Wild Fell (15 page)

I swam laps at Hart House every morning before breakfast, and Ame was an early riser so she could study, so we were both usually the first people at breakfast in the dining hall. Early morning small talk at breakfast eventually led to longer talks at lunch and dinner, which eventually led to me working up the courage to ask Ame Millbrook out on a date.

Over Chianti and
pasta puttanesca
at a cheap Italian restaurant near the campus, we each discovered that neither of us was very ready to trust when it came to relationships. Ame had been badly hurt after discovering that her boyfriend had been cheating on her for six months before they broke up. For my part, it appeared that my parents’ divorce and my mother’s departure had affected me more than I’d thought.

It struck me later as ironic that our very fragility on the topic was the common bond we shared, and that it proved to be the source of our courage to yield to the feelings we were each clearly developing for each other; love in the form of emotional
détente.

The first night she was nude in my arms, I marvelled at the contrast of her slender whiteness against my own darker skin. Her delicacy against my bulk was shockingly erotic for both of us. In the darkness of the bedroom, I would wrap my arms around her back, cradling it, my back bowed, my weight on my elbows, my hands cupped her shoulder blades as I thrust, both of us slick with sweat. Making love to Ame was a sublime, sensual ritual
pas-de-deux
. I hadn’t been a virgin when I met Ame, not by any stretch of the imagination, but somehow, with her, I felt more myself than I ever had.

When I was on top of her, feeling her body react to every movement, I felt somehow as though the act was more than just sex. If I’d believed in souls, I would have said I felt—in my soul—that I was securing the final lock on the door between my childhood and my manhood.

I had no idea why this should be so important to me, nor did I question it any more than I had questioned how this sense of closure was connected to the recurring dreams I’d had off and on since I was nine years old—dreams of a girl in an old-fashioned dress who seemed to grow
alongside
me into womanhood as I grew into young manhood. The girl appeared in different incarnations in different years, always roughly matching my own chronological age, always the same girl in a sequence of old-fashioned dresses and hairstyles, but
always
the same girl.

The night Ame and I got engaged was the last night I dreamed of this girl, now in every sense of the word a mysterious and beguiling young woman, even just in dreams.

In that last dream, she stood on some sort of rocky beach staring out across the water at a point in the distance. When the woman slowly turned her head away from whatever it was she was observing and met my eyes, I knew she recognized me. In the dream, she
knew
me. She smiled at me with a
knowing
that was somehow terrible.

I woke with a jolt, feeling as though I had fallen out of the sky onto the bed. The abrupt movement woke Ame. She murmured comforting words, then took me in her arms and held me until my heartbeat returned to a normal cadence and we both slept, with me dreamless at last.

Naturally, I’d asked Hank to be my best man. It was the right thing to do, and besides, I’d promised.

She’d come out as a very butch lesbian in her second year at Carleton University to no one’s surprise, least of all mine.

Hank had called me in Toronto that year and asked if she could take the train up from Ottawa and stay over, because she had something important to tell me. In my dorm room at East House in Knox College, she’d told me that she was gay, and in love with a woman named Cosima, a journalism major. She told me that her life of trying to be what everyone had wanted her to be—a girl named Lucinda Jane—had almost killed her, literally as well as figuratively: she had seriously contemplated suicide when she was sixteen.

“I had the razor blades in the bottom of my sweater drawer. I kept them there, secret. No one knew. Men’s razors,” she said with a hint of something like pride, or contempt. It was hard to tell which. “Not those fucking pink
lady
razors.”

I was horrified. “Why didn’t you tell me, Hank? Jesus. All those times we spoke on the phone long-distance. You could have told me. I would have been on the next bus . . .” I trailed off, unable to contemplate what her suicide would have meant. A world without Hank in it was literally incomprehensible to me. “Why? How could you keep something like that to yourself?”

She sighed. “I couldn’t, Jamie. I couldn’t admit what I was feeling, not even to myself. Telling you would have just made it real, and I wasn’t ready for any of it to be real.”

Hank confessed that she had finally come to terms with the fact that, in an effort to please everyone else, she hadn’t succeeded in pleasing anyone, least of all herself. Her earnestness had moved me, but the news couldn’t have been less of a surprise, or less relevant to our friendship, and I told her just that as I held her tight.

Later, as we lay on the floor head to head, very drunk on Jägermeister, staring up at the swirling ceiling of my dorm room, she said she had something to tell me.

“What, Hank?”

“I fucking love you, Jamie.”
I fuggen lovezu

“Me, too, Hank. I love you, too.”

“I wish you were my brother.”

“I wish you were
my
brother.” I started to giggle. “No, I mean, I wish you were my
sister
.”

“Not me,” she said with drunken solemnity. “I don’t want to be anyone’s sister. I wish I was your brother, too.”

“You are, Hank.” Buffeted on the waves of Jäger, it made sense. “You are my brother. Tell you what—if I ever get married, you can be my best man, okay?”

“You getting
married
? To
who
? Why didn’t you tell me?”

Now we were both giggling. “No,” I said, nearly choking. “I’m not getting married. But . . . 
when
.”

“And you want me to be your best man? Wow.”

The ceiling continued to spin. “Yup. I do.”

Hank paused, then reached for my hand, squeezing it tightly. “
Bro
,” she said.

The next morning, we weren’t sure which of us had passed out first, but we realized two things through the haze of agony: We each had the worst hangovers of our lives. And neither of us could remember having been happier.

In the years since graduation, Hank, having eschewed law school, had become a very successful landscape gardener.

During her undergrad, she had spent her summers planting trees up north and working on outdoor landscaping crews in the city. In the process, she had discovered that she loved the work and, more importantly, that she had a natural affinity for the soil.

Before opening her own small firm in Ottawa, she had worked on various crews for other landscaping companies, first on summer vacations, then full-time upon graduation. She found that her communion with soil and seed was instinctive and unfailingly accurate. Her various employers noticed that she was a hard worker who put in long hours in the sun without complaining. They also noticed that she took an effortless leadership role with the crews, which were usually comprised of men, and that those men accepted her leadership just as effortlessly. Her supervisor, Sid, regularly slapped her on the back and joked that she was “just one of the guys” and “practically a man—and I mean that in a good way, so don’t go gettin’ all
militant dykey
on me now, eh?”

Hank always assured him she understood exactly what he meant, and laughed right along with him. Sid was still laughing right up until the moment Hank handed in her notice and quit to start her own competing landscaping business. She took two of the company’s best workers on the crew with her and, in the process, snapped up a plum condominium maintenance contract her former employers had been too lazy to bother formally renewing with the condo board. Sid had been furious. He’d called her a thieving dyke and promised her he’d blackball her so she’d never get another landscaping job in the city as long as he had breath in his body.

“Do your worst, Sid,” Hank said, saluting him as she walked out of the office for the last time. “You’re practically a man. And I mean that in a good way.”

Ame became less of a free spirit once we were actually engaged, and she wasn’t remotely pleased at the idea of a lesbian best man standing next to her fiancé at the end of the aisle in church. When she told me her parents and their friends would be horrified at the idea of a lesbian in their daughter’s wedding party, I suggested we elope or marry at City Hall, if she chose, or that her parents stay home. But if we were going to marry in a church, Hank would be my best man.

And so Hank
was
my best man. She was resplendent in a tuxedo that matched mine, her crew cut shining beneath a fresh coat of Brylcreem.

My mother, who flew in from Vancouver, with her second facelift and her third—very rich—husband, was the only person at the reception who called Hank “Lucinda Jane,” which Cosima, who’d come as Hank’s date, found hilarious.

Before ducking out of the reception, my mother kissed me on both cheeks and gave me a brittle hug.

“I haven’t been much of a mother to you all these years, Jamie,” my mother said. “I’m sorry about that. I’ve often regretted not being there. I didn’t regret leaving, because I had to find myself. But I regret leaving you. I’ve always loved you, though, son. I hope you and Ame will be very happy together.”

I didn’t believe a word of it, but I reached out and kissed her cheek. She stiffened in my arms, but allowed me to kiss her nonetheless, performing the traditional ritual homage to the normal mother and son relationship we’d never had.

“Thank you, Mom,” I said as sincerely as I could. “And thank you for coming. You, too, Stan,” I added for my second stepfather’s benefit. “It means a lot.”

My mother, who had studiously avoided my father throughout the service, pressed an envelope into my hand. “A little something for the honeymoon,” she said. “I know it’s not much, but it made sense to give this to you rather than another silly wedding gift you’re just going to throw away, anyway.”

When I opened the envelope, it contained a cheque for ten thousand dollars. I briefly thought of tearing it up, but I knew it would be an empty gesture, and ten thousand dollars was ten thousand dollars. If I genuinely didn’t bear my mother ill will for having left us, giving my father and me a chance at a happy life together—and I didn’t—it seemed hypocritical to throw her gift back in her face.

Ame and I had two good years together before I realized I had ignored the signs that had manifested themselves after we’d gotten engaged, and that I’d married a woman very much like my mother.

We divorced, much more acrimoniously than my own parents. Unlike the departure of my mother, however, the departure of my wife shook me to the core. Through Ame I thought I’d caught a glimpse of what a real marriage could be like, and I discovered that I’d idealized it much more than I’d ever dreamed. And perhaps I
did
catch that glimpse of what it could be like, but you can’t build a life together on a glimpse of anything so amorphous.

After my divorce, I moved back in with my father. He protested, of course, citing my youth and my new eligibility, urging me to “get back on that horse” and try again with a new girl.

“I feel guilty,” my father confessed, a bit shamefaced. “I believe that your mother and I were a fearful example of marital bliss for you.”

“It wasn’t you, Dad,” I said. “You were a great father to me. I couldn’t have asked for a better example of how to be a husband.”

“For all the good it did me,” he said ruefully. “Look at me. I’m an old man with no wife.” He laughed, but there wasn’t a lot of regret in that laughter. “No wife, no life.”

“Sometimes things just don’t work out the way we want them to, Dad.” I shrugged. “It happens. As far as I’m concerned, Mom threw away the best thing that ever happened to her. She was a gadder. I don’t think she knew what she wanted.”

“What did you say?” He sounded shocked, but then he laughed out loud. “Good
Lord
, Jameson. Where on earth did you hear that word?”

“Something I heard Mrs. Alban say one night when you and she were talking, when I was a kid. After Mom left. She said Mom was ‘a gadder.’ I didn’t know what she meant at the time. At first I thought she said ‘gander.’ I thought that was funny. But you know, I think Mrs. Alban was right. Mom didn’t leave you for another man, she left us because she didn’t like herself very much and she thought that by leaving us, she could figure out why.”

“I don’t think she ever did,” my father said. “Poor Alice.”

“And by the way, you may not have a wife, but you
do
have a life. So don’t say that. And you have a son who loves you more than anything.”

“That I do,” he said gently. “That I do, Jamie. And I’m so proud of you. But I still don’t want you to move in with me. I’m far too old, and you’ve gotten far too bossy.”

By the time I moved in with him in May of that year, I had been concerned for some time that things were not entirely right with my father.

It had started off with small things, him repeating himself in conversation with no subsequent memory of having just said what he’d said. At first, he thought I was teasing him when I told him I’d just responded to that very statement a few minutes earlier. When he realized I was genuinely startled, he rubbed his eyes and said, “Well, I guess I’m just getting old-timers.”

We both laughed at that. For my part, my laughter was genuine, but my father’s carried a trace of something that caused me to look twice. By the second or third time it happened, I was the only one laughing. My father’s face had taken on a haunted aspect.

In the weeks and months that followed, my father’s memory began to slip slowly, but with what I now realize had been inexorable, murderous determination.

Frequently he would ask me to speak more slowly, though I habitually spoke more slowly than he did. He became enraged at the sound of a radio, or a television, telling me that it was impossible for him to think with all the noise in the house. His confusion became constant, though he did his best to hide it from me. For a while, he managed to do so successfully. But then eventually it became impossible to hide. I begged him to see a doctor about it, but he was adamantly opposed to what he called “a lot of fuss over just getting old.”