Serial Monogamy (19 page)

“B
ig death-bed scene next? We should get the final promo ready for next weekend if you're wrapping up.”

“Not quite,” I say, annoyed at his presumption, even if Jonathan now seems, like Al, to be enthusiastic about the serial. “We said June 9. I have three more instalments to file.”

“Right. Okay. And you'll want to tell us what happens after he goes. Left Nelly with enough money she never had to work again, while Catherine Dickens died soon after a lonely recluse. I checked Wikipedia.”

I bite back a withering retort. Becky always says I am too hard on people. I sometimes think the novelist is my better self, interested, understanding, wanting to know more. If Jonathan were one of my characters, I would be seeking out the wellspring of his weakness, puzzling out the working-class background in the middle-class newsroom; the tough-guy father who wanted him to be an
engineer, whatever it was that makes him both so convinced he has to cover for something and so laughably bad at doing so. The novelist would want to find the true person underneath all that, but in real life, I don't have much of a talent for hiding my contempt.

“Catherine Dickens received condolences from the Queen and lived another seven years after his death, visited regularly by her children and grandchildren. I think she was probably happier as a publicly acknowledged widow than as a publicly shunned wife. Nelly was left £1000 and the house in Mornington Crescent. Not enough to live on, so there's speculation there was also some kind of insurance policy or annuity. She married and had two children and ran a school in Margate with her husband, so she did have to work. She was never rich. Dickens did have an awful lot of dependants to take care of.”

“Okay. Well, I don't care much about Catherine then; just finish up with Nelly.”

That evening I tell Al about the conversation. The girls have bolted down dinner and rushed off to play, leaving us at the table finishing a glass of wine.

“Poor Catherine. She was a very social person and had artistic interests and hobbies. If he hadn't beaten her down like that, she would have probably matured into a happy matriarch when she finally got a break from child-bearing.”

“Do you think she regretted having all those children?”

“No. I don't think so. Why would she? Victorian women were proud of their big families. I think she truly loved her children. And Dickens barely let her see them after the separation. Imagine being parted from them like that…The youngest was six.” I choke up and can barely get those last few words out. Ana and Goli are seven now; they'll be eight in July. I bite my lip and blink back tears. “I don't want to be separated from the girls.”

“You are not going to die, Sharon.”

“We are all going to die. It's whether I will live long enough to see my children to adulthood.” I look down and fiddle with the stem of my wineglass. Al waits. “When they first told me it was cancer, all I could think about was the girls. I was completely panicked. How would they survive without me? I thought they would be traumatized by it, their lives would be ruined. I remember Anahita crying for me one of the first times I left her at daycare. ‘Where's Mummy going?' It was heartbreaking. I thought of them crying like that for me all the time, no mother to make cheese sandwiches…”

“I can make cheese sandwiches.”

“You know what I mean. No one to braid their hair, or find their socks. No one to cook Goli's eggs the way she likes them or to talk Ana down when she's in a temper.”

“Sharon.” Al puts a hand over mine. “We've been over this. I promise you I'll take care of them whatever happens. I'm not incompetent.”

“I know you aren't incompetent. That's what I'm trying to say. I started to accept it, I guess. I began thinking, Well, they would survive. They would learn to do without me; they would rely on you and it would be okay. The living go on, and gradually they forget the dead. They have to.” I tell him about the grave at Mount Pleasant. “People should not be like that, I don't think people are like that. I think they recover from huge losses, and making dinner and getting homework done begins to fill in the gaps. You can't spend all your life grieving, no matter how large the loss. Anyway, once I stopped worrying so much about the girls, I started to think about myself. About non-existence. I had to ask myself if I minded…”

“Minded dying?”

“I don't want to be in pain…Chemo was bad enough.”

“They'd give you morphine…”

“I don't mean that. I don't mean I would rather die than be in pain or be sick. I mean, it's dying I am afraid of, not death. I mean, afterwards, what's to be afraid of? Unless you believe in hell or something. If it's just non-existence, and that's what I've always believed. We never took the girls to church or anything. So, you aren't there any more to resent the fact you aren't there any more…”

“So you don't care if you're gone?”

“God, I care, of course, I care. I like life and I want
to keep living it. I love you, I love the girls and I want to stay with you. I don't want to miss anything, but if I have to, well…I guess all I mean is that I'm not afraid of what happens next.”

S
hay sat on the couch contemplating the bare surface of the two card tables and the ruins of Plan B. Her friends were long gone; Mrs. Brown, a last-minute addition to the guest list, had stayed afterwards to help clean up but once the Royal Doulton was safely back downstairs, they had agreed the table from the shed and the extra chairs could be returned to their proper places in the morning.

Despite Jeff and his unexpected companion the party had been a success, Shay thought. Alex had instantly grasped the situation when Shay had appeared in the apartment doorway with two guests and a pleading expression on her face. Alex had plied the new arrivals with sparkling wine and interrogated them on their nationalities, professions, and educational backgrounds—Philippa was English and worked in Jeff's office—and soon gleaned that Jeff had snagged an eight o'clock table at Bibendum.

Clearly, he was trying to impress somebody and it
wasn't Shay. Meanwhile, Shay hurriedly swept the name cards away but could do nothing about the table itself.

“Oh, sorry. Is this a dinner party?” Jeff asked as he noticed her bustling about. “I thought it was just a party party.” Shay tried her best effort at a relaxed smile, waved dismissively at her carefully laid table and said, “Yes, yes. An any kind of party. We are just expecting a few people for dinner a bit later.”

Thankfully, this proved true as Fiona didn't arrive until seven thirty while Greg and Liz Clark showed up at twenty to eight filled with apologies about a late babysitter just as Jeff and Philippa were heading for the door. Glad to see the last of Jeff and relieved the party could now revert to plan, Shay belatedly put the lamb in the oven and turned to the fish. Looking at the six perfect pieces of sole she had selected, she had a moment of inspiration. Why not? “Do you think I should just pop down and ask Mrs. Brown to join us?” she whispered to Alex, who was standing at her elbow in the kitchen.

“Won't she have eaten already?” Alex asked.

“Baked beans on toast at five, I imagine.” Reminding herself that the best parties were spontaneous, Shay headed quickly downstairs and tapped lightly on Mrs. Brown's door; her landlady must have been sitting very nearby for she opened it instantaneously.

“Everything going nicely, love?” Mrs. Brown asked.

“Yes. Everything's good, but we did have a guest drop out.”

“Oh. That young man, was it? I didn't like the look of that girl he had with him,” Mrs. Brown said, lowering her voice as though the offending couple might still be within earshot. “Overdressed, I thought.”

“Or under,” Shay said, and they both laughed. “I was just wondering if you would like to join us? I realize you've probably already had tea, but you've been such a help and I would love you to at least try everything…” Shay was fumbling her belated invitation but Mrs. Brown did not seem to mind in the least.

“I'd be honoured,” she said as she removed the apron she was wearing, turned to a small mirror hanging in her entranceway and patted her hair, and then happily followed Shay upstairs.

There, Alex quickly commandeered her and introduced her round while Shay started cooking her fish and heating her lobster sauce. When it was ready, the guests took whatever places seemed convenient, oohing and aahing over the menu cards that Shay now pulled out from the bookshelf where she had hidden them when Jeff and his date had showed up. They listened enthusiastically to Shay's explanations of the dinner, enjoyed a very rare leg of lamb, applauded the charlotte russe that had emerged perfectly from its mould, and finally recalled the various tables at which they had been served a savoury at the end of a meal, a practice that needed to be revived, they all agreed.

Mrs. Brown regaled them with her mother's tales of wartime rationing, trying to make cakes without eggs
and living off Spam hash, and even Fiona warmed up and got the giggles at the idea of the Victorians using gelatin made from cod bladders to set their fruit jelly or eating sweetened macaroni as a dessert.

They all appeared interested by Shay's research and agreed that when they thought of a Dickensian dinner it was only Christmas pudding and a goose or something of that nature. Shay had expanded their horizons, gathering around her a convivial group entirely comfortable with a party that included only one man and four single women, one of whom was at least seventy, and all in perfect agreement that this was a splendid dinner. Shay's nerves and embarrassment evaporated and she again felt the rush of excitement over her culinary discoveries that had inspired her menu planning in the first place.

They only finished eating at eleven, by which point the Clarks had to hurry home to the babysitter. Fiona left soon after, and Alex and Mrs. Brown and Shay chatted for a bit and then set to cleaning up, agreeing that the party, for which all three now took credit, had been a huge success.

By midnight, that left an overstimulated Shay sitting alone in a tidy apartment with time to think. Even now that the awkward moment was well past and the rest of her plans had gone smoothly, the willowy Philippa in her short skirt had left a nasty little kernel of nervousness and disappointment in the bottom of Shay's gut. She had misread Jeff; she had assumed he was an easy catch; there for the taking if she wanted him. Perhaps he had
sensed her condescension and just wanted to prove others desired him too; perhaps Philippa was just window-dressing. Or perhaps not. She would ask Alex on Monday, or phone her tomorrow. Alex always knew these things.

Still, on reflection, she didn't think she had the necessary enthusiasm to take another stab at Jeff. She wanted love, not game-playing. She wanted an adult, not a boy. She wanted that feeling of falling into another person, trusting his instincts, his fidelity, his embrace. She looked at her watch. 12:25. It was only 7:25 in Toronto. It was spring but still cool in the evenings. Shay pulled on a light jacket, flipping her dirty-blond hair over the collar and speculating nastily whether Philippa's straw-coloured tresses were just a dye job. She slipped down the stairs and out the front door as quietly as she could. The Internet café that she relied on was about a ten-minute walk away, down a main street that would still be full of pedestrians. It stayed open until two most nights. She had had occasion to discover this on a previous instance where she had broken their moratorium on communications.

The place was all but empty when she arrived; she took one of the screens as far removed from the counter as possible and logged on to her email. She supposed she could have written pages, but she didn't really have much to say. “This isn't working for me. Is it working for you?”

A
l did respond to my email that night in 2003, and I stopped worrying about Catherine Dickens and Victorian cuisine and went back to Toronto. He finally left his wife, his first wife, Soraya, a Lebanese Canadian whom I think he married mainly to please his parents, and we planned our small wedding the minute the divorce was final. I dropped out of grad school, wrote a novel about Jane Austen to amuse myself and published it under my full first name and my new married name. So, Shay Blainey became Sharon Soleymani, and her life was not at all what Shay had once imagined.

In fiction, I hand my characters endings sufficiently ambiguous that I don't get lumped in with romance writers and sufficiently redemptive that my readers multiply. It is a balancing act impossible in real life. There, Anahita has grandiose plans for some school project, doesn't leave enough time for it and gets into a snit when it doesn't go how she wants while I wind up yelling at her, “Why didn't
you tell me last week you were going to need pipe cleaners?” and feeling guilty for yelling and even more guilty when I realize that, when it comes to domestic ambition and time management, she is exactly like me. Or Al goes off to campus on a winter morning without shovelling the snow and I spend the day cursing his thoughtlessness until I am ready to boil over but when he comes home he reminds me he had that tenure committee meeting he was so dreading and I have completely forgotten to ask how it went. Daily life is fragmentary and irregular and it is only in fiction you can somehow make its halting and erratic course seem subtly symbolic of something.

At any rate, we did not live happily ever after. Our disagreements and hurts were legion; we would wait until the girls were in bed to have it out or, worse yet, we wouldn't have it out but just add it to the pile of unresolved arguments that accumulate in a marriage. And then Al did it again; he had an affair with one of his students. It used to be received wisdom among the smart women I knew—the Alexes and Beckys—that if you had an affair with a married man, the best you could hope for was to be the next wife he cheated on. But in the depth of the moment we all think our love is special and unique, unfathomable and infinite and then, in the misery of deception and divorce, we are convinced no one else has ever felt pain like this.

If Al and I are different, it is only because of cancer. He came back and we got a second chance and this time, to make amends, I wrote a story just for him.