Fire in the Firefly (7 page)

Civilization sacrifices parents for children.

Barbarism, the other way around.

The Collected Sayings of Julius Roebuck

T
here's a level of synchronicity they have managed to achieve, he and Anne, which Roebuck has for many years admired, an interdisciplining of agendas. It is one thing they've agreed on since the start, since before their first pregnancy, even: that they will make a habit of sitting down together as a family to eat. Admittedly this is not always feasible. Roebuck has his business meetings, and Anne, too, her own affairs. But more often than not, the dinner hour will find the five of them at the table all together, passing the salad and news of whatever has been happening since breakfast.

When he contemplates old age, there isn't much hilarity in view. But the prospect of talking politics and abstract religion with his adult children is a pleasure Roebuck anticipates with what for him are the very highest of his hopes.

For now, though, they are still in the stage when no line of reasoning survives for more than three minutes before complete annihilation by some unrelated train of thought. It's a challenge when company comes, but a rule is a rule and the kids eat with them even when guests are being entertained. Yasmin is holding up her end of things quite well. But then again, she's practising.

Morgan has been at pains to tell them how she's doing
all
the work on her science project, while the other girls aren't doing anything,
anything
, especially Ginny Moragani, that bitch. Anne and Roebuck spin heads in parallel reproach while Zach keeps cutting in asking if he—Dad—would rather fight a grizzly bear or an adult Siberian tiger? Also he wants to know what Yasmin would do if an Albertosaurus poked its head through the window. Forsaking the last of her manners, Morgan hurls a mussel shell, aiming at Zach but missing on account of aerodynamics and nearly grazing Yasmin, who bats it down with catlike reflex. Roebuck has been given to understand that the topic for later is likely going to be the lonely womb. He admits a certain level of curiosity.

After the usual string of arguments and obfuscations, the kids troop upstairs to brush their teeth. Anne goes along for
good-night
kisses and soon is back down, escorted by a sulking Zach in his Sponge Bob pyjamas. Zach thinks it's totally unfair he isn't getting any bedtime story. Roebuck excuses himself. Story time has always been a favourite. With a little luck, they'll have the dishes cleared before he's back.

He is good at this, more so now the older girls are not as interested. Back when they were younger, they were always, always, wanting princesses and mermaids. Roebuck—like his wife a product of more hopeful
times—disapproves of princesses and finds it challenging to make them sympathetic, at least the versions Katie and Morgan demanded. His son prefers zombies and hammerhead sharks. For a year or more the two streams could sometimes be merged, and Roebuck struck narrative gold with hybrid creations involving both royal daughters
and
interesting carnivores, a far more satisfying arc. But now the girls have mostly opted out. Kate has her own Facebook account; already she has taken to closing her door. It won't be long before they're fretting in the dark about what kind of photographs she's posting.

Tonight, though, Zach says he doesn't want a
made-up
story. He wants a real one, from a book. The one about the farting dog. Roebuck hates that farting dog and lobbies for Kipling. What about “The Elephant's Child,” which he knows Zach doesn't mind and which he really does enjoy because of all the different voices he gets to put on? Zach wants nothing to do with his father's attempts at zoomorphic accents. It ruins the story. Then how about “The Cremation of Sam McGee?” Roebuck has this one down by heart. Some mornings, for drill, he runs through the whole of it on his drive into work.

“Sam McGee sucks.”

“Zachary!”

They settle for a Dr. Seuss, which has the advantage of being short. Roebuck is getting curious about how the conversation downstairs has been moving along.

Anne and Yasmin are head to head when he switches off the light and tiptoes back downstairs. The dishes are still heaped in the middle of the table. Yasmin glances up and smiles, though his wife seems oblivious to his return. Roebuck gathers plates and fades back into the kitchen.

When he thinks about Yasmin—which happens far, far more often than he knows it should—he reminds himself that in fairness he must always factor in the liabilities of beauty. Women who are constantly watched fall into the habit of watching themselves. And certainly, Roebuck watches Yasmin. A phrase from somewhere nudges in; he pauses, tracking it. “When contemplating her, the mind leaps instantly to bed.” He can't recall the source, much less the author, but his own mind, undeniably, has jumped into bed with Yasmin so often it's worn out the springs. No fault of hers either; he concedes this point as well. There's just something about his wife's partner that sets his nostrils flaring and his hooves pounding whenever he inhales in her vicinity, or on the brink of flaring and pounding before he reins it in and locks it back inside the stable and bolts the door. No one, not Yasmin (or Anne either, more succinctly), no one at all but Roebuck himself is aware of the physical effect she has on him.

The irony's so blatant he almost enjoys it. He doesn't even
like
Yasmin. In fact, truth be told, his feelings probably shade closer to active dislike. She is, as far as he can tell, a truly
one-dimensional
being; the kind of person who values only what reflects her own self back. Still, he's hardly one to talk. Where Yasmin is concerned, Roebuck's own reactions are as basic as a bulb of mercury in heat. If he were a less forgiving soul, he'd be ashamed of himself.

He has kept up with the research on pheromones: those intriguing chemicals that geneticists know stimulate sexual attraction. Marketers have been trying for years to replicate them in the lab and infuse them into products. The romantic side of Roebuck hopes they never do; his business is art, as he understands it, not science. But he sympathizes. Chemistry's a wonderful explainer of the inexplicable.

It's a blessing, all in all, that she is so unappealing in so many other respects. Though here again, he needs to watch himself. Anne's attachment puzzles. He knows from long experience that his wife is never one to suffer fools gladly. So there has to be something there Anne sees and he doesn't. The two of them, somehow, complement each other at some level he is unable to access. The topic hasn't shifted when he steps back into the dining room.

“Maybe it just isn't meant to be …”

“Oh, Yasmin, don't even
say
that!” Anne's face wears the same earnest, loving look that comes over it whenever one of the kids arrives home with bad news from school. “You
know
! You know you know.”

Yasmin needs persuading. “God, I hope you're right! Maybe you are …”

“Of course I am. Of
course
I am.” Anne reaches across the table and takes Yasmin's hand. Roebuck gathers cutlery.

All this while they've been working through the question of Yasmin's fitness for parenthood. After much reflection, much
self-doubt
, many conscious and unconscious allusions to a higher destiny, they have together arrived at the conclusion that it is a positive thing, on balance, the fact that Yasmin is tearing herself apart over this. That she has invested so much in contemplation of her own suitability speaks favourably for how genuinely she approaches the subject. He can hear them from the kitchen. Yasmin's voice rising and falling; Anne's steady, calm, encouraging …

One of the things they do particularly well together, he and Anne, is parenting. They are firmly together on that plank at least. Still are. He can't help thinking that, deep down, Anne must share his opinion that Yasmin is definitely
not
cut out for motherhood, especially the
single-parent
variation. He wishes he could ask.

His wife is constantly perplexed by her friend's inability to land a mate. Roebuck's own theory—far from
bullet-proof
—is that Yasmin is intelligent enough to want a thinker, but not enough of a thinker to keep one. He was foolish enough to suggest this once and watched the subject take an instant and dramatic shift into a detailed and much more clearly articulated assessment of his own shortcomings—and who the fuck was he to think he was so smart? Since then, whenever Anne talks about Yasmin, Roebuck sighs and shakes his head and says it's a puzzler all right: so smart, so beautiful, such a lovely personality: it just doesn't add up. But he can't help believing that, at heart, her truer feelings are probably in line with his.

Roebuck refills glasses. “That's the last of it,” he says, setting down the empty jug. Yasmin has clasped her hands together like an ornament between her breasts. Anne nods and passes him the pitcher. “Why don't you make us up a fresh batch?”

Last summer, with Anne away at the cottage during so much of the renovations, they spent a fair amount of time together, he and Yasmin. All major decisions were made without reference to him, naturally. Anne and Yasmin spoke each day by phone and kept in constant touch by email. They'd decided it had to be
his
project too. So once or twice a week throughout that August, he would climb the stairs behind the mesmerizing spheres of Yasmin's rump to the top floor of his empty house, where she would lead him, room to room, navigating scaffolds, stirring motes of drywall dust into the musk of her perfume, while he assumed the role of doubtful, cautious client—questioning the colour of this finish or the placement of that vent—whose reservations she was on the ground to manage and subdue. If the work crews had left for the day they would drink a glass of wine afterward, in the shade of the backyard, certifying progress to date. Yasmin would talk about Yasmin. Roebuck would contemplate same.

He discovered then that with a little tinkering, she could be made to stimulate two very distinct regions of his brain. His primitive, limbic system reacted on its own. No need for analysis there. But as the summer passed and exposure lengthened, Roebuck learned the trick of inducting Yasmin to the abstract, more complicated regions of his thinking. It was—and still is, as he perceives it—a form of compensation; something useful in exchange for something not. By now it's settled into a conceptual exercise, a kind of
thought-experiment
. He imagines Yasmin as a sort of
meta-Yasmin
: The Ideal Customer; the sum of all women. The challenge is then to figure how to pitch her. Recently, he's been adding Greenwood to the mental mix as collaborator on a common cause. “Look,” he tells his phantom art director. “Study. This is your model. This is who we're talking to …”

“More brandy, less sugar.” Yasmin is standing at his elbow, holding out the bottle of Courvoisier.

“Don't listen to her,” Anne calls through the door. “That last batch was plenty strong enough.”

Roebuck smiles, takes the bottle from her hands, and pours as she watches. “More,” says Yasmin, watching still.

Roebuck pours again.

“We have a question for you when you come back out,” Yasmin says as she wanders back to the dining room.

He crushes some ice, slices an orange, splashes the wine, and then, because curiosity is driving him again, adds another slug of brandy.
Sangria
comes from the Spanish word for
blood
. They are waiting for him at the table.

“So,” he says, prevaricating. “Will there be a black president?” This shot is aimed at his wife, whose feminist sensibilities are rooting for Hillary Clinton. Roebuck is defensively inserting mischief.

“Who cares!” Yasmin has been primed for this all night. “This is serious!”

“We want your opinion,” says Anne, “as a man.”

“Ah,” he says. “Not my field …”

“Yes, yes …” His wife cuts across the caveat. “Your expertise is women, blah, blah, et cetera, et cetera. We know all that. Still, we would like you to give this one a shot.”

But it's true. Roebuck
is
far more confident of his understanding of women than of men. He seldom gives much thought to other men except from time to time to wonder if he himself is fairly representative. Research suggests that probably he is. But it's also true he really doesn't care. Men are not significant.

Yasmin drives straight to the point. “Why would a man donate sperm?”

“She means to a sperm bank.” Anne is a great one for clarification. “What would be his
motivation
?”

“Ah.”

So the topic has matured. Roebuck fills their glasses and settles into his chair. The expression on both women's faces might be well described as
avid
. He takes a sip, considering. How can he not be enjoying this? “Off the top of my head, two possibilities, starting with money …”

“Nope.”