Mad Hope (4 page)

‘Why?' she replies gaily. ‘Everybody is coming to support me in this new phase of my life. They want me, I mean us ... ' She shoots a look over at Anton, instead of down at her belly. ‘They want us to do well, to live long and prosper.'

‘They think you're crazy, sweet thing.' I grab another egg salad, then put it back when I see the look on her face. The vacuum gurgles, retches and chugs to a halt.

‘For a person with a baby on the way you sure have a lot of chokables lying around,' I say.

‘I know,' she says. ‘It's like you live your life not understanding anything at all and then you find out there's a whole new subset of things you don't understand.' She turns to Anton, who is now standing in the living room doorway looking defeated. ‘Anton, that's good, you're such a good helper. Thomas needs help with the quiche.' She looks quickly towards me. ‘Don't say it. Real men do, and besides you're essentially just defrosting, not sampling.' She slaps my hand away from the sandwich tray and begins arranging wedges of cheese on a cutting board.

For a long time I believed there was only one type of cheese in the world – it came in a large orange square block with the word
cheddar
printed in capital letters across the middle, and it sat in stacks next to the bags of two percent in the SuperSave. My Self and I agree that it is a very, very good thing that I have been disabused of this notion. Stilton with pineapple slivers, my Self whispers.
Camembert
. Once, while tipsy, I told Joe I could never love a man who didn't love a good cheese. I made him promise that, if we split, he would find someone who appreciated a decent fondue. I sidle up to Taisie and she hands me a slice of Manchego.

‘How do you stay so slim?' she says.

I shrug. She's right; they are incompatible passions, cheese and dance, and life is not often fair.

‘How many guests?' I say.

‘Twenty or so, if they all show,' Taisie says.

‘You'll have to sit on a throne.' I pretend-crown her.

‘I know, I don't mind.'

I can tell she really doesn't. It's a combination of things – the padding she has created for the wad of new life inside her, and the extra padding all the gifts represent. Anyone who says stuff can't help you feel safe, ward off the creepy-crawlies of the future, anyone who tells you this is only partway right. Stuff can make you feel a lot better, and then turn around like a floozie and make you feel a lot worse. It's a tricky inverse relationship based on the stories you were told as a child, the last time you got laid, how many people admit to loving you and probably the position of the moon, or its glint on the world's rapidly reproducing satellites. Anyway.

‘I'll be the greeter,' I tell my starry-eyed friend. ‘People need to feel sufficiently greeted these days.'

Anton sits next to me on the bottom step, just inside the door.

‘What are we waiting for?' he says.

He seems nervous or tired; it's sometimes hard to tell with kids. With people, for that matter. ‘We're waiting for Taisie's friends,' I tell him. ‘We're going to dance with them.'

‘Really?' He brightens a little.

‘Really,' I say. He nods and crosses his ankles officiously. ‘If there's one thing I know,' I tell him, ‘it's that women love a dancer, especially when they are surrounded by other women.'

He looks like he might be interested, so I press on. ‘The thing about west-coast swing is it's always characterized as more
elastic
than regular ballroom,' I explain. ‘There's a little more freedom within the constraints of the steps, something less naive and brash about the moves. Impossible, of course, to convey this to a beginner – today is about a tight twirl in the foyer, some impromptu dips and pivots. Something to make us all stand up a little straighter.'

‘Let's play a game,' Anton says.

‘All right,' I say. I hate games, always have, can't help getting impatient with the conceit, with waiting to take a crack at the trick at the heart of them. Joe liked games, but there was no logic to his games, no real rules to butt up against. He liked to gather things randomly, and it seemed to me there should really be some strategy behind the gathering, a plan.

‘I Spy,' says Anton.

‘What?' I say.

‘That's the game,' he says.

‘Okay,' I say, ‘
what
do you spy?' (And I know I sound angry, but he's being so thick and thrilled and
childish
.)

‘I spy with my little eye,' he says, ‘something that is … ' He swivels his head around, searching. ‘Something that is ... '

I witness an idea click firmly into place in his brain.

‘Something that is blue!' His gaze has settled on the umbrella stand in the corner next to the radiator. He sits on his hands as if to stop them from pointing out his quarry.

I stand up, execute a half-assed pirouette, then make a show of scanning the zone, peering behind pictures and checking from floor to ceiling for clues. When I get to the umbrella stand I stop, do a quick once-over, then an exaggerated double take. Anton lets out a swift snort and begins to rock back and forth in anticipation. I pull out the umbrellas one by one.

‘Don't open them,' Anton whispers. ‘Bad luck.'

‘Hmm.' I scratch my head and begin to examine the umbrellas individually. There is no blue on these brollies. None. Anton is about to pee, he's so jazzed. I nudge the umbrella stand away from the wall and search its circumference for something, anything – a flicker or a shadow of navy or aquamarine. There is a spot of faded black on the rim of the stand. ‘This!' I say, pointing.

‘No, no, no,' he says. ‘Not blue!'

There is a bluish frame around a black-and-white photo of Taisie and Marco above the radiator. ‘This,' I say, getting tired.

‘No!' Anton cries, and leaps up from his seat.

‘I don't know then,' I say, wishing someone would knock on the door and end all of this frippery.

'It's the umbrellas!' Anton shouts. ‘The umbrellas!'

‘There is no blue on the umbrellas,' I say, quietly but firmly.

‘No,' says Anton, with a modicum of kindly condescension. ‘But the umbrellas are closed because the sky is blue. The sky is blue,' he shouts, jumping up and down.

Which is exactly when my prayers are answered and someone knocks on the door then opens it without waiting for a response.

Despite Anton's bewildering notion of the order of things, we become allies for the next hour or so, leading aunts and co-workers through into the living room, ferrying coats and shoes up to Taisie's room, where we pile them into a messy mountain on the bed, which Anton monitors with increasing inquisitiveness.

Back downstairs, I make a production of loving the ladies, baiting them like a bullfighter, enclosing them in my dancer's embrace, arching my eyebrows as I compliment them on their hairdos, laughing wickedly at how they have managed to avoid fashion faux pas, especially –
especially
– if they haven't. Anton watches me, perched on the stairs, staring through the slats. After a while, he adds his own hip-hop moves from the sidelines, gives me little go-girl salutes with his very fine I Spy eyes.

Once the guests have all arrived, he helps me to settle them with drinks, carrying one in each vigilant hand. Taisie is wearing a tight white shift over a pair of hot pink leggings. Not at all wise, but bold, I'll give her that. I know she was thinking
virtuous
, but not
too
. But, well, Taisie is big, even when she's not pregnant, not fat but fleshy – present in the world in a way other women are not. The outfit is not ideal. Martine, one of Taisie's high school friends who carefully retousles her long auburn hair after ­showering every morning, then hangs vintage forties dresses from her petite, right-angled frame, has cottoned on. She takes a punch glass from Anton, pats his head, then leans over to Jan – a nurse's assistant from Taisie's work with a semi-manageable drug habit – who is sitting on a cushion at her feet.

‘Bless her heart,' Martine exclaims loudly. ‘Wearing white! And only twelve days before her due date!'

Anton, apparently sensitive to insincerity, whips around to face her, his eyes ablaze with mob-style loyalty. ‘Bitch!' he says, and makes like a boxer with his head.

I hear someone whisper, ‘Trauma!' into the air, as if it were a shared secret. Which I guess it is; it's hard to sweep a double homicide under the carpet, much as we all (including me, my Self) might try.

‘Bitch!' Anton says again, his hands like teapot handles on his hips. I whisk him away in a waltz, but not before he manages one more unintelligible expletive. Once out of the living room, Anton breaks away and escapes up the stairs. I think: Coat Mountain. I think: Go for it, kid.

Back in the centre of things, Taisie is lifting tissue paper gingerly out of a gift bag. That's an issue with this new-style wrapping: you never know if what you pull out next will be the number-one prize or another bunch of decoy decoration. At the bottom of the bag someone has nestled a pair of soft leather booties with ladybugs embroidered on the toes.

‘Oh,' says Taisie. She looks up from the boots, and her eyes are full of tears. ‘They're really, really beautiful, aren't they? Imagine. My baby will have feet.'

‘Oh yes,' say the assembled ladies. They lift their plastic punch glasses in a toast.

Once Joe's note said:
Saddest comic strip character?

Later that night, Taisie and I watch a show on black-on-black violence in Toronto – black-on-black, it sounds like a new hybrid dance form to me, gumshoe man meets old school hip hop. That, or a hard-hitting investigative news show exposing corporate fraud, how business gangsters avoid taxes to stay out of the red.

‘Toronto the Not So Good,' I say.

‘Why,' says Taisie, gesturing at the screen, ‘does it still feel like they're making a movie about a faraway place?'

‘Never mind,' I say. ‘Never underestimate the power of the remote.' I press the Mute button. ‘How was that?' I say, waving at the pile of loot in the corner.

‘Good, it was good,' she says, in a way I know implies the ­opposite.

On the
TV
, two men pretending to be computers exchange quips. Then a woman wearing angel wings strokes a man's muscles. They are good muscles, I concede.

‘I miss Marco,' says Taisie.

‘He'll be here when you have the baby, right?' I say, and it is entirely the wrong thing to say. Taisie and Marco are taking a break after nine years together, three of them married, although not the most recent ones.

‘I thought we'd be better married, then I thought it was marriage that wrecked it all, made it all too obvious and bourgeois. But I think we just wore each other out – and I don't mean from fighting, I mean we knew each other until we couldn't know each other anymore. We're like smudged grooves on a record,' she says to me, kneading the cushion next to her.

I give her a look that says she is taking the metaphor too far and she nods sadly. She knows.

‘You're courageous,' I say.

‘Like fucking hell,' she says.

Strike two. I pick up the
TV
guide and pretend to be reading. Then I look over at Taisie. ‘Anton seems to be doing well,' I say.

‘Yeah,' she says. ‘I was trying to figure out whether he should be here for the birth. I was, well, I was thinking maybe you could be here with him, and if things get too intense, you guys could, I dunno, go out.'

‘Oh,' I say. ‘Okay. Will we need to, like, assist with anything or anything?'

‘No.' She smiles indulgently and pats me on the knee. ‘My midwife will take care of things. Anton was pretty good tonight, no?'

‘Yes,' I say.

When the guests were leaving, I found Anton crouched on the stairs. I could tell he was far, far into his Self. Joe was sometimes doing that, sinking down into himself, disappearing. But he was a grown person – so it often occurred to him to walk out the door. Usually he'd leave with a gun in his satchel, rusty, never loaded, an old .22 he found in the back of his uncle's oven. It was odd what he'd come back with: the smallish packs of Cheetos you get in vending machines, antique compacts made of pewter with leaping deer embossed on the front, the powder inside still solid, intact.

Last October, he took off for six days. The night before he left, he sat in the kitchen with his head in his hands. I could see his legs shaking under the table.

‘What's wrong?' I wheedled, and hated myself.

‘I've got the Chinese Jangles,' he said, smiling.

‘Migraine?'

‘It's when you think lewd and lascivious thoughts and your shoelaces come undone.'

He kissed me deep and walked out the door.

Joe came back six days later with a tiny, thumbnail-sized basket woven entirely of human hair. He pinched the fishing-wire loop at the top, lifted the lid and showed me the contents, an emptiness that could house a fly.