Oh, My Darling Read online

It was true. Last time, after a similar battle, they had tied all the pieces to the roof rack. But she knew there was no point now, in the midst of this Herculean struggle, explaining to Manfred not only that there was an easier way, but that they had discovered it years before. She went inside to watch the news.

  Later, in bed, she felt Manfred roll in beside her, his bearlike body curving to hold her slight one.

  “I tied them to the rack,” he said. “You were right.”

  The alarm rang at three in the morning. Leila made tea for the drive, pouring it into a Thermos. Manfred sat at the kitchen table, already in his jean jacket, staring at the backs of his hands, which rested on his knees. He had a handsome head of hair even now, thick salt-and-pepper curls that Leila had always loved to stroke. She thought he might have gone into a daze, but he looked up at her suddenly, brown eyes warm and awake.

  “I was thinking,” he said, “that we should be quiet so as not to wake Ilse. But of course she’s not here.”

  Ilse, their grown-up daughter, lived on the North Shore now with a family of her own.

  “I know.” Leila nodded. “And how many years has it been?”

  “Millions.”

  “Millions and millions. But we’re still whispering.”

  They had done this twice before. The first time had been to protest the purchase of two dolphins from SeaWorld in San Diego. The second was because of Bella’s baby, Chava. Bella was the beluga whale, and her birthing of Chava had been much heralded by the press and observed through glass by hundreds of schoolchildren. But after six days, Chava had died.Now Manfred was protesting the purchase of an orca from an aquarium in Nagoya. Kimalu had been caught off the coast of Iceland only three years before. It should, Manfred said, be reintroduced into the wild, not spend its days circling the tank, every now and then throwing itself into a back flip, getting fish handouts to cheers from the crowd.

  So it wasn’t new, Manfred’s use of the cage. Still, Leila could feel the excitement building in him as they drove through the voluptuous, darkened city. He sat with his chest lifted, his face calm yet alert. She shifted gears as she pulled off Georgia Street and into Stanley Park. They followed the path of the seawall, past the statue of Percy Williams, a Vancouver boy who broke the 100-metre-dash record in 1929, now frozen forever, balancing on one heel, fists pumping furiously.

  Manfred opened the window.

  “Oh, don’t,” Leila said. “It’s cold.”

  “I want to hear the tide.” He gestured toward the seawall.

  But the car was moving too swiftly for that, and in another moment Leila turned into the darkly treed parking lot of the aquarium.

  None of this was new, but still, the energy as the car engine cut away. No other cars in the lot, thank God. Just the moon, pouring its fierce liquidity over the rocks marking the parking space, illuminating the metal buttons of Manfred’s jean jacket.

  Manfred unbound the bungee cords and untied the ropes.

  “Stand on the other side.”

  For once they moved in sync. Manfred clambered onto the front of the van and lifted the top piece of the cage; Leila caught the other end and they lowered it onto the asphalt. Top, bottom, sides all came down silently.

  They carried the pieces to the plaza in front of the aquarium doors. It took only a moment to decide where to set it up: close to the doors, but far enough from the fountain that, should it become windy, Manfred wouldn’t get sprayed.

  Nothing but the beam of the moon, the sound of the occasional screw falling on the polished granite. They worked with such purity of zeal, Leila had to marvel. These moments were crucial: if they were stopped mid-set-up by a security attendant, the whole thing would come to nothing, and they would have to pack up and drive home, feeling ridiculous.

  “There.”

  Leila paused on her knees, where she had been searching for a lost screw, and Manfred gestured to the cage, bungee cords in hand. Yes, there it was. Fully erected. Roughly the size of a refrigerator. Moonlight shot a shadowed grille across the granite plaza.

  Leila sat on the lip of the fountain and poured out a cup of tea. Only a small sip for Manfred, or he would need to pee (he had a bottle for the purpose, but it was important not to over-hydrate). Out of solidarity, Leila took a smallish sip as well.

  Then Manfred, with his beautiful curling head of hair and warm, brown eyes and clever, embracing palms and enormous convictions about the rights of whales and dolphins and animals in general, Manfred came to her and encircled her body in a hug. Then he stepped into the cage, swinging the door closed with a click, and Leila padlocked him in.

  Leila drove back along the Stanley Park Causeway, past the fountain shooting bright shafts of water high into the air. The forest was darker than the sky—you could see the tops of the trees. In another half-hour it would be dawn. Then it would be Leila’s job to telephone the media, because Manfred refused to have a cell phone in the cage. She would read them Manfred’s carefully worded press statement. Better to reach the assignment editors as they arrived at six or just after, rather than speak to a reporter on the night desk who wouldn’t have the clout to break the story properly. That was Manfred’s plan. After that, Leila would shop at the market, and then go home and cook lunches and dinners for the next week, things she could transport easily in heated thermal containers.

  She imagined him as he must be right now, sitting in the cage, knees pulled up, wrapped in the brown blanket, his beard tucked under the edge. He would be alert to every sound. Then the dawn would come, illuminating what had been obscured: popcorn on the pink granite, a crust of bird shit on the edge of the fountain, popped remnants of balloons; and then at last, after what would feel like several days but was really only an hour, a car would pull up—the first of the media to have received Leila’s call: Kim Kozak from The Vancouver Sun, or Morrie Chazen from The Province, or maybe, if they were lucky, an entire BCTV camera crew. And Manfred would stretch, already so stiff (it hurt his arthritis, these bouts in the cage), yes, he would stretch slowly, in that unhurried way of his, giving each leg a shake, and then, at last, he would deliver his words of compassion for the innocents: for Nakita, the resident orca, and for Bella and the dead Chava, and for the three dolphins, Kelsie, Wanda and Finn. And for Kimalu, who awaited transfer this very moment, in a concrete holding tank in Nagoya.

  They had put the worst behind them: the difficult years when Manfred worked for Greenpeace and sometimes, for weeks on end, Leila didn’t know exactly where he was—in the South Pacific or the North Atlantic, or the Arctic, chasing after Japanese whalers harpooning minke whales, or blockading nuclear-armed aircraft carriers. There was a framed photograph on top of the piano, which Ramona, their granddaughter, pointed to whenever she came over. It showed Grandpa driving a Zodiac, dressed head to foot in a yellow life-suit, beads of ice in his beard. It made Ramona laugh, and then their daughter, Ilse, would scoop the girl up and say, “Don’t laugh, you little scallywag, can’t you see that Grandpa is working really hard to save the animals?”

  Manfred had been away for long periods. And then, when he was home, there had been all that conviction, which, let’s face it, could get wearing over time. Why did Manfred have to care so much? Didn’t he realize how hard it was for Leila at home, holding down a part-time job at the library, walking Ilse to school alone, eating dinner with Ilse, alone. She had been starved for adult companionship—a pervasive loneliness, which even now, years later, she could taste on the roof of her mouth; a feeling she had had at times, so hard to explain, that her skin, even, gave off a scent of deprivation, making people she might otherwise have been able to befriend (co-workers at the library, mothers in the playground) want to avoid her.

  On Manfred’s sea voyages there were girls. Tough German girls and furious American girls and solid Swedish girls, all of whom called themselves women. They had hair on their legs, tufts of underarm fur, and they went en
tirely without makeup. These were Manfred’s colleagues: together they hung banners off buildings, slept suspended in the rigging of the Lions Gate Bridge, or wrapped themselves in fish nets outside the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa, to protest deep-sea trawling.

  Leila knew everything that had happened. Secrets would have debased their marriage. And through it all, their marriage was the most impor-tant thing, remaining constant when around them, to the left and to the right, their friends’ relationships foundered in acrimony or ended in divorce. Still, campaigning had its own rhythm and logic, which wasn’t all that easy to explain, though Manfred did struggle, many times, to do just that, telling her that together he and Leila could transcend the container of convention, with its restrictive and arbitrary rules. His argument was powerful. He loved Leila hugely: loved her slender body and freckled skin and blue eyes; loved the way she clipped her long straight hair into a bun, using a tortoiseshell pin; how she leaned close to Ilse, whispering, as though they had a secret language. There was nobody as important as Leila, he said—but surely she knew that? So shouldn’t their marriage, grounded as it was in this knowledge, be capable of more than the stultifying norm? It seemed to Manfred that it should, and Leila, though she fought with him at first, found herself pulled like a dinghy in his wake.

  What all this meant, in stark terms, was that Manfred, after he had hung a banner, or been chained for eight hours to a log boom, or narrowly escaped having his Zodiac torpedoed, went back to the mother ship, the Rainbow Warrior, and drank beer and ate vegetarian dhal, and there was Gretl, with her skinny arms, or Nancy, who hated her mother, or Frieda, or Gudrun, or Sue—and of course he made love to them.

  (Though Manfred confessed he spent much of the time, after the sex, talking about Leila—his love and her inhibitions, and what a wonderful mother she was. How he could never, ever, get along without her. His captive heart.)

  “You could experiment too,” he had offered, and Leila, making a sublime effort, had initiated a couple of trysts. She had no trouble attracting lovers, as it turned out. But the men had not interested her deeply, and the sex had felt awkward and useless. It was Manfred whose body she understood: the smell of his chest hair, the feel of his callused fingers. Even now, when all that other stuff was over, she still felt, driving along Denman Street, the city beginning to wake up, that Manfred, in his cage, was the centre, the exact centre, of her life. She imagined a Renaissance fresco with many figures, in town squares and on mountaintops, but always at the focal point of each motif was the prophetic, bearlike figure of her husband.

  Driving the Zodiac.

  Kissing her pregnant belly.

  Taking Ilse into his arms for the first time. Weeping.

  And now, standing alert and ready for what the morning would bring: reporters, police, aquarium administrators.

  Once, lying in bed, she had asked him to tell her the name of every girl. She wasn’t sure why she wanted this. She was testing the limits of his truthfulness, perhaps, or her endurance. When he was done naming them, she had stared at the ceiling, picturing them not as people at all, not as girls or as women, but as an array of cunts: bushy red hair, black spare pelt, brown freckled lips—each vagina with its own scent, its own tautness and give. She had gone to the kitchen and made herself a peanut butter sandwich. As she stuck the knife into the jar she imagined being inside each girl, bearing down on her with an animal fury, pushing and forcing.

  Even when Manfred had seen the light, as he did in his fiftieth year, and even when he had sworn a vow of faithfulness to her, and been faithful, now, for seven years, still those cunts persisted, floating dimly in the back of her mind. No longer potent. No longer capable of making her fling a peanut butter sandwich across a room. Just blowsy and unproductive, like flowers of the field.

  She had made peace with them, she supposed as she turned under the Granville Bridge and headed toward the market. At last she had made peace with them. They could no longer harm her. Instead, they floated mutely at the back of her brain, like the sunspots of colour you get from gazing at a light bulb.

  At Granville Market, Leila got out of the van, stretched, then crossed to the square near the bread shop and sat on a bench. The main doors to the market had opened just minutes before. Already there was a bustle of vendors, trucks backing up and unloading boxes of cabbages, a florist setting out her bouquets beneath the corrugated awning. Now was the time for Leila to call the press, just as the first reporters arrived in their offices, poured their coffees, opened up their e-mails. She took out her cell phone. The numbers for The Vancouver Sun and the TV stations and the CBC radio newsroom were on her speed-dial. She was about to press the first button, when a bright commotion caught her eye. The three Ecuadorian men who so often played music in the square had just parked their pickup, and they were pulling a crinkly orange groundsheet from the back of the truck. She watched as they set up their equipment in front of the bakery, the man in the back handing down the drums first, and then the pipes and the synthesizer. Another fellow in a baseball cap ran an extension cord to a covered plug at the base of a pole.

  Soon Leila would enter the marketplace. She would walk past the dazzling arrays of flowers, the buds of roses, velvet petals ready to unfold. She would pick out the food for the week, then go home and cook Manfred’s favourites: goulash with egg noodles, moussaka and baklava, a lemon chiffon pie. At lunch she would beat her way past laughing schoolchildren and furious aquarium attendants to hand the thermal dishes to him through the bars of the cage.

  “It’s so delicious, Leila.” That was what he always said. Grateful, abashed almost, by these hot offerings, after his hours of privation.

  But for now the sun was about to touch the metal masts of the sailboats, torching them into flame, and all the masts were knocking together, making hollow tones like wind chimes. Seagulls cawed. And then, as though for her alone (vendors buzzed around her, but she was the only one sitting in the square), the Ecuadorian musicians began to play. Softly, tentatively, but then with gathering force, the air filled with the sound of their pipes, strange and ripe, a wordless song from a mountain pass Leila had never seen. And so she stayed exactly where she was, and listened.

  The War Between the Men and the Women

  It is 1968, and there is a war between the men and the women. Jane hears it on the radio, where for the first time women’s voices read the news; and she sees it at school, where her art teacher, Miss Hannah Shapiro, has started going bra-less, great wandering breasts shifting this way and that under soft denim; and there it is, on the bus: women travelling into Vancouver from the islands display gloms of hair beneath their arms.

  At home things are still as a knife blade. Jane’s father slices the ham, laying a piece on her plate, while her mother watches from her end of the table, wary and silent. Jane sits between them. She has the same foxy colouring as her father; the same sharp eyes and sandy lashes. She looks like a different race from her slender, bangled mother.

  The curtains block out the back of Hollyburn Mountain. The neighbourhood dogs have been called in. Children are at their homework, or television, or sitting down to eat, though most eat earlier, and few follow such perverse rituals: multicourse meals with salad, ham and vegetables, dessert. Sometimes there is even a cheese plate, her father patting veined slabs of Roquefort onto English crackers. And there is wine, on weekends a half-glass poured for Jane. Even before things get bad, Jane feels like a chained dog, wanting to run around the table, wolf her food, bite someone’s leg off. Anything to stop this nightly ordeal.

  The overhead light casts its glow.

  Her father’s pointed chin is hidden but not forgotten beneath a trim beard. He wears a flannel shirt, over which he has donned a sweater-vest. He never wants to turn the heat up. As for her mother, doling out the scalloped potatoes, the only trace of her subversion is in the colour of her hands. Tonight her skin has turned crimson, with Prussian blue in the veins.r />
  While Jane’s father has been teaching at the university, her mother has been in the shed dying cloth, coating it with wax, cracking the wax to let the dye seep through, and then hanging lengths from the clothesline, where they drip ruby blood onto the grass. Then she has showered, changed, applied makeup, listening for the rev of Jane’s father’s MG up the driveway.

  “Patrick,” she says now, “how was your lecture on Hannibal?”

  You can tell that he, Patrick Morris, has been waiting for this moment ever since getting home: just look at the need on his face. The martini and wine haven’t hurt either, causing a slow emanation of dissatisfaction, like gas released from a chasm in the earth.

  Yes, the students were the recipients of his annual lecture on the Second Punic War. No, they had not been inordinately impressed. They shuffled papers. They coughed. They asked the inane questions they always asked. He responded in Latin to flummox them, to make them feel the whip of his brain on their idiots’ flesh. He told them that everything—everything—would be on the test, even the quotes he dropped in class, and that the tests themselves would come out of nowhere, like hailstorms.

  “They have no conception of the challenges.”

  “I’m sure they don’t.” A murmur like a ripple in a stream.

  Jane would like to put a fork through his head.

  Tonight her mother, Gretchen, seems lighter than on other nights, less absorbed in the game, and Jane knows why. She has decided to enter one of her batiks in a juried craft show in North Vancouver. Now, as her mother nibbles the cheese-crusted potatoes, Jane can feel her mother carrying this knowledge like a bubble of mirth.

  “It was merely the greatest ambush in military history,” Jane’s father continues. “Hannibal crossing the Alps, rising out of the mist, surprising Flaminius at Lago Trasimeno. But do these students care? Half of them are on acid. The other half want classes to be held on the beach.”