at least it is starting to again. Meredith is recovering from a recent six-month affair with a young mystery novelist, a swaggery extrovert who nonplussed her with his overtures and eventually she succumbed. And eventually she was hurt. He was probably a little in love with her, and she more than a little with him, but he wanted marriage and children and even if she were to divorce Thompson, she has had her tubes tied. Besides, she is forty. And she has Lizbett and Darcy, her beloved girls for whom she would do anything, even stay in a marriage that has felt less than full. But she still feels aftershocks from the affair, which was vigorous and inventive.
She had not thought she was unhappy, but she realized after being with Allan, who was a vital, spontaneous man, that Thompson’s quiet reticence, his understated responses, if he responded to her at all, have created in her a kind of hunger. Thompson is slow-paced, laconic. Allan was spirited, responsive, both loquacious and an enthusiastic listener. When she talked, he talked back.
Once she said, “I’m not sure why I’m doing this terrible thing.”
“Terrible thing?”
“This … being with you. I’m forty years old, married with two children I love … a husband I love.”
“Why are you, then?”
“Because you came after me. I was flattered. And intrigued. And it’s an added dimension to my life. It’s like parentheses filled with ignition and pleasure. Everything in my life has always felt so exposed. It just spills over onto everything. I like the secrecy of this … there’s a precariousness that’s sustaining … like being abandoned somewhere unknown. I don’t know what’s going to happen. But that’s the thrill. The unexpected. The dangerous.”
“Dangerous?”
“Well, in the sense that I am very vulnerable. I rarely feel vulnerable. I mostly feel safe. I organize my life so that it is. No surprises.”
“So this is not about me? It’s about the risk.”
“You’re inseparable from it. You invite defiance. You’re cocky and assured. You strut.”
“Strut! Jesus!”
“Yes. As if you have no match.”
“Maybe you’re just bad.” He’d laughed. She hadn’t.
“I hope I don’t get punished.”
Mostly the affair had puzzled her because she and Thompson had regular sex. Good sex. Sex wasn’t the issue. Nor was connectedness. They thought alike. It was really Meredith’s need for reaction.
Meredith is an extrovert, a demanding one. Some might call her brash. And her spiritedness needs fuel. When Thompson fell in love with that vivacity, he suspected it might come at a price. She’d offset his emotional timidity with an impetuous, almost ravenous devotion. But when she went after him, though he responded willingly, he did so with deliberate caution, fearing he’d lose something crucial. He lives within himself and does not emerge easily. He is an awkward connector. He doesn’t talk because he doesn’t like talking, so he rarely does, unless he has something important to say. Meredith was attracted to this quiescence, believing it to be depth, which it was. He was always preoccupied with the contortions and convolutions of existence; how greed and power superseded charity, how influence superseded compassion. He believed humans were primal, that “power over” was the engine of society and that manners and morals, intellectual and philosophical thought, art and music, were attributes of comfort and leisure without which instinct ruled. He was troubled by the fact that connection, the key to life was arduous and tenuous. Life was more about irony and survival than love.
Except where his daughters were concerned. For them he felt a feeling so pure, so clear he could almost see it — as a bright, overwhelming light, all-encompassing, inescapable, which began and stopped with them. They took up all of his deepest vision, the vision that fed his quiddity.
Even though she had always craved, commanded attention, it was a relief for Meredith to be with Thompson. His need for isolation was so embedded that it read like assurance, an independence that was appealing. But lately the restraint she had so admired in him had come to seem like indifference. She adored him, adores him, and she is certain he adores her, but she wishes it were not so complicated, that it did not require such effort to get him to acknowledge her. Sometimes she feels like screaming to get him to interact, to react.
One of the things that redeems Thompson — because almost everyone who tries to talk to him has a difficult time — is his wry sense of humour. He is subtle, quick, and acute. This morning, after they had made love, he had cracked her up when he said, “What took you so long?”
Above all, he loves her for her abundance: abundance of love and generosity, compassion, abundance of spontaneity and spirit, abundance of creative energy. Above all, she loves him for his spareness, his thoughtful withholding. They have had an embedded mutuality. They are like a wooden matchstick. Neither part is useful until the match is struck.
Below, Lizbett has heard her parents’ lovemaking. Her bedroom is directly below theirs and their bed has a light squeak. She realizes they are not aware of this or they would do something about it. She is not the least disturbed. She has grown up with an openness toward sex, first, when she was little with Where Do I Come From? Now she has thoroughly read Our Bodies, Ourselves and The Joy of Sex with her best friends. She has felt that throb between her legs. She has not yet masturbated, but she has had “pretend” sex with her best friend. And she has kissed her best friend’s brother, who is fifteen. That was nice, arousing even. She looks forward to knowing what real sex feels like.
She has been awake and up for some time. Ever since she was a baby, she has not been a sleeper. Meredith found her difficult because she was never still; always into everything. Always questioning. She continues to be like that. This morning she has already showered and dressed, tying her still-wet hair, the exact red of her mother’s, in a ponytail, putting on her favourite red shorts with a red-striped T-shirt and leather sandals. Before she leaves her yellow-and-white room with the daisy wallpaper, she makes her canopied bed and though she doesn’t play with them anymore, rearranges all her dolls in her old bassinette with the eyelet skirt. She loves the dolls. But she will be twelve in a few months and is on an ambitious new track.
For a moment, she sits at the edge of her bed, as if contemplating her next move and idly runs her fingertips across her lips. She feels a tiny bit of ragged nail and bites it, then presses it and bites some more. She does this with all her fingers until one of them is bleeding.
Recently she had the lead in a month-long run of Annie at the Nathan S. Hirschenberg Arts Centre and it has given her a kind of celebrity. Not that she didn’t earn it. She has been studying voice and ballet at the Conservatory since she was nine and told her parents she wanted to be an actress. Before Annie she had already played Gretel in a new musical version of Hansel and Gretel at The Children’s Theatre Workshop. She has done two television commercials, one for cookies, the other for cereal. She will go to sleepover drama camp in August, as she had last year. She has been acting, really, from when she could walk and talk and realized her antics got a positive reaction. Anytime she has an opportunity to perform, she does. The part of Annie was hard won. Dozens of other girls auditioned. For Lizbett, the thrill of the exposure has only whetted her appetite for more.
She has no illusions, however. She is astute and practical. She knows life doesn’t always go as she’d wish. And she feels divided in courting her parents’ pleasure and finding her own way.
Lizbett feels especially attached to her mother. They have a special
