he always is, and he smiles and declares everything about this moment good, and everything about the next one better. He uses the word
love
generously, like it’s not such a big deal. He can see it, he says; it’s blue.

W
E’RE FLYING BACK TO TORONTO AND ON THE SMALL
television hanging from the ceiling is a news broadcast. The scene is a suburban office building with a stream of distraught professionals being escorted from its doors. One of them – and this is weird – is Marvin in his gigantic rave pants, and there’s the Editor, almost serene, and Heather the Up-Talker, and Hard-Working Debbie wiping away her tears.
The Daily
has been sold to BFD Television. Mohsen is idling in the driveway waiting to take everyone back to the city.

We’ve all been fired, it turns out. I start laughing. But then I wonder how I’ll be without the paper, and what I will do with this story I’ve been trying to tell for so long.

And yet I’m kind of glad it won’t see the light of day because I’m tired of records. Everyone always says to write it down, get it out, set it free, but I doubt the usefulness of all this purging. It’s overheating the airwaves. It’s noisy.

I think I would like to give you something in a language that I haven’t created yet. Maybe it would be edible, or soft to the touch. Even though I know it’s impossible, I would like to tell an entirely new story for once, one that will never be published or talked about or forgotten.

Jennifer Lambert. Ellen Seligman. Jackie Kaiser. Heather Sangster. Kong Njo. Lawrence Hill. Gary and Cindy Onstad. Maryam Sanati. Jason Logan. Ethan Hawke. Kate Robson. Jude and Mia. And Julian, who knows.