The Best Thing for You (11 page)

“Go away,” I tell him.

Insufferable is the silence between us. I eat while he stares at the sea.

“You are poison,” he says finally. “You’re a goddamn toxin in my system. I don’t even like you all that much. You’re not a good or decent person. You don’t care about your patients. You condescend to May. You torture me. Are you really pregnant?”

“Yep.”

“Get rid of it,” he says. “Oh, please. Oh, god.”

“No.”

“Are you laughing?” he asks. “This amuses you?” I screw the Thermos cup back on the Thermos and tuck the banana peel through the Thermos handle. “I didn’t choose this,” he says.

“You’re okay, Calvin,” I tell him. “You’re going to be fine.”

He gives me a look of hot, ragged hatred. I look at my watch.

“Five minutes,” he says, so I sit there for five more minutes, looking at the view, bouncing my Thermos on my knee, and then I go back to work.

We take to clipping articles from the papers, Liam and I, after our son has gone to bed, dating them, and keeping them in a file called “Parmenter.” Over the next couple of weeks we collect a dozen such articles from local and city papers, even a couple of smug Letters to the Editor (“Perhaps now our revered politicians will emerge from their labyrinthine circumlocutions around what has become the one premier issue of our time, television and copycat violence –”). Nothing so far in the nationals.

“Who writes these, you know what I’m saying?” Liam says one night.

He uses scissors. I use an X-Acto knife and a breadboard. I say, “Nobody. Tea drinkers.”

“
ESL
students,” he says. “ ’Dear sir, I wish to register my utmost outrage at a system who fosters the pernicious scourge of peer violence between our children –” ’

“Here’s one. This woman’s a homemaker. As she watches her little ones get ready for school, shrugging on their little knapsacks –”

“Fuck me, poetry,” Liam says.

“– she worries about what’s waiting for them out there in the world. She knows she cannot be with them every step of the way, but she also knows that she has filled them with the great tide of her love which they will carry in them always as a talisman against evil.”

“Her point?”

“People should stay home.” I scan the remainder of the article. “People should just stay home with their stay-at-home mothers and feel the great tide of love sloshing around inside them all day.”

“Maybe we don’t need
all
of these.”

“The lawyer said.”

“I tell you what,” my husband says. “The amount we’re paying him, he should be doing this.”

“We can afford it.” I square some pages, fold them away for the blue bag.

“I can’t afford it. I’ve got tenure review coming up in a few months. Imagine if this gets out.”

I say, “Yeah, imagine.”

“Which reminds me,” he says, ignoring me and talking to me at the same time. “Faculty party next Thursday, okay?”

I say, “No, not okay.”

“You have to come. Other spouses come. We have to act normal.”

“In case of what?”

“Exactly.” He slaps the file closed like it’s settled.

“Last order of business,” Dr. Gagnon says. “The parking lot.”

Everybody groans. Dr. Gagnon grins and shows us his fists – asymmetrical, like a boxer. Around me doctors are starting to push back their chairs and collect their papers. It’s the clinic’s monthly administrative meeting, my first. “Whoa, whoa!” Dr. Gagnon says.

“Cut it out, Paul,” says Dr. Silver, a curly-haired blonde my age, tough and tiny as a gymnast. “We did this last year. You lost.” She’s gone.

“What did we do last year?” I ask my neighbour, Dr. Li.

“Voted not to expand the parking lot.”

“This is not about trees,” Dr. Gagnon is saying. “This is about access.”

“This is about sap on your Lincoln,” someone says.

“I like the parking lot,” I tell Dr. Li.

“Dr. Clary likes the parking lot,” Dr. Li says. Everybody looks at me.

“The view,” I say quickly, but they’re staring too long. Most of them don’t know me, have probably never heard words from my mouth before, but still. The next thing I know the meeting’s over and Dr. Gagnon’s asking me for a word. We go to his office. “Am I in trouble?”

“How’re things working out for you so far?”

I tell him fine.

“Everything okay with the staff?”

“Is there a problem?” I’m thinking, if he knows about Ty, if they all know, he should come out and say it. He shouldn’t do it like this.

“On the contrary.” He raises his eyebrows. “Your nurses love you.”

“About the parking lot?” I say, but he laughs and waves me off, waves me right out of his office. I understand the issue isn’t dead but I’m not a player here, not yet. He’ll use me when I’m useful. In the hall I close my eyes, exhale, open my eyes. What does he know?

“Keep in touch, Doctor?” he calls after me.

“I never know what to wear to these things.”

“That,” Liam says.

I’ve got clothes all over the bed. In my underwear I’m standing, hands on hips, surveying all my worldly goods here on the bed. I hold a skirt hanger to my waist, trying to picture myself in the article – a little flippy wool job, almost a skating skirt. “I must have bought this,” I say.

“Wear what you wore this morning.”

I almost could, too – the sharp black suit, the bracelet, the black shoes. Only this has become my outfit for visiting the lawyer’s, and I don’t want to be reminded. “There’s going to be drinks, right?”

“The Dean will be there, the tenure committee,” Liam says.

“Yes, Mom.”

On the way up to campus we drop Ty at Isobel’s. He doesn’t especially like it. He says, “Suddenly I need a babysitter?”

We tell him Isobel needs help moving some boxes.

“I don’t like bullshitting him, but I don’t like leaving him
alone either,” Liam says. “And Isobel doesn’t have
TV
, which is amazing. I think he could use a quiet evening to think about Monday.” Monday, Jason’s trial.

“Those were some pretty tough questions this morning,” I say. “I thought lawyers weren’t supposed to do that. Coach the witness.” I feel stupid saying the phrase.

“He didn’t tell him what to say.”

I wait, but he doesn’t say anything more. “You don’t want to talk about this, do you?”

“See, only because I’m driving.”

He parks at a meter near the Fine Arts department. The wind is pushing leaves down the street. It’s gone cold. A nearby tree is red. “Witness for the prosecution,” I say, now that we’re out of the car.

He gives me a look.

“Fall,” I say, pointing. I’m thinking: six weeks already.

“You’re here!” Cheryl, the departmental secretary, says when she sees us. She seems surprised, concerned.

“Shouldn’t we be?” Liam asks.

She makes her eyes go big.

“Hi, Cheryl,” I say, and she grabs me in a hug. We have never hugged.

“You look –” Instead of a third word, she makes a big gesture.

“Fat? I look fat?” I whisper, as Liam steers me away, into the common room. We nod and smile. People are turning toward us. “Let’s get out of here.”

Liam is smiling. “You are paranoid,” he murmurs.

“Dr. Clary.” A great tall man puts his hand on my husband’s arm, staying us. He means Liam, but I don’t laugh – practise. “I’ve been going through your grant application. We should talk.” He says this darkly, peremptorily, like an actor doing a
surgeon. This is the Dean. I smile ten thousand watts and excuse myself to the makeshift bar.

An hour and a half later, this:

“Sudan, Mauritania,” a bearded man is saying. “I’m saying, slavery in our time! I’m saying, right now! But will people believe it? Until someone goes in there with a camera?”

My group shakes heads.

“Y’all hear about that beating a ways back, outside that video store?” Where has this Texas accent come from? How did it get in my mouth?

“You mean that thing back in the summer?” someone says. “Should you be sitting down?”

“No, why?” I say.

“This world,” someone says. “Slavery, Jesus.”

“Video is over,” someone else says.

Everyone starts talking at once and gesturing with cheese. I go find Liam. “Bad,” he says, taking the wineglass from my hand. He’s flushed; instead of putting my glass down he drinks from it. “The Dean thinks he can get me funding for my book.”

His book? “That’s great, honey,” I say. But he’s barely looking at me. Restlessly he scans the room, bounces in his shoes.

“I think we should both be there on Monday,” I say loudly. “For Ty’s sake.”

He smiles again. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he murmurs. “Of course we’ll be there. Can we talk about this later?”

“I just wanted to make sure.”

“Liam,” someone says. “How’s the little book coming? On the little starlet?”

“Brian,” Liam says, shaking his hand.

They call this work.

“Katherine, you look amazing,” this man, this stranger, says,
and he hugs me too. “My sister had the same procedure a couple of years ago and she’s fine.”

“Okay, what is going on?” I ask Liam in the hall.

Ty, when we collect him, is in a mutinous mood. “You told her,” he accuses us. He means Isobel.

“Did you talk about it?” I ask, because my Liam is driving.

“I knew it,” Ty says. “She was being nice to me.”

“And normally, god knows, she’s very mean.”

“Who else knows?”

“Look, idiot,” I say. “We had to get a lawyer somewhere. Isobel referred us. Should we have picked one out of the phone book? You know what happens when you pick them out of the phone book?”

“You’re going to tell me,” he says, so then I don’t. Instead I ask Liam about his little starlet.

“You know,” he says meaningfully.

When we get home he goes straight into his office and shuts the door. We hear the
TV
go on, the now-familiar screech of tires and sting of music signalling the start of
that movie again.
I tell Ty to get the hell into bed.

“Sieg heil,” he says, and I slap him.

We stare at each other, sharing disbelief. He reaches for, but doesn’t quite touch, the reddening mark of my hand on his cheek.