David Gilmour: Extraordinary

“Anyway, I married him. I looked out my bedroom window one afternoon and saw all those flat fields and thought, Why not? We had a wedding in a small country church with a graveyard you could see from the pews. Afterwards, we went to a party in town. You know why? Because someone told me they’d seen Terry Blanchard outside the hardware store and that maybe he’d be there. Isn’t that pathetic? God, what was I thinking? Going to a party on my wedding night because this other guy might be there! And here I’d thought I was over him.”

“Was he there?”

“No, thank God. I couldn’t relax until I was sure. I kept peeking at the door every time someone came in. I suppose that’s how you know you’re with the wrong person—when you keep looking to see who’s coming in the door. It wasn’t a bad party, if you were drunk enough. Which I was.”

“And did things get better?”

“Your body always tells you where you belong—and where you don’t. Sometimes when I was having Sunday dinner with Bruce’s parents, who were perfectly decent people, by the way, salt-of-the-earth types, I’d feel this sensation in my body, a sensation that said simply, You don’t belong here, these are not your people .”

“Did you ever find your people?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Who?”

“You. Among other people.”

After a pause, I said, “Tell me you had a good life, Sally.”

“I was lucky in a lot of ways. I just used up my luck early. But yes, I had a good life.”

“With happy moments?”

“Many,” she said easily. “Everyone does.”

“Tell me one.”

“Leaving my husband. I enjoyed that.”

“Was it precipitous or gradual?” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Your decision to leave. It took a long time.”

“Years. Are you sure you’re interested in this?”

“Very.”

“There’s something numbing about disappointment. You have to act on it quickly or time begins to gallop,” she said.

“You’d like Chekhov,” I said.

“Can you put a cube of ice in this? But no more vodka. I’ll be up peeing all night.”

“How are your legs?”

“The same. But only at night.”

I came back in from the kitchen.

“Will you turn the light out in there?” she said.

I went back and did it.

“Where was I?” She had slipped off to other thoughts. “Oh yes. By now I had two kids, Chloe and Kyle. We had a narrow little house in Toronto. Nice place. I did the interior myself. It was my birthday, I was thirty-three. Yes, yes, I know what you’re going to say: the age that Christ was crucified. I didn’t see things quite so grandly. Although it turned out to be a big year indeed. The kids were old enough to look after themselves, and that night Bruce took me to an Italian restaurant, a new place I’d read about in a magazine.

“Our table wasn’t ready, so they sat us in the bar. We had a martini and looked out over the restaurant, all the people eating in this lovely copper light, and suddenly, I could barely believe my eyes, there, facing me, sitting not ten feet away, was Terry Blanchard. I’d heard he was in the Middle East working for an oil company. But no, there he was. He was sitting with a thick-bodied woman, the sort of woman whose nylons you can hear cracking when she walks across the room. Confident. Talking. Terry listening. And I thought, He cannot love her.”

“How’d he look?”

“Wonderful. Those men age so well. He was snappily done up, a tie, white shirt. And I had the ridiculous, ever-so-quick thought that somehow he had known he was going to see me and had gotten, you know, dolled up for it. Does your generation use that word, ‘dolled up’?”

“Not really. But I know what you mean.”

“Anyway, I know it’s nonsense, but that’s what I thought. Meanwhile, I could hear Bruce chewing on his olive and breathing through his nose.”

“Did you say anything?”

“No. I just kept taking these little mouse-peeks at him. And I think he was doing the same to me, but we never did it at the same time.”

“Why didn’t you go over?”

“Too shy.”

“Too shy?”

“No, that’s not true. The fact is, I didn’t feel especially pretty. I felt like I’d put on weight, that there was something clumsy about how I looked, and that he’d be disappointed. But I wanted him to come over. I could feel the skin on my face go very tight, like I was sitting in a high wind. It was awful. But sort of wild, too.”

“And?”

“It was astonishing how much I remembered about him—his shirt, his underarms, even the wood dust in his eyebrows. I was surprised that it was all so vivid, so immediate. So yesterday. He had remained frozen in my heart exactly as I had felt about him the last time I saw him.”

“Did it make you sad?”

“It didn’t. It made me feel sort of light-headed and exhilarated. I can’t imagine why. But I wanted to tell someone. I wished I was with someone other than Bruce so I could whisper, ‘You see that man over there…’ And then tell them the story.”

“Then what happened?”

“Then he was gone. The table was empty. Napkins on the tablecloth, water glasses half empty, the waiter clearing away stuff. To this day, I don’t know how I missed him leaving.”

“And did you see him again?”

“I went back to the restaurant a few times. Alone. I sat at the copper bar. But I never saw him. Still, I’ve always been curious, always wanted to ask him, ‘What were you thinking when you saw me, what were you remembering?’”

“Oh dear.”

“Well, yes and no. Because of what happened later. Just a few weeks later. I’m not sure it would have happened if I hadn’t spotted Terry Blanchard in a restaurant on the night of my thirty-third birthday.” After a moment’s reflection, she continued: “We’d been invited to a cocktail party in Forest Hill. I can’t remember who invited us. But it was a splashy affair. Not really our crowd. I was excited about going. I’ve always liked getting out and about.”

Out and about. Very Sally, that phrase.

She went on: “There were quite a few men there, and I was getting a good deal of attention, which often happened. I’m not bragging. I was a good-looking woman.”

“You still are.”

She paused with a hint of relish to collect her thoughts. “I was having a chat in the corner with a man I had met that evening. Marek Grunbaum was his name. Handsome in an Eastern European, sort of state-police way. The kind of face that knocks at your door at three in the morning and your wife never sees you again. But he wasn’t like that at all. Tough, yes—he owned a factory that made car parts. It was clear from the ring on my finger that I was married, but it was also apparent that that didn’t concern him very much.

“He had a beautiful pink handkerchief in the breast pocket of his jacket, and such elegant manners, the capacity to suggest that everyone in the room was worthy of attention but that you somehow were more worthy. A party trick, maybe, but hard to resist, nevertheless. Who isn’t stirred by absolute attention?

“I noticed him discreetly glance around the room. What was he looking for? Did he have a jealous wife? Then I realized what it was.”

“What was it?”

“He wanted to see what my husband looked like. But he was confused, because, looking over the crowd, there was no one who appeared to look like the kind of person I would be married to. You could see his eyes move over the English husband of the hostess, then over a local politician, then a retired hockey player who was very much à la vogue in that circle. They like to adopt people, those Forest Hill folk, athletes, ex-convicts, priests, writers—creatures of a different cloth. It lasts a while and then the circle closes again. Anyway, Marek didn’t stop, not for a second, on Bruce, who was wearing a green shirt and leaning with one arm on the fireplace mantel, his jacket open, his little pot belly exposed. Leaning and giving me the look. Eyes half shut like a reptile. I could feel myself getting nervous. I was thinking, Oh-oh, he’s mad at me. He’s going to sulk in the car, he’s going to get out of bed in the morning and sit on the couch in his pyjama bottoms, smoking a cigarette and clearing his throat. No, nope, nothing’s wrong. And I’d flounce around, chirping like a bird, trying to cajole him out of his foul mood. God, is there anything that creates self-disgust faster than apologizing when you haven’t done anything wrong? The person you end up hating is yourself.