Keeping Things Whole (17 page)

The rank humidity of our home life was suddenly washed away by clean lake breezes. Immediately my shoulders rolled back and the top of my skull rose an inch or two. And I was fully aware of the flesh coming toward me. “Saf. Great to see you.” I completed the hug she offered. Would you rather I pretend my fingers didn't notice the absence of anything beneath her sarong?

Bryan, shirtless in a pair of cargo shorts, greeted me with, “Ant, beer?” while holding out a cold bottle. Oh heavens.

“Bryan, thanks for having us up. Actually I'd love a dip before anything. I'm hotter than hell.”

“Why do you think we have a dock?” He tilted the bottle neck my way a second time. “The cottage wet bar.”

“Just a swim for now, thanks.”

Kate and I exchanged another pair of pinched looks as we hauled our luggage out of the trunk. Foolishly I reached for her heaviest bag. “I'll get that.”

“Not when I've already got it you won't.”

A cottage on Labour Day weekend was indeed the worst scenario possible to try life without drink. An increased exposure to nature minus work minus Windsor pollution equals drinking time. My industry runs on one slogan: You can always feel better than you do. By the time we had been for a swim and unpacked a little, we had a cocktail to refuse for the cottage tour. Soon after that we were declining a sun-downing gin while supper was grilled. When a salad bowl and a platter of steaks were passed around, we had to fight off some chilled rosé.

“Didn't Kate tell you we're Mormons now?” Once again I tried to dodge a bottle and a pair of eyebrows titled my way. “Actually, we thought we'd start a little cleansing program up here. Clean air, clean blood. But pour away for yourselves. And here's a little thank-you present for later.” The sack of weed I handed Bryan could have liquefied their skeletons and spilled their lungs out onto the floor like newborn puppies. “We couldn't arrive without a gift.”

Kate's failure to engage in conversation with anyone gave me hope. Perhaps that summer meal was just the temptation she needed. Was she ready for years without booze? Was she going to pack away our Riedel glasses and decanter to reach instead for sippy cups? Her LSAT score was in the nineties. Could she even bring herself to say
sippy cup
? How could she go from scheduling Brazilian waxes to scheduling play dates? Suddenly King Midas became our sommelier, muttering
Be careful what you wish for
as he poured. I wanted Kate to be Kate until she suddenly accepted a glass of wine.

“All right, just a taste,” she said as Bryan tilted his sweat-beaded bottle once again.

“Triumph!” Bryan half-yelled, splashing more than a taste into my beloved's glass. “Antony?”

“I'll just share with Kate. No sense dirtying a second glass.”

“Suit yourself,” he replied, smiling to the ladies on either side of him.

Kate didn't meet my eye.

Okay, sure, a few sips of wine wouldn't really 'tard a fetus. An entire glass of wine was nothing compared to the total deletion I claimed to advocate, but this public bait and switch was the ugliest thing I had ever seen Kate do. There, just once, I got religion and saw the wine for blood. As the Spanish say, only those we love can break our hearts.

Without drugs or love (excuse the redundancy), I suddenly couldn't stand the fake lawyer chat about hypothetical travel and dream homes of the future, all in a cottage paid for by Mommy and Daddy. When Kate took her second sip of wine I excused myself by saying I'd prefer a cup of the stars and headed to the lake.

Supine on the dock, dark water lapped steadily beyond my feet and weathered boards supported my back. A starry northern sky above—all that ragged, stellar dust hanging there whether I wanted it or not. Finally the inky lake water read me a list of options.

1. Leave now. Take the slap you were oh so purposefully delivered, hop in your car, and abandon the bitch to the company she has clearly chosen. Here was the one time I could squeal off without worrying about whether her pills were still in a bag in the car. I could have moved out of our apartment over the rest of the weekend while she tramped her way back with her boozy pals.

2. Smile and encourage her to drink and smoke with abandon. Get the party on and drown Cletus the fetus in shiraz for all I cared.

3. Walk back into the cottage and guzzle wine. Be a dragon of smoke. What's good for the goose…

4. Cry into her hair.

Every star above me was a taunt. Romeo and Juliet, the “star-crossed lovers.” No single fight or bout of loneliness can instantly make a privileged Westerner believe in fate, in a path pre-written for you in the stars, but on
Labour Day
weekend the stars can do one hell of a job showing you what's beyond your control when your chick's up the pole. Imagine the resentment of every atrocity-fucked African when they stare up at the stars. What put the rich, not them, in the land of free education and drinking water? Even the dock beneath my back reminded me of how powerless I was. My long, straight body lay out on the long, straight dock, yet these brief lines couldn't survive four seasons of the water's ebb and flow. Lying in the dark, it was easy to picture myself from above, see myself as some kind of public sculpture. At the shoreline, a tasteful little placard would announce my title:
Brief Imposition (aka Fatherhood)
.

Sadly, foolishly, I did nothing that night save wait. Waiting can be the cancer of relationships. You hope that more time will improve your situation, not worsen it. Really, though, you'd be better to attack your problems with the knife and/or chemo. Cut it out. Carpet-bomb. Take no prisoners. And if you're going to do chemo, best have some of Canada's finest on hand to soothe the bod and restore the appetites.

To my surprise, when I finally returned to the cottage it was already quiet. No braying laughter or slurred conversation greeted me. No music thumped in the dark night. The only lights were a fluorescent stove light in the kitchen and a single candle burning on one enclosed porch. I was just another dumb moth to a candle.

Kate sat in the corner of a couch with her legs curled up. Even in the smudged candlelight I knew exactly what each side of her ribs would feel like, the closer side scrunched down a little, the farther reaching up. She did look at me.

“So what's going on?” I asked.

“They found us so fascinating they went to bed early.”

“And us?” I held out my hand.

“Okay.”

Was that love or had we slipped into the lethal relationship stage of being each other's sleeping pill? Did she want me or just a warm body and strong arms?

As I bent to blow out the candle, I saw her wine glass beside it. She'd either barely touched what Bryan had poured her or had other glasses and drank this one down to a comparable level. My delay there at the candle meant I was behind her as we climbed the stairs. Only I grinned as we overheard the rhythmic creak of Bryan and Safaa's bed. In our bed, crisis or no crisis, there was the cant of her hips, that harp I couldn't see or feel without my memory playing its music, without familiar plucks and dives already trembling in my hands. Her warm back against my chest. The smooth backs of her firm legs.

“Don't.”

Seconds after I let out my sexless sigh, that father's deflating hiss, we both heard small feet padding lightly down the hall—Safaa's second, telltale trip to the bathroom. This overheard mark of sex in a northern bedroom unavoidably took chaste Kate and me back to a story of hers from when she was seventeen. We heard Safaa's movements and thought of a younger Kate's whether we wanted to or not. So deep and pure was our dysfunctional silence that we even heard Saf lowering the toilet seat after the bathroom door had swung closed.

Kate, not I, had previously trained us in the kind of forensic urological listening we then couldn't help but do. Informed, assertive Kate had been on the pill since she was sixteen. “Don't let me fall asleep,” she had told me during one of our early post-coital dazes, later explaining that to avoid urinary tract infection every woman should, as the doctors say, “void” after intercourse to rinse unsterile ejaculate out with sterile urine. In the trajectory of a relationship, that early clarification later became a mild complaint. “I wish I could be the one to come then snore for a change,” she'd say, rising in our dark then marching down the hall. On early dates, when we were all wandering hands, a bottle, a jay, and some good music prompted her to tell me a story which aroused as much as it surprised.

“The summer I turned seventeen my friend Emma and I were dating these guys in a band.”

“A
band
? You mean a get-laid team.”

“Generations of screaming women can't be wrong about the six-stringed dick.” She flashed me her hundred-dime smile before continuing. “Our guys worked at one of the Orillia resorts for the summer.”

“Oh no.”

“Oh yes. We'd drive up on a weekend night. One of her parents' cars or my mom's, even her grandma's a couple of times.”

“Something tells me more than just cars are going to get pooled here.”

“Chris and Matt had a third roommate, Dan, and soon we were going up with his girl too, Becca. They worked nights, so there wasn't a whole lot of time with the drive back. We'd get there, have a little smoke, spin some music, and get busy. But this was an employee's bunkhouse. When I say roommates, I mean
room
mates, not housemates. The first time it was just Emma and me, two couples at two ends of a long messy room, plenty to hear and some action you could see if you wanted to. But when Beck started coming up, that made three busy beds.

“It never did become full-blown group sex. Those single beds were like rafts, and no one swam across. If we'd been older, someone might've. I might've. But then again, if we'd been older we would never have started off in the same room like that.

“The real orgy was sound. They were all musicians. Only work, movies, or fucking could keep a guitar or drumsticks out of their hands for two hours. Played with each other and against each other. At night, we got it in both ears. If you heard one spank, you'd soon hear a second, then feel a third. Call and pink answer. Gender expectations had never been so clear. They wanted us to moan, scream, whinny. The sex wasn't really raunchier, just more showy. Every BJ required a mane of tossed hair. It could seem guy-driven, but the more they got the room going, the more likely each of them was to drop out of the race.”

“Ah, seventeen.”

“Exactly. We heard who came, who was left unfinished, who had trouble—”

“Making the caged bird sing?”

“Or so it seemed. We heard the big decisions, but not all the little ones. Who was willing to bust his or her knees on the bare wooden floor, who got nasty near the end, who preferred—or at least got—commands, not invitations. But you could also hear what you weren't hearing. You'd catch the end of a whisper or hear frustration in the groans. Have you ever been in a group? It's not so much different as there's just more of it. Like driving a bigger car.

“All that sound—yours, his, hers, theirs—then just the scurry of a whisper. Later of course there would be laughs, jokes between beds. But what was being whispered in that shared dark? Eventually Em or I would have to break the darkness to head off to the can. Without a word, one night was all that was necessary to clarify who was on the pill and who wasn't. At least Dan the rubber man lasted the longest.

“Those car rides up and back, they were also their own little room. What we hadn't seen or heard in the bunkroom came out later in the car.”

“Post-game analysis?”

“Endless. TSN turning points. Locker-room interviews. If one of us got a finger in the bonus tunnel one night, then next week the other two would. But the dirtiest talk was on the way up, not back, the gals thinking, not just recounting. This was before porn was everywhere. Driving in the dark, our itchy knees all angled in the same direction, we said everything without ever saying that the girl talk was becoming the real sex. All of that goading, prying, magnetic talk. Each of us learning what we wanted, what we were getting, and what we weren't. The guys thought they were getting it delivered, sex as easy as pizza. Really they were just finishing what we had already started in the car, putting what we'd made into the communal oven.

“There were three beds, one at each end and one in the middle of a long wall. That bed in the middle was the limelight. You got watched from both ends. Tit city. Again, would this have been possible at any age but seventeen? Originally the middle was Emma's bed. We rarely saw her on her back. Watching her one night, I whispered into Matt's ear that I wanted us to have that bed next week. Make it happen. On the drive back, I told the girls we should start rotating beds, that each couple should take a turn in the centre. Throughout all of this, Emma and I would always have to march off to pee, one of us walking down the hall, knowing the other heard us, felt us. The sopping sorority.”

Kate had driven me crazy first telling me all of this, good crazy. That story had been part of the sex in my apartment which had led to the love in my apartment then the everything in our apartment. Kate then and then and suddenly a chaste northern cottage. Silent and unable to sleep, each of us knew what Safaa was doing down the hall on her second trip to the bathroom. Kate cleared my hand off her hip. She wanted a warm chest zipped into her back but a eunuch's hips below. With a little curl and an abdominal shrug she let me know she didn't want my arm touching anything more sexual than her own. I was needed but not wanted—fatherhood.

You leave a relationship in stages. When the sex started to leave, at least one of us was bound to follow.

Back then, yes, I wanted
to undo the pregnancy. CTRL-Z that late pill or progesterone-immune sperm. Undo. Undo. Undo. A pregnancy most unplanned. Kate's indecision left us with the undead unborn. Gloria—and Trevor—had already schooled me in
un
s.

As Kate despondently started her last year of law school, cells and student debt accumulating, I did think of my paternal infection, of me trying to avoid a little usurper just like Trevor had. My elementary school drama with pea plants and photographed eyes wasn't going to let any of us forget the human-no-papa-going virus I carried in my genes. I still claim my motivations and methods were different from Trevor's, but of course an unplanned pregnancy is a binary. You're for or against, on the team or not. As our weary exhales burdened days then weeks, hugs were either squirmed out of or locked together with desperation. She cried so regularly during sex it became our new thing, another spill or taste. But she also resumed shutting the bathroom door to pee.

These are his eyes, aren't they?
When my science fair question had hit its mark, Gloria took some time to calm down then asked for a few days of ceasefire. “I can show you one thing, Ant, one more thing about him, and that's all I have for the rest of your life. But you should know you probably won't like what you see. Wait until Saturday, then this last piece is yours for the asking.”

She was right, it was indeed a
thing
she had to show me, a prop she had kept in the wings for more than a decade. Saturday was to be the opposite of Father's Day. You can have a thousand educated thoughts about gender, then in actual parenting, messy and constant parenting, you're repeatedly backed into one of a few messy corners. Will my daughter be another victim or, if not, pathologically selfish and manipulative? Will my son be another asshole taker or, equally unwelcome, a coward?

Wait until Saturday
. I'd learned by then that there was no point trying to whine or bargain once Mom had set rules, nothing to gain and dignity to be lost if I tried, so I sat it out. Concentrated at school. Kicked some (gr)ass on the soccer field. After school each day I was flagrantly good, but from a distance. Did homework quietly in my room. Proposed a meal rather than ask what was for supper. Single children of single moms, you've got to learn silence, its opportunities, its rewards, its respect. Silence is your coin.

Come Saturday morning she greeted me with four words, one of them as bright as these
Web
links
. “Eat your breakfast first.”
First
.

Breakfast dishes cleared from the kitchen table, she tried one last stall. She lifted a large manila envelope from off the top of the fridge and did her gentle but direct look into my eyes. “Antony, you've asked for information, however impolitely. I agree you deserve to know. But look outside. It's a sunny, spring day out there. This envelope is now yours and yours alone. Its contents will almost certainly upset you, and there's absolutely no reason why you have to open it now.”

She laid the envelope in the centre of the table. “I'll be around the house all day. Nothing you say will be wrong.”

I was twelve and had waited six or seven years for this. I wasn't about to go for a bike ride instead of opening that envelope. As soon as she was out of immediate earshot I shook out the meagre contents. Two photocopies slid free. The first was a copy of a smaller piece of paper. The copied edges of the notepaper were faint but uniform compared to the brief, scratchy handwriting it contained.
Here, take a look
.

The unwilling
led by the unqualified
doing the unnecessary
for the ungrateful.

No salutation. No date. No signature. And not Mom's handwriting in any way.

The second sheet was a photocopied article from an early 70s issue of
Time
magazine. Two photographs pinned down the columns of text. A master shot showed military caskets being loaded onto a giant jet in Vietnam. A detail shot showed a chalk inscription on the wooden lid of one casket. Some anonymous American soldier had scrawled this same indictment of
un
s, this litany of negation, on the casket of a fallen comrade.
The unwilling led by the unqualified doing the unnecessary for the ungrateful
. The Vietnam War in a sentence.

Boy-sponge, I absorbed every word. I had never read more quickly or with better retention. Antony, branded. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Dad, and the Word was Dad. I was immediately incapable of forgetting all those
un
s. And yet the copied article, not the note, kept bringing me back. The note was from Trevor, the article from Mom. She distracted me with history, allowed me to fixate on the context, not the kiss-off. This soldier's mantra of
un
s had been engraved on Zippo lighters and written out on helmets, ammunition cases, even rifle butts. No doubt some Saigon engraver's stall did a steady trade switching between one grunt's paean to freedom (
Death before dishonour
) and these
un
doings. You can
still find these engraved Zippos
for sale online, or at least you can find intentionally scuffed and faux-aged counterfeits. Oh, weBay.

Again, you wouldn't believe this in a novel. One night at the casino, smoky work a welcome distraction from September's should-it-stay-or-should-it-go debate with Kate, I saw this same slogan of uns printed on the T-shirts of half a dozen buzzcut American soldiers over for some post-Iraq whoop-up. Thirty years after soldiers wrote this little anti-poem against their government's war in Vietnam, the same government was now printing it
for
soldiers on tax-funded T-shirts. Government-funded, anti-government swag, the keeping-things-whole fashion line.

I'm running now like I was running there in Mom's kitchen, observing not confessing. Yes, my stomach went squirmy and my ears rang as I read Trevor's note. Alongside that sticky heat was a spreading thaw that pulled me out of myself. I could see my own neck, my skinny arms raising and lowering one page then the other, the back of my head twisting left then right. With the article, Mom had sewn me a net of history, knowing it would slow my fall but not prevent it. She'd also spared me going to her with questions and playing parental catch-up. I stood alone, obsessively rereading a copy of the note with which half my genes had tossed me aside while calling Gloria unqualified. And me ungrateful. At least this note of mine took months to write, not two seconds.

With a first, unplanned pregnancy, sure, a young Gloria would have started out unqualified. But she was a learner and a doer, Medea offstage long before she was Medea onstage. For a hippie who'd been in one protest march after another—US troops out! No nukes! Pro-choice NOW!!—raising another resource-consuming North American baby was/is certainly unnecessary. Ironic that most mothers would condemn me for putting what I want ahead of what a baby might want. Look at the selfishness of North American mothers putting what they want ahead of everything else. Go on, have two kids, have three. You love your kids, and love can't be bad, can it? Malthus, Schmalthus, right? There is no argument. There is only
I want
, so stop pretending we're any different. Gran, Gloria, Melissa and her sisters, me, Kate—we all said be honest about what you want.

The unwilling led by the unqualified doing the unnecessary for the ungrateful
. Family life in a sentence. If Gloria was the unqualified, that made me the ungrateful. Well, T-bone, we're all waiting to see about that.

How was I supposed to go to school on Monday after reading Trevor's rejection letter on Saturday? Do exponent homework? Watch cartoons? A man who had fled his homeland to avoid fighting in Vietnam had been as unwilling to raise children as he was to kill them. No half-assed poetry lesson in school would ever stick language to me like absent Trevor's note had. It took me years to fully appreciate that the one poem I'll never forget has an anonymous author, no fame sought or bestowed. From the start, Mom showed me it wasn't Trevor's phrase, just something else he borrowed. Then again, when the man was mostly just words to me, it was hard not to confuse
father
and
author
. That's another family curse I haven't stopped.

A kitchen table is as good a place as any to admit that half your genes come from an asshole. (Though with a laptop, you're probably not reading this at a kitchen table.) Mom didn't hear any shattering glass or slamming doors. No screaming. No crying. Eventually she came back with her own line ready. “That's the note the man who called himself Trevor Reynolds left me one afternoon after we'd discovered I was pregnant with you. Abortion was still quite daunting then, legally, and it certainly wasn't an option for me emotionally. I wanted you even when you were a possibility, even when he left, even when I realized who he was and wasn't.”

It was hard to look her in the eye, but for several reasons I didn't want to be looking down.

She pressed on. “You know the phrase
nature versus nurture
. Always remember that nature
and nurture
are like length and width: you can't have one without the other. There's no nature to see without some nurturing, and nothing to nurture without nature. Yes, you have his eyes, his cheekbones, probably his shoulders. But you're you, not him. You are becoming you—by choice, by experience, through education. Both your nature and your nurture are very, very different from his.”

I didn't last the weekend before I tore up that copy of Trevor's note and scattered the pieces into the Detroit River. But of course Gloria had expected that. (Encouraged it?) The photocopy showed the edges of an original note I hadn't yet seen. Eventually, I got
it
too.

FYI, manila envelopes are still called manila envelopes even though most of them are no longer made in Manila. How did they earn a global reputation for strong paper? By making it from hemp.