What We Hold In Our Hands (15 page)

Lily climbed back into bed, pressing her cool skin against Becket's warm body.

He pulled her to him, murmuring, “Our children will have your eyes, your pony legs.”

The muscles between her neck and shoulders squeezed tighter.

“If you want children, why haven't you married?” She was up on her elbow now.

“I wasn't ready.”

“So when did you decide?”

“Just now.” He was on his back, staring at the ceiling. “I dreamed we were in bed on a Sunday morning, you nursing the baby, me kissing the top of her head, our son dragging in a big stuffed rabbit.” He turned to face her. His smooth fingers reached for her arm.

“It was just a dream,” she said.

“It's gone now,” he agreed. But the dream seemed to linger in the parched air like the vanilla scent of the cigars he smoked when she wasn't there.

Lily didn't stay for dinner, but came back when she could. Telling Max she'd signed up for a Pilates class Saturday mornings, she was in Becket's bed by nine thirty, home by noon. She tried not to ask why she needed Becket in her life, what kind of balance his love restored, because she could not imagine her weeks without him. She seemed to have become a new person, unruffled by her students' fumbling, more patient and easy with her daughters, letting Emma go to a party at a boy's house, as long as she didn't stay too late, agreeing to take Beth clothes shopping Saturday afternoon, but not too early.

Max said, “You look terrific in that dress. Must be those Pilates classes.”

It was February, and they were on their way to a dinner party to celebrate Max's sister's twentieth anniversary.

He lifted Lily's hand, kissing it.

Her skin felt warm and prickly. Max wasn't one for compliments or hand kissing. His brusque manners were a family joke. At work, Evan was the front man, charming clients, making his rounds in a crimson
SUV
emblazoned with the company logo.

“What do you want to do for
our
anniversary?” Max asked.

“I'll have to think about it,” she said.

“I thought a trip. Maybe Italy or Eastern Europe. Terrific architecture in Prague.”

Lily thought of Becket's ears, how they clung to his bullet-shaped head beneath his cropped, lambs-wool hair, how she had never sat beside him in a car or on a plane, his head parallel to hers, listening to the silent percussion of each other's eardrums.

“I've started seeing a woman,” Becket said softly.

So softly she could almost imagine he hadn't said it. They'd just kissed goodbye at his door, his bare feet on one side of the threshold, her running shoes on the other.

“What am I?” she asked.

“You're a wife. Someone else's wife. I just wanted to let you know so you wouldn't think you're the only one.”

“I know it's not fair,” she whispered, index finger tapping the doorframe. “But I
want
to be the only one.”

Another Saturday, when Becket started to reminisce about how they'd met, the nostalgia in his voice caused Lily to shiver and pull up the blanket. From the bed, she could see her white runners lined up beside the door.

“Maybe I should take Pilates for real. Maybe that's all this has been, exercise.”

“Not for me.” He slipped one hand under the arch of her neck.

“So, how are things going with what's-her-name?”

“Things are going, but I don't want to talk about it. We never talk about Max.”

“When you're married, will you want a mistress?” she asked, searching his face for the real answer.

“The tech bubble is going to burst,” he said. “The
NASDAQ
is already showing a decline. The writing's on the wall. I think we should transfer all your money to the dividend fund.” His eyes had their urgent, steamroller look.

“Okay,” she agreed, closing his lids with two gentle thumbs.

Outside Becket's condo, the March sun warmed Lily's skin. The air smelled earthy and fresh. She couldn't bring herself to follow the slick, muddy stairs into the subway, which would have taken her home in fifteen minutes. Instead she walked up Yonge, the longest street in the world, imagining Mrs. Santos on Monday, changing the sheets, washing away the dried evidence of Lily and Becket's lovemaking, wiping Lily's fingerprints off taps and doorknobs, vacuuming up all traces of her dead skin cells and hair. The invisible Mrs. Santos making Lily disappear.

Lily dragged her sorry body past Beth and Emma's high school, where both girls were practicing for the school play. The house would be quiet when she got home. She wanted to keep walking, to leave the city behind, but by the time she reached her street, her clothes were damp with sweat, and her hips and knees ached. Just as she lifted the latch of the iron fence, Max's van pulled up to the sidewalk.

He called out, “Must have been some exercise class.”

Inside the house, he said, “We have to talk about our trip.” He was pinching his bottom lip between thumb and forefinger, a sure sign of stress.

Max had been planning their anniversary trip for May, but now he didn't know when he'd be able to go. “Evan's lined up too many jobs for spring and summer,” he told her over the ham and cheese sandwiches he'd made while she was in the shower. “Don't look so upset. I promise we'll get there.”

Lily picked the cheese out of her sandwich, abashed at her good luck in the timing of Max's confession, but unable to stop her tears. She wept on and off for the next three days, Max's sheepish attentions making her even sadder and more contrite. She'd failed at love, not only with Becket, but with Max, Beth, and Emma, stealing time from them, hoarding parts of herself away.

That spring, she gave her students extra work, scribbled in their practice books with red marker, and pushed them to master their recital pieces to do well on the June exams. She flew at the piano, banging out Schubert and Beethoven, until Beth and Emma screamed at her to stop.

In September, prices on the Toronto Stock Exchange began to tumble, technology stocks leading the way. Becket had transferred her money as promised, but even the dividend fund was losing ground. People were scrambling out of the market, but Lily remembered what he'd said about the fund, “The longer you hold it, the better it gets.”

In October, Max and Lily finally went to Prague and Venice. Her sister Judith drove in from Kingston to stay with the girls.

On the plane, she stared at the dark hairs sprouting from Max's ears, then slipped a quilted eye mask over her face. She seemed to sleepwalk through the five days in Prague while he pointed out arched windows, spires, pilasters, and pediments. Jetlag, grief, or allergies made her face puffy, her ears crackle. But the first morning in Venice, she woke to see her skin reflected clear and golden in the ornately framed mirror. She and Max made love in the canopied bed. Later, they stepped down streets glistening with receding water and consumed fragrant linguine and rosé in a small room crowded by six white-cloaked tables. Across the canal, orange asters spilled from window boxes, a fresco was peeling from a yellow wall, and three doves sat on a shining roof.

Wherever they turned, whichever alley they ventured down, they saw or heard something beautiful that made any ugliness around it beautiful too. “Look at that,” Max said. A painting of a saint with golden eyes and alabaster cheeks hung beside the broken exit sign at an art gallery. “And those,” she said. Dainty purple blossoms sprouted from mud in the cracks of the dirty sidewalk. They saw a glass and silver chalice fill with green light from the narrow stained-glass windows in a musty, sewer-smelling church, and heard a grey man caress a Puccini aria from a scratched and dingy violin while they watched the purple hole, where his nose should have been, open and close with his breath.

On the plane home, Lily leaned in and traced the curves of Max's ear, allowing her fingertip to brush the bristly hairs.

Patti drags her fingers across the iron railings of her neighbour's fence just as the piano teacher opens the door and peers out. Patti says hello, wishing she could remember the woman's name. For years, she managed to avoid the neighbours, but once her pregnancy became obvious, everyone on the street began to claim her. Even the reclusive piano teacher has asked when she's due.

Inside the apartment, Patti heads for Jeff's studio, where she examines his empty easel, his cluttered desk, the canvases stacked and lined against the walls, the window facing the piano teacher's like two eyes opening onto each other. The room across the way is empty except for a black upright piano, a few chairs, and a small desk. The piano isn't furniture, Patti thinks. Or art. It's an object used to make art, like a paintbrush, but it doesn't require paint, only a musician to press her fingers to its keys. Unless someone makes a recording to capture its movement through time, no evidence of the music remains, nothing to admire or lust after, nothing to denigrate or destroy.

She turns from the window and flips through the canvases, looking for her own image. She finds the piano teacher's back, supple as a question mark in its close-fitting black sweater, posed beside a boy with a shock of golden hair, the white of his shirt split into vertical lines of grey, purple, and yellow. Under this painting is one of Patti in profile before she became pregnant. Her hair is a dark sheet of purple, black, and blue, lit with strokes of pure white, her face a swerving black line and pink smudge, her eye a white triangle edged on one side in brown and on the others with black. The predominance of white makes her eye appear to be looking away, at something the artist cannot see.

Tomorrow will be the final day of Jeff's weeklong workshop. Patti imagines the sunny weather giving way to drizzle halfway through the morning. When Jeff goes in search of his students, it will begin to pour. He'll find everyone in their usual places, packing up their paints, trying to keep their just-begun paintings dry. He'll direct them to a shelter at one end of the park while he searches for Rhonda and Janine, his shirt sticking to his chest, running shoes slipping on the muddy slope of the ravine. Thinking he hears voices in the woods, he'll follow a path that snakes through the trees and find their thermos in a clearing beside the riverbank, along with their folded clothes. He'll hear laughter, catch a glimpse of naked flesh swaying under water.

“Come in and join us,” Rhonda will call, popping up from the river to show her big white breasts, while Janine dives under. Rhonda, uncovered, is as pale and round as the mushrooms that will sprout there after the rain. Although Jeff has spent a week wanting to lose his face in her dense, springy red hair, and his hands under her body-hugging
T
-shirt, what he'll want most now is to turn and run.

Later, he'll come home, having forgotten his talk with Patti in the diner. He won't expect to find a suitcase in the hallway or Patti's mother in the kitchen, wrapping the dishes in newspaper and packing them into a cardboard box.

He'll rush upstairs to Patti's office, where she'll be kneeling on the floor, sorting books and papers into a plastic bin, hair tucked behind one ear and falling over her shoulders. He has a sketch of her exactly like that, her profile with that same determined expression. He'll tumble back into that time when he wanted to capture her every mood and pose, when he explored her with a seemingly endless curiosity.

“Don't go,” he'll say.

Patti pulls the painting from the stack, carries it to the bedroom where another portrait hangs over the bed. In this one, she gazes softly at the artist while holding three white-tipped fingers against her pink neck. An image can become oppressive, desire and possession holding the subject forever in check, stopping time, denying change. She'd read that Buddhist monks built elaborate sculptures out of sand to remind themselves of the impermanence of everything, knowing that soon the rising tide would wash their efforts away. So wasn't it fitting for a tide of reactionaries to topple the Buddha statues?

Patti takes down the pink and white canvas. She doesn't destroy it, simply replaces it with the purple and black painting, then turns the softly gazing Patti to the wall.

Lily doesn't make it to yoga. Instead she looks at old photo albums, dragging them onto the shady front porch because the air-conditioner has conked out, and the house feels unbearable. Max has promised to send one of his men to fix it, but Lily knows not to expect anyone. They're all too busy with paying jobs. She's given up asking for a new kitchen or bathroom. For years Max has talked about knocking down this house and building a bigger, better place, while time has stolen by, asserting its own work order of changes.

In the first album, Beth is a thoughtful, shiny-haired toddler, Emma an awestruck, bald-headed baby. Both stare at the camera and the woman behind it.

Becket has a daughter. Lily saw them one Saturday afternoon a month and a half ago outside the Royal Conservatory of Music, where she'd been adjudicating piano exams. He was bent over a stroller giving the toddler a spoonful of ice cream, but she'd recognized his smooth woolly head, his small, close ears.

She'd placed a hand on his shoulder.