Hal tells me I’ve picked another loser who hasn’t got a job and doesn’t take me out. He closes the door and leaves behind empty bottles in a beer puddle on my pine table and the lingering image of the purple and black striped shirt he wore to my sister’s wedding at Wasaga Beach twenty-five years ago, where he sat by the water’s edge flirting with a cute blonde, lighting her cigarettes and fetching her drinks. I watched him as I followed my sister and her new husband around, passing out wedding cake wrapped in doilies and silver ribbon to guests who would forget to take it home or would discover it at the bottom of their purses two weeks later, rock hard and turning colour.
You can’t know for sure how you feel about a man until you end up stuck to him — with him — with him in you. You think you like him, maybe even love him. You create scenarios as days pass and he doesn’t call. His mother died and he went away. His girlfriend keeps showing up and he wants to call you but can’t get a moment’s peace from her. He got a job and left town.
You tell yourself he didn’t mean much. He was just another lover, someone to pass the time with. You were going to break it off anyway.
The phone rings. It wasn’t so long ago that you saw each other, was it? No, you’re not mad. Of course, you understand.
Then you hop in your car at eleven at night and your daughter calls you a whore and your understanding son says he’ll look after things, and you drive out into the darkness, rationalizing your right to your own life, praying, bargaining for him, or her, or it to keep your kids safe until you get home.
You go.
Just to get there.
Just to get there one more time.
Some of your friends say you’re too available. You deserve more. Make him choose. You or her. Secrecy or out in the open, public declarations of affection that make everything alright.
How can you drive out there in the dark in the middle of the night? It’s not safe. He shouldn’t make you do that.
You’re a disappointment to women everywhere. Weak and boy-crazy. A horny middle-aged disappointment who can’t tell what it feels like when you get in your car and put on Patsy Clines “Walking After Midnight” and smell the lavender as you back out of your driveway, and breathe Patchouli Oil, and the fresh smoke of the cigarette you’ve just lit, and the ripe smell of the hay that’s been cut in the fields you pass as you climb the hills and reach the bonfires and the black water of the lake, and remember a thousand times in your life when you couldn’t smell anything but disappointment with yourself.
How can I not go, I say
Sometime over the last year, i started telling Ben about Mary-Beth, and Mary-Beth about Ben, and this is what really bothered me about Mary-Beth coming up to the cottage to fix our problem. They know too much about each other.
Ben knows all about the man Mary-Beth dated who had the latest, greatest fishing boat with all the gadgets and gismos to help him spot a fish five hundred feet away; how the kids on the dock where he parked the super fish-finder caught more fish with sticks and string than he ever did, how Mary-Beth said he was never any good at finding the right spot on anything, which surprised me that Mary-Beth would even bring that up.
“The only things he ever found out there were mosquitoes and a good place to pee,” Mary-Beth had said, and I repeated it for Ben hoping he would shed some light on what answers he might be finding out there on the lake with his rod and his smokes. He was on his second summer of soul searching and as far as I could see he hadn’t caught a single decision.
Once, after we had made love and Ben fell asleep, I went outside on the porch, which threatened to give way at any moment and send me down a grassy slope into the cold night waters. I stood there and watched the blackness roll in towards me and wondered what Ben thought about when he was out there alone, fishing in the weathered aluminum boat that came with the cottage. It bobbed up and down and back and forth against the dock — yes, no, yes, no — as indecisively as the man who climbed into it and went fishing for answers.
The precarious life of a fisherman.
I never told Ben about Mary-Beth’s theories on why he can’t make a decision, or what she thinks about the way his girlfriend has begun following him around and showing up without notice, which is really beginning to irritate him. I’ve never said a word about my “aftermath cycles,” which Mary-Beth named and asks about whenever she sees me on the street and I’m looking anxious.
Days one through five after I’ve seen Ben, I’m fine and can live with or without him. Days six through ten, I teeter between calm confidence that I’ll see him again soon and a state of questioning despair when I’m sure he’s chosen the other one, or someone entirely new, and won’t even call to tell me. By day eleven, I’m ready to break it off and get rid of the headache that’s been sitting above my eyebrows for the past four days.
“What day are we on?” Mary-Beth always asks, then we’ll go for a coffee or a drink, or just stand on the street, the two of us backed up against the hardware store, analyzing the meaning of the ring-less phone.
“Everyone thinks I should dump him.”
“Why,” Mary-Beth says, “you like him. Love doesn’t just have to happen in the daylight or between 6 p.m. and midnight, for all the world to see. To hell with convention. What’s it got to do with love?”
“You’re right,” I say, “why get messed up with that.”
“He’s been honest with you, from the start,” she says with a serious tone to her voice.
“You’re right, he has.”
“So, he’s not as honest with the other one. What does that tell you about their relationship?”
“You’re right again,” I say. “I’m really glad I ran into you.”
And I am glad until Mary-Beth tries to turn the helpful advice into a commitment for dinner at her place the next night. I didn’t mind our impromptu meetings on the street, every now and then, but Mary-Beth wanted some kind of payoff — friendship — for listening to the aches and pains of my heart that she solicited in the first place.
I decline her invitation, saying I have to watch my son play basketball or something like that. I can’t remember now. I regret ever telling her anything about Ben. Mary-Beth assumes she’s now part of our relationship and can bring it up in conversations on the street corner, the way most people talk about the weather.
“Are you awake?”
Nothing.
“Ben?”
Nothing.
I can feel him slipping away, a weakening of the walls that hold him in place.
Not yet.
Not yet.
He sleeps. His body rises and falls, and he breathes as though he might stop and be gone forever. In the dim light, with only a thin line of pale yellow coming in from the kitchen, he could be anyone, or everyone — if I let what I already know about him drift out the window onto the night’s breeze, and I clear the slate for nothing but the shape of his silhouetted shoulder as he lies on his side facing me with closed eyes, like the others who’ve clothed me with their passing love.
He breathes.
He stops.
He breathes.
And I remember standing in line at a post office, years ago, with a brown package in my hands, waiting my turn.
And the striped T-shirts Johnny Marks used to wear.
And the way he used to sit on the front porch of his sister’s house with his back against the pillar, with