Punctuating the Glory

Three in the bed the next morning, my husband turns to the right and then to the left and says he thinks we should show our guest a good time. It was my idea. I agree. 

Our guest is patient and kind, generous and beautiful. She has stepped in. Our deliberations last night, D’s eagerness, my burrowing into a pillow and hiding my face went on for at least forty-five minutes, and S played moderator for it all.

Yes, I am the hung-up one, though S is here because I have set this scene, which, it is undeniable, began with a rarefied, glamorous night: D in a bow tie and burgundy jacket, S in a black slip with a heavy ring dangling on a chain, me in a jumper and art object heels, three abreast, three in a row, discomfiting the introductions and later the seating arrangement at the party, scooping up steak tartare and brazenly asking for more toast at the bar, ordering drinks for each other: wine for D, rye for me, and for S a sweet, sweet cocktail called The Good Kisser. Who would know what to do with us?

As it turned out, I did not; though it seems that now in the morning light my powers might very well return to me. I get up on one elbow and smile over my husband at S. Three is still a crowd. But possibly, by making room for her, I have created the necessary space.

.  .  .  .  .  .

To begin with, I was home. Five weeks into the semester, and I had moved to Saskatoon for grad school, set up housekeeping in our brown camper van, read five assigned texts, discovered a local dumpling house, drafted a funding proposal, attended a literary evening with my advisor and most of my cohort, submitted my first paper and written my second, eaten wild blueberries from the farmers’ market, secured a TA position, familiarized myself with the etiquette of a new gym, become infatuated with the sculpture garden on campus, decided which cafés and parks we would go to when D visited, done homework in a laundromat, established the subject of my thesis, cooked chilli and quinoa on my little gas stove, chosen a preferred floor (the fifth) and study carrel in the library, reattached the mud flap on the baby truck I’d purchased to carry me back to Edmonton every other weekend, eaten Sunday dinner with the family in whose back driveway I was living, perfected my daily shower routine, written many beautiful emails to D, received a syllabus for the poetry class I was teaching in the winter semester, set up student health insurance, bought a school mug, and dropped out. 

D and I were premiering a film begun a year before I’d received the surprising email from the University of Saskatchewan in July. He had produced and directed; I had written it. My work had been finished for months already, but for the past several weeks, while I dabbled in graduate studies, D had been on his phone and laptop simultaneously for twelve hours a day, the creative job over, the secretarial job he hated still dragging on. But now it was the second week of October. The movie was about to air on CBC, and I had suggested we bring S to the party.

D had been dating S for three months. She was an actress; she understood. We felt privileged to have someone to share our pride in each other, our giddy relief that everything had come off. 

For a minute it had been touch and go. Only a few days earlier, while I was making my last drive back to Edmonton, D had been performing some minor forgery of insurance documents that had not come through from Toronto in time. He had shot some improvised scenes in public, and discovered at the last minute that we needed another level of liability coverage before we could put them on TV.  We could afford the coverage, D told me before I left Saskatoon; he just didn’t know how quickly he could get the paperwork back from out east, two hours ahead.

I drove with my phone propped up in front of me on the dash, vigilant, waiting for him to text or call and say that the CBC’s six o’clock deadline had been met. If they didn’t air the film, D would be miserable. He would believe he had wasted the past fourteen months. He would be physically ill. 

Six o’clock passed. Six-o-six passed. It was quarter past six. Sadness and dread began seeping into me like a wet spot on an upholstered seat. I stopped looking at my phone and started mentally composing a message to S, wondering how direct I could be. If things were going to end badly, D would need someone with him. 

When I looked again, at six twenty, there was D’s nonchalant text about how we would celebrate when I got in. As if it had never been a question that everything might not be fine. As if I had been ignoring an expected, innocuous message about ordering pizza for dinner later. As if I hadn’t been counting down every minute under my breath, willing time to slow down, playing chicken with the clock. 

I switched on the radio and rolled down my window. The combines were running in the fields. All the way to the horizon, both suspending and grounding, both holding and releasing all grasshoppers and women and vehicles, rising to meet a purple wash of rain in the north, blanketing the white oats and yellow wheat, a golden fog of chaff and dust hung in the air. The wind was thick. The smell was of boiling honey and corn cut off the cob. The setting sun flamed in the hairs on my arm. 

It seemed clear, if cliché, that there could be no better direction to drive than west, no better national media corporation than the CBC, no better place on earth than the prairies, no better truck than a Ford, no better husband than one who would forge a letter of creditable coverage, no better dog than the little black one I missed walking in the ravine, no better work than the work I had been doing in Edmonton, no better destination than home. I let my foot rest as heavily as it wanted on the gas pedal and headed for the Battlefords at 140. 

Beside each combine I passed, there was a loose huddle of pickup trucks, like mine but muddier, better broken-in, each surrounded by a few men. They would probably find me ridiculous, but as I passed each group, I lifted my hand in their direction. I didn’t need their approval. At the end of the day, we all knew where our work was. We were all small in the landscape. We all punctuated the glory. 

As D and S and I did last night. I’m sure more than a few of the wives speculated that S was stealing my personal and professional thunder, showing up with the two of us when she hadn’t worked on the movie, looking as good as she did. And waiting for D to bring her a plate of spanakopita and pulled pork and brie, hanging back in our co-director’s kitchen, which was full of people who knew D and me, checking her dark lipstick when she thought no one was looking, finally establishing herself on a little patio furniture throne outside. But I was proud of it. Who else had breezed in from another province just in time to join her husband and his girlfriend for a night of celebration, confident of her reception, settling cozily back into place after a month of making sure there was another woman around to do the entertaining? 

If anyone had asked, I would have said that what D and I wanted was a witness to our achievement, the triumph of our creative and domestic partnership. We wanted S, the younger artist, to get a taste of the privileges that were coming to her, to have the chance to be the perfect, promising young thing. We wanted to foster her sense of her own precocity. Youth is never glamorous to itself. We wanted to put her in a room where she would shine. We wanted to give her something we wished we had been given. We wanted to show off, and to be shown off. We wanted to go to an expensive bar after the party. We wanted to be generous. We wanted to do whatever we felt like in the comfort of our own home.

I was the one who invited her back to our apartment for fancy whiskey, appropriating D’s line on at least twelve or fifteen other occasions. I was the one who smirked as I took S’s green velvet coat in our narrow front hallway, and then, though perhaps it was premature to be undressing him, D’s suit jacket as well.

I was the one who put on the Weather Station record, the record I heard for the first time as I sat on the floor in D’s 99th street apartment wearing black tights and one of his shirts after the first time we fucked. The first time we fucked, I was exactly the age S is now. I was cheating on someone else; it felt pure and romantic; I shook the first time D touched me.  Desire was still the imposter, not the bed we made every morning and lay down together in and had, on many occasions now, invited other people into and by that very act reclaimed for ourselves.

The second time I entered D’s apartment, I stayed. Desire became a floor lamp, a kitchen table, a freshly cut key. There was still a parade of girls. D had a plate of candles, red and blue and green votives all melted together on the bedside table. I supplied the Irish whiskey. People thought I wasn’t getting anything out of it. But about half the time, I joined in. Our shared life became expansive. For seven years it had been the room in which everything happened.

Of course some things had changed. If there was no longer a parade, exactly, I didn’t miss it. D and I were becoming more involved in our respective work. We did projects together and on our own: a documentary, a play, ten or twelve music videos, a chapbook, two novels, the movie. There were long stretches with no other women. Before S, it had been nine months. But there was still our pride in maintaining a certain openness, elasticity, porosity.

Where was my pride last night when, twenty minutes in my own door, I was pleading exhaustion and an artist’s destabilized ego? When I convinced all three of us to have a sleepover, no sex, and see how we all felt in the morning? 

I was the one who had just lit a new, tobacco-scented candle and set it on the windowsill. I had supplied the Japanese whiskey.

D raised his eyebrows but agreed and S smiled warmly and insisted that I honour my own boundaries. I made a joke about not knowing how we were all going to fit into the bed. Of course I knew how we would fit. D got in as usual on the right, in his boxers; S borrowed a t-shirt and changed in the bathroom before slipping into the middle spot; and I crawled in last, and naked.

I really had wanted to go to Saskatoon. When I was offered the place in a program I had not applied to, in a discipline in which I was beginning to feel like an imposter, for a degree I had long since given up on earning, the decision was both utterly obvious and utterly free. Our friends were annoyed that we were not worried about our marriage. The notion that I would move to another city alone rattled them; perhaps it made them suspect that, thrust into the hands of similar good news, their spouses would not allow them the same freedom. Especially once, two weeks after I’d made my decision, S was suddenly on the scene, with my blessing. Embracing a new degree of independence seemed like the chance to realize one of our long-polished plans. D and I had always talked about the day when one of us would set up a secondary home in order to more purely pursue ambition or opportunity or the practice of art. I wanted to study again. I wanted to live up to my old professor’s expectations. I wanted to take up the place that, because of her recommendation, had so unexpectedly been offered to me. I wanted someone other than my husband to recognize my intelligence. I wanted to resurrect an image of myself that believed, when she was told, that she should try to publish her undergraduate thesis. I wanted to spend long evenings in the library, go to poetry readings, not think (for a season) about when D was coming home or who was going to cook dinner. I wanted to know at what times, precisely, the freight trains crossed the wooden bridge that would take me across the South Saskatchewan river to class. I wanted to prove I could live in a van. I wanted my own private, preferred barista. I wanted the euphoria of staying up all night to finish a paper, dropping it off at an eight o’clock class, and going home to sleep. And D also wanted all these things for me.

The program was not prestigious, but I believed I could make of it what I needed. And when it turned out I couldn’t, when I broke the news to D that I was lonely, that I had made a mistake, that I did not belong, there was no recrimination. I simply came home. I entered and stayed. And I was thrilled that things were going well between D and S, that he hadn’t been lonely while I was away, that he was happy to have me back, that I might now become friends with S, that we might get a chance to borrow each other’s books and cook breakfast together. 

She was so adorably localized, like a magnet. Her body seemed more individual than other bodies, a blessed object or a signed copy. Even in the midst of my awkward display of awkwardness, I liked being around her. When I moved in the bed, I could smell her perfume.We all said goodnight, a bit self-consciously, and then quieted to the business of going to sleep. 

Within three minutes, however, D’s snores began ripping through the dark. At first I lay stiff and still on his left, my whole body clenched to keep my hip and thigh on the mattress. S was silent on his other side, seemingly relaxed, a perfectly composed mound under the duvet. D snored on like a congested bear. What was hours felt like hours.

At three or four o’clock, we raised ourselves up on our elbows like a couple of synchronized swimmers. Our eyes met as a clotted noise erupted from D’s nose and open mouth, so loud it almost drowned out our twin fits of giggles. I patted the top of the dresser for my phone. The screen lit us both briefly: S’s big eyes still pristine with winged eyeliner and peeping up over D’s shoulder; D’s stubble, deltoids, full lips; my own clean face, doubtless puffy and pillow-creased, my bangs doubtless flipping up from my forehead. When S realized I was recording, she laughed even harder, curling her chin toward her hips, burrowing under the covers to muffle the sound. I grinned in the dark, keeping the hand holding my phone up, free of the rustling sheets. D turned and sighed. I sent the video to S and we both returned, diligently, to feigned sleep.

I dropped out the weekend I was planning to drive home anyway for the premiere, the weekend after I had my first thesis consultation with the novelist-professor who ran my program. I had an appointment in her office on Thursday afternoon. It wasn’t the office I expected. A brocade sofa took up most of the space in the foreground of the room, almost blocking off access to the standard-issue laminate desk, which was pushed up against the window. A menagerie of Venus flytraps ranged along the window sill, and a row of Fluvogs ranged along the radiator under it. I recognized a blue and red pair I’d been eyeing online all summer and was suddenly relieved I’d decided not to buy. A pink vinyl trench coat hung on a cast iron coat tree. An antique radio was playing reggae fusion. The song ended and a sleepy sounding male voice announced the time and the campus station call sign. It was exactly two o’clock. I knocked on the open door. 

Dr. L stood, one ankle dipping a little as she stepped around her desk to shake my hand. She waved at the sofa and told me I could put my sweater and bag anywhere. Coming into the room, I noticed a short shelf full of her own novels below a shelf of modern classics and a shelf of craft and theory. She was published by HarperCollins. I had no idea. 

But she was asking me how I was settling in to the semester. I sat down on the slippery sofa and told her how grateful I was for the extra work she and the administrative staff had gone to, getting me registered so late, how welcome I was being made to feel. It was true. Everyone from the second-year cohort to the secretary who dispensed the grad lounge keys had been nothing but kind to me. Dr. L asked about my thesis. Had I considered whether I’d prefer to work in prose or screenwriting? 

I launched into a summary of the novel I was already halfway through. Both characters and plot had deviated, almost continuously, from my original plan in the writing, and as I spoke I realized that I hadn’t kept anyone, not D, not anyone, apprised of the development of my main character and her sidekick. 

But even as my image of the story became clearer as I talked, I felt it becoming flatter and more lurid as well. A hole started opening up in the fabric. The more I described the world to Dr. L, the more I seemed to write my protagonist right out of it. The landscape became cramped, hostile, unmanageable. The figures seemed displaced. I started leaving out the details most crucial to me, as if to shield them from whatever transformation was making my work of the past year ridiculous in this ridiculous room. I had thought I held my story securely in my head, but here it was, dribbling away like Jello off a warm plate.

Dr. L loved it. She began talking excitedly about my protagonist’s “unusual” profession, which, as I’d feared, was upstaging every other aspect of the character in Dr. L’s mind. That was our angle, she told me, that was what we would use to spin the research grant, to pitch the novel as a kind of sociological study, to lure in agents. She began pulling books off her shelves and searching for other, half-remembered titles that might be in the university library, but would certainly be accessible to me through an inter-library loan. For a moment I was caught up in it, too, the idea of writing a trendy book, a book that would be talked about in The Globe and Mail, a book that would make money, a book that would cast me, the young author, as a riot grrl in tortoiseshell glasses. I left Dr. L’s office with a stack of books on personal loan and a sheet of perfectly circular memo paper, ripped from a round pad, with a list of books to hunt down.

By the next morning, Friday morning, things were disintegrating for real, though I was focused on worrying about D, on getting through the day and being on the road by five o’clock. I got up in the dark and packed up my laundry, and pulled the full bucket of grey water out from under the van and emptied it into the storm drain at the end of the block. I arrived at school as the fitness centre was opening. I worked out, showered, put on a dress and makeup so I would look nice when I arrived home in merely fourteen hours, and headed to the library. I found all the books on Dr. L’s list. I withdrew the ones on the shelves and requested the ones scattered in libraries across Saskatchewan. I answered emails. I ate my goldfish crackers. I finished the essay that wasn’t due for three weeks. I did my readings for my class on Monday. I ate my cashews. 

I got up to fill my water bottle. It was exactly noon. There was nothing else I needed to do. But the trip back to Edmonton was only five hours, including a pit stop, and D wasn’t expecting me until late. I loaded all of my newly undertaken, doomed novel research into my locker on the second floor of the Arts building, bought a coffee and a Boston cream donut, and sat down under the tree. The green space in the centre of campus, which everyone called The Bowl, was teeming. I’d been on campus every day for over a month, but I still found the undergraduates loud and confusing, all riding cruiser bikes, somehow; all in baggy, ugly, pastel clothes. I was getting one of those instant sugar headaches. I decided to go for a walk. 

It was painful, strolling the shady paths between the romantic old stone buildings. I wanted to feel excited, as I had the first morning of graduate orientation, with my new red thermos of coffee, my carefully cleaned summer shoes. I wanted to discover again the Science building with its local fossils, its reptiles and geodes, its tanks full of native plants. I wanted to sit under the tree I’d just left, that I’d felt compelled to leave, reading all afternoon. I wanted to wander into the newly renovated nursing building, where my Early Canadian Literature course met on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and discover a sunny stairwell to make my own. But I only had the undeniable feeling that I had outgrown the pageantry. Over the course of about twenty minutes, walking from Arts to the student union building on the far end of campus, I lost the last of my interest.

By the time I got back to Edmonton that night, I knew I wouldn’t be going back.

Even though, in the end, I lived in the van for five weeks instead of eight months, getting up early this morning to pee, rinse my mouth, and wash my face, our shadowy apartment felt as spacious as a hotel bathroom. Like a benevolent spirit, I toured around. My bare feet felt dry and light on the clean floors. I smirked at our jumble of shoes in the hallway, S’s strappy black heels perched on top of D’s boots and my platforms. A pair of Blundstones that could have belonged to any one of us was almost buried under the detritus of dressing up. 

It was only seven-thirty, too early to start clattering around, but in a few hours— I could picture us all together in the kitchen, Ranger underfoot, D dishing out compliments with careful symmetry, myself pouring thick, lumpy batter into the waffle iron, S pouring me a cup of coffee with that one big roller in her bangs that D had told me about. Turning our hips to avoid collisions when someone needed to open the oven at the same time that someone else needed to open the fridge. Setting the table. Vying for DJ. Deciding to make compote at the last minute.

I had a new message. At four-oh-two am, S had replied to my recording with a line of red hearts. For a few seconds, I teased myself with the idea of posting the video, letting everyone know she had stayed over.  Then I opened the file. The video was impressionistic, soft black with S’s squeals under D’s snores. My pillow-creased face was invisible, of course, and my smile was inaudible. In showing nothing, it seemed to show everything.

For the first time, I wondered exactly how often S had slept beside D while I was on my expensive, illustrious adventure. Abruptly, I wished that D was awake, that S had been the one snoring, that D and I had shared a small conspiracy, that the mirror image I’d seen in the dark had been my husband’s face and not his girlfriend’s. The wrong mirror is horrible.

I stopped in the bedroom doorway and studied the vista spreading out in front of me. The sunrise was burning in the window at the head of the bed. All the way to the foot, both seeding and polluting, both swaddling and aerating the man and woman and dog, rising to catch the orange band and falling to catch the blue band of that early winter sun, a fog of dust and mites and hair and tiny flakes of sleepers’ skin floated in the shaft of light. The duvet cover I sewed in the summer was rumpled. The smell was of the furnace turning on for the first time this year. The rising sun left me in the doorway in the dark. 

Ranger was curled around D and D was curled around S, his arm draped across her ribs and under her breasts. She was convincing, pretending to sleep. She looked comfortable. Perhaps she wasn’t pretending. Perhaps she was actually and blissfully asleep, encircled by arms that I in five years of marriage have never woken up in. What D and I value is our autonomy. That, and I am a restless sleeper. I prefer to sleep on my stomach, one leg flung out like a mangled crab, one arm under my pillow and one tucked into my crotch. D can only ever cuddle me for about three minutes before I lurch away into position, then drop off into a chaotic, demanding dream world that threatens to obliterate me, that leaves me washed up and confused every morning. 

D, grinning sleepily, not bothering to open his eyes, threw out a couple of limbs in my general direction. I walked over to the bed and lay down next to him. He reached for me. The back of his forearm slid over the front of my hip and onto the mattress. 

. . . . . 

A kind of shudder runs all over my body as D decides we should start up where we left off, better rested in the morning light, without heels or bras or watches to remove, without a stultifying conversation to kill the mood. He turns to the right and then to the left and says he thinks we should show our guest a good time.

Surely this is why I am naked, after all, up on one elbow, smiling benevolently at S. Surely D is, even half-asleep, simply picking up what I have been putting down. Surely this is my home, my own bedroom. 

Surely, the two of them are beautiful. As he turns to her and kisses her, their bodies begin to clench and unfurl like a time lapse of ferns. They are much more beautiful than D and I have ever been. I pull back to the edge of the mattress so as not to inhibit their movements, so as not to be in the way. He is behind her and almost under her, his hands under his blue t-shirt over her stomach and slipping in to her underwear. She is squirming. She is flushed. She is breathing quickly through her mouth like a child just about to wake up. Her back is arching and her eyes are opening and closing.

Now, with the sunrise brightening on his face, D looks angelic, unfallen; childishly satiated, primordially complete. Under his hand, S lifts her hips and presses her face into his chest. I feel a twinge of pride in the fact that I have orchestrated this. I feel a churn of arousal in my lower abdomen. I feel a gulp of tenderness in my throat, in my mouth. I really do want to spread myself out like a duvet cloud under them. I want to diffuse the light like a dust cloud around them. I want to watch them ascend, unencumbered, to the ceiling. It seems clear that there is no better thing to do than to catch them; no better one to be than the duvet cloud, the ceiling, the one to make coffee and revive them after it is all done.

Of course I can’t touch S. What has been easy, irresistible, with tens of other women is impossible here. For one thing I can’t move. But I can see everything. I am not curious. An aggression has left me, or perhaps become too strong. I have the impression that S will bruise if I stroke the inside of her elbow with my fingertip. I have the impression that she will burst like a raspberry in my mouth. No, I believe I will bruise. I will burst. I will seize up with cramps. I will become a hunched frozen lump, sinking through the middle of the bed. There will be nothing to hold me up. There will be nothing to keep the ceiling from coming down. D and S will be buried in the rubble. They will be crushed by my weight. Nevermind that I know my own female body to be elastic and resilient, glorying in its resiliency, begging for someone to slap my face, press their full weight on top of me, fuck me with a whole hand. All activities that seem impossible with S. I have the impression I am about to witness an entirely new and elevated form of sex.

Which must not be interfered with, or ruined, or delayed. Because now D is hard. More than that, he looks happy. His biceps jump as he moves over her body. And I can’t touch him. What could be inspiring now about my own pleasure? I only feel a desire to allow the two of them to perform what my husband and I have only imperfectly rehearsed. But D stops. He looks to the right and then the left. He groans gently, not unkindly, and says I look miserable.  He disentangles his body from S and sits up, trying to maneuver himself into a position that allows him to pull me up into his lap. 

And now there is a longing to return, to become once again a player in the scene, a member of the class, a small, honest figure in the field. Where is the field? Pushing my hand between my legs, I have only just realized how wet I am. Is there anything that can be done with this wetness?  I am curled in what can only be described as a fetal position, and my thighs, pressed together, are slippery. But my lips are dry. My jaw (as D reaches out to touch my face) is clenched and knotted. My teeth hurt. My skin (as D puts his hand on my back) is prickling with gooseflesh. D’s hand is so warm, and I am so cold. I am floating. I am thrown out into the night. I cannot locate myself in space. The kind (even, yes, still desiring) eyes throwing their beams come at me from a great distance. The field only exists for D, for S. I have carefully made it.

It is all very surprising. S, suddenly standing, looks down with maternal concern. She pulls on her slip as if her body might be distressing me. And yes, I am shaking, my leg juddering away at the end of the bed. And yes, all sense of reverie is gone. And no, D and S are not returning to their previously scheduled activities, though I still try to insist. And now it seems that something has fallen, collapsed. If I was the room, the page, the field, the sky, where do we find ourselves?  Where is desire? Where is the glory?

“Punctuating the Glory” appeared in The Sycamore Review 33.1.