An Imperfect Librarian - Elizabeth Murphy [56]
The two palm-sized beach rocks are in my pocket. I rub them between my fingers. “Goodnight, Elsa. See you tomorrow. Call before you come.”
The bellboy opens the hotel door and greets me.
I ask him if they have Internet access. The connection turns out to be slow but my message goes through anyway.
Norah, ...
just arrived in Oslo to take care of some personal
affairs...will be in Newfoundland late Monday
afternoon...I wanted to tell you...I’m sorry for not
trusting you...I miss you...I love you...
C...
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
mor, far, datter & sønn
THE TELEPHONE WAKES ME. IT’S not the woman in my dream. While Elsa talks, I check my email: eleven marketing penis-lengthening apparatus, fourteen offering an advanced degree without study, fifteen messages from Nigerian scam artists, twenty-one offers of cheap prescription drugs and one message from Norah.
Hello Carl,
You missed a spectacular fall at Cliffhead. Folio
injured herself. She was asking for you ;>) The tail of
Hurricane Juan ripped shingles off my roof. No damage
to books :>) I missed you too :>( If the snow holds off,
we can fit in a few beach bonfires. Lots to look forward
to :>I (That’s meant to represent a big smile).
Norahp
p. s. Tolerance of ambiguity helps in a relationship.
Elsa calls me from her car in the hotel parking lot. “I’m on my way to your room.”
I jump out of bed and put on my trousers. “No point. I’m just going out the door now.”
We meet in the squatty lobby of the hotel. She tells me the plan for the next forty-eight hours. I tell her that I want to see a lawyer about the divorce. She’s standing next to a couple from Germany, in front of the desk staff and not far from the man she left for another woman. She shouts: “You ask me, ‘Come back to you!’ For two years, ‘Come back to me, Elsa. Come back.’ Now you’re tired and you wake complaining, ‘I want a divorce. I want a divorce.’”
Everyone is staring at us. I turn to face the door. “Is your car out front, Elsa? We can talk there.”
She’s frozen in the middle of the lobby, playing the space like centre stage. She raises her hands to her face. “Talk about what? A divorce?”
The bellboy opens the door for me. “We’ll discuss it in the car, OK?”
It’s cold outside, even colder than in my basement flat during those sombre nights when I slept without the body of my wife beside me. Finally, she comes out of the hotel and unlocks the car. “Many couples separate for a period, resume the marriage later and it’s much better,” she says while she plays with the car keys in her lap.
“We’re not one of those many couples.”
“When I met Sophie, I thought she was what I needed.”
I take the keys from her lap to put them in the ignition. The sooner we start moving, the sooner I’ll see a lawyer, the sooner I see a lawyer, the closer I’ll be to–
“Then I realized I did not want to be with Sophie or with any woman. I wanted to be with my husband and...”
I turn to face her. “What?”
She looks out the windshield. “If we don’t have our children now it will be too late. I became forty this year. You’re fifty. How much longer can you wait? You don’t want to be seventy with a ten-year-old. We’ll make an excellent child together. Your dark colour. My fair colour. Our child will be unique. You’re well-educated. I’m a skilled athlete.”
“A well-educated, dark father? Is that what I represent for you? I don’t want children. I don’t want to be married to you. I can’t believe I was so naïve.”
It’s Saturday morning, not yet eleven o’clock and I have a headache. In Cliffhead, it’s even earlier but I bet the dogs have been up for a couple of hours. Norah is probably sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper and drinking coffee under the orange glow of the lamp. The horses have already been fed but the barn will need to be shovelled out. She might take a ride on Biblio as far as the pond to check on Ray’s traps. Maybe she