nursery as he went—a door that remained closed all the time. He walked downstairs again, his footsteps echoing in the hall, and in the kitchen took a pizza out of the freezer and thrust it in the oven. Shoving his hands in his pockets, he went to stand by the window, where the trees’ serrated black edges cut into a starspattered sky, and was achingly aware of the silence of the house, of his solitude and his loneliness.
He was in limbo. Nowhere. Alone yet unable to be with anyone. Divorced from laughter and the small, cumulative pleasures of living with the woman he loved. Cut off from his sexuality and the deep erotic joy he had found in Lucy.
He was thirty-seven years old.
He wanted another child. He had loved being a father, and the thought of remaining childless filled him with a nameless dread. All too well as he stood there he could recall Sarah’s tiny movements, and her miniature perfection as she had lain trustingly in his arms. He wanted a family. Like sex, this was a normal enough human urge. Yet Lucy was denying him both of them.
He moved his shoulders uneasily. The job he’d been offered today wouldn’t interest him nearly as much if Lucy were still living with him. He knew that as well as he knew that the sun would rise in the morning. He loved his present job—was more than fulfilled and challenged by it in every hour he spent in the hospital.
So yet another thing that had been stolen from him was decisiveness. He was allowing his future career to depend on Lucy. He’d never sold the house they’d lived in because he kept hoping she’d come back to it. He couldn’t even take a lover, for God’s sake.
What kind of a man was he?
An empty shell, like the whelks and angel wings Lucy had scattered round the living-room.
So what the hell was he going to do about it? Eat frozen pizza in a house that held nothing but memories for the rest of his life? Stay celibate because no other woman was Lucy?
It was five months since he’d seen her. Last April he’d flown to Ottawa, where she was living, and pleaded with her to come back to him. White-faced, she’d refused. And like a beaten dog he’d crawled back home, only wanting privacy to lick his wounds.
Dammit, he thought, that’s not good enough. Once, years ago, she’d told him that there was no use begging anyone for anything. So why had he wasted his time begging her for something she didn’t want to give? He’d never do that again. Never.
His mind made another leap. Maybe, Troy thought, he was kidding himself that he was still in love with her. If he saw her again he might realize that he was clinging to something that existed only in his imagination: a prettified notion of undying love, a romantic fantasy that had no basis in reality.
Like a limpet glued to its rock, he was still clasping the words he’d said on their wedding-day, and had meant with all his heart. “Til death us do part”. Death had parted them, all right. Though not quite in the way the marriage ceremony had pictured it.
Could it be true? Might he discover, if he saw Lucy, that the ties binding him to her had unraveled of their own accord? Or even rotted from disuse, thereby freeing him?
He didn’t know the answers to his own questions. He did know he was sick to death of being half a man, a hollow man, a man of straw. He was tired of feeling frustrated, trapped and unhappy…How long before his friends got bored with him, before women like Martine started viewing him as a crabby old bachelor who was better avoided?
The buzzer rang on the oven. Troy shoveled the pizza on to a plate and sat down at the counter. He chewed the crust and the layered cheese and mushrooms as if they were cardboard, his convictions—and his angerhardening.
He was going to go and see Lucy. And this time he’d tell her she could come back and be his wife—in fact as well as in name—or else he’d file for a divorce. A simple choice. Yes or no.
No more begging. No more opening himself to the kind of rejection he’d suffered in April. No more of the dull ache that had lodged itself in his belly months ago and never gone away. He was through with being a zombie. Enough was enough.
Marriage or divorce. A straightforward choice. And then he’d know where he was, even if he didn’t like it very much. Because the hard fact was that Lucy, in the year since she had stormed out of the house after the worst fight in their marriage, had not once gotten in touch with him. No phone calls, no letters, not even a Christmas card.
Divorce. Troy played with the word in his mind, hating the very sound of it, yet knowing he’d be a naive fool to imagine that Lucy was going to throw herself in his arms the minute he walked across the threshold of her apartment. There was a very strong possibility she might slam the door in his face.
If she chose—for the third time—to reject him, then somehow he’d have to learn to let go of her. With the sharpest of scalpels he’d have to amputate her from his body and his soul, and afterwards he’d have to allow himself to recuperate, to heal, so that he could rebuild a life that would include risk and intimacy and, eventually, children.
But in order to let go of her, he had to see her first.
The pizza seemed to have disappeared. Troy poured himself a beer, grabbed the latest medical journal and went upstairs to read it.
Troy slept better that night than he had in weeks, and the next morning his resolve was unchanged. He was going to get on with his life, Lucy or no Lucy. And the sooner he saw her, the better. It had, however, occurred to him that before he went banging on the door of her apartment it might be sensible to check that she hadn’t gone away on holiday. So that afternoon he phoned Evelyn Barnes, his mother-in-law, who also lived in Ottawa.
“Troy here. How are you, Evelyn?”
With genuine pleasure Evelyn said, “How nice to hear from you. I’m snowed under at work and otherwise fine.”
Evelyn was a forensic pathologist; while she lacked the emotional warmth of her middle daughter, Lucy, Troy had always known she was fond of him, and that she had been upset when Lucy had left him. He said, “Is Lucy around? While I’d rather you didn’t warn her ahead of time, I need to see her.”
Evelyn hesitated. “No…no, she hasn’t lived in Ottawa since May.”
She’s found another man.
The words had sprung from nowhere, and the rush of emotion that churned in Troy’s chest had nothing to do with detachment. “You mean she’s moved?” he said stupidly.
“She’s working on the east coast for the summer.”
So it was temporary. Troy loosened his hold on the receiver. “When’ll she be back?”
“Not until October, as far as I know.”
It was now the end of August. Suffused with an anger that he made no attempt to subdue, Troy said, “I can’t wait that long. Give me her address and I’ll go wherever she is.”
The pause was longer this time. Evelyn said reluctantly, “She made me promise not to tell you her whereabouts.”
“For Pete’s sake,” he exploded, “what’s she playing at?”
“She’s trying to sort things out, Troy, as best she can.”
“Good
