If Sylvie Had Nine Lives Page 13

  “You should’ve gone to the other job first.”

  “Well I didn’t.”

  “Julia should be there. She’ll let you in.”

  “Julia’s not.”

  “She will be. Right away if not sooner.”

  “Word is, she won’t be showing up at all today.”

  “She what? I’ll be there in fifteen.”

  “Make it ten, or I’ll have to squat right here in the driveway.”

  “Twenty.”

  Three times he slipped past other cars on streets where it’s all right so long as you don’t get caught, and ten minutes later he was within a block of the job. He rounded the final corner and was suddenly driving through a storm of black flecks. He stopped in the driveway and blinked and blinked again. You get one set of eyes. Blink. One set. Cynthia was knocking on the side window and Erik was reaching for the phone again. He lowered the window and handed her the receiver and the mini–Yellow Pages with the tiny print that he kept under the seat.

  “Look up an eye doctor, any eye doctor.” He could see the steering wheel, the dash, the gearshift, the control for the wipers, the stick for the signal lights, but between himself and all those was a storm of black.

  “What the hell, Erik?” Cynthia was flipping through the book; he was in good hands, but still: one set of eyes.

  “I’m inside a snow globe and all the flakes are black.” A pair. Two in total. He closed his left eye and all was clear again. He saw the steering wheel, the dash, the sticks, the gearshift plain as day. This calmed him. He closed his right and opened his left and the black was back. He cupped a palm over the bad eye.

  She shoved the receiver back through the window. “Found one. Second Avenue. She says come right away.”

  “Glorious fucking day. You drive.”

  “I need a toilet.”

  “Just hold it!”

  “Okay, okay.”

  He edged his ass to the right, lifted his legs one at a time past the bulk of the phone, slid carefully to the passenger side, took the mini–Yellow Pages from Cynthia and clutched it to his chest.

  “Erik?” Cynthia shifted, shoulder-checked and backed out of the driveway. “I told Syl.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I called the house this morning looking for you and she didn’t know where you were either, and then I told her how last Friday I saw you and Julia coming out of your office, her hair messed into a haystack at the back and why did you have the venetians closed, I wondered. So I just told her. This morning on the phone. She said she was going to call Julia right pronto and have a conversation.”

  “Glorious fucking, fucking day.”

  BUT SYL HAD BEEN with him at the hospital through operations one, two and three. A few days of rage and shock, and then she’d taken Erik’s hand as he lay in bed between surgeries one and two and told him they had too many years together to let it ruin them. “This sort of thing happens all the time. People get past it.” The drive to Edmonton and back had been a tonic, all those miles of music, all those hours of talk about anything but the affair. A truce, like living inside brackets.

  When he told her that during the final operation he’d watched the instrument moving “inside my very eye,” she said, “Stop. Just stop.”

  His friends were squeamish too. But where was their appreciation for mechanics? Where was their fascination for how things worked? The job of the tiny instrument, he told them, was to suck the vitreous jelly out from his eye because it was drying up and tugging at the retina.

  “Must you use the word ‘suck’?” said Calum, the designer he was working with now.

  After the surgeon had drawn out the jelly and injected the gas bubble in its place and sent him home he was determined to follow orders, heal properly, resist the temptation to look up.

  “Keeping my head down,” he told Syl. “Ha.”

  “Good idea. Keep the other thing down too.”

  “You said you didn’t want to talk about that.”

  “I don’t.”

  While he waited, neck bent, at the table that first evening, his view was of the placemat. He was allowed to raise his head for five minutes or so at a time, and only once in a while. He would save those minutes for swallowing. He tried to admire the placemat while he waited for Syl to slide a dinner plate onto it. It filled almost his entire field of vision, yellow flowers bright against lime green. Syl had bought it a couple of years ago during her everything-sixties phase, around about the time she sewed a mini dress in paisley print and walked around the house singing about buying the world a Coke and keeping it company. “No,” he’d said to her one day, “you’d like the world to buy you a Coke.”

  “That would work too.”

  I would like to buy her a Coke, he thought now. Truly. She was soldiering on, sticking around, slipping only rarely into punishing sarcasm. Yes, a Coke with a wedge of lime, the way the waiter brought it that time in Orlando. Such a small thing, but she said she’d never seen that sort of flourish with a plain old glass of pop, and she loved it, didn’t he? Yes, he did. People do get past this sort of trouble, don’t they? He stared at the yellow flowers. Often, yes, they do. Here was dinner now: ham steak, kernel corn and fried potatoes. And beyond the plate of comfort food and the placemat and the table’s edge, a glimpse of Syl’s legs, clad in jeans, which was about the most he’d seen of her all day, given his angle of vision. There would come a day when he’d see those legs unwrapped again, the curve of her calf, her slim ankles, her soft inner thighs.

  A FEW DAYS IN, Syl said, “You’ve been walking around looking at the floor for half an hour.” She came close, stood on tiptoe and kissed the top of his head. “Calum brought by the elevations for the Casa Rio kitchen reno. I can lay them out on the floor for you.” Syl would do that — extend an olive branch. Sometimes she’d yank the branch away as soon as she’d offered it. You had to watch the tone of your reply.

  “Thank you, babe. That would be great.” He sat on the couch, his knees wide, and looked down at the drawings. With the patch covering one eye, his world had been two-dimensional for days now, and he had a jolt of recognition when he saw the elevations, a kitchen wide and high but not deep. The drawings looked competent, if uninspired, proportions well thought out, appropriate to the space. This new designer would work out, but he was no Julia. Julia had a talent for adding something unexpected, yet right, in every room.

  “No jarring,” the surgeon had said. “I can’t tell you how important that is.” She’d waggled her finger like a teacher when he asked about snowmobiling. “Not this coming winter. Preferably not ever.”

  “And sex?” he’d said.

  “You’ll know.”

  His movements careful, Erik got down on the carpet on all fours, gathered up the elevations, rolled them and slid them into the tube. To his left was the low bookshelf where Syl’s long-forgotten correspondence binders leaned in on each other. Discouragement under a layer of dust, and after that failure she’d tried retail. When Brycie and Adam were in high school Syl would come home Thursdays after her evening shift at The Bay and hide in the basement with the TV on, as if her years inside the four walls of family had made her go rusty with the world outside those walls, those few people. Once, when he went downstairs to visit her — not to talk, she was typically out of sorts for conversation after work — but just to sit side by side a while on the comfy red couch, he’d caught the beginning of a rerun of Hill Street Blues, the part where, before he sends them out into the streets, the sergeant says to the officers, “Let’s be careful out there.” That’s what I should say to her every day, Erik had thought, show her I’m thinking of her in her world. But when he did say it the next morning she replied with a defensive glare, “Let’s be careful in here, too.”

  He lived with a different Syl now: since taking on the bookkeeping for the business she’d recovered confidence aplenty, in here, out there, every-which-where. She would form her lips into a little curve that made her les
s attractive than she really was, and he’d ready himself for whatever she might be about to say or do.

  “COVER YOUR GOOD EYE,” Dr. Patel had said after the final operation, and Erik, standing beside his hospital bed, cupped a palm over his right eye and looked at her raised hand. He felt a little nauseated, and with his good eye in darkness his balance was off. He slid his feet apart to steady himself and reached for Syl, who guided his hand onto her forearm.

  “How many fingers?” Dr. Patel said.

  “Three. Three fingers.”

  “Good. Lie back down and get some rest now. I’m going to ask you to stay the night.”

  “Effing right I will. Make sure it’s in working order, finally.”

  Dr. Patel leaned in over the bed and reattached the bandage she’d removed a few minutes earlier. With gentle hands she smoothed the tape into place on Erik’s forehead and along his cheekbone. “I understand your frustration.”

  “You might think you do.”

  “Sometimes things don’t go quite the way we hope.”

  “No shit.”

  “I’ll check back with you later. Try to relax.”

  The woman didn’t see the simplest things. Like the fact that telling a person to relax would do the opposite. Erik would never say to a client, “Try to relax.” He would say, “I will make this right.” He heard the surgeon’s shoes on their way to the door, and he heard them pause when Syl said, “Wait, please, I have a question.”

  “Certainly.”

  “He got the right answer, three fingers, but he was looking way to the right and down. Not at your fingers, but over at the baseboard, so?”

  “This last operation left things a little out of alignment.”

  “So he’ll have a wonky eye from here on in? He’ll be looking off to the side just to see what’s in front of him?”

  “We’ll put a prism in his glasses to bring things back in line. Bend his sight, if you will.”

  “Erik,” Syl said after the doctor left the room. He didn’t open his good eye; he couldn’t manage the sight of anyone or anything. He heard her stifle a giggle. “Erik, you can’t even see straight.”

  “Is that supposed to be funny?”

  “You always say there’s a way.”

  “I don’t always say it.”

  “Well my way right now is to make a joke.”

  “I say it when I’m in a better mood.”

  “Which is almost always.”

  “Can you please stop talking?”

  “Okay, Erik. I’ll go down and get myself a coffee. You relax.”

  AN EYE PATIENT goes early to bed. Following doctor’s orders, he slept on his belly with his forehead resting on a bolster, so the gas bubble holding his retina in place would keep on trying to rise out the back of his head. Syl had helped him arrange pillows under his chest and shoulders to save his neck. It was early September still, and there was enough light even at nine-thirty that with his good eye he could make out the fragility of the cornflowers on the sheets. They looked as if they’d blow right off the fabric if he breathed too hard. Wedding sheets from the seventies, a present from Syl’s Uncle Davis and Aunt Viv. The better linens, the five-hundred-count Egyptian cotton that Syl said she’d found on sale, were now on the bed in Adam’s old room, where a few days ago she’d moved her book and lamp and the small amber bottle of sleeping pills she resorted to on occasion. She wouldn’t want to disturb his eyes, she’d said, and it was like she’d chosen that particular phrasing for the sake of irony.

  “You’ll sleep better,” she’d said then, softening.

  “I appreciate the care.”

  “It’s the thing to do, right? If there’s one thing I learned from my dad.”

  “True. Legendary, the way he looked after your mom. Let’s hope this will be weeks, not years.”

  The early days of cornflower sheets, no one ever gets those back. It was going to be a long night. And a long haul. Twenty-five years, and suppose we have that many again. As long as he wasn’t in the same physical space as Julia, he could almost believe the affair hadn’t happened. He was — they were — both forgivable; they’d done the hard thing, they’d left each other behind. The very hard thing. When he told Julia she didn’t have to quit, and she said, As if, and, There’s plenty of work out there, I’ll be fine, he’d made a gesture of protest, but he hadn’t argued. He could put her out of mind if she was out of sight — sometimes he went hours without even thinking of her — but he couldn’t guarantee his behaviour if he found himself in the same room. Physical presence, it’s a power. Twenty-five years ago Syl would have gone through with marrying that other guy, count on it, if Erik hadn’t made the trip to Saskatoon as soon as he heard and asked what the hell and put his own physical presence undeniably in the way.

  ERIK’S EYE PATCH was frosty pink, a shallow cup of hard plastic. He waited for the day he could take it off. He wondered how much sight he might recover in the bad eye, and how much depth perception. But the brain has its ways, the doctor said, its workarounds and compensations.

  “You could be a pirate for Hallowe’en,” Syl said one morning. She reached across the breakfast table and with a fingernail she tapped his glasses lens in front of the patch. He felt the same red jolt he’d felt that day in July when the stupid damn neighbour’s stupid fucking parakeet had landed on his shoulder and clamped the arm of his glasses in its beak.

  He took a moment to recover before saying, “I’ll be long done with the patch by the time Hallowe’en comes.”

  “You’ll still have it, though.”

  “Stowed in a drawer where it belongs. Besides, I’ll have my newfangled specs. I don’t think a pirate would wear both.”

  “You’re right, honey. We’ll come up with something else.”

  Honey. That small word flowed deep into him. It was the first time she’d used it since her cousin Cynthia had blown his secret open. “Something else would be great, babe.” From where he sat he could see their two cereal bowls, their two cups of coffee, their hands. He raised his head, as allowed, to eat his bowl of Just Right. Syl was busy with the crossword. She looked up briefly and smiled in a quick and ordinary way before she looked down again.

  Game Face

  SYL LED ERIK to the bedroom to show him the elements of his Hallowe’en costume laid out in a tidy lineup, black against the yellow bedspread: turtleneck (men’s large), pants, leather gloves, a stocking cap. Thrown across the turtleneck, a coil of rope, spanking white, for contrast.

  “Suits me fine, pun intended.” He settled a warm hand on her lower back. “But before we put clothes on let’s take some off.”

  “You’re on.” She reached for his zipper.

  Fresh from the shower afterward, his cock relaxed, he sorted through the tangle of covers and clothing their love-making had sent to the floor. He sat on the edge of the bed, the unnatural angle of his left leg more pronounced than usual as he lifted his foot to pull on a black sock. Bent since birth, that’s me, he sometimes said.

  “That’s anti-sexy,” she said, “a man in nothing but socks.”

  “Even when the man is me?”

  “Okay, maybe.”

  Earlier that afternoon she’d hauled out the box of Christmas decorations and dug through it for a downy white bird to go with her own costume. She played with it now as Erik proceeded upward from his socks, item by item to the stocking cap, and finished by sliding an arm through the coil of rope and settling it on his shoulder. On the bedside table, talk radio was talking about the millennial catastrophe the Y2K bug was sure to bring on in two months’ time: Give us a call and tell us if you’re laying in a supply of canned tuna and bottled water to get you through till the world’s computers come back up. If they come back up, ha ha.

  Syl reached for the off switch. “Shotguns and baseball bats too. Stock up on those, why not?”

  “Don’t laugh. I had a guy call me yesterday, wanted to know if I could build a bunker in his backyard by December 31.”

&nb
sp; “What did you tell him?”

  “Told him where he could buy a shovel.”

  She led him back to the bathroom, removed her black glove from her right hand and her white glove from her left hand, and dabbed cold cream below his eyes. Since the third operation, there’d been a sag in his left lid that made her think of old burlap. With a thumb against his temple she lifted the eyelid taut for a moment, then let it droop again. This was how they were now, altered.

  “You’re my joy,” she said. Saying it could make it so.

  “You’re mine.”

  She massaged cold cream into his skin, playing against the resistance of his cheekbones, opened her box of face paints and brushed heavy black marks below his eyes, like in the photo on the dresser that showed him suited up for high school football decades ago. Syl wasn’t sure why a cat burglar would have such marks, but she liked the way they underscored the look. Calum and Mitch had billed their party as a masquerade, heavy on the first syllable, and so Erik ought to show at least a token gesture toward a mask. A game face.

  “You’ll hardly see those for my spectacles.”

  Syl shrugged. “You could have told him just to have a little faith.”

  “Who, the guy that wants the bunker?”

  “Yeah.” Faith was what she herself was leaning on.

  Working blind behind her back, she pinned a length of black boa to her leggings, a flowing tail. She settled an Alice band with glued-on velvet ears on her head, leaned toward the mirror and painted feline whiskers fanning across her cheeks. An inverted yellow triangle of nose at the tip of her own. With sufficient makeup she could manage kittenish at forty-four, just. She struggled to fix the white bird to her shoulder, slipping the wire claws through the loose knit of her sweater. They scratched at her skin. The bird flopped forward and buried its beak in black angora. Erik managed — “Hold still, this’ll work, baby” — to pass the claws through the sweater in a new place and cinch them around her bra strap.