Inside (20 page)

“You know, there is,” Azra said. “Maybe it’s weird to ask, but Mike and I are both working, and with the kids and all their activities … Well, is there any way you could go over to Grace’s and do the mail and the plants?”

“Of course. You don’t mind, Grace?”

When she looked at him, her expression was dazed. She couldn’t be bothered to mind right now, that much was clear.

“She lives on Monkland, I’ll write down the address,” Azra said. “Here, I have an extra set of keys. This really helps, Mitch. Thanks.”

He felt dismissed. He squeezed Grace’s hand again—cold against his own—then walked down the green hallway with her keys in his pocket.

He drove west along Sherbrooke, past the dark red turrets of the Westmount Library, the setting sun piercing the windshield. All along the street people were hurrying home from work, leaning forward against the wind that was whipping leaves off trees and whirling them around. He knew a lot of people who lived in this part of town but rarely socialized here, having peeled away this layer of his life a long time ago.

Outside Grace’s building the trees were a riot of green and early, creeping yellow. He walked up the steps, remembering the apartment they had moved into as a young married couple so long ago. They had been so thrilled to buy their first things together, furniture and dishes, all of domestic life a novelty. It was hard to believe they’d ever been so young. He left the mail on a table in the hallway and went into the kitchen, looking for a watering can. There were dirty plates in the sink, and cereal boxes and granola bars and fruit
scattered across the counter. But it was a homey kitchen, a child’s smeared finger paintings tacked on the fridge. On the counter was a school photo of a blond girl with a gapped smile and clear, wide-set green eyes. She didn’t look much like Grace, who had had dark hair even as a child.

He couldn’t find anything to water with until, rummaging through the cupboards, he found a teapot that he recognized, queasily, as his mother’s. God knows when she’d given it to them. She’d been dead for seven years.

He filled the teapot with water and wandered from plant to plant. Toward the back of the apartment was Grace’s bedroom, and he peered in for a second and then, seeing no plants, stepped back with a feeling of relief. The other bedroom was a riot of pink sheets and stuffed animals and books and toys. No plants there, either.

Five minutes later he was done, and he put the teapot back exactly where he’d found it, which seemed stupid given how messy the kitchen was, but still. It felt like the right thing to do.

Back at his own apartment, he thought about Grace as he made dinner. When they met, he was halfway through his PhD program, the teaching assistant for a course Grace took called Personality. Later in their relationship, she confessed to having an encyclopedic memory of that time—what they’d said, where they’d been, what each of them had been wearing. He smiled and nodded, but truthfully he remembered little of those early encounters. What stuck in his mind was Grace’s work, her professional, detailed lab reports, so superior to those of her peers that halfway through the term he stopped reading them and gave her an automatic A. The sophistication of her performance was in dire contrast to the handwriting on her quizzes, which was round and bubbly. She didn’t dot her
i
’s with hearts or flowers, but she seemed like the kind of girl who had, and not that long ago. She pressed down so hard that sometimes the pen broke through the paper. It was the penmanship of a very young, very determined person.

Although he’d thought then that he was depressed, in retrospect his time as a grad student was, in fact, the happiest of his life. The worries that had so nagged at him now seemed like luxuries. Was
psychology
important
? Was it
effective
? Did it
matter
? He stayed up at night chewing over its various intellectual and emotional bankruptcies, and these anxieties functioned as ballast, distracting him from his suspicion that it was himself, not the profession, that was unworthy. Eventually, as he started working, the worries dissipated, and at night he thought about the people he worked with and their problems, not his own.

After that class was finished, he started seeing Grace around the department, meeting with her professors, working in a lab. They would run into each other late at night at the vending machine, or reach for the same milk container at the coffee shop at eight in the morning. Neither of them had a life, so they made one together.

He couldn’t recall a single thing Grace had said to them when they were dating. What he did remember was how
he
felt, things
he’d
said that made her laugh or nod at his wisdom. Over candlelit dinners she sometimes looked like she wished she had a notebook handy. At first this was great; then it was uncomfortable. He wanted her to figure out that he wasn’t all that wonderful.

But after he really got to know her, he understood that this was just her nature. She brought the full force of her attention to bear on you, made you drunk with that and with yourself. She wasn’t being manipulative; she was genuinely interested. Once he realized this, though, he began to resent her for
not
thinking he was uniquely gifted. It was unfair, but he couldn’t help it. He stopped calling, stopped inviting her out. In response, she asked him over, cooked dinner, and started telling him all about herself, her family, stories from her childhood. Then she calmly engineered him into bed, and there, without exactly being the aggressor, she let him know that he had been ignoring her, that it was his turn to pay attention. And he did.

A year later they were married. They were in their early twenties, and the only married people they knew were their parents’ age. Everyone seemed to think it was cute—or reckless. “You’ll be divorced before you’re thirty-five,” his mother muttered darkly when he gave her the news. And she was right, as she was about most things. She had loved
Grace, though. He wondered if she still thought they’d get divorced when she handed over the teapot. She was a materialist, his mother, stroking her favorite blanket and cardigan sweater in her last days at the hospital, long after she’d forgotten his name.

He had never wanted to admit it, but he mourned the loss of Grace the student, the adoring undergrad. When she got her own degree and they became peers, the tectonic plates beneath them shifted, resettled. They stopped having sex. They were buddies. What this said about him, his loss of desire, his need to dominate, was so profoundly unflattering—and so unutterably, unchangeably true—that he couldn’t even think about it.

Grace was perfect for him. She was trustworthy, caring, loyal, and smart; she understood both him and his work. So their divorce was, for a time, the great failure of his life—until he went on to other failures.

He discovered the truth about his marriage when he almost slept with a patient. An unhappily married forty-year-old banker whose husband was sick with pancreatic cancer, Marisa was rumpled and bosomy, with a messy tangle of upswept brown hair and lipstick that was always smudged; her perfume was unpleasantly spicy and overpowering. Every time she came in he thought she looked like she’d just gotten laid, although he knew from their sessions that this wasn’t true. Lonely, bereft, she wanted someone to hold her hand; she loved talking to Mitch, and there soon developed an unspoken tension that he allowed to build. He even grew to rely on it, the excitement of it feeling, at times, like the only thing that got him through the week.

At home he and Grace were sleeping in the same bed but on different schedules; she went to bed early and he stayed up well past midnight, so they overlapped as little as possible. Then Marisa’s husband died, and the day after the funeral she came into the office sobbing, dissolving, and admitted that despite her pain she was flooded with relief. Mitch patted her hand, understanding that she had chosen him for this confession instead of a priest, and that to violate her trust would be profane.

Years later he saw her at the Jean-Talon Market, and she looked great. She had lost weight, and her hair and clothes were less rumpled,
though she still couldn’t keep her lipstick on. She was standing fifteen feet away, choosing an eggplant, and when she looked up and saw him, the expression on her face was horrified. He nodded noncommittally and drifted away, realizing that she hadn’t looked at all sexual during that terrible time in her life, of which she had just been reminded. She’d just been a mess. Only someone as lonely and narcissistic as Mitch could have interpreted it otherwise. He walked quickly to his car, half his grocery list abandoned, thanking his lucky stars that the damage hadn’t been worse.

A couple of days later, he stopped by Grace’s room again, during visiting hours, showing up empty-handed; bringing flowers to your ex-wife seemed like a weird thing to do, no matter what the circumstances were. There was another patient in the room, the wall-mounted television was blaring a French
téléroman
, and his heart went out to Grace. She hated television, which gave her headaches when she was tired. Now she was staring up at the ceiling, slack-jawed, her expression vacant, her hands by her sides. When he knocked, her eyes jumped to life, and she looked so happy that he flushed. He should have come back sooner.

“How are you feeling?” he said, pulling up a chair next to her.

“Fantastic.” She smiled, in spite of her evident pain. She had lost the glassy-eyed look, though she was still pale and the planes of her face were shadowed. Somebody had braided her hair. “Azra says you helped out at my place. Thank you.”

“It was nothing.” He had brought back the key to her apartment and set it on the bedside table, on top of what looked like a drawing her daughter had done.

In the other bed, a middle-aged woman moaned, seemingly agitated by the TV as well, so Mitch turned around to look. The soap opera was taking place in a hospital too, where a young woman wearing a lot of makeup was hooked up to a life-support machine while a handsome doctor looked down at her in consternation.

“
Mais non, mais non
,” the other patient mumbled, though Mitch couldn’t tell what exactly she was objecting to. A detergent commercial
came on with a raucous jingle, and Grace winced. Noises carried into the room from the hallway, too: doctors being called to stations, the bright chatter of nurses, the hum and beep of distant machines. He was so used to being in a hospital that he rarely thought about it from the patient’s point of view, how difficult it must be to get well in the midst of the chaos and noise. He wished now that he had brought Grace something, a magazine or a book. “Is there anything else I can do?”

“I don’t know. Tell me what’s new. I haven’t seen you in ages.”

He shrugged, not knowing where to start.

“I heard you were with someone, a lawyer or something.”

This gave him pause. “Where did you hear that?”

Grace’s eyes sparkled at him. “It’s a small city. Somebody met her at a party.” She was right, of course—it
was
a small city—and it was no big deal. Nonetheless he felt at some obscure disadvantage. “It didn’t work out,” he said.

Grace reached for his hand and squeezed it. “Sorry.”

She was watching him intently, waiting to see if he had anything more to say about it, which was so typical of her, and so different from Martine, who simply would have changed the subject, that he smiled. He realized, now that his initial shock had passed, that Grace still looked good. She had stayed trim, probably still ran and skied. For a second he couldn’t help picturing her in those early months, splayed on their bed and whispering to him urgently, “Come inside.” She never put it any other way, and when he did she’d say his name, as if his identity had been a bit of mystery to her but was now, at this crucial moment, confirmed. This was the Grace he would always think of: young and smart and so fiercely competent that it took him years to discover just how vulnerable she was. She smiled at him now, wistfully, as if she were tracking his thoughts.

“It’s okay,” he finally said. “What about you?”

“Oh, no. Between work and Sarah, I don’t have time to meet anybody.”

“Where’s your practice now, anyway? Are you still on Côte-des-Neiges?”

She shook her head, wincing as if it hurt to do so. “I quit. I’m a teacher now. Grade six, on the West Island.”

“What? Seriously?” He was shocked by this. Plenty of therapists burned out, tired of hearing about intransigent life problems day after day, but Grace’s passion for her work had always seemed inexhaustible, her curiosity about other people such an entrenched part of her personality. She was the one everybody cornered at parties, the recipient of her friends’ troubled late-night phone calls. Strangers poured out their hearts to her in airports and grocery stores, and she never complained or seemed frustrated or bored. Her profession suited her better than anyone he knew, including himself.

“It’s a long story,” she said, clearly not intending to tell it.

Then her eyes shifted behind him, and he turned and saw a little blond girl trooping into the room—scissoring her legs in giant steps, swinging her arms like a tiny soldier—with Azra trailing her. Then she saw Mitch, stopped short, and cocked her head to the side. He guessed she was about nine.

“Come here, you,” Grace said fondly.

Mitch stepped back as the girl approached her mother and gently ran her fingers along her arm, as if afraid she might break.

Grace smiled at her. “That tickles,” she said.

Sarah smiled and kept doing it, her fingers scurrying up and down Grace’s arm like mice.

“Stop, kiddo,” Grace said. “Say hello to my friend Mitch.”

“Hi,” the girl said, without looking at him.

“Hi, Sarah. How are you?” This wasn’t the sort of question you asked children, who didn’t go in for small talk, and the girl ignored it. She didn’t seem bothered by his presence. It was just one more thing that had happened—her mother in this strange place, the doctors, staying with Azra.

“What’s the best thing that happened to you today?” Grace asked her.