The Wife's Tale (6 page)

The sign flickering in his expression read,
I am saved
. Perhaps he saw his own reflection deep within Mary’s eyes, and imagined that she already possessed him. Or maybe he recognized
her as belonging to his new circle of damaged souls. Their whole lives felt decided in that moment.

Gooch paused, watching her, then lifted his shoulders and smiled wanly as if to say,
Ah, life
. Mary Brody nodded twice and tilted her head as if to respond,
I know
. She gestured for him to follow her to the back, which he did, swinging his long frame on the complaining crutches. She took
the prescription and passed it to Ray Russell Sr., quietly asking if he could fill it right away, for her
friend
. She turned to find Gooch waiting, eager, like a pup. She wordlessly showed him to a chair, feeling the heat rise from his
body as he lowered his cast to the floor and himself to the seat.

Mary breathed him: leather jacket, unwashed body, dusty scalp. His round blue eyes begged for affection, clarity. As if they
had already been married twenty-five years, instead of never having had a conversation before, she frowned reflectively and
asked, “What are the doctors saying about your dad?”

Gooch’s father, James, a tower like his namesake, had driven the Dodge, in which Gooch was passenger, straight into the hundred-year-old
oak tree at the sharpest bend in the river road, on the way home from the strip club at Mitchell’s Bay, where Gooch had been
sent to retrieve him. James had insisted on driving and Gooch was, tragically, more afraid of his father’s drunken rage than
he was of his drunken driving. He had buckled into the passenger side, trying to convince himself that his father
did
drive better juiced than sober, just as he professed. Still, he couldn’t stop himself from muttering, “Asshole,” to which
his father responded with a crisp backhand. That was how his cheek got bruised, but no one except Mary would ever know that.

Gooch looked at Mary directly. “Still feels like a dream.”

“That could be your medication,” she said with authority.

The article in the
Leaford Mirror
didn’t mention, under the photograph of the smashed Dodge, that James Gooch had been driving home from the strip club, but
it did note his impairment, and describe the paralysis and brain swelling and the unlikelihood that he would wake from his
coma. The article also reported that Jimmy Gooch had a leg injury and would not play out the rest of the high school season,
further speculating that Gooch’s hopes of a basketball scholarship would be delayed, or dashed altogether.

“My dad’s having a bad time with his colitis,” Mary said, as if to answer some unasked question.

“Want a ride home?” Gooch offered.

“Six-thirty,” she responded, “by the time I get done counting my cash.”

That evening, when Mary’s shift was over, Gooch was waiting for her in the parking lot. She felt curiously calm striding out
to the tan Plymouth Duster where he sat smiling shyly. She was intent on the evening air, the curious warmth of the late fall
night. She had brushed her teeth in the staff bathroom but hardly glanced at her reflection in the mirror. She hadn’t fretted
over what she might say. She hadn’t worried that she had never been kissed. She knew what was to come as if it were a memory,
not a projection.

Gooch and Mary were bound
mystically
, or so it seemed. Even if she would eventually understand that she was the only person in Gooch’s life, including himself,
who did not hold him responsible for what had happened, or feel somehow betrayed by the consequence of his injury, she’d been
right about Jimmy Gooch that first day she looked into his eyes. He was not the cocky star athlete to whom things came easily,
but a big, battered boy who needed a safe place to hide.

They drove to the lake in comfortable silence, to a clearing among the trees, a refuge to which Jimmy Gooch had plainly driven
before. He knew just where to turn so the branches wouldn’t scratch his door. They climbed out of the Duster, Gooch on his
crutches, and leaned against the warm grille, a breath apart, watching moonlight stroke the water, lifting their eyes to the
stars. Mary tried to recall the constellations from eighth-grade astronomy. The Big Dipper. The Little Dipper. Polaris—the
North Star.

Gooch turned to her after a long time and said, “No one but Pete’s even come by the house.”

“I heard you didn’t want to see anyone.”

“I don’t,” he shot, then laughed. “I didn’t. At least, I thought I didn’t. No one I know.”

“You know me. We had our lockers side by side.”

“We did?” Gooch asked, cocking his head.

Mary’s cheeks burned. “Never mind.”

“I’m kidding, Mary,” he said. “I remember you.”

“I thought, because I look different now…”

“Where are you going after this?”

“Home?”

“No, I mean after graduation. Where are you going?”

“I thought I might work for a year and save some money. There’s this school of fashion and design in Toronto but that’s pretty
far. My parents kind of need me right now. My dad’s having a hard time.”

“Colitis.” Gooch nodded, watching the stars.

“I heard you were going to Boston,” Mary said.

He gestured to his leg. “Not now. Not to play.”

“I’m sorry.”

Gooch shrugged. “I’m not. It’s a relief.” He sighed, loudly enough to scatter wildlife. “It’s all a big relief.” But he didn’t
look relieved.

Mary waited as Gooch took another deep breath and, in his exhalation, told her the true story of his life: his alcoholic parents,
his father’s violent rages, his mother’s penchant for scenes, the tragedy of his older sister’s drug addiction, his paralyzing
fear that he could not measure up. People expected so much from a giant boy.

Mary’s eyes never left his handsome face as he spoke, lingering over the asides: describing his passion for writing, his love
affair with the U.S.A., his impatience with complainers, his preference for Chinese over Italian, his goal of reading the
classics, his embarrassment that his clothes had to be custom-made. He paused, puzzling over her pretty face. She thought
he might kiss her, and was unprepared when he said, “Your turn.”

Although she might have told Gooch her own life story, confided about her sickly, disappointed parents, her intense loneliness,
her hunger. And though she might have confessed her love affair with the parasites, and described her own incapacitating fear
of not measuring
down
, Mary Brody did not reveal herself that way. Instead, she moved from the spot beside young Jimmy Gooch, imagining herself
a fusion of every brazen starlet she’d ever watched seduce a man.

She reached for the buttons of her blouse, then shifted out of her skirt, then unclasped her bra and pulled down her panties
and peeled off her socks, until she was completely, exquisitely nude. She raised her arms, not as a flourish to her striptease
but because she was standing naked in the serious moonlight on a warm night in November, and was certain never to do so again.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Gooch said, without moving forward.

“You won’t,” she promised.

Gooch rested his plaster-cast leg on a nearby stump and pulled Mary to him, stroking her hair when she shivered. He helped
her up to the warm hood of the Duster and let his lips fall on the swell of cheek beneath her lashes. She held her breath
as his mouth sampled the length of her neck, and brushed her soft shoulder, and found her rising breasts. She shivered as
his fingers conducted currents from her nipple to her groin. Lips found pelvis. Tongue parted lips. A glimpse of the divine.
From her thigh she heard him whisper huskily, “I love your smell.”

In the way Mary Brody had been engrossed by food and then obsessed with her parasites, she became, after that night, consumed
by Jimmy Gooch.

At Leaford Collegiate’s parent night that winter, Mary overheard the guidance counselor, Miss Lafleur, whisper to anxious
Irma in her charming French-Canadian accent, “She goes from being Mary to being
Mary
.” Sylvie Lafleur was gamine and fair, with strawberry hair in a braid down her elegant back. She cared deeply about her students,
and had been encouraging to Mary during the course of her transformation. “She’s meeting her new body. Okay she’s distracted
from her schoolwork. This too shall pass,” Miss Lafleur assured.

Mary was struck by the fact that all things
did
pass, and added the phrase to her personal theology, below the rule of three and her enduring belief in miracles.

A distant relative of the famous Canadian hockey player, Miss Lafleur lived alone in a small apartment in a building overlooking
the river in Chatham—the same building, in fact just down the hall, where Mary’s father had died with his thrombosis. Sylvie
had been a godsend, bringing groceries to Orin when Mary couldn’t. Stopping by for a chat because she knew he was old and
lonely.

The guidance counselor was a woman who knew things, but Mary mistrusted Gooch’s reliance on her advice. During his final year
he met with Miss Lafleur weekly, receiving tutoring for the time he’d missed because of the accident, and discussing his academic
options. Mary worried that the woman would persuade her boyfriend to choose some faraway university, or counsel Gooch that
Mary Brody was clearly not the right girl for him.

Miss Lafleur must have known that it was not Mary’s own body she was distracted by, but Jimmy Gooch’s. His smooth, tanned
complexion, yeasty at his hairline, buttery at his neck. The berry texture of his tongue, the firmness of his cheek, the ripple
of his core, the substance of his swell. The talc-soft skin from there to there, and his creamy voice when he asked her to
touch it. A sensual rhapsody. More necessary than food. More vital than air. In the months after Gooch’s father passed, and
when it was clear that he would not play sports competitively again, the two clung to each other, humming with endorphins.
Desperate love, dense as gold.

In the early years of their marriage, Gooch and Mary spent Saturday nights (and most weekday mornings) rutting to anthem rock,
lost in a guitar riff of scent and motion, pace and pressure, retention and release.
Say something,
she’d beg, while he stroked. Gooch thought she wanted dirty talk, but it was really just the sound of his voice.

By the middle years of their marriage, Saturdays were spent playing cards on a rotating schedule at their friends’ modest
homes. Pete and Wendy’s duplex for euchre. Bridge at Kim and François’s backsplit. Poker at Dave and Patti’s old manse, before
Patti left Dave for Larry Hooper. Gooch liked to gamble and was sullen when he lost, even though the largest pots rarely exceeded
twenty dollars, and even if he was reminded a dozen times that it was supposed to be for fun. “I come from a long line of
sore losers,” he’d joke.

One windswept autumn evening they were at Kim and François’s place, over the bridge, on the other side of the river. By then
Mary had recovered all of her lost weight, clinging to, as the grief-stricken clutch mementos, the pounds she’d added over
the course of her two failed pregnancies. She chose flattering clothes and wore coral lip gloss to complement her green eyes,
and dyed her prematurely gray roots rich chestnut every five weeks. She had good taste in footwear. She still had her uterus.
As a couple, the Gooches were damaged but hopeful.

The ill wind that night drove branches against the sliding glass door, and Mary moved chairs twice, stalked by the draft.
Wendy announced her pregnancy—twins, yay. Kim’s middle one had just started kindie, and she’d brought a stack of pictures
of the new baby in his adorable doggie jammies. School raffle ticket time again. Mary ate a bowl of dill dip. Gooch won eighteen
dollars and drank nine Black Labels.

Heading to the truck at the end of the evening, Gooch squeezed his wife’s thick waist, then, remembering how she hated that,
leaned down to bite her ear. “You smell like a pickle,” he said, which meant she should brush her teeth because he wanted
sex.

On the short drive home, as they were discussing the naivety of Dave’s young girlfriend, a splendid brown buck leapt from
the dense bush into the path of their pickup. But this was no deer caught in headlights. This was a kamikaze bomber slamming
the grille, bouncing onto the hood, flipping up to the windshield, then launched back to the pavement when Gooch jammed the
brake.

The bright truck lights caught crisp orange leaves stealing from the scene. Furious gusts peeled down tufts at the animal’s
heaving breast. Gooch peered through the shattered windshield at the buck thrashing on the pavement. Wordlessly he climbed
out of the truck, approaching the fallen creature, whose leg was clearly broken. He must have heard Mary shout, “What do we
do, Gooch?” But he just stood there, a minor actor in the wings in the thrall of the great star’s death scene. Mary waited
for her husband to take action. An eternity passed. Howling wind. Horrible tap-shoe hoofs. Gasping clouds of condensed breath.
Gooch?
Gooch?

Mary shifted the gear, pressed her foot on the pedal, and drove at the creature.
Thud.
Stop. Reverse. The only thing to do. Shift.
Thunk.
Stop. Reverse. Shift, swallow hard. Dead. Undeniably. Stop. The wind pushed pebbles of glass onto her lap. She dusted the
fragments off absently, heart thumping, watching Gooch climb into the passenger seat, not daring to glance his way. The wind
would have blown Mary numb, were she not already so.

After silently appraising the damage to the vehicle—apart from the windshield, a dented front grille and hood—the couple headed
for the house. Mary locked herself in the bathroom with a loaf of Sarah Lee, licking the cords of biting-sweet icing from
the top of the cardboard package when she’d finished gulping the spongy yellow cake. Afterward she brushed her teeth, even
though she was certain Gooch would no longer want sex. She could hear the television on in the living room, where he was watching
the nightly news.