The Way the Crow Flies

  Madeleine finds a nice birdshitty table outside at the Café LaGaffe and orders a cappuccino. She discovered, during the vegetarian feast that Olivia’s mother is Algerian and her father is a United Church minister. She has blue eyes and speaks French with an Arabic accent. Madeleine doesn’t have to explain contradiction to Olivia.

  Marianne Faithfull croaks over the speakers, “It’s just an old war, not even a cold war, don’t say it in Russian, don’t say it in German….” Madeleine reaches down for an empty matchbook from the pavement and wedges it under one wobbly wrought-iron leg. Success without Colleen promises the cover. She blinks. College. “Say it in bro-o-oken English….”

  She can see the CN Tower over the shingled roofs and between the skyscrapers beyond. She can smell the four corners of the earth. The old guy whose pet parrot rides on his head and swears walks by.

  “Hi George,” she says.

  The parrot swivels his head and replies genially, “Fuck off.”

  Madeleine laughs, asks the waiter, “Have you got a pen?” And reaches for a napkin.

  In Jack’s hospital room, the cardiologist told him and Mimi, “In these cases, we have three options. One is to extend the life of the patient through surgery. Two is to improve the health of the patient through drugs. Three is to stabilize the patient and increase his comfort through drugs and … oxygen … et cetera. In your case, Mr. McCarthy, the first two options are not open to us.”

  The doctor looked about twelve.

  Jack’s face felt tight. He thought, You’re sending me home to die, thanks for nothin’, buddy. He nodded and said, “Fair enough.”

  Mimi said, “You can do better than that.”

  “I’m afraid we can’t, Mrs. McCarthy. But there’s no reason your husband can’t enjoy—”

  Mimi said, “C’est assez, merci,” and turned her back on him.

  He flushed. Jack winked and gave him a complicit smile. “Well. We’ll see you soon, sir,” said the young doctor, and fled.

  It was not a case of getting a second opinion. This was the third opinion—Mimi hadn’t stopped until she had pulled every string and found out who was good, who was the best and who was a butcher. She turned back to Jack and said tartly, “Well Monsieur, what am I going to do to you?”

  He grinned at her; she almost managed a smile, squeezed shut her eyes, clenched her hands until she felt the nails dig into her palms and, just as tears breached her lids, felt his arms around her.

  “You’re not supposed to get up.”

  “Who told you that?” He chuckled in her ear, holding her as close as he dared, careful of the intravenous tubes at his wrist. She felt warm. Hairspray and Chanel. Still so soft.

  What is it to end a love story after forty years? So many nice times. So many remember-whens. Remember, Missus? I remember—-je me souviens.

  What is it when so much of what is precious is so far past? Like a drawer sealed for so long. Open it, up wafts memory, love, no sorrow or recollection of hardship. How can this be? They lived through the Depression. They lived through a war. How is it that it was so sweet? How is it that the scent rises fresh as lilacs and cut grass? That sunny place. Post-war. Let’s have kids. Let’s be the ones who do it right.

  They sway ever so slightly. That’s why, darling, it’s incredible that someone so unforgettable, thinks that I am unforgettable too.

  They stood like that for a while. From outside the hospital room, through the big window that looked onto the corridor, it would have been difficult to say which one was weeping. Jack held his wife and experienced such a powerful sense of déjà vu, it felt like a blessing, and he had never been so grateful in his life.

  Mimi wanted to tell Madeleine the truth. Jack said, “You’re the boss. Let me do it, though.”

  When Madeleine arrived at the hospital later that day, Jack told her, “They’ve sprung me. No need for surgery.”

  When Mimi returned to his room after fixing her makeup, she could see from her daughter’s face that her husband had told her nothing at all. She got out the Scrabble. She pressed on.

  They discouraged their daughter from visiting again too soon. Jack didn’t want to alarm her with the sight of an oxygen tank—she was busy, she was young; better that he and Mimi should get used to his new “lifestyle” first. “Wait till I’m back on my feet,” said Jack over the phone in February, “and we’ll go for a big juicy steak. That is, if Maman lets me.”

  In March they said they were driving down to see her in Toronto, but at the last minute Jack phoned to say Mimi had the flu. In April they said, “We’re thinking of going to New Brunswick next week, why don’t you plan on a weekend in May?”

  SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE

  “Who am I, then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I’ll come up; if not, I’ll stay down here till I’m somebody else.”

  Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  WHEN MADELEINE GOT HOME last Friday night after the taping—the night the “thing” happened in her car—Christine had cooked eggplant parmigiana. Madeleine wasn’t hungry but she said, “Boy, something sure smells good.”

  She ate a slice and Christine ran her a scented bath. Madeleine was still fresh from her shower of a couple of hours ago, but Christine had put flower petals in the water.

  “Thanks, babe.”

  Christine handed her a glass of wine and began gently, sensuously, to wash her back. It felt like someone stomping around, rattling the things on Madeleine’s dresser. Something was going to fall and break.

  “Um. I think I’m getting a cold.”

  “Oh yeah?” said Christine sympathetically, brushing back a lock of her long wavy hair where the tips were trailing in the water.

  “Yeah, my skin hurts.”

  Christine dropped the washcloth into the tub with a plop and exited the bathroom.

  Madeleine called after her. “It felt … great, babe, really—thanks…,” her voice sounding robotic in her own ears.

  The death of desire is a bottomlessly sad thing. Books are written, documentaries are made and counsellors are paid to help people want each other again. Perhaps it’s just a momentary ebb in the tide of our relationship, let’s take this opportunity to see what treasures have washed up on the beach in the meantime. Get to know one another again. Take a holiday.

  And perhaps it comes back, or perhaps it does enough for one party but not the other. Desire can be detected at such low levels that it’s difficult to say when it’s dead. The patient is on life-support “but she can still hear you.” When do you pull the plug?

  Madeleine waited until the apartment was silent before getting out of the bath. If Christine was already asleep when she came to bed, Madeleine would be relieved. But it would be all she could do to resist waking her to find out if she was mad at her. If Christine wasn’t angry about the small “empathic break” in the bath just now, she was sure to be angry at having been awakened. Madeleine would exert a good deal of energy getting Christine over her anger; this might involve Ovaltine and cognac. Then, once Christine had reassured Madeleine that she was no longer angry, Madeleine might use the opportunity to punish Christine for having had the gall to be angry over nothing. This punishment would consist of a silent, innocent distraction—an absent glance toward the curtained window as she set down the steaming mug.

  “What is it, Madeleine?”

  “Wha—? Oh, nothing. It’s just … never mind.”

  And Madeleine’s actual grievances would rear, not their heads, but a few hairs, apropos of nothing. Christine would never see what didn’t hit her, but she would intuit it all. At three A.M.

  “You hate me, why don’t you just say it, Madeleine?”

  “Christine, why are you so mad at me all of a sudden?”

  And the cycle would begin again.

  In fact, Madeleine loves Christine dearly, would feel gouged and left for dead were she to lose her—feels everything but the abiding sexual interest that allows two people t
o grapple happily and hotly, then take each other for granted, in the nicest possible way, over breakfast. And to allow one another what is now called personal space, but is really just a new spin on an old virtue—privacy. Privacy is sexy.

  They got together in their twenties; privacy was hypocritical then, a form of patriarchal frost. Madeleine is learning the difference between secrecy and privacy. With Christine she has no privacy, but plenty of secrets. Christine can smell them, like bones buried all over the house, and it drives her crazy. Madeleine has hidden them so well that she has no idea they are secrets. Mice dying behind the walls, dreadful smells wafting up the drain.

  Christine will walk away and slam the bedroom door. Madeleine, in a rage at being shut out, will punch the wall, then her own head. She may, depending on the ferocity of leashed but ungrounded anger, open the cutlery drawer, find the sharpest knife and carefully wrap her hand around its blade, slowly squeezing up to, but not past, the point of laceration—because how did her life take her, step by step, into the domestic clutches of such a bitch? Then she will open the fridge to get a glass of water, and the sight of the leftover eggplant parmigiana will cause her to weep, because poor Christine cooked it innocently and with love.

  As they played out a version of this that Friday night, it never occurred to Madeleine to tell Christine what had happened to her in her car on the way home.

  “I’m not into ‘healing,’ okay?” says Madeleine at her next appointment, and places a cheque for six sessions in advance on Nina’s desk, next to a conch shell. “I don’t want you turning me into a vegetarian or—and I don’t want to be straight when I walk out of here, I want be exactly like I am now except able to drive again. And, you know, work.” She sits in the swivel chair, leans back and folds her hands.

  Nina says, “You don’t want to be a vegetarian and you don’t want to be heterosexual—”

  “I wouldn’t actually mind being vegetarian, I’m kind of interested in that, just not the hairy-leg kind.”

  Nina narrows her eyes.

  Madeleine says, “You suppressed a smile just now. Either that or you’re offended ’cause beneath your hemp-and-linen leisure suit you’re sporting a pelt like a Sasquatch.”

  Nina smiles, says, “Madeleine, I’m going to take a chance and guess that you’re not here about your diet or your sexual orientation, or your profession. Or even your driving habits.”

  “So why am I here?”

  “That’s what I’m hoping we’ll work toward.”

  “No, can you please just take a wild therapeutic guess?”

  Nina says, “You want to go forward. But something is stopping you. You feel as though you should know what it is, but you can’t make it out. It’s like trying to identify an elephant when all you can see is one square inch of it.”

  Madeleine is tempted to yield to something. Repose. The promise of it makes her newly aware that she is fatigued. “Or looking at a mountain from an inch away,” she says.

  Christine had mixed feelings about Madeleine going into therapy.

  On the one hand: “Good.”

  “Why?” said Madeleine. “You think I’m that fucked up?”

  “I think you have … issues.”

  “Gesundheit.”

  On the other hand: “Is this just an elaborate way of leaving me?”

  “What? Christine, what are you—?” If Madeleine were Christine she would say, “Why is everything always about you?” But Madeleine never thinks of the right thing to say in the moment. Unless she is in front of hundreds of strangers.

  “Christine, have you seen my keys?”

  “Where did you leave them?”

  That’s not what I asked you.

  “They’re right in front of you, Madeleine.”

  So they are.

  “Why do you think you’re here, Madeleine?”

  “Gee, doc, if I knew dat, would I be here in de foist place?”

  “That’s very good.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You sound just like him.”

  “Want to see me do Woody Woodpecker?”

  “I’ve seen you.”

  “Oh. Right, you’ve seen After-Three.”

  “I’ve seen you live too.”

  “Are you stalking me or what?” Nina just smiles. Madeleine says, “Want to see my evil-out-of-synch-ventriloquist-puppet laughter?”

  “I’ve seen it.”

  “Want to see me do it naked?”

  “I’ve seen you do it topless.”

  “Oh. Terrifying, eh?”

  “It was very very funny. Madeleine—”

  “Nina, are you American?”

  “Originally, yes.”

  “Where you from?”

  “Pittsburgh.”

  “My condolences.”

  “It’s actually quite nice.”

  “Got you.”

  Nina smiles. “A little.”

  “I’m just saying that our relationship, as it grows and matures and … deepens, will inevitably … change.”

  “Just say it, Madeleine, you’re leaving me.”

  “What? No! Christine, we can still—we can live together, we can still go camping.”

  Christine rolls her eyes, pours herself another glass of wine and doesn’t bother to set the bottle down. She is defending her thesis next week. Madeleine hates herself for wishing Christine would shed ten pounds, feminists are not supposed to feel that way.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Like what?” asks Madeleine, innocent distraction, reminding herself of someone—

  “Like you hate me.”

  —her dad. “I don’t hate you.”

  Christine glares over the rim of her wineglass. Madeleine feels like a weasel, knowing she is lying but unable to say exactly where the lie is, frisking herself to find it. “I just think we should each be free to—”

  “Fuck around,” says Christine. “That’s what you want, just say it, you get paid for saying horrible things all the time.” Here we go. “Go ahead, Madeleine, say it in a funny voice.”

  Christine is right. But Madeleine doesn’t know how to deviate from the script.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Out to get cream.”

  “Bullshit, Madeleine, do you ever not lie? ‘Hello,’ she lied.”

  “We’re out of cream.”

  “We’re out of a lot of things.”

  Madeleine feels as though she’s leading a double life. Loathsome guilty troll at home. Successful ray of sunshine to the rest of the world. The one who makes it look easy. The person who looks “exactly like my cousin/my best friend in high school/my boyfriend’s sister, maybe you know her.” Photos are produced from wallets and purses; Madeleine never fails to be amazed at the total lack of physical resemblance, and she never fails to smile and say, “Wow, that’s amazing.” Madeleine is familiar. Maybe that’s why she gets away with so much. Why the audience is willing to follow her so far from home. Why there seem to be so many of her. While she fears there may be none at all. Pied Piper without a pipe.

  Nina balances a smooth pink stone the size of an egg in the palm of her hand and asks, “Who’s Maurice?”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t pathologize my work.”

  Nina waits.

  “I made him up, that’s my job, I make up weird shit all the time, it’s what I get paid for.”

  Nina waits.

  “I kind of based him on a yucky teacher I had.”

  Pad thai will forever taste of conjugal discontent.

  “You’ve got so much to say to everyone else, pretend I’m a stranger, Madeleine. Pretend I’m the goddamn waiter.”

  She has never told Christine about Mr. March. She has never told anyone, not really. Not much to tell. Dirty old man she never thinks about any more.

  Madeleine is a flirtaholic. Everyone has to have a disorder nowadays, like Brownie badges sewn up the sleeve, and that’s he
rs. If she were a guy she would be an asshole, but she is “endearingly feisty,” a “high-octane pixie,” and has the press to prove it. She tells herself that as long as she does most of the flirting right in front of Christine, it doesn’t count. And it never leads to anything serious like an affair. Except for that one time, which definitely didn’t count. Plus the New York thing.

  Deep down, Madeleine knows that what she is addicted to are escape clauses. Backdoor rabbit holes. Flirting: the long wick that leads to the stick of dynamite that can reliably blow up your life and land you in a new one. This is for people who are terrified of being trapped—and more terrified of being abandoned. This is for people for whom sex with a familiar other becomes more and more like having their wounds probed while splayed across the gutted upholstery of a midsummer car wreck.

  Some say we keep repeating patterns until we figure out what they are. Madeleine is too busy to find out. It’s all fun until someone loses an eye.

  “Christine, where’s my—”

  “It’s right in front of you.”

  Christine doesn’t even have to look to know it.

  “Is it just me or are you incredibly bored too?”

  Nina is silent.

  “Want to play Parcheesi? Have sex on your hand-knotted Bolivian rug?” Madeleine puffs an imaginary cigar. “Don’t worry, you’re not my type.”

  “What’s your type?”

  “Oh, you know, masses of pre-Raphaelite hair, tad of a drinking problem, an overdue thesis and a violent streak.”

  “Is Christine violent?”

  “Naw, just when I drive her insane she’s been known to”—Madeleine grins—“lose it somewhat.”

  “What does that look like?”

  Madeleine pauses, then springs, hands outstretched, toward Nina’s neck. “Like this!” Nina doesn’t flinch.