Object of Your Love Read online

  After lunch, she puts on her clothes, thin sweaters that do not keep her warm. Thick ones are too heavy, she says, she cannot support their punishing weight. They exhaust her. In her inadequate cardigan, she shivers, rises to turn up the thermostat on the living-room wall. She sits again in her chair and reads large-print books borrowed from the library, blinking at the heavy black lettering, her legs extended straight out in front of her, her heels, supported by a footstool, pressed together, the toes of her shoes pointing up at the ceiling. She reaches to turn on the radio.

  In our kitchen cupboards there are tins of peanut brittle, cookies with a dot of strawberry jam in the centre, bags of jelly beans, Oh Henry chocolate bars. These are the things Mother wants. She eats very little. Though she can’t finish dinner, at the end of the meal she always says, “What is there for dessert? I have to have something sweet with my tea.” Her day builds up into this little hill with something sweet on the top. Outside of sugar, she is not interested in food. She says she can’t taste anything, is never hungry. It is as though her system is dormant, as though all her bodily functions have ground to a halt. No longer does she perspire or menstruate or get up in the night to relieve herself.

  * * *

  Late on a wet, dark September afternoon, I am reviewing inventory before a large window in the back room of the dentist’s office where I work as an assistant. The office is downtown, just off King Street, in an old, picturesque Victorian house with peaked gables and white spindle porch rails. It is a cozy office, with crooked walls, modern, muted lighting, small, impractical examination rooms, soft music floating from invisible speakers, grey silencing broadloom on the floors.

  It is 5:15. Dr. Peter Beveridge steps into the room and closes in behind me, swift and silent as a leopard after its prey. “Everyone’s gone home,” he whispers into the hollow of my neck. I myself have heard the last of the staff preparing to leave, the singing of empty coat hangers set swinging on the cloakroom rod, the hum of the evening traffic flowing in through the front door as it is opened again and again. Good night, good night.

  Dr. Peter Beveridge spreads his hands on my hips with much the same professional authority I have seen him employ in pressing rebellious patients into the dental chair. On my neck I feel his breath, which smells, I have noticed recently, like the powders he packs into the dental cavities of his patients. The scent is on his fingers, it seems to come out of his pores. I have a mental picture of this compound slowly flowing through his veins, a white, chalky substance.

  “I want you to leave Mrs. Beveridge,” I say without turning around. We are reflected together in the windowpane before us, he a foot taller than I and brilliant as light in his white smock. Recently he has holidayed in Mexico, returning with his face bronzed and healthy. I look at his reflection and shake with desire. For three years I have worshipped him like a god: his height, his powerful shoulders, his square, clean jaw, his moist, brown eyes, his sculptured hair, his tan, his good fortune, his income.

  Dr. Peter Beveridge sighs. “Oh, Jean,” he says gently but firmly. He is fifteen years older than I and sometimes talks to me as though he were my father or my analyst. “You feel depressed today,” he tells me. “It’s just the rain.” We are looking out the window at the bank parking lot next door, where a diagonal rain is falling and the wind has driven huge orange leaves flat against a wire fence.

  “It’s not the rain,” I say impatiently. In the parking lot, cars arrive and depart, their headlights shining in the gathering dusk. People run in and out of the bank, their collars turned up against the weather. Through the enormous plate-glass bank windows, I can see the customers shuffling forward between crimson ropes to the tall counters, talking to the tellers, carrying on their common, innocent transactions, preparing to dash out once more to their cars and drive home in the steady, inching traffic, cook dinner, turn on their television sets, spend the evening with their husbands and wives and children. That is all I want, I think: a normal life.

  If I let him, Dr. Beveridge will draw me out to reception, where there are warm lights and a long couch, behind which, in a large aquarium, jewel-coloured fish glide slowly through illuminated water. The fish have a tranquillizing effect on patients, especially those coming to us for invasive procedures such as extractions, implants, crowns. Dr. Peter Beveridge will snap the front door lock, pull the drapes in the bow window overlooking the street, hang the Closed sign on the door, like a shopkeeper preparing to take inventory. He will lay me down on the couch and apply himself to me while the fish swim round and round.

  Soon I will find that I am not thinking about the skilful progress of his hands or what is happening on another more disturbing level, the level of feeling. I am not connected to him or to myself at all. Rather, I am concentrating on the fish, memorizing their shapes and colours, the incandescent black, orange, yellow, purple, blue dots and stripes. It is less alarming, less complicated to follow their calm circuit than to focus on Dr. Peter Beveridge’s body, now beginning to heave and quake on top of me, to offer its shameless, grateful, plaintive whimpers. The fish regard me with candid, immobile eyes, sway and turn, press their wide flat lips against the glass, blow mocking bubbles at me. And I, in turn, pity them in their watery prison, am numbed by their slow, perpetual motion.

  Dr. Beveridge tells me that he is sick. He is sick of dentistry. He wants to spend the balance of his life duck hunting. He is fed up with tooth rot and halitosis and cash flow and mortgages. He is weary of his beautiful wife, Alice, who is, he says, so good, so perfect that she makes life seem intolerable.

  Sometimes Mrs. Beveridge drops into the office to speak to Dr. Beveridge. I see her walking down the carpeted hallway in her simple, quiet, expensive clothes: wool hound’s-tooth slacks, a cashmere blazer, thick, cable sweater, a pair of highly polished loafers. I cannot stop staring at her, at her flawless, olive skin, her dimples deep enough to hold a penny, her large dark eyes, her cap of straight, shiny hair. She is like a beautiful doe, I think. I believe that if I were to replace her, if I were to be the new Mrs. Dr. Peter Beveridge, I would become like her: deep, gentle, wise, translucent, calm.

  * * *

  One evening in September, Dr. Beveridge telephones me at home. He never calls me there, and I can tell that Mrs. Beveridge must be standing at his elbow because he speaks in a formal way. Would I consider babysitting for them that evening? It is asking a lot, he acknowledges, it is very short notice, he is afraid I might have some social event of my own to occupy me (here, he is being—something—cute? ironic? unkind?). Their scheduled babysitter has cancelled on them and there is a function they must attend. I would be doing them an immense favour.

  I eat an early dinner with Mother and then walk across town in the dark, through deep, dusty drifts of leaves to their house. I am excited about seeing Dr. Beveridge on a weekend night, about getting a look at the inside of his house for the first time, about being near him in his wife’s presence because this seems to me cheeky and iniquitous. I feel jittery and treacherous and aroused and ashamed. I am too dressed up for babysitting, having put on a silk blouse, short skirt, black nylons, black suede high heels. One of his sons (age ten) answers the door and then Mrs. Beveridge comes forward with her white smile and her kind, trusting face.

  “Oh, Jean,” she says, taking my hand warmly. “This is so good of you.” She is discreetly attired in low pumps, a simple black wool crêpe dress, small drop earrings. Her beauty is pure and true and natural and sustaining, like clear springwater. I may at this moment love her as much as I think I love Dr. Beveridge.

  The house, a long, low bungalow, is just as I imagined it would be—elegant but unpretentious: low, pearly light, champagne broadloom, white leather couches, long expanses of sheer-draped window. Serenity. Silence like a cocoon, all sound absorbed by the finger-deep carpet and the raw-silk wallpaper.

  Into the living room Mrs. Beveridge leads me, where there are many people standing about in intimate clusters, drinking cocktails and eating
fancy morsels of food before they all go out together to this important dinner.

  “Everybody!” she says, calling their attention to me. “This is Jean, Peter’s assistant. She’s saved our lives tonight. She’s staying with the boys.”

  They all turn then, garmented in silk and dark suits and ruffled shirts and bow ties. With a critical arching of their eyebrows, they appraise my inappropriate clothes, they smile coldly at me as if to say, Well, if she’s the babysitter, what’s she doing in here with us? I feel foolish, unworthy, raked over by their eyes. Then Dr. Beveridge says to me in a businesslike tone, “Come, Jean, I’ll show you the boys’ rooms. This way.”

  I follow him down a long, carpeted hallway. However, we never reach the boys’ rooms because Dr. Beveridge turns and pushes me into the master bedroom, swiftly, silently pulling the door closed behind us. He calls me a beautiful bitch, though I am not beautiful at all, I am homely. Maybe the bitch part is true, though. Like a wild animal, he tears at my blouse. I watch a button fly across the room, hear a seam give way. With his great professional teeth, he bites my neck, my shoulders, my breasts. Pain shoots through my body. I should, I tell myself, be pleased by this turn of events, for though I had not dared to hope for this opportunity, this little bonus, little tip for the serviceable babysitter, hadn’t I prayed for something in this vein?

  But now I find myself looking around, full of envy and curiosity, cataloguing the contents of the bedroom, observing Mrs. Beveridge’s silver hairbrush on the dresser, her designer jeans draped across a small, sweet upholstered chair that looks like it was meant for a doll’s house, the closet doors standing open and her dresses hanging there, pressed intimately against Dr. Beveridge’s suits, the thick pocket novel lying open on the low, wide waterbed. Presently, Dr. Beveridge, satiated, recovers himself, smooths his coiffure, straightens his bow tie in the mirror, pats me territorially on the behind and slips gracefully out into the hall, returning to his friends, leaving the door slightly ajar. Their ugly, explosive laughter tumbles in on me as I crawl on my hands and knees across the carpet, searching for my button and flapping my blouse to dry his slobber off it so that I can go out and find the boys’ rooms for myself.

  When I am putting him to bed, Eric, the son who answered the door, says, “Do you work for my father?” He is a serious, fair boy with a round, intelligent, gourdlike head.

  “Yes,” I answer. “I’m his dental assistant.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I keep the examination room organized,” I explain readily. “I hand him whatever instruments he needs to work with. I mix the preparations he uses in the patients’ mouths.”

  “That sounds boring,” Eric tells me.

  “It’s not boring,” I say, somewhat defensive. “It’s interesting. You have to be very organized. You have to be quite intelligent to be a dental assistant.”

  He scrutinizes me calmly. “You don’t look intelligent.”

  * * *

  Dr. Beveridge says to me, “Jean, you’re driving me crazy!” because I have told him, “Keep your hands off of me. If you touch me, I’ll scream at the top of my lungs. I mean it.”

  “Jean, don’t do this to me.”

  “Leave her and you can have me again,” I say.

  “I am the hunter and you are a little purple-winged duck,” he used to tell me, and he’d pursue me all day long. Little pinches and strokes as I squeezed past him in the examination room. Nicks and bites between patients. Mouth against my neck. Finger down my collar. Finger driven hard into my armpit like the cold rigid barrel of a gun. Knuckle riding down my spine. Hot breath in my hair. Lips brushing my ear. Fingers up the sleeve of my uniform at the X-ray station. A hand down my front in the supply room. In the empty staff room, a hand shooting, swift as an arrow, up under my skirt and inside my panties. Fingernails raking at my pubic hair.

  And I was supposed to keep working. That was my instruction. I was not to flinch or jump or shiver or blush or indicate in any way my arousal. I was to go on mixing up the platinum in a little dish, sliding the tiny pieces of X-ray film into their sleeves, placing gleaming probes in notches around the circular instrument table, fastening paper bibs around the patients’ necks, as though nothing had happened. That was part of the game. There was this buildup, this mounting of desire until the office emptied out and he had his way with me on the sofa, the love couch, where all day long the patients had sat innocently reading Ladies Home Journal or watching the circling fish, later silent witnesses to our passion.

  “I want to be something more important to you than a game,” I tell Dr. Beveridge. “I’m tired of being your toy.”

  “Oh, Jean. Jean, you’re not a toy,” he says sadly, shaking his head, his eyes so misty that I believe he is about to cry.

  He tries to carry on. Leaning over his patients, his beautiful square fingers probing their mouths, he pauses and looks hungrily across their foreheads, searching my face. I sit on a high stool, with my heels hooked over the rung. I slap an instrument firmly into his extended hand and in the instant before I can release it we connect: there is an electric charge, a current running between us, through the sentient probe, with its salient, delicately curved tip. I feel the emotion of his grip, the adultery, the desire of it, the power of his maleness that set my heart pounding the first time I stood at his side. I try not to look at his immaculate hands, his manicured nails, or to watch the action of his fingers, which are long and pale and nimble as a pianist’s. I catch him staring at my exposed knees. A fine perspiration forms on his upper lip. His hands begin to shake.

  “Jean, you’re going to ruin me,” he says after the patient has left the room.

  “I hope so.”

  One night after work, he catches my arm in the hallway, hisses in my ear, “You’re acting like I don’t exist, Jean!”

  “You don’t,” I say ruthlessly, pulling on my coat. Recently I have been careful to leave the office at the same time as everyone else so that he cannot apprehend me, press me, unwilling, onto the waiting-room couch. Out into the night I run with the others, into the damp fall evening with its bitter smell of dying leaves. Clattering down the wooden porch steps, I turn onto the sidewalk, away from the congestion and traffic lights of downtown, and hear my own voice, shrill, sad and gay, calling, too loud, to my co-workers, “See you tomorrow!”

  * * *

  On the evening of the last day in November, Dr. Beveridge says to me, “All right, Jean, you’ve won,” and hands me a key. “I’ve rented a small apartment for us. It’s available as of today. We’ll live there on a month-to-month until things settle down and we can find something more comfortable. I’m going home now to tell Alice. You tell your family too. I’ll meet you at the apartment at eight o’clock tonight. Here is the address.”

  Then he sweeps me off my feet, carries me out to reception and makes love to me for the first time in weeks, in the blue quivering reflections cast by the aquarium. I am in rapture. I look up at the shining fish moving in their transparent, deadly regions. Suddenly I enter, I am transported into the aquarium’s landscape of sunken ships and treasure chests and tiny plastic scuba divers. My body floats, is sucked into one of the black, watery caves. I close my eyes and the searing colours of the fish burn my eyelids. I feel the fish moving over me, wave after wave of them, their scaly, wafer-thin bodies brushing the length of my limbs like feathers.

  * * *

  It is late when I arrive home.

  “Jean,” Mother says, relieved to see me. “It’s nearly seven. We wondered.” In the kitchen she and Floyd and Blanche have almost finished dinner, which is never delayed on my account because of Blanche’s galloping appetite. I see that Mother has set aside something for me on a plate, covered with a pot lid.

  “Too bad you came home,” Blanche says, disappointed. “I was thinking of eating your dinner.”

  “Help yourself,” I tell her indifferently. “I won’t be sitting down.”

  “Is anything wrong, Jean?” asks Mother
, worried, detecting something in my face. Floyd, his cutlery poised in the air like daggers, stops to observe me.

  “She looks smug about something,” says Blanche cautiously.

  “Jean, sit down,” says Mother, perplexed.

  “I don’t have time to sit down,” I say. “I’m going upstairs to pack my bags. You may as well know,” I tell them, “that Dr. Peter Beveridge and I have for some time been carrying on an affair. He’s leaving his wife tonight. He’s breaking the news to her even as we speak. We’re meeting later this evening. We have an apartment waiting for us. We’re going to be very happy.”

  There is a moment of exquisite silence while they absorb the news. Blanche’s eyes are big and round, her face flattened with shock as though someone has hit her head-on with a frying pan. Mother cups her hand over her mouth.

  Blanche is the first to find her voice. “I knew it!” she cries, though her soft, puddinglike face is now quivering with surprise. “I knew there was something funny going on.”

  “I’m glad you think it’s funny,” I say.

  “She doesn’t mean amusing,” Floyd explains. “Jean, I’m disappointed in you.”

  Blanche says, “Floyd, stop her! She can’t do this! How will this look at our church? She’ll bring disgrace on us all.”

  Floyd’s face has gone blank with fear. Faced with this opportunity to preach, he is nearly tongue-tied. “Jean,” he says feebly, “this is a terrible thing.”

  “It’s not terrible,” I say exuberantly. “It’s the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me.”

  “She’s gone mad,” Blanche says.

  “Where will you go?” asks Mother. What she means is: will you be warm? will you eat enough? will you have a comfortable bed? When a woman gets old, all she can remember is the advice her mother gave her, passed on by her mother before that. These are the absolutes. Dress for the weather. Don’t stay up late. Wear shoes that fit. Eat green vegetables. Nothing else can be known for sure. Perhaps nothing else is worth knowing.