Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

They sway ever so slightly. That’s why, darling, it’s incredible that someone so unforgettable, thinks that I am unforgettable too .

They stood like that for a while. From outside the hospital room, through the big window that looked onto the corridor, it would have been difficult to say which one was weeping. Jack held his wife and experienced such a powerful sense of déjà vu, it felt like a blessing, and he had never been so grateful in his life.

Mimi wanted to tell Madeleine the truth. Jack said, “You’re the boss. Let me do it, though.”

When Madeleine arrived at the hospital later that day, Jack told her, “They’ve sprung me. No need for surgery.”

When Mimi returned to his room after fixing her makeup, she could see from her daughter’s face that her husband had told her nothing at all. She got out the Scrabble. She pressed on.

They discouraged their daughter from visiting again too soon. Jack didn’t want to alarm her with the sight of an oxygen tank — she was busy, she was young; better that he and Mimi should get used to his new “lifestyle” first. “Wait till I’m back on my feet,” said Jack over the phone in February, “and we’ll go for a big juicy steak. That is, if Maman lets me.”

In March they said they were driving down to see her in Toronto, but at the last minute Jack phoned to say Mimi had the flu. In April they said, “We’re thinking of going to New Brunswick next week, why don’t you plan on a weekend in May?”

WHEN MADELEINE GOT HOME last Friday night after the taping — the night the “thing” happened in her car — Christine had cooked eggplant parmigiana. Madeleine wasn’t hungry but she said, “Boy, something sure smells good.”

She ate a slice and Christine ran her a scented bath. Madeleine was still fresh from her shower of a couple of hours ago, but Christine had put flower petals in the water.

“Thanks, babe.”

Christine handed her a glass of wine and began gently, sensuously, to wash her back. It felt like someone stomping around, rattling the things on Madeleine’s dresser. Something was going to fall and break.

“Um. I think I’m getting a cold.”

“Oh yeah?” said Christine sympathetically, brushing back a lock of her long wavy hair where the tips were trailing in the water.

“Yeah, my skin hurts.”

Christine dropped the washcloth into the tub with a plop and exited the bathroom.

Madeleine called after her. “It felt … great, babe, really — thanks…,” her voice sounding robotic in her own ears.

The death of desire is a bottomlessly sad thing. Books are written, documentaries are made and counsellors are paid to help people want each other again. Perhaps it’s just a momentary ebb in the tide of our relationship, let’s take this opportunity to see what treasures have washed up on the beach in the meantime. Get to know one another again. Take a holiday.

And perhaps it comes back, or perhaps it does enough for one party but not the other. Desire can be detected at such low levels that it’s difficult to say when it’s dead. The patient is on life-support “but she can still hear you.” When do you pull the plug?

Madeleine waited until the apartment was silent before getting out of the bath. If Christine was already asleep when she came to bed, Madeleine would be relieved. But it would be all she could do to resist waking her to find out if she was mad at her. If Christine wasn’t angry about the small “empathic break” in the bath just now, she was sure to be angry at having been awakened. Madeleine would exert a good deal of energy getting Christine over her anger; this might involve Ovaltine and cognac. Then, once Christine had reassured Madeleine that she was no longer angry, Madeleine might use the opportunity to punish Christine for having had the gall to be angry over nothing. This punishment would consist of a silent, innocent distraction — an absent glance toward the curtained window as she set down the steaming mug.

“What is it, Madeleine?”

“Wha—? Oh, nothing. It’s just … never mind.”

And Madeleine’s actual grievances would rear, not their heads, but a few hairs, apropos of nothing. Christine would never see what didn’t hit her, but she would intuit it all. At three A.M.

“You hate me, why don’t you just say it, Madeleine?”

“Christine, why are you so mad at me all of a sudden?”

And the cycle would begin again.

In fact, Madeleine loves Christine dearly, would feel gouged and left for dead were she to lose her — feels everything but the abiding sexual interest that allows two people to grapple happily and hotly, then take each other for granted, in the nicest possible way, over breakfast. And to allow one another what is now called personal space, but is really just a new spin on an old virtue — privacy. Privacy is sexy.

They got together in their twenties; privacy was hypocritical then, a form of patriarchal frost. Madeleine is learning the difference between secrecy and privacy. With Christine she has no privacy, but plenty of secrets. Christine can smell them, like bones buried all over the house, and it drives her crazy. Madeleine has hidden them so well that she has no idea they are secrets. Mice dying behind the walls, dreadful smells wafting up the drain.

Christine will walk away and slam the bedroom door. Madeleine, in a rage at being shut out, will punch the wall, then her own head. She may, depending on the ferocity of leashed but ungrounded anger, open the cutlery drawer, find the sharpest knife and carefully wrap her hand around its blade, slowly squeezing up to, but not past, the point of laceration — because how did her life take her, step by step, into the domestic clutches of such a bitch? Then she will open the fridge to get a glass of water, and the sight of the leftover eggplant parmigiana will cause her to weep, because poor Christine cooked it innocently and with love.

As they played out a version of this that Friday night, it never occurred to Madeleine to tell Christine what had happened to her in her car on the way home.

“I’m not into ‘healing,’ okay?” says Madeleine at her next appointment, and places a cheque for six sessions in advance on Nina’s desk, next to a conch shell. “I don’t want you turning me into a vegetarian or — and I don’t want to be straight when I walk out of here, I want be exactly like I am now except able to drive again. And, you know, work.” She sits in the swivel chair, leans back and folds her hands.

Nina says, “You don’t want to be a vegetarian and you don’t want to be heterosexual—”

“I wouldn’t actually mind being vegetarian, I’m kind of interested in that, just not the hairy-leg kind.”

Nina narrows her eyes.

Madeleine says, “You suppressed a smile just now. Either that or you’re offended ’cause beneath your hemp-and-linen leisure suit you’re sporting a pelt like a Sasquatch.”

Nina smiles, says, “Madeleine, I’m going to take a chance and guess that you’re not here about your diet or your sexual orientation, or your profession. Or even your driving habits.”

“So why am I here?”

“That’s what I’m hoping we’ll work toward.”

“No, can you please just take a wild therapeutic guess?”

Nina says, “You want to go forward. But something is stopping you. You feel as though you should know what it is, but you can’t make it out. It’s like trying to identify an elephant when all you can see is one square inch of it.”