Serial Monogamy (8 page)

D
uring the autumn that Al was absent from the house, I had to acclimatize myself to the horror that is alternating weekends. Every other Friday, I would pick up the girls from school, remove the half-eaten sandwiches and crumpled art projects from their backpacks to be replaced with nighties, toothbrushes and clean underwear, and remind them that Daddy would collect them before dinner. This is what we had agreed, with frigid civility. We tried to avoid making practical arrangements in front of the children, reminding each other when voices grew nasty or my tears began that we could not risk them seeing this kind of thing. Al took the girls one weeknight and every other weekend, but perhaps this was just temporary. He had said he wanted joint custody: I had pointed out he didn't have enough room in the apartment to keep the girls all week and was desperate at the idea they might one day encounter his girlfriend. My brother had told me I needed a
lawyer and provided several names. I hadn't called them yet and Al hadn't raised the possibility of divorce. Now that he had got out, he mainly tried to avoid more arguments. Occasionally, one of the girls would say she didn't want to go for the weekend. When pressed the children would always agree they wanted to see Daddy; they just did not want to sleep over at his apartment.

“Why?” I asked, uncertain that I wanted to hear the answer.

“It smells funny,” Anahita said. I instantly imagined the worst and felt my anger rising. What kind of smell? The smell of a new perfume? At my pleading, Al had promised that, for the time being at least, he would hide all signs of his student from the girls and I, thankfully, had never seen her. She was this invisible, unknown malignancy.

“What kind of smell?”

“Soapy. Like medicine.”

“Like medicine? It's probably just he cleans with a different kind of cleaner than Mummy is using. That's all, sweetie. Just a different cleaner.” I didn't know if I really believed that, but whatever it was, the place doesn't smell like her home.

“Yes, it smells,” agreed Goli, backing up her sister. “And Daddy buys the wrong kind of milk.”

“What kind does he buy?”

“He buys the blue one, the one that you always drink, and we drink the red one.”

Al was feeding six-year-olds skim milk. He never uses milk himself, takes his coffee black and doesn't eat cereal. Maybe the student was buying skim.

“Did you tell him it was the wrong kind?”

“Anny told him and he said to stop fussing.” Goli stared up at me. Her lower lip trembled.

“He said milk is milk,” Anahita added. “But you always say it's different and that kids should drink the one in the red box.”

“I'll tell him you need the right kind of milk. Tonight, I'll tell him when he comes, I promise.”

“Why can't he just stay here tonight?” Anahita wheedled.

“No, Ana, you know. We've talked about this. You need to see Daddy at his place.”

After they left, the house would be overcome by an unwelcome hush. In the quiet, I could hear an odd mechanical hum that I had never noticed before. It sounded ominous, as though some system were malfunctioning. I would hunt about for a bit and then realize it was only the fridge. The phone would ring and I would start up with fright. It was only a telemarketer. I swore at him and banged down the phone. I had never noticed the quietness of an empty house before; I mean, before Al, before the girls, I lived alone in a variety of houses and apartments and they never seemed empty. I was sometimes lonely, I wanted some larger life outside the confines of the small spaces I inhabited but I never felt uncomfortable in them.
Now, I would roam about, picking up a magazine and casting it aside, retrieving a stray pink sock from under the couch and finding myself in tears.

The days of those empty weekends were tolerable; they were just like my regular work days and I would keep working to fill them even if I was struggling with the novel I was supposed to complete that spring, uncertain how the characters might ever extract themselves from a disintegrating marriage. The nights were worse, much worse. I could barely tolerate myself or the house after dark. I tried to make sure I had something planned; sent out emails to every other single woman I knew seeing if she wanted to go to a movie Saturday night. Friday, I would usually just go to a mall, buy the girls too many Christmas presents or spend a long time in the bookstore browsing the self-help section, skimming through titles about infidelity and mid-life crisis. Sometimes, Becky would manage to book off from family responsibilities and we would have the luxury of an evening out together in a restaurant. It felt odd to be alone on a Saturday night without our children, strange like the empty house, but—as long as I didn't drink too much wine—less tear-jerkingly sad.

We tended to have long conversations in which Becky patiently allowed me to revisit old haunts again and again. “Al said we were never suited to each other. That we're too different.”

“I thought he said you were too alike.”

“He's said that too. He's not entirely consistent.”

Becky pondered the question and then offered, “I don't think you're all that alike. Al is very likeable and—”

“And I'm not?”

She laughed.

“Of course you're likeable, sweetie. I was just going to say that Al wants to make a good impression; I think he wants people to like him.”

“And I don't care whether people like me?”

“Well, you don't, Sharon. You are so wise and gentle with your characters but you can be really tough with real people. You're rude sometimes.”

Becky wasn't being cruel, just repeating our accepted wisdom; she was good cop, I was bad. Al charmed people; I got my hands dirty. I was rather proud of my status as the tough one in the crowd, the person who could be counted on to complain if service was slow or fire the neighbourhood teenager who was supposed to shovel the snow but missed the big storm.

“Al got himself in a bind this time. Any way he moved he was going to piss somebody off.”

“Yeah. Backed into a corner. He couldn't please both you and…what's her name again?”

“I don't believe I remember her name.”

Becky laughed again.

“Underneath his charm, there's a certain superiority…” she said, pensively.

“Oh yes.”

“So, underneath that there must be need. People who bother to be charming do it for a reason.”

Was it need? He certainly made himself interesting. He first seduced me with stories of the Iranian revolution, romantic and frightening tales that made him seem so heroic. Even though he was only a boy at the time, even though he isn't Muslim and his family eventually fled Iran, he described Tehran in those years as a tantalizing place, full of both promise and danger. By day, the city throbbed with heat, anger and displays of the Shah's military might, but by night the cool air was alive with forbidden cries of “Allahu Akbar.” In his push to create a modern society, the Shah had outlawed Islam, even forbidden the veil. His secret police were everywhere, but nobody could find let alone stop the people who cried their protests from the rooftops. I guess that story didn't turn out so well in the end, but Al just seemed to regret that pulsating moment of hope and fear, and it all sounded fabulously exotic compared to sneaking cigarettes in the girls' washroom at Halifax West High School. Al wanted my attention and he got it.

At some point in these conversations, I would usually remember my manners and ask after Becky. On one occasion she said she'd had a bad week; she had a paper to prepare for a conference and two of her boys got head lice, first one, then the other, so she had kids sent home from school two days running. She had spent two nights in a row washing and combing so she could send them back the next morning.

“They are so bloody hard to see. You'd think a doctor would be good at it, but David was no help at all, and he says the treatments often don't work. If we haven't got rid of them by the weekend, we'll just have to give the two of them buzz cuts.”

“At least with boys you can do that. When the girls got them, we had such a battle over it. Goli agreed to have her hair cut a bit shorter but Anahita refused. And she can be so stubborn and her hair is so thick for a little kid's. Al had a huge argument with her over it.” The girls are fraternal twins; Goli has my hair, fine and straw-coloured the way mine was when I was a child. She will probably go dirty blond when she's older too. Anahita's is blond too but already a bit darker, and wavy and thick. Picking lice out of it took forever.

“Yeah. Al told David that he must have spent hours brushing her hair when you guys had lice.”

Becky paused, realizing she had spoken out of turn. I suppose I had just assumed they weren't in touch; assumed if Al had fallen out of my life, he had also disappeared from the lives of my friends, that he was the guilty party and would be ostracized accordingly.

“When did he tell him that?” I asked.

“I guess they were talking about it this week.”

“Oh.” Really, what had I expected? That David would drop his squash partner on moral grounds?

“It's not true. I combed her hair. Al wouldn't go near either of them; he was disgusted by it.” He associated the
lice with filth and poverty and was appalled by the episode, despite my attempts to reassure him that all Canadian school kids get head lice at some point. I read somewhere it's something about the cold weather, they come back again every spring even stronger, although I have no idea if that's true.

“I guess maybe David misunderstood him or something,” Becky said, trying to brush the topic away.

“Maybe. More revisionist history. Playing the sensitive guy, the perfect dad, for the new girlfriend.”

“Let's talk about something else.”

“What else is there to talk about? I don't know how that bitch can live with herself, two small kids, like encouraging someone to abandon—”

“Sharon.” Becky's voice had a small warning note, pulling me back from the precipice. “You don't know she's encouraging him; it may be all his idea.”

“Then why is she going along with it?”

“She wants to be you, sweetheart. She wants to be the wife in the nice house with the kids. She's lonely and she's hoping and waiting…”

“I just think she's a bitch…”

“Sharon, use your imagination. Think what it must be like to be her.”

S
hay sat on the edge of the unmade bed idly flipping through the pages of a cookbook. Chocolate crème. Cabinet pudding. Charlotte russe. In the pictures, the desserts looked simultaneously airy and luscious but the recipes sounded rather complicated, and Shay had never been much of a cook. She sighed and put the book aside, thinking she really should be getting dressed.

It was ten o'clock and usually by this hour she was sitting at a reader's desk at the British Library. She would have managed to eat two slices of toast and pull on a pair of jeans and a sweater, even if she had left the bed unmade and her plate sitting in the sink with the dinner dishes from the night before. It was a mighty effort just to get out of the house, but her work was a tonic that provided her with direction and purpose. Except that, if she were honest with herself, she had to admit her research was boring her silly, and for the past few weeks she had often spent mornings in bed, crying intermittently. Sometimes
in the afternoons she had dragged herself into the library but sometimes she had stayed home and read crime novels. It wasn't so much that the pain of separation was any greater than it had been when she had first arrived in London three months previously, it was just that her work was not proving the all-consuming distraction it was supposed to be.

At first it had been fairly easy. There had been things she needed for the apartment; she had introduced herself and her project to the librarians; she had figured out the best route for getting to the library on the tube. “I just won't think about him,” she would announce to herself as she set off each morning to spend a day burrowing through letters and documents, gleaning little snippets of information from her reading, enough to convince herself she was making progress. She had been befriended by Alex, another graduate student who was working on some interminable project about French exiles during the Napoleonic Wars, and the two young women would take tea breaks together in the library cafeteria. The evenings were harder, but she'd signed up for yoga classes at a local studio to postpone the moment when she had to go home, heat up some macaroni and cheese in the apartment's kitchenette, walk around the neighbourhood a few times to clear her head, treat herself to a glossy magazine and a chocolate bar from the shop at the corner and then take to her bed. At least she could always sleep—long, deep, dreamless sleeps from which she awakened feeling dopey and dull.

So, she had plodded on, unhappy, lonely, yet progressing as she felt she ought. But it was November now; the little snippets did not seem to be adding up to anything while the evening walks were cold, dark and rainy. And then that week, on the Monday morning after an empty weekend, just as she was lying in bed telling herself she really would get up and out in good time for once, her neighbour had walked past her door going back upstairs. He must have forgotten something on his way to work and returned to retrieve it, but the very sound of his footsteps coming toward her had destroyed all her good intentions.

He was a shy, oversized and lumbering young man, who worked in some IT department somewhere and usually progressed heavily down the stairs from the third floor early each morning, serving as Shay's alarm clock as he passed by her door. Her cramped apartment was on the second floor of what had once been a modest single-family home. Their landlady lived on the ground floor, in the so-called garden flat that backed onto a small, dank yard.

It was an arrangement rather similar to the one Shay had enjoyed in her last Toronto apartment. She had lived on the third floor of an old house near the university. The sun had shone through her bedroom window there, just as it was shining that day in London; she had not bothered to lower the blind the night before, and a few weak rays reached her white duvet cover, awakening memories of lying in bed under fresh sheets in the daytime, and then the footstep on the stair…For the tiniest second, she actually
thought it was him. She was back in Toronto; she had left the side door open so he could slip down the alleyway and into the house without hanging about or ringing doorbells. He was climbing the back stairs, the ones that led to the apartments on the second and third floors. She was waiting at the top. In a minute he would be in her arms.

In Shay's admittedly limited experience, there were two very different kinds of loneliness. The first was the low, abstract ache she had often felt in her first years away from home, that undefined sense there was something more than this and that definite conviction it would be provided by a boyfriend, if only she could find one to her liking. The last one, an exotic creature who she had thought was a poet but turned out to be more interested in dope than in her, had taught her that there are worse things than being alone. After she ended that relationship, Shay had sunk back rather thankfully into the first kind of loneliness.

And then there was missing someone. And that was altogether different. It was sharp and fierce, it was a loss with a face and a name. It was a conviction there would never be another love like the one she had experienced in those afternoons, when he had whispered her name and kissed her eyelids. There would never be another who saw her so fully and came to her so completely, apparently needing her as much as she needed him. Even if she could find her way beyond this immediate grief, life without him seemed to offer only a dreary kind of compromise.

And so, she had spent the rest of that Monday morning in bed, and in the afternoon only managed a trip to Sainsbury's to buy frozen cheesecake and tandoori chips. Tuesday had been slightly better. This time, she had bought fresh vegetables and a chicken breast for dinner and wandered into a branch of Waterstones, where she convinced herself she could justify the purchase of a heavily illustrated cookbook dedicated to impracticably lavish Victorian recipes. Now here it was Wednesday. Ten a.m., according to the clock radio. She realized she was hungry. Time to eat some toast, get dressed, walk to the tube and get back to work.

Shay got off the bed, picked some clothes off the floor and put them on. In the kitchenette, she filled the kettle and popped bread in the toaster; once her meagre breakfast was ready, she put it on the messy table in the living room, plopped herself down and, looking for distraction, pulled a pamphlet toward her from the pile of scattered papers.

It was a thing she had discovered the previous week when she had ventured out to the Dickens Museum. After weeks at the library reading through Dickens' letters, or what little remained of them, the side trip to Bloomsbury felt like a distraction that could at least be considered work, although when she got there the museum only made her feel more sad. It was located in a house in Doughty Street where the writer had lived for a grand total of two years, but it was the only one of his houses left standing in contemporary London. His
residency dated to the happy, early years of his marriage; the museum seemed full of sorrowful reminders of fleeting halcyon days, and Shay was in the kind of mood to find parallels to her own situation at every turn.

She unenthusiastically toured the small rooms restored to the period, noting which pieces of furniture had actually belonged to Dickens himself. It was a month before Christmas and the whole place was already done up with wreaths and mistletoe and yards of red ribbon, which annoyed Shay all the more as she peered around the decorations into display cases stuffed with old letters, pens and the writer's toiletries. Before she left the museum, she ventured idly into the gift shop. She wouldn't dare buy him anything as corny as a Dickens coffee mug and besides, they had agreed, no communication. But perhaps she would find something to send home to her mother, some nice bit of English paraphernalia she could package off before Christmas. She picked up Dickens T-shirts and Dickens mousepads and put them down again before finally turning to the large selection of books, various editions of everything the author ever wrote.

Sandwiched among all the eight-hundred-page novels, she spotted the thinnest little pamphlet with staples holding its slender spine together. She picked it up just because it seemed oddly out of place. It appeared to be a cookbook written by somebody with the unlikely name of Lady Maria Clutterbuck and titled
What Shall We Have for Dinner?

Shay skimmed its few pages and found she had discovered a historical oddity: it was a book of menus, suggestions for meal planning for groups as small as two and as large as twenty. It paired turbot with shrimp sauce and fried oysters with a shoulder of mutton; it suggested serving sole, a filet of beef and pigeon pie to a party of six or seven; it called for such exotic dishes as minced collops, lark pie and lamb's head, and suggested finishing meals with sweet omelettes, jam pudding or toasted cheese. It seemed a fabulous insight into Victorian life, but it contained only a tiny handful of recipes, an odd selection of desserts and meats with scant instructions and fewer measurements. Who needed a book to tell you that you might serve apple pudding after a mutton stew, and how was one supposed to cook from this little text? Who had thought it was a good idea to publish it?

The back cover explained that Maria Clutterbuck was merely a comic pseudonym for Catherine Dickens, the writer's wife of twenty-two years and mother of his ten children. Catherine Dickens had thought this menu book a useful tool for the Victorian housewife, or perhaps Dickens himself had thought so, since it had been issued by his own publisher.

Shay purchased the pamphlet for only £3; she brought it home and that weekend, in between her crying jags, began contemplating Catherine's menus. Was the Swiss pudding a sweet reminder of Dickens family holidays on the continent? Was a pigeon pie a foolproof way to cheer
a difficult husband? Did a nice dish of toasted cheese provide some comfort in the dwindling years of a marriage? Shay bought the much more expensive cookbook she had found at Waterstones when she discovered that it contained recipes for many of the dishes Catherine mentioned.

Now sitting at the breakfast table and reading through the little book again, she felt something stir inside her breast, a current running through her brain that she hadn't felt for months. It was excitement, a desire to know more. She had departed for England agreeing with her supervisor that her subject was the appearance of Ellen Ternan in Dickens' fiction; she had spent hours poring over letters seeking references to how his writing progressed in the years of his affair. She saw Ellen in only the vaguest outlines in her mind's eye, a pretty blonde in a big crinoline, but now a full-blown picture came to her of the writer's wife, the stout lady with the brown ringlets, the fleshy face and the dull eye, sitting there in the morning room of the big house planning the evening's menu, calling in the housekeeper or perhaps marching down to the kitchen to consult the cook herself and decide once and for all what was to be served for dinner.

Shay pushed aside her empty plate and reached for the kettle to pour more water over her tea bag. Could she possibly change topics? Shay's supervisor, cross-appointed from the Women's Studies program back in Toronto, was an old-fashioned feminist with a frighteningly good
grasp on the works of Virginia Woolf. Shay wasn't sure how she'd react to her decision to abandon the mysterious Ellen Ternan in favour of the culinary talents of Catherine Dickens.

Of course, she was not Shay's original supervisor because she couldn't keep working with the original one. Not after that day of bright sunshine and churning emotions when her professor—she still had trouble thinking of him as Al—had reached across the desk and placed his hand on top of hers.

Shay shook herself, cast aside the pamphlet, got up from the table and walked downstairs, where she knocked at her landlady's door.

“Mrs. Brown,” she asked as the woman appeared in a floral housecoat, “I don't suppose you have a pudding basin you could lend me? I've decided to make a charlotte russe.”