All has gone perfectly according to plan, so far. His silence, his subterfuge, disguise — and he is here, exactly where he wants to be. It’s February, the landscape a strange and scary white, the cold so bitter it makes his skull ache. And of course, he’s brought all the wrong clothes. The clerk at the hotel reception kindly loaned him a pair of thin woollen gloves, which do little more than keep the wind off his hands; the mind-rattling cold just rips right through.
He finds her classroom: C308. Jay’s voice: “Last few minutes, let’s just recap. Can you articulate what it was that interested you or pleased you the most about Jane Eyre? Yes, Ashley.”
“Well, I really like the Rochester character.”
“What about the Rochester character?”
“The way he risked everything so he could have Jane? In spite of all the obstacles?”
Jay’s exasperation is not audible, and he mentally shakes hands with her for that. She says, “Well, yes. Certainly, the romance plot has its attractions. For one thing, it tends to do what we expect a novel to do. But let’s not overlook everything else that’s going on in this book, all that Bronte has to say about class and gender and society. About what women are permitted to hope for. And how crucial it is that Jane can’t have Rochester until the playing field is levelled, first by her sudden wealth, and second by his near-destruction. In short, though she may believe that she can stand at God’s feet as any man’s equal, in the real world it’s an entirely different matter. Until, unless, the man is taken down a peg, until he is blinded, maimed, reduced. Made to atone.”
The students shuffle their papers, collect jackets and backpacks with a cacophony of zippers and Velcro.
Leland rests his back against a locker right outside the door. Kensington Suites was nearly four months ago. The first week after she left England, she emailed him several times a day. He shot blanks back, a blank for each four or five messages. Her messages became less frequent, and then trailed off all together. He risks a peek — one student lingers at the desk — and ducks back into the hallway until, apparently satisfied with Jay’s answer to her question, the girl makes her way through the door. He watches her pass, then walks in.
She seems embarrassed. Certainly, she wants to get him out of the building as quickly as she can, though a colleague heading into the classroom — a small man, balding but with a tonsure of wispy red hair — recognizes him.
“Oh. My. I didn’t know,” he stutters. “You know each other? I’m a great admirer of your work.”
An introduction has to be made. The man practically drops to his knees, and Leland, annoyed, says only, “Well, thanks so much.”
“Are you just here for — ”
“A visit. I’ve been wanting to observe this creature in her natural habitat for some time now,” and he gives Jay a squeeze which he feels her resist and surrender to at the same time.
“Well, you’ve picked a good week: there’s a schnook in the forecast,” the little man says, gesturing vaguely toward the lowering sun through the tall windows of the corridor.
“How lovely,” Leland ventures, but Jay pulls him away, saying, “We’d best get going or we’ll miss our train. See you!”
Their trek to the train station (she calls it the C-train, but it’s more like a subway that travels above ground) is right out of Zhivago, vicious biting winds, ice forming at the tips of his hair, eyes watering; the cold is beyond belief, blistering, how do people live like this? The smell inside the train is overwhelming — sour breath and wet fabric. The windows fog up from the meeting of dry cold and damp human. At each stop, the doors glide open, admitting yet another icy blast, a reminder of what lies outside this fetid shelter. The freeways they pass as the train slides down the rails are concealed in billows of blue exhaust. They speak very little. They are glad to see each other.
“Schnook?” he asks, after a while.
Jay explains “chinook.” A native word for a warm wind that comes off the mountains in winter.
Exactly how warm, he wonders, but is content, for now, to wait and see. Perhaps because it has been so long, perhaps because they’re both a bit stunned by this sudden reunion, her more so of course, or perhaps because of the long silence between them, she doesn’t ask a lot of questions and instead looks intently at him, puts her hands on him: his shoulder, the back of his neck, his knee. She holds his hand on the train, but speaks only when he asks questions.
“What’s that?”
“Home Depot. Hardware, stuff for home renovations.”
“And that?”
“The Saddledome. Hockey arena.”
“And that?”
“Drop-in centre. For the homeless.”
If he were talkative, he’d remark that homelessness in this godforsaken wilderness is akin to suicide, but he doesn’t, because truly he doesn’t much feel like chatting at the moment. He is merely interested in being near Jay. In her presence. With her hand held loosely in his own.
She sizes him up. “Speaking of homeless, you will not survive the twenty minute walk from the station, so . . . ” She takes out her mobile and sends a quick message.
Their stop is called and there at the station a venerable Ford van idles, windows frosted over, with a handsome blond boy at the wheel.
Jay’s real life seems a kind of dream. The excessively friendly dog, the outwardly indifferent but deeply wary and protective sons. The modest bungalow with paint peeling off the door frames, piles of snow-covered leaves on the lawn.
“The first snow came early this year,” Jay says, “right after I got back from London. Oh well, good fertilizer.”
Inside, it takes him quite a long time to deal with coat buttons; his fingers are numb, and she offers tea to warm him up. But this is a busy household, and after she has pushed the mug into his hands, she suggests that he make himself at home, have a look around, and busies herself with feeding the dog, checking messages, interviewing the children, preparing the evening meal. It is okay not touching her, because now he’s where she lives. And he wanders, with a chipper curiosity, through each of the rooms. Her office — vases containing fragrant dried grasses, stacks of student papers and books. The youngest son’s bedroom — the desk a mess of strong-smelling little pots of paint, fierce tiny figures, dwarves it looks like, painted with fervent artistry. Posters of films and rock stars dangling raggedly from the walls, socks and jeans crumpled where they were shed on the floor. Unmade bed.
Ah. Jay’s room. This is where he wants to be. Without forethought or shame, he settles in. Squints to study the pictures on the walls, fingers the nightdress and thick velour robe hanging inside the closet door, sifts through the pile of laundry in the plastic basket. Then he opens dresser drawers, runs his hands over balled-up ankle socks in neutral colours, Jockey knickers in cheery shades, swimsuits pushed to the back of the drawers for the season.
The bed. He quietly shuts himself in, hangs his jacket, loosens and removes his tie and his leather belt, and stretches out on what he’s certain is the side of the bed she doesn’t use.
The life of the household goes on outside the door. He is aware but not aware when she enters the room to softly call him to dinner, then leaving just as quietly when he doesn’t respond. She says to her children, “He’s fallen asleep. He must be tired after the long flight. Let’s just go ahead and have dinner, and then we’ve got to leave for hockey by 6:45, and what about homework?” The clatter of dishes, the murmur of their conversation. Doors slam, toilets flush, water runs. It’s wonderful, this stealthy presence without participation, this semiconscious eavesdropping. She comes in to the room again, rests a hand on his shoulder with a gentleness that thrills him more deeply than any passionate demonstration ever could. She undresses, quietly and quickly; it’s pitch dark already. He enjoys the game of guessing, picturing through closed eyes: the woollen blazer, tailored shirt, pleated pants removed, and yes, the change into jeans, cotton T-shirt, no, probably a long-sleeved cotton jersey, turtleneck, yes, and thick socks, against the cold. He loves what he knows already, what he can guess. He wants to know everything.
Loud clatters, thumps, cries of, “Where’s my cup?” The sound of a car sliding down the driveway. Then the house falls silent, except for the melancholic huffing of the dog. And voices on the message machine. A girl calls for the eldest son, a high-pitched boy for the younger. An automated message announces that, “You or someone at this number has library materials which are overdue.” Australian guy from the video store announces much the same, only live not recorded. Then: “Your son or daughter missed one or more classes today.” Automated. Finally, a man calls. “Hi, it’s me, guess I missed you guys. I’ll try to get to the game, but if I can’t get the truck started tonight, I’ll just call back later.” That one, he hears very clearly. That would be Gray. The sculptor.
An hour passes, maybe two? Leland hears doors slam, zippers open. Something heavy thuds down the stairs to the basement lair of the eldest son. “What a gong show, did you see that hit? The ref shoulda called that!”
The green numbers on the bedside clock glow 9:00. Morning? No, still night. Water runs, brushes move against teeth, doors open and close, open and close, fridge opens and closes, opens and closes. “Good night.” “Night, Mom.” The phone rings one more time, around 9:45. “Just arrived out of the blue,” Jay says. “I wasn’t expecting — I don’t know . . . I don’t know . . . right. Okay. I’ll call you tomorrow, right, bye.” A gasp of frustration. He hears that.
It’s amazing what he hears, as he lies on Jay’s bed on this winter night. Dry branches scraping against the window in the wind that rises suddenly. The dog snuffling and scratching. The startup of the dishwasher, the locking of doors. A young man’s voice in the basement, laughing on the phone. And Jay’s feet, padding down the hall.
She undresses, again. Sounds like she’s putting on the famous tent, which is fine. He wants only to sleep. And again, she doesn’t speak, just lays a hand on his shoulder, puts her cheek against his for a moment, then walks around the bed, crawls in her side, curls up with her back to him. It takes a long time for her breathing to deepen. Nearly an hour, he thinks. But after he’s waited another hour just to be sure she’s asleep, he rises, uses the lav, borrows a neglected-looking toothbrush and returns to her room, stripping down to his shorts and crawling back in, nestling against her carefully. He mustn’t wake her.
It’s still dark when the alarm rings at 6:10. He doesn’t know why he has to feign deep sleep, but that’s what he does. He feels her react with shock, at first, at his presence, but she soon orients herself, pushes back against him for a moment, luxuriously. A promise, a welcome.
And their first morning begins.
Footfalls, her voice calling the children’s names a first time, then a second, then a testy third. Dishes, the rustling of brown bags, the thud of overloaded backpacks, the knock on the back door. A man’s voice: “Hey buddy, set for school? Hang on, I’ll give you a lift up the hill. Why don’t you go hop in the truck and I’ll be out in just a sec — ”
Jay’s voice, rising, nearly shrill, “Hey, hi. What’re you — Jesus, Gray — don’t!”
The man’s footsteps down the hall, door opening.
Leland feels no need to react or move, stays exactly where she left him in the centre of the bed, his bare arm extended over the place where she slept, eyes tightly shut, breathing deep and even. He hears the door close, quietly — and receding footsteps. Jay’s voice, “He just showed up, fell fast asleep in my bed, I don’t know, I told you, oh for Christ’s sake!” Hard footsteps, a door, this one slammed, the roar of an engine. He pictures a menacing billow of blue smoke.
The house falls silent. So silent that he really does fall back to sleep, for a while. Until he senses her in the room again, at the foot of bed. Now. Now it can all start. And he lifts his head from the pillow. “Good morning.”
“Hi. You slept a long time.”
“Yes. I did. Come here.”
He opens his arms and watches as, without hesitation or self-consciousness, she raises the flannelette tent over her head, lets it drop to the floor and moves swiftly toward him.
Afterwards, nestled together, he says, “So your other man was here this morning.”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
She pulls away and turns to look at him. “What do you think he said, Leland? He was here, he was pissed. Is that what you want?”
“Jay, the reason I am here is to try to answer that very question.” He pulls her back into his arms and, breathing into her hair, says, “You know, I haven’t been with a woman since the last time I was with you.”
She thinks about this for a moment. “I can only imagine how rough it’s been.”
“You seem to have had no difficulty keeping yourself occupied.”
“Hey, you dumped me, remember? What the hell was I supposed to do?”
A long silence, then.
It’s nearly noon when she rouses him, pulls back the bedcovers. Outside, water runs. The pale white sun of yesterday replaced by clear blue sky and golden light. “Ah,” Leland mutters. “The foehn.”
“The what?”
“Your chinook. This happens in Austria too. This type of winter wind. They call it the foehn.”
The temperature outside has gone from minus thirty to plus five, and it rises steadily through the busy afternoon. Because Leland has, apparently, arrived just in time for Teacher’s Convention, in which every schoolteacher in the province has to convene, while every student in the province gets a four-day weekend. This bizarre annual rite, he discovers, gives rise to a range of preparations. They drive to the mall, pass a car bearing a bumper sticker that reads Jesus loves you. Everyone else thinks you’re an asshole. Inside the supermarket, while Jay tosses packets, cartons and plastic jugs into the shopping cart, a chirpy woman on the loudspeaker advises shoppers to consider all the good things one’s nose does, and to reward said nose for its hard work by purchasing Safeway Aloe Vera facial tissues. Back at home, she leads him into the basement, rummages in storage closets and cardboard boxes to assemble for him an outfit of winter clothing that makes him look and feel like a teddy bear made of polymer microfibres. “But it’s warm outside now, the chinook!” he protests, feeling bulky, sweaty and foolish, particularly about the watchcap, which she insists on calling a “tewk”.
“Chinooks sometimes last a week, sometimes just a few hours,” she asserts, and zips the Board Doktor jacket up to his chin. The next step, and time is running short now, is loading the car, because they need to “swoop” (Jay’s word) by the two schools in less than an hour. They must be on the highway the moment the boys get out of school, so as to reach their destination before nightfall, which comes early at this time of year.
“Why before dark?” Leland asks.
“One, because I have lousy night vision, and two, ninety percent of the roadkill happens at night.” Seeing his puzzled and fearful expression, she adds, “I mean deer and elk and such.”
“Can you elaborate on ‘such’?”
“Here, hold these.” And the two of them scramble to load the van with supplies: grocery bags and coolers, cases of pop and beer, the dog, snowboards and boots, skiis, ski poles and boots, skates and hockey sticks, a couple of snow shovels, a toboggan, a bag of books, newspapers, CDs, and old movies on videocassette. And cold weather wear for the four of them: jackets, ski pants, boots, mitts, neck warmers, hats, scarves, goggles, thick socks, and longjohns. This collection of clothing strikes Leland as particularly odd, given that now, at nearly 3:00 PM, the mercury has risen to seventeen degrees, and people pass on the street in shirtsleeves. At the schools, some of the students wear sneakers and shorts. The music of coursing water from melting snow fills the city as they drive west, toward the mountains.
At the cabin, Jay says, “Whether by design or accident, I have managed to be a pretty good role model for Ben and Danny all these years. My private life is private, and as far as they’re concerned, men and women don’t sleep together if they’re not married, or at least committed. So I’m going to ask you to sleep in the guest room. The boys can share the bunk room like always, and I’ll be in the master.”
He grudgingly goes along with this the first night, though he finds the temptation of a brief nocturnal visit almost irresistible. He makes an opportunity, the next day, to talk to each of her sons. With the youngest, his pitch is very straightforward: “Look, mate, I’m dead keen on your mom, you know that, right? Now she seems to think you’d be bent out of shape if I were to share a bed with her, but I don’t think she’s right about that, do you?”
The boy replies, “Aw, no big deal. Dad’s girlfriends stay over all the time.”
With the elder, Leland knows, the matter must be broached rather more cautiously. The two of them have been sent round the side of the house for firewood, and as the boy stacks logs into his outstretched arms, he says, “Man to man, Ben. You know what it’s like to want to be with a woman, right? Well, I feel that way about your mother. She figures you’ll object if we sleep in the same room, but I think she doesn’t give you guys nearly enough credit. What do you think?”
The boy says nothing, keeps piling the logs ’til they’re nearly to his chin — Christ, oh Christ he wants to kill me, oh
Christ my back — but then Ben stops, grabs the top four or five logs off Leland’s quivering arms and coldly smiles, “Actually, Leland, I’m not cool with that. Mom’s with Gray,” and heads back toward the house.
On their second full day, Jay gets up early, drives the kids to the ski hill, and then returns to the cabin, where Leland waits before the fire, which he has learned to construct, feed, and maintain. And it’s then, over cups of tea, that he tells her of the quiet mutual agreement of separation he has obtained from Christa. (He does not mention the cost of this agreement, which was enormous, and she doesn’t ask.) It’s then also that he speaks of Meg. His mistress. An abbreviated tale of their four raucous years, ending with the breakup a few months ago. It disturbs him a bit that Jay hears him out so calmly, appears so unsurprised. He says nothing about her man, though. He has decided to give her time.
Toward the end of that long, drowsy day, he surprises himself by saying, “My guess is that we’re stuck into this now. We pretty well have to go on from here, I think.” Until that moment, he hasn’t been exactly sure what he came here to accomplish. But now in this beautiful strange peaceful place, the way forward seems clear.
Next day there’s a hockey game on the freshly scraped ice of the lake, a cleared section about thirty metres square. Jay and her kids generously allow him to eschew skates and put him in goal with his feet encased in bloody big clodding snowboots. Then the rest of them fire tennis balls at him with hockey sticks, Ben taking a few particularly hard shots at his crotch. But even he eases up after a while, and Leland just stands watching Jay and her boys circling and swooping on their skates like sailboats, like shorebirds, chanting, “Get it through the five-hole, get it through the five-hole!” At one pause in play, he and Jay watch the dog take off after a herd of elk, laughing themselves silly at her foolish doggy heart, as if she has the ghost of a chance to outrun, not to mention bring down, a single one.
He holds Jay in the dark before bed, then goes out on the deck. The nights are so cold and clear and black and utterly, utterly silent that he knows himself to be fully alone in the world. The sky so purely dark that it makes no difference whether he opens his eyes or not. Behind his closed eyelids, a little girl moves in dappled sunlight, counting off to ten, chubby hands covering her eyes. Katie finds him here, a lonely figure surrounded by dark mountains, under a black sky.
On their return to Calgary, he’s introduced to Jay’s mother in her rest home. Mara, a sweet, still pretty woman of seventy-five, stroke victim, welcomes him warmly — “I like your accent” — with a flirtatious gleam in her bright blue eyes. “Where’s Gray?”
As always with women and their mothers, it occurs to him that this old woman is what Jay will become.
“Gray’s not here,” Jay says. “This is my friend from England. Leland.”
Mara brightens. “I’ve been to England. We always ate in the pubs. The food was much cheaper, and really very good.”
Leland says, “Pub food has always been a favourite of mine.”
“In Wales,” Mara goes on, “we stopped to ask directions, and this little old man stood there and talked and pointed, and well we nodded and smiled and said thank you very much but you know, it’s a funny thing, he was speaking English but not one of us understood a single word.”
“Yes.” Leland smiles. “The Welsh accent can be very thick.”
Mara smiles back. He is passing the test. “I’m glad Jay has a friend from England. I always ordered the ploughman’s lunch. Where’s Gray?”
In the car on the way back to Jay’s place, the radio plays one 80s tune after another on the classic rock station. He proves that he knows every word to every tune including Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer,” by singing as loud as he can.
“Oh do shut up,” is Jay’s response.
“I can’t help it,” he says. “I was single through the mid 80s, out clubbing a lot. The songs just stuck.”
“Well, while you were out clubbing, I was stuck at home changing diapers. The only adult voices I heard all day were Peter Gzowski and Erika Ritter.”
“Who are they?”
Now, Leland is going home. To all that is familiar, the good and the bad of it. Not single, not married, somewhat betrothed, perhaps. Work to do. Bereaved father. Someone who must write, despite everything, because it’s all he really knows how to do. And on his flight back to London as he tries to decide which moment goes deepest — sitting quietly with Jay before the fire, or the hilarity of the hockey match, or the deep silence of the mountain night — she shows up again. Katie. And as always, she’s speaking the last words she said to him: “You selfish prick! First you cheat on my mother, and now you cheat on the woman you left us for! What is wrong with you?” Thrusting at him that small newspaper clipping from a tabloid: And what literary lion was observed recently slinking out of the hotel room of a visiting Canadian writer quite early one morning?
He remembers mornings. Katie was a lark, like him, a morning star. Early riser. My girl. There she is, oh about four years old, toddling into the kitchen, table set for the two of us, and she loved corn flakes, hungry, every morning, hungry, and she pours her cereal into her bunny bowl, and her little hand comes up, and pats the cereal down flat in the bowl, in the morning light her little hand, patting the cereal flat before pouring on the milk, and takes her first bite — yes, and then this little groan of pleasure, of satisfaction.