Swing in the House and Other Stories Page 3

  “In England,” he continued, “we have spring. It’s a beautiful, delicate, graceful transition. It has subtlety. Of course, you wouldn’t get that.”

  “It rains.” Her voice sounded whiny, even to herself. “And when it rains, the drops are bone-chilling. It’s not happy weather.”

  They moved to B.C. She told herself it would be fine. For one thing, there would be distance between Mike and Ishl. Although she had no idea how much of a threat Ishl actually was, she was always there, behind Julie’s thoughts, weighing down her dreams, as elusive and omnipresent as God, but with multiple piercings. And Patty was out there, living the isolated life of a single mother. Poor Patty. Maybe she could help her out.

  Mike found work as a sound technician for a film studio in Richmond, a ten-minute drive from Vancouver. Julie began to work two part-time jobs. One consisted of teaching new immigrants “life skills,” a job she had done full-time before Paul was born. The other consisted of finding host families for foreign students. They rented a house in an agricultural preserve in Richmond. There were willow trees, a small pond, a huge field of wild grass. Across the road, a cranberry field, where Sikhs in bright turbans stood knee-deep in dark crimson water. Julie reassured herself that Paul would be just as stimulated here as in a big city; the stimulants would just take different forms. When they went for walks, they counted the chickens, dogs, blue herons, ducks, horses, and even llamas, which their next-door neighbour mysteriously kept in his backyard.

  Soon after they had settled in, Julie visited Patty, who lived in a similar area a half-hour away in White Rock. A home on her parents’ property, a loft above a chicken house. She had decorated it in her vibrant style. Red floor, brightly patterned, contrasting cushions, an orange cat that sat and stared at them from the corner of the room.

  Patty was in art school. She showed Julie some sketches she had done for a new self-portrait. Sweeping, sensual pencil strokes. Patty’s face, but a little thinner and older and a great deal more wanton. Patty served Julie a cup of green tea and then settled her heavy body down on the red floor. On the wall behind her, looming over her: a life-sized portrait of a sharp-featured man in a rumpled shirt. Patty reached for the cat, but he whimpered and fled back to his corner.

  Julie asked her what was new. Patty was coy; she beamed and shrugged.

  “Who’s that?’” Julie asked, pointing to the picture.

  “Someone new, yes, not a boyfriend,” but her eyes nevertheless shone. Like a little girl’s. Or, it occurred to Julie, like a madwoman’s. Julie wondered if she herself had had that look when she first met Mike. A woman in love.

  Finally, Patty dropped her guard and began to talk. The guy in the painting was the opposite of the man Julie had helped her to leave in Montreal: that man had been a tall, beautiful African, an aspiring actor, had a very loud laugh and was prone to unpredictable rages.

  “Do you remember?” Patty asked.

  “Do I remember!” Julie exclaimed.

  Patty told her that she was considering going back to Lionel. She said that she missed being a family, and she missed sleeping with him. “But so far, every time he says he’s coming, he backs out at the last minute. But still...”

  Julie shook her head at her friend, and mouthed, “No.”

  “Anyway, in the meantime, there’s this guy from Berlin.” She told Julie that the man who had posed for her was a set builder and aspiring film director with an intelligent, brooding way about him. He had followed his ex to Montreal, then come out to B.C. to recover from a broken heart.

  “He actually married Ishl to stay in the country!” she added.

  “What? He was with Ishl?”

  “No, she just married him so that he could stay here. His girlfriend refused to. Ishl isn’t into men, remember?”

  Right, thought Julie. “You want to help him recover from his broken heart, is that it?” she asked as she glanced up at the picture. The subject seemed stiff and unwilling. Also, familiar. She looked back at Patty, who hugged her fat knees and sighed dreamily. Julie felt depressed. She made an excuse to leave.

  Life went on. Work, kid, taciturn husband. Julie and Mike never left Paul with a babysitter to go out to supper or to a movie, but one Saturday, Julie arranged for him to have a play date so that she and Mike could go shopping for some new furniture for his room. As they were descending an escalator that day, a couple going up on the escalator beside them began to wave and shout excitedly at Mike.

  “Hey, Mr. No-Forwarding-Address!” the man shouted. The woman yelled, “Mikey Smythe, you prick!” The man was tall and black-haired, with long black sideburns, the kind only the exceptionally beautiful can pull off. Mike reached for Julie’s hand, surprising her. Paul did that, when he was nervous, and their hands, despite the difference in size, felt the same. The same warm stickiness. Julie watched her husband’s face as the other couple scrambled off their escalator and ran around to theirs. Mike’s lips were twitching.

  “What are the chances?” The woman said, as she and the man caught up to them. She pronounced it chawnces.

  “We are Andy and Billy, by the way,” she said to Julie, giving no indication who was who. “But I expect you have heard all about us from Roo here.” Roo? The woman slapped Mike softly on his right cheek.

  “You know, I had a feeling you would end up here,” the man said, and then added, “Wanker.”

  “In my defense, I was going to write to you…” Mike began.

  “Is this your lovely wife?” the woman said. She touched Julie on the shoulder. “Lucky Mike. Lucky you too, though. Roo was my first crush, you know.”

  All Julie could get out of Mike on the way home was that they had been in a band together in England. No, no records. Just a high school thing. Not really music, more like Art, whatever that meant. Yes, he had known they lived here. No, he wasn’t particularly keen on getting together with them.

  “Was Andy your first crush?” Julie asked.

  Mike stiffened. He didn’t answer.

  “Which one is Andy anyway?”

  Silence.

  “Have I got it wrong? Was Billy your first crush?”

  But he had retreated into one of his mysterious funks. She cheered herself up by remembering how he had reached for her hand. She remembered the warmth of his fingers in hers, and also the need.

  She knew she was never going to see those people again. If she wanted a social life, she would have to get it going by herself. The trouble was, Patty rarely wanted to get together. Julie gradually realized Patty was in love with the artist’s life. Julie herself was in some inferior class of friend, she knew, someone not hip and artsy, and their relationship only consisted of occasional visits or phone calls. Work was all right; she led foreigners around town although she barely had a grasp of Vancouver at all. The glorious colours in which everyone had painted B.C. out east set her up for a letdown. The city seemed shabby, there was no street life, and that particular summer it rained every single day in July.

  Julie did call Patty from a pay phone on her way home from work a few days in a row to try to coax her to come out on her birthday. She called her several times, maybe too many times, that week. Mike had encouraged her to. He didn’t mind looking after Paul. Julie understood that he felt suffocated by her presence, by the routine they shared. Paul’s innocent joy in discovering the world was contagious, and it mitigated his father’s suffering, but somehow the effect didn’t cross over into the realm of the relationship of his parents. Julie stuck to the belief that the relationship was still good for both of them. Where would they be without each other, without Paul? Mike had a restless streak; he was a hazard to himself. He would probably have quit working altogether if he hadn’t had to support a family. He would be in Thailand. He would be addicted to drugs, she firmly believed, and probably have a few STDs by now.

  Patty declined Julie’s invitation again; recently she always seemed to be waiting to hear from her German friend. He would say he was coming by, then not show, o
r show up just as she was going to bed.

  “I’m worried about you,” Julie said.

  “Yeah, I know. This isn’t a great situation.”

  After a moment, Patty shocked Julie by asking if she thought she should “jump him” when or if he did eventually turn up. When Julie finally replied, her words were careless.

  “Sure, why not? It couldn’t hurt.” She felt slightly depressed as she spoke.

  She stalled going home. She walked through a park in the rain. A teenage boy had just taken a young husky off its leash, in defiance of the signs posted everywhere. The boy glanced at her and grinned as they watched the dog zip around and around in a big slanting circle, as if it had been waiting for this moment its whole life.

  Julie finally got on a bus to go home. The bus was crowded. She paid her fare and, swinging along the overhanging handrail, made a brief attempt to pass through the tight knot of people at the front.

  Suddenly, she came face to face with Patty’s painting, her German friend. Their eyes met. Then his bounced away and returned to his book.

  This is the only way for people with no real friends to meet people. By meeting other people’s friends, by crazy coincidence. No, why would it be him? Too much imagination, she scolded herself. She studied him. Skinny, wearing too many layers for the weather. A green denim jacket, two shirts, black jeans, a flat cap on his head. He had a pointy chin, sharp cheekbones, and startling light-blue, narrow eyes. He moved toward the back, his nose still in his book.

  After a moment, she followed, and told herself that if the words on the cover of the book were German, her imagination had won.

  They were.

  “Excuse me,” she said.

  He looked up and smiled. A happy, trusting, inquiring, unsurprised smile.

  “Yes?”

  There was a pause during which they smiled at each other and she felt very pretty. There was also a vague flash of recognition. She tried to figure out what the feeling was, and decided it was that she was about to make a mistake again. A flash of recognition of the feeling before a big mistake.

  “Are you Patty’s friend?” she heard herself say.

  “Yes,” he answered, as if expecting the question. “And who are you?”

  Julie mumbled her name, explained how she recognized him, and he said, very clipped, very German, that he seemed to recognize her too, and that Patty would be happy to hear that someone had recognized him from her painting. He didn’t tell her his name. Then he rang the bell, excused himself and got off the bus.

  Julie’s heart sank. If he were interested, she told herself, he would have stayed on the bus. Wait, interested? She swore at herself, for everything. She listed the reasons in her head. For her apparent subconscious wish to deceive both her friend and her husband. For her stupidity at staying married to someone who clearly did not love her. She pushed that thought down. But, most of all, for her obvious unattractiveness. If I were better-looking. The thought accompanied her all the way home. She studied the posters on the bus advertising skin creams, hair dyes and holidays at beach resorts. If I didn’t have bags under my eyes, if my hair looked all right, if I looked good in a bikini.

  It finally stopped raining. The next morning, Julie was hanging clothes on the line outside when she heard Mike through the kitchen window, answering the phone.

  “No, she never told me about it,” he was saying. “Well, I don’t know. Yeah, maybe we don’t talk much.”

  “We’re babysitting Angeline on Saturday,” Mike announced as she came inside with the empty basket. “Patty needs a break.”

  Julie was surprised. She had given up calling Patty. She was happy that Patty had thought of her, and that she could help her with Angeline. Ever since the time she had nursed Angeline, the little girl had felt like a part of her family, as if she had managed to burrow under her skin.

  “So you met this Max guy,” Mike said. “Some crush of Patty’s?”

  “Oh, yeah, that’s right,” Julie said. She hesitated. She had gotten out of the habit of conversation with her husband since… since forever. He didn’t seem particularly interested now. Or was he? Did he know Max through Ishl? Was he jealous? And of whom?

  “It was embarrassing,” she finally said. “For some reason the guy practically leapt off the bus when I went up to talk to him.” A deep breath. “What did he tell Patty?”

  “Oh, nothing much,” Mike said, his face unreadable. But he went on to report what Patty had told him: Max nearly fainted when a beautiful woman with beautiful eyes got on his bus and told him she had recognized him from a painting.

  “Oh, and he missed his stop,” he added.

  Angeline was almost six months older than Paul, but much taller, and with none of his babyishness. She watched primly as Paul splashed naked in his plastic wading pool in the backyard. She refused to even take off her sweater, although her brown face glistened with sweat.

  “When’s my mum coming back?” she asked.

  “Tomorrow morning,” Julie said.

  “Are we having dessert tonight? I saw a cake.”

  Julie’s heart sank. She had made the cake for her, remembering that her third birthday had just passed, but then Patty told her that Angeline had terrible skin rashes, and that she was trying to eliminate wheat from her diet to see if they would go away.

  “It’s not a very good cake,” she told her. “I want to make you a different dessert. When this one is in bed”—she indicated Paul with her chin— “we’ll go see what we can find.”

  Angeline’s eyes lit up and she allowed herself a small, hopeful smile.

  Later that night the little girl watched Julie gravely as she cut pieces of melon, banana and kiwi into a bowl. When she opened a container of strawberries, some kind of childish energy seemed to stir in her for the first time, and she hopped in the air, clapped and whooped for joy.

  “Strawberries!” she sang happily, as she ran and hugged Julie around the waist.

  A few days later, Julie, Mike and Paul returned home from work and daycare to find three messages on the answering machine. A record number.

  Mumbling, “Oh shit,” and then a small voice in the background whining, “I want to go to Julie’s.” Click. Then another message, this time an adult shouting her head off in the background, and a little girl saying, “Hello?” A third message. Shouting and crying. Nobody speaking into the phone.

  Julie looked at Mike and for once they immediately agreed about something, albeit silently. After supper, Julie drove to Patty’s parents’ farm and parked next to the chicken coop. She stood next to the car, looking up into the window of Patty’s place, patting the dog that had rushed up barking at her and was now licking her bare ankle. She looked around her. Patty’s parents had money; they had property in B.C., and that was nothing to sneeze at. But Patty was living with her daughter upstairs from a chicken coop, about two hundred metres from their big house. Her place smelled. Like chickens, but also something else, something sadder. Julie wondered at her own luck. She went up the steps.

  Patty hugged her. She didn’t look distressed. In fact, she couldn’t stop smiling. She opened a drawer and took out a small, square cardboard box. Angeline came bouncing into the room. She was dry-eyed. She greeted Julie with a hug around the waist before her gaze fell on the box.

  “Is it for me? For me? For me?”

  “No, it’s not for you,” Patty said crossly.

  Julie watched her friend carefully. To her relief, Patty’s voice softened as she continued. “Santa’s bringing your presents—if you’re good.” She turned to Julie and said, “Max told Angeline that Santa exists, but most adults are just too stupid to realize it.”

  “You said it’s the mothers and fathers who give the presents,” Angeline said.

  Patty ignored this remark and opened the box, pulling out what looked like a wooden clog. Julie looked mo

  re closely: it was a man’s head garishly painted with a bandana, eye patch and moustache. Patty handed it to Julie a
nd laughed as it fell open in her lap, to reveal another smaller pirate’s head, and then another, in the manner of a Russian doll.

  “He won’t even like it,” Angeline said, pouting.

  April. Mike came home from work, went straight to the TV and turned on the sports channel. Julie said, “Hello.” He turned around quickly and said, “Oh, hi,” as if he was surprised, had forgotten she lived there.

  “I’m going out,” she said as she put on her jacket. She told him that she was going to help Patty’s friend with his college application. “Paul has that sleepover birthday party,” she reminded him, “but he’s never done this before, so maybe they’ll call.”

  “Got it,” Mike said, eyes on the screen.

  Fifteen minutes late, Max rushed into the café. Black leather motor-cycle outfit clinging like a catsuit. He was coughing, smiling, gasping for breath.

  “You’re late,” Julie said, instead of, “Are you all right?” At first, she regretted her rudeness, but then realized he hadn’t noticed. He smiled and held up his right index finger.

  He told her he would be right back and put his helmet on the table. He went out again before she could say anything. The helmet was big, black and shiny. It took up most of the table and, because it was sitting across from Julie, it seemed very incongruous, like a bowling ball next to a cup of tea. Julie was wearing a long skirt, sandals, and expertly coiffed hair; she’d gone to the hairdresser’s that day.

  Nearly twenty minutes late now. For his free lesson. A cloud of paranoia floated across Julie’s mind. What had Patty said? That she was so bored with her life that she didn’t mind correcting some foreigner’s essay, for free? Suddenly, she missed her husband, who was responsible, never late and had acceptable manners. She remembered that he had a cold that morning, and she hadn’t asked him how he was feeling before she left for the café.

  She finally got up, walked to the front door and looked out. There Max was, sitting on the terrace, just a few feet away, smoking a cigarette, as if he had completely forgotten their appointment. She wondered if he thought he was good-looking. Maybe that was what this was all about.