KEVIN RYAN AND
MARY PURCHASE
AUGUST 11, 2006
THE HOUSE was empty now except for the bedroom Mary had grown up in. Everything else was in cardboard boxes, or else was ready to be there, the whole house just one seriously full trunk load of the car away from having been emptied out completely.
Two towels in the bathroom, always the same pair. A face cloth draped on the edge of the sink. Two toothbrushes standing together in a hard white plastic cup.
In the kitchen, one last open box, flaps yawning, a box that they kept putting things into and then taking them out of again whenever they needed to make a meal. One step forwards, two steps back, Kevin thought hopefully, stirring scrambled eggs, watching the steam rise as the eggs went from flat and opaque to mounded and wet.
The rest of the rooms were empty. The runner was still on the stairs, but the front room was stripped right down to the hardwood floor, the fireplace with its round screen staring out across the room like an open mouth, the coiled-up cable from the television left behind like a sleeping snake. They had made love there once, late at night and urgent, Mary’s back flat against the wall as groups of passersby passed the front room, their conversations on the sidewalk louder than Kevin’s and Mary’s breathing. It seemed to Kevin that they had made love in every room, as if they were marking their terrain, as if Mary was intent on overwriting almost every memory of the place with something new and treasured.
There were no curtains left downstairs, so all the rooms were flat and ringing with echoes whenever either Kevin or Mary walked through them. The basement was so wide open and empty that even light bulbs seemed like an unnecessary luxury—and at the same time, to both of them, the house seemed filled to bursting.
No curtains upstairs either. The realtor had said the curtains that had been there were in such poor shape—raddled with claw marks from the cats—that it would be better if they weren’t there at all, if all that was left was bare windows and imagination. Only the ceiling lights were left there, harsh and staring in the empty rooms, and they only turned them on for absolute emergencies.
The realtor was a slight, blond, angry-looking woman with a strange way of holding her face, as if she were constantly smelling something that had just begun to go bad. Every time the woman left, Mary would worry again about whether the house smelled like cats, and whether the smell of the now-departed animals would keep it from selling. And then she’d realize that it didn’t matter.
Inside the room that Mary had slept in as a girl, she and Kevin often simply forgot there was anything like an outdoors. It was as if the house, the street and even the whole city had closed in tight around them outside the plaster so that there was really just that single room, and for wonderful, full periods of time there was nothing else they needed beyond those four walls. Neither of them had expected it could happen, and both of them, when they were apart, wondered cautiously if it was really something they could trust.
Outside, the For Sale sign shook against the front of the house in the slightest of winds, smacking the house with flat plastic slaps, the sign sometimes almost vibrating in its eagerness. Mary and Kevin took to leaving the windows open so that the summer air swept through the house on its own schedule, while they both moved silently in the near darkness—a darkness where they believed all things could be explained simply with touch.
Days went by and Mary kept turning down offers for the house, stalling the sale as if there was an unwritten, undiscussed agreement between them that everything, all of it, could only last in the strange, otherworldly hiatus of a house without contents, without curtains, with only one room that still held anything familiar.
That room, with its old posters of forgotten teen stars and the thin, light blue bedspread with a rainbow sewn onto it, was more like a time capsule than anything else. It was all as foreign to Kevin as if he had taken some drug that let him age while staying caught in some out-ofthe-way spot in the past. A single bed that Mary knew well from when she was a girl growing up. White-painted louvred doors in front of the closet, and an impossibly small dressing table—also white—with an oval mirror.
Sometimes they talked, but they didn’t talk in any depth, and they didn’t fool around with framing up and building a future outside the walls they were already comfortably and immediately inside. If they had, they might have had to point out that they were grown-ups and past all that eagerness, that they weren’t the right age to be building castles or charting voyages. So they talked bare practicalities instead, like when they had to get to work and when the girls were likely to be home, and whether either of the girls would even notice, during one of the few times that their lives and Kevin’s would normally intersect, that he wasn’t there.
Mostly they didn’t have to talk, because the feel of their skin touching was always sharp, the single note of a tuning-fork vibration. Once, he stood behind her as she fried eggs, both standing naked in the small kitchen, and he felt the room full of the sun and the warm shape of her, and it was like the shape he could draw in the air with his hands thereafter held everything important.
The real estate agent—for the first time anyone on the street could remember, not Twig Chaulk—was growing more and more frustrated, her mouth turned more sharply down every time Mary saw her, the offers still climbing but no one ever offering enough.
Kevin would look out for Mary’s car, parked by the curb, from the second-floor window at the front of his house. Then he’d make his way down the street close up against the fronts of the houses that pressed tight to the sidewalk, as if he could make himself invisible, or at least insignificant, but succeeding only at appearing guilty. He would look around, trying to seem careless but with his head darting back and forth too quickly, and he saw only the flat, uncaring fronts of the houses, imagining that was all there was to McKay Street, and that all over the street, no one knew.
But all over the street, they knew. They knew and they talked.
Sometimes, after Mary was asleep, Kevin would walk around in his skin, the slap of his bare feet echoing through the empty house, the tips of his fingers trailing loose along the walls like a cat’s whiskers, sensing more than they actually felt directly, wondering about the tingle of them together, the shivering wonder, and knowing also that he would be caught dead the moment Cathy came home from her latest Ottawa trip. She’d come home and just see the colour of his skin, his whole body overlaid with the tan of what they’d done, all of it there like some fine and obvious tattoo. He wouldn’t be able to lie, he knew. Not to her. She’d rip right through any lies like thin paper, well attuned and used to every single hint and scent a liar might give off.
He knew he wouldn’t even bother to try.
And then Kevin realized, hairs standing up all over his body as a fugitive summer breeze curled through the windows and down the stairs, that he just didn’t care. He stood there at the foot of the stairs in the falling cool air, feeling the sudden recognition running through his blood headily, like the knowledge was a new and unfamiliar drug. It was sharp and bright inside him when he went back to bed. Mary was still sleeping, and she pushed her naked back up against his chest without fully waking.
Later, they lay together while the house ticked and settled in the summer warmth, a long quiet morning stretching out as if it wouldn’t end.
Then Mary, her voice muffled because her face was next to the skin of his arm, her breath warm on his skin: “This can’t last,” she said, her voice flat, an arm thrown across his chest. Saying the words as if she thought that simply by speaking them, they could agree to set an end point that neither of them actually wanted. “It can’t last this way.”
Kevin was quiet for a moment, his eyes searching for any sign of the ceiling in the half gloom above them, the sunlight bright and playing through the leaves so that it cast shadows against the far wall. Kevin, suddenly feeling the dangerous tremble of the possible, the toppling towards decision.
“So what can?” he said.