Parallel Rivers Read online

  “I’ve found it’s the most secure place,” she says. “She’ll sleep now, I’ve just fed her.” She watches anxiously as I hang a plastic bucket on the faucets to catch the drips. “You should change the washers. It’s a relatively simple job. Just make sure you buy the correct size. I understand you’ve lived in this house for some years?”

  “Yes. For five years, nearly.”

  “By yourself?”

  Throughout the evening, each time I pee — in the dark and as quietly as possible — I check the level in the bucket. The baby, smothered in blankets, looks cosy, and does indeed sleep. She has a lovely dreamy expression, not her mother’s owlish looks. I’m excited by the different dishes our guests have brought. Each couple has placed on the table in the kitchen alcove a dessert and a main dish. His friends have set out rum cake and rum mousse and a deep bowl of tabouli. Helen and her lover have produced Nanaimo bars and a pressure cooker full of beef stew. I’ve made whole wheat pasta and a Mizithra sauce and a crème de menthe cheesecake. Kurt hasn’t made anything. Too busy. We load our plates in the kitchen, carry them into the living room where the stereo plays jazz too loud. But when it comes to eating, I taste nothing. Everyone chats amicably, oo-ing and ah-ing over the food. The glasses empty and are refilled. Helen talks only to the men, as does Cheryl, and somehow they manage not to talk to each other. I’m too quiet, of course. I try to smile a lot. I visit the bathroom a great deal. Maybe no one notices.

  “Your friend’s very attractive,” Kurt tells me as we make espresso in the kitchen.

  “D’you think so?” I glance through the doorway, through the hall, into the bright living room. Helen wears a jumpsuit cut open at the back: her shoulders are freckled. She’s talking easily; with the room door ajar and her voice raised, I can hear snatches of her story of the Indian woman she learned spinning from. Her lover’s bearded face looks bored and rather sheeplike; he’s watching Cheryl who’s finished with the books and is now sorting through the records.

  We listen to Mozart over coffee.

  “You have mice?” The woolly beard has found a little hole in the wall under the bookshelves. We all crouch low to stare.

  “Well, I put down traps, but Penny seemed to think they were cruel, so — ”

  “Did you catch one?” The front of the pantsuit is high-necked.

  “No,” Kurt says. “My helpmeet empathizes with the mice.” Then he paints a vivid picture of pain and anguish, mice kittens left motherless, glancing at me for approval or to make sure he hasn’t transgressed.

  Helpmeet. Helpmeet. Of course he’s talking tongue in cheek.

  “But is kitten the accurate term for young mouse?” says Cheryl.

  “You could try poison,” says the woolly beard. “There’s stuff you can get that makes them thirsty. You leave out a bucket of water and they — well, if your setup is correct, they drown. A fairly painless death.”

  “Sounds horrible,” says Helen, shuddering. “You need a cat. A natural predator.”

  The way she leans from her cross-legged position on the carpet, hands behind supporting the twist of her upper torso, throws her breasts into relief tight against the thin green material. A gap appears, a shadowy cleft, as the fabric creases at the small of her back. The three men are looking.

  “You know,” says Mal looking around, “this place could work.”

  “No shop talk.” Kurt raises his eyebrows, smiles at me.

  I should say something. I’m sure they find me boring. I can’t explain my feelings about the mouse, that sleek, essential presence. I already have her poisoned and drowning in the bucket above the baby’s perfect nose. But I don’t have to: the conversation has turned. The therapist is scanning through a dictionary. The spinner lists the various materials one can spin from. The men are glad to look at her.

  “Sheep’s wool, goat’s wool, dog fur, rabbit fur, even human hair,” she counts them off on her long fingers, “silk and cotton fibre . . . ”

  I imagine the tiniest scrap of knitted fabric — a little sweater made from spun mouse fur, knitted tight with number fourteen needles. A Christmas present for a microscopic baby.

  “God, you’re quiet,” says woolly beard to me.

  “She is, isn’t she? She’s often quiet. But she emanates peace.”

  “Yes. Tranquility. Calm. Here we are. Kitten, a young cat. No mention of mice.”

  “I’m just thinking. Watching and thinking.”

  “She’s thinking of lying naked on a soft sand beach, somewhere warm.” Helen blinks at the men.

  “Of us all leaving so she can go to bed.”

  “She’s a fancy goldfish alone at the bottom of a well. You should see her swimming underwater.”

  “She’d have a wonderful effect on some of my clients. Honestly, you’d make a good body worker, Penny. Check the baby, will you, hon?”

  “It’s getting late.”

  “You know, I used to be able to stay up till the wee hours, then sleep a couple of hours, get up, work out. I was always ready for anything —”

  “Still have to do all that in our business, eh, Mal?”

  “The women are fading.”

  “It’s the Mozart. It does have a soporific effect, a somniferous, lulling —”

  “Stop. You’re putting me to sleep,” says woolly beard. “We should be going.”

  “Lovely evening!”

  “We must do it again.”

  “We’ll have you next time.”

  “Good night!”

  We wave goodbye to our guests, then I close the new drapes. They run smoothly along the new rail. Kurt goes into the kitchen to wash the dishes I carry from the living room. When the room’s cleared I reposition the furniture and let my eyes travel the walls, concentrate on breathing deeply. Above the record shelves hangs his Pierrot and Pierrette. A lot of the stuff is his. I close the glass door, shut out the clatter of pots and dishes, watch through the upper frame his stooped back, muscles working under the grey Viyella shirt as he dries plate after plate. I notice the seam under his left arm is coming apart, and I know he’ll want to make love tonight. I must get rid of the people from this room, forget the repeating words . . .

  I’ve eaten too much. I feel like I’ve shovelled down my throat the nude back, salty freckles and all, the grip’s biceps, the woolly head, the therapist’s glasses, and the thick dreaming baby.

  “I’m so thirsty!”

  “The garlic,” he says. “Cheryl’s baby was well behaved.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you enjoy tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Helen’s a flirt. It’s better when there’s more people. About a dozen’s just right. Then you get parallel conversations going and people can slip from conversation to conversation. It’s more lively, more stimulating. You might find it easier to relax. I’m not criticizing, but you’d probably have more fun if you opened up a bit.”

  “When you make love like that — hard, and looking into my eyes — I take it very personally — ”

  He can’t stop laughing. He grabs my breasts, speeds up, finishes.

  “I know it sounds funny, but I’m serious. How can I respond? And how can I possibly initiate this kind of lovemaking?”

  “Don’t be so tense. You used to enjoy it. I haven’t changed, you know.”

  “I know. It’s me.”

  And that night I dream of a young Indian woman who sings to me that my experiences are just different weaves of the same fabric — all spun from my hair.

  “The ancient Greeks believed a man’s head to be full of sperm,” he says. “A lot of hair has always been a symbol of fertility.”

  It’s a week later and he is to begin a new job — preliminary scouting, he says. For now we’re safe outside on the cedar chairs. I’m hypnotized by the tree tops which the wind bends this way and that. I stretch my legs out, my arms in the air. He’s shifted from the ancient Greeks to picking at the dead leaves of last year’s morning glory. He’s so smug! I bare
my teeth at the back of his neck; he turns abruptly; the morning simmers with bird song.

  “Good God! What’s that look?” He seems genuinely alarmed, and I laugh out loud.

  He asks, “Has your head completely healed?”

  I lift my hand without thinking, gingerly trace the raised scar.

  This afternoon when I leave work the heat envelops me. I can smell the pavement softening. The stretch of water visible beyond the apartment buildings is thick with sails. At the back of the supermarket, sparrows squirm in the dust near the trash containers. I decide to take off my shoes and walk home.

  “Hey!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Come here a minute. Quick. Shh! Be careful!”

  I pad barefoot to the corner of the house where he’s been digging. Smiling at me, he pushes aside the long grass and there, wedged in the angle where the chimney bricks abut the soft wood siding, in a slight indentation in the soil, is a tiny cluster of naked, pink-white bodies in a straw-and-shredded-paper nest.

  We kneel by the house, smelling dank earth. As he meticulously rearranges the grass to cover the spot, a red-winged blackbird trills and is answered by another in the next yard.

  “I almost hit them with the spade,” he says. “We won’t disturb them again.”

  “Remember when you cracked your head open and we had to go to the emergency? You really wanted me, didn’t you? Blood all over the place. And you wanted it in a public place, well, semi-public. It was the danger of getting caught. You left your panties in the hall. I think it was the violence.” He seems to want to fuck now all the time, at least a couple of times a day, any fifteen minutes break from his suburban location. Making hay, he calls it. Tonight he’s into verbal foreplay. “Probably the violence. The concussion. Waiting in the hospital waiting room. Violence can be a real turn on, a real rush.” Three tiny wrinkles appear, one after another, in his forehead. And we’re done.

  I feel confused. I want to please him, yet don’t want his spot-fucks or to help dramatize them. Sure, I remember the night of the accident, feeling excited, but mostly I’m back home, holding the rabbit, on the verge of something, but I stop myself from voicing this memory. “I never want children.”

  Reaching for his car keys, he knocks over the wooden rabbit. “You may change your mind,” he says. “I know you’re thirty, but you may change your mind in the next ten years. Other women have.”

  I shake my head. “It’s got nothing to do with you. I’ve decided. Let’s not go into it again.”

  “All right. Okay. You brought it up.”

  I glance at the clock and it’s five past twelve and I’m looking through the window into the garden where he works so diligently turning the soil, digging in peat while I sip wine from my favourite glass, the last surviving piece of a set of elegant stemware my parents gave me years ago. Alone with my smuggled bottle, I’m in hiding because he thinks I went out at nine to go swimming and to have lunch with Helen. The curtains are partly drawn so it’s cool in the room, but airless, the windows all closed and the glass-panelled door into the hall shut tight. I’ve dragged his leather chair to the gap in the blue drapes so I can watch him working and drink my wine, and I feel good. A woman in white walks down the sidewalk with a man beside her and I’m aware of how the sun cuts across the roof and lays a hard black line between me and everything beyond the dim clutter of gardening tools on the patio in front of me. He arrived an hour ago and came in to change clothes and now he’s digging hard, must be hot; he’s down to shorts and his tattered running shoes and he frequently mops he brow. Last night he asked if I found other women attractive. Sometimes, yes. And what about Helen, what about Helen with the freckled back? I should have told him I’d swallowed her that night at the potluck. Funny, that was here in this room. Woolly beard sat over there, muscles sat there. I was here. I’m drunk and warm. The next-door neighbour works in her own yard. She has on a pretty headscarf, an old blouse of faded pink, and her thighs bulge from plaid shorts. She’s too fat and too squat. She’s breaking up a section of her lawn, using her axe (an axe!) in a brutal double-handed over-the-head stroke. Chop, ease, lift, pause. Chop. He’s worked his way along the bed under the rosebush and crouches now just a few feet from the woman. Too close, except that the fence separates them. Such a strange uncomfortable proximity. Perhaps I do find women attractive — certainly more attractive than other men — but I’m just not interested in any kind of physical relationship right now. I love Kurt. Yes. Here in the room I can say in a drowsy way I love him. Yes. But why not with him if I love him? The window needs cleaning and the whole room could use a good dusting, and a row of red circles shows where I’ve set down the glass during the last two hours. He’s come into the house twice since I’ve been watching, but he’s not caught me. Once to use the bathroom, the second time to get a beer that now sits half-full on the arm of the cedar chair in full sun where he left it more than half an hour ago. The garden is starting to come along. Yes. The woman has laid down her axe and is calling to him. He’s stopped work and now the two of them are chatting across the fence. He’s gesticulating, telling a story while she waits, hands on hips, her face in the shade. He’s holding his cupped hands toward her. She’s sweating. She must be stifling. Bet he’s telling her about the mice. I’ll pour another glass. But the bottle’s empty. He’s given up digging and he’s sitting in the shade to finish his warm beer, stretching his legs out. Spermhead, dreaming his fertile dreams. The woman’s chopping again, she’s making a circle under her apple tree, and he’s leaning back, his body a more or less straight line propped up by the chair, facing the sun’s rays, all his fine work, and he’s smiling, yes, and as the woman chops, she’s smiling. Divided by the fence they both smile away to themselves, and I smile at them, yes, and feel suddenly released, marvelous, and don’t want to drink anymore, don’t want to spoil the moment by greeting them, by rushing outside to hug him as I half feel like doing. So I just sit quietly, as I’ve been sitting quietly these last few hours, during which time I feel a great deal has happened, and I’m honestly happy, honestly exhausted —

  Three

  When I wake up, it’s dawn, not quite light. I hold my breath till I hear his long hushed exhalation. Tomorrow — today — the surgeon will insert a probe into my navel, make an incision lower down, just above the pubic hair. I try to imagine the angle of the cut, its length and depth, what type of scar will be left. Frightened, I will a car to pass, strain to hear a motor in the distance. I want to see the white lines flutter across the bedroom ceiling when the headlights hit the window. Then I’m swimming in a blue lake; my hair glistens like anthracite on the water. At the end of each filament clings a minute baby. When I hear a car, I open my eyes, but the lines are already stable again.

  At the hospital, before anaesthetic, I feel very clear. I can see my life. He does not love me. I do not love him. Now I will never have children. When he comes to pick me up after the operation, however, I’m bemused and slow. I feel like giggling, but can’t make the effort to laugh.

  “I dreamed of you. You were a vampire and had a silver grin, something you could take off and put on at will, a piece of jewellery. You stank of garlic. Your body and head were shrouded.”

  He looks worried. I know that if he kisses me now, my face will collapse and I’ll be helpless with laughter, probably for hours. He plays a more serious role, though, conscientious, concerned.

  “You’re talking very slowly.”

  “They kept offering me cookies. I’d like a huge omelette. And cottage cheese. And toast with lots of butter.”

  Tonight, we curl up in bed, his breath warm on my shoulder.

  “I can’t sleep on my belly.”

  “I’ll sleep on your belly, then,” he mumbles.

  I giggle. “You know it wasn’t a serious dream, about you being a vampire. It was a really funny dream.”

  “In that case, let’s both just sleep on our own private backs.”

  “I’m going t
o cut my hair,” I tell him. “Will you like me with short hair?”

  “How short?”

  “Short. A couple of inches long. Maybe. Well?”

  “I like your hair long. Let me think about it.”

  There’s a hint of autumn in the air this afternoon. I’m scrubbing the boot room floor. The back door is open and a chill breeze fills the house before escaping through the screen door at the front. The pattern in the linoleum brightens as I work. He’s been standing on the step, framed by the doorjamb, for a few minutes.

  “I’ve thought about it,” he says. “About your hair. I think we must approach this decision in the right way, be aware of the implications. Long hair is a symbol of fertility. It also suggests freedom, maybe even promiscuity, availability. That turns me on, to be honest. Cutting it might be a statement of dependence, but it diminishes your stature, powerwise. It might be a kind of self-punishment. I can only speculate. Perhaps you want to punish yourself for not feeling sexually motivated. Perhaps for denying your motherhood instinct.”

  “Yeah, fine. But will it look okay? Will you like me with short hair?”

  “And laces in your shoes?” His mouth turns down at the corners. “Sure. On condition that I cut it.”

  “You can’t cut hair. You don’t have the right, I don’t know, scissors.”

  “I can borrow scissors. I have access to scissors. You want something simple, right? I can manage.”

  A kind of indigo, the sky this evening. Such a hot day, Indian summer with a vengeance, and we both have the day off, and he has brought home the barber gear. I wear a simple orange shift and my hair hangs to my waist. I’m enjoying the just-washed weight and earnest bounce of it.