Everybody Has Everything

THE NEXT MARCH



A year later, Ana watched James through the kitchen window, open for the first time in months. He looked medium. His brown hair had thinned at the top of his head to reveal a little gleaming planet that hoped not to be discovered. When he turned sideways, the silhouette of a small belly emerged from his untucked shirt, surprising her.

Ana rapped on the window. James waved. She pointed to her wristwatch. He nodded.

Months before, in winter, old clay pipes had cracked in the depths beneath the back lawn. In the basement, Ana had discovered shreds of toilet paper and purple-black sludge coating the drain next to the washing machine. James had handled it, which meant that when Ana came home from work the next afternoon, there were three men in her frozen, broken yard, and James, too, each of them drinking beers out of the bottle. James had gloves on; the men did not. One was Romanian and two Italian, though they considered themselves Sicilian, really, James informed her later, in the bathroom, his mouth filled with toothpaste. The tinier the country, the more divided, James noted. (Ana thought: What about Andorra? But she didn’t say it out loud.) He prided himself on always knowing something significant about everyone within eleven minutes of introductions.

The pipes had been replaced, but the yard remained ripped apart. James and Ana had decided to leave it until spring, and now it was spring and James stood in the very centre of the frozen lawn like a spoon in a bowl of hardened pudding, with two rolls of sod at his feet. James knew a little about gardening – he had interviewed some organic farmers in California who discovered ammonium sulphate in their fertilizer – but not enough to save the lawn.

Ana surveyed the kitchen. The risotto ingredients were lined up in small ceramic bowls as if waiting for a cooking show close-up. Ana wore an apron James had sewn years ago in his high school home economics class: Wok With James, it said in black iron-on letters across the chest, a reference to a TV show Ana had never seen.

James slammed the back door, letting in a gust of cool air.

“How can you not be wearing a coat?” asked Ana.

He leaned over her three-ring binder, reading the recipe in its plastic sleeve.

“This looks great.” Then: “I’m not cold. That apron is still f*cking hilarious.”

He plugged his iPod in to the dock in the next room and returned mid-sentence, speaking over the music, telling Ana about the band, which included a tuba player. This enthusiasm reminded Ana of a time during their courtship when James would arrive at her apartment in the middle of the night – three or four a.m – just as the black crust of the sky was breaking. He had a key by then, and wouldn’t wake her, but would stand for a moment at the side of Ana’s bed. She would press her eyelids closed, feigning sleep. After a few minutes of heavy breathing, if he was still there, she would open her eyes. James never went out at night in those days without the paramedic’s shirt he’d bought at a second-hand store in Kensington market. It had blue crosses on the shoulders and a polyester sheen made day-glo by James’s sweat.

“How did it go?” Ana would ask, watching him vibrating with eagerness to tell her what had happened to him and what she had missed with her early hours, her morning-person status.

“Excellent,” he’d grin, his tongue broad with drink. “I got right to the front around midnight.”

James wore the shirt so he could cut through the crowd, calling: “Excuse me, excuse me! Paramedic coming through! Medical! Injured woman!” He did this when the lights were low, timing it perfectly so the music was just beginning, and the crowd was distracted but not drunk enough to be ugly. Oh, man, it was miraculous: the fans parted for this compassionate professional.

Ana was charmed when she heard the story the first time, and laughed. But later, she came to identify the gag as a piece of a bigger problem. James got older, but the great sense of entitlement stayed around: his stacks of unpaid parking tickets; his clear conscience over buying a shirt, wearing it, and then returning to the store a day later. He had many theories, rationalizations about Dada and culture jamming and upending a system that was inherently disadvantageous to … well, not him, maybe, but people who didn’t even recognize they were disadvantaged. Somehow, it was his duty to get the best of the world. After a while, Ana tuned out that particular strain of James, the yammering of the kid from the suburbs justifying why his hand was reaching for the last piece of cake.

But back in the beginning, it intoxicated her to be with someone who handled everything, everyone. This was new to Ana, who had paid her mother’s bills at nine, worked after school at the donut shop at thirteen, wiping the drink fridge clean of broken juice-bottle shards and bugs entombed in gelatinous substances.

In the beginning, she wanted to curl up inside James’s certainty. She loved him, she loved him, and how he fell into bed next to her those late nights. His slick skin, sweat and beer. The lean muscle of his thigh flung open on the sheets. She pulled him closer in his paramedic shirt.

From the window, Ana watched James outside in the yard. He stared up at the darkening sky, which was much too light for stars. But she took note of the fact that he looked anyway. He was hopeful. She felt something shift inside of her, as if, to make room for all this love, she would have to rearrange her insides. James was gigantic that way. When she wanted him, she wanted all of him. When she didn’t, he felt murderous, unstoppable. A superhero gone mad on a busy downtown street. It had been a while, Ana realized, since she had experienced the scope of her love.


Not wanting to linger on this absence, she turned to her vegetables. While James showered, Ana walked through the house, placing small glass pots of candles on the mantle, on ledges. She turned down the lights, put a single blood-red Gerbera in a white vase in the centre of the table. Her hand moved across the placemats and linen napkins. In the living room, as she half-lowered the blinds, a man walked by, his hair softly blowing, his spine curved, hands in pockets. He looked up, and their eyes locked. Ana marvelled that while he was a grown man, he was still far too young for her to romance, to have sex with, even to know. At thirty-nine, she was too old not just for boys but for full-fledged adults. A male temp at work had called her “ma’am” the other day.

But Ana knew also how she looked through the window: “good for her age.” Attempting a moment of private flipness, she thought: My body has not been ruined by childbirth. She savoured it, then abandoned the thought as too cruel.

Ana turned her head to a flattering angle, but when she glanced sideways, the man had already walked on. All she could see was concrete, and an old oak tree that threw moving shadows across the line of parked cars.


The baby was in a blue checked sling across Sarah’s body like something worn by a contestant in a beauty pageant.

“Hands-free,” Sarah joked, waving her glass of wine. The baby nursed covertly. Only the extra crescent of Sarah’s pale chest peeking out of the sling confirmed to everyone in the room that there was a naked breast close by, and a mouth upon it. Each discomfort provoked by this was unique to its owner.

It had grown late, but Ana did not want them to leave. These dinners, which Sarah and Marcus protested over in the beginning, had become regular Friday night gatherings, always at Ana and James’s house, with the excuse that they were all working together to break Sarah’s maternal isolation. Sarah complained about the “mommy circuit,” as she called it. She liked to mock the neighbourhood mothers with their fear of strangling stroller straps and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and uneducational toys. They bored her. She described a kind of narrowing that happens to women when they have children, a trivializing. Ana listened, rapt, to the traveller returned with her tales. She had a colleague, Elspeth, with secret children. She hid them away from the men in the firm, like Jews in attics. Occasionally she confided in Ana, usually when complaining about the nannies.

But the mothers Sarah knew existed entirely in public. They met in the daylight in coffee shops and at drop-in centres, speaking of nothing but their children. They had left their jobs and were shrinking, hunkering down, backing into their stalls. At first, during these litanies, James cast concerned glances at Ana that she could feel, though she refused to meet his eye.

“I like it,” she told him later. “Sarah knows about us. I like that she doesn’t treat me like an outsider.” And so he was relieved to be able to enjoy it, too, this refracted life that might have been theirs (that might still be theirs, she reminded herself).

Tonight, Marcus and James were talking about Jesus. James had recently finished a segment for his show about a new church that gathered in movie theatres downtown. James was bulimic when in possession of fresh information; as soon as it came in, it had to come out.

“Jesus is back in vogue. These kids relate to Jesus like he’s straight out of Japanese anime.”

“Yes, but at the end of the day, you have to see it as completely fictional, right? You can enjoy the fairy tale, but it’s sad, isn’t it, to see grown people subscribing?” asked Marcus, in his question mark-inflected way. James’s own sentences were stubby and leached of doubt.

“And dangerous,” added Sarah. “I had a horrible incident in my class just before the baby. I was hugely pregnant and I actually told a student: ‘You can wear your hijab in here, but know that it changes nothing about your fate.’ ”

“Wow,” said Ana. James laughed, slapping his knee.

“I was so hormonal!” said Sarah. “But this girl is impudent, truly. She’s a total bitch. She makes fun of nerds.”

“Is she popular?” asked Ana. These were the only terms through which she could understand high school: popular and unpopular. When her mother had settled them down long enough, Ana had often been popular, and guilty for it.

Sarah didn’t answer, because James had moved in to the space. “Diehard secularism is just as dangerous as institutionalized religion.” Ana knew this speech. “Secularism becomes religious, then you have Stalinism, all the iconography of religious faith in a secular package.”

“What are you saying?” Marcus was smiling, always smiling. This placidity was broken only by a small, angry scar below his lower lip in the shape of check-mark, a hint of past violence. He seemed to take great pleasure in James, which surprised Ana, and was a relief to her, too. James’s verbal girth had become less appealing to people over the years. Ana didn’t say this to Sarah. She didn’t want to draw attention to her petty worries. She was sure that the smallness of her inner life would appall Sarah, that this was not how Sarah wanted to think of her new friends. She often got Ana to talk about her life with her mother, her itinerant upbringing amongst the downtown artists and drunks. These stories made Sarah red with excitement, and they woke up Ana, too. She felt breathless sometimes to talk about herself in this way, as if she were recounting the racy chapters in a book she had read. But there were details Ana would not share, because she knew they would sour the bohemian fantasy. She didn’t tell Sarah about the famous blues musician who breathed cigarette smoke onto her hair and ran a finger under the collar of her sweatshirt when she was eleven years old, stopping there only because her mother entered the kitchen. That time, her mother did something: she slapped his hand away. A week later, they moved again.

“We need to take it back to Jesus,” said James.

“You propose living by Jesus’s doctrine?” asked Marcus.

“Well, I mean, I can’t, but even people who reject Christianity dig Jesus. Who’s not down with Jesus?”

Sarah shifted and unstuck the baby, who emerged endlessly out of the sling. A magician pulling a toy snake out of a hat.

“He’s a long guy,” said James.

Finn made a hissing sound, then burped. Sarah patted his back, and he flopped over her shoulder. James saw the baby’s reflection in the living room window, his head bobbing. He looked like Casper the Friendly Ghost, this bald kid. James wondered if anyone would be offended if he made this observation out loud. Marcus was easygoing, but it was hard to know for sure; the women were the ones bonding in this foursome. They went for lunch when James was on the road for work. What did they talk about? James tried to imagine Ana talking about him, their sex life, his balding head.

James wondered if Marcus possessed a less genial side. He couldn’t figure out where to place him yet, if he should invite him to shinny or take him to a lecture. He couldn’t quite see a future with Marcus in it. Marcus did not smoke.

“Does anyone want to hold him? I’m pretending to ask politely, but I’m actually begging,” said Sarah.

“I will.” James rarely saw his nephew and nieces, though they lived only a half-hour from his home. Holding his nephew as a baby, he had felt that he was holding a mewing, grotesquely small version of his brother. He kept expecting the baby to sit up and say: “So, Jimmy. I made an awesome trade today! Markets are up!” The boy bucked and twisted in his arms. But when held by his mother, as if to make a point, he softened, even cooed. This had seemed to James to indicate a future mean streak. He had kept his distance since.

But Finn was more of a public concern. Happy in all arms, he seemed to belong to everyone. He sat propped in James’s lap, facing outward with his legs straight in front, shaking a plastic cup. “Ba,” he said. “Babababa.”

“Exactly,” said James.

James had developed an unspoken narrative in which he and Finn had a special bond. He did not tell Ana how it made him feel, this warm bag of socks over his shoulder, the pleasure he got when Finn moved his penny-shaped mouth.

He was certain that Ana was still heartbroken, as sick inside now as after the third miscarriage, when she vanished for four days, leaving only one voicemail. She returned in the same clothes she left in, walked past James in the foyer, and straight into the shower. While she showered, James looked in her purse and found nothing, until, at the bottom, his fingertips touched a layer of sand. Sand! She had driven all the way to Lake Superior, she finally told him, her hair wrapped in a white bath sheet, seated on the edge of the white duvet. She had gone to see the rock in the shape of the old woman, and she’d slept in a motel with a sanitation sash across the toilet and a hundred channels. Those were the details she shared.

She felt better, she told him, and she was sorry.

James stood outside the door to the bathroom as she showered, wondering if he should get angry, wondering if this great writhing hatred within was visible to her. He did not want to find out, so he brought her tea, rubbed her back as she fell asleep on the new sheets he’d bought to replace the ones she’d bled into, the ones onto which she had leaked their lost child.


James watched her now, carrying in an apple-green lacquered Asian serving tray with a pot of decaf coffee, four mugs. Finn giggled while Ana poured the coffee.

“Oh, Ana, it’s always perfect here,” said Sarah, leaning back with her coffee, one hand stroking a forest green silk throw cushion.

“It really is great,” said Marcus. “It’s like a hotel.”

“Tell me about work. Tell me about the crazies,” said Sarah.

Ana pictured Christian. He was junior but she had worked with him on several cases, most recently researching a one-off on a patent infringement. He appeared at her office door far too often, breaking the silence of the fifteenth floor with its neck-bowed research lawyers clicking away. Christian brought with him his litigator chatter, his unmet high-fives and golf scores.

Ana described how Christian insisted on using a billfold instead of a wallet, and the way he demonstrated this characteristic constantly. He played off the partners’ vanities, researching their past successes and bringing them up in meetings, wide-eyed: “Oh, wow, I studied that case in first year. You killed! Oh wow!” And the men above her adored it. Even as they shushed him for his obviousness, their bodies inflated before her eyes, their cheeks reddened with pride.

Ana was surrounded by men all day, and had been for years, but she didn’t understand them, really, their shimmery foreheads, their noise, their presumption.

Sarah listened, asked Ana questions that no one else asked her about intellectual property. “What’s the infringement?”

“Oh – it’s nothing. It’s a tech company suing another tech company over storage device interfaces.” Sarah nodded lightly, her mouth pursed in listening. “I give the opinion. They ask for it, I give it.”

The men drifted off into a separate conversation about hockey. James talked from down on the rug with Finn, who attempted to pull himself along the edge of the coffee table. Every few minutes, James would grab him and making farting sounds on the baby’s belly, and the boy squealed with delight.

Ana’s certainty that she was dull was offset by the wine, which had the effect of speeding her up. So she told Sarah how there was a new young temp on her floor, a meek young woman merging documents for special projects.

“Special projects!” said Sarah. “I love that. Makes me think of birthday parties for handicapped people.”

This girl, Ruth, was off-putting. She hovered with a half-smile, hoping someone would talk to her. The other day, her cardigan was buttoned wrong, and it dangled lopsided off her torso.

“I didn’t know if I should pull her aside and tell her.”

“What did you do?” Sarah asked. “I know what I’d do.” (Only later did this aside come back to Ana. In the night, she jolted awake: What would Sarah do? Why does she know so easily?)

“I did tell her, but late in the day. Around three. She was mortified, too, and since then, she’s seemed kind of angry with me. She walked right by me yesterday, and not even the office nod.”

“That’s f*cked,” said James. Ana startled. She hadn’t known he was listening.

“Is it? She’s the youngest woman on our floor, she’s not even a lawyer, and I criticize how she looks. Doesn’t that affirm a certain currency for her?” Ana frowned. “Maybe I did it because I’m threatened.”

“But you were trying to help her,” said Marcus.

“But I only drew attention to her. I didn’t help.”

No one said anything, and in that silence, Finn grew frustrated, unable to walk more than a few steps along the coffee table without falling. He sputtered: “Bababa! Ba!”

“Oh no!” said James, grabbing Finn under the armpits, jokingly waving the baby back and forth between his parents. “Who loves me more? Who loves me more?”

“Here,” said Sarah, stepping forward, blocking Marcus with her body. Ana tried to find Marcus’s face, offer a small smile to diffuse the puff of humiliation in the air, but he was looking to the side and Ana was stuck with it, this unreceived grin.

A stuffed bear and several blankets were gathered, the baby placed inside his jacket, all with great efficiency. Ana offered a Tupperware container of leftovers, which Sarah at first resisted, and then slipped into the bottom of the stroller.

At the foot of Ana and James’s walk, a group of young people appeared out of the darkness, the girls with bare legs and metallic purses. Cell phones bulged from the boys’ hip pockets. Their loud directionless voices criss-crossed one another.

The two couples watched them from the porch.

“It’s nice that there are still students around here,” said Sarah.

“Except they don’t know when to take out the garbage,” said Ana.

“And they play their shit music all night,” said James.

“If it was better music, would you mind?” asked Marcus, laughing.

“It doesn’t even have words,” said James.

“Jazz doesn’t have words,” said Ana.

Marcus lifted the stroller with Finn tucked inside, moving down the path toward the sidewalk. Sarah followed him. The students remained, their talking elevated to yelling. They did not move to make way.

“Right on!” shouted a boy, pocketing his phone. It was a signal to go; plans had been made. They passed through Sarah and Marcus and the baby like ghosts walking through walls.

Marcus put his hands up to his shoulders, palms out and shrugged.

Sarah and Marcus waved as they walked away, pushing the stroller, calling thank-yous behind them as Ana and James stood on the porch, James’s arm protectively around his wife, wondering if anyone else had noticed that Ana had never once held the baby.



Ana checked her watch, rubbed the silver chain link between her fingers as she walked. She passed the smoky glass of Ki, glancing at its leather banquettes and ceiling of long, narrow lamps dangling like shining knives. She recognized a group of associates, Christian at the centre. Usually they waited until after work. But she sensed in these younger ones a retro dream, a wish to return to the three-martini lunches and sharp suits of the old days. The corporate credit card that Ana kept tucked behind her drivers’ license, unused, was at the front of their wallets, ready for the draw.

She went farther than usual, away from Bay Street, rejecting the subterranean food courts, past the high-end sushi restaurant where the counter was surrounded by a river, and the sashimi rode past in a little boat, and you could reach out your hand and pluck whatever you wanted.

Off of King Street, on a quieter one-way street crowded with delivery vans and bicycle couriers, a man approached. Noting his tank top, Ana thought: “Is it that warm out today?” But then she saw that he was muttering to himself, his face covered in deep, bloody acne, his fingernails running up and down his arm like he was doing scales. She tried to decide which way to go, and bobbed and weaved. He mirrored her and then stopped abruptly, face-to-face, smelling like urine. He shot her a f*ck-you look.

Ana pulled her coat tight around her, and walked away quickly. She felt the man’s eyes on her back, watching her like she was a celebrity. She turned into the next restaurant she saw, a sushi place with a ring of half-dead Christmas lights around the window. As soon as she set foot inside, she knew it was a bad idea. The room was almost empty; only a couple of teen-agers, possibly cutting school (undiscriminating diners; cheap), sat together in the window. A smell overwhelmed her, something chemical, treacherous. A waitress swarmed her with unidentifiable Asian chatter, ushered her to a table with a hand on Ana’s back. Ana found herself seated in a booth, looking at a greasy menu, a dollop of something red crusted to the centre of the photograph of a Hockey Sushi Box.

Ana tried to relax. She liked her lunch hour, waited for its arrival, mourned its conclusion. Most people in her office didn’t take lunch. They ate out of Styrofoam boxes at their desks. But Ana went out a few days a week, speaking to no one, revelling in anonymity. Often she would stop at the kitchen store or the storage store and peruse the towers of large plastic containers. She sometimes bought something small, the Portofino Office Storage Box in olive, with the faux-leather grained top. She had a stack of these boxes in different sizes and colours – chocolate, cranberry, pastel floral – in a wedding cake shape on a shelf next to her desk at work. Sometimes, while on the phone with other lawyers, she surprised herself by noticing that as she talked, she was stroking the boxes, so beautiful she couldn’t bear to put anything inside them.

In the sushi restaurant, she pulled out an old issue of the New Yorker that Sarah had dug out for her. She was halfway through the story on Raymond Carver and his editor that Sarah had insisted she read, saying, “Oh, Ana, you would love this.” But as she read about Carver, too drunk to notice his editor thieving his words, she couldn’t fathom why Sarah had recommended it. She often seemed to hold an image of Ana that was entirely foreign to Ana’s own conception of herself. Sarah had told Ana when they first met that she thought Ana looked like a figure skater. Even James had no idea what this meant.

But Ana couldn’t concentrate on the story. She was pulled back to the meeting of the previous evening, and the blonde, quivering woman in the Chinese slippers who had told them she would “set things in motion.” Uncharacteristically, James had arranged the meeting, calling people who knew people for recommendations and booking the appointment. Ana rushed to be on time after a long meeting and met him outside the agency doors. She was still red-faced from her sprint when she learned that yes, they were good candidates for international adoption. The white woman in the Chinese slippers told them this while sitting beneath a giant oil painting of the Great Wall of China. Now they had to find a social worker who would come by the house and interview them. Several meetings for several thousand dollars. And then, if they passed, it was back to the agency, and a series of courses on cultural sensitivity, and several thousand more dollars. And then their names at the bottom of a long scroll that could take years to wash up on the shores of China.

Ana drank tea and ate her flavourless sushi, prying apart the upcoming invasion. “It’s bullshit,” James had said. “But we have to do it.” He was determined, and with James, that was significant. Still, it was Ana who had spent the years before being opened and scraped. Now she would have to do it again, but in her own house.

She was waiting for the softness, the cool white space. Ana had invented this state of being when she was a child, lying in bed during the loudest parties, the doors slamming and the accelerated roar of her mother’s nightlife. Or even on a quiet night, alone with her mother, watching her shape shift over the course of the evening, the ice cubes clattering in the tray, and the bottles ringing in the garbage against the other bottles – then, poof. Ana could vanish. She thought of the white space as a destination, a place she had to get to in order to block the noise. Now the noise came from the woman at the adoption agency: “And Ana, what kind of hours do you work?” The voice hungry for judgment.

Ana arrived, finally, at her white space, even and unsullied. She paid her bill and stepped outside.

As soon as she re-entered the human stream on King Street, Ana recognized the girl in the cardigan from work. She was smoking, walking slowly, wearing the very same cardigan, buttoned properly. If Ana walked as slowly as this girl, it would look like she was stalking her. She wanted to cross the street, to ignore her, to make her vanish, but it seemed impossible not to be found out. She walked at her normal pace, and was quickly next to her. She said: “Hello, Ruth.”

“Oh!” said Ruth, putting her cigarette behind her back, as if her mother had snuck up behind her at school.

“Did you have lunch out?”

Ruth shook her head. “I can’t really afford it. I just went for a smoke.”

Ana recognized the phrasing as something rural and coarse. She sounded like Ana’s distant cousins, who said things like: “I’m going to the can.”

“It is a nice day,” said Ana. “How are you doing anyway? How do you find it in the office?” Ana had a flash of altruism, pictured herself as the kind of lawyer who might take the girl in, mentor her. She had been to a few of these events in the past, wearing a pink ribbon for charity and walking a few kilometres with other women lawyers. Legs looked pale in their shorts, and everyone seemed vaguely embarrassed. Ana had not been able to stop herself from beginning to jog, slowly at first, and then running. The walking women were far behind when Ana finished the course before anyone else and left quickly.

Another time, at a luncheon called Women Lawyers: A Dialogue About Transformative Leadership, she had sat at a table with a group of married associates, mother lawyers she had rarely seen on the fifteenth floor. They exchanged numbers about outsourcing: who delivers dry cleaning, emergency nanny agencies, car services that drive children to music lessons. At one point, one of them looked up from typing into her phone and said: “Okay, who do I hire to screw my husband?” Everybody laughed.

One statistic lodged in Ana’s head from that afternoon: for every ten male lawyers at her firm, there was one-half a woman. Ana pictured that half-woman lawyer, sliming along the hallway on her stumpy armless torso.

The girl looked straight ahead, put her cigarette between her lips a little defiantly. “I don’t know. It’s okay. It’s not really what I want to do. I guess I’m not supposed to admit that to the boss.”

“I’m not the boss,” said Ana, so quickly that they both knew it to be false. “So what do you want to do, then?”

“I want to make movies. Maybe documentaries. About bands, maybe.” Before she even finished the statement, her defiance drained away, as if this were the most unrealistic dream a person could hold. Her voice turned into a mumble. “I don’t know.”

It struck Ana as unlikely that this limp girl had some affinity for rhythm in her, that she liked back rooms, electric guitars. Maybe she was one of those girls who gets used. Maybe she stood at the front of the stage and stared upwards, inserted herself in the band’s stopover, became a joke between a drummer and a bassist the next morning.

“My husband makes documentaries,” said Ana. “For TV.”

“Really?” Ruth looked at Ana sideways. Ana felt something: They didn’t like each other. Ana tried to pull the girl back from the brink of this mutual realization, to distract her with kindness.

“He works in public television. You should meet him. Maybe he could help you out.” Why had she said this? The thought of Ruth, in Ana’s house in her mis-buttoned sweater, mumbling at James’s feet. This was the type of girl who would love James, and James would be kind to her, would perform for her, tap-dancing through his latest thought. It would be both excruciating and sweet, a combination that exhausted Ana.

She could not imagine this evening happening, and knew they had entered a conversation that had no conclusion. Ruth would be checking in with her again and again, for months to come.

Inside the building, outside the door to her office, Ana did it first: “I’ll throw some dates at James and get back to you.”

Ruth looked up at her, and something surprising happened: her face thawed. The blandness, the boredom, slid away. She was smiling, a huge, unyielding smile that revealed a heap of crooked teeth. The teeth made Ana remember the child’s game with the hands piling up, each person pulling the one from the bottom, slapping it down on the other.





TWO MONTHS BEFORE LABOUR DAY



The day James got fired was not the worst day of his life. He was as still as a man tasered to the ground and he contemplated this calmness as Sly – his old friend, his boss – sat across from him, slick with sweat, panting, saying what they both knew was coming. “This kind of television isn’t resonating in our research … It’s not you, we think the world of you, it’s the genre … the demographic … the economy … the Internet …”

James’s mind was a jumble of all the things that made this moment not so bad: The unwritten novel, the untapped potential, the upcoming summer.

He thought suddenly of a parlour game he and Ana had played in the early years of their marriage. “Who are you? Four things only.” James, when he read aloud his own list, was always: “Husband, journalist, hockey player, future novelist.” He thought that listing his marital status first would flatter Ana, but Ana saw through it. When she did James, she put journalist first. But now what he had written had come true: He was mostly her husband.

Ana would know what to ask. Severance package. Legal loopholes. He got into her head, a divided plastic binder, and said some things, and Sly gave answers. Sly even lowered his accent to something kind of Cockney for the occasion, like they were a couple of British coal miners at a union meeting in the Thatcher years. Then, when Sly had wrung out every cliché, he leaned in, as if about to go for a hug: “I’m so sorry, mate.” He reached out a hand. James thought: I’ve never heard him use the word “mate” in my life. He noticed that Sly’s hand was shaking, and suddenly felt bad for him. James had never had a job that required him to fire anyone.

A thought crept into his head, surprisingly, of his old favourite childhood thing, the rock tumbler – and how he would sit for hours in his bedroom watching the rocks go up and down the tiny conveyer belt, growing smoother and more similar to one another – and then he thought of his wife, of Ana’s ass, particularly, turned toward him in bed. The first thing I will do is my wife. And the ass image faded to be replaced by a face, that of the intern Emma. Emma: a name no one used to have, but now there were three Emmas working on his show.

This Emma’s face in his head was all lips, red, which of course meant baboon ass, and soon James was thinking about the fact that he was an animal, and marvelling at how base it was to be a man, waking up his goaty longing.

It was Emma who brought in a stack of collapsed cardboard boxes.

“At my last job, they like escorted this guy from the building. They didn’t even let him take his pictures or turn off his computer,” she said, standing near the open door. Her voice was shrill, pointed. It corrupted a unique silkiness in her body.

James nodded. He took a framed picture of Ana from the desk and put it into the empty box, face down.

“So you know, they obviously like you here,” said Emma. She was wearing all black – black T-shirt, a tight black skirt, black boots. But she looked naked to James. He could barely stand to look at her, the curve of her breast, her dark skin. What was she, anyway? Was she black? Asian? Some modern hybrid.

If she knew what he was thinking, he’d be called a racist, on top of being a sexual harasser. It was as if by being fired, he was able to see new shapes in the picture, to really look at this woman without the echoes of workplace propriety seminars and inter-office “plain language” memos. He felt like a priest who had been handed civilian clothes.

“I don’t think I’m un-liked, I just feel—” James paused. “Obsolete.” Before the word was out, he realized he had potentially bricked a wall between them. It was a word that drew attention to his age, which was about fifteen years worse than hers. But the repulsion he anticipated didn’t happen: instead, she made a clucking, aww-ing sound, like she was tickling Finn under his chin. Then she turned and shut the door, faced him again in the sealed room. She walked toward the desk, smoothing her skirt at her hips. It was a surprising gesture, and it amplified for James the sensation that with his firing, a range of previously unthinkable things could now occur.

“Can I say something to you?” she asked. She was quite close to him, eye to eye, with only the desk between, at the level of her crotch.

A peep escaped James’s throat. He nodded.

“I really love what you do,” she said. He tried to smell her, but his nose was useless from smoking. “I think it’s really important. Like, seriously, no one else is going to do the stuff you do. That piece you did on the Inuit film collective? I totally loved that. I think they’re making a huge mistake.” She stepped back, shook her body a little, relieved to have unburdened.

James wanted to lean over, curve a finger and say: Come here. He wanted to make her climb across the desk on her knees, put his hand between her legs. He wanted to shake her for her feeble attempts at consolation. He loathed her inexperience and her boots that were too pointy for walking. Then he loathed himself, too, the never-ending stream of hateful thoughts like these. A lifetime of images of women glorious and grotesque trotted beneath his eyelids, unfulfilled, ungrabbed hands and fists never inserted, things that occupied his mind, filled him up, kept him dumb. He wished she would leave.

“Thanks for saying that,” said James. She stood there, as if waiting for something.

James doubted she was waiting for the same thing he was. Without looking at the title, he pulled a book from the shelf and handed it to her.

“You should have this.” She flipped it this way and that, like she had never touched a book before.

“Thanks.” She held it out to him: “Could you write your number in there?” James hesitated: It was the phrasing. “Could” he? Well, he could. And so he did, his cell phone number in red ink, right on the title page, like an author’s autograph under the title: Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television. It was the first time he’d cracked its spine.



James walked a block with the box of books dragging his arms down, his back moaning. He had decided to carry the box home. He walked with purpose, wondering if anyone in the windows of the cubic building where he’d worked for years was watching him go. Perhaps there was someone standing at a revolving door, under the propaganda-sized posters of the network’s news anchors, head shaking sadly: Glad it’s not me. James was almost certain this was not happening, but still, he couldn’t bring himself to look back.

When he was far away, and standing in a grassy area near the Art College, he dropped the books and smoked a cigarette. Then he called Ana on his cell phone. James left a message: “It’s just me.”

He heaved the box back into his arms, felt the sweat at his forehead. He had not gotten fat yet, but it was coming. Oh, he was old, old, old. He still couldn’t fathom that he was forty-two. He felt seventeen, always, expected to see seventeen every single time he looked in the mirror.

The sweat trickled down his forehead, needled him in the eye. His arms weren’t free to rub so he squinted, shook his head. He deduced that he looked crazy. The students walked around him, giving him space.

He liked to cut through this campus, wondering if the art school girls mistook him for a hip young professor. Academia was one of the few professions where forty-two seemed relatively young, he thought. In television, even public television, it was ancient. Why did this suddenly come as a revelation to him? Why had he never prepared for this moment? It occurred to James that he might be in shock.

He put the box of books down on a bench and sat next to it, breathing heavily. A mother – squat, rigid with anger – walked by quickly, dragging a toddler by the wrist. Both of them were silent, the mother staring straight ahead, and the boy blank, inert. They had just exited a fight, and were moving fast through its plume. The boy wore a backpack with the tail of a lion poking out of the bottom.

James walked in the opposite direction from the pair, carrying his box through the fish gutter chaos of Chinatown. The crowds thickened and thinned as he passed McDonald’s and the hospital. A new organic chocolate store had opened up where a Chinese grocer had been.

James’s arms were aching by the time he reached the bottom of the street. Theirs was one of only two detached houses on the block. The others were two-in-ones, houses and neighbours joined at the hips, with shared yards and little fences between.

He knew that Ana would be home soon, and he was pleased to see a parking space right in front of their lawn. She had taken the car to go shopping after work and would need a place to park. The neighbourhood was permit-only, and in the throes of what James had labelled, in his letters to the city, a “parking crisis.” He had considered pitching a piece to his producers on the absurd parking situation in the city (There was no logic to it! No system! No grand vision!), but couldn’t figure out the right angle. And it was too blatantly anti-environment for Sly. Who had sympathy for drivers these days?

But James loved the car, a leased black Jetta. He wished it were here right now. He would get Ana to pack one of her wondrous picnic lunches with the white cloth napkins, a glass bowl of green grapes, her breast of chicken sandwiches. He would drive her anywhere she wanted to go, out of the gridlock, maybe to Niagara Falls to look for barrels, suicides, get a drink in a horrible restaurant with gigantic plastic menus and cream sauce on everything.

This was, he realized, a memory from their twenties.

Suddenly, a silver SUV pulled into the space directly in front of James’s house, a space James presently thought of as Ana’s. Now where would she park?

James hated the silver SUV. It was a bully. The cars on the other side of the street had garages and no reason to take up perfectly good parking spaces that were meant to be used by those on James’s side of the street, where there were no garages, just small gardens backing on to other small gardens. But this particular guy – a loud, brickish Portuguese construction owner whom James called Chuckles to his friends – used his garage as a woodworking shop and cannery, and paid for permit parking (James had done some lane sneaking to figure this out). He had a large van, too, which often had two-by-fours sticking out the back, taking up even more spaces. All of this infuriated James, who loved rules when they worked to his advantage, but was otherwise an anarchist. Ana had pointed out that he might be a libertarian, but James bristled, picturing people in mountains with war-painted faces arming themselves against immigrants.

Chuckles got out of the car, pulled his pants up over his hips with his paws. He had a Bluetooth clipped to his ear and was gesticulating, but James couldn’t make out the words. When James got closer, and Chuckles disappeared into his house across the street, James saw that, of course, he had taken up nearly three parking spaces, parking smack in the gravitational centre between two cars, leaving emptiness on either end much too big to be acceptable, much too small for anything but a smartcar. Now Ana would probably have to park a block over, which meant it would take her longer to get back and comfort him, and also the extra walk would be hard for her after a long day.

James staggered up onto to his porch and dropped the box of books. He unlocked the door to the smell of cut lilies and last night’s olive oil. He threw his jacket on the ground. In the kitchen, he found a black magic marker and in the recycling bin, an old photocopied flyer for a maid service. On the back of the flyer, he wrote: We have a parking crisis on this street please respect your neighbours and park nose to nose – you are taking up several spaces

James wrote fast, wetting the paper, letting the ink leak through onto the countertop.

He paused.

You have a garage – why don’t you use it, you fat f*ck

He looked at the paper. More? He added punctuation:

you fat f*ck!

James stood beside the car, humming profanity under his breath. He placed the note under the windshield wiper and went inside, sat on the white club chair facing the window and waited. Soon, surprising himself, he fell into a deep sleep. When he woke up, darkness had come to the room. His cell phone beeped from somewhere. He had missed a call from Ana, who was on her way home. She had texted: Any other groceries?

He looked out at the SUV, the flyer paper flapping in the breeze, and a deep pull of panic set in his stomach. No, no, no! In his stocking feet, he got up and ran to the door, down the stairs, looking both ways, wondering if the fat man would appear, or Ana, or – this was the worst image – both at the same time. Both of them, dots far away coming into focus, rolling in from two different directions; Ana’s puzzled face as the fat man pulls the paper off the car; Ana, looking up at James in the window as the fat man shows her his handwriting—

James grabbed the paper from the windshield and ran to the porch. But then he saw the box of books there, and remembered his day. He looked at the paper and tore off the bottom part, crumpling “you have a garage you fat f*ck!“ and sticking that portion in his pocket. Then he walked back to the car, calmer now, and placed the rest of the note, the note he told himself was neighbourly, on the windshield.

Then he went into the house and waited for his wife.


At the north end of the street stood a house that Ana felt certain was a brothel. Its thin, yellow-brown curtains were always shut, even now that it was spring, and the front yard was dotted with cigarette butts and smeared, discarded plastic bags.

One by one, over their seven years on the street, Ana and James had watched the old Portuguese and Italian couples die off. Sometimes their children moved in, plumbers and contractors who got up before the sun rose, slammed truck doors and sped off to rebuild houses belonging to people like Ana and James, houses like the rest of the houses on the block. But most of the time, the houses were sold and the dumpsters arrived. Then came the couples and their children, and the mother eager to meet Ana and James, until the discovery, so soon, that no, they didn’t have kids. Yes, the schools around here were supposed to be good. Yes, it’s a big house for two.

The Victorian façades remained, though often painted witty crayon box colours. But inside, walls were coming down.

Ana could see the lack of walls as she walked home from her far away parking space, cloth grocery bags in her hands. Through large front windows, the uniformity of these renovations revealed itself: the broad loft-like space imposed on the skinny Victorian bones, the pot lights, the marble kitchens at the back looking out onto tiny gardens kept by gardeners. The tacit, unspoken agreement about what was beautiful.

Then there was the brothel, a squatter house than the others, shutterless and plain; the only other detached house on the block besides James and Ana’s.

Ana hesitated on the sidewalk in front. Last winter, when the city was sunk in snow, she had seen a young woman walk out of the house late at night wearing a gossamer T-shirt and leggings, arms wrapped around her torso, her feet hanging over the heels of her slippers. Her hair was blonde and thin, a wild aureole about her head. She spied Ana, coming home late from work with her attaché case in her hand, the remnants of coffee in a thermos mug in the other. The girl’s eyes were scooped out, set as far back in her head as a blind person’s. She scowled at Ana and scurried away, out of the streetlight shadow.

This was months ago, in the dead cold, and Ana had seen no other sign of activity from the place. She slowed down, tried to peer inside, but could see nothing.

Walking on, she saw a neighbour rocking a new baby in the window, her eyes on a flat screen TV.

On the porch, James’s box of books told Ana exactly what had happened. Her heartbeat doubled. She assumed a neutral face.

She opened the door and hung up her coat, and James’s, which lay in a heap in the foyer. James was in the kitchen, but he wasn’t cooking. He was drinking a beer, leaning on the island like he’d been looking for a place to rest. Ana laid the groceries on the counter.

“I got fired,” he said. Then: “You might want to sit down.”

“There’s more?”

“What?”

“Why do you want me to sit down?”

James stared at her.

“Because I got fired. I thought you might want to brace yourself.”

“Oh. But you told me first and then you told me to sit down.”

James took a drink of beer. Ana saw that she was making him furious, and she began to move around the kitchen quickly, trying to piece together a strategy. But there was still this twister touching down in her stomach. As if looking in from the window, she saw the two of them with all their sensible choices, and all of it vanishing like an invisible man in a movie, top to bottom, just fading out. A rush of noise erupted in her skull. She concentrated, braced herself to do the right thing.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, and went to James, putting her arms around his body. He smelled her neck. He moved a hand down around her waist, grabbing for her ass, rubbing his groin against her. She broke away.

“You need to eat,” she said, rooting in the fridge. Then she returned, ruffled his hair, and retreated again to look through cupboards.

Over her shoulder, she asked: “What happened? Was it Sly?”

James told her the details, sitting on a barstool while she lined up vegetables, began chopping onions and leeks into her glass bowls. She said: “What an a*shole,” and “Did you talk to HR about severance?” and “We can file for wrongful dismissal” – all the things James wanted her to say, each comment another application of balm until the wound was fairly covered, and James a little drunk.

“We should put the adoption thing on hold,” said Ana, tossing the salad. She thought James would fight her, but he didn’t say anything, his head down.

The two of them sat in front of their pasta at last, neither of them eating. Ana wondered if her husband was also feeling that they had lost their grasp. Something had been severed and set adrift; Ana was left feeling arid. But she suspected James’s sensation of loss, radiating off his curved back as he picked at his food, was something entirely different, bound to a manhood she could scarcely bring herself to imagine.


“James has a beard,” Ana said.

“Is it sexy?” asked Sarah. Ana had never considered this possibility, as the beard was so clearly linked to his firing, to the strange new arrangement in their house. It was the opposite of sexy. It was impotent.

“No. He looks like a fisherman.”

“Fishermen can be sexy.”

Ana nodded her head from side to side and raised her eyebrows.

Finn was sitting with his legs out in front of him, staring up at the TV, where a cartoon someone named Peep and a cartoon someone named Chirp were running through a stream. Finn had a large red ball in his lap, ignored.

Sarah sipped her coffee. She was barefoot, like Finn, both of them optimistic of the spring. Ana wore tall, slim boots over her jeans. In Sarah’s house, she never felt the need to take off her shoes.

“Did Marcus ever have a beard?” asked Ana.

“Oh, God, yeah. He went through a whole proletarian thing in his mid-twenties. He was breaking from his parents for good. Bought a van and went west, worked in a national park.”

“You’re kidding.” Ana couldn’t see this, picturing Marcus in his plain black sweaters and wire-framed glasses that made her think of German architects. “Where were you during that time?”

Sarah stretched one arm over her head, groaned a little. “Probably backpacking, or screwing around or something. We weren’t so serious then,” she said. “Really, it was only a summer, when I think about it. I guess he hasn’t had too many beards, actually.”

The credits of the television show moved across the screen.

“Mommy, TV finished,” said Finn, not taking his eyes from the screen. “Mommy, Finn watch a little bit of TV.”

“Sure, tomorrow,” said Sarah. “Can you press the off button, now?”

Finn stood up and pressed the button.

“Good job, Finny! Good job!” said Sarah, clapping. His jeans had little loops on the side, like he might be doing carpentry later. They were about an inch too short.

“I can’t seem to get the sizes right,” said Sarah, as Ana glanced at the pants. She opened her arms for her son to run in to. “Everything he owns is either way too big or way too small.” The boy took a kiss on the head, then disentangled himself and ran toward a pile of blocks in the centre of the room, beginning to stack only the blue ones. Ana wondered if Finn learned these things at daycare – stacking and sorting. She couldn’t imagine him at daycare three mornings a week, away from Sarah, though apparently he went. She had never seen them apart.

“Did you notice how I didn’t say n-o to him when he asked about the TV?” said Sarah in a low voice. Ana nodded. “I’ve been reading up. You say: Yes, later, or yes, tomorrow, instead of n-o-t now. It’s a tactic. It confuses them, offsets the meltdown.”

Ana felt a little sorry for Finn, unwitting citizen of a country of deferred pleasure. The block tower teetered.

“I think James might be depressed,” said Ana. “He reminds me of my mother these days.”

“What, the drinking?”

“No, it’s something else. He’s just not …” Ana struggled, “… alive to the world like he used to be. Does that make sense? James has never had any bad luck.”

“Do you think it’s only bad luck?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, don’t take this the wrong way, but James has a kind of … certainty that might be hard to work with,” said Sarah carefully. “You know what I mean. I mean, we love James because we know him, but I wonder, in a workplace, if that could be …”

Ana felt a touch defensive on James’s behalf, but she knew that Sarah was right, and the certainty she referred to was in fact arrogance. James had left the university when he became a hot young pundit, in high demand after a seminar he designed on the decline of masculinity made him an expert on men. He had a national newspaper column and a radio show by thirty, and then ten years on TV, hosting this and that, called upon to air his views on any subject. James always had an opinion: the return of debauchery, the need for a new waterfront, why hockey matters. Somewhere in there was the book about cultural identity. Oh, James’s pride at that book launch, but only two trays of cheese. The lack of cheese was the first sign that as an author, James had arrived late to the party. Store shelves were already heaving with books on cultural identity. No one bought James’s. He went back to television, a little stiffer, a little meaner.

“I worry about him,” said Ana, but the reason was cut off because, suddenly, Finn burst into tears. Sarah was on him instantly. Ana watched: Sarah identified the problem – the collapsed tower – and talked to him quietly through his screams, asking him questions: “What can you do to make this better? You don’t like it when things you build break, do you?”

Out of habit, Ana imagined herself with a child that age. She stored away Sarah’s wisdom and words, trying to picture herself applying them later. But the picture was fainter now than it had ever been. Any child to come would not be hers, in all likelihood. This hypothetical child might even be out there right now, floating in a woman’s belly in a far away country, being carried through a rice field, out of the hot sun. The image didn’t excite Ana, or sadden her. It seemed absurd; the stuff of science fiction, of a future she hadn’t arrived at yet.

She looked again at Finn being stroked in Sarah’s arms, and tried to envy it. She knew how James felt when Finn was nearby: she had seen his face, for once entirely drained of rage. After dinner the other night, she watched her husband on the porch as Finn was wheeled away, waving good-bye at the stroller sadly. Ana rooted around for some feeling to match James’s, but came up with only a casual affection for this boy, for all boys, a mild curiosity that didn’t demand investigation. Hadn’t there been a time when the sight of a pregnant woman had caused her to look away, yearning? Hadn’t she hidden in that hotel room after the final miscarriage and wept? A chill crept over her body: She needed to find that person again, or James would be lost to her.

When Finn calmed, scurrying toward a basket of clean laundry on the edge of the room, Sarah returned to the couch, rolled her eyes at Ana, and looked expectant, waiting for her to start the conversation where it stopped. Ana admired Sarah’s silences; they had a kind of presence, like rooms she was inviting Ana into.

“I feel like …” said Ana, groping for it. “I feel like I miss him. I miss something we were.” She was remembering the previous night, how she had returned home and James was gone, as usual. He had made some kind of silent commitment to not being home when she got home, as if to sustain the scaffolding of the life before he got fired. Ana did not ask him where he went.

In the immediate wake of the firing, there had been meetings, interviews, and then a long late-night conversation about James taking “a break.” Perhaps they could live off her salary while he tried his hand at fiction, maybe wrote a script on spec for a hard-hitting cop show about the politics of downtown living. Ana trod delicately while they spoke, knowing James did not want to hear anything but yes, yes, yes, that he saw everyone but her huddled together against him in a giant no. They could afford for James not to work, after all, because Ana had always made more money, and because, most of all, they didn’t have children. Neither of them said this, but it was there, breathing between the lines of the conversation.

James had come in after Ana had changed from her dress into blue jeans and a T-shirt, was pouring herself a glass of white wine and standing at the back French doors, looking out at the churned-up garden, still unfinished. The landscapers had vanished around the time James lost his job.

James slammed the door, dropped his jacket on the floor, kicked his shoes off so they blocked the doorway. Ana was watching all of this from far away in the kitchen, across the first floor, seeing through the walls that used to be there. James had a drink in his hand within seconds. He had not said a word.

“Nice day, dear?” she asked in a June Cleaver voice.

“Not really,” he said. “Do you know the only thing worse than having someone say to you: ‘Do you work in television?’ ”

Ana didn’t answer, recognizing a set-up.

“It’s: ‘Didn’t you used to work in television?’ ”

Something had happened in Starbucks.

James told this story while lightly pulling at his beard, like he might be trying to hurt himself. Then he said: “Good night,” and went to bed without supper.

Ana didn’t want to tell Sarah these details. They were humiliating and could be used against her. Ana was still selective with her new friend, still wondering if she was like the other girls Ana had known in her life, with their dizzying switches from kindness to spite. James had told Ana she would always have a problem with other women because she lacked sentimentality, and because she was beautiful. But Ana hated this idea of her sex, and refuted it, looking always for that woman friend who would hold her fire and prove James wrong.

And so Ana kept coming here to Sarah’s, watching Finn grow, carving something into the space when the men weren’t around, listening to her friend talk about her own long days, her fears for her son, her hopes for her future. She genuinely liked this woman, this chaotic person who left a huge bag of cat food in her hall for weeks and weeks, just walked around it instead of moving it to the pantry. The house was filled with unfinished gestures, doors off their hinges propped against half-painted walls.

Her own home was a study in paucity. In the past couple of years, Ana had got rid of every little tchotchke: a pink velvet bobble-headed rabbit she bought in Chinatown on a whim; a virgin pencil case, useless because it was too short for pens; an empty picture frame; little half pads of stickies. Over the course of one week, she moved from room to room, drawer to drawer, putting items in liquor store bags. Days later, when she heard the rattle of the garbage truck in the alley, Ana watched from the window, wondering if she should cry out: “Wait!” and save the bobblehead, or even the pencil case, save them not because they were attractive or useful but just because they were hers, and in that way, valuable, maybe.

And yet, Ana felt calmed at Sarah’s. She didn’t require her white space when Sarah was around.

She helped her clear the coffee dishes. Finn circled their feet like a shark.

“Sarah—” Ana began, moving the dishes around on the counter.

Sarah turned to her, open-faced.

“How did you know?”

“Know what?”

“Know you wanted a kid.”

Sarah raised her brows a little. “Oh,” she said. She puzzled a moment. “Well, I guess it’s kind of like when you ask gay people ‘When did you know?’ and they say: ‘I always knew.’ ” Then she added: “What about you? When did you know?”

Ana moved the dishes side to side.

“I’m not sure,” she said. Then she looked up: “Same, I guess.”

Finn moved in and Sarah leaned over to pick him up, distracted by his murmurs.

At the door, Ana kissed Sarah on the cheek, and Sarah tilted her head: “Everything okay?” It sounded so much like a statement that Ana could only nod her assent.


A few weeks later, James and Finn were at the park. James held a miniature soccer ball and a bag of graham crackers. Finn was running in circles, over and over, until he collapsed. He was wearing a plush panda suit, his face peering out from below the ears, his wrists and ankles exposed, a pair of white runners on his feet. It was still hot, but according to Sarah the panda suit obsession was not negotiable, and she had decided not to fight it.

Finn got up, arms out, ran in a small circle until he collapsed again. James laughed, crouched down on the grass, irritated by the cigarette butts, the stupidity of people who smash beer bottles where children play. A tall hipster walked by, smoking a cigarette, wearing sunglasses as big as the front window of a car. James felt a surge of hatred toward the guy’s skinny legs, his huge headphones, probably playing something electronic. He picked up an old cigarette butt and tossed it at the guy’s back, narrowly missing him as he trotted along, oblivious. Around Finn, James became a virulent non-smoker.

James and Finn had already been to the museum that week to look at the dinosaur bones. The week before, they had taken the ferry out to Toronto Island and James had steered a paddleboat with Finn at his side. Sarah said she was thrilled to get a break, that she could finally get some time to herself to work on her photography, to sleep.

“I can’t go back to teaching,” she told James. “But I can’t always be around him either.” James was impressed with how efficiently Sarah had sliced and packaged time. Three days a week, Finn was in daycare, but only until two. Marcus often didn’t get home until seven or eight, when Finn was in bed. The daycare mornings were catch-up time for chores, household management. Sarah needed just one afternoon a week to herself, open time. James was happy to take Finn. He liked the idea of saving someone.

When James was with Finn, he felt useful again. He got a different response from people when they entered a store or rode the streetcar together than he did when he was alone and suspiciously present during the city’s working hours. But with Finn, the world was a gigantic welcome mat. People hummed a low, inviting note that only parents could hear, that James had never known existed. It reminded him of when he would walk with his black friend, Kyle, and Kyle would exchange a little nod with every other black person that went by. James had considered researching this phenomenon for the show, but when he took a pretty black intern to lunch to covertly test his theory, she just looked straight ahead and never glanced at anyone.

“Finny, do you want to get a croissant?” asked James.

“Oh yes please I do!” cried Finn and began to run toward Queen Street, a two-and-a-half-year-old who knew the way to the city’s best croissants. James wondered if he could work that into his novel, which was so far about terrorists and eighteenth-century mock trials and the nature of agony. Or something. James hadn’t decided yet.

While they sat on the bench eating croissants, James asked Finn questions.

“What did you do at daycare yesterday?’

“Panda suit.”

“How’s it going with the panda suit then?”

“I like croissant.” James pulled his ears out and made a silly face at Finn, and Finn laughed and laughed, little pieces of croissant stuck to his chin, a strange bearded panda.

Marcus was waiting on the porch when they arrived back at Finn’s house. His feet rested on a broken tricycle, and his laptop was open on his knees. His briefcase balanced on a scabby paint tin.

“There he is,” he shouted. Finn dropped James’s hand and ran up the walk toward his father. Finn curled into Marcus’s body. Marcus pushed back the head of the panda suit and kissed the boy’s hair, smiling. James shuffled back and forth, halfway up the walk, feeling found out.

“Thanks for taking him, James,” said Marcus.

“You’re home early,” said James, and the wifeliness of the comment immediately struck him.

“Such a beautiful day. I wanted to take him to the park.”

“Yeah! Park!” said Finn, as if they hadn’t just come from there.

The two men nodded at each other, caught in the silence of a meeting without women.

“Definitely a day for the park,” said James. “I’ve got to get going, so …” He began to back away.

“Do you want to come in? Grab a beer?”

“No, no,” said James, who suddenly remembered where he’d had this feeling of barging in on intimacy before: walking into his old apartment to find his roommates clothed but dishevelled in the kitchen, gazing awkwardly at one another, mouths swollen. “I’ve got – stuff – I should – but thanks. See you soon, Finny, okay?”

“Bye, James!”

“Hey man,” said Marcus, rising with Finn still barnacled to his chest. “Really: Thanks for helping out. It’s hard for Sarah, being home all the time. You’re saving her sanity.”


When Ana came home, James had dinner on the table, a glass of red wine poured and breathing for her. They ate dinner in the breakfast nook, with the French doors open, looking at a huge hole in the yard. After months of delays, the contractors had showed up with shovels and begun digging again. James had simply found them there, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. He did not ask what they did with all the dirt they removed.

After dinner, as Ana cleared the dishes, James rubbed up against her and to his surprise, she responded, pushing back, putting her hand down his pants. He had developed a nut-brown tan from the sun where his face was un-bearded. Ana assumed he’d had a good day writing, and felt, maybe, that a corner had been turned.

James pulled the blinds in the living room and the kitchen, sealing the house from one end to the other. Ana appeared behind him naked. She unfolded a clean kitchen towel, carefully placing it over the sofa cushions before lying down, spreading herself open, and he stood above her, looking down, breathing heavily. It was the first time in a long time that they had been together without the presence of this third, shadow person, nudging them forward, giving them reason. The absence flickered as sadness in James, and then it snuffed itself out. He buried his face in his wife’s neck, moving his tongue between her breasts. For Ana, she felt as if she had been f*cking while swathed in a gauze for two years, trying to feel through the thing between her and her husband. But now, with her hands on his hips, her body was greedy, ferocious for him. They closed in on something like joy.