Object of Your Love Read online

  “That sounds like rape,” said Loretto.

  “Rape can be fun.”

  Loretto wasn’t sure how much of this to believe. She thought Bev must be making some of it up.

  “You bring out the worst in men,” she told Bev.

  “Sometimes the worst is the best.”

  “You like the idea of driving a man mad.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Oh, yes you do.”

  “I like to be desired.”

  “You look like a sex-craved bitch.”

  “I am a sex-craved bitch.”

  “And you love every minute of it.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe, nothing.”

  Where did these men come from? How did they find Bev? Loretto thought it must be word of mouth. Loretto had to listen to all of this. Why did she listen to this smut? She didn’t know. In one way she was ashamed of herself for listening and in another way it made her feel good. It made her feel she was the only sane person in the world.

  * * *

  One afternoon, deep in March, someone called Loretto and told her what she later supposed she should have been expecting to hear all along. The message was brief but Loretto tried to keep the person on the line as long as she could. She listened to the voice, which was throaty, soft, benevolent, tried to think of who it could be. Many possibilities flashed through her head. Wanda the Wallflower, calling to exact revenge. Wanda’s mother, angry about the liver blood. The desiccated wallpaper lady, Florence Quickly, with her hair like pink candy-floss. The old clerk who had fainted in Booth’s lingerie department.

  It could have been any of these women but Loretto somehow knew it wasn’t. It was a complete stranger calling with a gift and this was the peculiar thing: the news was like a gift, something offered free of charge, a piece of information Loretto needed to have and at the same time it was like poison, a poison offering, kind as mercy killing.

  Loretto didn’t know whether to feel angry or grateful. She did feel exposed, humiliated, foolish to realize that this stranger knew more about her life, about Dewey, than Loretto herself did. The voice cut through Loretto, like a sharp bitter wind sweeping through her body. “Who is this?” demanded Loretto several times. “Who is this?” But what difference did it make who it was? It was the message that was important and Loretto knew instantly that it was true—hadn’t she noticed that the pieces of life always seem to fit together in this cruel way? The stranger hung up. Loretto had been upstairs folding the laundry. Outside there was a snowstorm. Large heavy flakes were falling, thick as white paint, coating everything, enveloping the house like a muffling shroud, shutting out air. Loretto hung up the phone and stood with her hand on the receiver. The house was silent as the storm. Within the whirling cone of white, Loretto felt her own insignificance.

  All afternoon, working around the house, Loretto kept hearing the voice on the phone. Not the words especially, but the texture of it, a kind of remote yet ostentatious concern, possibly sympathy. Which was something Loretto didn’t want. Not from a stranger. Not from anybody. But was it sympathy? If that person was so sympathetic, why would she even call Loretto? Guile. Phoniness. Mockery.

  The next day, Saturday, Loretto and Dewey got up around ten o’clock. Dewey stood at the window and read the thermometer.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t go jogging today,” he said. “It’s minus thirty and it looks like there’s a wind.”

  “You better go,” Loretto said. “You need the exercise. Just bundle up.”

  She sat on the living-room couch, watching him put on his wind pants, runners, jacket and wool hat, a pair of thick mittens.

  “Don’t hurry back,” she said. Moving to the window, she watched him run up the hill, jogging on the ploughed highway shoulder. If he did the full run, he’d be gone at least an hour. As soon as he disappeared over the top of the hill, Loretto got to work. She went into the bedroom, opened up the clothes closet, gathered Dewey’s shirts into her arms, carried them through the house, opened the front door and threw them out into the snow. Back in the bedroom, she collected his socks, underwear, slacks, jackets, ties and threw them outdoors too. She’d made several trips before the phone rang. It was Bev.

  “What’s going on over there, Loretto?” she asked. “What the heck are you doing?”

  “Oh, I just thought I’d air out Dewey’s clothes,” Loretto told her.

  There was a pause. “What’s the matter, Loretto? You sound angry.” Bev’s voice was quiet, worried, scared.

  “You tell me! You tell me why I’m angry! You seem to know more about what’s going on in my life than I do!”

  Another long pause. “It was only once, Loretto.”

  “Once! That’s not what I heard. Once what? Once a week? Once a day? I suppose I was babysitting your brats at the time!”

  “They’re not brats, Loretto. They’re nice children. Loretto, don’t do something rash.”

  “Why not? Why do I have to always be the reasonable one?”

  “You’re not reasonable, Loretto. You’re rigid. You drive people away with your perfectionism. People are human, Loretto.”

  “Don’t tell me what people are! I can see it for myself!”

  “You’re not an easy person to live with. Any man would have done what Dewey did.” Bev’s tone was calm, reasonable, patronizing. Loretto couldn’t stand it.

  “Shut up!” she shouted. “Shut your cheap face!” She hung up the phone and returned to her task. She went around the house, opening cupboards, opening drawers, collecting everything she could find of Dewey’s and throwing it outside. Toothbrush, shaving kit, shoe shine kit, hairbrush, deodorant, aftershave, soap-on-a-rope, throat lozenges, Swiss Army knife, brass shoehorn, cuff links, battery charger, alarm clock radio, stamp collection, baseball glove, baseball cap, baseball uniform, curling shoes, fishing rod and tackle, squash racket, ice skates, hockey stick, hockey puck, compass, walkman, textbooks and notepaper, pocketknife, pocket calculator, paperback novels, high school pennant, high school graduation photograph, framed photograph of his mother, coffee mug, favourite cereal, favourite cookies, auto and sports magazines, umbrella, wristwatch, camera, birth certificate, piggy bank, overcoat, galoshes, rubbers, rain slicker, records, sunglasses, jockstrap. By the end of the hour she’d torn apart every room in the house. The process left her feeling amplified, light-headed, dizzyingly objective, as though she were on some powerful drug, as though her body carried all this out automatically, without instructions from her brain.

  She went outside and locked the car, came back in, locked the front and back doors and all the windows. Then she stood in the living room watching for Dewey. She wanted to see the expression on his face. That was what she wanted more than anything right now. Soon he appeared over the hill, jogging at a steady pace, his head down. A moment later he caught sight of the house. He slowed down, stopped, then started up again, running faster than before. By this time the wind had carried some things off the lawn. Shirts and ties had blown out onto the highway. Magazines, study notes were over in the woods, snagged on branches. He stopped and picked up a tie from the road, looked at it dumbly like he was trying to read some difficult instructions written on it. His face was red from the wind. He waded through the deep snow to where Loretto was standing at the window.

  “Loretto, what the hell is this?” he shouted.

  “You think!” Loretto called through the window. “You think and maybe you’ll figure out what it’s about!”

  He went to the front door and tried it, then went back down onto the lawn and stood at the window again.

  “Loretto, unlock the door! Jesus Christ, Loretto, I’m freezing my goddamn ass off out here!” His face was turning blue. She could see he was shivering. She hoped he’d get hypothermia.

  “I’m glad,” she shouted. “That makes me happy! Because it’s just what you deserve!”

  He looked around, incredulous, his hands on his hips. “Fuck!” he said, and kicked the snow.


  “Bingo!” Loretto called through the window. “You guessed it. That’s what this is all about! It’s about fucking!”

  Loretto went into the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub. She heard Dewey at the back door, at the windows. She was afraid he might break one of them and get in that way. Her whole body was shaking. She bit hard on a knuckle to steady herself and tasted blood. Soon the sound of Dewey looking for a point of entry ceased. Returning to the living room, she saw him wading through the snow, gathering up whatever he could hold. Cars were passing on the highway, slowing down, driving over the things on the road. Some of them honked cheerfully. With his arms full, Dewey walked up the highway toward Bev’s house.

  * * *

  In the spring Loretto had to look at the things Dewey didn’t collect. The cereal and cookies, for instance, he left. The squirrels got those but the boxes remained. Other small heavy objects that had slipped down through the snow: engraved fountain pen, nail clipper, penknife, key chain, pinkie ring, wedding ring. In the spring the snow melted, revealing these memorabilia. By this time, though, Loretto was packing her bags. She’d found another place to live. She carried her things out to the car, tramping on the rings, the fountain pen, grinding them with pleasure into the moist heaving earth.

  Loretto moved into town. She got a job as a dispatcher for the taxi company. Its offices were just off Princess Street, behind the movie theatre, in a corner of the bus depot. It was busy there, with people arriving and departing all the time on the big wheezing Greyhound buses. From her corner desk, Loretto spoke into a microphone to the drivers out in their cars. She was the only woman employed by the taxi company. The owner said the drivers liked the domestic sound of a woman’s voice coming to them over their two-way radios.

  It was a pig sty in the office, at the desk where Loretto sat, where other dispatchers sat on other shifts. Grease and dust, cigar butts, cigarette ash. The filth reminded her of the farm. At first she tried to clean it up but gradually she got used to it. It wasn’t until she went home at night that she noticed the dirt under her own fingernails, the smell of cigar smoke on her clothes, in her hair. It formed a greasy film on her skin, like cooking fumes settling on a stove hood.

  People got used to seeing Loretto there, speaking into her microphone, looking out the window at Fink’s Hair Salon across the way. They waved at her when they passed by. People got to know her and they didn’t get to know her. Once a month Bev’s ex-husband, Gabriel, came into the office to collect his paycheque. He wouldn’t look at Loretto. When she contacted him over the radio, they talked to each other in a cold impersonal way as if they’d never been neighbours. Loretto guessed that Gabriel was angry with her for pushing things. If she hadn’t pushed things, he and Bev could have kept going along as they had been, and what was the matter with that?

  Loretto had begun to think she took too straightforward an approach to life, that she saw things too much in the black and white. The truth was that life used to make Loretto sick. The way people carried on. But what was the harm in what Bev and Dewey had done? If everybody was still happy while it was going on, what was the harm? What people didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. Maybe running around didn’t mean anything at all. It was all just surface stuff. Games. Perks. Little indulgences. Little white sins. Maybe a person had a right to them. Maybe life demanded it. Maybe there was no right or wrong. That’s what Bev used to say.

  Dewey changed. At least, Loretto heard he did. He became even slimmer, developed grey hair at his temples. She heard he was gentler and wiser now, nicer and more settled. Why couldn’t he have got that way sooner? He was admired and well liked in town as an honest, moderate police officer on his way up through the force. People seemed to have forgotten about the two affairs he’d had, but of course they hadn’t forgotten about the liver. Of course not. That story had passed into legend. At first it seemed incredible to Loretto that Dewey could command such respect in the community after the way he acted. He wasn’t fit to wear the uniform, as far as she was concerned. He made a joke out of the law. But as time passed, her thoughts on the subject changed.

  Now and again Loretto dreamed a dream about Dewey, and in it she was trying to help him pick up his clothes out of the snow and carry them back into the house. Loretto wondered if she was capable any more of throwing someone out in the snow. She wondered if she was still the same person who’d done that five years before. She hoped not. She couldn’t say why. She couldn’t say what it was she hoped she’d acquired. Tolerance, patience, forbearance, mercy. Or, on the other hand, pride, dignity, imperviousness. The ability to rise above the smallness of others.

  After the discovery of the affair between Bev and Dewey, Bev and Gabriel had stayed together for a while. But eventually Bev ran off, leaving Gabriel with the kids. Five years after Loretto and Dewey split up, Dewey got married to the town librarian. She was eight years older than he was and she had blonde hair falling in a classic page boy to her shoulders. When she heard about the marriage, Loretto went to the public library on a Saturday morning. She wanted to understand. She climbed the porch steps and passed between the fat, leafy columns into the pink sandstone building. She sat down in a window corner in the periodical section at a scarred mahogany table as big as a bed, within earshot of the circulation desk. She thought if she sat there long enough listening to this librarian talking on the phone, talking to the library patrons about their overdue books, their books on reserve, that she might begin to understand how a chic, educated woman like this could love Dewey. How they fit together. It was disturbing.

  She sat there for several hours in the brilliant sunshine, looking out the big windows at an empty school yard, at the dry, dusty, bleached streets, at petunias spilling from flower boxes in front of the Public Utilities building. She sat there with old liver-spotted men who read newspapers or dozed off with spittle foaming in the corners of their mouths. She listened to the librarian’s knifelike voice and still she did not understand. She did not understand but she could not make herself get up and leave. She felt sapped by the hot sunshine, weighed down by the thick dark table, by the stacks of brittle and yellowing newspapers, by the cumulative ages of these dry men with their papery skins.

  She listened to them snoring and to the noise of the photocopier whirring somewhere in the stacks until the librarian went out for lunch. Loretto heard her giving instructions to someone, a young assistant, and the sound of her heels clicking across the floor, ringing up into the pink dome, clattering down the stairs to the front door, which swung open, letting the din of the street traffic spill in. Only then could Loretto force her legs to move, swing them around slowly, slide off the chair, walk like a zombie to the front door and out into the yellow summer heat.

  The librarian had some money. She owned a house she’d inherited from her father. It was on a private peninsula with such a narrow neck that it was almost like an island sitting out in the wide river. Loretto had always wanted to live on an island. The big white house was visible from the bridge. Loretto sometimes drove across the bridge and saw it there among the trees, saw the stony bank and acres of mown grass. Sometimes she slowed down to get a better look at it, but invariably a car behind her would honk and she’d have to move on.

  At the taxi office, Loretto watched the travellers’ comings and goings. She looked out the window at the bright, windblown street. Sometimes she wondered about Bev, pictured her riding in a spacious car somewhere, floating over country roads with a strange and attractive man. Enjoying life. Doing what she pleased. Seeking moments of brief but intense happiness, moments of splendour. At times, Loretto felt a desire, a powerful need, to communicate with Bev, though of course this was impossible. No one knew where she was. Nevertheless, one summer afternoon during a quiet moment on the desk, Loretto drew a piece of stationery out of the drawer and picked up a pen. Dear Bev, she wrote.

  SUMMER SKY: WHITE SHIP

  I

  ON Saturdays and Sundays, as soon as the clock reads twelve noon, the
Kings begin to drink. Eric King, opening a beer in the kitchen, says to Anne, “You’re fat.” Anne wears a bikini and measures forty inches around the waist.

  “You wanted babies,” she says grimly, slapping cheese sandwiches together for the children, “so now you have a fat wife.” To console himself, Eric slips a hand inside the seat of her bikini.

  “Get lost,” she says. “The children will see.”

  “They wouldn’t know the difference,” says Eric.

  “They’ve got eyes. Anyway, this is my week off.”

  Eric glances at the calendar, suspicious. He can’t keep track of Anne’s cycle. “You said you had the curse last week,” he says resentfully.

  The Kings’ three children—all girls—are under the age of eight. Eric, aiming for a son, wanted at least one more child, but after an ectopic pregnancy, the doctor said another try might kill Anne. Eric thought it was worth the risk but finally gave in. “Well, all right,” he said grudgingly. “No more kids.”

  Eric’s concession to Anne for having the children in the first place was to let her name them. She has called them Jade and Desiré and Cassandra. After Eric has had a few beers, he gets the children’s names mixed up. He calls Jade Cassandra and Cassandra Desiré and Desiré Jade. It’s not that he doesn’t love them, he says, only that he can’t remember which is which.

  “How can you do that?” says Anne. “How can you confuse your own children?” She appears amused, but is not. The only time she smiles at Eric any more is when she’s mad at him. “If they were boys, you wouldn’t forget their names,” she says.

  Eric, reclining in swim trunks in a deck chair, scratches the hair on his stomach. “Jesus Christ,” he says stoically, and blows cigarette smoke out his nostrils. He is still slight and wiry, though there has been a perceptible slackening of his stomach and chest muscles. His reddish hair, which he grows long in the summer, the way he wore it when he met Anne ten years ago, hangs in his eyes.