Mating for Life (27 page)

• • •

When Ilsa arrived home in the taxi, Michael was working in his office and barely looked up. He asked how her trip was at dinner, but then, when she started to tell him, his BlackBerry chimed and he reached for it and his eyes slid away from hers and she stopped talking.

The next morning, she went to her studio and she took out all the sketches she had been doing over the past few months, nudes, erotic paintings she had done because she was trying to do what Lincoln had said she should do. They were all sketches she hated. She knew this now. She began to cut them to shreds with scissors.

Eventually she got to the nudes on cardboard, some she had done recently and some that were older and that Lincoln had handled, the ones he had told her were so good. She hesitated, then got out a paper knife and began to slice them into long, stiff strips.

In the back of another cupboard she found a box. She lifted the lid. It was filled with letters, mostly in French, from when she had lived in Paris, letters from Eric, saying things to her like,
You are my queen,
and quoting Paul Verlaine poems (“
Votre âme est un paysage chois
i
”) and other such bullshit.
There were also letters from her father, mostly affectionately drunk ramblings because that was the only time he wrote. She put the letters from Michael aside. Perhaps she would show them to Ani someday, to prove that they really had been in love, once.

She ripped everything else up with her hands.

But she didn't throw any of the shreds away. She packed them into garbage bags and dragged them home with her, kept them with her as she began to pack her things. Ani was at school and Xavier was at the park with Sylvie and then Ilsa had arranged for her to take both kids out to dinner and a movie, even though she wondered if Xavier would be able to sit through it. But they had to be out of the house. “You can't bring them back until you call me first,” she had said to Sylvie.

She called Michael. “You need to come home from work. I need to talk to you.” She spoke quickly so she wouldn't lose her nerve and pretend she was calling about something else.

“Is it an emergency?” he asked.

“Yes. Come home.”

14

Northern Cardinal
(
Cardinalis cardinalis
)

Cardinal pairs mate for life, and they stay together year-round. Mated pairs sometimes sing together before nesting. During courtship they may also participate in a bonding behavior where the male collects food and brings it to the female, feeding her beak to beak. If the mating is successful, this mate-feeding may continue throughout the period of incubation.

T
he day before, when Myra had learned Johnny was coming to visit, she had tried to hide her agitation from Jesse. All the time, she had wanted Jesse to think it was fine, that Johnny had never become angry with her when she said she was going back to the city with Jesse, that their relationship was perfectly normal: friends who were once lovers (of course, she didn't use the word
lovers
when she discussed it with Jesse) and now were just people who had once known each other. “We're still connected through you,” she had once said to him. “We're still friends.” But it wasn't true. They weren't. They had barely spoken since she'd left, or only when they had to because of something to do with Johnny's son. They were like people who had gone through a divorce.

She missed him, though. It still felt acute. She had almost said to him, when he called and said he was coming, that he
shouldn't come to the house, that he should meet Jesse at a neutral location so she wouldn't have to see him. It wasn't that she didn't
want
to see him. She just needed more time. Maybe another few months, and she would be over him and be able to be in his presence without worrying about the magnetic pull, painful to resist. But instead she had forced herself to say, “Okay, then, see you tomorrow,” and she had hung up the phone.

“Your dad's coming for a visit,” Myra had said to Jesse later, trying to sound casual. “Tomorrow afternoon. He's coming for dinner.”

“Great,” Jesse had said. “See you later, I have class.”

“Got all your books?”

“Think so.”

She had then gone shopping at St. Lawrence Market, and fretted about what to buy and what to make. She had returned empty-handed and texted Jesse:
Let's take him out. Let's show him around the city a little. Where do you think he'd like to go?

And Jesse had replied,
Nowhere, or least not to any of the restaurants you like
.

But she had still taken them to Campagnolo, and had felt a little embarrassed when Johnny had said, “Damn, it's hot in here,” and had taken off his flannel shirt and laid it across his chair, and had eaten his meal in his white T-shirt, essentially an undershirt, and then said, “Is that it? I'm still starving.” He had summoned the waiter and ordered another dish, the tagliatelle, and she had fully felt the wrongness of the setting. She should have bought steaks and potatoes and vegetables at the market and made him the simple kind of meal he liked.

But why? Why should I have made him what he likes? What about what
I
like?
Myra had barely been able to eat anything, and had left her meal mostly untouched before offering it to him. “I don't even know what that is,” he had said.

“It's duck confit risotto.”

“No, thank you.” Meanwhile, Jesse sat silently, eating his spaghetti all'amatriciana, and Myra had, for just a moment, hated Johnny, and then hated herself.
We really shouldn't be here.

She had invited him back to the house for coffee. The conversation had been stilted. At the door, later, Johnny had shaken Jesse's hand, then pulled him in for an awkward hug. “I'm proud of you, son,” he had said. There were tears in Myra's eyes.

“Thanks, Dad.” Jesse seemed genuinely happy. Perhaps he had missed it all, the subtext, the wrongness, the undercurrent of hurt feelings. Maybe he really had been simply eating his spaghetti at the restaurant. Because she
wasn't
his mother, was she? So what did Jesse care whether Myra and Johnny got along, whether they had anything to talk about, whether they were able to look each other in the eye, whether they had any sort of connection at all?

Then Johnny left, and Myra went upstairs to bed.

• • •

The next morning, the last person Myra expected to see at her back door was Johnny. But there he was. He looked tired and rumpled, his beard darker than the evening before, gone from five o'clock shadow to morning-after grizzle.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “I thought you were driving back last night.” She could see the dogs behind him running in the yard. “The gate's not closed.”

“They won't run away.”

“What's going on?”

“I didn't want to go back,” he said. “But I didn't want to come back here, either.” She stood still, not sure what to do. “So I . . . I slept in my truck.”

“Oh.”

“You going to let me come in, or what?”

Inside, he took off his boots and sat down at her table. “You know what?” he said, and he sounded angry. “Last night, when it was time for me to go home, all of the sudden I saw it. I realized it.”

“Saw what? Realized what?”

“That's why I didn't go home.”

“
What
are you talking about?”

“I saw what you hated about it, especially in the winter. What you didn't like about being at the marina. And then the idea of going back there alone, without you, without Jesse, with the other boys away and probably moving out soon, planning on living in town . . . there really didn't seem to be any point. And I realized . . . I realized that I miss you. I really miss you.”

She stood staring at him. She was still in her pajamas, a long white T-shirt and purple shorts. She hadn't been able to sleep the night before, not even a little bit. She probably looked terrible, she probably looked old. She had cut her hair when she returned to the city, a bob that landed just below her jawline. Johnny hadn't said a word about it. Now she wished it was long enough to pull back into a proper bun. It was probably sticking up everywhere.

She turned away from him and put on the kettle, and thought of her mother, who had passed away a few years before. Her mother would turn on the kettle when things were being left unsaid. She would boil the water, and make the tea, and wait. And usually by the time the tea was finished the things that needed to be said would have been said.

Myra faced the stove. She looked out the window. She saw a cardinal, bright red, sitting on the neighbor's fence. In the city, these bird sightings mattered, these small brushes with nature. At the marina she wouldn't have noticed a lone cardinal.

Johnny came up behind her.

“I don't feel like tea,” he said. He put his hand on her waist. “Turn off the stove.” He kissed her neck. “I miss you so much, Myra.”

“No,” she said, pulling away but feeling the urge to push toward him, into him. “
I
want tea.
I
want to talk,
I
want to know what you're really doing here.”

“I told you, I miss you.”

“And
I
told you, it's not enough.”

“Did you? I don't remember you saying that.” She realized she hadn't, had only said it in her head, out of self-­preservation.
Whatever he has to say, it's not enough.

“I meant to.”

He sat down at the table again and she stood, watching and waiting for the kettle to boil. “Myra, the truth? First of all, last night, I went to a bar, and I ran into one of the women who comes into the marina every summer, that Ilsa, the pretty one. And I thought maybe I'd find some comfort with her, so we . . .” Myra closed her eyes. “I'm sorry because I know it's probably not what you want to hear, but I want to be honest with you.” No, it was definitely not what Myra wanted to hear. She waited for him to keep talking while hoping he wouldn't. “Anyway, nothing much happened. We kissed a little. It just made me feel lonely for you. I don't like that feeling at all, didn't like not being able to push it away.” More silence.

What exactly am I supposed to say to that?
Myra wondered.

He started to speak again. “I've never felt possessive of any woman, like I wanted her to be mine. And I certainly have never felt so upset about any woman leaving as I did when you left. At first I thought it was because you decided to take one of my boys with you, but I knew you were right to do it, I knew Jesse should be at school, and that just made it worse, that you cared so much about him you got him to the exact
place he was supposed to be without even giving a rat's ass what I thought. You're not like anyone I've ever met before. You're not like anyone I've ever
been
with. You're so . . . you're so smart, you're so . . . I don't even know, just different. And
I'm
not smart at all, as you know. I've only ever read one book to the end, that I can remember.”

“I know that, Johnny, I know. We've talked about this.”

“For school, because I had to. I don't even know what it was called.”

“It was called
No Great Mischief,
by Alistair MacLeod.”

“See, you're so smart you even know the name of the only book I've ever read, and I don't even know the name of the fucking book!”

“Why are we talking about this?”

More silence. She turned the flame under the kettle down a little. “Most of the time, when you were around, I couldn't figure out what the hell you wanted with me, what you were doing, why you stayed,” he said. “Honestly, right at the start, when you said you were staying, the first thing I thought was,
What would a woman like this want with a man like me?
And I figured it was maybe because you weren't so great after all since you wanted to stay, and I suppose I treated you as such. Less than what you are. But then I started to realize you were great. But then you left. I guess I wasn't surprised when you did. But it hurt.
That
surprised me.”

She stood, still silent, watching him as he sat at her table. It was pine and long and pushed against the window. His shirt stood in contrast to the light flowing through the window, bright like the cardinal had been against the snow. Behind him, she could see the dogs playing in the yard.

“Do you remember
why,
even if you couldn't remember the title, you never forgot that one line from the book you read for school—that last line from it, the one you once told me about?”

“‘We're all better when we're loved,'” he said automatically.

“
That's
why I stayed with you.”

“You've got to be shitting me. You stayed with me because of a line at the end of a book I can't even remember the title of?”

“I stayed with you because I believed that
you
believed that, that you thought it was true that people were better when they were loved and that you, one day, were going to love
me
and we were both going to be better because of it. And I also . . . I also stayed with you because I wanted a baby.”

“Come on, really? You never said.”

“Yes. Always. The whole time. I bought the idea that you were this virile man who impregnated women at the drop of his hat, and I thought you were the answer to all my problems. I couldn't get pregnant, when I lived here, with my . . . ex-­husband.” Not technically a lie anymore; they had finalized things when she returned to the city. “When I lived here with him, I didn't have any luck. I'm barren, I think. Something is wrong.”

“We could have tried. Maybe that's the problem. We didn't really try.”

“Trust me,
I
tried.”

“We should try harder. If that's what you want, well, that's fine with me. Let's keep trying.”

The kettle had finally started to boil. She shut it off, turned, and got the kettle and two bags of Earl Grey. She stood waiting for it to steep.

“When you loved me, I
was
better,” he said. “I know I didn't act like it, but I was better. And last night, I realized all that was going to happen if I went back alone was that I was going to get worse again. I sat awake all through the night thinking about how to get you back, what I needed to say. And all I can think to tell you is how much I've been missing you.
How much I miss you. How much I . . .”

She waited. The tea was probably ready. Now it was probably too strong. Still she waited.

“I love you,” he said.

It
was
enough. Of course it was. What she had always wanted to hear him say, more than anything, ever, was more than enough.