Losing It (4 page)

“Anything?” Julia asked when Bob stepped back into the house, an old, solid, respectable home that Bob had bought with his first wife, Stephanie, when he’d landed tenure. He had loved the solemn bearing of it then, but it was dark on sombre days. The windows were original, with diamond-shaped panes set in lead. Bob was stiff from the night of bad sleep. He turned back into the hall and suffered a moment’s awareness of how closed-in the place made him feel. Though Julia had managed her best with it before the baby – she’d done over the living room and had had a wall taken out upstairs to open up the master bedroom – it reeked of Stephanie still. Her mirror in the hall, her wallpaper with the iris pattern in the den, her hand-stencilled border linking room to room.

“I’m just about off,” Bob said. His briefcase was right there in the hall beside his packed bag and he knelt to click it open quickly and put his package inside. But his fingers fumbled with the combination. Calm down, he thought, and he tried to breathe deeply. He put the package and the rest of the mail on the oak floor to give the lock his proper attention. But Matthew erupted from the kitchen pulling a thumpy plastic elephant that scattered the mail.

“Shit!” Bob roared and the boy flooded into tears, ran back to Julia, who hugged him quickly, smoothed his brown curls.

“Bob
,” she said softly, but with an edge so that he understood perfectly.

The taxi pulled up in the driveway and honked. Bob opened the case, retrieved the package from the floor, put it inside and snapped the lid shut again. “I’m sorry,” he said, straightening. “I’m sorry, Matthew.” He nuzzled the boy’s neck. Matthew kept his face buried in Julia’s front. “I
wish
I didn’t have to go,”
Bob said, and kissed Julia on the cheek, nuzzled her earlobe. He felt a wave of tenderness for her as she stood in her frayed yellow sweatsuit, the sleep still in her warm brown eyes, her blonde hair, not natural any more, but the colouring suited her, wisps tucked behind one ear and straying over the other – a surge of love and appreciation for her beauty. Little as she tried, she was still striking.

She turned for a proper kiss but the taxi honked again and Bob had already stepped away to pick up the rest of his luggage.

“Hey,” she said at the door. Bob was halfway down the steps but stopped, took three strides back to her, and kissed her on the mouth.

“I wish you could go with me,” he said. His voice was gentle and deep, his eyes soft with what he knew was a look of self-mocking, a sense of the absurdities of the world and his own position. “Next time,” he said and kissed her again.

“You’ll get lipstick,” she said and wet her thumb, rubbed it off his lips.

It wasn’t a long ride to the airport. The route skirted the university and along the Rideau Canal. Ottawa was subdued, the colours muted and wet, the sky choked with gnarly clouds and the vague threat of winter, a dull chill, a starkness where the leaves had left the trees, the sudden thickness of people’s clothing. The roads were congested with workaday government and high-tech types on their way in for nine o’clock. Bob studied their faces: doomed-looking, numb-eyed men and women clutching their coffee cups, rolling forward a few feet then stopping, their shoulders hunched already, backs aching.

The taxi driver said the forecast was for rain then and Bob made an appropriate reply, his face composed, as if there were
no special package in his briefcase. As if he hadn’t ordered it from an Internet company five weeks ago and conducted a detailed correspondence to tack down his measurements – hip point to hip point, belly button to base of the spine, the average size of his penis and testicles (measured in bath water, resting) – his skin colour (porcelain-beige, pale), his pubic-hair type (basic black, mince, but with traces of heather-brown). Bob asked, “Does your business pick up in the rain?” and the driver told him all about it. It wasn’t such a simple thing. It depended on what type of rain it was, what time of day, what season. A really hard rain in the morning in the summer might mean that people decide to call a cab to get to work, or they might just stay home. A light rain in January that made everything icy slick …

“Yes,” Bob said, following him and not following.

“All I know, the really heavy rain, the traffic is
crap
,” the driver said, and Bob nodded in solidarity.

“We should all stay home in a heavy rain,” Bob said. “Stay home and take taxis!”

She was waiting for him by the ticket counter. It had all been arranged, and yet when she stood up he felt giddy and a new sense of awe. She was tall and wiry and womanly and twenty-one, in black hip-hugging pants that twenty-one-year-olds used to wear when Bob was twenty-one. With flared legs and rounded, pocketless bottoms and even damn near the same ridiculous cloggy skyscraper shoes from the olden days. And her maroon leather jacket was open to reveal a clingy black top several sizes too small. Nobody could get away with clothes like that. Except if you were twenty-one and immortal.

“Professor Sterling,” she said, stepping towards him. She had sunglasses tipped high on her head, holding back her
shoulder-length black satin hair. She looked like she belonged in a glossy magazine, a certain kind of immortal of the instant. But more than that, Bob knew this girl had an intensely intriguing spirit. She was Sienna Chu, half-Chinese, half-Irish, and her eyes were ever-so-slightly crossed so Bob couldn’t tell if she was looking directly at him or away.

“Please, call me Bob. Everyone in the department calls me Bob.” He touched her arm briefly, put his briefcase down – he was dragging his main luggage behind him on little wheels. “Well, isn’t this marvellous!” he exclaimed, gesturing vaguely so that he might mean the occasion, the day, the airport, or perhaps just life in general.

“I am so excited! I’ve never been to a Poe conference before.” She blushed, it was endearing, and she had no further need to be endearing, he was already teetering on the edge of total endearment.

“Where’s your ticket, Sienna?”

Helen in the English-department office had booked her into economy, which was ludicrous. Bob marched her straight to the booth to upgrade her to business class. “Some things in life are not worth stinting on,” he said. “If we’re going to die a ragged, awful, cruel death, then it should be in great comfort, with plenty of leg room, a champagne glass at our lips, and smart, good-looking attendants to look after our every whim.”

Bob waited for her reaction, but she apparently chose not to react, looked away instead like a princess who doesn’t have to listen if she doesn’t want to. But she did let Bob pay the difference, then take her to the restaurant to buy her a proper breakfast: two eggs and sausage, toast, hash browns, coffee. “You can’t trust the food on the plane,” he said. “
Even
in business class. Alcohol, certainly, but I have a friend in catering and the stories he tells me!” She gobbled down her food like a starving
child. He tried not to stare at the soft taper of her fingers, the smooth heaven of her throat.

“They say the same about residence food,” she said.

“Don’t get me started on residence food!” he exclaimed, too loud. People looked at them from other tables. But he couldn’t help it, he was utterly alive, he felt like shouting. “Don’t get me started,” he repeated in a more normal voice. “I have seen them taking the bodies out at night. Poor, anonymous freshmen who paid the ultimate price for coveting the custard pie. It’s scandalous, there’s been a cover-up for years. The parents are bought off by the multinational that owns every college catering company in the Western world!” He was babbling but couldn’t help himself.

“No wonder you like Poe so much,” she said, and pulled out the conference brochure. “I
really
want to hear Solinger on Poe’s concept of women,” she said.

“Oh, Poe and his women.
Don’t
get me started!” Bob said. But it was too late, he was already started. There was Eliza Poe, Poe’s actress mother, who outshone her shiftless husband so badly and died so young, penniless, a charity case after having played more than three hundred parts. And Poe’s wife and cousin, Virginia –
Sissy –
fourteen when they married, who lingered for years on her deathbed, the relentless cough of the white plague, tuberculosis, her skin pale, deathly beautiful, tinted with night sweats, too pink in pallor. The poor dear, saddled with Poe, a dead-poor, luckless, mercurial poet, scathing critic, inventor of the detective story, author of all those cryptic tales, wildly ambitious, jealous, driven, haunted, alcoholic, unstable, brilliant, morose, half-starved, bitter, possibly mad.

“Curiously,” Bob said, glancing at his watch – he didn’t want to miss the flight, and giddy as he was he could see himself
doing it – “Curiously enough, one time Poe
almost
got a government job. It was as if the gods were playing with him. Prominent writers used to get cushy jobs back then –”

“Yes, you said,” Sienna cut in. “I remember you mentioned this in class.”

“Did I?” Bob asked. “Yes, probably. My God, the old professor has started repeating himself.”

She might have interjected something about him not really being old, but instead she said, “His name was actually published for the post, wasn’t it?”

“Yes! Well, it was
Pogue
, under the list of new appointments, and Poe inquired and was apparently told the name was his, garbled by the press. He was all set for the swearing-in.
At last, a government job!
He waited and waited …”

“Should we get going, Professor Sterling?” Sienna asked.
“Bob
, I mean.”

“Yes, we should,” Bob said, but stayed a moment more just to look at her. Then while they were walking to the departures gate they passed a mirrored wall at which Bob couldn’t help glancing. He was struck, as he had been several times lately, by a feeling of being an impostor, but quite a good one: solid-looking, squarish, fleshy, yes, but tanned, too, and prosperous and well turned out. She was gorgeous, a real head-turner. But he too had a presence, didn’t look hopelessly drowned beside her.

There was an annoying delay in the customs line-up which Bob hadn’t figured on. Being Canadian, he found it hard to consider the United States an entirely foreign country, and he’d forgotten about this small matter. Time really was pressing now, so he sent Sienna into another line down the row. Then he waited patiently while a young woman with an English accent and seven rings in her cheek showed her passport, answered one
question, then was let through. She was followed by a raggedy, intense man with a sickly pale face and dust on his jacket who squinted at the customs officer like a known criminal, also said only a few words, and was similarly waved through.

“Next!” the customs officer said, staring at Bob. He pulled his luggage up to the yellow line, stood with his briefcase under his arm.

“Name?”

“Uh, Bob Sterling.
Professor
Bob Sterling.”

“From?”

“From here. From, uh, Ottawa.”

“Destination?”

“New York City.”

“Purpose of trip?”

“Oh, uh -” Bob couldn’t seem to get the rattle out of his voice. He felt suddenly and completely guilty. “I’m going to New York for the Poe conference at Columbia University.” Then he added, “Edgar Allan Poe. The writer.”

“You’ll be there for how long?”

“What’s today, Friday? Till Sunday.” That was better. His voice sounded more normal. The customs officer was a plain-looking woman, her uniform puffed-out and sexless, her face quite blank: pale blue eyes behind wispy brown lashes. In her identity-tag photo she looked as if she was being busted for drug possession. Rebecca Williams.

“Do you have anything to declare?” It was a standard question, and it may have been the way she ran all the words together that made Bob pause to consider that, given his age and stage and position, perhaps he had, or at least ought to have, things to declare. She didn’t mean it in a philosophical way, of course, and he realized it nearly right away, but for an instant he tried to think what he could possibly say to excuse
himself, as if she had seen into his soul and was demanding some sort of justification or analysis.