As if it mattered

By Stephen Kimber

From Mixed Messages, "an anthology of literature to benefit hospice and cancer causes," published by English Garden Publishers and featuring such writers as Jane Urquhart, Paul Quarrington, Joseph Boyden, Wayson Choy, Katherine Govier, Will Ferguson, Andrew Pyper, Stuart McLean and Erika Ritter. Edited by Paul Knowles.

The 1-0-4? You. Quizzical. Professorially skeptical. You mean the 4-0-1. As if you were lecturing a particularly dense student. Or you wife. As if this kind-eyed cop standing in your front porch telling you your wife has just been killed in a car accident must have gotten her highway route numbers mixed up.

As if the numbers mattered.

The 1-0-4? You mean the 4-0-1. I heard you say it. In my head. In that strapped, trapped-in-place, tumbling, twisting, turmoiled, ice-skidding, gravel-spitting, chassis-flipping, coffees-flying, metal-crunching, airbags-exploding, windshield-shattering, roof-meets-mind, final, strangely never-ending ever second between what had been and nothingness… I heard you say it.

Even though you hadn’t.

Not yet.

But you would.

You did, didn’t you?

The 1-0-4? You mean the 4-0-1.

I loved you for it. Perhaps that is why I fell in love with you. For your uncanny ability to fixate on such an insignificant detail and miss what really matters — to be, so often, so beside the point. I used to think of it — my gender forgive me — as an expression of your endearingly ditzy, feminine side. Or, to give you your male professional due, as a manifestation of your absent-minded professor self.

As you will now have to discover for yourself, I twisted whatever you prefer to call that guileless obtuseness of yours to my own advantage. Not that I intended to.

How could you not have known? You must at least have suspected? How did we end up with our roles so scrambled? I should have been the one listening to the kind-eyed cop. And you should have… Instead of…

The 1-0-4? You mean the 4-0-1.

Of course, I hated you for it too, for your annoying need to be correct. About everything. And anything. Do you remember that time you decided I should take Quinpool Road to get to my office?

“It would be faster,” you said.

“No, it wouldn’t,” I answered. “There’s less traffic and fewer lights on Chebucto.”

Three weeks later, when I’d forgotten all about the conversation, you brought it up again. “I was right,” you said. (You were always right, of course, or perhaps you just never mentioned it again when you were wrong.) As an experiment, you told me, you’d driven each route for a full week during both morning and evening rush hours, then averaged out the times. Taking the Quinpool Road route saved, on average, forty eight seconds’ driving time in the mornings, thirty six in the evenings. You. Triumphant.

Did I ever tell you how much I disliked that about you?

Not that that explains anything. I mean this didn’t happen because I hated you for your need to always be right. I did it because… well, that’s the question, isn’t it?

You mean the 4-0-1.

You were wrong this time. Not that that’s your fault. And not that it explains anything either.

I didn’t take the flight to Toronto. Another damn sales meeting, I’d told you. Carolyn’s panicking about the fall numbers already. So she’s called a special meeting. You know how much I hate those meetings. But what can I do? It’s just one night. Me. Resigned.

There was no meeting. No Toronto. And so, no 4-0-1.

I did go to the airport, but only to pick up Hubert. You remember Hubert Durand? The French author? The one whose universities’ tour I organized last spring? You don’t, do you? Like I said, you always missed what matters. Anyway, let me tell you some other things you don’t know that now don’t matter anymore either.

Hubert, a professor of literature at some university in Paris, wrote a novel, a truly trashy erotic romance, the translation of which somehow ended up in a discard bin at the New York Review of Books. Some reviewer picked it out of the pile, read it, loved it and wrote a review that tarted up Hubert’s simple lust story with multiple metaphysical meanings he had never intended nor — believe me when I say this — understood.

His freshly re-interpreted book — repackaged with a gauzy, sepia cover photo that featured mysteriously entwined naked limbs — their naughty bits decorously obscured by breathless blurb copy from the now-infamous review —became a cult phenomenon on North American university campuses (where smut is always welcome, especially when served with a dollop of sanctifying meaning). The publisher, understanding how quickly today’s cult success can become tomorrow’s pulped returns, immediately decided to cash in with a lecture tour to celebrate the novel’s miraculous resurrection from the remainder bin.

Which, of course, is where I came in. You must remember this part. After I’d organized Hubert’s east coast stops, the publisher asked if I would accompany him. They were worried his English might not be adequate, that he’d get lost, or disappear, or something. I didn’t want to do it. I was trying to nail down the local details of the next Atwood book flog, but the publicity people were insistent. I told you all this at the time; I know I did. Am I telling you again now to try and explain why what happened happened? I didn’t want to go. I didn’t intend…

It’s not quite true. While it is fair to say I didn’t intend for precisely what happened to happen, I didn’t not intend it either — if that make any sense. The only part I really didn’t intend was how it has now all ended. I definitely didn’t intend that.

At any rate, Hubert’s English was fine. Better than fine, actually. I met his plane at the airport. By the time we’d rescued his luggage from the carousel, he’d already propositioned me. I won’t flatter myself; he was practising his new role as middle-aged campus literary Lothario. He was good at it. And good looking too, in a rumpled, stubbled, smoky, boozy, weathered, French author sort of way that usually doesn’t appeal to me.

So why did I say yes? I didn’t. In fact, that first time, I laughed at him. Out loud. Perhaps that was because it had been so long since anyone had come on to me like that. You certainly never did. That first night at the bar, I was the one who picked you up. Remember? Five years ago, when my biological clock was still a ticking time bomb. You fit within what I thought at the time were all the requisite father-of my-child parameters: you were male, heterosexual and had a pulse. Better, you were gainfully employed, a tenured professor even, smarter than me, probably kinder. What can I say? I was thirty five; I wasn’t thinking straight. Otherwise, I might have asked for a fertility test, or at least a sperm count.

Was that the issue? Too few of your little guys swimming victory laps around my crown jewels? Does that explain everything? Anything? I doubt it. The truth — I never told you this, perhaps because I didn’t want to acknowledge it myself — was that your diagnosis was also this condemned woman’s minute-before-midnight governor’s stay of execution. I was not ready, not fit to be a mother.

As a teenager I remember talking my way out of babysitting jobs — Test tomorrow… Have to study… So sorry… Why don’t you ask my little sister? — because just the thought of taking care of some crying, clinging, wriggling, shitting, puking helpless little thing scared the hell out of me. In my late twenties, when all my friends suddenly seemed to transform themselves into baby-making factories, I had to force myself to coo and cuddle, and pronounce every Winston-Churchill or rhesus-monkey-looking one of them the most adorable baby I’d ever seen. And, worse, to put up with their mother monsters, my former friends who’d joined the coven, swallowed the Kool-Aid and now professed that having your nipples nibbled raw by an insatiable teething beast was fulfilling, that sleeplessness was its own reward… and, oh, Chloe, why don’t you join us?

At the time, I thought I must just be jealous. I realize now I was not.

The more we tried — and failed — to conceive, the more I worried we might actually succeed. I can’t tell you how relieved I was the day that officious young resident at the clinic finally delivered his male-factor-infertility-for-dummies lecture, complete with personally tailored, colour-coded PowerPoint charts that might have been funny if he — and you — weren’t so serious.

See this blue line here, Mrs. Lydon, he explained, a long, elegant finger tracing its trajectory across the computer screen. This line represents what medical science considers a normal sperm count — twenty million or more sperm per milliliter of semen. He clicked the mouse and a second, much shorter yellow line magically drew itself beneath the first. This line shows your count from last week’s fertility test, Mr. Lydon. As you can see, it’s only eleven million per millilter, or just over half of the normal level. We call this condition oligospermia, or, in layman’s language, low sperm count. He paused, turned and smiled at both of us. The good news is that modern artificial reproductive technologies now offer the opportunity for us to assist Mother Nature…

That was his good news, not mine. When I recoiled, the doctors, who quickly became puppy-eager to offer up their cocktails of anti-depressants to deal with my “problem,” and assumed my increasingly shrill refusal to consider artificial insemination (“too clinical”), sperm donation (“some pimply-faced guy in a backward baseball cap jerking off into a bottle is not going to be the father my child!”), male fertility drugs, (“what if we ended up with some hideous mutant?”), or adoption (“I don’t want someone else’s damaged goods”) was just my understandable, if crazed hormonal response to the news you were not the man you were supposed to be, but that I would get over it, come around, be realistic, adapt.

I didn’t. And, when I think about it, you didn’t try too hard to change my mind. I wonder now if that was because you were as frightened about having a child as I was. It’s too bad we didn’t talk more. Perhaps if we had, this would all be easier.

What else can I tell you that will help you make sense of it all now?

The first time? St. John’s. Last stop on the tour. After the post-lecture reception at the university. We’d taken a cab back to the hotel.

“A night cap?” he said. “To celebrate such a wonderful evening.”

“I should call my husband,” I said. And meant it. I was feeling randy from the two glasses of wine and the exhausted exhilaration of having done what I knew was a good job, but all I wanted was to curl up in bed and listen the sound of your voice over the phone.

“Just one?”

“Well… OK… but just one....”

I knew where it was heading, long before the first glass of wine became the second Scotch-on-the-rocks and the third Scotch turned into a coquettish, I-really-shouldn’t, sweet-dreams, bottoms-up Bailey’s; certainly well before Hubert got off the elevator at my floor instead of continuing on to his own because “a gentleman always sees a lady to her room;” and way before a simple thanks-for-all-your-good-work, goodnight peck on the cheek turned into a gasping, groping dry hump against my hotel room door while Hubert took the plastic room card-lock key from my outstretched hand and slid it into the slot in the door and we tumbled backwards through the opened door onto the carpeted floor, at first giggling and then urgent, rolling, pulling, shrugging, unbuttoning, unzipping…

I’d known where it was heading, and I didn’t do anything to stop it. After, I asked myself, What was I thinking?, tried to summon up some shame, or, at least, the least regret. I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop thinking about how good it all felt. Not the sex. The sex itself, as always, was a letdown (if that makes you feel any better). It was the letting go, the giving up, the absolute and total abandonment of all my usual, careful, consider-the-consequences calibrating, measuring, weighing, balancing. The pleasure, the release was in just experiencing the moment. The sex was better than I said (why should I lie now?), but the power of the orgasm had less to do with what was happening between my legs and much more with the absence of what usually happens inside my head.

Even the next morning, I felt remarkably free of guilt, or even angst. Perhaps because I knew the tour was over and I would never have to see Hubert again. Perhaps because I knew you would never find out.

What did I know?

This time — the second time, the time that never actually happened — it was different. Hubert emailed me last week. He’d been invited to speak at some literary conference in Boston and had a few free days afterward. He wrote that he was thinking of flying to Nova Scotia, and wondered if I might be free to show him around and “perhaps renew acquaintances.” I wrote back to say — equally blandly — that it was a very busy time for me but that, if he came, “perhaps we could have lunch.”

If you’re curious, you’ll find this exchange of unrevealing correspondence on my computer in a sub-folder of the “Freelance” folder of my email program entitled, “Other…”, along with three previous messages from Hubert, including a “Thanks for everything!” message containing a smiley-face emoticon, which he wrote just after he arrived back in Paris the first time, and two even more impersonal messages, including the text of a news story — in French — from a Paris newspaper about his North American tour and a much-forwarded email containing a link to a joke about George Bush eating French fries that I didn’t get. Or perhaps wasn’t funny. You won’t find any other replies from me. There weren’t any.

You’ll be curious, of course. You’ll check my cell phone records — why is it that modern technology makes everything so easy to know and so difficult to understand? — and discover a series of calls to and from Hubert’s hotel room in the Boston Marriott, only one of which lasted longer than two minutes. That call, made on a Sunday afternoon three days before he flew to Halifax, was from me to him, went on for twelve minutes and thirty four seconds, and was followed, less than half an hour later, by a one-minute-and twelve-second call from his room to me. And then, three minutes after that, the records will show I placed a call to a number in Sackville, New Brunswick. If you check, you’ll find the number is for the Marshlands Inn. You remember that lovely old inn where we stayed on our honeymoon? I’m not very imaginative. If you call, you’ll discover I made a reservation for the same room in which we stayed, the one with the sleigh bed and cast iron clawfoot tub. I’m not very inventive either. The reservation is for Mr. and Mrs. Joshua Lydon.

There will be more hints and allegations you’ll discover as you go. When the Visa bill comes, for example, you’ll notice a purchase from Leeza’s Lingerie dated the day after that exchange of phone calls. You’ll find the purchase itself — a too lacey, too revealing, much-too-girlish-for-me pink peignoir set — in my suitcase with the price tag still on. You won’t know this — except that I’m telling you — but I left the tag attached in case I chickened out and decided to return it instead. (Leeza’s has a strict thirty-day returns policy, so you shouldn’t wait too long—… My God, such strange advice I’m offering you! Think of it as the practical side of my personality, showing itself even in death. I mean, there’s no point for you to keep it… unless… do you have secrets too?

How little we really know about anyone.

And even what we think we know… do we really know it at all?

I would like to tell you I planned to call it off — whatever this “it” really was. I did. In fact, in the days of doubt between that flurry of Sunday phone calls and the arrival of Flight AC8894 at 10:38 on Wednesday morning, I considered calling Hubert to cancel many times. The cell phone logs don’t count calls considered but not made.

I would like to tell you I was hesitant because I loved you. But then I would have to tell you that I went ahead anyway because I didn’t love you. And neither is quite true.

If you must know, you had very little to do with either decision. Neither did Hubert. It was, as so many things are, mostly just about me. About the positive job evaluation I got. And the raise I didn’t. About the fact I actually cared about either. About the jeans that no longer fit the way I’d imagined they once did. About my father’s cancer. And my mother’s loneliness. About the new computer program I can’t seem to make do what the ads claimed it would. About the hot flashes that began before I was ready for them. About all the people I never became. And the one I did. About me.

It was as twisted and as uncomplicated as that. Escape from reality. Pretend for a day and a night. And then back to my life, my job, my husband.

No one would ever know.

So much for that.

It was different than the first time. We — I — couldn’t pretend I didn’t know the road we were traveling down. Literally. Figuratively. We stopped for coffee in Truro. Hubert had acquired a taste for Tims double-doubles during his last visit. We talked about the success of his book and his inability to write the next one, the conference in Boston and the pretentiousness of academics, the war in Iraq, the first signs of spring in Boston and the far-from-last vestiges of winter in Nova Scotia, the unlikely prospect that a Nova Scotia vintner could ever produce a wine Hubert would consider acceptable … everything, that is, except the fact this was all a huge mistake, and that it shouldn’t have happened the first time, and that it couldn’t happen again.

I was saving that conversation for after dinner. No, later. For after sex. Or, perhaps, later still, for those few minutes tomorrow in the airport lounge after he’d checked in for his flight back to Boston and before he proceeded through Security. It’s been fun, Hubert, I was going to tell him, and good for me in a strange kind of way — it’s important to be honest — but it can’t go on. I have a husband. And a job. And a life. Goodbye…

Do you believe that? Do I believe that?

Not that it matters now, of course. We never made it to the inn, let alone to dinner, sex, breakfast, back to the airport. We never had the conversation.

It was early afternoon. Around two, I’m guessing. The sky — grey, gloomy, heavy with menace and malice — pressed down hard against the frozen landscape while wind-whipped snow squalls chased each other angrily across the road in the beams of the car’s headlights. We were driving along the 1-0-4 somewhere between Wentworth and Oxford. I used to know all the landmarks but, ever since they replaced the old, winding, “too dangerous” road with a new toll highway a few years ago, it all looks the same to me.

I needed a cigarette. I know, I know. I don’t smoke, and haven’t since long before I met you. But I had one that first night in St. John’s. After. Hubert was still on his back, waiting for his breathing to slow down. I was tucked into the crook of his arm, feeling the room spin. He reached over to his sports jacket and pulled a pack of Gitanes from its inside pocket, lit one, and held it out to me. I arched my neck up toward his proffered hand, took a long, slow drag and remembered how much I used to like the sensation of smoking. Do you remember me joking that if the doctor ever told me I had a terminal illness, the first thing I’d do was go out and buy a package of cigarettes — or was that from before I met you? Not that it matters. Smoking kills. Trust me on that.

Hubert had left his package of cigarettes in the well between the car’s front seats, along with my sunglasses and cellphone, and his new iPod. You would have been proud of me. I know how much you hate when I get distracted putting on my makeup while driving. I didn’t look down, just kept my eyes fixed on the snowy nothingness in front of me and felt around with my right hand like a blind man until I felt the familiar shape of the cardboard packaging.

“Want one?” I asked Hubert.

“Sure,” he said. “But, please, let me…”

“No, no, that’s OK. I can do it.” I had a sudden image — black and white, from a fifties’ movie, a romantic comedy, perhaps? — of me with two unlit cigarettes dangling from my mouth, lighting one, passing it across to Hubert and then lighting my own.

Smooth.

Not so much in real life.

I did manage to get both cigarettes out of the package, insert them, filters facing correctly, into my mouth and, then, more awkwardly than in the picture in my mind’s eye, lit each of them with the car’s lighter. But, as I reached back up to take the first from my mouth and hand it to Hubert, I somehow knocked the second from between my lips. It fell into my lap. Instinctively, I looked down and frantically began to use my right hand to brush it off my slacks. Wrong hand. Now, one burning cigarette had fallen onto the seat between my legs, the other had become — thanks to me — a shower of sparks burning pinkprick holes in my slacks. Had I packed another pair? I—

“Merde! Non—“

I looked up, saw the red tail lights of a monster eighteen-wheeler looming up out of the snow swirls dead ahead of us. We were going too fast; it wasn’t going fast enough. We were about to rear-end a transport truck!

“No! Fuck—“

I slammed on the brakes and, at the same time, twisted the steering wheel to my left, thinking, ‘If I can just get past him, everything will be OK.’ But then it wasn’t. An air horn blast just above and behind me! Oh, no. There was a second truck. In the outside lane. Trying to pass me and the first truck. Sandwich time. I dragged the steering wheel back to my right, felt the hurricane whoosh of the second truck as it barreled past to my left. Breathed again. Braking had put some distance between me and the truck in front. It was going to be OK. I almost had time to feel the pain from the cigarette still burning between my legs. Almost. The car’s rear end fishtailed as it hit a patch of black ice. Was this a metaphor for my life? Just when you think… Brake? Don’t brake? Brake. Jolt. Gravel. Pavement. Ice. Gravel again. Then flying. And then silence.

And then everything happened at once, and didn’t happen at all.

Which was when I heard you say it.

The 1-0-4? You mean the 4-0-1.

I wanted to explain, make you understand that this wasn’t about Hubert, or you, or us; that it was about me; that none of the explanations explained anything because there was no explaining anything; that I was sorry for what you could never know; that I’d loved you in my way, been true to you in my fashion.

As if any of it mattered.

But I couldn’t.

I’m dead.

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