Mating for Life (2 page)

The problem was that Liane's work
had
become boring, at least to her. Adam had once said, “Well, of course it is, that's what happens, but you've found your niche and you need to stick with it now. You'll get out of the slump.” Except she was afraid she wouldn't. Once, the folklore-related work of Alan Dundes, discovered by Liane during her undergrad years, had seemed to hold secrets. She had believed these secrets might even reveal an important
point
about humanity as a whole.

If she could just get back that fervor, maybe everything would be okay.

Now Liane took out a pen and started to make notes by hand, snapping the screen of her laptop shut. Her pen
scratched against paper:
Envious gazes, Dundes has written, are driven by envious thoughts and have the potential to do actual physical damage. The evil eye is not a black-magic-related curse, as most people believe, but rather the embodiment of an envious glare—an instant curse that anyone is capable of, even without intent. It is the lack of intent that is the point: Can we control something we do not intend to do?
She paused and thought suddenly of William Burroughs.
It is as though everyone is in possession of a loaded gun he or she could accidentally set off at any moment,
she wrote.

Liane was not an envious person herself and did not believe she possessed anything in particular for others to be envious of (she considered herself average-looking, hated her reddish hair, was possibly of higher-than-average intelligence but not a genius, and wasn't rich). But envy, and its power to damage, was part of the myth of her childhood. Helen had been a popular folksinger who was now often featured in nostalgic documentaries; recently one of her songs had even been covered by a well-known alternative band. Liane had noticed as a child that Helen would never leave the house without first securing a necklace with an evil eye charm dangling from its chain around her neck. When Liane asked, Helen told her it was because, right around the time her first gold record was delivered (1969; Helen had only been twenty), her throat started to ache constantly. She went to see a shaman about it—“Why a shaman?” Fiona, who had been in the room at the time, had asked. “Why not a doctor?” But Helen had ignored her—and the shaman had told her that someone was doing black magic on her, possibly inadvertently and definitely due to envy. (“I was so young. It was unheard-of. Joni Mitchell didn't have her first gold record until the next year, and she was already twenty-seven.”) If she didn't protect herself, the shaman told Helen, she could lose her voice forever.

Liane had pictured the shaman as a frightening character with a headdress made of dead animal skulls and felt foolish
when, years later, it turned out he was an old friend of Helen's named Bob. Liane became afraid that her mother really would lose her voice. She had a recurring nightmare about walking in the forest on the island with Helen and a large black bird attacking her mother's throat. And as she grew older, she began to feel anxious every time she felt envious of anyone. She developed a fear of the damage she might unwittingly do to others if she ever allowed it to take hold—and so she tried to care as little as possible about what others had that she did not. (Once, as an awkward preteen, she had looked at Ilsa and thought,
Why can't I be that beautiful?
and then had run from the room and refused to make eye contact with her sister for the rest of the day.)

She put down her pen.
Fear.
This was part of her problem. She was afraid that if she completed the thesis and got the job helping Tansy teach classes about superstition and folklore, she'd eventually get a post teaching classes on superstition and folklore herself. (Wasn't that the entire point? Her
niche,
as Adam put it.) She was afraid she would then end up teaching the same thing over and over until one day she would look out at a class full of young people with futures ahead of them that were undetermined, all of these young bodies still possessing the freedom to walk out of the lecture hall and never come back if they didn't want to—

And she'd smite them all with an envious glare.

The fact that her childish fears still loomed large in her life was not the kind of thing she could discuss with Adam. Or anyone, really. She looked down at her wrist and fiddled with the red string that was there (she didn't practice kabbalah; the red string guarded against the evil eye and was less obvious than a necklace, so Liane wore it on the off chance that anyone ever became envious of her), then abandoned her work, even going so far as to shut down her laptop in an act that felt final, defiant.
It's only for now. I just need a break.

She went outside and sat on the end of the dock. There was a slight chill in the air. Summer had not yet taken hold. The dock next door was empty, and no sounds were carried to her across the small expanse of water. She thought about what she might say, if she could work up the courage to talk to the Reading Man.
Hi,
would be a start. But, historically, she had never been able to do this.

• • •

Liane had been in grade six when she had her first irrational crush on a boy she didn't know. Boys she
did
know didn't interest her at all, but sometimes she'd see a boy walking down the street or working at a store and suddenly think,
That could be him, he could be The One
. She'd gift him with all sorts of characteristics he probably didn't have and lie in her bed at night dreaming up ideal meeting scenarios and perfect conversations. She would eventually feel like she knew the boy, even if she had just created an ideal version of him in her mind.

This was back when she still believed in The One, of course. Now she wasn't sure. But she was probably going to marry Adam anyway. “We should probably get married,” he had said to her a few weeks before while they were out for dinner, eating at their regular table in the corner of a picket-fenced patio they liked to frequent. Liane had wished not to feel so disappointed. A different type of woman, the woman Adam perhaps thought she was, would have been thrilled.
So
practical,
yes,
why didn't they? They had made some rudimentary plans—nothing traditional,
obviously,
and not a destination wedding because it was overdone and presumptuous; how about cocktails? Adam even suggested screening their favorite movie for their friends. (It was a French noir film called
Breathless,
and it was his favorite, not hers. She didn't point this out.) Popcorn. Spiked Cokes. But wasn't that missing the point? The night was supposed to be
about them. He had raised an eyebrow when she said this.
About
us
?
he had repeated. Liane hadn't told anyone yet that they were engaged, if they really were. But she knew that marrying Adam would mark some sort of shift into a life she had to stick with. It had never occurred to her that she might not want to. She had always been the type of person to stick with everything.

Back in grade six, Liane's routine was to cut through the parking lot of the plaza across from her school every afternoon, although it wasn't necessary for her to do so. Sometimes she would be with Ilsa, who was in eighth grade, but almost never with Fiona, who was in university by that point.

When she passed the window of the pet food store, Liane would strain to catch a glimpse of the boy who worked there, while trying not to look
like she was looking. He was much older than she, probably sixteen. She was only eleven. This, combined with the fact that he worked at a pet food store and she didn't have any pets, meant meeting him was unlikely. But it didn't matter. Liane didn't know his name or anything about him other than the fact that he almost always wore a purple Barenaked Ladies hat.

She listened to the album
Gordon
over and over. When school let out for the summer, she walked by the pet food store at least twice a day. She made Ilsa go with her to three Barenaked Ladies concerts in the hopes that she'd see the boy. She never did.

“Why don't you go in and buy a can of dog food or something?” Ilsa had asked after finally refusing to attend another concert, or listen to the song “Brian Wilson,” ever again. “He'll never know you don't have a dog.” They were standing outside the store. “Do it! I'll wait here.” But Liane shook her head, embarrassed. To Ilsa it would have been nothing to saunter in, grab a can of dog food, and ask dozens of questions about it with her hand on the boy's forearm. He
probably would have asked Ilsa out, too. It didn't matter that Ilsa was thirteen. She looked sixteen and acted even older. But Ilsa would have said no. She would have been angry with the boy, even though he couldn't possibly have known that it was Liane, standing outside with red splotches on her pale, freckled cheeks, who had a crush on him.

“I can't,” Liane had said. “I just can't. I can't talk to him. I'll
die
.”

“No one has ever died from saying hello to their crush.”

“
I
might be the first.
”

Eventually he had stopped working at the pet food store. It was a while before Liane stopped thinking of him every time she heard that song.
Ring a bell and I'll salivate. How'd you like that? You can call me Pavlov's dog.

Now Liane looked down at her empty hands. She was an engaged woman. Her days of girlish crushes were officially behind her. Whether she could bring herself to say hi to the Reading Man was of no consequence to anything.

She stood and walked back up to the cottage, entering the living room and standing before the built-in floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. Many of the books on it were hers, some were Helen's, a few were Ilsa's or Fiona's or Liane's father, Wesley's, and others had been left by cottage guests. Mysteries and romances and crossword puzzle volumes shared space with Vonnegut (Wesley's) and Plath (Helen's), a biography of Violet Trefusis (Ilsa's; she'd brought it to read the year before, sighed a lot, and left it on the shelf with a bookmark in the middle), Tolstoy (Liane and Ilsa shared the Tolstoy). The crosswords and Sudoku books were Fiona's. Liane remembered Fiona saying something about how doing these guarded against Alzheimer's disease. Everything Fiona did had a point.

Liane continued scanning the shelf, then picked up a book called
The Monsters of Templeton
. It was unfamiliar to her, probably left by one of Helen's friends. She took the book
with her when she went upstairs to put on a bathing suit and a pair of denim shorts. With the book in her hands—it wasn't a textbook, not even a classic; there was no reason she
needed
to read it, but she had been drawn to it by the black-and-white leaves and shadowy figures on the cover, and this was something she had not allowed herself for a long, long time—she went back to the dock.

She stretched out her legs and started to read—pointlessly, simply for the pleasure of it, alone at the end of the dock, escaping from her own thoughts and memories into someone else's plotline. She read the first line of the book twice: “The day I returned to Templeton steeped in disgrace, the fifty-foot corpse of a monster surfaced in Lake Glimmerglass.” She looked out at the water and thought of the snapping turtle.

At the end of the first chapter she heard the sound of footsteps on the dock next door. Instead of looking sideways, she looked up and around her, at trees and sky, then stretched and started reading again, feeling warm and indulgent
. This is what you're
supposed
to do at a cottage alone for a week.

I looked up and began to spin. The stars streaked circular above me, my body was wrapped in the warm black, my hands had disappeared, my stomach was no longer, I was only a head, a pair of eyes. As I touched the beast I remembered how, even on that long-ago night, I could feel a tremendous thing moving in the depths below me, something vast and white and singing.

She looked over at the man just as he looked up, his gaze moving away from his book and connecting with hers. And she wanted to say,
I just read something I thought was beautiful, and it made me feel less afraid. Do you want to hear it?
because she was sure at that moment that he would understand the joy of finding a book you've never read on your own shelf,
falling into it quickly, and deciding to do nothing all day but read it. But instead she smiled at him (which was
something,
she told herself), trying not to squint too much in the sunlight. He smiled back, and they held on for an extra beat. Then they both looked out at the water and back down at their books.

• • •

By the end of the day, Liane had accomplished the following: she had read the entire novel, infused iced tea with the perfect amount of mint leaves and strawberry, given herself a pedicure using Himalayan sea salt as a scrub and kefir as a foot masque (the former was ingenious, the latter quite gross), and smiled at the Reading Man twice, both times because she had looked up from her book to find him watching her, his own book broken-spined in his lap, the pages blowing in the wind. Eventually he cleared his throat and said, “Hi,” in a voice that sounded like it hadn't been used for a while, and she said, “Hi,” in a voice that sounded the same.

She didn't die.

• • •

The next morning, Liane slid her laptop back into the bag she had brought it in. She took the cottage guest book out to the side porch with her coffee instead. She opened it and flipped backward in the book.

Thank you Helen for a wonderful week. We made the most of the weather and still enjoyed many long walks, warm fires and great food. We appreciate you being so generous in offering it to us for the week. Sincerely, The Smiths (Terri and Dave)
.

Liane yawned and turned the page. She had no clue who Terri and Dave were, but they sounded boring. Perhaps they
were friends from the village Helen now lived in. Helen had once said that most of the people who lived there were boring, but that she loved them for that because it made
her
feel more interesting.