If Sylvie Had Nine Lives Read online

  When she got home from after-work drinks the package was gone, and under the pepper shaker were three twenties and a note: Last of the rent money. In search of a breeze, Sylvie went to sit on the landing at the top of the outside staircase. She looked down at the street through a lace of elm leaves. A red pickup was parked at the curb, running. The dark-haired basement neighbour with the happy eyes appeared, slid a duffel into the open bed of the truck alongside two cardboard boxes and a mattress already there, and climbed into the passenger seat. Sylvie smoked a cigarette and then a joint and went inside to call Will. It was too long since she’d seen him. He, however, was on his way to yoga. Did she want to come?

  “Maybe next time. Could you come by later?”

  “It might be late. Things, you know, not sure when.”

  The living room was stifling, the bedroom worse. The fan that used to stand by the window had belonged to Lisa. To create a cross draft Sylvie opened the outside door at the top of the staircase and the window above the couch. She stayed up till eleven watching TV, but Will didn’t show. Wearing only her panties and hugging a rolled-up blanket, she fell asleep on the couch. The next morning, the phone woke her. She pulled the blanket around herself and got up to answer it, still groggy.

  “Sylvie?”

  “Hello, Lisa.”

  “Thank you for the present.”

  Sylvie let the blanket drop and stood, panty-clad, in the already warm morning. Across her shoulders, an itchy film of sweat. “You’re welcome.” Crooking her neck to hold the phone, she opened the freezer and looked for the bag of beans to cool her forehead. It wasn’t there. She remembered tossing it after using it as a cold pack.

  “Sylvie, I didn’t want things to finish up this way.”

  “Me neither, Lisa.” She put her hand against the inside wall of the freezer, where it melted a print in the frost.

  “Me neither, Sylvie.”

  “No.” It was the only word to find its way out from among all the things she might have said, all the possibilities for counterfeit cheer or honest questions or best wishes that, though they might not be affectionate, would at least have been sincere. Sylvie heard the line click and she, too, hung up. She thought, She has a brother. Sylvie touched her cool hand to her throat, her forehead, the back of her neck, turning her head as she did so, and from this new angle she could see into her bedroom. The pink sheet on her bed made a long hill, and the shape of that hill was a lying-down body, and her first instinct was to run screaming in her underwear down the shaky stairs to the street. Then she saw it was Will, his tangled hair standing out around his sleeping head like a curly cloud of joy. She took a couple of deep breaths while the jolt of adrenaline subsided, then bent to grasp the blanket from the floor and pull it around herself. She went to the bedroom and put her hand on the sheet where it lay across Will’s shoulder. He opened his eyes, already in possession of himself, and she guessed he’d been awake for some time.

  “Tell me something wise,” she said. “Anything.”

  “You shouldn’t sleep with the door open,” he said. “You never know what could happen.”

  “That’s fairly basic.”

  “And yet you didn’t know it.”

  She nudged him to move over, which he did, dragging the sheet, still around him, and leaving a shelf for her on the narrow bed. I am abandoning her, Sylvie thought. I have abandoned her. Still wrapped in her blanket, she settled herself in the narrow space. A girl could walk out of a safe, upstairs apartment and into harm’s way and pretend that wasn’t what she was doing. A girl had to watch herself. She touched her cool hand to her forehead, wishing for ice.

  The Last Days of Disco

  MARGO AND BENJ necked lazily on a sand-strewn blanket. Alex and Penny lounged on web-woven lawn chairs, Penny with her eyes closed, white-blond hair twisted tight in a towel, tanning as if she was going for an A. Sylvie sat low in the canvas sling of her beach chair, the crossbar at the top pressing into the back of her skull, chair-bone to head-bone. And Jack, well, Jack was pacing. In their five years of marriage he might have walked all the way to Antarctica if he’d straightened out his hairpin turns and followed his toes where they led. But he wasn’t one to light out for parts unknown; nor had Sylvie been when despite her doubts she’d joined him at the altar, age nineteen. Sunburn bloomed above his tight blue trunks.

  This was new for the six of them, to be outdoors together in daylight. They knew each other in dim bars and nighttime kitchens, in scraggly, moonlit yards around smoky fires where they threw their bottles in among the flames to watch the labels scorch.

  A hardcover novel she’d brought from work rested in Sylvie’s lap: The Last Enchantment, thick as a brick. She ran her fingers across the impressed lettering on the cover. This was one of the things she loved best about the world, the physical feel of objects, the changes in texture under her fingers. It was what redeemed her job, mending books in an unwindowed room on the second floor of the university library. No more stacking journals in the basement. Now she worked with the loose weave of binding tape; the sharp splinters of crystallized glue that hid along the edges of a separated cover waiting to nip a finger; the dependable firmness of a replacement spine. Her job was to keep a thing going past its time.

  Jack halted. “It is time, people, to raise your beach bums, your sandy asses, off the sand.” Sylvie watched to see if his peculiar magic would work, as it so often did. She opened her book and ran her palm across a page, feeling the faint indentations the trails of print left in the rag paper.

  “It is time,” Jack said, “for your lesson in line dance Hustle! Form yourselves into a single line, my friends, on the dock if you would.” He was not — as Sylvie had reminded him last night when she and he were in the screaming thick of the worst of it — a man of vision. “You can see about as far as the bug screen strapped to the front of your Corolla.” Sometimes, though, he did show evidence of a vision for the next fifteen minutes or so.

  The dock where Jack wanted them to line up was a good size, a pier leading out to a square patio that stood above the water on stilts, but it wasn’t nearly big enough for five people to dance the Hustle in formation — or not for long. Sylvie dug her toes in, and the fine spill of sand across her feet was reason enough not to leave her chair — the grains against her skin, their slide, their heat.

  Jack stooped to tug at the corner of Benj and Margo’s blanket. “Repossess your tongues!” Benj kicked at Jack’s hand, but he got up and hoisted Margo after him, her limbs sun-honey languid. Jack grabbed Penny’s chair by the legs and dumped her sideways. She gave the others a flash of breast as she slipped it out of its cup to shake away sand.

  Jack’s reply to Sylvie’s accusation last night (in the screaming thick of the worst of it) had been to say he did too have imagination, he had a semi-trailerful. People were always telling him he had a real sense of fun. Sylvie had made for the bedroom, turning her back on the living room and the insults they’d flung at each other.

  “Are you gonna just walk away?” he’d said as she walked away.

  The sand so warm, and she was so sleepy these days. She closed her eyes. “Hi-yo, Sylverie.” Alex’s sweat-wet hand was on her knee. She flicked the sand off her toes and followed him. Below his cut-offs, the backs of his pink legs were embossed, criss-cross, from the webbing of his chair. She bit back on the urge to put a finger to his skin and trace the pattern.

  “YOUR TROUBLE,” Jack had said last night — he’d whipped past to face her in the hallway — “your trouble is, nothing’s ever enough. You’re just plain greedy.” He put one hand on his hip and leaned his opposite shoulder against the wall. “That was it when I met you, and that’s it now.”

  “So arrest me.” She put a hand on her hip in mockery and leaned against the wall as he did.

  “I wouldn’t bother.”

  “Exactly!” She slapped the wall hard. “You wouldn’t bother.”

  “Exactly.” He slapped the wall a bare inch from her face. She
felt the wind from it like old breath.

  THE FIVE OF THEM lined up on the dock under Jack’s direction, blinking in the sun, their ripening beers abandoned, bottles aslant in the sand, bubbles expanding inside them. Benj performed a showy stretch, arms out to either side, pecs proud. “We can’t dance without music.”

  “I’m your music,” said Jack. “Just follow the count of eight, over and over.” He clapped it out: one-two, three-four … Not exactly Soul City Symphony, but one thing you could say about Jack, he had rhythm.

  The rhythm method, that was another story.

  Still, as of last month they were five years married. Anyone would say it was time.

  “Idiot-proof,” said Jack. “Now, as you Philistines may not know, Van McCoy died last week.” He mimed grief with a downturned mouth and took on an emcee voice. “Remember that date: July 6, 1979. This ceremonial tattoo we are about to perform on Uncle Walter’s dock is the least we can do in honour of the man McCoy. Without him we would not even have the Hustle.” He did the party trick where he bulged his skinny belly so it ballooned above his trunks, skin stretched taut, and used his fingers to tap out a drum roll. “Sylvie, dear Sylvie, kindly educate these novices in the steps.”

  The conjurer’s lovely assistant. “Which combination?” she said. “Master,” she added, in the manner of I Dream of Jeannie, the clear-eyed woman in harem pants on the small screen who would swing her blond ponytail and pretend she wasn’t the one making the decisions. As a kid Sylvie used to feel as if she was in a conspiracy with Jeannie against all the boys in the world.

  “The one with the heel-slap, dear Silly.”

  It was the most teachable of the combinations the two of them had learned in ballroom dancing classes at the gym in the school down the block from their apartment. A short pattern, repeated, repeated, and four reps would make a square. Except: the rolling grapevine sequence tended to loosen when you stepped it out but tighten when you reeled it in, which meant the square would shift along the dance floor by a foot or so each time through. Then you turned ninety degrees and the pattern wanted four steps back. In the school gym one evening, Sylvie had danced backward into the grid of a metal light cage mounted on the wall, head-bone to light-bone.

  This afternoon she would play Jack’s game, sure, show off her own sense of fun. Earlier in the day, as Sylvie floundered in water up to her armpits, Margo had said, “You’re not exactly fluent as a swimmer, are you?” It was a fair comment, but she could keep her head up. Jack couldn’t swim to save his life. You could bet that once the dance was done he’d be standing dry and alone on the dock.

  One-two, three-four. A dazzling disco sun above, Jack clapping the beat, Sylvie leading the other four in the simple sequence, forward two, back two, kick, turn, and on. They caught the pattern with hardly a misstep. One pair of cut-offs and one pair of bulging Speedos, three pairs of breasts slung into bikini bras, Penny’s with the most generous swing on the turns, the most emphatic bounce when it was time to rise on tiptoe and slap her heels together. Sylvie had less bounce, less swing, but a pretty sweet bikini. And her breasts would swell by a cup size at least, she expected, over the coming months. Sweat trickled down her back, wicking to either side where it met her bikini bottoms. She’d been sick to her stomach at five a.m., then brushed her teeth clean of evidence and stolen back into bed beside a sleeping Jack. She’d woken again at seven, her insides settled for the day if the pattern of the past couple of weeks was anything to go by.

  The beat of the dance, kick, turn. “Dis-go here,” she said, to make Alex laugh beside her as she stomped a foot, “and dis-go dere.” Alex did laugh, and Jack said, “Hey, it’s my show.” She glanced along the weathered boards: still a few feet of dock between dancers and water.

  Last night, raw from shouting and sex, she’d said, “You know your biggest problem? You never think What if? about anything. Not your job, not your tooth decay, not your brand of beer. It’s like you can’t imagine how any of that could change.” For a year and a half, roughly the gestation period of an elephant, she’d been preparing to say that or something like it, then letting her lips go dry with her own silence. “Don’t you think that by twenty-four you should be deciding what you want to be when you grow up?”

  “I did that,” he said, “long ago. Don’t you think that if you didn’t you’re kinda late?”

  FIVE YEARS AGO, as she’d stood holding Erik’s hand while Jack, passed out and moaning, rolled from his back onto his side on the braided scatter rug in the basement suite, she’d said, “Jack makes me laugh.”

  “Ha. So do I.”

  She’d let go of Erik’s hand. “All I want,” she said, “is an ordinary life, nothing fancy. An ordinary job, a little house, kids one day. Save up for the big holiday in Hawaii five years from now.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  ON THE DOCK Jack clapped a final five-six, seven-eight and handed off the beat to the slap of ten bare soles on wood. Sylvie tapped forward twice, back twice, swung her leg through and looked over her shoulder to see Alex’s back foot lose its toehold on the boards. He fell butt-first into the water with a great flailing splash. He started to shout, Ffff —! but his head went under and the word got dunked. The others laughed but didn’t break their rhythm. On the next sequence Penny made a show of balancing on the edge and then let herself fall. They’d seen this from the start, of course they had, and still they were game.

  BACK THEN, Erik had used a gentle palm to turn her gaze away from Jack and toward himself. “We’re nineteen years old, Syl. Why do you want to know your whole future?”

  “Doesn’t everyone? How else would that woman on Twentieth with the big glass ball and the little stars from the teacher store sprinkled in her hair — how else would she make a living?”

  “How do you know she’s got stars in her hair? Have you been to see her?”

  “She has a window right on the street. Anyone can see her sitting there.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “You’re infuriating.”

  BENJ, dancing behind her now that the line had turned, said, “Don’t you have the most lickable dimples just above —” Splash. Sylvie was next in, laughing, pinching her nose. She panicked, almost, then collected herself. Treading water should be just another dance step. Benj swam up as if to rescue her and nuzzled her neck. Jack, on the dock, flipped the finger at Benj and all three of them laughed, Benj’s breath hot on her skin. Cross-couple flirting was one of her favourite things about the six of them, harmless and open, always in plain sight. She managed with her faltering tread to keep her head above water.

  Margo finally danced herself in, surfaced, and swam two strokes back to the dock, where she rested her manicured fingertips and looked up at Jack. Last man standing, he mimed Travolta, bouncing in his snug blue trunks. Sylvie felt Benj’s hand touch her knee under the water, felt it slide up her thigh. On the dock, Jack was more energy than style, ending with a one-eighty spin, an arm raised, pointing toward the disco ball of a sun. He held the pose, puffing.

  Margo was still looking up at him. “You gotta dance yourself in.”

  “No way. I’m the music.”

  In bed last night, when neither the fighting nor the sex had ended in a release that satisfied either of them, Jack had said, “Does this mean you’re not coming to the lake tomorrow?”

  “Oh, I’ll come. They’re expecting us. Fun in the sun. And such.”

  “Christ, Sylvie. I mean, Christ.”

  Now she stayed close to Benj, feeling the absence where his hand had left her leg. Jack said, “The Sunshine Band, uh-huh, uh-huh.” Sylvie reached an underwater hand toward Benj, closer, closer. He stared deliberately ahead and she saw how he was waiting, expectant. She stopped short of touching, maneuvered herself away from him, felt a pleasant lurch inside.

  Alex swam past, hiked himself onto the dock, took a run at Jack, shouted, “Boo-yah!” and they were in.

  “Jesus!” Sylvie shouted. “He can’t
swim!” Alex surfaced, showering her with a flip of his wet hair. No Jack. The others were oblivious, at play. Benj ran a fast hand over the water, driving a jewelled arc toward Penny.

  “You guys!” Sylvie said, but then hesitated while it flashed that Jack could be gone, so simply.

  Benj, behind her now, gave her ass a hard, angry pinch. The jolt brought her back to herself. “He can’t swim!” She put her legs and arms into clumsy motion, trying to propel herself toward the place where he’d gone under.

  Jack flailed his way to the surface and gasped for air. Alex said, “Whadya mean, can’t swim?” and he laughed and put a hand to the top of Jack’s head and pushed. “How’s that saying go? Drowning, not waving?”

  “Jesus!” Sylvie did a frantic, ineffectual dog-paddle. Jack came up again, still out of her reach. Slipped under. “You guys!”

  “Holy, you’re serious!” Alex dove, his feet strewing water-gems. As the ripple from his dive spread, Jack burst the surface, sputtering. He coughed, took in a rough breath, went down again. Sylvie got hold of his arm. He flailed in a fury. Alex broke the surface. “Stop with the windmill, man. I’ll get you to the dock.”

  But Sylvie had to be the one to get him there. Alex was laughing and nothing was funny. “Bugger off!” she yelled. Legs churning, she tried to get an arm around Jack’s chest from behind as he went down again.

  “Sylvie, jeez,” said Alex, reaching.

  Jack pulled her under and she lost him, came up coughing, her throat burning. Alex had him now, an arm circling his chest. So close to the dock, just a few more feet. Jack was flailing less now, sputtering more.

  Sylvie’s ass was a weight, her legs were weights. She gulped in air just before slipping under again. The burn deep in her nostrils. Tell me, water — tell me what happens next for me and this child. If she were to open her mouth and let the lake fill it, and fill her throat, and her lungs, her head, too, then the water would tell her. She closed her eyes. She readied herself. She opened her mouth. A violent spasm seized her throat, and she thrashed. She felt arms lift her and she stiffened and then surrendered. When she broke the surface she thought she would cough her whole insides out. Penny said, “Okay? Okay? Let’s get you out, Syl.” Sylvie was aware of the others, the commotion as Alex and Margo and Benj hefted Jack to safety. Penny’s arm pressed up underneath her tender breasts.