The Marriage Bed (13 page)

“I make de din,” she announced. Then added, “Pussy gone.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“All gone.”

“What do you mean? Martha, you haven’t opened the back door, have you? Oh God.” She had done exactly that; it stood wide, letting in a flood of late sunlight and cool air. There was no sign of the kitten. I searched the house, looking under beds and into cupboards, with no success. Martha trotted after me, beaming and busy, calling, “Puss, Puss.” But the cat was gone. Ross, still assiduously reading, barely looked up when I said, “The kitten’s got out. I’ll have to go out and try to find it.”

“All right.”

“The thing is, it’s so little – it will never find its way home if anything frightens it. I’ll try the lane first.”

But a survey of the lane and then our short cul-de-sac street produced nothing, though I poked under bushes and questioned random children and peered under front porches with rising anxiety. Finally I went back to the house.

“Any sign of it?” I asked Ross.

“No.”

“Well, you’ll have to help, I’m afraid. I’ll leave the kids with June for an hour – we’ve got to find it. Soon it’ll be dark; the poor little thing will get killed in the traffic.”

He closed his book and got up with reluctance.

“If you head east and I take the other way, we can cover more ground,” I told him. “Keep calling – it might hear you and come.”

After depositing the kids at June’s I set off, calling, “Puss, Puss,” as seductively as I could; and after a while I heard the very cross, receding voice of Ross in the dusk saying, “Puss. Damn you. Puss.”

An hour later we met at our own corner. “No luck?” I asked.

“No.”

“Oh God. Nobody’s seen it?”

“No.”

“Oh, what are we going to do?”

“Keep looking, that’s all. You check the kids. I’ll go south this time.”

The dusk thickened into dark. Behind a tangle of bare trees the evening star came out. The rush of post-weekend traffic on the downtown roads haunted me. But full dark came and the kitten was still nowhere to be found. Finally, cold and with a throbbing headache, I turned back to our street to retrieve the kids.

“I wouldn’t worry if I was you,” June said serenely. She was in the middle of giving herself a home permanent in front of the
TV
. “Cats always turn up.”

“This one won’t – it’s only a baby. Well, thanks for coping. Come on home, Martha.”

But I was just taking her coat off when Ross suddenly appeared. He had something inside his quilted jacket – something that could be heard loudly purring.

“Oh!” I said in a voice loud with relief.

“Found it crossing Bloor Street,” he said. “Stopped the traffic cold and just strolled across like Boss Cat. When I called him, he came running up to me and started to climb my leg. I think maybe he could use some milk.”

“Good idea. Could you do it while I put the kids to bed?”

I left him carefully heating up milk in a pan. And so ended the great battle of the cat. A day or two later he’d been christened Chairman Mao as a tribute to his masterful character, and nothing more was ever said about taking him back to Mississauga. But then nothing more was ever said about a number of major issues left on hold, but that didn’t mean they’d ceased to exist. Far from it.

“L
ook, Anne,” Margaret aid, “if you’re not doing anything special for lunch, why not come and have it with us? I’m unfreezing a quiche. Then I can show you that folder about the Science Club. You’ve simply got to join – it’s all wrong for you to lose touch like this.”

“I’d love to have lunch,” I said. It occurred to me how odd it was, not to say discouraging, that women as unlike each other as June, Billie, and Margaret should so unite in their efforts to improve me. All of them unsuccessful. And yet in different ways I was dependent on all of them. Where would I be without Junie to despise, Billie to mother, and Margaret to admire? Especially since these equations were to some extent interchangeable, depending on my mood. But it was better not to pursue this line of thought too far. It would only end in self-analysis, tears, and heartburn, none of which I really wanted. So I packed the vegetable-bag into the pram and meekly fell into line behind Margaret.

“You sure this isn’t too much trouble for you, Marg?”

“Not a bit. Give us a chance to hash over our arrangements for Baby Week. And you could use a little break, right? Come to that, so could I, after a weekend with my father’s awful old aunt. Whenever I hear about sweet, frail little old ladies getting raped and killed, I wonder why it can’t happen to Auntie Maud. I see you’ve been to the Liquor Board. Well, you can offer me a drink of whatever it is.”

“I can?” I thought in some surprise. Discovering a tough and funny side to Margaret was a surprise, too, because if she’d always been like this, I was only now on the right wavelength to perceive it. In any case, I said, “If you mean I can do something for you for a change, great. Let’s go.”

As for the Science Club, or any other group she might try to rope me into, I told myself stoutly, “Who’s afraid of Margaret Neilson?” and thought instead of the delicious hot meal that would come from her shining, immaculate kitchen, by comparison with which mine was a cave littered with bones.

A
fter peeling the kids out of their snowsuits, I followed Margaret through to the kitchen, where I found her capably flicking switches and extracting containers from the fridge. Her two polite girls took away my coat and laid the glass-topped breakfast table without being asked. Margaret wore a sweater and a pleated skirt that fitted her trim figure perfectly. The two silver wings of hair over her temples framed a face so serene and bland I thought I must have dreamed that remark about Auntie Maud.

When the older girl, Patricia, set out a plate of cupcakes iced in different colours, Martha’s eyes brightened with greed and she reached out to take one. “No, honey,” said Margaret firmly. “They are for after lunch.” And such was that woman’s calm strength of character that my daughter actually backed away from the table and came to lean against me, while I tried to look as if this was her normal behaviour.

“Gin and vermouth, eh?” said Margaret, inspecting the liquor bag. “Perfect. We’ll have a nice dry martini.”

“I shouldn’t, of course. But I couldn’t feel much worse than I do, so why not?”

“I always think the last week or so of it is the worst,” she said tactfully. “Poor old Hughie’s got another cold, hasn’t he? Bad luck.”

As if to oblige, Hugh produced the loose, rattling cough I knew so well. Automatically I felt his forehead. No temperature yet, but he’d probably have one before the day was over.

Margaret set before us two pale, beaded glasses, each with a tiny lemon twist, and we lifted them to each other. At that instant, Martha seized two of the cupcakes and bolted, stuffing them as totally as possible into her greedy, laughing mouth. Hopelessly I lumbered after her, but she was already halfway up the stairs. As she fled, her stumping little feet trod icing energetically into the immaculate stair carpet. On the landing Patricia caught her and tried to confiscate what was left of the loot, but with a shriek of evil glee Martha bit her and escaped. Through the bedroom door I glimpsed her rolling in a cloud of cake crumbs across the Neilsons’ snow-white counterpane.

Pat looked with respect at the semicircle of tooth-marks in her arm and said, “Wow.” I went back to the kitchen. Some battles, it seemed to me, weren’t really worth winning. But of course it was too much to expect Margaret to accept such anarchy.

“Sorry about that,” I said apologetically.

“Of course, she’s compensating for Ross,” Margaret remarked calmly. “Punishing you.”

“Well, maybe,” I said unwillingly. Was it just dodging the truth to think that Martha would be exactly the same kind of child if Ross had never taken off? She’d been raising hell long before she could sit up alone, that was sure. And all she’d ever said about it when I explained that Daddy didn’t sleep at home any more was, “Oh.” It was Hugh, actually, who felt it more. I knew this because for the first five minutes of all Ross’s visits, he kept his face turned away and wouldn’t look at his father.

“On the other hand,” Margaret said kindly, “it may be just a stage. Good martini, isn’t it?”

“Perfect.” And it was. Tensions, fears, frustrations, all seemed to drop off me like a set of chains. In seconds I became chatty and confidential, two things I’ve rarely been this winter, when depression has had to be hidden even from myself like some shameful secret.

“What’s wrong with those last weeks of it is sheer, blind terror,” I said. “You know. Spina bifida, cerebral palsy, Down’s syndrome. Ugh, just saying the words could be bad magic.” I dug out a Kleenex in haste from the jumble in my purse. “Don’t let me be morbid. But the fact is, I can’t remember feeling this guy move today. Maybe the poor thing’s just stoned. Pay no attention, I’m getting tiddly. And it’s heaven.”

“Any chance of Ross coming to his senses, you think?” Margaret asked, topping up our drinks.

“None that I can see.”

“Situation hasn’t changed at all? I mean you’d think after five months –”

“No change. Or at least … well, all right, there is one. At the start, he was so open. You know, he’d talk about the whole thing. There was nothing he wouldn’t discuss. We spent hours talking when he came to see the kids, or on the phone when he couldn’t get over. But lately he doesn’t come around so often. A lot less, in fact. And he has a lot less to say. I don’t know, but I figure that may be a good sign, don’t you? Maybe lovers can’t be chums, or vice versa. Shouldn’t even try. It was maybe better when we did more and talked less.”

Margaret got up to adjust the oven temperature. “Well, let’s face it, if he isn’t communicating –” There was a bright flush across her cheekbones and she blundered against her chair before
sitting down on it again. Dear old Margaret, I thought with a surge of affection, was ever so slightly tiddly herself.

“I was married before Harvey, you know,” she said suddenly.

“Were you really? I never knew that.”

Margaret’s husband Harvey was a small man with a large pipe. He was so silent and so little given to action that I sometimes thought Margaret must dust him regularly like a piece of furniture. But the two of them had that rare thing, a perfect marriage. His antique shop on Avenue Road was as neat and clean as her kitchen. Like her, he dressed quietly, in perfect taste, and together they calmly, systematically attended the city’s better cultural functions. They were like a pair of matched gloves, made of the same material and design, and I often thought of them with envy as I struggled to cope with the squabbling, complicated mess of my own married life. For Ross and me, marriage had been a crazy mistake from the start, while their partnership was wholly rational. Feelings – mine for Ross, his for me, no matter how violent – had nothing to do with it. I couldn’t agree with Billie’s definition of marriage as a deal; but I’d come to realize lately it was something that involved more tough concessions and trade-offs than I used to imagine. Unfortunately, this very practical angle of the thing was one I appreciated only when it was too late to be of any use.

“… Yes, but it only lasted three years,” Margaret was saying. “We had nothing at all in common.”

“Right. That’s what matters.”

“Just the same, we – I mean, in spite of everything … but of course it’s experience that teaches you, or ought to. The only answer was to break up. We were totally incompatible. I
know
that.”

We lapsed into a thoughtful silence.

“But it’s funny, isn’t it, how knowing from experience doesn’t help worth a damn when it comes to something like this,” I said sadly. “I mean it’s the wrong kind of knowledge to be any use.”

She darted me a queer, almost furtive look.

“True. Because as a matter of fact I ran into Phil again just recently. At the Granite Club, of all places. Back in town after all this time. He’s done very well … anyhow, we ended up having drinks and then lunch downtown, and …”

“And?” I said, deeply interested.

She drained the martini pitcher into her glass. After a quick glance around to make sure the kids were all out of earshot, she said calmly, “Yes, and.”

“No kidding.” Fascinated, I tried to imagine this kind of thing happening to Margaret in or even near the Granite Club. “And have you still got nothing in common?”

“Nothing, really. Except of course –”

“Ah yes. That.”

“I’ve been going to his apartment twice a week. He’s bought me a lot of clothes I keep there. We buy things for the place. Eat there sometimes. It’s like having two lives, Anne. And you’d never believe how enjoyable … I mean it’s awful – I’m horrified at myself – but I’m enjoying even the risk and the guilt. Of course, it’s got to be some kind of crazy mid-life crisis. For one thing, how can I keep on doing this to Harvey?”

“Does he know about it?”

“Of course not. I’m not that crazy.”

I looked at her with frank curiosity. There she sat, dignified, handsome, and guilty as hell. How it thrilled me to know that here was a liar, schemer, and pagan even more deplorable than myself.

“It’s all my Aunt Maud’s fault, really. She brought me up … my parents died when I was two. And she’s the kind of woman who thinks everything to do with sex is dirty. And everything
is
to do with it, for people like that. Even
breathing.
That must be what’s made me so greedy. Anyhow,” (here she tilted the pitcher hopefully) “maybe it’s not the worst thing that can happen to a
marriage, after all.” She tried to sound cool, but her voice trembled.

A wave of personal sorrow washed over me. “Oh Margaret, it’s got to be pretty high on the list.”

“Well, you could be right.” We looked gloomily into our empty glasses and found no answers there. But then the timer pinged; the kids swooped in; Margaret got up to serve the lunch. We ate and I felt Hugh’s forehead again. We talked about the girls’ progress at Havergal. Traces of pink icing lingered around Martha’s mouth as she grinned at me cheerfully.