Chapter Two
The night Ben and I got stuck while making love was a night like all the others I’d seen at Oak Lake.
That’s how I’d begin.
With something familiar.
With the same dark sky that greeted me every time Ben called and I drove out in the middle of the night to see him — on the wheels of one long-ago moment — under a sky full of stars, sprinkling specks of light on a lake rumoured to be bottomless. That’s what made me clamp down on him with a force I never thought possible. The bottomlessness of the lake.
The temporary loss of footing.
Even after it happened and Ben lay sleeping beside me, I was sure there was a point to this bizarre occurrence. I just wasn’t sure what it was yet, since it only developed in the last several hours of my life, placed in the lap of my artistic sensibilities, a metaphor I couldn’t imagine would do me any good.
If I were a writer, I might reach for a pen and record the details while they’re still fresh — the black water; the green and white fireflies glowing around the shoreline; Ben’s unbelievable release of control. How he nearly drowned me in his eagerness to take me with him.
If I could paint, I’d splash the canvas with underwater lovers and a horizon of black binoculars. Big, eyeless binoculars with glassy stares that threatened to make intimacy a spectacle. Something ugly. Something laughable. Something punishable.
I thought I saw someone watching us from a cottage down the lake. A stick figure against the dim porch lights. Maybe that’s what kept me from going with Ben to a place, he kept panting, was the best he’s ever been.
If I could write it all down, I’d have an accurate, detailed account of what happened. But I’m not a writer or a painter. I’m a storyteller of the verbal kind, with a wandering mind. I can’t stay on course and land in the middle of the end of the story. I have to go off here and there and make stops along the way. I have to take a walk on an island I think no one else has ever discovered and describe what I see before I make my way back to the point of the whole blurry mess.
I’ve had my share of impatient lovers, and an ex-husband who was forever asking, “is there a point to this story, Sadie?” So I’ve learned to pace myself and periodically inject, “and there is a point to this story,” into my ever-changing, always-evolving, becoming-something-else monologues.
And just how will I tell people what happened?
Will I start at the beginning, which some would say was earlier in the evening when I met Ben at Oak Lake, in the dark, so no one could see me. I drove my car down John Meyers Road and parked it on the side, just before it forks to the left for Sid Oaks Lane, then walked the rest of the way in — the same way I’d been doing it for over a year. Of course, that’s not really the beginning. They’ll want to know why I met Ben in the dark, why I didn’t want anyone to see me at this winterized ramshackle cottage he calls home.
Why does a forty-nine-year-old woman sneak around in the dark to meet her younger lover? A respectable woman who runs an adult literacy centre, has two teenage children, a mortgage in a small town, and a shitty car that empties her pocket every other week with its needs-this-needs-that attitude, and a nagging feeling she should have bought some registered retirement savings plans twenty years ago.
That’s the beginning of another story.
Or the beginning of this one.
I have so many. I collect them, and at this very moment I’m wearing most of them on my back. Literally.
“It’s a case of vaginismus,” Mary-Beth said on the phone, “an involuntary contraction of those muscles. It’ll go away if you just relax.”
I was standing in the small kitchen of Ben’s cottage, where the phone is. Ben by this time was an involuntary appendage and shuffled along the floor with me, the two of us wrapped in a blanket that smelled of cigarettes we had grabbed from the couch after we manoeuvred our way up from the lake. I was cold and had put my jacket on. Ben was wearing his black Levi’s shirt, faded and marked with the remains of too much clumpy laundry soap, which he doesn’t see or doesn’t bother wiping off.
“Usually fear or pain makes you clamp down like that,” Mary-Beth continued. “If you can relax those muscles, you’ll release him.”
“Why can’t he release himself? Won’t he lose it soon?” I was panicking. Ben kept sighing and shaking his head and didn’t know what to do with his arms, which were tired of holding me and bored with hanging idly by his sides. MaryBeth was calm, and I could picture her sitting up in bed under her crisp sheets in some freshly laundered summer nightgown, which she had hung on the line to dry that morning.
“You’ve probably cut off the blood supply,” she said quietly. “That’ll keep him erect.”
“Jesus Christ, Mary-Beth, what if we’re stuck like this forever!” I could already hear the cries of humiliation from the mouths of my children, the gossip and whispered enjoyment that would spread throughout town.
She’s the one who got stuck.
“You just have to relax,” Mary-Beth kept saying. “Do some deep breathing. Lie down and talk calmly. I could come out with some Valium. Where exactly are you?”
I didn’t tell her. I said I’d call back if I needed to. The last thing I wanted was Mary-Beth showing up, knowing Ben’s name before I even introduce them, asking him about this bad back, telling him he should quit smoking to get rid of that cough he’s had for a while now.
I only called her out of desperation.
I’m not friends with her.
We meet every now and then on the street, or we go for a drink. It’s always Mary-Beth’s idea. How can I say no? She gives me yearly Pap smears and listens to my complaints about my sore neck and recommends Kegel exercises to keep my bladder and all those other things up where they should be.
She knows how much I weigh.
Besides, I tell myself, she hasn’t been in town that long, and doesn’t appear to have many friends. Any friends. She only moved to Stirling from Ottawa two years ago, after Dr. Reynolds retired, and lives alone in the apartment above her office, a pale blue home on the edge of the Mill Pond with white shutters and a parking lot with five spaces reserved for patients.
“How about a drink?” Mary-Beth will say when we run into each other. We’ll go to Jim’s, the sports bar on the corner, where a ball game or hockey game will flicker above us and the smell of pizza and stale beer fill the air — where Mary-Beth pretends to be like me and I find myself acting like Mary-Beth, leaving things out, rearranging, talking in a language not entirely my own.
After a drink or two, we’ll go our separate ways. I always have a reason to get on with the evening. Groceries. Making dinner for my kids. Or film night with my friends.
I’ll watch Mary-Beth walk back down Mill Street in her comfortable shoes and navy suit and cropped, chin-length hair, and I’ll get an urge to rush home and burn anything in my closet that isn’t multi-coloured or beaded or bright, or scented with Patchouli Oil, which never bores me and fills my pores with nights I’ll never forget.
I’ll go home and put on my Storyteller’s Jacket while I scramble eggs for dinner and wait for Ben to call, which could be anytime between 5 p.m. and midnight.