So Much Love Page 2
It isn’t until we are finally on the 414 and through the trauma of the merge that it occurs to me that I didn’t actually apologize for my lateness. That ship has sailed. The only things I have to talk about now are my morning, the posters on campus, my grim presentation on the dead poet. But those all belong to the category of things Gretta doesn’t know about, that belong only to me. So instead I go for that marital standard: “Did you have a good day?”
Gretta rolls down her window and spits her gum into the weeds and gravel beside the road as we whoosh by.
“I thought the beadwork was just lovely.” That’s Denise talking, some cousin of both Gretta and the bride, with very feathered hair and a fluty voice. Everyone at the reception is conversing along those lines, though. “And the dress was nice and flowy, the beads didn’t weigh it down somehow.” Maybe it’s just a boring reception, or a reception of boring people with nothing else to talk about but lace and seed pearls and taffeta. If Gretta were speaking to me, I’m sure she would say something about the architecture—“It’s funny how dour these modern churches are, isn’t it?” at least—or comment on the Bible verses they read in the ceremony, some note of surprise about the unconventional James 18. I haven’t contributed anything to the conversation with Denise beyond smiling, currently with closed lips over a too-hot bite of crabcake.
Other than that, I’ve been alternating drinking champagne with scotch and soda and waiting for some interesting ironies to emerge from attending a wedding with my wife while we are in the middle of a near-silent summer, one of those periods in our marriage when the whole thing goes dark. Tonight has been a letdown so far. Gretta didn’t let me indulge in any sort of arm-linking, hand-holding, or other for-appearances-only shows of affection that might have given the evening a hopeful tone, as if we are about to start working our way back to real affection. She watched me with the same resigned tolerance she does at home, left six inches between us in the pew, and looked exhausted when people hugged her thin shoulders.
There is no argument, no issue we could work through, apologize for, forgive, resolve. There’s just a dull, sad distance that’s been present for months now. It’s been so long since we could be together without this film of disappointment, I find myself feeling almost homesick for Gretta, though I know she is somewhere in this same crowded room, likely eating a crabcake of her own.
“It’s nice to have a happy occasion to celebrate.” Denise’s hair is cut or pinned into wings in front of her ears. Behind her, through enormous panes of glass, the lawn of the golf course is gold and silver in the sunset, very tempting to slip out into it. “Especially when every news report seems sadder and sadder these days, doesn’t it?”
“Oh…Like the disappearances? Catherine Reindeer and that high-school boy?” I set down my drink to slice a large wedge of Brie from the round on the buffet.
Denise regards me with chipper attention, as if I’ve just entered the room. “Yes, exactly like that. Those poor kids. It’s gotten to be so long ago now, they aren’t on the news much anymore. Even when they are, there doesn’t seem to be much hope left. I mean, all the newscasters make it sound like the worst has already happened.”
“They weren’t kids, really. Well, the girl anyway—I mean, woman.” I put a fistful of crackers into a napkin with the cheese, in preparation for fleeing out the patio doors.
“Oh, no?”
“Well, she was in her twenties, late twenties. I guess it’s natural to think of someone who has been taken against her will as a child—it’s such a loss of agency.” I chew my lip. “She was a student of mine, actually.”
Denise accords me the appropriate blink of interest. There’s no reason to talk to her about Catherine, but she’s listening, and god knows it’s on my mind. “A good student, very cheerful and focused in class. A pretty girl too, not that it matters. It took me a while to figure out that she was older. Mine was the only class she was in last spring—she could only take one a semester. She had to work the rest of the time, keep the bills paid. She was twenty-seven.” What I don’t say, because Denise wouldn’t know what I was talking about or care, is that Julianna Ohlin was twenty-seven too when she disappeared—and never got to be twenty-eight.
“Oh, that’s so interesting… ” As Denise sips her wine, her gaze darts around the room. “Where’s Gretta?”
“Gretta?” One of the crackers slips from my napkin, bounces onto the floor, and hops under the hem of Denise’s long skirt. She pretends not to notice.
“Your wife?” Denise grins and punches me—gently but not that gently—in the shoulder. More crackers go skittering.
“Oh—sorry, Denise, could you just—” She obediently takes the napkin full of crumbs. I scan the room, brushing off my hands. “Gretta, she’s—” I see the bleached tablecloths, the polished wood floor, a couple who were at my own wedding, a young woman with dark glossy hair.
At last: “There.” I point toward a window glinting pink with the setting sun, almost directly across the hall from us. Gretta stands against the high windowsill, ankles tight together in her dreamy shoes. She is talking to a tiny brunette bouncing a tinier brown-haired baby in her arms.
“Oh. What a striking dress! So many shades of purple.”
I bristle slightly—I would have used the same wry tone to describe that dress but a husband has certain privileges. I change the subject. “Is that Mary? When did she have another baby?”
“Len! Where have you been?”
I flap a hand. “You know, the urban jungle.”
Mary is now tipping her arms toward Gretta’s to pass the flailing child over while Gretta bites her lip, shifts her sharp elbows.
“They’re calling her Emily.”
In the last blaze of sun, Gretta’s bare arms are a similar colour to the pale pink bundle she now holds, which clashes with her already-rumpled dress. She only glances at the tennis-ball-fuzzed head before passing the baby back to Mary as gently and quickly as she can. Uncomfortable, uncuddly Gretta. Mary strolls off to find more willing admirers. Denise moves down the buffet, smiling at someone in the distance.
Gretta is staring into space, space that after a moment includes me. She frowns. I tip my head in Mary’s direction and smile. She shrugs, then reaches out to take a glass of champagne from a waiter with a tray of them. He says something and Gretta nods, laughs, says something back. He grins and stands for a moment beside her, basking in her brief smile, then moves off into the crowd, offering his wares.
That could have been me.
—
I remember what it was like to be young—a child, even. I remember the best seat on the school bus is the one above the wheel well, for the footrest, for the rarity. I remember the tilt of my hand on a sweatered waist at a dance, the answering smile that meant go, stay, I like you, dance with me, yes, yes. I remember the crunch of feet on gravel and blotches of ink on exam papers and bright blue superheroes falling from the sky. I remember how it felt to live a life worth remembering.
I’ve seen photos of Gretta from her yearbook years, when she was younger even than Catherine was when she evaporated, as young as Julianna in her dancing years, though never so hazy. Photos of Gretta standing prom-dress proud in an overdecorated living room holding a white-rose corsage, or blowing out candles on a thickly frosted cake, or lying laughing in a pile of bronze leaves. And the other shots, where her eyes are canted down, or she’s drawn a book or her hair over her face. She was sometimes shyly veiled and at other times so direct and sure in her gaze that no one knew what to make of her. Or so her family has told me. But Gretta has always been fine with defining herself.
I’ve also seen her in the present tense, our present: lumped in her bathrobe, head bent and hair twisted tightly at her nape, reading on the chesterfield—she still calls it that. A book is in her lap and she dangles her upper body over it, her bare narrow feet propped on the ottoman. Her worn terrycloth robe falls open at the hem, letting the lamplight gleam off her dry, shaved shins. I try to tell myself
that the girl with the cakes and flowers and diplomas was always walking toward me, always on her way to becoming what she is now: mine. But my imagination won’t reach that far. By the time we met, Gretta had hardened into herself, become sharply self-sufficient. She had started leaving her vulnerability behind long before I ever met her. I could have loved her back then, perfectly, unreservedly, and we never even knew it.
—
It’s raining when we finally leave the reception. I’m sure we stayed longer than either of us wanted owing to a pathetic inability to find each other in the enormous hall. By the time we reunite, diffidently, too tired not to be comforted by a familiar face, the rain has transformed the gravel parking lot into soup. I’m a step ahead of Gretta going down the stairs and as I slosh toward the car, my mind is on the ruin of my only good teaching loafers. I’m halfway across the lot before I realize Gretta hasn’t followed me outside; someone has stopped her at the doorway. Someone—a man I don’t know, his suit crisp and his shoulders relaxed, clearly not pinched by the fabric at his armpits.
My clothes are already so wet that more rain doesn’t matter, although on another day I would scramble to the car on principle. But at this particular moment—watching my reticent wife chatting with a stranger—the downpour suits my mood, so I walk the rest of the way to the car, sit down on the hood and wait. After a few minutes, I watch her finally walk down the cement stairs to the parking lot, the man escorting her with his hand on the inside of her elbow.
She glances around the lot, for me, presumably. He—whoever he is—draws his hand off her arm to shield her face from the rain. It seems to me that his fingers brush her hair and he smiles in a way that assumes that because she can’t find me, I’m not there. And she smiles back, a private beam like I haven’t seen in months. I make my fingers into a megaphone and shout, “Gretta!”
She looks in my direction for a few seconds before she sees me. The man turns to go back upstairs, saying something while already walking away. Gretta laughs, waves, and starts to dash across the parking lot through the slicing rain. Her dress clings like…well, there’s nothing like wet silk. Of course it’s too dark to make out any details of panties, nipples, thighs, but I know them well enough that I can imagine.
Likewise, I don’t see her ankle twist in the rutted gravel, but it is easy to imagine when I see her tumble, how her ankle wrenches as she collapses onto her stomach and elbows, feet splayed.
Just for a moment I think about the ruin of her purple silk dress. In the night and the rain, it appears brown, and with the mud, soon it will be. But it was pretty—too clinging, too wild for a woman her age, but pretty. Most other women in their forties would’ve looked far worse in it. I startle to recall, as she lies there crumpled, that I am a man with a beautiful wife. Somehow that has always been difficult for me to keep in mind unless I am gazing directly at her. I slide off the hood and splash over.
“Gretta, are you okay?” I try to peer into her face as I reach down, anticipating her cold wiry fingers sliding into mine, a quirked smile of embarrassed gratitude on her lips. But instead she pushes up onto her hands and knees, then downward-dogs herself up to standing. I pull my hand back and straighten up beside her, disappointed not to have the chance to help.
“Yes.” The water droplets on her face are too profuse and speckled with dirt to mistake for tears, but I allow myself the error. “I’m fine.” But she limps forward, favouring the twisted ankle. Once I realize she’s not going to take my proffered arm, I stride ahead and unlock the car. She opens the passenger door, slouches into the seat without comment. When I sit down beside her, her gaze is fixed on the sun visor.
I put the car into gear and flick on the lights, thinking only briefly about the mud on the upholstery. And tolerance. And marriage. And that man, whoever he was, in the parking lot. So much of what goes on in Gretta’s life, I don’t hear about. She would say the same thing of me, I guess. The silence greenhouses in the sealed damp car.
When we reach the lot exit, I can’t seem to judge the space between the oncoming cars, so I wait for complete darkness in either direction—no headlights approaching—before pulling into the road. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Gretta run her fingers down her seatbelt and touch the buckle.
I dig my fingertips into the hard plastic steering wheel, watching the hyphenated centre line flutter past, and finally mutter, “Long night,” before I switch on the radio to the crackle of news, not what I wanted in the humid car. But Gretta cocks her head away from the window toward the words plea and police and goes so far as to touch my hand when I try for the dial. Her fingers are winter-cold and her dripping hair slides down her shoulder. I let her listen.
After the reports on the latest murders and union negotiations and stock-market tumbles, there’s a surprising mention of Catherine and that high-school boy who disappeared, Donny something. They remain the same degree of missing as last I heard. They are only on the news now because the boy’s family is holding another vigil. Somehow my heart doesn’t break for the kid I’ve never met—a failure of empathy. The night glistens with rain and it’s soothing to watch things slipping by the windows, too blurred to think about.
“Still missing,” Gretta says. She tips her forehead against the streaked side window. “It’s been four months for the girl, longer for him.”
“Hmm?”
“Those kids who disappeared last winter, they’re talking about them. Donny Zimmerman and the girl…Catherine Reindeer.”
Even though Catherine is often on the news, and there’s no one in town who doesn’t know about her disappearance or abduction or whatever we’re calling it (not murder, though, not yet), it’s strange to hear Gretta say her name—I feel like she’s torn a page out of my subconscious and read it aloud. What else can she see, inside my brain? My neck warms as I think of Catherine in a burgundy tank top with the right strap slipped off her shoulder, onto her biceps. Catherine up in the back corner of the classroom, giggling at a joke I’d made, the private thrill it gave me to make her laugh. My memories suddenly feel prurient, divorced as they are from their soundtrack—all of Catherine’s witty comments in class, her astute questions get erased, leaving me with nothing but her pretty arms, her warm soft hair. “I’d…I’d give her an extension.”
“What’s that?”
Stopped for an amber light, I see the destruction of Gretta’s inconvenient dress in the streetlight glow: drenched and twisted, torn to reveal a slice of muddy knee.
“On her final paper. She never had a chance to hand it in. Catherine. She missed the exam too, but… ”
“Oh, Len.” She twists in her seat to face me. “She was your student? How did I not know this?”
It’s strange how stricken she is, like she suddenly knows just how much I’ve been thinking about Catherine’s absence all these months. Her cold fingertips tap my wrist again and again, very softly. As if she knows everything.
I can’t return the favour and read Gretta’s mind—I don’t know what she is thinking and the slick concession road after midnight is not a good time to look into her eyes. Probably she assumes that the missing girl and I were close, that I am privately devastated by the loss. And since the devastation is true, it seems irrelevant that Catherine Reindeer came to my office only a handful of times, mainly talked to me about prosody, rebellion, Leonard Cohen. But I remember her, a girl in a burgundy tank top over tanned skin. Her skittering laugh that seemed to miss some notes on the in-breaths, the way she told me her thoughts on the poems without the typical undergraduate quivering at talking to a prof. And the tension of that class where none of the kids seemed to be doing well, and my desire to be more than an antiquated letch, to listen to her and not just gaze at the slope of her stomach.
The possibility that she might be dead has blasted all that hazy memory with a new light. Staring through the thick rain, I try to focus on the headlights. I think about a eulogy I could never give. And about her thick-fingered hand gesturing as she made
a point about Gwendolyn MacEwen. No one made the mistake of thinking that I knew her because I didn’t, not really. I only watched, and remembered.
It’s raining so heavily that the windshield looks like it is sliding away. It’s hard to see, hard to concentrate. Gretta’s hand is on my shoulder, she’s asking me something. I shake my head, trying to opt out of the conversation. I prefer my own version of events to the news, to anything Gretta would know. As long as no one knows anything for sure, then Catherine is alive.
“Len!”
And if no one knows, I am free to write my own story. A flash of headlights.
“Len!”
I swerve from the blond headlights bearing down on us just in time. A spray of gravel sluices up as I blur the car onto the shoulder. I’m not thinking, thank God: just watching the dull face of the guardrail pull closer, then braking, swerving, clutching the wheel, Gretta’s steadying hand still on my shoulder. It only takes five, maybe ten seconds before I’m driving on the asphalt again. I carefully duck my shoulder out from under her hand, so she won’t feel me shaking. Just another ten minutes home. All silent.
I park sloppily under a streetlamp, still shaking. Gretta leans limply against the rain-dark window, but she turns toward me when I turn toward her.
“Am I drunk? I didn’t think I was drunk, but I just didn’t—Am I?”
Gretta touches my cheek with fingers that, even after a half-hour in the warm dry car, are still icy. “My darling, I don’t know.”
The Girl for Me
It seems disloyal after all these years, but I’ve got to start buying different mascara. The Lancôme one I’ve always used wears so nice and soft—heavy makeup makes a woman my age look like a harridan—but it isn’t waterproof, and I’ve been crying all spring.
When Catherine first disappeared in March, everything was still frozen, but within a week the spring melt began. Rivers of slush ran down the edges of every street and the police came again and again, tracking dirty slush into my foyer. They doubted that an adult, a grown woman with a job and a husband, could be taken—as if such violence were kiddie stuff, or showed a lack of willpower. They kept asking questions about any unhappiness with Grey, an affair, secrets I can’t imagine my daughter would keep from me. Or him. I can’t imagine any of it. And so, helpless, clueless, I wept and wept.