Circus (20 page)

Jay can feel his suit pants rubbing against the seat of the bike, and his tie needs further loosening, but he pedals on, the bike now bouncing along the wooden boardwalk beside the open water. At the end of the path, he rides into the empty concrete stretch of parking lot beside the entrance to the Canadian National Exhibition grounds, with its grand archway topped by the winged stone angel who guards the nation’s miniature ponies and corn on the cob. Our Lady of the Midway. Jay breathes in diaphragm-deep before he leans back in a way he hasn’t done since he was ten and pulls a wheelie. As he tugs on the handlebars he can feel the weight of the bike lift off the ground, and he rises – not quite up, and not quite away, just a little higher than in everyday life. The trick doesn’t last long. As the front wheel drops jerkily back onto the ground, a siren cuts through the quiet spectacle of his only show-off move. He starts to hear the world again as the front wheel strikes the pavement a second time. For a moment he is simply astonished that he hasn’t fallen. As he turns the pedals in a slower, smoother motion, keeping himself steady, his throat
tightens at the thought that he’s stolen this bike – even if only for a short ride. What would Lisa say if she saw him now, moon-crazed and loose-tied, riding a stolen bike as proudly as a kid with training wheels? He loops the bike in a wide circle around the lot and turns in the direction of home.

Jay rides, slower now, through the side streets full of shambling Victorian houses, their gardens trellised with still-green cherry tomatoes. As he pauses at a stop sign, despite there being no cars around, he’s reminded of the elderly man who used to ride his bike along the same route past their condo every day whistling show tunes. He has never seen anyone be as consistently cheerful as the musical cyclist in his reflective clothing and trouser clips. Jay and Lisa used to call each other to the window whenever The Whistler passed by, waving at him from the seventh floor, even though he never noticed them, but it’s been months since they’ve had reason to do so. Even though Jay has kept watch, the poor guy hasn’t been around lately. Lisa thinks that The Whistler is old enough to have died, but Jay hopes that he has just moved to a seniors’ community where bicycle riding is encouraged.

The uncompromisingly chipper glow of the MegaFresh sign welcomes him back to his neighbourhood. Stepping off the bike, Jay pretends not to notice that the punk cashier is standing outside smoking and no doubt watching him as he rests the bike back up against the stand. He almost expects her to unleash her inner black belt and charge towards him howling Tarzan-style while she delivers a flying kick right to his chest. “Honestly,” she’d say, keeping him pinned to the ground with her foot on his sternum until the cops arrived and gave him
the right to remain silent, “why would someone like you need to take what isn’t yours?” But the girl tosses her cigarette on the ground and turns to go back into the store. Instead of relief, Jay feels as if she does have her foot firmly planted in the centre of his chest. She tossed his grand performance away so easily: the butt-end of a slow day.

When he arrives home, the condo is dark and smells of laundry detergent. It’s Clean Breeze, a scent designed to give clothes the impression of lightness and fresh air. Still, Jay can’t help himself from breathing in deeply. He sets his briefcase down by the door and navigates by the moon’s soft light to the kitchen to ready the coffee for the morning. He opens up the espresso and fills the chamber of the coffee grinder so that all he has to do when he wakes up is hit “start.” There is nothing on the counter except an unsorted pile of mail.

Maybe he’s been unfair to the moon, which is still enormous outside the living room window. Actually, now that he really looks, it seems to have backed off a little. Jay can’t say why, but he just needs the moon to be the right size. What if the lunatic became so narcissistic it stopped knowing when to pull the waves in? Maybe it’s already forgotten its role in the ordinary pull and push of days. That might explain why Jay has fallen out of his usual rhythms lately: he can’t predict when he’ll want to rush home and when he’ll feel so far away from her he can hardly remember why he’s there at all. Or maybe there are no cycles left to follow, no steady movement of days into nights into days. With a conciliatory nod at the moon, Jay closes the curtains and gets ready for bed. He doesn’t turn on the bedroom light for fear of waking Lisa, so he puts his T-shirt on
backwards and feels the tag scratching his neck as he lies down next to her and rests his cheek against her shoulder. She shrugs him off and murmurs, but doesn’t wake. He turns his back to her, draws his knees in close to his chest, and closes his eyes.

After what feels like hours, but, according to the alarm clock, is only ten minutes of insomnia, he rolls over and strokes Lisa’s back. He wants to tell her about stealing the bike, about riding it down to the CNE as if he were racing in the Tour de France. But it seems too important to share, too personal even to whisper – eye-watering wind and the lift of that wheel off the ground, his body fully aware of itself, belonging only to him. Instead, he describes the man at the store. “You remember Rick from NYU?” “Nnnhmmm,” she says, with a little twitch of her lovely hand on top of the sheets. He lowers his voice even more: “The guy at the store was like him, but even more peculiar. You’d know what I mean if you saw him.” Lisa’s breath is slow and smooth. Jay stops moving his hand and rests the whole of his palm on the curve of her back. “I just want to know if you still …,” he starts, but can’t finish. “Actually, I don’t. You don’t have to answer.” When she responds by snuffling unintelligibly, he kisses her shoulder through her pajamas.

He rests there beside her for a moment and then sits up, swings his legs over the edge of the bed, and fixes his feet on the ground. He walks through the dark and opens the door, turning the handle slowly so the latch makes no sound. In the empty living room, he turns on the light and begins to do sit-ups in his T-shirt and boxer shorts. He switches to push-ups, straightening himself out into a plank. He braces himself there
for a moment before lowering his chest to the ground and then rising up again, repeating the movement over and over, each one the same as the last. He works out until there is sweat dripping onto the carpet and his core starts to tremble as a warm ache pulls across his chest and blooms in his arms. He knows he should go to bed, should try to sleep, should try to get back into a steady rhythm, but somehow he can’t bring himself to stop. Right now, this is the best thing he can do for his heart.

T
HE TRIP WAS BOTH MORE AND LESS THAN
Edna Crawford had imagined it would be. The Big Apple itself had been uninspiring, which was a surprise, because she thought she was so well prepared. After all, she and Calvin read the
New York Times
every day. She couldn’t help her postcard-glossy expectations: the rousing swing of the Wonder Wheel’s unsteady seats at Coney Island; the popping of her ears during the elevator ride to the top of the Empire State Building. The Travel section has been Edna’s favourite part of the paper since they started a family, and she could easily spend hours reading about the beaches of Belize and the tortoises of the Galapagos, mapping out fantasy itineraries. She always stayed up late after the girls had gone to bed, occupying the time before Calvin got home from the restaurant by costing out hotels online and reading traveller reviews, as though they would be able to afford the time and money to go.

New York was their first real vacation together since their oldest, Emma, was born twelve years ago. Sure, there had been summer cottage stays and campground weekends, but they hadn’t been outside the drivable Pacific Northwest and they
always brought the girls. Edna couldn’t wait to take a vacation that didn’t involve water slides and Flintstones-themed adventure playgrounds. She expected it would be tricky to pick a destination when the time came, but she surprised herself by being decisive. She had full itineraries ready for Paris, London, and Tokyo. They could have breathed the lavender air in Provence, or joined an Alaskan cruise. This year, though, she had in her grade eleven class a new student from Brooklyn whose accent was full sun against the temperate West Coast drizzle the rest of them spoke. His way of talking marked him not as an outsider, but as the king of the teenagers. He was only fourteen, but he had known what it meant to live at the centre of the world, rather than on the edge of the sea, on a wobbly tectonic plate that was always threatening to slide into the Pacific. Edna took his arrival in her class as a sign.

“New York,” she’d replied when Calvin asked where they should go.

“I think that might be the most definite choice you’ve ever made,” he said, elbowing her gently, and teasing, “Don’t I get a say?”

“Nope. That’s what I want.”

“Then that’s where we’ll go.” Calvin gave her a noogie, rubbing the top of her head with his knuckles the way he would do to one of the girls. Clearly, they needed some time to themselves.

They arranged to leave Emma and Liz with her sister for the week. The girls came to the airport to see them off.

“Can you get me a Yankees jersey?” asked Emma, who was the star pitcher on her little league softball team.

“Consider it done,” said Calvin. Too quick as usual with his promises, as far as Edna was concerned. Those shirts are expensive.

“We’ll see,” she said, wanting to avoid false hopes, “but we’ll bring you both back something nice.” She kissed Liz’s cheek. “What do you want, Lizzie?”

“A hug,” said Liz.

Calvin picked her up and swung her around in such a wide circle that she stumbled and put her hands to her dizzy head when he set her back down. “Right, kiddos. We’re off!”

Though Liz was struggling not to cry, Emma waved exuberantly at them and held her little sister’s hand as Edna and Calvin waved back from the security lineup.

As they boarded the plane, Edna felt defiant about having left her saggy one-piece swimsuit behind in her underwear drawer so she could bring her only negligée: a red, semitransparent lace number. Throwing it in her suitcase was an optimistic gesture, since she almost certainly wouldn’t be able to close the hooks and eyes now; even so, its presence in her impeccably packed luggage was a small triumph. She pictured the two of them frequenting Art Deco cocktail bars – her in a fur shrug and a shapely black gown and him in a suit – holding each other passionately by the elbows like a couple in the movies. The New York version of her was slim, with bare, smooth legs rather than thick, sturdy calves in support socks. And surely as soon as the plane touched down at JFK, she would instantly know how to apply liquid eyeliner precisely and her hair would emerge in elegant finger waves when she lifted her head from the neck pillow. Once they
arrived in the metropolis, she and Calvin would weave as naturally as shoaling fish through the crowds of glimmering bodies, darting and disappearing in the multitude.

As it turned out, the real New York was oddly quiet. Of all the things she thought it would be, she hadn’t imagined the modesty, the general ordinariness. Regular trees, empty sidewalks, average-sized dumpsters with normal amounts of garbage. Even the Statue of Liberty was smaller than she had imagined. And Calvin had laughed at her for that, for thinking it small when it was clearly colossal. He quoted from the guidebook, which claimed that it measured 111 feet from the heel to the top of the head. “Think about it,” he said. “I’m just over six feet, and that’s pretty tall for a real human being. She’s massive.” Then he leaned his head back, his eyes tilted up to her crown. Still, Edna felt that there was something underwhelming about poor Liberty.

Even Macy’s had been a disappointment. All the empty clothes came in size Triple Extra-Large. The whole place was picked over, just as insipid as the rest of the city. Lonely. Not only because of what happened six days into their holiday, but in a broad, atmospheric way.

Sitting in the airport, waiting for the plane to take her home, Edna lets herself think, again, about whether she could have changed anything. If she had paused just for a second, had waited for him rather than walking on. If she had given them more breathing room between Central Park and cocktails. She stops herself and tries to think about something else. No use
regretting or worrying, right? Because those things don’t alter the landscape. You can only do what you can do, as Calvin liked to say. Worry is useless. It’s like wool that won’t knit up right. It’s like wool without knitting needles. She still doesn’t understand why knitting needles are no longer allowed on planes. If they were, she would have something to occupy her hands right now: the fan-lace scarf she’s working on for Liz. Who doesn’t know yet. She’s picked up the phone in the hotel room several times in the past few days and each time she’s put it down again without dialling. Because … how? How will she say what she has to say? When she tries to phrase it in her head it comes out in spools of yarn instead of words, looping and tangling and folding in on themselves. What if everything stayed woolly? If she says nothing about it out loud, has it really happened? To distract herself, she starts clicking the end of her pen and watches the ballpoint poke in and out, in and out of the plastic shell. That would have driven Calvin crazy. But surely the pen was just as dangerous as a knitting needle? If ever the need arose you could poke a pen into all sorts of vulnerable places, someone’s eye or neck for instance, and you could do a lot of damage. Edna wouldn’t hesitate to protect herself, now that she was on her own. She might be from Victoria, where a stranger was more likely to open a door for you or give you a pat on the back than attack you, but she knew that much about the wide world. No use worrying about what you would do if someone harasses you. Make a plan. Have a pen handy. There are all kinds of everyday-looking things that can be used for violence if necessary. That’s not worry. That’s action. It’s been a long, long time since she’s had to worry about her own safety.
If only she was knitting right now, rather than trying to figure out sudoku, having finished the last crossword in Calvin’s abandoned book of puzzles. The status of her plane on the departures board continues to say “Delayed” in glowing red letters, with no indication of when this delay will end.