TORONTO, DECEMBER 21, 2013
LILY GAVE UP on religion long ago, but when her mother’s illness overwhelms her, she goes to Holy Martyrs. They have the best music of all the churches in Toronto’s west end. None of that modern stuff; it’s traditional all the way, with a pipe organ and a four-part choir.
Her only other escape is physical. As her mother’s body breaks down, Lily builds hers up: weights, crunches, running. Yesterday, one of the trainers at the gym took her aside: “Lily, you’re overdoing it. Maybe you should see your doctor?”
Lily goes to Saturday evening Mass instead. A torrent of notes cascades out of the organ loft like a shout from God. Lily pauses at the back of the church, trying to let the music drown out her grief. On this particular winter’s night, even Bach’s Fugue in G Minor isn’t working.
Earlier that day, at the nursing home, Lily had spread out some pictures: family snapshots, portraits of friends from the old days, even a photograph from the Oka standoff that won Lily a photojournalism prize.
Mamére’s fingers tremble over a Kodachrome of Lily squinting in sunlight as she rides piggyback on a man’s shoulders. His big hands grip her ankles hanging over his chest. Her running shoes are different colours.
“Remember, Mamére? You took this one at the Seahorse. I would’ve been what—eight years old? Nine?”
Her mother’s fingers brush the snapshot. For one breathtaking moment, Lily thinks Mamére actually recognizes someone in the photograph. She has to remind herself that the movement is likely a trick of her mother’s torn and tangled nerve endings. Her frozen eyes might as well have been staring at a bedpan. Lily slips the photograph back into the leather portfolio.
Mamére is only sixty-seven; Lily, eighteen years younger. Almost as close in time as sisters.
Soon I might be you, Lily thinks. If she’s inherited the Huntington’s gene from her mother, she’ll get the disease. Paralysis, dementia, all of it.
Her doctor urges a genetic test. Lily refuses. Knowing her destiny would be like waiting for years to be in a car wreck, watching as her body tears itself apart in slow motion. No amount of healthy living will make a damn bit of difference.
Lily picks an almost-empty pew near the back of the church, where she can listen to the music without feeling like she has to take part in the Mass. She especially wants to avoid giving the sign of peace to strangers.
A man sits at the other end of the pew, bulky in his winter coat; he doesn’t look at her when she slides in. She suspects he’s not the sign of peace type, either.
At the altar, Father Silva lifts his hands and says, “Peace be with you.”
“And also with you,” the congregants respond. They trade kisses and handshakes.
Lily glances at the man at the end of the pew. He’s looking at her now, too. His eyes appear to be deeply bruised. A white patch on his tangle of grey hair makes him look as though he’s been daubed with paint.
“Peace be with you,” he says. He doesn’t offer his hand.
“You, too,” Lily responds.
When Mass is over, Lily remains in the pew, listening to the choir sing the processional. The man hasn’t moved. He’s sitting with his head bowed and hands clasped in prayer. Lucky him. Lily hasn’t been able to pray for years, ever since she realized that she was talking to the empty sky.
She glances at him again. Robust, her mother would have called him, with the broad body of a boxer and the High Renaissance profile of a stained glass martyr. St. Sebastian, after the Romans got finished with him. She imagines the man looking down at himself in surprise, his winter coat bristling with arrows.
Lily stifles a laugh but one note escapes up into the nave. She pretends she’s clearing her throat, but the man is on to her, trying to decipher the joke. He has to be at least sixty but looks younger when he smiles.
Lily smiles back. “Do you like the music?”
“Very much. My daughter joined this choir in high school.” Lily can hear the cadences of a long-lost accent in the man’s voice.
“Really? What part?”
“Soprano.”
She looks up at the choir loft where two dark-haired women, a soprano in her twenties and an alto about Lily’s age, gather sheet music. The older woman tucks in the younger one’s blouse, a tender gesture that reminds Lily of Mamère. The soprano and alto are obviously the bruised man’s wife and daughter. That’s why he’s waiting.
“Your daughter has a wonderful voice. I enjoy hearing her sing duets with her mother,” says Lily, searching for her gloves.
The man gives Lily a puzzled frown, then glances up at the choir loft. “No, no. Those two aren’t mine. My daughter Sophia is away.” The man hesitates, before adding, “Her mother is dead.”
Oh, great. All Lily wanted was a quiet moment alone, and now she’s stumbled into someone else’s grief. As if she needed more. “I’m sorry for your loss,” she says. It’s the correct phrase, all that’s required.
But before she can slide out of the pew, he says: “Thank you, but I lost her a long, long time ago. Not that you ever really get over it.”
Lily stands awkwardly with her coat half-on, trapped in this stranger’s tragedy. Surprised by his naked show of emotion, she’s tempted to confide in him.
My mother’s dying. Very, very slowly. I have to grieve while she’s still alive.
Instinctively, she knows this level of intimacy would open a discussion about the misery of witnessing a slow death versus the shock of a sudden one. No, thank you. Looking for a way out of the conversation without seeming rude, she offers: “Raising a little girl on your own must have been a challenge.”
He smiles as if she’s paid him a compliment. “Now that she’s grown up and gone off to work for her uncle in England, I don’t know what to do with myself. This’ll be my first Christmas without her.”
“England! How nice. Have a good night, then.”
“You too,” he says, still not moving from the pew.
Lily pulls on her gloves. The man’s solid presence is starting to attract her like a big planet pulling a smaller one into its orbit. She finds herself wanting to touch that white patch of hair. It reminds her of a blaze on a tree, marking a way through the woods.
Behind them, in the narthex, the organist hustles her way out the door with her arms full of sheet music, the choir members huddled close behind her, singing out their displeasure at the blast of wind.
Lily and the man are alone in the church. She sees now that his eyes are shadowed, not bruised. The mark of a fellow insomniac. Someone who lies awake nights, thinking about people who aren’t there any more.
Oh, what the hell, thinks Lily. I’m alone, he’s alone, we’re grown-ups. Pretending to rummage in her purse for car keys, she says, “Would you like to join me for coffee? There’s a place near here I’ve been meaning to try called Marcello’s.”
The man laughs, the sound of his voice echoing in the hollow space above them.
“Yeah, sure, I know it,” says the man. “I own it.”
Sitting in the passenger seat of Lily’s Honda, Marcello says he prefers walking to Mass, even on blustery nights like this one. He says he used to love driving but, these days, enjoys it less and less. Lily resists the temptation to ask why. As she pulls to the curb across from the café, a Future Bread delivery truck rumbles past, its sign reading: The Future Is Coming!
A chill runs through Lily as Marcello unlocks the front door of the café. She glances around at the neighbouring groceterias, dollar stores, and wedding and Communion dress shops, all asleep and dreaming.
“Not enough business in this weather to stay open late,” Marcello says, holding the door for her. “How about I make a couple of cappuccinos and we take them upstairs?”
Unbuttoning her coat to let in the warmth, Lily watches Marcello steam milk and pour espresso into thick cups, a gold band on his hand catching the light as he places biscotti on a plate. For a big man, he handles the food with surprising delicacy.
Balancing a tray, he leads her up a stairway behind the bar to a flat. An upright piano shines against one wall; a wood-burning fireplace dominates another. A few greeting cards are propped on a table. Otherwise, he hasn’t decorated for Christmas. Not that it’s any more festive at Lily’s place.
Over the mantel, a solemn-looking, dark-haired girl stares out of a painting—the daughter, obviously. Next to her are several black-and-whites of a woman with large, serious eyes, chin resting on her clenched fist. She looks directly at the camera, not smiling, but with noticeable emotion. She dearly loved whoever was taking her picture, thinks Lily.
“Your wife?”
Putting a record on the turntable, Marcello nods. “Ida. I took those the year before she died.”
As the Flower Duet from the opera Lakmé fills the room, Lily examines the photographs. Ida looks no more than thirty. Wide, dark eyes, a pointed chin, full mouth, blonde hair. Her expression is watchful, alert. And something else: slightly alarmed. Despite the passion in her eyes, there’s a certain tension in the set of her mouth. Perhaps she didn’t want her picture taken. Or she was guarding a secret she was afraid the camera would expose. Lily has seen that expression in some of her subjects. The look of someone with something to hide.
“You have a good eye,” Lily says.
Marcello acknowledges the compliment with a nod and waves Lily to the couch. When he offers biscotti, she shakes her head. He raises his eyebrows at Lily’s refusal to eat.
She crosses her legs. “What was weighing on your mind tonight, Marcello? I could feel you thinking from the end of the pew.”
He shrugs, soaking a chunk of biscotti in the coffee. “Sometimes I just like to sit quietly and talk to God. To Ida, really.”
“What was tonight’s conversation about?”
“I’ve been thinking about becoming a priest,” he mumbles through a full mouth.
Jesus!, Lily thinks, tugging down the hem of her skirt.
“A rather late-in-life decision, isn’t it?” she asks, carefully.
Marcello grins. “Now you sound like Ida. She thinks I’m crazy to even consider it. You’d be surprised how many guys join the priesthood after their wives die.”
The offhand way that Marcello mentions his late wife makes her seem alive. Lily feels almost guilty about being alone with her husband. Oblivious to the effect of his words, Marcello starts eating Lily’s untouched food.
“What about you? Why were you there?” he asks, dunking her biscotti in his cup.
Lily considers whether to tell him about her mother’s illness and her own fears of getting sick. She decides: No.
“The usual for a lapsed Catholic. I like the music.”
They sip their cappuccinos, Lily watching Marcello over her cup. Drink up and go, she tells herself. Early tomorrow, she has to return to the nursing home with its antiseptic washes never quite covering the odour of dirty diapers, the crrrkk of privacy curtains, the ring of a catheter hitting stainless steel while a voice sings, “Good girl, Ms. Daigle!” Lily never witnesses the siphoning of her mother’s bladder. She stands outside the curtain and waits. Waits for the neurologist, the nurse, the physiotherapist. Waits for the first signs of Mamére’s disease in herself. She’s so tired of waiting.
“Marcello, if you haven’t yet taken a vow of celibacy, I’d really like to sleep with you,” she announces.
He stops gathering their cups, his eyes wide. “You don’t even know me.”
“I don’t want to, except in a Biblical sense.”
“But I could be anybody!”
“You’re an attractive man. I want to go to bed with you. That’s really all there is to it.”
He opens and closes his mouth, as if struggling with how to tell her something. Finally, he says: “I’m sixty-three. Too old for a young woman like you.”
Lily laughs. “I’m forty-nine. I’d hardly call that young.”
“Lily, it’s flattering to…”
“Do you have condoms?” she interrupts.
Marcello shakes his head.
“That’s okay,” says Lily, rummaging in her purse. “I do.”
She places two Sheiks on the table.
Women have changed, Marcello thinks in awe. So have you, Ida reminds him.
Lily is lovely but she’s sfacciata, thinks Marcello. That’s the word Ida would use. Nervy.
I was nervy, too, says Ida. Or have you forgotten?
Marcello closes his eyes. I haven’t forgotten anything. That’s the problem.
Finally, something we agree on, replies Ida. He can almost hear the sarcasm in her voice.
His bed has been more or less empty since Ida’s death. A few relationships here and there, but the women always drifted away. One of them even said Marcello’s bed felt too crowded. When he asked what she meant, she said, “There’s you, there’s me, and there’s your dead wife lying between us—and I don’t think she cares for me very much.”
In fact, that wasn’t far wrong. But he senses that Ida wouldn’t mind him being with Lily.
You have a body, yes? she would say with her usual exasperation at Marcello’s cautious nature. So use it! Subito! What you waiting for?
Marcello moves next to Lily, close enough to pick up a flowery scent on her skin and something strangely sharp and clinical—an antiseptic, perhaps. He takes her hand. Lily moves it to her breast and kisses him. A puddle of clothing collects softly on the floor. Ambushed by desire, Marcello takes her hand and leads her to his bed.
Lily’s body surprises him: her muscles are hard as rock and she is almost completely hairless. He strokes and enters her, bringing her to climax, although his mind is unhappily aware that they’re having sex, not making love. An ugly Italian word pops into his head—gigolo—but he swats it away.
Marcello gentles her face with his hand, the gesture so unconsciously intimate that Lily recognizes it as muscle memory. His body thinks she’s someone else.
“Can I get you a sandwich? A glass of wine?”
“Thanks, no.” Lily suspects that Ida must have liked a little something after lovemaking.
“Just thought you might be hungry,” Marcello murmurs.
Lily yawns. Funny, how she can’t seem to put her body in motion. Is this an early symptom of Huntington’s? It takes a heartbeat to realize that she’s simply too comfortable to move her body away from his.
Maybe I should tell him about myself, she considers, then imagines the look on his face, the concerned tone of voice: You could get sick? Can they do a test? His eyes would brush her with pity, painting out the woman, sketching in a victim. It’s happened before.
She searches the covers for her bra. “Time for me to go, Marcello.”
He rubs his eyes. “Ah, I forgot. You don’t want to know me. Except in a Biblical sense.”
She’s hurt him, the last thing she wanted to do. Trying to lighten the mood, she says, “After what you just did in bed, I think you’d be wasted on the priesthood.”
Lily hopes for one of his embarrassed smiles. Instead he looks distressed. “You’re right. I’m not even a particularly good Catholic anymore.”
Lily shakes her head, confused. “Then why become a priest?”
Marcello’s hands try to pull an explanation out of the air. “Because I need to be forgiven.”
Lily turns on her side to look at Marcello.
“Forgiven for what?” she asks slowly, remembering that faintly alarmed look on his wife’s face in the wall portrait.
Marcello rubs his eyes. “For Ida.”
Lily feels time slow down as everything in the room—the bed, the discarded condom, even Lily herself—moves slightly out of true. What does she really know about this man? He claims to love his wife, yes, but now admits to doing something bad enough that he needs to take holy orders to be forgiven. Lily edges to the side of the bed and reaches down to pick up her panties from the floor, the hair on her neck prickling as she turns her back on Marcello.
Only then does she notice the clatter of sleet against the window. Marcello swings his legs over the side of the bed and twitches the curtains aside. Under a streetlight across the street, her car glitters inside a thick coating of ice.
As she stands at the window, an explosive sound shivers the panes. A flash illuminates the bedroom as the streetlights fizzle out. The hum of the bedside clock radio stops dead. All the ambient electronic sounds in the room vanish. The only thing Lily can hear is a muffled buzz in her ears.
“Transformer must’ve blown nearby,” says Marcello, turning from Lily to rummage in the bedside table.
“I’d better leave before it gets worse,” she says, scanning the darkness of the bedroom for the rest of her clothes.
“You can’t go home in this. Driving will be treacherous.”
She looks out the window again. Across the street, a dangling power line sends a zip-line of sparks across the roadway. Toronto is turning into a city of fire and ice. If something happened to her on the way home tonight, who would go to the nursing home to check on Mamére tomorrow?
Marcello sweeps the bedroom floor with the flashlight. When he finds a crumpled robe, he picks it up and sniffs it.
“Pretty sure it’s clean,” he says, wrapping it around Lily and belting it tightly. He scrounges under the bed and pulls out a pair of crumpled jeans and a sweatshirt.
Marcello’s lack of self-consciousness fascinates her. Unlike Lily, he’s confident in his body, the heavy muscles of his shoulders, the unfashionable tangle of hair travelling from a crosshatch of scars on his chest, down a belly softening with age, finally nesting around his dangling cock. It’s a body he’s at peace with. Does the job, she can imagine him saying with a shrug.
He opens the bedroom door. A noticeable chill has settled into the living room. Marcello hands the flashlight to Lily, motioning for her to light the way.
As Marcello builds a fire in the hearth, Lily tries to call the nursing home. Her mobile phone is dead. She tries Marcello’s landline and finds it dead too.
“You trying to reach anyone important?” he asks, too casually.
Lily can tell that he’s wondering about the possibility of a husband or boyfriend out there in the city somewhere, worrying about where Lily might be. “My mother. I wanted to see if the power is still on at the place where she lives.”
She can read the relief on Marcello’s face.
Bundled in the thick robe, perched on a stool by the fire, Lily watches the rhythm of Marcello’s hands as he prepares food by candlelight.
“So, are you going to tell me?”
“About what?”
“About Ida. What happened to her? And why you need forgiveness so badly?”
Marcello lets Lily’s question hang in the air for a moment. “Do you know what a proxy bride is?” he asks.
She nods. “Like a mail order bride, except that she was married to her husband before she met him.”
“That’s right,” says Marcello. “Ida was married by proxy to my father.”
“How did she end up with you?”
Marcello says nothing for a moment, as if trying to figure out how to put together an explanation. “I guess you could say that I stole her from him.” Filling juice glasses with wine, he continues: “My mother died when I was a kid. When I was nineteen, Pop married Ida by proxy. His uncle stood up for him in Italy and had her sent to Shipman’s Corners, where we lived. Ida was twenty. Beautiful, like you, Lily. I fell in love the moment I saw her. I tried to stay away, even slept in my car. But she kept calling me in for meals—you know how it was in those days. Women cooked, men ate. Every time I sat across the table from her, I fell more deeply in love.”
“Did your father know?”
“All Pop saw was the soup in front of his nose. Ida had told him, ‘Give me a month to get settled, then I’ll share your bed.’ She never did. Instead, the two of us became lovers. We’d sneak out at night in my car. Park in the farmers’ fields. Eventually we ran away together.” Marcello stops to stare disapprovingly at Lily’s untouched plate. “Mangia, Lily, that’s good cheese!”
To appease Marcello, Lily nibbles on a chunk of asiago. She can feel a chill coming off the window behind her, the clatter of freezing rain only inches away from this cozy space. Marcello’s story is hazily familiar. As if she’d seen it a movie or read it somewhere, long ago. Or dreamed it.
No, not a dream, but a bedtime story that started as Mamére’s gentle explanation for two friends who had lived for a time at the Seahorse. Eventually, she turned their story into a fairy tale she called Dreamboat and the Proxy Bride.
It’s all there: the mysterious young wife. The young man, eaten alive by a forbidden love. The cuckolded father. Lily feels as though she’s fallen into an opera. Perhaps, a temporary distraction from the misery of Mamére’s illness. She’s owed at least one night of forgetfulness, isn’t she?
In the distance, she can hear the zing-pop-bang of another exploding transformer, as the city’s electrical grid collapses under the downpour of ice.
Lily says, “Even if the storm lets up, I’ll stay here tonight and listen to your story in exchange for another glass of wine. Deal?”
“Deal,” agrees Marcello. “But wine on its own is bad for the digestion. You have to eat, Lily. I have a beautiful artisanal cheese and Calabrese bread.”
Nibbling an olive, Lily watches Marcello’s face in the candlelight, trying to turn him back into the young man whose photo sits in a portfolio on the back seat of her ice-coated car. He pours more wine and settles in to tell Lily about him and Ida.
She senses that she could be here listening to their story for a very long time.