Tilt - Alan Cumyn [26]
And then somehow he was telling her about Janine Igwash. He told her about the belt loop, about the invitation to the dance. About Janine’s mother.
“Breast cancer?” his mother said.
The cigarette was out now, squashed into a little plate she must have brought out. There were no ashtrays left in the house. She must have a pack, but Stan couldn’t see it anywhere. Only one stub and its ashes littered the plate.
Silence strung between them like the smoke. Stan rubbed his cold toes and waited.
“I had a boyfriend once whose mother had cancer,” she said finally.
“Really?”
It was the middle of the night and the normal rules of disengagement seemed suspended. He wanted to hear about that boyfriend.
“I was in university and he was a sergeant, I think.”
“What, a cop?” Stan said. His mother practically broke out in a rash whenever she saw policemen in the street.
“No, in the military.”
His mother, the pacifist, with a soldier? His mother who wanted all arms banned from —
“He was staring at me in a store. A liquor store. I was just old enough to buy my own booze and there was this older man — he was probably all of twenty-seven — with the darkest eyes. He looked like Omar Sharif. He wasn’t in uniform or anything. But you know a military man. You can see it in the way he holds himself. In his haircut, too, of course. But —”
“What was his name?” Stan felt like he was learning more about his mother in just a few minutes on this freezing back porch than in his whole life so far.
“I think it was Pete.”
“You think?”
She was talking about some guy she used to love — some guy she probably had sex with and still thought of all these years later — and she didn’t even remember his name?
“He stared at me across the wine rack. His eyes just . . . stared. Maybe I smiled at him. My face went baking scarlet. I remember that. Then when I was at the checkout he was right behind me. He smelled . . . like an animal. Like he wanted to bend me over the counter right there.”
It helped, maybe, that Stan could barely see her. He could feel her looking straight at him. This might be a dream.
“So what did you do?”
“Tuesdays, after sociology and before dinner at the dorm, I met him at his friend’s apartment about a twenty-minute walk from campus. The apartment hadn’t been cleaned in months and I was never sure about the sheets. Often we didn’t bother with sheets. He lived on base. I forget how he could get off for fifty-five minutes on Tuesday afternoons.”
“Fifty-five minutes?”
“Everything was precise. Except when the clothes came off.” She hesitated, and Stan could see that she’d been drinking wine, that most of the bottle on the table by the window was empty. She wasn’t drunk, but maybe she wouldn’t remember any of this in the morning?
“When his clothes came off he was more like a dancer. A really good dancer, as much an animal as an artist. His body . . .” She sighed, blew out as if she were still smoking. “We should all get to love a body like that at least once in our lives.”
“Weren’t you in university when you met Dad?” Stan asked. The question just slipped out, a product of the darkness, the hour. When she hesitated again — when she looked at him finally with her sad, sad eyes — he wished he could have taken the question back, reeled it out of the night air.
“It felt like . . . Tuesday afternoons, for fifty-five minutes, I got to be somebody else entirely. I didn’t have to talk. I didn’t have to wash. I didn’t have to . . . follow any of the natural laws of the universe. There was only . . . the law of desire. Everything else . . .”
The night seemed to have quietly drained her store of words.
“I would carry the taste of him,” she said finally. “On my body, in my clothes, on the edges of my fingers, for hours afterwards.”
She looked at Stan then, as if suddenly aware of what she was saying, of who they both were.
She had a Tuesday-afternoon lover the same time she was with the guy who was going to be her husband.
“You said his mother had cancer,” Stan said quickly.
“She was dying of it. I never met