And the next week, when Philip called to say he was organizing a bachelor party for a friend in Windsor, she suggested he stop by to see her perform at Jason’s Gentleman’s Club. The guy she went with till he got picked up for ferrying drugs across the Ambassador Bridge had talked her into dancing there part-time — said it turned him on, watching the guys watch her. From the age of twelve, from the time of her first boyfriend, Tania’s “fortay” was whatever her steady-du-jour wanted it to be. All she needed to know then was, What did Philip really want her to be?
Come to think of it, they hadn’t done much talking.
And she’s come a long way from Windsor — even gave up smoking Slims after she met Dr. Philip.
• • •
“Why must we look at Jupiter?” Tania stands on the patio, scanning the sky for the shooting flash of a meteor. A path at her feet, each stone grooved and molded to its neighbour’s shape, leads from the patio to the dark hollow of the empty pool at the centre of the lawn.
“It’s the biggest,” says Philip. “It will fill the whole lens.” The telescope has been pointing at the planet ever since it came out of the box. Philip put it together on the back patio, following each step in the manual with laser concentration.
He offers her a look.
She puts her eye to the lens and moves the scope slowly. Jupiter’s just a big ball of hot air. She wants to see its satellites and maybe the Leonid meteor shower the CBC said could happen late tonight.
“Why do they keep revolving round it?”
“Which?”
“The moons.”
“Gravity and inertia, Tania.”
“Crap. They’re just stuck in their orbits and can’t figure out how to get someplace else in the universe.”
“Don’t say crap, Tania. It’s still too cloudy.”
“You’ve missed the news,” she says as he goes indoors. But he strides upstairs, leaving her standing in the kitchen. In a few minutes, she hears the rush of a modem in his office, calling to another of its kind.
Philip reminded her a few weeks ago, as he did every time they drove past the university, that he took his viva voce there, in that building. With a whole bunch of guys like him.
“That one?” she pointed, pretending to have forgotten.
“No, that one. The newer one.”
“The one with the old facade, I see it now,” she said, quoting Philip because she knew he liked being quoted. Philip voted regularly “to ensure that interiors could be rearranged or redesigned, but the facades must be retained.” He didn’t notice the village growing ever quainter and cuter than its inhabitants, commuters to Mississauga and Toronto. Thirty-to-forty-something range, like him.
“You keep saying you’ll get back to school some day,” he chid-ed, turning homewards.
She had told him she was on the verge of college but never said she’d have to get her Ontario Secondary School Certificate first.
“I should do what I know best,” she said brightly as they sailed down the main street of the village in the Merc. “Look, there’s that nice little restaurant that just opened. Maybe I could wait tables.”
Philip’s expression said over his or her very dead body.
“I’d need a car for school,” she said. “And if I got a job. Any job. Unless you want me to get a job at Mississauga General and go to work with you.”
“We can’t afford two cars,” he said. “And I wouldn’t want you getting in an accident.” She would have thought that remark was real sweet only a couple of years earlier, but since she can’t go as far as a neighbour or the village without a car, it’s not real sweet any more. Maybe he doesn’t want her working at the hospital.
If he weren’t so opposed to her driving, she might have proposed getting an office job, but her typing isn’t good enough, and every job advertised had a computer that came with it.
She tried a different angle. “I could get a few shoots — might feel good to be in front of a camera again —”
Philip cut her off. “Ta-ni-aa.” Turning her name into three syllables, each of them upbraiding.
Oh-oh, maybe she shouldn’t have said “feel.”
“Besides,” he went on, “I’ve signed you up for a course.”
“Hel-lo? Did you ask me?”
“Etiquette lessons. Two hours on Friday nights.”
Surprise turned to wariness. Once Philip encouraged her to sign up for the Junior Women’s League but then found so many things for her to clean at the last minute that she’d ended up missing the monthly meetings. Another time he suggested she volunteer as an organizer with the local book festival, but he could never get home in time for her to take the car to meetings.
“Etiquette lessons? Where does anyone get etiquette lessons?”
“At the university. A four-week extension course. Fifty dollars, that’s all. You’ll enjoy it.”
“The hell I will.”
He winced, and the back of her hand went to her lips. She knew he thought mentioning the price would make her attend — spare change to a guy raised in Toronto, fifty dollars not to be wasted, to Tania, lately of Windsor.
So last Friday night, Philip gave Tania the keys to his Merc. She drove off alone.
Instead of two hours at etiquette class, she drove the country roads, feeling only a gentle vibration as she sped along alone in her bubble. Five top-shelf finely calibrated stereo speakers exhaled some classical thing on CBC Two — a violin? a viola? Some piece she might have known the name of if she’d finished school. Lullaby-nice.
Someone should have given her directions — she wasn’t sure who or whom. Someone should have said, This is what you can expect from the country-club set when you didn’t graduate from private school and have difficulty with three-syllable words, when you’ve been making love to a pole, panting, arching your back like a cat in heat. Which is what the other doctors’ wives were thinking, even if they never said it. Someone should have warned her, but you couldn’t explain this to anyone without sounding like some poor dumb little whining rich girl, and who the hell’d believe it? Half the girls at Jason’s would give their first-born — what’s a D. and C. but a once-a-year routine for most of them anyway — to be in her low-heeled two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar Ferragamo pumps cruising the back roads of Ontario in her husband’s Mercedes that very minute.
She drove and drove, timing her return to coincide with The National. She had her commentary about class all ready to spill, but luckily she didn’t have to.
As the car keys clinked to the hall table, Philip was standing at the kitchen door holding the phone at arms length; he whispered theatrically, “Your mother.” Then Ma’s smoke-thickened Michigan drawl gave Tania the latest instalment of her car troubles, this week’s list of bum checks, details of the newest telephone rip-off she hadn’t fallen for and the multi-level marketing scam for which she had …
Half an hour later Ma asked, “How’re ya then, Tania?” And as Tania searched for an answer that wouldn’t make her sound like a platinum blond debutante, she signed off with, “That’s real nice, dear. Gotta go.”
Philip never asked her about the class. Then, or since. Maybe she should attend a couple of them — learn to say “that’s wonderful” instead of “crap.” And smile while saying it.
Standing near the screen door, Tania’s thoughts spin with the laundry. She slides the door back, goes out on the patio. The fragrance of white alyssum rises around her. The Leonids must be falling out of the sky all around, unseen.
Something different could have happened tonight. Should have happened. Still could happen. But what?
There’ll be a sign. Maybe a pattern will reveal itself. Even to Philip, checking e-mail on his laptop upstairs and pretending he isn’t pissed.
Let him simmer down.
Would Tania know if she sees a sign? Or a pattern? And how will she know what it means? She’d stopped asking Ma to do tarot readings for her sometime in her teens when Ma said you’d have to do tarot readin
gs every minute to read all the signs and find all the patterns to really know what’s coming.
It’s when you think you know what’s coming that you really don’t. Dr. Philip Trent isn’t the same guy she met six years ago. Today his needle and the drip sends patients into guilt-free darkness, then conjures them back to consciousness. But back then, he was Party Animal Extraordinaire, when not working toward a seat in what he then called the Canadian Anesthesiologists’ Cartel — he’d call it something polite, like “Society,” now he’s part of it.
Anyway, the week after that car show, when he came to Jason’s, there was Tania dressed in scarlet leather, the way he and all his “gentlemen” buddies wanted her to be. A few months later, he bought this house without her ever seeing it, sure she’d be so excited. And she was. She’d moved in and become Mrs. Philip Trent.
The perm went first, the hair dye changed from blond to auburn. Tania packed all her spike heels and the red leather corsets, the black leather shorts, the little-girl ruffles, the feather boas in a suitcase and drove them down to Windsor to Ma’s low-rent apartment complex.
“Find someplace — here, put ’em in the tub,” said Ma. “Those cost ya somethin’ —”
“Never know if I’ll be needing them again, eh?”
“I’ll have a rummage sale one of these days.”
“You are not to sell my things,” Tania told her. “That would be really mean, like when you sold my dolls and my comic books. I’m leaving these things with you because I have no place else to put them, okay?”
But Ma held a rummage sale the very next weekend in a ramshackle shed that abutted the complex’s parking lot. “Eighty-five bucks.” Satisfaction gilded the smoked voice as Tania’s how-could-you’s blistered the phone line.
“Eighty-five dollars for all those beautiful shoes, for the boas, my g-strings, my black leather lace-up stays, everything? I could have given you eighty-five dollars …”
“Never took nothin’ from no one, not even when your dad didn’t pay his support.”
But eighty-five dollars — that’s all the props of her life in Windsor had been worth to Ma, hell, to anyone.
“You’re on your own, kid.” Ma’s affection came in heavy doses of unvarnished reality. “Over eighteen — not my problem no more.”
She was right, technically, except Tania hadn’t felt ready to be eighteen yet. And she wasn’t ready to be Mrs. Philip Trent. Didn’t know what she was getting into.
Tania draws the door closed, shivering a little. She lifts the lid of the washer, digs inside and transfers the damp white mass of clean sheets to the dryer. Philip is just tired from working in surgery all day, and she’s gotta try and understand. What does she know about zapping someone into “stasis,” as he calls it, then bringing him right back?
At the dinner this evening, one of the doctors teased Philip about a patient who woke up in surgery and screamed at the sight of his exposed heart. Philip went pink. “It does happen sometimes. I did the best I could.”
He went from pink to scarlet when she told that asshole to go fuck himself instead of picking on Philip. And maybe she should have said it with a smile like some other wives would have.
But she was thinking of the one time, the only time Philip told her how he felt. The time he talked about his dad dying. A five-year battle with bone cancer, from when Philip was ten. And Philip wasn’t Dr. Philip then, so he couldn’t do anything about his father’s pain. He’s had so much college since, he can’t even say, I felt like shit, but he must’ve.
“Did you pray?” Tania had asked. Philip laughed, the way he laughed at Ma for lighting candles in church and praying to the BVM.
Why isn’t Philip more curious about mystery? He once said he doesn’t have a clue how any of his drugs — succinylcholine, sodium pentothol — work. He just knows they do. Like the guy who did that hypnotist act at Jason’s for a while. All Philip needs to know is how to switch a mind off, switch it on.
He’d love to do the same with his wife. Probably wished he could switch her off tonight.
She spoons coffee into the well of the Braun and, as the steady brown stream begins, tiptoes downstairs to the basement for a pair of socks, a sweatshirt and sweat pants from the sports closet. She drops her evening gown to the kitchen floor. She listens for movement upstairs.
All quiet up there. She changes.
She wraps herself in her coat and a heavy blanket from the hall closet, unfolds a canvas deck chair on the patio and settles in, coffee cup warming cold fingers, to watch the night sky.
If she could, she’d switch her mind on and off herself. Go into what Philip calls the twilight space between sleep and brain death. Philip’s probably asleep right now or she’d ask him: when you induce anesthesia, how do you make damn sure your patient’s heart and lungs keep pulsing? And the rest of her organs, the involuntary ones? What about a patient’s mind?
Would it keep chattering?
Tania’s would chatter a whole pile of crap — even after etiquette lessons.
A year ago, Philip took her to a Queen Street office with cherry wood panelling and funeral parlour-style paintings to see a therapist he knew from his undergraduate days at Western. This was right after Tania had a screaming fit, shouting that he was killing her. That everything she thought was fun was either a no-no or too risky.
The therapist, a tall guy with glasses and an elbow-patched sweater that made him look older, began by asking where they met. From the way he said it, gazing at Tania’s cleavage, she could tell he remembered her from the bachelor party.
“Talk about your expectations of marriage,” he said, but Philip acted as if he didn’t have any. All he wanted, he said, was to keep Tania safe, and he couldn’t understand why she was so upset — he forbade her nothing.
“Nothing forbidden, eh?” said the therapist.
Tania sat mostly silent, the desk between her and the men. Like they were expecting to hear knocking and see the paintings tremble.
The therapist asked, “Do you plan to have children?”
Tania shook her head. She couldn’t imagine looking after a child or children. Ma had taken her to the doctor for her first birth control prescription at fourteen, right when she got her first period — insurance in their neighbourhood — and taking it had become a ritual ever since.
But then she glanced over at Philip and thought, hey, if Philip wanted a baby, why not? She’d oblige. Taking kids to school or hockey games would require a second car.
“No,” said Philip. “Before the epidural, it’s like a limb amputation without anesthesia.”
Tania could see the doctor thought she should feel touched by Philip’s concern, but she wasn’t. “Your ma must have gone through it,” she said, “or you wouldn’t be here.”
Philip’s ma wouldn’t have done it natural — she’s like Philip, and not just about pain. She won’t even take a vacation to Jamaica or Cuba with her friends for fear she might see poor people, and certainly she’d never visited Tania’s area of Windsor. She’d think it dirty, ugly, poor, run-down — no beautiful Toronto people.
Soon their fifty paid minutes were up.
As the therapist ushered them out, she felt two thick fingers inserting themselves into the back pocket of her jeans.
“How do you feel now?” Philip asked as they got in the car. Like the question hurt to ask.
“I feel nothing.”
He nodded and patted her hand.
She drew a hundred-dollar bill wrapped around the therapist’s business card out of her pocket and held it on her lap where he could see the card. And the money.
Philip glanced down at the card and the money on Tania’s lap. Then his eyes returned to the road.
“No pain anywhere?”
Did Philip think his friend’s obvious admiration of his wife — or his wife’s boobs — was a compliment to his good taste? Did he think it was a joke? On whom?
Philip seemed to imagine that he had accomplished a gallant rescu
e in whisking her away from dancing at Jason’s. And what did he expect in return? Her gradual retreat to his castle and the guarantee she would perform only for him and a select few.
Like in Saudi Arabia.
No big deal — Philip was like her old boyfriend, the one who’d gotten her into dancing at Jason’s in the first place. Or maybe like one of those professors who’d stand and watch her dancing with that look that said, I’m only here for research.
She wouldn’t have to go as far as before, but was it much different?
“No pain,” she said firmly, staring ahead.
“I can’t be responsible for making you happy, Tania.” Philip set the cruise control. “You should really try to find happiness for yourself.”
But damn right, Philip was responsible for making her happy. Every girl at Jason’s dreamed of a guy like him, a Dr. Prince Charming who’d take her away, marry her, make her rich and happy … and then if she wasn’t happy, he was, yeah, like, responsible.
Even so, by the time they got home, she got to thinking, okay, maybe he was right, and she would try and find happiness for herself, because Philip sure as hell wasn’t going to do it for her.
They didn’t go back to the therapist — not that she minded, but maybe Philip did mind about the card and the hundred-dollar bill.
And then Philip took over the shopping, which only made things worse. And it was impossible to complain that things were getting worse, even if there were someone to complain to, when he would call every afternoon at four to get her grocery list before leaving the hospital and end with his canned, “I love you.”
Sometimes he picked up cat or dog food instead of her t wo daily Slimfast shakes, but usually he bought everything on her list. Tania no longer had any idea what things cost or what was available, and Philip never seemed to notice that she cooked the same seven dinners over and over.
Daily, she cleaned with the determination of a fifties housewife, took long walks and runs on the deserted country roads, came back and made dinner.
But when she told him she was jogging, Philip warned her about black bears. After that, Tania no longer jogged out of sight of the house.