Ellen in Pieces (15 page)

The Christmas tree had been turned off but the lamp next to the couch was on. He didn’t see her until she spoke.

“Matthias?”

But he’d been quiet! Absolutely soundless. So how did she know? How could she not? She’d given birth to him, nursed him. (He’d probably suckled her the way the Hickey Machine suckled Patty, like a workaholic leech.)

All day Matt had been avoiding his mother. He was afraid of her blindness. Now he stood before her, mortified. She knew he’d come upstairs for the magazine. She knew he intended to jerk off with it. She knew everything: when he was in the room, when he felt ashamed.

He felt ashamed.

“Here I am,” he said.

She patted the place next to her; he came and sat beside her on the couch. His gift to her was in her lap, he saw now, out of the wooden box. She fumbled for the light, snapping it off and plunging Matt into darkness with her, but only for a second. When the light came back on, an intricate pattern sprang out from the ceiling and walls, kaleidoscopic, as she turned the pot.

“Can you see it?” she asked.

She was holding the pot over the bulb. Above and all around them, its negative spaces filled with light. Lacy, sensual, vaguely Arabic, or like some arcane script no one knew how to decode, the shapes frolicked and wrote themselves.

“Can
you
see it?” Matt asked.

“That’s all I see. Lights and darks.”

He tipped back his head to watch. Anne found his hand, found and squeezed it. Matt squeezed back.

This was what the pot was for.

I
N
the Convention Centre, the crowd pressed around them but they might as well have been alone. He and Ellen stared at one another, each surprised the other existed outside the universe of Ellen’s bedroom loft. That was what Matt was thinking anyway. Finally, he picked up one of the pots, only to discover it was mainly made of air. Afraid it would crumble in his hand, he set it down.

“Take it,” she said.

“No. I want to buy it. How much is it?”

She pointed to the small clear sticker on the box. One hundred and fifty dollars. He must have winced because, again, she invited him to take it. Then she looked away. With her face turned, he saw her crease again.

Ellen asked, “Who’s it for?”

He hadn’t got that far in his mind. He was only being gallant. But she misunderstood his hesitation and quickly scanned the crowd. It ruined everything, this acknowledgment that other people existed, one in particular who was unknowingly involved and very, very close to being hurt.

Ellen fished under the table for the Visa machine. She took his credit card, impersonally, made the imprint and handed it to him to sign.

Matt signed. He watched her pack the pot in the little wooden box, nestle it in the straw, slide closed the lid. She put the box in a string-handled bag and passed it to him.

“I love you,” he said.

Ellen said, “Oh, come on.”

F
AR
ahead, Nicole perused some knit goods. Over the top of the partition she could see on display in the next booth pictures jigsawed
from inlaid wood. When her eye fell on one of an eagle, she was back in Hazelton again, walking by the river with a tiny, wiry elder in a trucker’s cap, trying to ply out words. She got the feeling he was only pretending not to understand her questions, so she stopped asking, and when she did the river’s palaver came to the fore. Stones grated underfoot. And something else, a sound like a very angry person cleaning glass. The elder pointed to a tree.

An eagle? Really? Its call was so high-pitched and girlish.

She heard her name and turned. Matt was weaving through the crowd. In the weeks since her return, she’d grown used to the silent language of his resentment. All her beautiful memories, like the one she’d just been enjoying, tainted with his mood. But here he was, coming toward her now, shining all over. The old Matt.

She smiled and dangled two pairs of booties. “For the baby. Which ones do you like?”

Then she noticed the bag hanging on his arm and, curious, said, “You bought something. Can I see it?”

Matt said no, which pleased her more than anything.

S
o in her forty-eighth year Ellen took up with a man-boy in his twenties who wore shorts in any weather. She couldn’t believe her luck.

At first Matt had hours (all day in fact; he was unemployed) to lie around with Ellen, who, living off her savings, was queen of her own life. Queen Ellen spread out in the loft on the hot twisted sheets, inhaling the tang of their exertions, while Matt scampered naked down the ladder to do her bidding. He brought her a glass of water, a wad of tissues to wipe the milty puddle off her belly, a cheese plate from the fridge.

One afternoon he fell back, curls fanning across the pillow. “I need to ask you something really personal. I’ve never asked anyone before. I need the honest truth. Please.”

“What?” Ellen said. “What?”

“Is my cock too big?”

This went on for three glorious weeks that autumn while even the weather seemed to announce the return of love. The horse-chestnut trees burst into flame, the Japanese maples dripped red, burgundy, carnelian. It didn’t rain.

And then it did. Lashings of it, the wind tearing off the last celebratory leaves. The trees stood around, undressed and shivering, clotted with crows’ nests.

Now Matt brought his cell phone up to the loft and left it turned on. Ellen pretended she didn’t see it tossed onto the clothes he’d so urgently shed, but there it lay, connecting him to someone he’d failed to mention.

She pulled the sheet up to cover her body. Too much information.

Let the suffering begin.

A
CROSS
the street from the studio was a corner store. This time of year Christmas cacti, poinsettia, and little bonsai pines crowded the board-and-cinderblock shelves out front. Plants, cigarettes, and lottery tickets were the store’s main business. Ellen, worried the place would go under, occasionally scooted across to buy something she didn’t need. Another plant to ignore to death. A can of corn. There was little else. The Frosted Flakes looked archeological.

She ran across in sweats and an old loose T-shirt scabbed with drying flecks of clay. A dog was shivering in a newspaper-lined box beside the till. She couldn’t tell its breed. The black kind with a goatee and plaintive eyes.

“Where did it come from?” she asked.

The owner of the store said, “My brother. Driving from Chilliwack? He saw it on the road. You want it?”

“I just came in for some corn.” Ellen set the can down, leaving fingerprints in the dust on top. “Maybe you should take it to the SPCA.”

He waved his arms back and forth like an aircraft marshal directing a 747 with batons. “Too busy!”

“Oh. Do you want me to take it for you?”

Ellen tucked the niblets in the box with the small black dog and carried both across the street. Halfway, the dog reached up and licked her face.

“None of that now,” she said.

Hardly anyone got Ellen at first, but this dog did. He beat his feathery tail against the side of the box and smiled. When she shifted the cardboard carrier onto one hip to open the door, he leapt right down, dashing circles around the studio, sniffing everything—Ellen’s workbench where she carved her pots, her dentist’s chair. He jumped onto the couch and tossed the cushions aside with his snout. Then he did what Ellen always did when visiting someone for the first time. He flounced over to the shelf and read the spines of all her books.

M
ATT
didn’t come that day, or call. Normally this meant long unfocused hours tied up in knots of hope, then, when Ellen could no longer deny he was a no-show, her dejected release from these self-wound coils. How pathetic to be waiting all day for a man as young as her daughters. Tear-stained, humiliated, she fashioned little monsters out of clay, then flattened them.

Today she put aside these pitiful recreations. She had to get a dog to the SPCA. To do that, she needed a collar and leash. One thing led to another and, come evening, the dog was still there sniffing Ellen’s books.

She too loved the smell of old paperbacks, that particular, melancholy odour. It only followed then that the dog should have a
literary name. (She had to call him
something
before she turned him in.) Tintin? Tintin was the boy, not the dog. What was the dog’s name? She Googled it.
Snowy.

Snowy would not do.

Chekhov’s stories were right there on the shelf, perfumed by dust and sadness. The moment Ellen settled in the dentist’s chair with the book, the dog sprang onto the footrest, gingerly walked the double plank of her outstretched legs, then curled into a polite ball and fell asleep. A dog in the lap of a lady reading “Lady with a Lapdog.”

In the story the dog appears in the opening paragraph, trotting along the Yalta promenade. No name, just a breed. A white Pomeranian. (This is ironic, for Dmitry Dmitrich Gurov thinks of the women he seduces as of
the lower breed.
) How many times had Ellen read this story of a passing affair that swells to a grand passion? Many, many times, and every time reminded her of her first reading at seventeen or eighteen, when she’d sobbed. With each rereading, the sob returned, a ghost in her chest, lodged too deeply now to release, her own heartaches grown around it. She’d been living with that impacted sob ever since.
Catharsis interruptus.

Tonight though, she felt nothing. Something rang false.

A few days after noticing Anna Sergeyevna, the lady with the lapdog, Gurov seats himself close by at an outdoor restaurant. He wags his finger at the Pomeranian, and, when it growls, appeases it with a bone off his plate. It’s a ploy, of course, to secure Anna Sergeyevna’s acquaintance.

After dinner, Anna and Gurov take a long walk, just as Ellen herself had done that afternoon when she returned home with the leash and collar and a hundred and twenty dollars’ worth of dog food and paraphernalia. What happened with Ellen was that the
dog—the black one, the flesh-and-blood, tongue-and-tail one—made straight for the nearest tree and began to circle it, forcing Ellen to leave the sidewalk and slop around on the saturated verge. It was as though he were searching for something he’d lost in the longer grass at the tree’s base, something he was desperate to recover. Finally, he found it, this precious thing invisible to Ellen. When he did, he lifted his leg and pissed all over it, then romped ahead to the next tree where, evidently, he had also left something in the grass.

After ten minutes of this Ellen grew impatient and tried to pull the dog along. He stiffened his legs, effectively putting on his brakes, and stared at her, ill-done-by. She had to coax and herd him, then pick him up and carry him. In other words, the entire walk had been about getting the dog to walk instead of sniff. More than once she became tangled in the leash, or he did.

Yet when Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna go strolling after dinner, talking the whole time, marvelling at the way the light falls on the sea, the dog isn’t even mentioned. Presumably he was there, or had they left him tied up back at the restaurant?

A week later, Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna retire to her hotel room to consummate their affair. Again, no reference to the Pomeranian. Does he object to their lovemaking? Is he jealous? Have they shut him in the bathroom? It doesn’t say. In fact, the dog is only mentioned once more in the story. Months after they both leave Yalta, Gurov finds he can’t forget the lady with the lapdog. He travels to her town and loiters in front of her house until, after a miserable hour, an old woman comes out with the Pomeranian.

Gurov was about to call to the dog, but his heart began to beat violently and in his excitement he could not remember its name.

Here Ellen lifted the real nameless dog out of her lap so she
could return the book to the shelf. It was the first time the story had failed her.

An hour later while brushing her teeth, she realized something: the story was in Gurov’s point of view! It wasn’t
Chekhov
, but
Gurov
who was indifferent to the dog beyond the purpose it could serve him in seducing a young woman. Whatever Chekhov may have felt about the canine species, Ellen knew this: if the story had been from Anna Sergeyevna’s point of view the dog would certainly have had a name. And a patronymic. And a diminutive too.

So she settled on Anton. The resemblance was obvious by then—the longer black chin hairs, the compassionate tilt of the head. Tony for short, in honour of her dog-loyal hairdresser.

T
HE
next day Matt was out front getting rained on when Ellen and Tony returned from their walk. Her heart stuttered at the sight of those bare knees. According to the clock with movable hands on her door, Ellen was late. This clock had proved useful in their affair, which was being conducted strictly on a drop-in basis. Now it provided Matt with a grievance.

She pointed to her goateed excuse, though Tony’s goatee was not so obvious with the wet sock hanging down.

Matt asked, “What’s it got in its mouth?”

“A sock. Isn’t that cute?”

Before the door was fully open, Tony bolted in ahead of Matt, who threw back the dripping hood of his Gore-Tex and sampled Ellen, her mouth and neck. After they separated and shed their rain gear, he asked whose dog it was.

“Well,” Ellen said.

She told him the whole story of bringing the dog home and the
trip to the pet store. She might have been reading a script. Did he hear it? This was how she lived now, hovering above her own life, watching herself so that later, when she recounted her day to Matt, he would be amused.

He checked his phone.

“You would not believe what they had in that store!” Ellen babbled. “See? Party-balloon poop bags! I can coordinate Tony’s poop bag to my outfit. Or I can say, ‘I’m feeling existential,’ and take a blue one.”

Everything was in the box Tony and the can of corn had come across the street in. Matt reached for the plastic banana, squeaked it. Tony snapped to attention.

“That’s a lot of stuff to take to the SPCA, Ellen.”

“And I hate shopping. I don’t know what came over me.”

“Let’s go up,” he said, starting for the ladder to the loft, pulling on her sleeve.

Ellen sashayed over to the sign and turned the hands of the clock forward another forty minutes, remembering how, not so long ago, their pleasure hadn’t been so stingily meted out, yet still feeling grateful, so very grateful.

S
HE
walked Tony to the vet, paid for shots, deworming, and the flea treatments she had to purchase in a six-month pack. Wheaten terrier, the vet thought, with a dash of Labrador. Maybe even a little corgi. He lectured her on neutering.

Ellen said, “The thing is, I’m not keeping him.”

She should have been churning out Christmas pots, but couldn’t settle at her wheel, not since that debilitating conversation with Mimi the day before.

“You’re not coming home for Christmas?” Ellen had asked.

“I hate Christmas.”

“Say the word and I’ll buy you the ticket, sweetheart. All of us together for once, even your dad.”

“Who?” Mimi said, and Ellen sighed.

“Listen, Mom. I’m not in the mood for this. I just had my pubes waxed. I’m dying here.”

“You
what
?” Ellen asked.

She was practically shaking with mortification when Mimi finished explaining. “Everyone does it, Mom. No one would ever go around all hairy
down there.
”

Another thing for Ellen to fret about: her wild bush. If she went and had it done now, Matt would notice. Boy, would he notice.

She started training Tony out of library books, glad to have found a use for all that corn. Tony was gaga for niblets. Within days she had him sitting and lying down for niblets, though no inducement would endear him to the leash. He was a free spirit and, respecting that, Ellen let him sniff along behind her.

On YouTube, she watched Pumpkin the beagle read. It really seemed that he could. When shown a picture of a cat and offered a selection of words printed on cards, Pumpkin selected
C–A–T
one hundred percent of the time.

Some old competitive streak surfaced in Ellen. She opened another can of niblets.

Finally, finally, Matt dropped by. “Sorry,” he said.

“What for?” Ellen chirped.

“I couldn’t get away.”

Ellen pictured the girlfriend, not her ineffable face, but her tidy little Chekhov mound, pristinely waxed. All her thinking about the Russians had brought her to this unflattering comparison, that, pubically, Ellen was in the Tolstoy camp.

Matt said, “And I’m going home for the holidays. Did I mention that?”

One of the dog books explained stances, tail positions, barks. Ellen had noticed that though Matt always said “I,” when he really meant “we” he cast his eyes down and to the right. And if she told him how desperate this news made her, would he ever come back?

“And where is home?” she asked.

“Spruce Grove. Outside of Edmonton.”

She feigned nonchalance, said she was going away herself.

“Cordova Island?” he said. “Where’s that?”

“I used to live there a long time ago. When I was married. My younger daughter Yolanda lives there now with her partner and their kids. She dropped out of pre-med to relive my life. The weird thing is, then my ex-husband moved back.”

“Oh,” Matt said. “Should I be jealous?”

Ellen laughed, but he didn’t. His face folded up in a way she hadn’t seen. He was always so uncreased, so playful, except when lamenting his penis size or paying obeisance to his phone. It frightened her into blurting, “Oh! We’ve got something to show you!”

“We?”

It seemed Matt had forgotten Tony until Ellen called him. His black head popped up among the couch cushions.

Ellen selected three books from the shelf—
Lady with a Lapdog, The Portrait of a Lady, Anna Karenina
—books the average undergrad couldn’t tell apart. She stood them up on the floor. Tony waited, shifting from side to side, licking his lips, which Ellen knew now was a sign of anxiety. She showed Matt the index card with its neatly printed question:
Which book did Chekhov write?