A Lady Under Siege(15)
Seth was a professor of comparative literature at York University, and Irena had been one of his undergraduate students. She’d flirted with him, and he’d encouraged it, but had known better than to act on it while she was still enrolled in one of his classes. On the first day after term ended and the marks were in, she was at his office door. “Now you’re free to see more of me,” she’d said. Soon enough they were meeting almost daily, at his office, her apartment, even at the house near Lawrence and Yonge he and Meghan had bought with a generous down payment from his parents. Meghan never caught on—it was Irena who forced Seth’s hand, making him choose between her and his wife, and by that time he was addicted to her—the affair stirred his blood, and made him feel alive and virile. So Meghan moved out, Irena moved in, and he had a lot of explaining to do, to friends, family, and colleagues. He liked to say Irena was a “mature student,” all of twenty-six, so there could be no stigma about it. He was forty-one. And now he was going to be a father again.
Meghan stared at him, but he avoided her eyes.
“Oh Jesus,” she said.
“Yep. We’re going to have a baby, we’re going to get married, the whole bit.”
“You sound so enthused,” she said sarcastically.
“I want to be. I should be. The timing’s not great.”
“You stumble from disaster to disaster,” she said. “Or maybe you repeat things on a ten year cycle.”
There did seem to be a pattern to it, or at least a repetition. A little more than a decade earlier, when Meghan was twenty-one and an undergraduate, she’d taken a course in creative writing at U of T, led by Seth, who was then a PhD student. He came from money, and seemed tremendously sophisticated, well-travelled and worldly to her, a girl from small-town eastern Ontario—Fenolen Falls to be exact. It was an evening class, and a bunch of students went out afterward to a place where undergrads shared pitchers of beer. Seth joined them, and talked almost exclusively to Meghan, and later took her back to his place, where they made sloppy, drunken love. Three nights later they did it again, only sober this time. Prior to this her love life had consisted of a few casual and unsatisfying dorm party hook-ups, so she was feeling like Seth was a major advance, a breakthrough—her first adult romance. They slept together twice a week for three weeks until she figured out he already had a girlfriend, and confronted him. “I’ve dropped her,” he said. “Oh? When?” “Now.” After that, they saw each other every night, and within two months Betsy happened—an accident, obviously. Seth expressed true love while lobbying for an abortion, and Meghan had agreed to it, had made the appointment, but at the last minute couldn’t bring herself to go through with it. And that’s how Betsy came to be.
“Betsy’s not a disaster,” he protested. “You could say congratulations. She’s going to have a sister.”
“Half sister.”
“I want you and Irena to get along.”
“I should be friends with the woman who destroyed my marriage.”
“I destroyed our marriage,” he said, looking at her finally.
“Is that the new version? The first was, you were too weak, and she came on too strong. She did know you were married, even if you forgot.”
“You’ll need to forgive her, and me. And in time you will. Give me some credit, I helped set you on your life’s path. You were just an aimless girl taking vague courses toward a useless degree, I’m the one who saw talent in your drawing and got you into OCA.” There was truth in this—prodded by Seth she had switched to the Ontario College of Art to study design and illustration, juggling classes and motherhood through her early twenties, while most of her peers were partying it up. But she was in no mood to give credit.
“Thank you, Mister Svengali, I’d be nowhere without you.”
They locked eyes for a moment. Seth looked away first. Being a man, he hated emotional scenes like this. He’d said what he needed to say, and was actually relieved when Meghan said, “You should go now.”
She moved to the front door and opened it for him. On the doorstep he turned and said, “I think Betsy will like spending time with us, once she has a sister. More of a family environment.”
“Goodbye.” Meghan slammed the door on him. She leaned her forehead against it, and composed herself. After a moment she walked back through the living room, and the phone rang. Without thinking she picked it up. It was work, more specifically her friend and workmate Jan, catching her up on the latest rumours about job cuts and rolling heads. Nothing new or substantial to report, just Jan venting, mostly, until she remembered the real reason she had phoned, that a meeting about a book cover Meghan was working on had been moved up to tomorrow. She’d need something to present by ten in the morning.