“Are you all right?” Simon’s English accent inquires from New York. He does not reproach me for my silence of the last two days. Simon and I argue genteelly about abstractions, but are puritanical in sidestepping claims of the heart.
“There’s no good way to answer that question,” I say, bewildered that the story he knows about my sister and me has been usurped by a surprise story, a pretender that supplants the tale of two loving sisters who had a terrible fight.
My quandary would appeal to Simon, whose academic expertise is postmodern theories of language. He takes for granted that the reader, opening a book, sets sail purposefully but can never conclusively reach land.
Through the lace curtains of the den, snow is falling daintily, a gloss on a pretty winter scene. The glazed windows lend the front garden an enclosed, precious look. As a child, I would race outside on a day like this to step into a fantasy counterworld, where I befriended fauns and eluded witches until salvation came. But across the pristine expanse of white lawn, a procession of this-world visitors continues to advance. And I am mired in a darker universe.
“You have a letter,” Simon says.
“What do you mean?” I cross-examine him, as if he suddenly has the power to read my mind against my will.
“You asked me to check your mailbox,” he says patiently, “and so I did. You have one piece of mail.”
“Who from?” I say suspiciously—and ungrammatically.
He is interpreting my response and filing it under grief.
“Eve, we don’t need to talk about it now. I’ll save your mail for you. You can look at it when you get home.”
“I am home,” I say.
“Right,” he answers briskly. “And I’m in New York, thinking of you.”
Sometimes, in bed with Simon, I consider the two of us, expatriates in New York, and marvel at how brief the Canadian period of my life turned out to be.
Naturally, he disagrees. “You can take the kid out of the Empire”—he teased me once—“but you can’t take the Empire—”
Given that the Empire’s representative was at that moment deep inside me, I laughed, as he knew I would.
Simon is the university’s youngest tenured professor of English literature. I, too, teach English, but it cannot be said that I share my field with Simon. He has deconstructed language and reconstructed it again, the substance of his mental forays so arcane that one needs to be a mathematician to appreciate it.
His theories have earned him the sort of prizes for which he is not even permitted to apply. I’m waiting for the pendulum to swing back, and Simon knows it.
“Someone should study us,” I contend in our disputes on the topic, “the old-fashioned readers, sneaking our flashlights beneath the blanket of fashion to read as if the world depends upon it.”
Unlike me, Simon revels in his statelessness. He is a citizen of literature, he claims. His parents came to England from Vienna, and he has no geographical dolors. “Attachments,” he says, “are portable.”
Simon is too urbane to acknowledge that he is stung by my inability to contemplate our life together with any degree of seriousness. I prefer to think of us ironically—an approach he should endorse. The fact that Simon has won, with relative ease, all he desires simply underlines my resolve to stay just out of reach.
Although we have known each other for over two years, the time I spend with him confirms our disposition from the start, a wariness on both our parts that is refreshing rather than a deterrent. I met him when he came to observe the class I teach on women’s autobiography, a course for mature students. He was interviewing ordinary people about how they read. For a man whose writing is complex to the point of opacity, Simon is nicely accessible.
After he finished querying my students, he turned his attention to me.
The more discerning his questions, the more evasive I became. Why, he wanted to know, was I teaching American women the lives of British writers of the twenties and thirties? What did I find in Storm Jameson’s autobiographies or Vera Brittain’s testaments that was more persuasive than narratives of citizens of the United States? How, he persisted, did I expect stories of another culture to elucidate the lives of women who were looking for sanction and precedent within their own? And in what way did memoirs of English writers from between the wars speak to me as an American woman?
For a person who did not believe in geography, his exploration was rather confined.
“If you’d give me a minute,” I said, “you might find out that I’m not American.”
“I’m no Henry Higgins,” said Simon. “Where are you from?”
In my mother’s living room, Ben sits with Ella on his lap. I find it hard to look at him. My own mutable love life has been defined by the bedrock of my sister’s. Is it only now that her husband appears slightly out of place among Tam’s glamorous set?
“Eve,” Ben says. “Ella wants you. I can’t get her to sleep,” he adds. “Please.”
Ben’s benign manner has been appraised in print as the most excellent correspondence to Tam’s drive. Their evident affection made their life together the subject of fawning articles about domestic bliss. The idealization of Tam’s marriage was in the public domain for so long that I did not question it.
Mac and Harris shake hands ceremoniously with each member of the family. As they depart, Mac turns to me and says brusquely, “I’ll be back on Sunday.”
Then Laurie is sitting before me.
The room’s sounds recede into a hum. I see his tapered fingers set evenly on his thighs and want everything back: my sister, our youth, desire uncomplicated by history. More than anything, I want the incomparable elixir of beginnings, the heady confidence that all yearning can be assuaged by one man’s mouth and hands.
“Meet me tonight,” I say to Laurie. My mind has reverted to the sly resourcefulness of adolescence. “Side door at six.”
Laurie stands. “Your niece is waiting for you. I saw her at the foot of the stairs. Six,” he says. “I’ll be there.”
“Tell me a story,” Ella demands. She is lying in her pajamas, eyes distant with impending sleep. “I’m wide awake.”
The breadth of her forehead and her bowed upper lip are replicas of Tam’s. For a moment I am woozy, tossed between my present self as I look at my sister’s daughter and myself as a child, inspecting Tam.
“One you’ve heard or one you haven’t?” I say, our formula.
“The milk carton.”
“Again?”
Ella nods with satisfaction.
“One day,” I tell her, “we were at Nana’s cottage. I was three and your mummy was six.”
“Like me,” says Ella.
“Yes, this is a funny story,” I say, as if in warning.
“I know the story,” Ella reminds me.
“So what happens next?”
“Just keep going.”
“It was lunchtime, and Nana had run out of milk. She gave your mummy and me some change and told us to walk to Mrs. Edgar’s.”
“‘And hurry home,’” Ella says.