The Robber Bride (59 page)

“Just let me stay here,” he says. “Let me stay in the house. I could sleep downstairs, in the family room. I won’t bother you.”

He’s begging, but Roz hears this only in retrospect. At the moment she finds the idea intolerable: Mitch on the floor, in a sleeping bag, like the twins’ friends at group sleepovers, demoted to transience, demoted to adolescence. Locked out of her bedroom, or worse, not wishing to go into it. That’s it – he’s rejecting her, he’s rejecting her big, eager, clumsy, ardent, and solid body; it’s no longer good enough for him, not even as a feather bed, not even as a fallback. He must find her repellent.

But she does have some pride left, though God knows how she’s managed to hang onto it, and if she’s going to let him come back it has to be on full terms. “You can’t treat me like a rest stop,” she says. “Not any more.”

Because that’s exactly what he’d do, he’d move in, she’d dish out the nourishing lunches, feed him, build him up again, and he’d get his strength back and be off, off in his longboat, off in his galleon,
scouring the seven seas for the Holy Grail, for Helen of Troy, for Zenia, peering through the spyglass, on the watch for her pirate flag. Roz can see it in his eyes, which are focused on the horizon, not on her. Even if he came back, into her bedroom, in between her raspberry-coloured sheets, into her body, it wouldn’t be her underneath him, on top of him, around him, not ever again. Zenia has stolen something from him, the one thing he always kept safe before, from all women, even from Roz. Call it his soul. She slipped it out of his breast pocket when he wasn’t looking, easy as rolling a drunk, and looked at it, and bit it to see if it was genuine, and sneered at it for being so small after all, and then tossed it away, because she’s the kind of woman who wants what she doesn’t have and gets what she wants and then despises what she gets.

What is her secret? How does she do it? Where does it come from, her undeniable power over men? How does she latch hold of them, break their stride, trip them up, and then so easily turn them inside out? It must be something very simple and obvious. She tells them they’re unique, then reveals to them that they’re not. She opens her cloak with the secret pockets and shows them how the magic trick is worked, and that it is after all nothing more than a trick. Only by that time they refuse to see; they think the Water of Youth is real, even though she empties the bottle and fills it again from the tap, right before their very eyes. They want to believe.

“It won’t work,” Roz tells Mitch. She isn’t being vindictive. It’s the simple truth.

He must know it, because he doesn’t plead. He subsides into his crumpled clothing; his neck gets shorter, as though there’s a steady but inexorable weight pushing slowly down on the top of his head. “I guess not,” he says.

“Didn’t you keep the apartment?” says Roz. “Isn’t that where you’re living?”

“I couldn’t stay there,” says Mitch. His voice is reproachful, as if
it’s crass of her, cruel of her even to suggest such a thing. Doesn’t she realize how much it would hurt him to be in a place he once shared with the fled beloved, a place where he would be reminded of the dear departed at every turn, a place where he was so happy?

Roz knows. She herself lives in such a place. But he obviously hasn’t thought of that. Those in pain have no time for the pain they cause.

Roz sees him out, into the front hall, into the overcoat, which almost does her in because it’s her overcoat too, she helped him buy it, she shared the life he led in it, that good-taste leather, that sheepskin, one-time container of such a rascally wolf. No longer, no more; he’s toothless now.
Poor lamb
, thinks Roz, and clenches her fists tight because she won’t let herself be fooled like that again.

He takes himself off, off into the freezing February dusk, off into the unknown. Roz watches him walk towards his parked car, lurching a little although he didn’t touch his drink. The sidewalks are icy. Or maybe he’s on something, some kind of pill, a tranquillizer. Most likely he shouldn’t be driving, though it’s no longer any of her business to stop him. She tells herself it’s not necessary to have qualms about him. He can stay at a hotel. It’s not as if he doesn’t have any money.

She leaves his red roses on the sideboard, still wrapped in their floral paper. Let them wilt. Dolores can find them tomorrow, and reproach Roz in her heart for carelessness, rich people don’t know what things cost, and throw them out. She pours herself another scotch and lights another cigarette, then gets down her old photo albums, those pictures she took so endlessly at backyard birthday parties, at graduations, on vacations, winters in the snow, summers on the boat, to prove to herself they were all indeed a family, and sits in the kitchen going through them. Pictures of Mitch, in non-living colour: Mitch and Roz at their wedding, Mitch and Roz and Larry, Mitch and Roz and Larry and the twins. She searches his face for
some clue, some foreshadowing of the catastrophe that has befallen them. She finds none.

Some women in her place take their nail scissors and snip out the heads of the men in question, leaving only their bodies. Some snip out the bodies too. But Roz will not do this, because of the children. She doesn’t want them to come across a picture of their headless father, she doesn’t want to alarm them, any more than she already has. And it wouldn’t work anyway, because Mitch would still be there in the pictures, an outline, a blank shape, taking up the same amount of room, just as he does beside her in her bed. She never sleeps in the middle of that bed, she still sleeps off to one side. She can’t bring herself to occupy the whole space.

On the refrigerator, attached to it by magnets in the form of smiling pigs and cats, are the Valentines the twins made for her at school. The twins are clinging these days, they want her around. They don’t like her going out at night. They didn’t wait for Valentine’s Day, they brought their Valentines home and gave them to her right away, as if there was some urgency. These are the only Valentines she will get. Probably they are the only ones she will get ever again. They should be enough for her. What does she want with glowing hearts, with incandescent lips and rapid breathing, at her age?

Snap out of it, Roz, she tells herself. You are not old. Your life is not over.

It only feels like that.

Mitch is in the city. He’s around. He comes to see the children and Roz arranges to be out, her skin prickling the whole time with awareness of him. When she walks into the house after he’s gone she can smell him – his aftershave, the English heather stuff, could it be he’s sprinkled some of it around just to get to her? She glimpses him in restaurants, or at the yacht club. She stops going to those places.
She picks up the phone and he’s on the other line with one of the kids. The whole world is booby-trapped. She is the booby.

Their lawyers talk. A separation agreement is suggested, though Mitch stalls; he doesn’t want Roz – or else he would be here, wouldn’t he, on the doorstep again, wouldn’t he at least be asking? – but he doesn’t want to be separated from her either. Or maybe he’s just bargaining, maybe he’s just trying to get the price up. Roz grits her teeth and holds the line. This is going to cost her but it will be worth it to cut the string, the tie, the chain, whatever this heavy thing is that’s holding her down. You need to know when to fold. At any rate she’s functioning. More or less. Though she’s done better.

She goes off to see a shrink, to see if she can improve herself, make herself over into a new woman, one who no longer gives a shit. She would like that. The shrink is a nice person; Roz likes her. Together the two of them labour over Roz’s life as if it’s a jigsaw puzzle, a mystery story with a solution at the end. They arrange and rearrange the pieces, trying to get them to come out better. They are hopeful: if Roz can figure out what story she’s in, then they will be able to spot the erroneous turns she took, they can retrace her steps, they can change the ending. They work out a tentative plot. Maybe Roz married Mitch because, although she thought at the time that Mitch was very different from her father, she sensed he was the same underneath. He would cheat on her the way her father had cheated on her mother, and she would keep forgiving him and taking him back just the way her mother had. She would rescue him, over and over. She would play the saint and he the sinner.

Except that her parents ended up together and Roz and Mitch did not, so what went wrong? Zenia went wrong. Zenia switched the plot on Roz, from rescue to running away, and then when Mitch wanted to be rescued again Roz was no longer up to it. Whose fault was that? Who was to blame? Ah. Didn’t Roz think that too much
time was spent apportioning blame? Did she blame, perhaps, herself? In a word, yes. Maybe she still can’t quite leave God out of it, and the notion that she’s being punished.

Maybe it was nobody’s fault, the shrink suggests. Maybe these things just happen, like plane crashes.

If Roz wants Mitch back that badly – and it appears that she does, now that she has a greater insight into the dynamics of their relationship – maybe she should ask him to come for counselling. Maybe she should forgive him, at least to that extent.

All this is very reasonable. Roz thinks of making the phone call. She is almost nerved up to it, she is almost there. Then, in drizzly March, Zenia dies. Is killed in Lebanon, blown up by a bomb; comes back in a tin can, and is buried. Roz does not cry. Instead she rejoices fiercely – if there was a bonfire she’d dance around it, shaking a tambourine if one was provided. But after that she’s afraid, because Zenia is nothing if not vengeful. Being dead won’t alter that. She’ll think of something.

Mitch isn’t at the funeral. Roz cranes her neck, scanning for him, but there’s only a bunch of men she doesn’t know. And Tony and Charis, of course.

She wonders whether Mitch has heard, and if he has, how he’s taking it. She ought to feel that Zenia has been cleared out of the way, like a moth-eaten fur coat, a tree branch fallen across the path, but she doesn’t. Zenia dead is more of a barrier than Zenia alive; though, as she tells the shrink, she can’t explain why. Could it be remorse, because Zenia the hated rival is dead and Roz wanted her to be, and Roz is not? Possibly.
You aren’t responsible for everything
, says the shrink.

Surely Mitch will now change, appear, react. Wake up, as if from hypnotism. But he doesn’t phone. He makes no sign, and now it’s
April, the first week, the second week, the third. When Roz calls his lawyer, finally, to find out where he is, the lawyer can’t say. Something was mentioned about a trip, he seems to recall. Where? The lawyer doesn’t know.

Where Mitch is, is in Lake Ontario. He’s been there a while. The police pick up his boat, the
Rosalind II
, drifting with sails furled, and eventually Mitch himself washes into shore off the Scarborough Bluffs. He has his lifejacket on, but at this time of year the hypothermia would have taken him very quickly. He must have slipped, they tell her. Slipped off and fallen in, and been unable to climb back on. There was a wind, the day he left harbour. An accident. If it had been suicide he wouldn’t have been wearing his lifejacket. Would he?

He would, he would, thinks Roz. He did that part of it for the kids. He didn’t want to leave a bad package for them. He did love them enough for that. But he knew all about the temperature of the water, he’d lectured her about it often enough. Your body heat dissipates, quick as a wink. You numb, and then you die. And so he did. That it was deliberate Roz has no doubt, but she doesn’t say.
It was an accident
, she tells the children. Accidents happen.

She has to tidy up after him, of course. Pick up the odds and ends. Clean up the mess. She is, after all, still his wife.

The worst thing is the apartment, the apartment he shared with Zenia. He didn’t go back to it after she left, after he chased off to Europe to find her. Some of his clothes are still in the closet – his impressive suits, his beautiful shirts, his ties. Roz folds and packs, as so often before. His shoes, emptier than empty. Wherever else he is, he isn’t here.

Zenia is a stronger presence. Most of her things are gone, but a Chinese dressing gown, rose-coloured silk with dragons embroidered on it, is hanging over a chair in the bedroom. Opium, Roz thinks, smelling it. It’s the smell that bothers Roz the most. The
tumbled sheets are still on the unmade bed, there are dirty towels in the bathroom. The scene of the crime. She should never have come here, this is torture. She should have sent Dolores.

Roz gives up going to the shrink. It’s the optimism that’s getting to her, the belief that things can be fixed, which right now feels like just one more burden. All this and she’s supposed to be hopeful, too? Thanks but no thanks.
So, God
, she says to herself.
That was some number. Fooled me! Proud of yourself? What else have you got up your sleeve? Maybe a nice war, some genocide – hey, a plague or two?
She knows she shouldn’t talk this way, even to herself, it’s tempting fate, but it gets her through the day.

Getting through the day is the main thing. She puts two pending real estate deals on hold; she’s in no shape to make major decisions. The magazine can run itself until she can get around to selling it, which shouldn’t be too hard, because ever since the changes Zenia brought in it’s showing a profit. If she can’t sell it she’ll fold it up. She doesn’t have the heart to go on with a publication that has made such extravagant claims, claims she has so calamitously failed to embody in herself. Superwoman she’s not, and
failed
is the key word. She’s been a success at many things, but not at the one thing. Not at standing by her man. Because if Mitch drowned himself – if there wasn’t enough left for him to live for – whose fault was it? Zenia’s, yes, but also her own. She should have remembered about his own father, who took the same dark road. She should have let him back in.

Getting through the day is one thing, getting through the night is another. She can’t brush her teeth in her splendid double-sinked bathroom without sensing Mitch beside her, she can’t take a shower without looking to see if his damp footprints are on the floor. She
can’t sleep in the middle of her raspberry-coloured bed, because, more than ever, more than when he was alive but elsewhere, he is almost there. But he’s not there. He’s missing. He’s a missing person. He’s gone off someplace where she can’t get at him.