Occasionally, in a crowd, in an airport or a restaurant or in the street, Robert would see a woman’s face so prepared in its openness for the appeal of passion, tenderness or love, so composed and ready, that he was moved to drop everything and take her in his arms. A thousand times he had been able to resist. Once he had not.
She was a woman not much younger than Lila and not as pretty. His feeling for her was intense and complicated. He was corrupted by the wish to make her happy, and the fact that it took little to make her happy touched him in the same way his children’s simple wants had once aroused his extravagant generosity. He had no idea why he loved her. She rode a bicycle and pulled her hair back with a ribbon. Her hair ribbons, her candor, her books and records, and especially her strong rounded arms, put him in mind of Jane. When she closed a book she was reading, she marked her place with a little silk cord and folded her hands, one inside the other, in exactly the same way he imagined Jane would do.
Lila was stepping into a taxi on her way to see her lawyer. Nothing she could do, not even the bold, off-hand way she swung her handbag on her shoulder, could hide the touching awkwardness and clumsy surprise of a woman who had been betrayed by someone she loves.
The taxi driver drove through the late-afternoon traffic. “Would you object if I smoke?” he asked Lila, who was embarrassed by his courtesy. She wondered if he had a wife. His shoulder-length hair was clean and more than commonly fine, and on the fingers of his left hand there were three rings, so large and intricate and so brilliantly colored that she was moved to comment on them.
“I go with a girl who did a jewelry course in New Brunswick,” he said. “She keeps making me rings. I don’t know what I’m going to do if she keeps making me rings.”
“Are you going to marry her?” Lila asked. Now that she was taking the first step to dissolve her marriage, she felt she had the right to ask all manner of outrageous questions.
“Marriage?” He paid grave attention to her question. “I don’t know about marriage. Marriage is a pretty long haul.”
“Yes, it is,” Lila said. She rolled down the window and looked at the heavy, late-afternoon sky which seemed now to form a part of her consciousness. Why wouldn’t someone help her? She slumped, turned her face sideways and bit on the bitter vinyl of the upholstery. “Nigel, Nigel,” her heart pleaded.
Robert missed his house, he missed his sons and often he missed Lila. Guilt might explain the trembling unease he felt when he stamped the snow off his shoes and rang the bell of what had been his front door. Inside he would find the smell of fresh coffee, that most forgiving of smells, and the spicy chalk smell of adolescent boys. And what else?—the teasing drift of Lila’s perfume, a scent that reminded him of grass.
He arrived at 9:00 A.M. every Saturday, insisting, he said rather quaintly, on doing the household chores. More often than not these chores consisted of tapping on the furnace gauge or putting a listening ear under the hood of Lila’s car or filling out some forms for the fire insurance. He did all these things with a good—some would say guilty—heart. He even offered to do the Christmas cards and advise their many, many friends that he and Lila were now separated.
Most of the friends replied with short notes of condolence. Several of them said, “We know what you’re going through.” Some said, “Perhaps you’ll find a way to work things out.” One of them, Bess Carrier, wrote, “We’ve suspected for some time that things weren’t right.”
Nigel wrote: “We hope this Christmas finds you both joyous and eager for the new year. Time goes so quickly, but Jane and I often think of the two of you, so happy and young in Normandy, and how you found the goodness to come to our aid.”
Lila missed Robert, but she didn’t miss him all the time. At first, she spent endless hours shopping; all around her, in the department stores, in the boutiques, people were grabbing for the things they wanted. What did she want, she asked herself, sitting before a small fire in the evening and fingering the corduroy of the slipcover. She didn’t know.
She rearranged the house, put a chair at an angle, had the piano moved so that the sun struck its polished top. She carried her Grandfather Westfield’s temperance novels out of the basement and arranged them on a pretty little table, using a piece of quartz for a book end. The stone scratched the finish, but she rubbed it with a bit of butter as her mother used to do, and forgot about it. Some days she woke up feeling as light as a girl, and as blameless. The lightness stayed with her all day, and she served her sons plates of soup and sandwiches for dinner. When summer came, she bought herself a pair of white cotton pants and a number of boyish T-shirts. One of them had a message across the front that said “Birds are people too.”
She had a great many friends, most of them women, and sometimes it seemed to her that she spent all day talking to these women friends. She wondered now and then how Jane filled her days, if she knitted or visited the sick or what. She wished they could meet. She would tell Jane everything. She would trust her absolutely.
Certain kinds of magazines are filled with articles on how to catch a man and how, having caught him, to keep him happy, keep him faithful, keep him amorous. But Lila and her friends talked mainly about how few men were worth catching and how fewer still were worth keeping. Yet, when Robert asked if he might come back, she agreed.
She would have expected a woman in her situation to feel victorious, but she felt only a crush of exhaustion that had the weight and sound of continuous rain. Robert suggested they get away for a vacation, somewhere hot: Spain or Portugal. (Nigel and Jane had gone to Portugal where they had spent many hours walking on the beaches.)
Lila said: “Maybe next year.” She was too tired to think about packing a suitcase, but next year she was bound to have more energy.
Robert gave Lila an opal ring. Lila gave Robert a set of scuba equipment. Robert gave Lila a book of French poems that he’d found at a garage sale. Lila gave Robert a soft scarf of English wool and put it around his neck and patted it in place, saying, “Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas,” Robert said back, and to himself he said: There’s no place in the world I would rather be at this minute.
The card from England was late, but the buff envelope was reassuringly familiar and so was the picture—a scenic view of Salisbury Plain under a wafery layer of snow. Inside, Nigel had written: “Jane has been in a coma for some months now, but it is a comfort to me that she is not in pain and that she perhaps hears a little of what goes on about her.”
Lila read the words several times before they swam into comprehension. Then she phoned Robert at his office. Hearing the news he slumped forward, put a fist to his forehead and closed his eyes thinking: Jane, Jane.
“How can he bear this,” Lila said several times. Nigel.
Later they sat together in a corner of the quiet living room. A clock ticked on the wall. This room, like the other rooms in the house, was filled with airy furniture and thick rugs. Fragile curtains framed a window that looked out onto a wooded ravine, and beyond the ravine could be seen the tops of apartment buildings. From the triple-paned windows of these apartments one could glimpse a pale sky scratched with weather whorls, and a broad lake that joined, eventually, a wide gray river whose water emptied into the Atlantic Ocean. As oceans go, this was a mild and knowable ocean, with friendly coasts rising smoothly out of the waves and leading directly to white roads, forests and the jointed streets of foreign towns and villages. Both Robert and Lila, each enclosed in a separate vision, could imagine houses filled with lighted rooms, and these rooms—like the one they were sitting in—were softened by the presence of furniture, curtains, carpets, men and women and children, and by that curious human contrivance that binds them together.
They know after all this time about love—that it’s dim and unreliable and little more than a reflection on the wall. It is also capricious, idiotic, sentimental, imperfect and inconstant, and most often seems to be the exclusive preserve of others. Sitting in a room that w
as slowly growing dark, they found themselves wishing they could measure its pure anchoring force or account for its random visitations. Of course they could not—which was why, after a time, they began to talk about other things: the weather, would it snow, would the wind continue its bitter course, would the creek freeze over, would there be another power cut, what would happen during the night.
Carol Shields, Various Miracles
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