Fever (4 page)

And yet, sometimes they did stop. They would look at us with surprised expressions, then they would look at each other, and one of them might laugh in a strange, mirthless sort of way, or one of them might turn and walk away.

Gwen’s hasty marriage turned out badly. She divorced, then travelled, took interesting jobs that the rest of us envied her for, and married again. It was no more happily than the first time, but this man was rich, or at least his belongings, way of life and income surpassed our wildest childhood dreams, which consisted variously of owning a bicycle, wearing an evening gown, having a reversible plaid skirt, taking a holiday at a beach. I rarely see her anymore and when we do meet, we look at each other and have nothing to say. We share a world beyond and beneath words. Looking into her eyes I can tell that at night we must inhabit the same dream world, we must even dream the same dreams.

“You’re still my girl,” our father declared in the night to our crying mother, and in fact, he didn’t leave with Mrs. Markham or anyone else. He simply went to the city and got a job as a mechanic and lived as a bachelor in a rooming house. He bought himself a new car and if he drank or chased women, we never heard of it. Missing us, he finally returned.

Not wishing to dramatize my childhood, that was after all, full of trivial incidents and minor calamities, I said we were an ordinary family, but now, reflecting on that time, I see beneath our
surface ordinariness, something darker, much worse. Lives were shaped, twisted and thwarted. Hearts were broken. We don’t even have a family portrait. Not one. And from every single snapshot, one of us is missing.

The worst thing about the breakup of my marriage, the part I found the hardest to bear, even worse than the loss of my husband and first love, Lucas, was that it seemed to me that there was no justice. By this I meant that there was no one who would say, yes, you were badly treated, there was no one who would take my part and in my desperate need for support would say, whether it was true or not, that I was blameless. I no longer had any friends who were exclusively my own and even my mother, to whom I hadn’t been able to bring myself to talk at all about my divorce, could only watch me with puzzled eyes and no matter how she could see it hurt me, couldn’t stop herself from laughing and joking with my former husband if he phoned or came around on family business, because she liked him, everybody did, and I had told her of no reason to stop liking him.

But worse than the lack of support was that I could see that Lucas would go blithely on through his life and never accept any blame for any of the countless miseries he had inflicted on me, would never suffer for the suffering he had caused me, possibly would never even comprehend what he had done to me. And so I tried to carry on as if life could still go on, tried to swallow the
knowledge that seemed unavoidable to me, that in human life there is no justice.

After our divorce I kept on at my job, our children finished high school and moved into their own places, I got over my depression, sold the house and moved to a smaller one, and eventually I met and married Gary. Gary hadn’t been married before, which was a blessing it seemed to me, because I was lugging around enough emotional baggage from my first marriage that I did not then expect ever to get rid of, and I knew our marriage would have been impossible if Gary too, had been carrying a burden of unresolved problems and unfinished arguments. Not to mention the load of pain, so heavy that no matter how I thought I had subdued it, and in most practical ways actually had, it still emerged in my dreams.

In the first years of my marriage to Gary I would dream of Lucas night after night for stretches of time that seemed endless. I wouldn’t dare speak of it to Gary. Waking in the mornings and catching a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror, seeing a pale, anxious face, eyes still sunk in the dreaming’s darkness, I’d say to the face in the mirror, ridiculous. You’ll get over this, one of these days you’ll put that internal feeler out to test for the pain and the pain won’t be there, and no matter how you poke and prod, you won’t be able to find it. Then you’ll be free. Eventually your life will be new again.

But it wasn’t just the dreaming. I couldn’t keep my mind off Lucas, not even after Gary and I moved into a big apartment overlooking the wide treed park that stretched along the riverbank. We could see from our windows the far bank billowed green with trees that rose up to meet the grey stone of the university buildings, a view radically different from the one Lucas and I had seen from the windows of our suburban house, of a street of
similar houses, and another street behind it much the same and beyond that, more streets, more small, clean houses.

Gary would make some remark, or he would touch me, or I would pick up something so ordinary as a can opener and I wouldn’t be married to him anymore, steeped in the gentle ambiance of our life together, but sucked back into the passion of my marriage with Lucas. In those moments the very texture of the air in our marital home surrounded me. I saw the brocade gleam of the new sofa we bought that we both loved but couldn’t afford, I saw again the way his shoulders rounded, grew comfortable when he was deep in a book, and the creased denims and faded blue air force shirts he always wore at home that would forever spell masculinity for me. I could even smell his skin.

These were not merely memories, they were the texture of my soul made evident to me. And it occurs to me that marriage perhaps, is soul-making, and if it is so, then my soul is made of love and hatred and anguish in equal parts, and I have Lucas to thank for that. And this, it pains me to say, leaves Gary no place in this soul of mine, although he would be glad, because Gary disowns soul, which is probably why I found it possible to marry him.

I couldn’t stop feeling I was living in the middle of two marriages at the same time, an internal and an external one, and at any moment the internal one might be the more real to me. It continued to be the one on which I spent the most emotional energy, although I don’t think that Gary ever really noticed, much less understood why I suddenly tossed down the paper as we sat together reading by lamplight in the evenings with the curtains open so we could see the lights of the university shining steady gold across the river from us, beneath the colder silver light of the stars.

I couldn’t call them memories because they were as real to me as
the first time they happened and I was lost in them again. One minute I would be sitting by Gary reading the paper with my feet up on the shared footstool, dimly aware of the subdued roar of traffic far below our apartment, and the next I would be back in Lucas’s and my house reliving some episode from our marriage: the night he got so drunk at a party that he sat on the floor in our living room in front of everybody and necked with the visiting very pretty niece of one of our neighbours, who didn’t know who he was. While I danced in the dining room with neighbours’ husbands and pretended I thought it amusing, as the chasm that was becoming familiar inside my abdomen grew deeper and blacker, even while I smiled. Coming back to the present with an inner gasp, I would toss aside the paper and jump up, hurry to the kitchen and make coffee and occupy myself by polishing the fridge and stove while I waited for it to perk.

Lucas’s chief crime against me was that he was unfaithful, although I don’t believe I ever told my mother that. I was in such turmoil for those three or so years it took to make the decision to divorce, to do it, and then to recover from the immediate shock and misery, that even though her pleasantries with my former husband cut me to the quick and made me confirm my conclusion that there is no justice, I still couldn’t bring myself to talk to her about what he had done to me. So perhaps indeed she did go to her grave wondering what had broken up her only daughter’s marriage. Maybe she even blamed me.

Lucas’s infidelities were legion, they were probably dull, no doubt they were banal and silly too, but they were no less painful to me for all that. They began in the first six months of our marriage and they went on year after year, growing more reckless and more pointedly open while, although with wifely intuition I suspected them as soon as they began, I refused to acknowledge what was happening, even to myself. And went on
refusing year after year. Ridiculous, I’d tell myself in my new life, watching the food processor spin my cake batter around. I could even smile wryly at myself, for the greatest mystery continued to be not why he did it over and over again, but why I chose not to know, why I refused to admit his affairs to myself even secretly, even in the face of the most blatant evidence.

And yet, occasionally, I remember, I would tempt fate. One Sunday Lucas and I and another couple had taken our kids tobogganing and when we returned to our house four of the five kids quickly threw off their outdoor clothes and rushed up the stairs to some computer game in Steven’s room. Michael, our youngest and Lucas’s favourite, was still struggling with a knot in his scarf. The other husband, Karl, hung up his parka and went into the bathroom. Only Florrie, Lucas, four-year-old Michael and I were left in the entryway, and knowing but not admitting that Florrie and Lucas were in the middle of an affair, I deliberately went ahead into the kitchen to begin making cocoa, leaving Michael behind with them as a witness perhaps, as my agent, for what I was fairly sure would happen as soon as I left Florrie and Lucas alone. It was a test, I suppose, of the accuracy of my intuition, or to see if Lucas would sink as low as I suspected he would.

A moment passed, then, as I’d been fairly sure would happen, Michael began to wail and came running to me where I stood waiting at the kitchen counter, and threw his arms around me. Lucas called him back in a voice I remember as surprised and chagrined. “Mikey, Mikey, what’s the matter,” but he didn’t follow him into the kitchen for another moment. But I knew, oh, I knew perfectly well, even as I held Michael to me and soothed him, exactly how his father holding Florrie and kissing her had frightened him. It’s a miracle the things kids know of treachery and cruelty.

Yet I went on calmly making cocoa and served it to all of them, Florrie too, and never once said to Lucas, stop having an affair with my friend, or even asked him if he was.

There must be two of me, I often thought, because even while I was steeped in that long-ago moment, suffused by my old misery and shame, I noticed when the cake batter was mixed, I poured it into a prepared pan, I set it in the pre-heated oven. Some part of me continued to do all those things, even as it did them then, when the phone rang and it was Lucas saying something had gone wrong with the car, it had stalled in downtown traffic and he’d be home late because he’d managed to find a mechanic who was willing to fix it then. I’d serve supper to Steven, Karen and Michael, supervise their homework, get them into bed, and all the while be imagining which woman Lucas was with and where and what they were doing, while the other person in me worried about the cost of Lucas’s imaginary repairs, which at that moment I believed to be real, and wondered if I should keep his supper hot since he’d be hungry from standing around for hours in a cold and gloomy garage.

Lucas, of course, having learned that his actions would go unchallenged, grew more and more reckless. He became cruel to me in everyday ways, he taunted me about my failings, he ridiculed my remarks. In public he claimed never to have said the words or held the opinions I had just quoted as his which he might have said to me as recently as breakfast of that same day. Time and time again he left me stumbling through the wreckage of my self-esteem. His affairs grew stupider and more pointless, the women younger, increasingly naïve. I chased them away when they came to our house hoping to see more of Lucas by becoming friends with me. One of them even came to me in tears to tell me she had slept with my husband and wanted me to forgive her.

He had, by this time, apart from our older mutual friends, a circle of younger friends of his own. I rarely had anything to do with them, because around me they were sullen and hostile, any other attitude toward me would have forced them to face the situation they were a part of and that they didn’t wish to admit to. So Lucas always saw them alone. I had become more and more isolated, I had no strength left for friendships of my own, and I finally began to realize that in all the world I had no allies. That was when I first began to muse on the nature of justice.

Eventually my self-delusion had to end. There was no great revelation, no conscious decision, the subject of Lucas’s infidelities simply leaked slowly into the open and then became a flood, unstoppable. But even after the pretence was over there could be no peace between us. I was too full of chaotic love and rage, simultaneous, inseparable, that paralyzed and silenced me, and Lucas, seeing at last the hopeless state our marriage had sunk into, could with relief leave the blame at my door and depart.

I read an article the other day, sitting across from Gary as he chatted on the phone with his sister in Edmonton—it was their weekly call and I envied them both that closeness and unquestioning affection—written by an American officer who had been a P.O.W. in Vietnam where he had been starved, beaten and tormented. The only wisdom that bewildered military man had been able to gain from those years of suffering was simply that life is not fair, that terrible things happen to some people whether they do anything to deserve them or not, and like Job, those victims can only wonder why and try to bear their fate. I felt a kind of amused sympathy for the man, that it took that much to shake him into wisdom, then was faintly ashamed of myself for equating our experiences.

These last few years were peaceful ones, the first in my adulthood that went on in a pleasant way day after day without
calamities, disasters, or even minor blow-ups to destroy them. I had almost forgotten about the kind of suffering most people go through day after day all their lives. And when I thought of Lucas, which was seldom, I could find almost no pain. Those unbidden moments from the past had stopped dragging me down into them, it was rarely anymore that I came back to my life with Gary with a sense of shock. I felt as though a cure was possible after all, as though I really might live a life that was new in more than appearance.

One day a letter came to me from Lucas. Gary handed it to me and waited while I nervously opened it. For years Lucas’s only communications had been waspish, complaining letters about the children. I had got so that I could barely bring myself to open them, and yet, in the name of our years together and our ineradicable, shared parenthood, could not prevent myself. But it had been a long time since his last letter and I didn’t even know where he was living when this one arrived.

As I read it I had to sit down. Gary listened to my few stumbling phrases of explanation, then tactfully went into the other room. I couldn’t stay seated though, I rose, put on my coat, stuffed the letter into my pocket, and went out to walk in the park under the tall, old poplars, through the rustling yellow leaves that lay scattered across the curving asphalt paths. I thrust my hands into my pockets and held tightly to the letter.

Lucas had written to ask my forgiveness. He had written to tell me that he was filled with remorse, tormented by it, for the way he had treated me and that while he didn’t blame me if I couldn’t forgive him, he wanted me to know how sorry he was.

Justice at last, I thought, and I threw back my head and opened my arms to embrace the trees, the park, the wide, swift river, the endless, burning blue of the fall sky.

In my initial wave of emotion I thought I had been released at
last, and all my old love for him came flowing over me, and tenderness for him, the one who was suffering now. This is too much, I thought,
this
I can’t bear, to be able to love him again when I had for so long allowed myself only hate.