38

THE TROUBLE BETWEEN THEM began long ago when they were young and in pain, Gerard grieving for Ora, his love for her so real and tangible that she returned to life in a young woman he chanced to meet, a woman pregnant by another man. As for herself, Valerie had wanted Matt’s child as much as Ora had wanted Gerard’s. Nothing was ever said about this. Ora’s spirit was adrift without a body, which is what Valerie understood death to mean. Ora broke into her dreams, trapped inside her until she awoke to her presence. Not just once, but over and over again, and then Matt fled, and then she swore to bear the weight of the thing that Ora was unable to complete.

The night Matt left, Gerard came to her room. “I’m keeping the child,” she told him.

“But how?” he asked. “You are alone.”

“I’ll do it. That’s all.”

“Dear Valerie.” He looked troubled.

“You lost a child,” she said.

“But you came here because—”

“And then you brought my child to life.”

He embraced her. He asked her to marry him then.

***

The times were strange, Valerie understood that. For a short while they lived in Montreal. It happened that she’d loved the haunting melodies of Ora’s songs, so that she would have learned them, even if she’d had no connection to her. So she began to play and sing her compositions, adapting the fingerings of the oud for the guitar. Something changed with the singing, a part of Valerie shifting away from herself, slipping into a new form in the same way that water takes the shape of a pitcher. A kind of snare, but what relief she felt — her chaotic life held in shape by music, by a stronger spirit than her own.

She and Gerard had just been married, and Valerie felt confused, still hurt from losing Matt. Her mother had been upset when she guessed the reason for her trip to Toronto, then horrified when she learned that Valerie was marrying a man she’d known only a few weeks. It felt as if she’d dreamt that summer, as if she’d woken to find herself facing the results of her own carelessness — pregnant, abandoned by the father; grateful that she’d found a man who loved her, who loved even more the soul into which she’d vanished.

Sometimes in bed, he’d call her Ora, and it was an unspoken thing between them, that she’d let him do this. She’d disappear, drifting into spices, jasmine and pomegranate, as if she were Solomon’s bride. She’d remember a country she’d never seen: the waters of Yom Kinneret, the Negev Desert, the fragrance of orange and the taste of black, sweet coffee, the staccato beating of clay drums in the covered market of Jerusalem.

“Take me there,” he’d whisper, her name on his lips, on his tongue exploring her mouth.

She and Ora had become one person. It didn’t matter what he called her.

Yet Ora was dead, and time overtook her. Valerie’s French grew better than hers had been, her voice richer and stronger. The world forgot the disaster that took her life, and after a while, so did Valerie. She and Gerard were married two years when Valerie became pregnant with Chantal. As a mother, she grew in confidence. Her own mother forgave her and welcomed her grandchildren. The memory of Ora drifted away as Valerie returned to herself. She began to realize that Gerard seemed lost.

Little by little, everything changed between them.

***

It’s because of genocide, Valerie thought when Gerard stopped saying much. It’s about what you suffered in your youth, she’d realize when he became obsessed with injustice. Then he began losing interest in sex, and she became suspicious.

Because the towers fell, she thought now, would that make it right for me to sleep with Jean-Claude? Perhaps it would have consoled the man, yet he didn’t take advantage of her state of mind, didn’t make real her imagined world where she’d fly beyond time with him, away from sorrow and memory. Imagination was one thing; action was another. She felt close to Jean-Claude who, even in his suffering, was trying to console her. She imagined that pain had seared away the superficial dross of his life, leaving behind the pure ore of compassion. She once thought this was true of Gerard, but after what he’d done to their marriage, she was no longer sure.

***

Valerie remembered 1994, when Gerard returned from Rwanda shadowed by death, as hesitant in his own home as a tourist in an unfamiliar city. She watched as he stared in disbelief at a fresh bar of soap, at the rush of hot water from the shower, at the crispness of a clean shirt as he dressed, as if her taking the time to iron it were unthinkable, as if he couldn’t register domesticity while holding in his mind some ravaged life, some poor bloodied dress or pair of pants. It was one or the other — civilization or savagery — his soul could not accommodate them both, and it was savagery he’d witnessed, madness to clothe these memories in a fresh shirt and tailored slacks.

He went for a walk, came back, gulped down a double scotch.

“I don’t want to talk,” he said. “Not now.”

“When you’re ready.”

“There is no such thing as ‘ready,’” he said.

His face was a ruin. His eyes held the gutted reflection of a place he’d never be ready to talk about, because “ready” belonged to a world of logic, of understanding, of finding words for the truth. Valerie felt helpless. She took his hand between hers and held it.

“Don’t love me,” he said.

“But why shouldn’t I love you?”

“I can’t get this world off my skin. This filth.”

“You are not obliged to smear yourself in shit!” she yelled.

“Forgive me, Valerie,” he said at last. In bed, he wore a condom.

“Don’t take me for a fool,” she said.

“Why do you love me, then?”

“To prove it can be done.”

She wanted him to make up for what he had stolen from her.

They made love, dissolving into his nightmare haze of scotch and panicky sex and gunfire, and he drew her into such a terrible place that she could see the horror and butchery that he had seen, so that afterwards she wept and said, “Gerard, you have to stop the work you do. You’ll lose your mind.”

Only that night was her mistake, the way that trying heroin is a mistake. After that, she wanted this lost man — the one the journalist kept hidden — because on his tongue and on his lips was the same man who’d come to her room so long ago to hear her sing, who’d caressed her and the vague echo of a dead woman’s presence, who’d breathed a soul into her unborn child. She had to go back there. She had to find the fork in the road that set him walking toward the vale of the dead, afraid all the while that she was that fork, that Ora’s death had come to life in her, that she had caused him to suffer.

“No, that is not true,” said Gerard.

“Than what is?”

“That I am obsessed. I don’t know why I hurt you, Valerie.”

They made love again. She followed him into the darkness, then brought him home.

Their lives changed. He was afraid so often.

“I can’t,” he’d say in his sleep. “I can’t.”

After Rwanda, he drifted away from her, returning from his assignments like a soldier on leave, in need of a woman. He’d pour her a drink, he’d want comfort for a night or two. As strange as it seemed, it felt to her like new love, as if she were having an affair with her own husband.

Yet just as often, he’d return, a stranger with no interest in her, who wanted to sleep alone. He was away more often than not. Uncertain of what to do, Valerie attended to her small business and hoped the situation might resolve itself. In the year of the new millennium, they would celebrate thirty years of marriage.

***

Andre and James were coming up for the occasion. We’re going to cook something special for you guys, said Andre’s email. James’ recipe: lobster on a bed of white clam risotto. They’d already had to postpone the dinner a month because Gerard had been in Jerusalem, covering the rumblings of Intifada Round Two. This time he was delayed because he’d left for Cairo, flying from there to the port of Aden, Yemen, where suicide bombers had just attacked the U.S.S. Cole.

“Why do you need to be there?” asked Valerie when he called.

“Because seventeen sailors were killed,” he said.

Afterwards he had trouble booking a flight back. He called again and told them to start the dinner without him.

James seated them at the table and took their hands. “Let us give thanks for the grace of our friendship,” he said.

In the middle of the first course, Andre slammed down his fork. “You’re not pissed off?” he asked James.

“At what?”

“My dad being a no-show.”

“At least he called,” said James.

“Too bad he doesn’t realize it’s work to cook all this.”

“Cooking’s what I enjoy doing most,” said James. “It isn’t work. Being pissed off is work.”

Valerie asked James where his culinary gifts came from.

“God,” he said.

“Not your mother?”

“I’ve taken a vow,” said James. “Not to pass on what I received at home.”

“Sour grapes?” asked Andre. “Rotten apples?”

“Nothing you’re allowed to send through the mail,” said James, and he laughed.

***

When Gerard returned from Yemen, he dropped his suitcase, looked at Valerie and said, “I’m sorry, I know, I should not have done this, but you have no idea how dangerous—”

“Andre was so disappointed,” she said.

“It’s a new thing in the world, this kind of terror.”

“There’s nothing new about people getting killed.”

“But Valerie—”

“You weren’t even on assignment there. You were chasing trouble.”

“No, this is different. This violence is about religion.”

“How different is that? ‘It’s about Marxism. Or Maoism.’ Violence is always ‘about’ some crazy thing.”

“The world needs to know about it,” he said.

“Says you, big ego. The world doesn’t give a shit.”

He paused. “So, I should forget it. Tend my garden, with you and Voltaire.”

“Andre and James put a meal on the table,” she said. “You waited until the last minute to call.”

He walked away.

***

Gerard worked hard on his investigation, but his TV report on the Cole bombing and the role of extremist groups in the Middle East wasn’t as well received as his probings into food shortages and ethnic cleansing had been. Les américains l’ont merité, they had it coming, said some of his colleagues who shrugged the whole thing off. They saw nothing peculiar about the motives of the attackers, arguing that in the end, radicalism was about politics, not faith. They pointed out that if you looked at church attendance in Quebec or France or even Canada — and if you were at all astute — you might just notice that modernity was killing off religion.

***

Gerard came and went. In August, he took Valerie’s hands in his and kissed them and asked her forgiveness for his indifference. He invited her to New York — as if the two of them were lovers, cheating on the marriage they once had.

“I am going to be in Saint-Pierre,” said Valerie.

He looked dismayed. “Alone?”

“As you’ve been,” she said. “ All these years.”

“C’est vrai.” It’s true.

“I’m there for the flora,” she told him. “And to think about us, Gerard.”

“Yes,” he said. “I understand.”

He reached out to hold her, but she’d left the room by then.