Gravity Is the Thing Page 24

  You rest and I’ll get breakfast.

  I wondered how our interaction would itself interact with the presence of a third, a baby. Once we decided to resume our efforts in that direction, I mean, and assuming our efforts ever succeeded. Whether we would carry on the kindness.

  ‘Of course we will,’ Finn said, surprised by the question.

  He said, ‘Look at this cappuccino I’ve made you.’ The foam was whipped up into a creamy hillock, and when I stirred with a teaspoon I found it resilient and generous.

  *

  Suddenly, one morning, I felt better.

  The cold was gone. I could breathe through my nostrils.

  Suddenly! I thought, and it occurred to me that fine things, great things, magnificent things could happen suddenly! I ran down the stairs thinking of the French word for ‘suddenly’—soudainement—and, as I reached the bottom step, I remembered the German word, and I burst through the door into the foyer shouting, ‘Plötzlich!’

  A young woman stood in the foyer and stared. I had just shouted, ‘Plötzlich!’ into her face.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry.’ I was so frantic with embarrassment I couldn’t remember the French, which is ridiculous. Je suis désolée. I had practised it!

  But the woman seemed amused. There was amusement in the way she turned from me and pushed the front door open.

  I told Finn about this later, and we got takeaway to celebrate how suddenly funny things could be.

  *

  One night while we were playing pool, David Chin told us that his wife was pregnant. That was why she never came along. She’d had two or three miscarriages, he added, so she was being ‘super careful’.

  ‘Which?’ Finn asked. ‘Two or three?’

  David shrugged. ‘Three, I guess,’ he said, frowning slightly.

  *

  October turned up, and Finn and I went along to my former teacher’s book launch party.

  The party seemed to have a rich blue glow, the blue that a traffic light would be, if it were blue; a luminescent blue. The blue bathed the walnut wood and the staircase, which was sparse and winding, each step a fine golden slat, so that the staircase was mostly air, and this air carried you up through the pulsing blue to the roof terrace.

  There was not much you could talk about on the terrace except how grand the terrace itself was. Such a luxurious space, the view a black and starry sky over Montreal lights and buildings.

  It was cold though. I got so cold my face stiffened up. I had to shake it to talk. Finn drifted away to make conversation with strangers. I heard them laughing at what he said. My former teacher approached to say hello. ‘You don’t need to talk to me!’ I said. ‘You’re the important person tonight! You’re the celebrity!’

  But he laughed and said that I was exactly the person he wanted to be talking to. In the dim light, I saw just how handsome he was. And everything he said seemed lit from below. His words moved up a staircase, each step a fine golden slat! He was telling me about the rough and dangerous life he had once led up north, watching me closely as he talked, as if my reaction to his words was the only thing that mattered. I wondered if he had me confused with someone else. I began to see what my friend from the class had meant when she said that every woman fell in love with him for twenty-four hours.

  But why only twenty-four? I wondered.

  After a while, somebody took my former teacher by the arm and led him away into the crowd. He kept his smile fixed on me, and his gaze, as he disappeared into the dark.

  After that I spoke to several handsome Canadians. I began to see that all Canadians are handsome. Also, that Canadian men will look you in the eye in a frank and intelligent way. A young Australian man will only do this for a brief, startling moment, and only now and then, to flirt.

  ‘You think?’ Finn said. ‘Do I not look you in the eye?’

  ‘You’re half Canadian,’ I explained. ‘So you’re different.’

  This was later. A truck was reversing outside. We heard them all day in Montreal, those reversing trucks. They delivered milk and office furniture, collected garbage, but that still didn’t seem to us to justify their numbers.

  ‘That’s the song of Old Montreal,’ Finn said, and he sang it himself, the beep-beep-beep of reversing trucks.

  ‘Okay, that’s enough now,’ I suggested.

  Finn sings a lot. He sings the bling-bling! of a scene transition in Law & Order. He sings the sounds of the elevator arriving and the subway train departing.

  Once, he drew the coastline of the Great Ocean Road along the inside of my arm.

  ‘Try to wrap your mind around how perfect this latte is,’ he said, placing a coffee before me.

  *

  One day, late in October, Finn had gone to the Y and I was home, when the phone rang. It was one of Finn’s clients, asking if he could speak to Finn urgently.

  I tried calling Finn on his cell but it went straight to voicemail. So I put on my coat and set out to find him.

  As I walked along St Catherine, I saw him approaching me, deep in his coat and thought.

  He looked up. He saw me.

  And I knew.

  I had absolutely no idea what it was that I knew, but for the faintest crack of time, I knew.

  ‘You’re coming back already?’ I said, surprised.

  ‘Pool was too crowded.’

  I gave him the message and he said, ‘Ah, that guy. Not urgent at all. Let’s get coffee.’

  *

  A few days after this, I was suddenly frantic for chocolate and banana.

  Snow was threatening but I spun my scarf around my neck, threw on an overcoat and boots, and ran through the streets, skidded through the streets, to the IGA at Complex Desjardins, where I bought bananas.

  (I already had chocolate.)

  I returned to the apartment and made banana loaf with chocolate chunks, chocolate-banana tart with flaky crust and, finally, your basic bananas dipped in melted chocolate.

  Finn was a little annoyed, as he’d been trying to cut back on sugar. Thoughtless of me to fill an apartment with the fragrances of baking. However, he forgave me and tried them all.

  Afterwards, I surveyed the stack of dirty bowls, beaters, measuring cups, spoons, the flour glued to the counter tops, and the cake mix splattering the floor.

  ‘Visualise how happy you’ll be,’ Finn suggested, ‘once it’s clean.’

  ‘There must be better routes to happiness,’ I said.

  To prove this, I sat at his computer and googled: What is the key to happiness?

  Seven foods that are guaranteed to make you happy! Google offered, along with a list of foods that stimulate serotonin.

  Nice! I thought. Perfect!

  Because I like eating. Also, eating seemed a simpler route to happiness than exercise, say, or meditation, or cleaning up the mess in the kitchen.

  I looked at the list.

  Item one was bananas.

  Item two? Chocolate.

  Seriously! It gave me a chill.

  *

  ‘I have an idea,’ I said to Finn, a few days later. ‘A Happiness Café. It only serves food that stimulates serotonins.’

  ‘So all chocolate and bananas?’

  ‘There are others. Broccoli, for one.’

  ‘Well then. Serve broccoli, you’ll make a killing.’

  Later that night, we saw David Chin in the bar. He said his wife was seven months along now, and ‘so over it’.

  I told David my idea for a Happiness Café.

  He was very enthusiastic. He said I had captured the zeitgeist. Everyone’s into happiness these days, he said. Only, what would become of me when the zeitgeist changed?

  I’d just change the café name, I said. I’d change it regularly. At any point in time, my café would be the emotion most embraced by the zeitgeist. The Melancholy Café. The Café of Heady Outrage.

  I was only joking about all this, of course. It was the kind of game we played, the game of whimsy.
>
  *

  The last day of November, it snowed.

  It was cheerful, the snow. It was one of those days when all seems to teeter in gleeful suspense. Each window ledge held a pillow of snow, and it seemed that someone had reached out a tender hand and stroked the snow pillows into soft flourishes and cheeky billows.

  I unlatched the bedroom window, pushed it open, knocking puffs of snow awry, and looked down into the alley. Footsteps wide and deep in the fresh, fresh white below.

  A key in the door. Finn was home from the grocery store.

  The phone rang as I walked down the hall. Finn was sitting on the entry bench, pulling off his boots, grocery bags around him.

  ‘Getting the phone,’ I sang, passing him, and he glanced up at me, and I knew.

  *

  ‘What?’ I said, hesitating. ‘What’s going on?’

  The phone continued ringing.

  He stopped, one boot on, and looked up at me.

  ‘What?’ I said again.

  ‘Nothing!’ He sounded angry! His face became hunted, wounded.

  All of this was new. You may find this difficult to believe, but I had never, in five years, seen Finn truly angry, hunted or wounded.

  At last the phone gave up and stopped its noise.

  ‘You’ve cheated on me!’ I said. It blasted at me sideways, the thing that I knew. Suddenly I knew that he had cheated.

  I felt power in my knowledge, good and strong. At this point, things were good. My intuition shone. I was proud as a ledge of snow, swooped like perfect latte foam. Fresh and new, fine-cut and gleaming like suspense.

  His whole face furrowed. Meanwhile, I was trying to calculate the timing. I mean, he and I were together so much! How could he have found the time to pick up a girl? On the way home from the grocery store one day? It must have been like lightning! His eyes met hers over the capsicums—peppers, they called them here—and they hooked up behind the dairy section?

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I mean, it’s pretty distressing. But we’ll work it out.’

  Finn ducked his head like a schoolboy, and again I stared, having never once seen him behave like this.

  ‘You’re still seeing her?’ I hazarded, and the knowledge slipped down another, different rung. Clang.

  His head kept swaying there, on his neck, not denying, so then I knew.

  ‘Who is she?’ I whispered.

  He whispered his reply. I couldn’t hear. I was still in charge, standing up in the hall, while he was seated among boots and groceries.

  ‘Who?’ I repeated.

  ‘Tia,’ he said.

  I laughed at that.

  ‘You don’t like her! She’s a princess! And she’s not even here anymore! She’s gone home!’

  The whole thing unravelled. A practical joke. My unhinged emotions! I knew nothing. I fell against the wall in relief.

  But his head remained bowed. The back of his neck.

  Clang! Clang! Clang! I hadn’t known my stomach went so deep. It was a well in there!

  ‘Something happened when she was here over the summer?’ I breathed.

  ‘While you and Natalia saw that comedian a second time.’

  I was breathing hard now. Strangely exhilarated.

  ‘That day that Tia stayed back here because she had a headache?’

  He nodded.

  ‘And you had work to do, so you stayed home too.’

  No movement.

  ‘You didn’t have work to do! And she didn’t have a headache!’

  Again, the downcast eyes.

  ‘Oh, Finn,’ I said, still in charge, but Finn picked at the laces of his boots, and on it fell, the knowledge. Clanging ever more acutely.

  ‘And before?’ I said, icicles forming on the edges of my words. ‘Did anything happen with Tia before we came to Montreal?’

  His head swung up. ‘Before I met you,’ he said, a flash of pride, defiance. ‘We had a thing before you and I even met. I’ve worked with her for years, remember?’

  ‘What? What? What?’ Now I was one of those gaping fish. ‘You did not!’

  He stared at me.

  ‘You did not! Because you’d have told me! Why would you not have told me that?’

  ‘She didn’t want you to know.’

  Oh, now the icicles looped over my ears, my lungs, my fingernails! ‘It’s not up to Tia what I know!’

  He shrugged. I almost slapped him. I actually raised my hand to slap away that shrug.

  But the defiance was still in his eyes. It shot through everything we said as we talked in circles. This was his escape route, his loophole. There’d been something going on before he’d even met me. It was out of my jurisdiction!

  ‘How long before you met me?’ I said.

  ‘Right before. We’d been sleeping together for the few weeks just before I met you at that party.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But then why did you start things with me!’

  He shrugged, surly boy. ‘I liked you.’

  ‘And you didn’t like her?’ Not a question, more relieved confirmation. Except that he stared at me, unblinking.

  ‘You did like her,’ I said.

  ‘She didn’t want anything serious. To be honest, I thought picking you up might make her jealous.’

  I couldn’t speak. I was horror-movie moving my mouth around, trying to make words.

  ‘You still like her,’ I whispered.

  ‘I suggested you and I move to Montreal,’ he said, voice hoarse, ‘because I was afraid for us. To save us.’

  ‘Tia,’ I said. ‘Tia is why we came to Canada?’

  ‘But then she and Natalia came to visit,’ he complained, as if the rules of the game had been unfairly changed. ‘And now Tia wants to come again. To see if we can . . . make things work.’

  I stared at him. There was nothing left of me now. No fresh swoops, no gleaming suspense, not even any icicles. Only a sound: a high-pitched, searing sound, located somewhere at the base of my spine.

  I hadn’t known at all.

  *

  ‘You have to go,’ I said eventually.

  Following a rulebook.

  We were in our bedroom, and he was tipping out the swimming gear from his gym bag. He threw some other things in it instead. Clothes, toiletries.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘You told me I have to go.’ He looked up and caught my eye. The sulkiness dropped and it was him again. ‘The night I met you, I fell in love with you,’ he whispered. ‘Abi, I love you so much. We’re supposed to be together. It’s inconceivable, us breaking up. Abi . . . Abi.’ And he was reaching his hands towards me, crying.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said, desperate with relief, wrapping my arms around him. ‘We’ll figure it out. Stupid Tia can—’

  Abruptly he stopped weeping, pulled back, and shook his head.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, packing his bag again. ‘She’s not stupid.’

  And then I was breaking the rules. ‘Don’t you go anywhere,’ I said. ‘Don’t you dare leave this room. Don’t you touch that doorhandle! We will work it out! Put that bag away! Put it away!’

  ‘I have to go,’ he said gently, peeling my arms from around him. ‘I’ll stay with David Chin.’

  ‘You can’t go there! They’re having a baby!’

  ‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘I’m in love with Tia.’ Then he ducked his head, his wounded eyes, and I thought suddenly, with another fall, a clang: Here he is at last. Finnegan. Found and lost at exactly the same time.

  *

  A week went by.

  He didn’t call.

  I waited.

  I was waiting for flowers and apologies. These were in the rulebook.

  In turn, I planned to break the pattern. At first, of course, I would be the woman who ‘cannot forgive’. Our sad eyes at the table. But then I’d look up! And forgive him!

  I called him in the end, and we both wept on the phone. ‘When are you co
ming back?’ I said.

  Now he became irritated. ‘This is hard for me!’ he said. As if something had happened to him, unconnected to me.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I whispered, or maybe I only mouthed the words.

  He cleared his throat. ‘You were very needy.’

  ‘I was what?’

  ‘I mean, I don’t blame you. But you were very needy. And she’s . . . she’s not.’

  ‘She’s here? In Montreal?’

  He didn’t answer, so then I knew she was.

  ‘She’s in pieces,’ he said. ‘She feels terrible.’

  After I hung up I thought, Oh, cry me a river, Tia.

  I wished I’d said that.

  *

  Late that night, I stood in the living room looking through the window.

  In the street below, two men stood together in the rain and smoked cigarettes. One wore a dark jacket; the other rustled in a transparent raincoat. He was animated, or the wind had the raincoat; either way, it coruscated, rippled with light and frenzy. Everything out there was lit up by his raincoat, so it seemed.

  I pulled on my boots, buttoned up my coat, and walked out into the streets. Strode along the emptiness. Ran my hands along the air, tracing the rain, imaginary fence posts, hedges, walls.

  At an intersection, I urgently wanted to scoop out the warmth of the red traffic lights.

  Eventually, I turned into a nightclub on St-Denis.

  I stood at the bar and drank Crantinis, chewing on the straw. I thought about things. Specifically, I thought: Can they do this? If you lose your brother, aren’t you covered? Don’t you get immunity? If someone takes away the best friend of your youth, can they send you a new best friend named Finnegan, handsome with his pale skin, his dark hair, generous with his listening eyes and can they then say: We’ll take him too?

  What are the rules? I wondered.

  I was pretty sure that they had been broken.

  *

  After a while, I looked around and saw men who were also looking around. I remembered what you do. You call them to you, the men, with your eyes and your hips.

  A man with dark blond hair approached and took the seat next to mine. I don’t remember what we talked about. I think I was chewing on the straw suggestively and letting him know what I intended with my eyes. He seemed pretty keen on the idea.

  We went back to my place. He appraised the apartment, nodding to himself, found the stereo, chose music. In fact, he unplugged the stereo and carried it down the hall to the bedroom.