The Marriage Bed (20 page)

Jeff’s feet took the stairs two at a time. Hot face pushed deep into the pillow, I pretended to be asleep.

“Anne dear, I took the key off the bureau last night – didn’t scare you, did I? Thought I’d come round and help get breakfast before I do rounds at Sick Kids. I want a look at Hugh, too. You don’t mind, do you? I’ll get the kids up and make coffee – you stay right there.” He patted the large mound of my hip and went next door, calling “Wakey wakey” to the kids in a loud and cheerful voice. In a kind of dream I lay there listening to Mao yowling like ten cats to inform the world he expected to be fed before any insignificant brats of children. They, for their part, piercingly filled Jeff in, as he herded them downstairs, all about what they would and would not eat; and the poor devil actually seemed to be enjoying the whole experience.

With some urgency I tried to use this interlude to think of any way of escaping the consequences of my last-night’s idiocy. But all I could think of was what would happen if Ross, by any unlikely chance, actually did drop in on us at this point. That confrontation would be so rich in various kinds of irony that picturing it made me shake with laughter under the bedclothes.

“All right now, that’s enough,” I had to say to myself at last with some severity. “Straighten up, you daft bitch, and make up your mind quickish how you’re going to cope with this. Because it is a very ominous sign that Jeff is back here. As you well know.” Hoping it might aid thought, I heaved into a sitting position and
reached for a hairbrush. Getting the witch’s tangles out of my long hair was a business as painful as penance. My arms and back ached cruelly as I tugged away, and by the time I got the whole mass braided again into its thick rope, I had to lie back against the pillows, feeling sick and exhausted. After a minute I put some perfume from Billie’s bottle on my forehead, and the cool sting made me feel a bit better in body if not in mind. I still had not the remotest idea what I could say to Jeff to defuse the situation. The odd thing was that except for a sincere wish that he would just go away, I had no feelings about him now that I hadn’t had for the last two years. But how to explain this to the poor sod?

When he came in with the coffee tray, I looked at him sombrely, and was touched to observe that he felt shy with me. If only there were some painless way to speed him off without damage. But none occurred to me. Meanwhile, he put his arms around me and nuzzled his face into my neck.

“Hugh’s in good shape,” he said. “Oh, you do smell so lovely.”

“Don’t be silly, I couldn’t possibly.” My voice sounded so ludicrously cross I nearly started to laugh again, and a big answering smile spread across his face.

“Anne, I haven’t slept a wink, and I feel sort of unreal; but listen to me, love – I’ve never been so goddam happy in my life.”

“Jeff, let me explain about last night –”

“Say you are too.”

“No, I’m not. Far from it. I’m about to apologize to you in six different positions for the whole –”

He was kissing my neck and didn’t appear to be listening.

“I couldn’t wait to get back here and see you again. Crazy to feel like this, isn’t it? But look, I want us to get things straight right away. After all, I’ve known Ross a long time. If he hadn’t taken off, the whole thing would be impossible; but as it is – well, it
simplifies everything. And, as you know, Lynne and I were calling it quits anyway; so that’s all right too. It’s just a question of –”

“Jeff, wait a minute.”

“Now, I want you to relax, love. Your job right now is just to get a good baby here. Everything else you can leave to me. I’ll try to get hold of Ross this morning and tell him how it is. Lynne’s already in the picture. There’s no reason why we can’t start the legal side of it right away.”

“Wait!” I said desperately.

“Eh?” He looked at me, startled.

“I mean, hold on. You mean divorces all round? No, no, Jeff. That would be … I mean, look – last night I was quite simply bombed out of my mind. I know I – but it was just one of those crazy impulses. I really am most humbly sorry.”

His pleasant, snub-nosed face had gone very still. “What you mean is, you just want me to forget last night entirely?”

I put my hand on his back gently. “That’s it.”

“And what if I can’t do that?”

“Of course you can. You will. I tell you it was just –”

“No, I won’t, Anne. I never will.”

“But I tried to explain to you how it is with Ross and me. I know how it looks, but we’re not really apart. Not really.”

“You’re just not thinking straight, sweetheart, and no wonder, the way things have been with you. But you need me. And for the rest of it – you don’t know how long I’ve wanted you. It’s been years.”

“Please. I’m getting along all right. Or was, until last night. That was my fault entirely, and I –”

“Anne, you don’t understand.” He took me by the shoulders just as Martha bustled into the room clasping a box of Cheerios half as big as herself. She had evidently conned Jeff into letting her
wear her blue dress with its embroidered pinafore, but the skirt was kilted up at the back to reveal that he had not insisted on any underwear. “Here’s some cereal for you, Mum,” she announced. After an armpit-deep plunge into the box, she deposited a fistful of cereal on my tray.

“Lovely,” said Jeff. “Now go down and help Hugh with his breakfast, okay?”

“No,” said Martha.

“There’s a good girl.”

“Please?” I added.

“No.”

“Take some Cheerios to Violet,” he suggested craftily. Her face broke into a seraphic smile and she trotted off.

We talked a little faster now, in lower voices.

“Jeff, it was just one of those things that happen sometimes – you mustn’t take it seriously. You wouldn’t if we’d actually … you’d never give it a second thought if you and Lynne were –”

“No, look; are you really trying to tell me it meant nothing when you –”

In trotted Martha again, the box still clutched to her belly. “Violet didn’t want any. She ate the butter instead.”

“Oh Christ.”

“Then go and give the cat some,” said Jeff.

“No.”

“Please.”

“No.”

“Martha,
go downstairs,
” said Jeff. A vein in his neck was swelling dangerously. “I want to talk to Mummy.”

“Okay, talk.” With a heave she lobbed the box of cereal onto the bed and clambered up after it, with a generous display of bare pink bum.

He shot me a look in which there was no remaining trace of tenderness, and I was once more seized by a wild urge to laugh. Silently blessing Martha, I pretended helplessness and sighed. At the same instant a powerful contraction made me wince for real.

“You all right?” he asked.

“Sure. Just a cramp. They come and go, these days. Anyhow, you’d better get going on your rounds. There’s nothing more to say, except I’m sorry. Truly.”

He began to speak, but Martha cut him off. “My mother’s got a baby inside her. I’d rather have a hamster. We’d call it June or Albert, and it would eat up all the Cheerios.”

“No kidding,” Jeff said bleakly. “Well, it’s after nine. I’ve got to go. But Anne, I’ll call you tonight. We’ve got to talk.”

“Talking won’t make one bit of difference. Dr. Reilly dear, please know that.”

He looked at me hungrily, but Martha’s unblinking gaze was fastened on him. He drew back. Setting his lips in a tight line, he walked out of the room and went downstairs, one at a time. Violet greeted his departure as she had his arrival, with an outburst of witless barking, and we both distinctly heard him say “Fucking dog” before banging the front door behind him.

A
piece of torn newspaper, several Cheerios, and a doll littered the stairs, and I paused on my way down to retrieve them all laboriously, though it was much too late for neatness to help me at all. En route to the kitchen I read the scrap of newsprint. “Martinique. A prisoner locked in his cell was the sole survivor of an earthquake in the village of –” The rest was missing. But what a neat little paradox. It suggested something profoundly true about both liberty and bondage, and I greatly wished I had the wisdom to see
what it was. Because for a long time now the concept of prison had come to seem central to my whole life. That was why, the day Ross left, I helped him pack.

“Why not? I’m not your jailer.”

He looked at me with bitter annoyance. “You’re supposed to be crying. As usual. Or yelling and cursing. Not folding my goddam shirts. Or is this just another way of cutting me up?”

“Don’t. I’m trying to get it across that I know I have no right to try hanging onto you by force. Do you want this old brown sweater?”

“Well, I have no right to walk out on you, but I’m doing it.”

“Will you get it through your head I’m not blaming you.”

“I’ll send you money at the end of the week. And regularly after that. Forward all the bills to me at the office. If Mother calls, tell her anything you like.”

“That will be the day.”

“Why not. Here’s the chance you’ve been waiting for all these years.”

Suddenly I yawned. This new pregnancy caused spells of acute sleepiness that overtook me at the most unlikely moments. He immediately yawned too. Then he said, “Sorry. I know damn well I’m the one that’s failed here. You’re no more to blame than the cat is for being a cat. Better say nothing yet to Mother. God, I’m so tired. I feel as if I hadn’t slept for years.”

“Well, you haven’t, much.”

“You despise me. That’s why I have to get out.”

“Don’t forget your antacid pills.”

“I won’t.”

“Where will you stay – with Randy and Jill?”

“No.” He cleared his throat. “One of the girls in the office – she shares a house with some people on Prince John Street. It’s right near work. I can have a room there for practically nothing.”

“Which girl?”

“Larine.”

“Oh. I see.” What I saw, with painful clarity, was that our love might survive in some form for a long time yet, but our friendship had taken a damaging blow.

T
he kitchen window framed a frowning grey sky. I crumpled up the torn bit of newspaper and shot it into the garbage tin. Was that prisoner’s survival a victory or a defeat? Was freedom actually a kind of prison, and vice versa? But questions like these could easily drive someone in my position completely around the twist, and what good would that do me or anyone else?

I began to stack the dishwasher, sternly forbidding myself to cry. Outside a pallid gleam of sun was now trying to melt honeycomb holes in yesterday’s snow. The skinny black squirrel that lived in our back-yard maple left deep pits as he hopped across to June’s patio for the crusts her kids threw out. He scampered up the tree, whisking his tail jauntily. I stared at him so intently I could almost count his fleas.

Ah, Christ, that my love were in my arms, I thought. If only there were some way back for Ross and me to those sunny, blissful afternoons in his narrow student bed. O western wind, when wilt thou blow? Never, kid. Never again.

The phone trilled and I snatched it up on the first ring. It had to be Ross.

“Hello?”

The words at the other end of the line were so coldly and deliberately obscene that at first I couldn’t take in their meaning at all. Only after the caller hung up did I recognize the voice. It was Lynne Reilly, the conservationist. She mentioned her husband. She also
advised me to get stuffed, among other fanciful variations. Suddenly I burst out laughing as if a joke of cosmic dimensions had been revealed, beautifully timed, and gloriously, tragically funny.

W
ith the kids glued to
Sesame Street,
I went down to the basement for the daily diaper-folding and set about it, trying to ignore the pain like a stab wound in my lower back. It nagged until I dragged over a chair to finish the job sitting down. But nothing would help me much, I realized grimly, until I came to grips with June’s question – “What are you going to do about that guy?” – instead of moaning over the snows of yesteryear, or shaking with insane laughter because life was a joke. After five months of passive waiting, it was high time I came up with some kind of action. Unfortunately, the things I wanted to do were all illegal, or immoral, or both. That left only the things I didn’t want to do, like marrying Jeff. No need to waste time analysing that decision; it was final. But how could I
reach
Ross? Between us, like some bloody human traffic-jam, stood not only his mother and our kids, born and unborn, but Larine. It was hard to say which was the most threatening of them, except that her Monday visit had left me inclined to take away Edwina’s prize for first place.

No, on points, of course, the real opponent had to be Larine, and not just because he was sleeping with her instead of with me. That pale face materialized in my mind’s eye: receding chin, small, fishlike mouth, nose sharp as if whittled with a Scout knife. She was far from beautiful, but that was precisely the threat. She was pathetic with her thin little arms, her pale hair, and her tiny breasts. She made Ross feel strong. Ripe, rosy, big, masterful, I made him feel weak. That was a huge tactical disadvantage, and I knew it. But how could I overcome? Obscene phone calls? Blackmailing letters?
A punch in the mouth? None of these had much real appeal, except maybe the last. Anyhow, I had little confidence in planned campaigns. The last time I tried to use strategy to lure Ross back home, the attempt could not be called a success.

Of course, seduction was perhaps a bit obvious as tactics go; but it seemed to me worth a try. At that point I wasn’t breastfeeding anybody, and hadn’t yet reached anything like my present massive size. Consequently I felt quite capable of seducing pretty well anyone, given a reasonable chance. So one evening when I knew he was coming over, I put the kids to bed early, bribed with bottles of sweetened juice, and took a long, leisurely bath before putting on the long blue gown he liked. My newly washed hair smelled of sandalwood. I put a bottle of his favourite hock in the fridge, and a stack of Nana Mouskouri ballads on the stereo. He was late, so I had time for a refreshing little catnap before his key rattled in the door.