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Catching the horse’s nylon halter, kelly green, bright against the blue sky, white clouds, after coaxing the mare into stillness, the white of her eye, Danny Martin came up to her and kissed her lips, he took his time, she could feel the mare’s breath on her wrist, he was holding the cup and he tasted of milky tea out there in the snowbank on a spring day, the snow creeping back off the pavement, the asphalt shiny, the horse.

For weeks after, months, she imagined the kiss while falling asleep, and when her father sat her down on the plaid sofa and took her two hands in his, cradled them between his, explaining they would have to sell the horse, his heart nearly broken, she could hardly remember why she had ever wanted one.)

Harold Robbins described being overcome. Sexually overcome. Losing control. To think that such a thing could happen to adults. Those who made the world stable. Even after the bankruptcy, when there were less treats in the cupboard and no new clothes for a long time, everything had a certainty.

She understood why she hadn’t been allowed to read the Harold Robbins. Her parents hadn’t wanted her to know, and knowing, she could feel herself crossing over, becoming adult.

Terrified of the eels, which were definitely thickly knotted under the wharf, kicking hard to the dazzling surface of the lake; but as soon as she gets there, thirteen-year-old Eleanor
instantly forgets the eels, climbs up the slimy ladder to jump again, ribs heaving to catch her breath.

Mr. Ryan used to deep fry battered cod tongues and serve them with tartar sauce.

The men always had one specialty and they were praised for it as if it were a miracle. Doug’s cod tongues.

Somewhere she has heard the story, a famous editor had given Harold Robbins an advance after receiving the first half of a novel. When the final half came in, it was an entirely different story. The characters had different names, different crimes, different lovers, different settings. But Robbins wouldn’t change a word. His editor found him on the Riviera. Robbins wouldn’t leave his yacht. A champagne glass held high, women in bikinis. The editor claimed it would destroy Robbins’s career, published the novel as it was, and nobody noticed. It sold as well as all the other Harold Robbins books. People read for the sex and wealth.

Glamour, thinks Eleanor, and she remembers Mr. Ryan’s plastic toothpicks with the Playboy bunnies at the tip, in silhouette, jutting breasts and ponytails, the tiny cheeks of their bums perched on the picks, sticking out of the cod tongues. Mr. Ryan was being ironic with the toothpicks, making fun of himself, his inability to let loose. But the toothpicks were also a parody of the desire to let loose; he didn’t believe in letting go.

Mrs. Ryan sent her to the house for ice. Eleanor had left the wharf, wandered up through the raspberry canes, eating some, pressing her tongue into the nubbly thimbles. Spiderwebs in the shade of the spruce trees wobbling with droplets of an
early morning rain. Her sister, Fran, stood near the sprinkler for hours, the lines of water hitting her bright bathing suit in a burry asterisk of mist (the bathing suit was blue with bananas all over, the things that suddenly come back to you!), the steely threads moving over Fran’s scrunched eyes, down her throat, chest, protuberant belly, and thighs. Hitting the sharp bones of her ankles and resting there like silver spurs.

There was too much sun. The Ryans’ house was empty. She opened the freezer and took out the metal tray of ice. In the living room she lay the tray on the TV and picked up a Harold Robbins novel from the shelf. She checked the bay window in the living room, looked out over the lawn. She could hear the Ryan children at the wharf. The crashes of their bodies on the water, shrill laughter.

Mr. Ryan, just outside on the verandah, preparing the cod tongues. Their parents drank so much in the middle of the afternoon, thinks Eleanor. All day, in the sunshine with the fireweed swaying, the mild breeze lifting clouds of seed into the air, and the dark spruce with ribbons of lake hanging in the branches. They had been rich briefly, then the construction company had failed. The sprinkler reaching her sister’s feet, and then, mysteriously, the water had dried up, someone, somewhere, had turned off the tap, and Eleanor’s sister opened her eyes and blinked in disbelief.

It’s such a shock when someone dies, all that energy, angst, desire, memory, love, the sheer
propulsion
, amounting to nothing. She just wants the screenplay to capture that: the shock.

The Harold Robbins novel: Eleanor on the cusp of puberty,
small breasts, ears pierced with two ice cubes freezing the lobes, and then the sewing needle, a drop of blood; in the mirror, her earlobes as dark as cherries, burning, the delicate jiggle of the dark red stones in the gold settings, her grandmother’s, the hot sting of the sewing needle through numbed flesh.

But I’d never read a word of pornography, she thinks.

She opens to the second-last page. A man is holding a gun, he has caught up with a woman he is going to kill. Eleanor can tell he has chased her through the five hundred pages, she has betrayed him again and again, and he comes back for more, they are in a room alone, his arm out straight, his finger on the trigger. (Maybe she should shoot Philip, blow his head off with a rifle, ruin Constance’s wedding.)

I will be independent, she thinks. She feels alert, squares her shoulders, a cold breeze from the lake, the potluck is ending, she is out on the lawn by herself, had she fallen asleep? She checks her chin for drool. She wonders if Philip has been waiting for a specific date when he can leave, like Mrs. Ryan. Has he planned to leave her all along?

Grace was not bestowed, she realizes. Nothing. Was it something Philip decided one night, resolved, resigned himself to? Surely Mr. Ryan, arranging the bowls of tartar sauce, the toothpicks, the serviettes, must have known something was going to happen.

Eleanor’s mother singing out: Doug’s cod tongues, what a treat!

How unthinkable that he would one day be with her mother for a short time, he would, in his confusion after
Mrs. Ryan left, turn to Eleanor’s mother, who was herself so disoriented with grief, so lost, how unthinkable on that particular sunny afternoon when Eleanor read pornography for the first time. As if the characters of the afternoon had stepped into a different novel halfway through. Her mother in Mr. Ryan’s arms. Her father buried on a hill overlooking the ocean. Mrs. Ryan seeing a lawyer in British Columbia.

The man grips the gun. The woman takes out her hairpins. Her shiny mahogany hair tumbles over her shoulders. She begins to unbutton her blouse. The man breaks into a sweat, he tries to look away, but he cannot. The woman reaches behind and unzips her skirt, it falls to her ankles, the man is trembling. He tells her not to move. She stands before him in a black lace bra and panties, garters, and fishnet stockings. The woman reaches back and unhooks her bra. Out on the verandah Mr. Ryan lowers a basket into the boiling fat and a roar rises.

The woman says, Shoot me if you can, Eleanor moves her head, feels her earrings jiggle. The woman leaning against the wall, her breasts, the gleaming satin of her bra, Danny Martin’s kiss. The man slowly lowers his arm, he cannot hold the gun out any longer. The gun drops from his fingers to the floor. The woman steps out of her skirt, walks across the tiles in her high heels, and steps into his arms. The screen door slams. Eleanor drops the book, kicks it under the skirt of the couch (the screen door slams, it’s Constance, checking the garden for Eleanor). Mr. Ryan is surprised to see her. For a moment he stands on the other side of the room, basket of cod tongues. The eels are
undisturbed, writhing together between the crevices of rock at the bottom of the lake.

The editor snaps the top back on his felt-tip marker. He taps the flowchart with it.

We should see the father, he says. Who was he?

Eleanor and Philip take Gabrielle home in a taxi before the reception. Apple air freshener. She meets the eyes of the driver in the rearview mirror. It’s the same driver. The one with the different wife altogether. She grabs her lapel.

Gabrielle, look! But the ladybug is gone.

Eleanor’s mother, Julia, comes to pick up Gabrielle. She’s babysitting so Philip and Eleanor can have a night together.

She says, Yes, you do, you need it.

Eleanor’s sister has shaved her head.

Why would she do a thing like that, Julia asks. Who will hire her now, a bald woman? It’s dark in the house after the lake, after the wedding dress blaring like a trumpet, the tinfoil trays of food floating through the party like a school of capelin. Eleanor closes her eyes and sees the lake spitting sparks, soft sparks. A wedding is a sham, she thinks. Constance letting the screen door slam behind her. Shading her eyes to check the children, the dress lifting like the lip of a snowdrift.

Eleanor says, Mom, was that weasel white? That weasel that ran through the rungs of the dining-room chairs.

What weasel? There was no weasel.

Eleanor thinks of Amelia on tiptoe, reaching for Philip’s ear.

I want nothing to do with Philip, she thinks. My life should have gone another way. Climbing hills in Nepal. But if there were no Philip, there would be no Gabrielle. She fills with a gutful of love for her daughter. Gabrielle’s braids in her hands. Braiding her hair while it’s wet. One loose strand near the temple.

Why can’t Gabrielle stay here with her? Why can’t she and Gabrielle curl up in bed and sleep and forget the reception? Forget Philip. If he wants to get loaded and sleep with someone, just let him go. Dusk, almost night, and she and Gabrielle could order fish and chips. All the rooms in the three-storey house dark, except the kitchen, salt and vinegar. She imagines a rumbling under the ocean around Australia, the coral reef bursting apart, bits of brittle coral flying into the sun like batons.

She feels a catch — and leave Philip to be drunk with that blond woman, dancing, pouring beer over each other’s heads, and finally kissing? Glenn Marshall is wrong. You don’t wait for grace, or anything, you make it happen.

The last time she had take-out she saw the cook, in whites, lift baskets of fries from the roaring fat and stop to tip a sickly bottle of Pepto-Bismol down his throat. Straight from the bottle, and drop it back into the breast pocket of his apron.

You go on, Julia says. Gabrielle is fine with me. You need a party.

Then Philip comes from the kitchen with a mug of ice cream.

Lots of people shave their heads, he says.

He puts a mound of ice cream in his mouth, leaning against the wall, and pulls the spoon out of his mouth slowly. The
mound of ice cream like a fossil of the roof of his mouth, a soft steam. He sees Eleanor looking at his mouth and he raises an eyebrow. Immediately she wants to be with him, get drunk with him, dance, she is grateful that her mom is taking Gabrielle.

Julia says, Was that the groom I saw on Prescott Street directing traffic with two soup ladles? They got a picture of it, someone did. He’ll be nice by midnight. Say goodbye to your mother, Gabrielle. Kiss your mother goodbye.

Gabrielle throws her arms around Eleanor’s neck, their foreheads gently knock, they look straight into each other’s eyes.

Gabrielle whispers, I’m going to have chocolate.

Philip squeezes past them on the stairs. Eleanor sits and listens to her mother’s car doors. Hears the car pull away.

In the bathroom, Eleanor and Philip stand side by side brushing their teeth. He pauses, his mouth foaming, the toothbrush still.

What were you and Glenn Marshall saying?

He gets in the shower. Eleanor undresses and gets in with him. The water hits his shoulders hard. She lets her wrists rest on his shoulder bones.

Then she kisses his chest, down his belly, until she is on her knees. The water slides down his ribs like cloth. She makes seams with her tongue. She puts her hand on his chest and the water flows down her arm to the elbow, like an evening glove. The hot water costing a fortune.

She says, Will I shave my legs?

Philip draws her up, takes her breast in his mouth.

The reception is at the Masonic Temple. There are perhaps two hundred people. More than the potluck — and the food. Constance has relatives from Heart’s Desire, older women in shiny dresses, purples, scarlets, blues, clustered at long tables with pink streamers, and flowers and platters of marshmallow cookies, coconut-covered. Old-lady bifocals cutting the reflection of candle flames in half. They have brought trays and trays of food. Constance likes flowers. White roses at Christmas, always. Once on a winter afternoon she and Eleanor sat on the sofa and Constance said, I don’t love him.

She picked a rose petal off the coffee table and smoothed it onto her chin. It hung there. It had been nothing more than a mood. It had passed. He asked her to marry him and she did.

But the relatives sit back as if they’ve done nothing. Arms crossed over broad chests, they sit back and the reflections of candle flames align in their glasses like the vertical pupils of cats, glowing from the dark corners of the Masonic Temple.

Sadie says to Eleanor, I kissed Constance on her satin shoulder. My lipstick on her wedding dress. My God, I’m not kidding. The whole dress is
ruined
.

There’s a lineup at the bar. Eleanor sits and looks at the dance floor. Her eyes adjust to the dark. She can see Amelia Kerby’s lame flashing in the crowd. Her blonde hair is down now, curly. Her naked shoulder. She has someone by the tie. A chair screeches opposite her and Glenn Marshall gives her a beer.

She says, It’s Glenn Marshall again.

He says, I don’t dance.

Dance with me, Glenn, she says. She feels desperate.

That’s exactly what I don’t do, he says. It’s Philip’s tie. Here at a wedding with all of their friends. He is already drunk and she’s holding him up by the tie. Constance drops into the seat beside Eleanor.

It can’t last with Amelia, she says.

Things end, Eleanor says. She has heard this idea all her life — that things end — but took no interest. Now she tries it on to test its durability. She has always imagined she was building something with Philip. She had a do-good work ethic toward love. It was something you hammered, chainsawed, sized up with a spirit level, until it was absolutely durable and true. Along with something less substantial, a blithe, unexamined faith, airy as a cloud, that things were meant to be. There had never been a need to reconcile these conflicting notions.