“How are you
feeling?” he whispered.
“Wary,” she replied, slowly opening he eyes.
“Why?”
“I don’t know,”
Violet said, yawning as sweetly as a cat.
“I expect I was dreaming.”
“About being wary?”
Tom asked her.
“In my dreams, it’s
always a risky, unusable world,” Violet told him. “Things that were solid melt
and shift, and things that were soft and supple harden as solid as cement.”
“Well it is like that. And not just in your dreams either. You know what I was just thinking
about? That big crazy girl I told
you about on the subway, the one with the cake and the stupid dog.
“That’s odd,” she
said, rubbing her eyes. “What time
is it?”
“Four.”
“The witching hour,”
smiled Violet.
“Listen,” he told
her, “I don’t believe in witching hours.”
“Oh, well, actually either
do I,” she said, snuggling back down into her pillow.
“Let’s make love,” he said. “Sweetly and gently. Lovely, sleepy sex, dear Violet. Won’t that make things less risky and shifty and unstable?”
“Let’s make love,” he said. “Sweetly and gently. Lovely, sleepy sex, dear Violet. Won’t that make things less risky and shifty and unstable?”
“Maybe,” she said.
He took her gently in
his arms. A siren hurled by two
streets away. Three dogs began
barking, all of them quite near the house.
“I like it when you
hold me before we make love”, she tells him.
“I thought women
liked to be held afterwards.”
“Yes, that too.”
Her belly ripples
slightly as he moves his hand down to the soft triangle of hair between her
legs, spindrift, he
thinks, unable to remember where he’d read the word, but just liking the sound
of it for her there. It was
something about sailing, or about the sea. She sighs and opens her legs a little.
He is hard and it
always feels so great, so expansive, to be hard. He lifts his stiff cock from his jockey shorts and bends it
over against her public hair, holding it there—an arrangement, a configuration
in erotic space, the archetypal figure-ground projection. He suddenly notices how quiet it is now
in the bedroom and in the house itself and in the neighbourhood. And in the city. Who knows, he thinks, how far this
plush silence extends?
“Sometimes it’s
thicker, and that’s so nice”, she says, gazing up at him. “And then sometimes it’s longer.”
“Not so nice?” he
asks her.
“No, that’s nice
too”, she tells him.
He’s
grateful. He’s also a bit
relieved. But there’s a rind of
worry, just a rough little edge of something unquiet and unresolved, starting
up in his head.
“Did you turn the
furnace down?” Violet asks him.
He gets out of
bed. He likes to be useful. He likes to be active. He likes to do what needs to be done. He goes downstairs. Violet returns to sleep.
Three days later,
they are having Sunday morning Dim Sum at The Noble Restaurant, their favourite
Cantonese restaurant, on Dundas Street West near Spadina.
They have finished
the first four sevenths of their Dim Sum selection when the waitress deftly
adds the final three dishes to their table—three puffy, barbecued pork
buns—like hot snowballs, three little deep-fried bars of tofu (each surmounted
by a pink, hat-like mastication of mashed shrimp), slices of turnip cake, and a
spiky dish of flash-fried squid tentacles, Violet’s favourite.
Tom spears a slab of
turnip cake and saws it in half with his chopsticks. He loves turnip cake.
“You know,” he says
to Violet—who detests turnip cake—“I bet these bacon bits sprinkled all through
this stuff come out of a bottle.”
“I’m sure of it,” she
says.
Then they begin
talking again about having children.
“For one thing, they
cry all the time”, says Tom, lifting a pork bun out of its bamboo steamer and
onto his plate.
“They only cry if
there’s something wrong.”
“There’s always something wrong”.
“Oh that’s not true”,
Violet says, more defensively than she really meant to be.
They eat in silence.
“There are always
lots of parents with children here,” Violet observes at last, glancing around
at their fellow diners. She waves
at a Chinese boy who looks to be about three, and he enthusiastically waves
back. It makes her feel warm and
cozy.
“Isn’t he cute?” she
asks Tom.
“Who?”
“The little boy over
there in the turquoise sweater”.
“Ummm,” he says,
absently chewing on a squid tentacle.
Violet waves again. This
time the boy doesn’t notice. She
is crestfallen.
Just then a couple
seats themselves at a table opposite their table, against the far wall. They have two children, a girl about
five and a toddler of some indefinite toddler age, but old enough to require
packing upright into a highchair.
Violet is expecting the young man and his wife to go on adjusting their
children when, much to her amazement, the husband suddenly leaves off with the
kiddos and, walking around to his wife’s side of the table, plants a long,
solid kiss on her forehead. Prim
feels something akin to shock.
What is it? The specificity
of the act? Its deliberation?
Tom notices too.
“Now there’s a good marriage!” he says. He means it more or less as a joke.
“Yes,” Violet
agrees. And she feels like
weeping.
