Sweet Affliction (10 page)

“It's okay, honey,” Sophie said. “Don't cry. It's okay.”

“B'seder,” Frieda said.

“What?” said Sylvie.

“B'seder—it means ‘it's okay.' The literal meaning is ‘in order,' which is why this is called a seder—because we do it in order. But colloquially it means ‘fine, good, a-okay.'”

“So this would be a b'seder seder?” Maitland said. Rachel laughed, not a real laugh but the kind of laugh that signalled she was ready to stop crying.

“I'm okay,” she said. “Really. B'seder.” Laurent picked up an empty wine bottle, peering at the bottom optimistically. He overturned it, and a trickle of red dampened the tablecloth. “Whoopsie,” he said.

“What now?” said Maitland.

“Well,” said Frieda, “since Passover is about telling stories, and revisiting the past, I have a story I'd like to tell.” She felt the twin weights of Sylvie's pale eyes on her.

“Go on,” said Sharon.

“It's about a woman,” Frieda said.

“I like it already,” said Maitland.

There was no traffic on the drive back to NDG. The kids were sleeping like proverbial angels, Christine in her car seat and Maurice buckled in beside her. Maitland was driving. On four glasses of wine he was still a better driver than Sylvie, who didn't trust her instincts sober. Sylvie's sensual mood had passed and she was achy, feet swollen. Maitland was quiet, a hand on the wheel and the other on her knee.

“You're quiet,” she said.

He yawned. “Just sleepy, babe.”

Through the windshield she watched the lights of the city appear as they ascended the mountain.

“I never get tired of this view,” she said. “Sometimes I think I'm bored of this city, I'm ready for something new, but then I see a sight like this, and I fall in love all over again.”

Maitland smiled in front of him and made a murmur of agreement. The car dipped and rose.

“That was quite a story,” Sylvie said.

“The Passover story? Yes, it's very interesting,” Maitland said.

“Yes. But the other story. The one that Rachel's friend told. Frieda.”

Maitland was silent. He took his hand from her leg and placed it on the wheel. Then he said, very quietly, “She's quite the little bitch.”

Sylvie let her breath out slowly. She hadn't noticed she was holding it. “I just don't see how it was relevant,” Sylvie said. Maitland looked at her askance for a moment, then turned his eyes back to the curving road. “Why would she tell a story like that? To make herself feel better? To right a wrong? What difference does it make, now? Things that happened in the past should stay there. I don't see how it's relevant,” she repeated.

“Sometimes, Sylvie, you only see what you want to see.” His voice was not bitter but she sensed bitterness from somewhere within him. A bitter smell, like cherry pits.

Sylvie tightened her scarf around her shoulders. “Is that it? I suppose that could be it. I don't know.” They passed the lookout point and the road began to descend. Sylvie kept talking. She couldn't seem to stop. She needed to talk it out. “I don't know what I'm saying. The choices people make. I'm not sure I understand myself. What good does it do, to talk about the wrongs of the past? To make ourselves relive them over and over. We only fuel our anger that way. You don't fight fire with fire. You fight fire with
water.
”

“If you're going to hit me,” Maitland said, “can I at least pull over first?”

Sylvie began to cry. She cried quietly, so as not to wake the children.

“You want me to be angry at you,” she said finally, “but I refuse. I am not that kind of person.”

“Okay,” Maitland said.

They went on in silence. Sylvie tried to feel sadness or sympathy for that girl so many years ago, the one betrayed by a friend who liked her too much, but found she could muster only a detached pity.

“What's the point?” she said again.

A pair of yellow eyes appeared fifty feet in front of the windshield. Sylvie heard Maurice say a single word,
Papa
, and then Maitland was swerving into the oncoming lane. There was a clattering sound that seemed to be coming from inside Sylvie's body but was not, and her fetus flipped a full one hundred and eighty degrees and arched its body like a fish. The tires skidded on the moist pavement and then the anti-lock mechanism clicked in, the car swung out and around, and suddenly they were motionless on the outside shoulder, facing the wrong direction. Sylvie did and did not want to turn around. She did, slowly. Christine was still asleep in her carrier, her bangs stuck to her hot forehead. Sylvie touched her cheek, and she fluttered her lids and sighed. Maurice was wide-eyed. “What was it?”

“It was a deer,” Sylvie said.

“There are no deer in this park,” Maitland said. “It must have been a dog.”

“A big dog,” Maurice said. “Maybe it was a werewolf.”

“Maybe,” Maitland said.

“Did we hit it?”

“No,” said Maitland. “
Calisse
, that was close.” His hands were shaking. He rested them on the steering wheel and bent his head forward onto his wrists.

“It was a deer,” Sylvie said.

Helga Volga

When Abby and Marcus walk home they do this thing where they pretend they've just met and are going home together for the first time.

“This your place?” Abby says.

“Yup,” says Marcus.

“Nice.”

“Thanks,” says Marcus. “I try to keep up.”

It's not as funny as it used to be, but Abby thinks they're both afraid of what will happen if they stop.

I can't talk about it right now,
Marcus said.

They live together but they're not married and never will be, because they don't believe in things like obligation. At least Marcus doesn't, and Abby is more or less indifferent. It didn't seem to matter when they first met, because when they got together it was with the sense of being superior creatures who didn't need rules. They attended friends' weddings with mildly amused condescension. They ate their cake and drank their mojitos and toasted themselves and their ungovernable love. But last June Abby watched her childhood best friend walk down the aisle and thought, there's something sexy about a contract.

And then this morning, he calls her from work.

I have to tell you something bad, but I can't talk about it right now.

There is no response to this, or at least none that will not lead to an argument. Isn't it funny how you can find yourself saying words that if you heard them on a TV sitcom you would turn to your partner and go “Oh please, that's not how real people talk.”

So Abby said, “Yes honey, of course, we'll talk later.”

She puts Stacey in the highchair and tries to feed her a grilled cheese while Stacey makes noises like a pterodactyl. These days everyone's giving their baby girls old-fashioned names: Olive, Maude, Mabel, Gladys, names Abby remembers from visiting her mother on the Alzheimer's ward. But she loves her girls' clean names, names without a past.

She has given Angela a hollowed-out egg to paint with her watercolours. Earlier she poked a hole in the top and bottom of the egg with a sewing needle and carefully blew the yolk out. The shell is so light and delicate it makes her fingers ache to touch it.

Now Angela considers the egg, turning it over and over. She lays it gently on her placemat and crushes it with her small fist.

“Oh sweetie,” Abby says, “why did you do that?”

Angela looks up at her, puzzled. “I wanted to see all of it at once,” she says.

After lunch it's nap time. Angela gets a blue foam mat and a blankie, and Stacey goes in the white wooden crib, which used to be Abby's. Angela has a case of the wiggles so Abby has to lie down and hook a leg over her to get her to fall asleep.

Who is it, she wonders. One of his co-workers? The girl from the party? Helga Volga? Of course, it's always Helga Volga. As she watches Angela sleeping, a tiny bubble of spit escaping her lips, Abby gets an intense ache in her forearms. She has to rub them together like a cricket, and when that doesn't work she squeezes them between her knees.

When they were a new couple, Abby and Marcus invented a fictitious woman so they could talk about the possible directions their relationship could take. It was easier, somehow, to have a concrete focus rather than an abstract, hovering cloud of uncertainty.

It started when Marcus was planning to travel Europe for a few months. Abby was caring for her mother and couldn't leave, and in any case felt too old to hoist a backpack and share sleeping quarters with a dozen snoring Australians.

“I want you to have your freedom,” she told Marcus. “Part of travelling is, you know, experimentation.”

This word made Marcus feel like he was going to work on the Manhattan Project. “I don't want to experiment, I love you,” he said.

“One has nothing to do with the other,” she said. “You'll meet a beautiful woman named Helga Volga or something, and she'll be like ‘Come back to my castle in the Caucasus, handsome foreigner,' and I don't want you to start thinking of me as like the old ball and chain.”

Marcus started to protest but Abby kept talking. “Just make sure you're careful, because Helga has chlamydia and I don't want you bringing it back here and giving it to me.”

“Okay, but really, it's not going to happen.”

“And she's not allowed to come and live here either.”

“Right. Um… can we keep in touch through letters?”

“Yes, but no phone calls,” Abby said, smiling.

After that, Helga Volga became a stand-in for anyone in their relationship that wasn't them. At parties they would select people for each other and designate them Helga Volga, the most likely candidate for an affair. When they found themselves trapped in a tired and spiralling conversation about their relationship, one or another would sigh and say “If only Helga Volga were here. She would know what to do.” After one such exchange, Abby took a piece of pink chalk and wrote WWHVD? on the wall above the doorway. Eventually all they had to do was point to the writing and their argument would seem funny and absurd in light of their love and generosity toward each other.

“Will Helga Volga be there?” Abby would sometimes ask when Marcus announced that he was going to a party at a friend's studio, or to a show in a warehouse loft, or for drinks at The Miracle. If he said no, there was a possibility that Abby would join him, though often as not she'd stay home, listening to records and reading, or sketching in her notebook, or just sitting in her armchair, smoking, with John or Alice Coltrane on the turntable.

At the beginning Marcus only ever said no. And he never thought to ask her the question. One evening Abby picked up her shoulder bag and told him she was going to an art opening at a studio in the East End.

“But you hate vernissages,” Marcus said.

“It's an old friend,” she said, and Marcus pictured one of Abby's art school companions, a feather-haired girl in a Laura Ashley dress, or the one with the multicoloured dreadlocks. Marcus had always felt like this girl may have wanted to sleep with him, but her show of public and exuberant lesbianism kept getting in the way.

“Are you going right now?” he said. “I can be ready in ten.”

“Well, I don't know,” Abby said. “Helga Volga might be there.”

“Oh.” Marcus instantly revised the image of the old friend. A gangly tattooed boy with a thatch of mink-black hair. A sculptor with strong calloused hands. Someone in a band.

“Oh, well, okay, then have a good time, I guess.”

“Thanks!” Abby seemed not to pick up on the anxiety in his voice, taking his wishes at their best. Which is how he meant them, he really did.

When the door had closed, Marcus stood in front of the record shelf for a long time. Finally he pulled out Leonard Cohen's
Songs from a Room
. He put it on.

After that,
yes
became a possibility. And from a possibility, a certainty.

The cat, who was once very fat, is now very thin, so when she sits on her haunches her flesh hangs down over her feet, as though she's wearing a ball gown. When she's hungry she hovers by Abby's legs and makes a series of high-toned upbeat enquiries. These Abby answers by getting up off the floor where she's been lying next to Angela and going to the kitchen, while the cat trots along, almost tripping Abby in her excitement. Sometimes when the cat's cries become too much for her, Abby will shut her in the bathroom, where the cool tile and plant life calms her. Once Abby retrieved the cat to find she had defecated in the bathtub, directly into the drain, like target practice.

Abby's learned to tell when Marcus is setting out on a crush. It starts with a discussion of some random information, some factoid that Marcus would otherwise find silly or irrelevant.

“Have you heard of synesthesia?”

“Yeah,” Abby will say.

“It's this condition where your senses are crossed and you can, like, hear colours and see smells.”

“I know. There was a special about it on the CBC. We listened to it together.”

“Alice has synesthesia.”

“Really.”

“Yeah.”

“How do you know?”

“She told me that when she hears ‘
Wednesday'
, she sees green.”

“That doesn't count.”

“She said she thinks of lemonade as pointy.”

“If that counted then everyone in the world has synesthesia.”

“I find it super interesting,” he'll say.

The next thing he'll find super interesting will be her eyes, and her opinions on contemporary music and art, and her legs, and eventually her bed. And for a little while Abby will have nights to herself, to sketch and read and sit in her armchair, listening.

“Who do you think knows more about women,” she asked Marcus once, “someone who's dated a lot of them or someone who is one?” It was a serious question. But now she sees that knowledge comes neither from first-hand experience nor rigorous study. Both of these things make knowledge more likely, the way going out into a storm makes getting hit by lightning more likely than staying home and watching TV. But neither guarantees it.