Necessary Lies(30)
In the kitchen, Anna felt her body become heavier, harder to move. It was getting dark, time to switch on the lights. “Now,” she urged herself on and arranged a few more slices of poppyseed cake on a platter. When the murmurs in the living room became less intense, she walked in. Julia took a big piece of cake from the plate and winced.
“I’m eating like a pig. God, you must think I’m pregnant or something,” Julia laughed, addressing Anna for the first time. William laughed, too. It was a guilty laugh, begging for acceptance.
“Oh, no,” Anna said, quickly, and then thought that it was probably a stupid thing to say.
They never knew when Julia would come, when a few angry words from Marilyn would make her pack her bag and arrive on their doorstep. It became a way of life, a sea-saw in which they were only one of the sides — once up, once down. And there was always K?the with her terse calls to William. “But Willi, she is only a child.”
Anna let words slip, betray her resentment. She was not good at sharing William, at changing plans at the last minute because of Julia’s arrival. It became harder and harder to pick up damp clothes from the bathroom floor, to remove Julia’s long golden hairs from her hairbrush.
“Why do you let her speak to you like that?” she made a mistake of asking William after a long series of “Oh, shut up Dad,” and “Lay off, will you!”
“What do you want me to do?” he asked in return.
“Tell her she can’t live like that. Tell her you don’t like it.”
He gave her a hurt look, then, as if she disappointed him, turned into someone else, someone he could no longer trust. “Then she won’t come here, at all,” he said. “Is that what you want?”
When Julia turned twenty she moved in with them, taking psychology and music at McGill. William beamed with pride. Anna could hear them, from behind the closed doors of Julia’s room, laughing, recalling stories from the past. Some cat with a striped tail making off with Julia’s doll. The bitter lettuce leaves from their garden in the country. She couldn’t shake off the feeling that they were talking about her, laughing at her behind her back.
Her own questions Julia answered with quick yes or no, flashing Anna a smile with her braced teeth, their conversations ending before they could begin. Anna thought herself only good enough for picking up the trail of crumbled tissue, dirty dishes on the floor, on the sofa, socks rolled into sweaty balls that had to be turned inside out and soaked before washing.
If only she and William could have a child, she thought, it would be all different. She wouldn’t mind it so much. But no matter how much they wanted it, she couldn’t get pregnant. Her doctor urged her not to despair. There was no medical reason why she couldn’t conceive, he said. It may be just a matter of time. She was not the only one, either. It happened so often in his practice.
The trip to Italy was to be an escape, a rest from the tensions of the last months. Two weeks alone with William, long walks though the streets of Florence, Tuscan meals at trattorias, his voice whispering in her ear how well-dressed people seemed there, how open about their bodies. “Look at the ease and grace with which they move,” he kept telling her, his eyes following the young women who passed them by. They went to see David at the Academia, and then sat looking at Michelangelo’s Bacchus in the Bargello, at the rounded belly and the lecherous half smile of the marble god, suspicious of the boundaries of virtue. When they sat there, a blind man in dark glasses walked in. He was holding a thin white cane, and a young boy who held his arm described to him, in a soft, humming voice, what sculptures they were passing by. When they reached Bacchus, the blind man leaned forward and slowly ran his fingers along the marble skin.
Something wasn’t right. She knew that as soon as the taxi brought them from the airport. Julia was standing behind the screen doors waiting for them, her hair gathered into a tight pony tail, her pale face covered with red blotches. “I’m sorry, Dad,” she said, biting her lips. “Could I talk to you … alone?”
“Go ahead,” Anna said. “I’ll wait.” She paid the driver, an elderly Sikh in a freshly ironed blue shirt, and asked him to leave the suitcases in the driveway. “The children, Ma’am,” he said with sympathy. “With them, there is always trouble. But without them, there is no life.” Anna nodded and waved to him as the taxi backed and left.
The lawn, she noticed at once, was a mess. Cigarette butts were scattered among drying, trampled grass, and broken beer bottles glittered in the sun. Someone had dug out deep square holes in the middle of the lawn. A splash of silver by the window turned out to be one of the junipers, sprayed with paint, its branches imprisoned in a shining amour.
Anna waited outside for a few more minutes, registering more broken flowers, spots where grass was painted red, blue, and yellow. Someone had pushed a tire into the flowerbed. She was growing anxious. “William!” she called. Nobody answered. “William! Julia! May I come in?”
She stood in the hall listening, but heard nothing. In the living room Julia was standing by the fireplace, leaning over the mantel. William was sitting on the sofa, his face hidden in his hands.
“No, I have nothing to admit,” Julia was saying when she Anna came in. “And I don’t have to take this shit, especially not from you!”
The sour smell of vomit, cigarette smoke and spilled beer filled the air. The walls and ceiling were covered with drying red flesh of tomatoes, yellowish seeds still clinging to the pulp. More broken glass; among the shards were fragments of William’s crystal wine decanter. Anna stepped on something soft that squiggled under her foot. Bending down, she saw it was a used condom.