Mating for Life (13 page)

“Um. All of what?”

“You know, the beginning of the shift away from the idea that women needed men. The whole a-woman-needs-a-man-like-a-fish-needs-a-bicycle movement?”

“There was an a-woman-needs-a-man-like-a-fish-needs-a-bicycle movement?”

“But you're only talking about it in terms of women and men,” Tansy butted in, seeing her opening. “What about gay marriage? Why has it been such a hard-won fight, then, if no one cares about marriage anymore? Why is it that gay men and lesbians are fighting to be recognized as married couples?”

“For the financial benefits,” Grace said dismissively. “And probably because they want to be able to have a party and get gifts and money, just like all the straight people have been doing for years.” Now Grace glanced at Liane, and Liane
felt like she'd been caught at something. “How old are you, Liane? Thirty-five?”

“I'm thirty.” Liane liked her job but suddenly wished she worked at a regular office, where the staff gathered in the lunchroom to talk about
So You Think You Can Dance,
or some other show she had never watched but had seen listed in the online grid she searched regularly for documentaries. Liane didn't know from experience, never really having worked anywhere but at a university, but she imagined people at places of work not solely focused on intellectual development
understood, among other things, that you
never
overestimated a person's age, that you
always
erred on the side of extreme caution when guessing at it. Perhaps these imaginary coworkers wouldn't be book-smart, but they'd have a different kind of intelligence. They'd notice if you wore new cowboy boots, for example. Or seemed to be making an effort to eat more salads after reading that carbohydrates were the prime culprit of abdominal fat—because although you were admittedly not ancient (not compared to most of the other professors, but definitely compared to the students), you had still started to notice a few changes, a metabolic slowdown that left you wondering whether, on top of being alone for the rest of your life, you were also going to end up with one of those stomachs that could only be described as a “front bum.”

Indeed, this was not the kind of discussion that could be had in the anthropology faculty lounge.

“Sorry,” Grace, who wore masculine button-up shirts every day (possibly for the very purpose of concealing a front bum, Liane thought, and then felt guilty about it) and likely cared nothing about what age people thought she was (if Liane were to guess aloud, she'd say forty-five, but in reality Grace seemed at least fifty), said. “I always forget how young you are. Our faculty wunderkind, teaching and about to be published already.” She said it warmly; some of the other professors
weren't as kind, were in fact
un
kind, in subtle, insidious ways. But Grace did not appear to be prone to envy. Liane always, when meeting a person for the first time, gauged the level of envy he or she was capable of.

“No worries,” Liane said, being sure to smile and make eye contact. She had learned a lot about human interaction in the faculty lounge. Then she looked down again, hoping that Grace would somehow forget about the line of questioning—why did she need to know how old Liane was, anyway?—and turned a page of the magazine, pretending she was very engaged in the article she could no longer remember the topic of. She read the first few sentences of a paragraph in the middle of the page: “
In principle, the advent of a highly capable artificial intelligence that can take over the cognitive burden of running the world sounds quite nice. As British mathematician I. J. Good wrote in an influential paper in 1965, ‘The first ultra-intelligent machine [is] the last invention that man need make.'”

The sentence made Liane feel dread, both because of its content—she was understandably threatened by the idea of artificial intelligence—and because she had somehow made it nearly halfway through an article without absorbing its topic. She had thought she was reading an article on polar bears interbreeding with grizzlies.
That was last week. You read that article last week.
This made her think about another article she had recently read, about the importance of flossing your teeth. Apparently not flossing your teeth could increase your risk of dementia, even lead to early-onset Alzheimer's.
Oh, great. Maybe that's what I have.

She flipped backward, away from the image of robots running the world and the idea that she was becoming demented, but couldn't settle on anything. Then she realized Grace was saying something else to her. “Pardon me?”

“I've been thinking of holding a panel discussion on marriage for my postgraduate class, and I was wondering if you
might be willing to be on the panel. The students will likely be able to relate to you. And they might find your situation interesting. Engaged once, and now certain that marriage is not for you.” Grace paused. “We won't, of course, get into any private details. Just a brief overview of your situation, followed by a discussion that will be largely academic, not personal. Yes?”

“Well, I mean, it's not exactly what I said, that marriage isn't for me. I just said . . . you know, that I wouldn't . . .” She wished for a moment that the apple chunk had done its job. She stood. “I have a tutorial, which I am about to be late for.” Her voice was strange, too bright. She gathered her belongings before crossing the room to check her mailbox.

Tansy and Grace moved on after a brief, awkward moment to the subject of procreation, and what would change about the practice (“practice,” that's what they called it, as though it,
sex,
especially for procreation, was not something they themselves engaged in) without the tenet of marriage to sanctify it. Would it be like
The
Handmaid's Tale,
but without the strange sex scenes?
Yes? No? Maybe?
Liane stood with her head bent toward her mailbox and continued to listen, counting to ten in her head. Then she would leave. After she got to ten.

“Will men be unnecessary, will sex be for pleasure only, is sex
already
for pleasure only, for almost everyone except Catholics and Mormons, and those unlucky people currently in the throes of ‘trying' to have a baby?” (Grace was truly on a roll.)

What if Liane had not stood to leave? What if she had stayed in her seat, and Grace had asked her,
Do you want to have children, Liane? You don't need a husband to do that anymore. So? Yes?

Maybe. But it would have to be with the right person. And I don't think he exists, except in my imagination,
Liane would have answered, without being able to stop herself. And then everyone
would have known absolutely everything there was to know about her.

Time's up.

• • •

Outside, Liane turned down St. George and began to walk toward the King's College building, one of her favorites on campus. She slowed. She had been exaggerating about being late for her tutorial and now, yet again, she was going to be early. She looked across the field in front of the building, with its soaring central tower, and thought of what she knew about the field: that below it was a buried pond. During the cholera epidemic in the 1800s, this pond had been found to be teeming with cholera and had been subsequently buried. Liane had always wondered how it was even possible to bury an entire pond, and felt strange when she walked over this area of the campus, especially during damp weather when the ground yielding beneath her feet made her imagine sinking down into the ancient and still-infested waters. She usually skirted the buried pond, even though it took her longer to get to class.

Now she saw a young man crossing the field and slowed further. There was a woman jogging after him across the field, calling out something. Both of them looked familiar. “Jesse!” The woman called, and the boy stopped walking and turned. She was holding a textbook, which she handed to him. “You forgot it, and I knew you needed it,” Liane heard the woman say. The boy was Jesse, Johnny-at-the-marina's son. And the woman was the one who had been at the marina in the summer. She handed Jesse the textbook. It was so out of context that Liane had stopped walking altogether and was simply watching them both. “I was coming this way anyway, and I knew where your class was, so . . . I'm glad I caught you,” the woman said. “Your phone was off.” The boy smiled. “Thanks,”
he said. “I usually turn it off during lectures. Sorry. I'll see you later.” “See you later.” The woman turned and started walking away. She didn't see Liane.

Liane had just assumed she wasn't his mother, that the mother of this boy had been one of those blond women who had lived with Johnny for a time, but now realized she had been wrong. She thought about catching up with the boy and saying hello, welcoming him to campus, telling him she taught there, but she didn't really know him. Instead, she continued walking along the perimeter of the field, keeping to the edge of the buried pond.

• • •

Inside the classroom, she shuffled her notes. She would be discussing Norwegians, and how they believed envy to be the enemy of happiness. The Norwegian term
skadefryd
(otherwise known as
schadenfreude
) related to modern superstitions about the potential to do damage with thoughts, mainly because the word, literally translated, meant “to harm joy.”

She felt the nervous flutters in her stomach, but they weren't anywhere near as debilitating as they had been during her first few classes, when her cheeks had been embarrassingly blotchy and she'd heard a few titters spread around the room as she cleared her throat repeatedly. She had retreated to her office and signed up for an online course in public speaking, practiced in front of her mirror at home at night, thinking this was one of the good things about living alone. The lecturing got better. (Later, also while online, she had checked out her rating on a site called RateMyProfessor.com and noticed, with guilty pleasure, that in addition to good reviews from her students, she had also gotten a chili pepper in the “hotness” column.)

Now Liane stood before the students gathered for her class and started to speak. The students bent their heads,
taking notes by clicking keyboards on mini-laptops or tapping iPad screens. When Liane remembered her own years in university, the sounds of pens scratching, papers rustling, the interaction involved with borrowing someone's notes, making a copy, returning them reverently, she always felt nostalgic.

Eventually it was eleven o'clock. As usual, a small group of students waited to ask Liane questions about the lecture, and she patiently answered them. You couldn't know whether you were going to be a good teacher until you actually became one, and Liane was. This made her feel proud of herself. She had a calling, a vocation. It hadn't all been for nothing. When the students were gone, she left the room. She opened the heavy doors to go outside and felt the wind on her face and realized there was a hint of coolness there. Perhaps summer was finally retreating. This made her feel wistful for the kind of summer she had thought she was going to have but hadn't. A small knot of students brushed past her, talking, laughing (“What do you want to do now?” “I don't know. Coffee?” “Frisbee!”), and Liane felt the jealous knot form. She looked away from them.

• • •

Later, when Liane got home, she made tea and decided sadness and loneliness had won over hope: she threw the geraniums into the trash. Then she decided to take a bath in the claw-foot tub. And she picked up the
Malahat Review
.

The magazine was in her hands, getting slightly wet, and the neroli-oil-scented water was nearly up to her chin. She flicked through the pages until a title caught her attention: “The Snapping Turtle.
”
By Laurence Gibbons.

It was a short story about a man who was an intelligence investigative specialist for the Ministry of Natural Resources. He was spending a summer month at a cottage so he could keep an eye on a group of men believed to be illegally harvest
ing turtles from the wild, but ended up spending the time he was supposed to be spending performing reconnaissance on the men watching a redheaded woman swim in the lake each morning and read on the end of the dock each afternoon. He started leaving books for her on the end of the dock, secured by rocks.

The story ended with the man wracked by guilt—he had failed to find out if the men were indeed poaching turtles illegally, and also, one day, the woman simply never returned to the dock and he was left with a sense of longing, both for the woman with the red hair (Red hair! Liane dropped the magazine into the tub when she read this, then picked it up and continued to read the story from the soggy pages) and the life he had always hoped to lead, one he felt slip away from him that summer. “Life is full of what-ifs. And should-haves. And did-nots,” she read. “And he was afraid of what it meant that these what-ifs seemed to be growing further and further apart in his life. Eventually they would run out completely, like the turtles whose numbers were dwindling because people like him were supposed to be doing something about it but weren't. Eventually they would disappear forever, and all he would have would be his regrets and the memory of the color of her hair.”

She wrapped herself in a towel, spent a few minutes attempting to dry the magazine with her hair dryer, and left the bathroom, turning on her laptop and sitting down damply on the couch, waiting impatiently for the laptop to boot up. Her hand shook as she typed the name into Google.

She read his bio, but it was only the final sentence that registered, and that she repeated, over and over. “Laurence Gibbons lives in Toronto with his wife and two daughters.”

But still.

At one point, she put the magazine—one of the pages had been scorched by the hair dryer and she'd given up trying
to dry it, so it was still damp and resembled in some places ­papier-mâché—into the trash with the dead flowers.