Red Girl Rat Boy Part 11

After he slept, a quiet hour pa.s.sed. How long has this been going on? How could you? Humiliating, unsayable cliches, dead idioms. Jake's toothbrush buzzed.

"Goodnight," I said. "I'm watching the news."

Then a PBS doc, the US invading Grenada. I dragged upstairs. At the sight of him in our bed, I U-turned to huddle by the TV till dawn.

Off Henry went to school, my clever boy. Then he'd go to grand-mere's, to make mince tarts. Her pastry, inimitable.

Mr. Suns.h.i.+ne was p.r.o.ne in the living room, applying tape by the baseboards to keep the floor clear of paint. He held the roll between his teeth.

"How long have you been f.u.c.king Melanie?"

Jake didn't tear the tape. Silence. Like greetings that give the avid caller only a circling whisper for unendurable seconds. Hi there! Hal and Mich.e.l.le are having too much fun to answer the phone, so leave a message.

"It's got nothing to do with us. Totally separate, totally." Another 80s word.

Then why pray tell have you kept it secret?

"There's no difference for you and me! We make it nearly every day."

There is so. You have lied, in your body.

Mr. Suns.h.i.+ne scrambled up, headed for the door.

"Don't you run away! I'll call her. That'll be different!" The soccer list, by the phone. I dialled. f.u.c.k you I'd say. Jake grabbed at the receiver. Ringing. I spat in his face, cliche. He backed off. Thanks for calling. Melanie and Curtis aren't able. . . A warm voice. Why wasn't she there, the b.i.t.c.h?

"You G.o.d-d.a.m.ned b.a.s.t.a.r.d. It's over."

I went to work.

Subsequently I repeated the above many tedious times. It's also possible to cry so often it gets boring. Not tears again!

"This isn't f.u.c.king necessary, Lauren!"

"f.u.c.king her wasn't necessary!"

We could shout because our boy was helping to move grand-mere's sofa so her cleaner could vacuum behind. Then they'd watch Charlotte's Web. For hot chocolate they grated bittersweet, melted it over hot water. Neither admired Debbie Reynolds as the spider's voice. They were re-reading the novel. Soon they'd move on to Jimmy Stewart and Alastair Sim.

Henry would go on living in his home, Jake and I decided. We'd take fortnightly turns with him. How to tell them?

"Madame will think it's crazy." Here we agreed.

Shortly before Christmas, again the taped f.u.c.k you, the m.u.f.fled start and finish.

A woman. Myrna, Rosalind, Lesley, Robin, Andrea?

When I knew they'd be out I phoned, listening three times to spiteful Andrea who'd once asked Rosalind, "What do you want a baby for? You haven't even got a man of your own."

No match. Erase.

As I was driving my mother to our house on Christmas Eve she remarked, "You look worried, Lauren."

"I am." Which I hadn't planned to say.

"Is it Henry?"

"Is what? Has he said something?"

The car moved along the silent road. Snow in Vancouver isn't common. The whiteness brings a quiet that's always surprising. She doesn't even answer me, I could say at book club.

In January I escorted my mother to a game. She sat in the car with the heater on, to watch her grandson's team win. Melanie and Curtis were visible. Jake did not join us. No one went to Tom & Jerry's.

Next day, listening to the messages, my brain was full of a library crisis. Perhaps that freed my ears?

She'd had to struggle past the expletive's initial consonant. He's fff.u.c.king you over. As if in a movie my mother sat at her desk, her linen handkerchief wrapped round the receiver.

When at the next book club I opened her dossier of old age and frailty, when I observed how those greedy ears yearned for more, I knew the novelist's power. I had those women. Elated, I took them to wartime France to see my mother's loving guilt. They clasped their hands, wept softly. "Oh, Lauren, your poor mum. So hard, so sad." Next I catalogued her doctor's a.s.sessment, the geriatric social worker's, her housecleaner's. My husband's. Saying Jake axed open my throat.

"He, he, he's," horrible guttural, "been unfaithful. You can't imagine how long it's been going on."

"Years!" cried Fair Rosalind, and slid off her chair in a faint.

Later she said a hundred times, "Jake swore he'd told you."

"You knew, Lauren!" he himself shouted. "You couldn't believe I was just tree-planting in Terrace every year!"

Unread codes.

Done for. No good life could grow there again.

"I won't do that," Henry said. "I'm going to live with grand-mere."

"Mum and I will take turns, here." Jake spoke gently, though an hour earlier he'd been roaring, "Rosalind talked to me. For you I was just a dumb hunk." Those cliches too.

"I don't want turns," said Henry.

We tried.

We tried with my mother. She did her wave thing.

Not the weekends but the long turns were the worst.

Each summer Henry was with me for a month. Thirty-one days. Not long. Long enough to feel the child in his room close by in the apartment, to hear him breathe and stir in our shared air, to watch him dream, yet soon so soon to feel time draining and sucking away as it does during the speed-of-light week before the deadline set for the worst thing ever: helping my boy pack his little clothes, his books and games, and releasing him to the other parent.

Men have abounded, mostly s.e.xual amateurs. An unsuccessful migrant word, that, its meaning muddled en route to a new tongue.

I still love my work. Friends, books, movies. Not plays. My son doesn't speak of his father.

Renaissance, that's what happened to grand-mere after Henry moved in. She died in her nineties, weeks after dancing at her grandson's wedding. What price did she pay for breaking her own code to send that foul message to her distant child? Not quite idiomatic. Crucial. She'd have wiped her lips, after. As for the answering machine, only last week I saw one at Too Much Collectables, in a window full of retro tchotchkes and faux-distressed chairs. I walked on towards Bean a While. Their coffee's good. Rosalind and I still meet sometimes, to talk. Lesley bought our machine. In itself that old technology was reliable.

Addresses THE RIGHT APARTMENT. MEANING WHAT?.

For Julie, that Jeremy be in it.

He did the hunting. Often she came along, still happy though sickish-dazed from The Pill.

Distinctive 1 BR suite even had a pantry. They moved in.

By then Julie could, just, see around him.

Also she knew she had never filled Jeremy's vision.

Sort-of arguments began, about The Pill. He, after research that took a lot of time away from his work, decided on condoms and foam.

In the distinctive building's entry, ceramic tiles formed octagons in a complex black-and-white arrangement. Stained gla.s.s. No elevator, no laundry room. The bra.s.s doorplates and fir floors were original.

"I checked." Satisfied, Jeremy closed the pantry door to work for hours so they could get ahead.

The paned windows stood tall, Julie not. They and the floors gleamed (she made sure of that), yet the elegant life once lived in these turn-of-the-century Vancouver rooms did not seem like anything she could match.

"What about a baby?"

"No, not yet. "

"When?"

"Not yet!"

Every time, Julie did not start a third interchange. Did she lack character? She did hunger for concord. They settled, kind of, on soon.

To be alone so much was still surprising. The magazines suggested picking one room each day, in rotation, for special cleaning. Julie did that. She ordered dress patterns, clipped recipes. Dinner was quite good sometimes. When Jeremy stayed late at the law office, she'd get into bed to wait, wanting him.

The spermicidal foam oozed all over the bed linen. Back and forth Julie walked to the laundromat, never meeting the same people there.

"You're pregnant?"

Jeremy couldn't or wouldn't believe she hadn't tricked him.

"Got your way, again." He slapped at the want ads, some red-circled. "I have no time for this. Can you at least follow up?"

Did again mean he hadn't wanted to marry?

Julie followed up, went further.

Of the place she found, he said, "It'll do for the time being."

What could time do but be?

Jeremy conceded the value of 2 BR nr shops, bus, beach, although old frame houses with lacy trim had been bulldozed to make s.p.a.ce for the mod apt tower. He deplored and Julie smiled at the lobby's earnest mural of a tropical sunset, the palm trees etched on the mirror by the mailboxes.

Of 1 prkg he said, "Too bad you were careless. No money for that now."

Their own decor did please him. All paint and textiles and floor coverings were bone. Not the red lumps that dogs gnaw on, Julie knew that. White trim.

"Perfect neutrals. You do see how they don't call attention to themselves?"

The look of their Danish coffee table by the picture window also pleased Jeremy, for the north-east light enhanced the teak's grain. He removed their white cups to the kitchen as soon as they were empty.

"If only we were higher up." He opened his briefcase.

Under new mgmt.

"That's you!" Silently Julie teased the hidden kicking child. "You get the second BR." Jeremy's desk, electric typewriter, file cabinet lived in the master.

The elevator too was soundless. Eyes closed, Julie couldn't tell whether the movement was up or down. The little tale she made of this uncertainty failed to amuse her husband after his stressful day in court.

"Do you mean that?" Jeremy asked.

He asked the question again when the baby's crying made Julie worry about the neighbours. "This building's solid concrete. I guess construction is another thing you just can't understand?"

Still Julie couldn't forget his pallor after the delivery, his joyful tears as he phoned long-distance to tell his parents and hers about James, while she trembled after a labour not much like that in the natural childbirth book.

Nor did she forget how they two began, at her sunny Kits bach gt view. Unusually for a girl, she'd had her own apartment. Jeremy had been surprised.

As Julie walked home from her little job in the weeks before their wedding, the pavement went all wavery rivery till she sped like a hydrofoil to the soaring elevator, the hall, her own door, and the engulfing heat of Jeremy's body. She'd been the initiator. He, taken aback. Shocked? Julie, though her mother and all the books warned against premarital activity, knew no doubt.

What was that view, anyway? The only one of her cla.s.s to leave Victoria after secretarial school, she was just proud to have her own address.

Perhaps the s.e.x was why the ceremony didn't change her?

After their honeymoon at Expo 67, the Kitsilano place felt cramped, wrong. Not even a nook for Jeremy's work.

He found, first, the stately s.p.a.cious 1 BR at a good address, a fine old Dunbar mansion chopped into suites. Tall graceful trees darkened the place. Leaking radiators, mice. Julie and Jeremy s.h.i.+vered till he located the distinctive building.

"Where we'd still be, if you hadn't been careless."

She didn't remember much about Expo either. The hotel room. Fireworks, sugar, glitter, crowds. French actually spoken.

Now this high-rise.

The developer had built three towers close together, so Jeremy and Julie's living room in The Buckingham observed one in The Kensington where sofa, stereo, TV, and coffee table were similarly configured. The occupants were two men. Older, Julie thought, early forties.

The man with curly hair sometimes waved at the baby. Julie would raise James's tiny hand, smile. The overweight man didn't wave. If he noticed her across the airy gap he snapped the Venetians shut, even in suns.h.i.+ne.

Jeremy did the same. "I'm not paying rent to watch a couple of queers day in day out. We need our own house."

More things Julie hadn't understood.

James filled her hours. His certainty amazed her. Now! He cried with his mouth so wide his throat made a quivering red tunnel.