Suitable Precautions (3 page)

“I'm hungry,” he said. “What about you,” he checked the letters in his bag, “Ella?”

They spoke through the mail slot. Ella said they should meet at the pasta place on the corner when his route was done.

“No, I'll pick you up,” he said, sliding the mail to her, waiting for her to take it before he let go. Ella had felt stupid as the flap clanged shut and the mailman walked away. Her calves were cramping and she had forgotten to ask for his name.

But it didn't matter now, Ella thought happily, popping the cap off the beer. Charlie loved her just the way she was. She was his. “Charlie, Charlie, Charlie,” she whispered to herself as she padded back to the living room and handed him the bottle.

“A cold beer and a hot woman,” Charlie said. “This is heaven, right, babe?”

Ella said that it was. She stretched her legs out along the couch and let him balance the bottle between her bare ankles. When it spilled, he licked it off her skin, careful with his tongue as his hands pushed up the leg of her jeans. He spilled more on her shin, licking as he went. The blond hairs on Ella's thighs stood up from the cold and so she took the bottle and began pouring. Down his chest, over his waist.
They licked, drunk on expectation, and Ella rushed to take off her panties before they were doused in beer, knowing the way the cheap fabric stained. She wrapped her legs around him tightly; it so often seemed that Charlie was just barely tethered to her, that when they made love he was in danger of gliding over her and disappearing.

She washed his uniform in the sink, the washing machine broken again and the beer stains setting. First his shirt, then his pants, which she hung over the shower curtain rod to dry. She cleaned everything. Washed her hair, the beer bottle. Once, after seeing a police show, she made Charlie scrub down the entire couch: if a crime were committed in the house and the police checked for bodily fluids, she knew she would feel unbearable shame, even if she were lying dead in the next room, her throat slit by a drug addict trying to steal her stereo.

“You're crazy,” Charlie said to her, “but I love you.”

Ella kept washing her hair.

She bundled him up for work on winter mornings, taking care to tighten his scarf, reminding him to bring his gloves. He never left the house without an extra pair of socks in his bag, in case of rain. “Happy feet make happy people,” Ella said. In the summer Ella froze bottles of water halfway, alternating drops of juice from fresh lemons and limes into each distinct layer of ice. This was her definition of love.

It had stopped amazing Ella that she loved Charlie, really loved him, and yet lied to him the way she did. She read him poems when he couldn't sleep, and he brought her bouquets of dandelions from abandoned hydro fields. Sometimes they fought over the dirty dishes in the sink, and sometimes Ella was lonely and cried quietly, hoping Charlie wouldn't
wake up and ask her what was wrong. They were in love in a very strange and troubled world, Ella knew, and the fact that they were happy was enough for her to know that the lie was worth it, that the work she did to keep it up was love itself. If one of the letters showed up in Charlie's mailbag, Ella said nothing about it and threw it in the garbage. She stopped bugging Charlie to go to church on Sundays. She had found faith.

Ella knew there was a paradoxical relationship between truth and lie: the more outrageous the lie, the more people believed it to be true; the more outrageous the truth, the more people believed it to be a lie. Either way, you believed. If you were lucky, Ella thought, the difference between the two eventually disappeared, and you kept standing in your bra in front of the bathroom sink, washing beer out of a uniform.

“I'm a ghostwriter,” she had said over spaghetti on their first date. “Freelance.”

It had been easy to lie, easier still to keep it up when Charlie moved in during Ella's second spring in the house. Charlie's salary was enough, and when it wasn't Ella made up the difference, pretending to ghostwrite. Ella imagined life as a rich woman, and she knew what it was like being a poor one, and now she was comfortable. That was the best so far. She and Charlie ate fish and chips on Fridays and thought about the names of their children, the ones they would have when they had saved a little money and maybe planted a tree in the backyard.

“How about Emily for a girl and Aaron for a boy?” Ella asked.

“When we have the money, babe,” Charlie said. “But I like Emily.”

Everything had a price. Ella discovered this to be true after Charlie told her he couldn't imagine his life without her, that he wanted to marry her. Ella started having dreams.

They were different dreams, but somehow always the same. In the first one, the house was burning down. The blue paint was glowing an electrified orange, melting in radioactive globs onto the lawn. The white trim cracked. The old wood split apart in violent explosions. Charlie was there, inside the house, and Ella was screaming, Charlie, Charlie, get out! But Charlie just stood there behind the broken screen door, shaking his head at Ella, his skin melting, mixing with the blue paint. In another, Ella and Charlie were on a sailboat. Ella with her hair around her shoulders, basking in the sun and watching Charlie turn the ship's wheel. A storm followed them. It pushed them closer and closer to the horizon. The force of the wind whipped Ella's hair across her face, drawing blood. Look, Ella, look, isn't it beautiful? Charlie asked her. He smiled in a way that made his skin taut over his skull. Ella could see all the way down to the bone.

“Baby, another bad dream?” Charlie asked when Ella woke up sweating in bed.

“Yeah,” she said.

“What about?”

“Can't remember,” she lied.

“It's just a dream, baby,” he said. “Go back to sleep. I've got to get up soon.”

The dreams became worse if she had used the money. On the day she spent two fifty-dollar bills on a new blue dress, she dreamed of hurtling towards the earth in a ripped-apart airplane. She kept trying to reach for Charlie's hand, but couldn't find it. The plane slammed into the water, and Ella felt herself drowning. She woke up coughing.

Unconscious guilt, she told herself. These dreams don't mean anything. But she knew otherwise. She let the droplets of sweat evaporate off her body and listened until Charlie's breath came slow and even out of his mouth, smelling just slightly of garlic. She got up and walked naked out into the garden to eat a handful of earth.

She started saving the envelopes that arrived from Rome, tying them with a red ribbon and climbing the ladder to the attic. She sat cross-legged on the dusty floorboards for hours at a time, thinking. Something needed to be done.

She wore her blue dress to their anniversary dinner. Charlie gave her a pair of beautiful green earrings, the colour of Ella's eyes, he said, and a card. On the front was a watercolour picture of two people holding hands and walking along a beach at sunset. Love is the air, the ocean, the land, it said. When she opened the card, there was part of an e. e. cummings poem that she liked written in Charlie's spidery handwriting:

Happy Anniversary, it said after that.

He signed it, For Ella, my sun, my star, my ocean. Love, Charlie.

She gave him the stack of letters in a cloth-covered box.

“What's this?” Charlie said, undoing the ribbon and flipping through the letters.

“You don't recognize them?” Ella asked. “You deliver them every once in a while.”

“I don't know, babe,” Charlie said. “If I looked at everybody's mail all the time, I'd go nuts. I don't even read my own mail. Most of the time I don't care what I put in the box as long as there isn't a cat clawing at my leg or some little old lady telling me I forgot her Sears catalogue.”

There was disappointment in Ella's fingers as she rearranged her silverware on the clean white tablecloth.

“No, babe. Don't be like that. I'm sorry.” He put his hand on hers. “Tell me what you're thinking.”

“Well, you're supposed to give paper for the first anniversary,” Ella said. “That's if you're married, I guess, but I thought it was a nice idea. I figured, what with you being the greatest mailman in the world and all, that we should return these. Paper, right?”

Charlie was silent.

“I thought it could be a love letter, or something,” Ella said a little desperately. “Sent again and again from across the ocean. Imagine sending that and never getting a reply, never knowing what happened to your letter.”

She wanted to tell him that returning such a letter would be an act of mercy. An act of penance. That she was planning to donate her dress to the Salvation Army. She wanted to tell him everything.

“But babe,” Charlie said as he twirled an envelope in his fingers, “it's from Italy.”

Ella reached into her purse and pulled out two plane tickets.
Roma
, they said.

“Ella! You're crazy. I knew from the beginning you were crazy. You were the one on the route that was craziest.” He thumped the tickets on the table. “Do you know how many washing machines these could buy?”

Ella shrugged. “It's only paper, Charlie,” she said. “Happy anniversary.”

They got drunk and laughed all night long, but the next day Ella went to church and prayed to Saint Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of travellers and harvests, of seekers of lost and stolen articles. The patron saint of mail. The protector against shipwrecks.

 

I SHOULD TELL YOU, Ella almost said when Charlie took the letters out of his backpack again, but the noise of the train stopped her. She and Charlie had talked little since the rusty squeals of the engine had combined with the drunken songs of the cigarette-smoking men, three or sometimes four of whom hung out of the stuck-open windows, yelling obscene Italian to the
nonnas
with thick ankles who dotted the dried-out paths alongside the tracks. Ella had even stopped holding Charlie's hand, the clattering of their wrist bones against their shared plastic armrest not worth the effort. In the corner of the car, there was a chicken in a cage. A dog smelling of junkyard roamed the aisle. A nun lost herself in prayer as the ticket collector tapped people on the shoulder who pretended not to hear him.

“Strange pilgrims,” Charlie shouted into Ella's ear.

“What?” she said.

“I'm glad we're here.”

“What?”

He handed her a granola bar.

In Ella's guidebook to Italy there was a section on train travel. She had highlighted the prices, the connecting stations, the numbers to call for schedules and reservations, even though she couldn't understand the recorded messages
she got when she dialled. Under her pens the map of intersecting train lines turned into iridescent veins and arteries, criss-crossing the leg of Italy, their ink-blood pooling, it seemed, somewhere near Rome. All roads lead to Rome, the caption below the map said. The facing page had a health warning about deep vein thrombosis. There was no mention of chickens.

Charlie kissed Ella on the lips as the train pulled into the station. The men got off the train, leaving behind the virile stink of their armpits, dog fur, a few feathers. The nun stayed where she was. “This is it,” Charlie said.

Charlie inched his way past the nun who was faking sleep. Ella looked at him and imagined herself having his children, taking care of him when they were both old and he was sick and thin from cancer and her eyes were milky white with cataracts.

“Ella,” he said. “Are you coming?”

Ella put the highlighted guidebook into her bag, sure the nun was watching through the reptilian sliver of her right eye. Charlie helped Ella down the stairs and held her hand as they walked into the pearl pink sunlight that settled over the city. She held on tighter as they walked alone, together, into a stream of women on scooters, their hair unfurled; of men in pointy-toed shoes and dark sunglasses, saying,
Pronto, pronto
, into their cellular phones; of angels etched in the stone façades of banks and insurance companies.

Ella bought a carved giraffe from a North African man selling his goods off a tattered blanket. His hands, covered in pink and grey scars that snaked up his arms, touched hers when he gave her the figurine. “You will have good luck,” he told her. She believed him on the grounds that a man with
such scars would not joke about luck. Charlie hailed a taxi. The world now negotiable, it would never be flat again, no matter how many times Ella had dreamed of sailing to the edge of the earth and looking over.

The dreams had changed since she bought the plane tickets. The night before the flight, Ella had seen herself in fields of poppies, her feet bare and covered in earth. She heard Charlie's voice calling to her from a great distance. Look, Ella, look, he said. Isn't it beautiful? Ella's hair was long and tangled and touched the backs of her elbows, tickling her. But it wasn't her hair, after all. It was an avalanche of butterflies. Yellow. Black. They blocked her view of whatever it was Charlie wanted her to see. They flew in her eyes, into her ears. She could barely make out Charlie's words above the fervent fluttering of wings. In another dream she saw Charlie and a small girl playing in a park, the girl in a yellow rain slicker, feeding ducks. Charlie turned to look at Ella. With a shrug, he took the little girl's hand and walked away.

“Another bad dream, baby?” Charlie had said when Ella woke up breathing hard.

“Sort of. No. I don't know.”

“Well go back to sleep, we're leaving early for the airport.”