Chapter 15
the Second Circle
“As long as the sun shines, one does not ask for the moon.”
– Zhanna Petya
In August, Nancy picks up a call when she is pushing a shopping cart through the parking lot of a grocery store. It is early morning for her mother and 8 p.m. for Nancy. “Listen to this,” her mother says. “In July 1984, Russian cosmonauts aboard the Soviet space station Salyut 7 reported seeing angels hovering just outside the space station.”
Her mother goes on to paraphrase the newspaper article:
Some chalked this up to fatigue, as they had been in space for 155 days already. At first, according to Commander Oleg Atkov and cosmonauts Vladmir Solovyov and Leonid Kizim, the space station was completely bathed in an other-worldly orange light. This light appeared to come from outside the space station and moved through the walls into the craft. For a short period of time, this orange light was so bright it blinded the crew. When their vision returned, they all began looking for the source of the light. They worried about a possible explosion, as fires had occurred before on the space station, but what the crew found was more incomprehensible than the orange light. All three cosmonauts said they saw angels hovering inside the orange cloud, just outside the space station.
“They told ground control they were humanoid in appearance – their faces and bodies looked human,” Nancy’s mother said, “but they had wings and dazzling bright halos. The beings kept pace with the space station for ten minutes before vanishing.”
“Wings and halos?” Nancy says. “This is ridiculous.”
“Yes, angels have wings and halos. And it is in the newspaper, Nensi.”
“Those cosmonauts were breathing too much carbon monoxide. They must have been impaired. Nobody knows what that kind of prolonged weightlessness does to the brain.”
“All three, Nensi. All three saw the same seven angels. Angels! When the angels looked at the men in the space station, they smiled. The angels smiled! The cosmonauts said the angels had wonderful smiles – smiles of joy, of ecstasy. They said no human could have smiled like that.”
“Mom,” Nancy says. “What kind of newspaper are you reading?”
“They all said they felt a great loss when the angels disappeared. It says that, here in the article. They were devastated when the angels went away.”
Nancy has just finished placing the last of her groceries into the back of her car. She pulls down on the hatch door and because Mitsubishi did not begin to think about the difficulty of this hatch and the torque required to close it, Nancy breaks a nail. She’s standing behind the SUV with the hatch wide open, and she is looking at the broken nail. She bites off the ragged remainder and pulls with both hands on the hatch and finally pushes it shut.
“Jesus, Mom. Enough about angels already. Tell me how you are.”
“Things are good,” her mother says. She pauses and Nancy can so clearly envision her sitting at the kitchen table nodding. “I have not heard from Slava in a month. When you talk with him next, you tell him to call his mother.”
“I was fine being the mistress, you know.”
“You were what?” Ray watches as a dog, a skinny German Shepherd that looks like a coyote, trots along the sidewalk away from his car. There’s a wild scruffiness to the dog that makes Ray think it really is a coyote. Even though it’s moving in a straight line, it seems as if it’s tilted sideways.
“I was fine being the mistress.” Her words are slurred, as if she’s drunk and trying too hard to not sound drunk.
He’s losing patience with her. He doesn’t care if she was fine. He doesn’t care if she was a well-adjusted mistress. “Look,” he says. “Why am I sitting here?”
Nancy takes a breath and can feel her anger. “I was just an amusement ride for you, wasn’t I? Something for you to climb up on and fuck every now and then.”
“That’s not how it was,” he says.
“I was a roller-coaster, or some other ride at the fair. You got your thrill and then you got off and carried on.”
“I don’t understand where this is coming from.”
“It’s coming from the fact it’s true.”
“I never thought of you like that.” Ray knows if he’d been serious about Nancy, he would not have continued to treat her like a mistress.
He looks at the elms along the street. One of them is in trouble. It was a dry year. Rain was sporadic and not enough. A gust of wind bends the trees and a flurry of leaves is scattered across the road.
Ray’s job as an arborist was not the original career he’d pursued. Ray had his law degree. He was practising in a well-respected firm. Being a lawyer was what he thought he wanted. However, on the fourth month of the second year of articling with the law firm of Brice, Jones & Farnsworth, Ray woke up at 4 a.m. with chest pains. This was the beginning of his realization that law was not for him. At the hospital, the doctors were surprised by Ray’s blood pressure but his heart was fine. For now. They said it was a panic attack. A breakdown of everything that protects us from being overwhelmed by anxiety. He needed to move more. He needed to find a way to cope with stress. But Ray knew the slow build of twitchy unhappiness from his work as a lawyer was killing him. It wasn’t the stress and it wasn’t the hours – it was being completely aware of his unhappiness. There was a stench around the entire occupation that started to stick to his skin. Even the most benign fields of law contained a sleaziness factor. The so-called “heart incident” was an epiphany for Ray. The occupation of lawyer was killing him. He was one of two stars among the eight articling lawyers with the firm but he was ready to turn away. It was not easy, but he knew he was ready.
He’d spent four summers and a year out of high school working at his uncle’s greenhouse and he was drawn to the memory of that joyful time. Ray’s training was not formal, but it was extensive.
He got a job with the city’s Parks department. It was hard work, and they kept trying to promote him into positions where he no longer actually worked on trees – but rather, managed other people who worked with trees. Ray kept refusing these promotions. But, two weeks ago, he accepted a promotion with conditions of freedom. He managed a team, he was in the field as much as he wanted, and he got a hefty raise.
It was easier to say what he did now. Arborist was easier on his conscience than lawyer. It was an additional syllable but it was easier to say. He smiles at the memory of a woman at a party who asked him what he did and he told her, except she heard abortionist. “You actually tell people that?” Her face was a squished horror of revulsion. “What, you don’t like trees?” Ray said. But she was already gone.
“I want you back, Ray,” Nancy says. “Even though you are a prick, I want you back. Even though you’re mostly an asshole, I want things to be the same as they were.”
Ray is not sure what she just said, or for how long she’s been talking.
“What?”
“What do you mean – what? I think I’ve been quite clear.”
“You want me back,” he says.
“Yes. I want all of you, but I’ll take what I can get.”
“Why?”
“Because I love you. Love is about compromise. It’s about bending. It’s about taking what you can get.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I’m talking about love.”
“I don’t think that’s love, Nancy.”
“I accept you as you are,” she says.
“You don’t even know me.”
She leans forward and pours another drink. “I know you cheat on your wife. And I know your cock really well.”
“Yes, I know you do, but that’s not exactly me. It’s a body part.”
Ray looks at his parking receipt, and halfway down the block he can see a uniformed woman checking the windshields of cars. His parking slip is good for six more minutes. “Any chance we can finish up in the next six minutes?”
“No,” she says. “I’m getting to know you before I go.”
“Go where?”
“To bed, Ray. Out dancing. Out on a date. Somewhere other than this conversation. You know. Go.”
“I need to buy more time.”
“You’re not going to buy more time by being short and grumpy with me, Ray.”
“That’s not what I…Just hold on,” he says. He places the phone on the passenger seat and shoulder-checks to see that no cars are coming. He swings the car door open. At the machine, he buys another hour of parking.
He sits back down behind the wheel and sighs heavily. He nods his acknowledgement to Dante’s Divine Comedy – because he is clearly in the Inferno. He is inside the Second Circle of Hell, guilty of lust, of surrendering to the desire for fleshy pleasure and most definitely adultery. The winds are blowing and there is no peace. There is no Virgil to guide him out of this hell. Ray is alone and will have to push forward on his own. He picks up the phone. “You there?” he says.
It was as if Ray and Nancy were floating and helpless in the ocean and their conversation was rising and falling with three-metre swells. Sometimes they could see the jagged land, all brown and emerald green, and sometimes, it was all blue-grey water in every direction.