Mating for Life (10 page)

It was 1968 when Helen escaped to Toronto and ended up flopping in an apartment with a group of Vietnam draft dodgers. At night she sang them the Irish folk songs she remembered her mother singing while cleaning, mending, or cooking, and one of the group told her she needed to learn how to play a guitar. “I already
do
know how,” she said. “I just don't have one.” So they pooled their money and bought her one.

Later, she moved into a Yorkville apartment with three
other girls, all of whom wanted to be folksingers, too. They started busking on street corners and trying to think of a name for the group they were going to form. Then Helen was approached by the owner of a bar. “What about my friends?” Helen asked. “Can they come sing, too?” But the man had said no, just her. The bar was called the Purple Onion. It was the same place where Buffy Sainte-Marie wrote “Universal Soldier.” Helen went back to the apartment and packed her things into a bag before her friends could tell her to move out.

The record executive who discovered her was a kingmaker, and also her first lover, and journalists would always ask about him, but she would refuse to say his name. “It was the first and last heartbreak for me,” she would say, trying to sound cavalier. Closer to the truth would probably have been something like,
The first cut is the deepest,
but that line was already taken. Soon, though, it became her trademark to sing songs that were anti-love, to preach, through her music, about how women didn't need men at all. She had been raised by a woman who thought the greatest thing Helen could aspire to was to marry Beacan Wilson. She had never once seen her father kiss her mother. Her brother had tried to rape her. “I'm not a huge fan of men,” she would say in interviews. Of course, there were rumors that she was a lesbian, but Helen didn't care. (Abigail did, though. This was apparently the final straw. She stood up in church and publicly denounced her daughter. A childhood friend wrote Helen a letter to tell her about it.)

“Down with Love, Says Helen Sear,” read her
Rolling Stone
cover line.

Success made her life a blur, until she turned twenty-five and walked into a party and met a man named Nate, the guitarist of one of the most successful rock bands of the era. He spilled his glass of red wine on her, then gave her his shirt to wear. She had wandered the party smelling like him until
she believed at the end of the night that she knew him. (She never really did.) She went with him back to his hotel room.

Weeks later, when he went back out on tour, she discovered she was pregnant. She wrote him a letter. He didn't reply. She considered her options and decided that although she could exercise her choice not to keep the baby, she could also exercise her choice
to
keep the baby. She could purposefully raise him or her without a father—and maybe that would be even more controversial than anything she had done so far.

By this time she had been befriended by Edie, a trust-fund child (Helen had recently heard the term “trustafarian” and thought of her old friend, always with a twinge of bitterness) who wasn't musically talented but was intelligent and spontaneous and the perfect accomplice, with her long dark curls and aristocratic good looks in stark and appealing contrast to Helen's blond hair and wide-set blue eyes. “
We
can raise the baby together,” Edie said. “Who needs a man?” That was how it had started.

Fiona was born, and she grew a little older, and then the seventies drew to a close and Helen passed thirty and tried not to notice. The songs she was writing were different, more offbeat and jazzy and not so popular with the North Americans, but the Europeans loved them, so she decided to go on an extended tour over there. On the night she met Claude, she had decided to procure a bike and ride it through the city, pretending to be a Parisian girl without a care. She wore a hat and sunglasses so no one would recognize her, but this made it difficult for her to see and she fell off the bike. Claude was standing on the street corner and he picked up the baguette and cheese that had fallen from her basket and said, “This won't do, will it?” and took her first to dinner and then to meet his delighted artist friends.

Her pregnancy was purposeful, although she didn't
quite
explain this to Claude. Still, he seemed pleased about it, in his
vague way. He even tried to live with them back in Toronto, when Ilsa was a baby. But he couldn't. He missed Paris. He thought Toronto dismal in winter, repressed in summer. He loved Ilsa, though, and Helen promised never to keep her from him. It was when Claude was living with her that she and Edie began to drift apart, ever so slightly. A man sharing their space changed things.

The eighties weren't kind to Helen's career. She had been warned to expect it, but still, it stung. Her record sales were plummeting, both at home and abroad, and no one seemed to understand that she needed to evolve, that she couldn't just be the same girl, singing the same songs. She got restless and left the girls with Edie. She went to India for a month, because it seemed like the thing to do. She met Wes at an ashram when she was sitting on a cold floor trying to meditate. She had been unable to focus and had opened her eyes. He was watching her, his green eyes (the same as Liane's) bright.
I want you,
she had begun to
say, over and over again in her head.
I want you, I want you.
And as they sat, wordlessly staring at each other, she had become positive that he was saying the same thing in his mind. Not in the base, physical sense, not
I want you
as in
I want to sleep with you
(although of course there had been that), but as in
I want all of you, inside, outside, all of it
.

She thought she had loved him most, when she did allow herself to think of him. And she wondered why that had done nothing to pull him back from the edge. “We can't choose who we love,” she had said after he died. “I still would have wanted to love him, even if I had known there was no curing him.”

It was this line, “We can't choose who we love,” that Edie had thrown back at her when she had eventually confessed to Helen that she had seen Nate at a party—and had only approached him to confront him about Fiona, she had insisted—and ended up falling into a headlong affair with
him that had somehow turned into a marriage at city hall. “Are you pregnant?” Helen had asked, incredulous. Edie was younger than her by a few years, but still. It seemed unlikely. “We might try,” Edie had said softly, and Helen had thought,
This might be all my fault
. She had allowed Edie to live in her shadow, had many times treated her like a nanny—and then Edie, whether on purpose or not, had managed to attain the one thing Helen had never been able to. “I don't want to see you again,” Helen had said. This banishing of Edie had been the worst heartbreak, though, because theirs had been her longest relationship, even if it wasn't sexual.

After all this, you're not going to find great love on a cheesy website,
Helen had thought.
And maybe not ever again. That part of your life is over. Move on.
It was June and just about time to pack up and go to the cottage, so she deleted her profile before leaving town.

• • •

But then: On her first day at the cottage that year, the day before the girls arrived, Helen had gone for a walk. She had stopped when she had seen Iain in his garden and stood watching him, mostly because he was strange to behold. All those greens, in bushel baskets around him. He was wearing some sort of apron and carrying a basket but there was nothing unmasculine about him. He stood up and looked at her and she smiled and said, “Hi,” and was about to make an excuse about why she had been standing there staring at him when he smiled back and said, in a voice that made her go weak at the knees (literally, they knocked together a little and she had to steady herself; she was
such
a sucker for a Scottish accent), “Would you like some greens? I have tons. Literally, I think.” Greens. Honestly. Iain and his greens. But it was yet another of the little things she loved about him that added up to a larger sum: the way that he was so relentlessly him
self. (Except, of course, when him being relentlessly himself meant him being relentless about the topic of marriage.)

He had walked toward her and they had started to talk. About the greens, at first: dandelion and chard, spinach and chicory, turnip leaves, rutabaga leaves, beet greens. “They're the secret to longevity,” he had said. “Oh, good,” she had replied. “I was getting tired of goji berries, turmeric, and the ground-up bones of wayward children.” To her relief, he had laughed, but then they had stood in silence. She, searching for something else to keep the conversation going, had asked him if he had seen the two blue herons who were out on the lake most mornings. “Oh, yes,” he said, “all the time. Aren't they a gorgeous pair?” Helen nodded and wondered what to say next, but then, thankfully, he had said, “Would you like to have dinner?” And she had said, “Yes, why don't you come over to my place and cook me some of your youth-preserving greens and I'll do the rest?” And he had said, “If you're sure, because I can cook,” but she had shaken her head, wanting to have him come to her, although she wasn't sure why.

Iain came to dinner—to her relief, not bearing wildflowers or something equally trite, but instead two bottles of wine, one red, one white. “I wasn't sure which one you liked,” he said. “What if I didn't drink at all?” she had replied. “Then I would have had to have them both myself,” he said. “And besides, aren't you Helen Sear?” She had nodded, for some reason embarrassed to admit this. “I'm sorry,” he said, sensing discomfort. “I didn't mean . . .” “That just because I used to be a folksinger I'm also a complete alcoholic? It's partially true.”

She took the two bottles from him and stood looking at him and found she wanted to run her hands over his chest, to take off his glasses, to kiss him. Perhaps she would have done this, many years ago—in fact, this was exactly what the old
not
-old Helen would have done: put the bottles down and led him to her bedroom, taking her shirt off along the way, shrug
ging out of her skirt, no underwear, of course. However, it was one of the sad truths about aging that a person couldn't just do things like that, that a woman couldn't count on the fact that lifting one's shirt over one's head would render a man speechless—at least not in the right way. And that you needed to have at least a few glasses of wine, if not several, before the courage could be worked up to do any of it.

“Used to be?” he said. “You mean you aren't anymore?” “Well, it's been a while since I performed, but I suppose the label is stamped on me forever.” That's how she sometimes felt, stamped by her songs, by the things she used to say.

Later, when the wine helped her lose inhibitions and she
did
lift her shirt over her head, he was sweet, said all the right things, made her feel good, maybe even great. And as time went on he also made her feel that none of the places she had gone to or the people she had been or the mistakes she had made in the past—many of these mistakes and much of this pain outlined in those songs she could never shake—mattered. She eventually came to feel that she could tell him everything.

This had not turned out to be true in all cases.

• • •

The night he proposed was also the night they'd had their first fight.

She had laughed before she had realized he was serious when he said, “Marry me.” Her next response had been to say, “But
why
?” Also a mistake.

“Because I love you,” he had said. “Because I want to wake up with you beside me every morning for the rest of my life.”

“Every morning? What if you go on a trip? What if
I
go on a trip?”

“Come on, Helen, don't get all technical on me.”

“We can still do those things even if we're not married.
Also, don't you want to know that every morning, when you wake up beside me, it's because I want to be beside you—not because I have to be, not because of some piece of paper?”

He had sighed and taken off his glasses and she had felt the first tingle of fear.
You could lose him if you don't do this.
“I suppose that's true. But . . . I want to be more to you than anyone else, than any of the others. Which I realize makes me sound incredibly insecure, and I'm not. It's not insecurity. I'm not trying to stake my claim, so don't suggest that, either. I just . . . I can't help it. I want you to be
my
wife. I want you to marry
me
. And I'm a Catholic boy at heart. It's how I raised my own kids. I'm not sure how comfortable I'd be living together if we didn't marry.”

“Let me get this straight. You actually think that marrying me will somehow keep you out of hell?” Helen was having trouble keeping a straight face but when she looked at him she realized he didn't find any of this funny.

And so she had composed herself and said
yes,
because how could she not have? Iain was the kind of man who pulled out her chair, held the door for her, gave his seat to women on buses and subways. (Which, yes, she sometimes did think perhaps reflected a belief in him that women were the weaker sex, but still, it was endearing.) Iain always, always kept his word, when it came to her and when it came to others, his family, his friends, strangers even. He was her best friend, truly, he was the person she wanted to be with all the time, the person she thought of and smiled about when she wasn't with him. He made her feel like a better person, and this was no small feat. He was never threatened or frustrated when she became strident, never became annoyed with her when she jumped on a soapbox. “She's a lot of work, isn't she?” a friend had once said, and he had smiled and pulled Helen close and kissed her on the head and said, “An awful lot.”