Extraordinary

One

What? You didn’t know I had a sister? Yes, Sally, a half-sister really. She was fifteen years older than me, my mother’s daughter from a turbulent first marriage. I saw her now and again when I was growing up, but probably the difference in our ages, a generation, and the fact that she never lived with us, made her seem more like a sympathetic aunt. She swatted me once, just an impatient cuff on the back of the head, when I was eight or nine—I’d knocked over a flower jar in her kitchen—and I thought, You can’t do that, you’re not my mother. And yet it wasn’t quite like a quarrel with my brother, not on the same level, so to speak, as with a peer. How you feel about someone when you’re very young, their stature in the world compared with yours, sometimes never changes. Which made certain moments between Sally and me confusing. Especially later on.

By the time I was conscious enough to wonder why things were the way they were, she was already married. How such a lovely creature (long face, dark hair) ended up with a blockhead like Bruce Sanders, I’ll never understand. But I suppose that’s the nature of people, even family: you never really get to know anyone that well, even when they try to explain themselves.

Anyway. For sixteen years, she endured sulks, punishing silences and God knows what kind of lonely moments, until one night she didn’t; and the next day, Bruce Sanders woke up in the guest room of his own house, the evening’s final words thudding between his small ears: “I’m leaving you.”

It may have taken her a while to get there, but when she did, my goodness, she acted with the efficiency of a guillotine. The straightest line between two points. I was only a teenager, but it felt as though I had just had my first glimpse into affairs of the heart: when a woman’s finished with you, she’s really finished.

With Chloe, her twelve-year-old daughter, in tow (her son stayed at home with Bruce), she took a studio apartment in San Miguel de Allende, a sun-baked town in the mountains north of Mexico City, and resumed her career as a painter—something for which she was gifted but the execution of which had been discouraged by a husband who thought the whole business “unrealistic.” A few weeks later, Sally attended an afternoon cocktail party at a house on the Callejón de los Muertos, tripped on the carpet, smacked her head against the fireplace and broke her neck. Returning to Toronto on a gurney, she spent six months in rehab and the rest of her life in a wheelchair.

Nice deal, eh? But she was a hearty soul, and even with the wheelchair, the crutches, the falling down here and there, she raised her preteen daughter all but single-handedly. Her ex-husband, Bruce, in a state of ill-disguised pleasure at the hand life had dealt her, said, “Move back in with me,” the implication being, Now that you’re not in the game anymore, now that no one else will take you, you might as well come back.

But no handouts, thank you. Sally and Chloe found a way to live and be happy. As for me, I wasn’t around much, to say the least. Sometimes I’d go up to her apartment in the northern part of the city and drink too much and get her to drink too much and then leave for another year or two. The truth is, I was so distracted with the failure of my own life that it felt as though I didn’t have the time to go out of my way, even momentarily, for anyone else. Although God knows what I was doing instead. Still, it makes me queasy with regret, even after all these years, to think about it. Because I loved her, I really did. But I was under the assumption that she would always be there, this not-quite-mother, not-quite-sister, that there was no need to tend to it, to look after it like a garden. And then, suddenly, it was too late by years. Simply too late.

Looking back on things, I suppose it’s the reason I did what I did that night, to make up for all those times I glanced toward the top of the city and said fuck it and went about my own business instead.

Do the dead forgive us? I wonder. I hope so. But I suspect not. I suspect they do nothing at all, like a spark flying from a burning campfire: they just go psssst and that’s it. How they felt about you in that last second is where you remain, at least in your thoughts, for eternity. Or rather, until you go psssst too.

Years went by. Chloe graduated from high school with green hair and a dagger tattoo on her right arm, went to university in Montreal and then left town to do a graduate degree in the States. Several months later, Sally telephoned me out of the blue one night and asked me to come over to her apartment. To bring a bottle of Russian vodka.

By the end of the evening, I’d agreed to help her kill herself.

Over the next five weeks, I raided second-floor medicine cabinets at dinners and parties until I found what I was looking for in the attic of a sweet but doddery aunt. I don’t need to mention the name of the drug here. It was a sleeping pill yanked off the market only a few months after its appearance. Quite the scandal. You mixed it with a couple of stiff belts before bed and you didn’t get up in the morning. End of story. Yours anyway.

So one June evening, I climbed the eighteen flights of stairs that ran up the back of her apartment building, hurried along the flowered carpeting in the hallway and let myself in. It was important that no one see me.

Candles were burning. I could see she had made herself up a bit, had on a green silk dressing gown.

“I had a nap this afternoon. I’m as fresh as a daisy,” she said.

I said, “You look wonderful tonight.” I went into the kitchen, cracked open the ice tray, made a brace of burnt martinis, poured a round into two tulip glasses and sat down beside her.

Taking the glass in her hand, partly crabbed, she said, “Cheers.”

“Cheers indeed.”

We talked about all sorts of things—the city’s mayor, a stolen Cézanne that had recently turned up in a Chicago attic, mentholated cigarettes, the Dave Brubeck Quartet, Marlon Brando, the arrest of Klaus Barbie, the final episode of M.A.S.H. I didn’t mention the pills, nor the purpose of the evening; neither did she. It was, for a while there, like a Saturday night between two old friends, a forty-nine-year-old woman and her thirty-four-year-old brother. Half-brother, I know, but you wouldn’t have guessed it that night.

“Let’s put on some music,” she said, and I did, a collection of snazzy Mexican folk songs, which, I don’t know why, reminded me of an incident that had happened years before; how, when I was fourteen, in secret and against the wishes of my parents, she had smuggled me out of the house and driven me to see a girl at a small-town dance fifty miles away, returning hours later to fetch me. (The girl being, in the parlance of my mother, “a cunning little tramp.”) It may sound like a small thing for Sally to have done, this drive down a dark country highway, but I was so hungry for that young girl, for her small face and for the mysterious smell that lay under her jeans, that it was—or seemed to be at the moment—a matter of life and death. And Sally, as though she had maintained one foot still in childhood, understood the degree of it. The urgency of it. It took me years to put words to it, but I intuited something crucial that night: that the doing of something you don’t need to do for someone whose approval you don’t need is an extraordinarily reliable test of character. As the years have gone by—I recently celebrated my fifty-eighth birthday—I think more and more that the course of one’s life and the loyalties which colour it are the flowers that have grown in such unnoticed gardens.

“Did I ever tell you how kind that was?” I said suddenly.

Sally appeared to think about that, her glass tilting at a dangerous angle on her lap. “You were in love,” she said simply.

“I was. But all that driving.”

She took a sip from her glass. “I like these martinis. How do you make them again?”

I must have looked surprised as one is sometimes at the end of a Chekhov short story. You don’t know what it means or what it implies about life, but you know it’s the truth. Sally would never live to make a burnt martini, but she wanted to know how to do it anyway.

In the seconds that followed, I felt a swoosh—a sudden, terrible regret. She seemed to read my thoughts, because she said, “You were fine.”

I worried I was going to burst into tears and lure the focus of the evening onto myself.

“I haven’t been much of a brother,” I said.

She responded with an absolving laugh. “You’re making up for it now. You gave me this,” she said, and raised her martini glass in bent fingers. “But you’re hesitating. You haven’t changed your mind?”

“No, don’t worry about that.”

“Good. I don’t want to worry about that.”

“You don’t have to,” I said.

“Just think of it as returning the favour for driving you to the dance.”

I didn’t know how to take this, whether to let it alone or not. Was it a joke? Of course it was, this retreat into flippancy. And yet not a joke you could feel good laughing about. I didn’t know quite where to rest my eyes. But I thought, Don’t perform. Just look at her. But I have never been good with silence, it makes my heart crash, and in that moment it seemed as though she too could hear it thumping and again came to my rescue. “Whatever happened to that girl?”

“She met someone else.”

“Ah,” Sally said, not surprised but not superior to it either. A tone of voice that summed you up like a sudden, flattering glance in a store window.

“Apparently, he was a very good dancer,” I said.

“They always are, those summer boys.”

“Anyway, I got over it.”

“You did indeed.”

I waited for the small blossom of pleasure to recede and then, seeking a fresher, more subtle kind, added, “Between you and me, Sally, I’ve always talked a bigger game than I played.”

We fell silent for a moment.

“Were you?” I said.

“Was I what?”

“A good dancer.”

“Oh, I loved dancing. I’d dance with anyone.” She glanced out the window and I could see her as a teenager, at a dance, in a tangle of young bodies and coloured lights and those neon things they used to stamp your hand with, and for a second I wondered whatever had happened to all those bodies, those young bodies; and again it struck me that life was such a harsh business that no one, not even the beautiful like Sally, was ever safe.

I said, “Would you like another martini?”

“Oh boy, would I ever.”

I went into the kitchen, the pills still in my pocket. I had put a ball of cotton batten in the plastic vial so they wouldn’t rattle when I moved. It was a clean white kitchen with a lot of room. It was the kitchen of a woman who had raised children, who liked order in her life.

“Don’t forget the Scotch,” she said.

“It’s already in.”

When I came back, one of the candles was sputtering. I blew it out, found a pair of scissors in the desk drawer, cut the wick down and relit it. Settled back in my chair, I noticed that Sally’s eyes, pools of ink in a slightly swollen face, were observing me with what, I’m not sure. It was the regard of someone who is seeing something behind their eyes. I couldn’t tell, though, if it was good or bad.

I said, “Can I ask you something, Sally?”

“Yes.”

“I was wondering about your marriage the other day.”

She nodded her head as if to a question she had been asked many times before. “What part of the marriage?” she asked neutrally.

“The why part.”

Again she nodded, this time with a hint of amused sleepiness. “I had my eye on someone else. To say the least. But I couldn’t get him.Or keep him, anyway.”

“Tell me.”

I could see her recede into herself and then re-emerge. She had found something in there that pleased her. “There was a boy who went to my high school, a narrow-hipped cowboy. No, he really was a cowboy—wore a narrow-brimmed hat, drove a pickup truck, listened to country and western music.”

“A cowboy hat?”

“Even to school. He knew the etiquette, when you could wear a hat and when you had to take it off. Like when you go in a building, you take your hat off, but when you sit at a counter in a diner, you can leave it on. Some smart aleck stopped him in the corridor once, a hockey player, and said in a big attention-getting voice, ‘Hey Tex, can I try on your hat?’ He said, ‘Sure, if I can try on your underwear.’”

“Wow.”

“He made furniture. Kitchen tables, chairs, headboards. I remember once he was in such a rush to finish and get over to my place that he had wood chips in his eyebrows. God, he smelt good. You know what the French say about smell?”

“I do, yes.”

“Even in the truck I could smell him. He had a narrow chest and he always wore a cowboy shirt. It would have looked corny on anyone else, those imitation pearl buttons, but on him, it was like he was born into it. Like a skin. He called me Miss. He’d say, ‘What time do you want me to come and get you, Miss?’ or, ‘We should be getting you home pretty soon, Miss.’ His name was Terry Blanchard.”

“Did you ever kiss him?”

“Every chance I got.”

“And?”

“Ever kissed a cowboy?”

I said, “So what happened to him?”

“He had some kind of trouble in town. One night he turned up outside my window. He knocked on the glass and said he was going away for a while but he’d write. Would I write him back? And then he kissed me. There was a big country moon that night, the kind you can reach out with your finger and almost touch. I could see it over his shoulder. I said, ‘Come into my bed.’ It just came out, like hearing yourself talk in a dream.

“He slipped over the window ledge backwards and fell onto the bed, his boots in the air. You could see them against the skyline.

“I heard my grandmother walk by my room. She said, ‘Everything okay in there, Sally?’ She must have seen his truck in the driveway. And I said, ‘Grandma, just fine. I’m going to sleep now.’ Those country people, they’re a lot more sophisticated than you’d think. I never asked her and she never asked me, but every so often I’d catch her staring at me. Everybody gets up to something private, it’s just that every generation thinks they’re the first ones to do it right.”

“So did he write?”

“Never. Not a word. I used to go out to the mailbox—it was at the end of a long driveway—and throw stones at the power lines and the crows, even at the mailbox itself, while I was waiting. An old guy and his son delivered the mail in a car. I’d see the car at the far end of the highway where it broke through the cornfields. Walter, the son, would be in the passenger seat, his tanned arm hanging out the window with the mail in his hand. They’d slow down and I’d grab the mail. I think Walter had a tiny thing for me, but he had a kind of funny-shaped head, like a paint can. I suppose I was cruelly uninterested in him. I’d just snatch the mail, and without even saying goodbye I’d start to go through it—the local newspaper, ads for baking sales, bills from the local hardware store, even Christmas cards that had gotten lost for six months. I’d start off full of hope, there’d be all this stuff, but then there’d be five letters left, then three, then none, and I’d go through the pile again as though maybe I’d missed it.

“But never a letter. Once, I even waved down the car as it pulled away. ‘Are you sure there’s nothing for me?’ The father said, ‘Well, let’s take another look.’ And he did. ‘Maybe tomorrow, Sally,’ he said.

“It was the longest walk back to the house—a hot day, cicadas roaring, those big pointless fields and nothing to look forward to. I let the screen door bang behind me. My grandmother said, ‘Sally, don’t let that door bang, it scares the willies out of me.’

“I went back into my bedroom and lay down on the bed, the wallpaper with little wooden rocking chairs on it, the yellow fields outside. I thought, I’ve got to do something, read a book or write in my diary or play some records, and I kept thinking my way through it: open up the record box, take out a forty-five, put it on the record player and start it up. But it just seemed like too much work. Everything did. Everything seemed exhausting. I just lay there till supper.

“I never found out what the trouble was. He just vanished.”

“And your mother? Where was your mother, our mother, while all this was going on?”

“She was around. At her convenience, of course. Sometimes she’d come by in a grey car with a big grille with flies stuck in it and take me to the Tastee Freeze in town for a hamburger—it was a ritual we had—and then she’d take me for a long drive on backcountry roads, let me light her cigarettes for her. She was a great talker. A good listener too, to be fair—as long as you said what she wanted to hear.

“On one of these drives, just as it was getting dark and we were heading back to my grandfather’s, I told her about Terry Blanchard, about that night he tumbled into my bed. It wasn’t a confession, it was just that talking about it was as close as I could get to doing it again.”

“And what did she say?”

“She asked me if I felt better now that I’d talked about it. And I said yes. And then she said something that I have never forgotten. She said, ‘You’re going to feel good about all this for a while and then later, when I’m gone and you’re alone again and the excitement of talking about it has worn off, you’re going to go back to feeling the way you did before. And that’s normal. Just remember that that’s normal. There’s nothing wrong with you.’ Then she told me about going out on a date with a Hollywood movie star when she was just nineteen.”

“Who was it?”

“I think it was Errol Flynn. She claimed to not know this from personal experience, but someone had told her his dink was so big he had to strap it to his leg. It made me laugh. A funny story to hear from your mother. But I don’t know. You could never be sure with her. She told me she wrote a short story for the New Yorker once, too. But I never saw it. Maybe she did. But I doubt it.”

“The New Yorker? That’s a pretty tall order.”

“It certainly is.”

“And was she right?” I asked.

“About what?”

“About how you were going to feel later.”

“She was. After she left, I kept looking at the clock. An hour later, I was still fine, happy even. Two hours later, same thing. But then later, after dinner, I was watching television with my grandfather, and I could feel things starting to darken again. It was as if some kind of poison was slowly creeping into my body, like some awful leak, and the whole good feeling I’d had with my mother just slipped away. I couldn’t concentrate on the TV show, it was like the screen was a sort of anchor that allowed my thoughts to go in some very gloomy directions. I was afraid it would show on my face or that my grandfather would hear it in my responses. He liked to talk during television shows, but that night it was driving me crazy, as though I had something important to figure out and he was interrupting me from it with his chatter.

“So I went to bed. But here’s something odd. Sometime near morning, it was just getting light, I found myself on the floor. I was soaked in sweat, I was menstruating, I thought I was dying. Dying of a broken heart. But then I thought about Terry Blanchard, about that night he came tumbling into my bed, and I didn’t feel anything. And then, like sticking your hand in a basin of hot water to test it, I thought about him again. Nothing. I mean, absolutely nothing. Gone. I thought, I’m free of him! This is how you do it, this is how you recover from love. And little by little, I started to notice things in the world—a snowbank, a name written on the washroom wall—without all of it leading back to him.

“It must have been the next summer—I was seventeen—when a beat-up white car pulled into the driveway and a man with small ears and an acne-scarred complexion shambled up to the house. He was lost, he said. Was there an asbestos factory near here? He was late for a pickup. Could he use the phone? It was Bruce Sanders. Eight months later, I married him.”

“Eight months?”

“The details don’t matter. Not now, not at this stage. But he was a great lover. A mind reader. You’re surprised?”

“Why, yes. Yes, I am.” A childhood memory of Bruce slouching through our living room at a Christmas party turned over in my memory like a playing card.

“So was I,” she said, her eyebrows poised on a deadpan face. In that moment, in that light, she looked Asian. “Anyway,” Sally said, “I’m through with that stuff. I have been for a while. It all seems just so messy.”

I wasn’t sure how to answer and looked into my glass. A car honked three times eighteen floors down. I heard a jet passing over. “I didn’t know we were so close to the airport,” I said.

Picking up on my discomfort, and probably sorry she’d thrown that in, Sally went on. “Bruce Sanders was certainly nothing to look at, on the surface anyway. He wore a kind of military brush cut that stuck up like a raccoon’s pelt. But he had a wiry little body with deep tan lines from working outside. He was very strong, deceptively so. There was a lot of dangerous leverage in those arms. I saw him lay his forearm across the throat of some local lacrosse hero one night and lift him up the wall, right off the ground.

“There was something about Bruce I admired, some old-fashioned, tight-lipped masculinity. They are a rare thing these days, real men. Too many sissies eager to get on the right side of women.” Pause. “What women like about men is that they’re not women. And they don’t think like women.”

“We’re simple creatures,” I said, and we both laughed. We were having a preposterous time. I caught myself thinking, Should we be doing this? Or should we be doing something else? We are talking about what we’re talking about because that’s what she wants to talk about. But is this really going to happen? Now that we’re here? Is she waiting for me to say stop, or am I waiting for her? Is this going to happen because we’re both waiting for the other to say something? And if I were to say something, what would it be? What would I mean? If I were in her place, what would I want?

“Sally…” I began, but her hand fluttered me to silence. I had not considered this part, at least not the way it now presented itself.

She went on: “That said, Bruce was not very socially able. Sulked in public gatherings. I think he felt out of his intellectual league if the conversation ever steered toward movies or even the Beatles. For some reason, he found them especially infuriating.”

“The Beatles?”

“He said the only reason they get to be the Beatles is that other people don’t get to be. Whatever the hell that means. Anyway, it annoyed him when I talked too much at parties. When I got excited. Excited because I was so hungry for talk that I’d drink too much sometimes and get very, very talkative. He’d sulk for days afterwards. That was my punishment.

“Anyway, I married him. I looked out my bedroom window one afternoon and saw all those flat fields and thought, Why not? We had a wedding in a small country church with a graveyard you could see from the pews. Afterwards, we went to a party in town. You know why? Because someone told me they’d seen Terry Blanchard outside the hardware store and that maybe he’d be there. Isn’t that pathetic? God, what was I thinking? Going to a party on my wedding night because this other guy might be there! And here I’d thought I was over him.”

“Was he there?”

“No, thank God. I couldn’t relax until I was sure. I kept peeking at the door every time someone came in. I suppose that’s how you know you’re with the wrong person—when you keep looking to see who’s coming in the door. It wasn’t a bad party, if you were drunk enough. Which I was.”

“And did things get better?”

“Your body always tells you where you belong—and where you don’t. Sometimes when I was having Sunday dinner with Bruce’s parents, who were perfectly decent people, by the way, salt-of-the-earth types, I’d feel this sensation in my body, a sensation that said simply, You don’t belong here, these are not your people.”

“Did you ever find your people?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Who?”

“You. Among other people.”

After a pause, I said, “Tell me you had a good life, Sally.”

“I was lucky in a lot of ways. I just used up my luck early. But yes, I had a good life.”

“With happy moments?”

“Many,” she said easily. “Everyone does.”

“Tell me one.”

“Leaving my husband. I enjoyed that.”

“Was it precipitous or gradual?” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Your decision to leave. It took a long time.”

“Years. Are you sure you’re interested in this?”

“Very.”

“There’s something numbing about disappointment. You have to act on it quickly or time begins to gallop,” she said.

“You’d like Chekhov,” I said.

“Can you put a cube of ice in this? But no more vodka. I’ll be up peeing all night.”

“How are your legs?”

“The same. But only at night.”

I came back in from the kitchen.

“Will you turn the light out in there?” she said.

I went back and did it.

“Where was I?” She had slipped off to other thoughts. “Oh yes. By now I had two kids, Chloe and Kyle. We had a narrow little house in Toronto. Nice place. I did the interior myself. It was my birthday, I was thirty-three. Yes, yes, I know what you’re going to say: the age that Christ was crucified. I didn’t see things quite so grandly. Although it turned out to be a big year indeed. The kids were old enough to look after themselves, and that night Bruce took me to an Italian restaurant, a new place I’d read about in a magazine.

“Our table wasn’t ready, so they sat us in the bar. We had a martini and looked out over the restaurant, all the people eating in this lovely copper light, and suddenly, I could barely believe my eyes, there, facing me, sitting not ten feet away, was Terry Blanchard. I’d heard he was in the Middle East working for an oil company. But no, there he was. He was sitting with a thick-bodied woman, the sort of woman whose nylons you can hear cracking when she walks across the room. Confident. Talking. Terry listening. And I thought, He cannot love her.”

“How’d he look?”

“Wonderful. Those men age so well. He was snappily done up, a tie, white shirt. And I had the ridiculous, ever-so-quick thought that somehow he had known he was going to see me and had gotten, you know, dolled up for it. Does your generation use that word, ‘dolled up’?”

“Not really. But I know what you mean.”

“Anyway, I know it’s nonsense, but that’s what I thought. Meanwhile, I could hear Bruce chewing on his olive and breathing through his nose.”

“Did you say anything?”

“No. I just kept taking these little mouse-peeks at him. And I think he was doing the same to me, but we never did it at the same time.”

“Why didn’t you go over?”

“Too shy.”

“Too shy?”

“No, that’s not true. The fact is, I didn’t feel especially pretty. I felt like I’d put on weight, that there was something clumsy about how I looked, and that he’d be disappointed. But I wanted him to come over. I could feel the skin on my face go very tight, like I was sitting in a high wind. It was awful. But sort of wild, too.”

“And?”

“It was astonishing how much I remembered about him—his shirt, his underarms, even the wood dust in his eyebrows. I was surprised that it was all so vivid, so immediate. So yesterday. He had remained frozen in my heart exactly as I had felt about him the last time I saw him.”

“Did it make you sad?”

“It didn’t. It made me feel sort of light-headed and exhilarated. I can’t imagine why. But I wanted to tell someone. I wished I was with someone other than Bruce so I could whisper, ‘You see that man over there…’ And then tell them the story.”

“Then what happened?”

“Then he was gone. The table was empty. Napkins on the tablecloth, water glasses half empty, the waiter clearing away stuff. To this day, I don’t know how I missed him leaving.”

“And did you see him again?”

“I went back to the restaurant a few times. Alone. I sat at the copper bar. But I never saw him. Still, I’ve always been curious, always wanted to ask him, ‘What were you thinking when you saw me, what were you remembering?’”

“Oh dear.”

“Well, yes and no. Because of what happened later. Just a few weeks later. I’m not sure it would have happened if I hadn’t spotted Terry Blanchard in a restaurant on the night of my thirty-third birthday.” After a moment’s reflection, she continued: “We’d been invited to a cocktail party in Forest Hill. I can’t remember who invited us. But it was a splashy affair. Not really our crowd. I was excited about going. I’ve always liked getting out and about.”

Out and about. Very Sally, that phrase.

She went on: “There were quite a few men there, and I was getting a good deal of attention, which often happened. I’m not bragging. I was a good-looking woman.”

“You still are.”

She paused with a hint of relish to collect her thoughts. “I was having a chat in the corner with a man I had met that evening. Marek Grunbaum was his name. Handsome in an Eastern European, sort of state-police way. The kind of face that knocks at your door at three in the morning and your wife never sees you again. But he wasn’t like that at all. Tough, yes—he owned a factory that made car parts. It was clear from the ring on my finger that I was married, but it was also apparent that that didn’t concern him very much.

“He had a beautiful pink handkerchief in the breast pocket of his jacket, and such elegant manners, the capacity to suggest that everyone in the room was worthy of attention but that you somehow were more worthy. A party trick, maybe, but hard to resist, nevertheless. Who isn’t stirred by absolute attention?

“I noticed him discreetly glance around the room. What was he looking for? Did he have a jealous wife? Then I realized what it was.”

“What was it?”

“He wanted to see what my husband looked like. But he was confused, because, looking over the crowd, there was no one who appeared to look like the kind of person I would be married to. You could see his eyes move over the English husband of the hostess, then over a local politician, then a retired hockey player who was very much à la vogue in that circle. They like to adopt people, those Forest Hill folk, athletes, ex-convicts, priests, writers—creatures of a different cloth. It lasts a while and then the circle closes again. Anyway, Marek didn’t stop, not for a second, on Bruce, who was wearing a green shirt and leaning with one arm on the fireplace mantel, his jacket open, his little pot belly exposed. Leaning and giving me the look. Eyes half shut like a reptile. I could feel myself getting nervous. I was thinking, Oh-oh, he’s mad at me. He’s going to sulk in the car, he’s going to get out of bed in the morning and sit on the couch in his pyjama bottoms, smoking a cigarette and clearing his throat. No, nope, nothing’s wrong. And I’d flounce around, chirping like a bird, trying to cajole him out of his foul mood. God, is there anything that creates self-disgust faster than apologizing when you haven’t done anything wrong? The person you end up hating is yourself.

“So I waved him over. I thought it would make everything transparent, innocent. I introduced them. ‘Marek, this is my husband.’ Marek asked him a few questions. Just good manners. Did he work in the neighbourhood, how long had he lived in Toronto, how old were our children? But the ball never came back over the net. Bruce stood there, drink in hand, yes, no, looking into the contents of the glass as if he were waiting for the ice to melt.

“It worked. He’d done it before. He knew how to do it, this bubble of toxicity. It drove Marek away. Within seconds, everything was gone. Marek took everything with him when he walked away. There was just me left behind—me and this red-faced man with his sports jacket riding up at the back.

“I peeked over his shoulder, hoping Marek might be looking this way or waiting to come back. But no—he had landed in a clutter of middle-aged women, tennis players, rich, polished, tactile. He was theirs now.”

“And then?”

“We went home a little while later, Bruce and I. But something miraculous happened in the car. It was as if a virus had come of age. I didn’t formulate the sentence, I didn’t think of its ramifications. But it found its way out of my mouth all on its own. I said, ‘I don’t love you anymore.’

“We drove the rest of the way in silence. I went into the house and straight to the kitchen. When he came in after me, I pulled a steak knife out of the drawer. I didn’t say anything, I just turned around and stood there with a steak knife in my hand. And that was the end of it.”

A small bell pinged and the elevator doors clanged shut at the end of the corridor.

“Tell me if I’m talking too much,” she said.

“Go on. Please.”

“I moved my children into a yellow apartment and got a job in an art gallery. A boutique in Yorkville next door to a French bistro. To have somewhere to go every day, people to say hello to—those wonderful, sparkly, frivolous conversations about nothing at all—to have my own paycheque. It was the happiest I’d been in years, maybe my whole adult life. And no one to make me nervous.”

“And Marek?”

“Ah, Marek,” she said, settling back into her chair. “I don’t believe in God, but if I did, I’d say that the arrival of Marek Grunbaum with his pink handkerchief that night was God saying to me, ‘I’ve overlooked you. Here’s a make-up present.’ He had a wife and three children who adored him. He made a few awkward sounds about leaving his wife, but we both knew he wasn’t going to, that I was the latest in a short but piquant list of lovers. That was fine. Just knowing that every Tuesday night I was going to go to that bistro, sit at the same table, our table, have two ice-cold martinis and a bottle of wine, and then go home and get laid—just having that to look forward to made the whole week divine. I hope that doesn’t sound coarse.”

“No. Not at all.”

“There were two gay men living downstairs. Sean and his boyfriend, Peter. They worried about me: was I lonely? was I unhappy seeing a married man? did I have enough money? Isn’t that a scream? The only time in my life I didn’t need to be worried about. It was as if a grey screen between me and the world had been lifted and I could see everything so vividly.

“One day, I’d just finished reupholstering a chesterfield—Sean had passed it along—and I found myself with a couple of bolts of cloth left over. Just for fun, while I was watching television, I took a pair of long scissors and cut out the shape of a sailboat, a blue sailboat, and pasted it onto a square of leftover yellow cloth. I put a mast on it and a sun and a big swordfish jumping in the air. Then I hung it over the fireplace.

“Peter Ungster, my neighbour, came upstairs one evening to borrow a corkscrew and noticed the wall hanging. He lingered in front of it with a sort of puzzled expression on his face. ‘Where did you get that?’ he said. (He sounded a bit like Truman Capote when he talked, like a sleepy porpoise. How he survived growing up in a mining town in northern Ontario is a mystery. But that’s another story.) ‘Is it for sale?’ he asked, tilting his head. I thought he was playing it up a bit, indulging the new widow in her little hobby, but he wrote me a cheque for twenty-five dollars and took the swordfish back home with him. You never forget a moment like that, the first time you sell something you made. The money makes it different, makes you different.

“His boyfriend, Sean, knew a woman who owned a shop for children’s things: toys, pictures, puppets, stuffed animals. She saw the sailboat and ordered five of them in different colours. A red sailboat, a green sailboat. I put a moon overhead, a flying fish sailing over the bow, a lantern on the mast. Soon I had two teenage girls working for me, doing the cutting, the dyeing, the shipping. I kept one as a souvenir. It’s faded a bit—the sun coming through the window does that—but it’s over there. Yes, that’s it, over the sideboard.”

A blue whale winked mischievously at me from the mouth of a lagoon.

“And the job at the art gallery?”

She leaned forward in a gust of enthusiasm. “It was a period in my life where I couldn’t seem to do anything wrong. Things just fell into place, like musical notes. Most people who work in the art world don’t wish you well, especially if you’re leaving to do something artistic. They want you to fail—it makes their lives less haunting. I understand that, and I expected it. Long faces, sour faces. But I guess life had just given me enough shit for the time being. They threw me a party at the boutique. A little one. Marek Grunbaum came in a cream suit. He looked smashing. A fluffed pink handkerchief stuffed in his breast pocket. It was like showing off your boyfriend at a high school dance. He drove me home that night, and I remember looking out the car window as we passed up through the city, past the parliament buildings, past that park with the man on the horse, and I remember thinking, I’ll never be this happy again.”

“Were you?”

“Was I what?”

“Ever that happy again?”

“Of course I was. You’re never just happy once in your life. Life isn’t like that.” She paused. “Will you have a small Drambuie with me? It’s up there in the cupboard over the fridge. Yes, there, right behind your hand. Could you heat it up? Just put it in those snifters and pop it into the microwave.”

“Did Marek like Drambuie?”

Deadpan. Eyebrows raised. “Marek liked everything. It’s wonderful to be with a man who adores a woman’s body. Every inch of it. But wait.” She pointed to the microwave. “Yes. Thirty seconds should be enough.”

“Is that too hot?”

“No, it’s perfect. Smell that. I’ve been saving this for a rainy day.”

I sat back down. It was eleven o’clock.

“My little sailboats caught on. I did a craft show in Memphis. A rep from a middle-sized American chain saw my stuff and bought me out. I like that about Americans, how they do business. They come in, they look around, and they write a cheque. No pussyfooting. So suddenly there I was, with a bunch of money and two teenage children. What to do?

“Peter Ungster was trying on a new hat in my mirror, and he said in that funny voice, ‘Why don’t you move to Mexico? There’s an artists’ colony in San Miguel de Allende. That sounds like baloney, I know, and there is a lot of baloney down there, but not entirely. You could open a little shop—you could paint—do whatever you want. Leonard Cohen lives there. Or people say he lives there. Nobody ever seems to see him. For a while I had a friend there, an antique collector, soi-disant, but it turned out he was just looking for some Mexican boy to fuck him in the bum and leave him for dead. Which isn’t far from what happened. But don’t get me get started on that one.’

“So I went. San Miguel is a pretty town nine thousand feet up in the air with a sweeping cathedral right in the centre. Somebody in the Cucaracha bar told me it was designed entirely from a single European postcard. But people start drinking early in those towns and they kind of make stuff up. One moment it’s not true, next moment it is. No one seems to care.

“I took Chloe with me. She was twelve years old. I couldn’t leave her with Bruce. That would have been like leaving her in a black-and-white television show. Besides, she wanted to go. She was very adventurous. She could hardly wait.”

“What did Bruce say?”

“He threatened to take me to court. But I called his bluff. I wasn’t rattled by him anymore. I said, ‘Okay, Bruce, I’ll leave her up here with you.’ That scared the shit out of him. He wasn’t a mean spirit, he just didn’t want me to have my cake and eat it too. As if you’d do anything else with your cake except eat it. But the notion of a gangly, phone-hogging, incessantly hungry, expensive, operatic teenage girl running up and down the stairs with a pair of school friends really shook him up.”

“So he folded?”

“Like a deck chair. In fact, he gave me money. He pretended it was for Chloe’s expenses, but I think it was to make sure she actually went.”

“And her brother, Kyle? Can I ask what happened there?”

Her face clouded. “You know that story,” she said softly. “I made a mistake. I was so hungry to be happy that I made a mistake.” She looked toward the window.

I said, “We don’t have—” but she went on.

“Kyle was seventeen. He wanted to stay with his friends. Besides, I didn’t want to strip Bruce of everything. I worried he’d kill himself. But I should have tried harder, I should have insisted.”

I could see her sinking into a fog of distress. I said, “Did he know about Marek?”

Sally had disappeared on me, but then returned. “Who? Kyle?”

“No, Bruce.”

“I made it clear not to wait around. It was a kindness, really. He was mooning around my yellow apartment one evening, waiting for Chloe to collect her clothes for a sleepover. I sat him down in the kitchen, I put a Scotch in his hand, and I said, ‘There’s something I want you to understand. Even if this thing with Marek Grunbaum doesn’t work out, even if it doesn’t work out with the man after him, I will never, under any circumstances, come back to you.’”

“Jesus.”

“He needed to hear it. Bruce was one of those men, you know the kind: A woman leaves them and they take on a look of wounded confusion, as if the whole thing is a kind of problème psychiatrique. A fit of madness that could, conceivably, vanish as quickly as it came on. You know how it goes: My wife went nuts, but I’m being patient. They overlook the fact that you’ve hated them for years. They overlook the fact that you’ve got a new boyfriend, lost twenty pounds, wear different clothes and have an expensive new haircut.”

“Did he believe you?”

“He looked at me with those half-closed eyes and said, ‘I’m not in any hurry.’ At which point I snapped at him. I regret it. Sort of. No, I don’t. I said, ‘For God’s sake, Bruce, you can’t jerk off for the rest of your life!’

“Chloe and I flew to Mexico City and then took a bus for a couple of hundred miles north through the desert and up into the mountains. A friend of Peter’s, Freddie Steigman, met us at the bus station. He was a native New Yorker, a pensioner, thirty-five years with Allstate Insurance. He used to be roommates with Edward Albee. Back when they were in their twenties. Albee was a poet then, apparently a very bad one. You know him?”

“The Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? guy.”

“Yeah, that’s him. When he retired, Freddie came to San Miguel for a holiday. But he fell in love with the Mexican boy who looked after the hotel swimming pool. The boy disappeared after a couple of weeks, but Freddie stayed on.”

The candle sputtered. Sally watched it for a moment, her eyes sleepy. Getting ready to leave the party.

“What was Albee like?” I asked.