Dear Life

other again.
    I did not think of Gwen except as a person who had got in the way and created absurd problems. Her little stout legs, her foolish hair, her nest of wrinkles. A caricature you might say, somebody you could not blame and should never have taken seriously either.
    Then I was home. Our house had not changed. I turned up the drive, and I saw his car. Thank God he was there.
    I did notice that the car was not parked in its usual place.
    The reason being that another car, Gwen’s car, was in that spot.
    I couldn’t take it in. All this way I had thought of her, when I thought of her at all, as a person who would already be set aside, who after the first disturbance could not maintain herself as a character in our lives. I was still full of the relief of being home and his being home, safe. Assurance had spread all over me so that my body was ready, still, to spring out of the car and run to the house. I had even been feeling for my house key, having forgotten what I had done with it.
    I wouldn’t have needed it, anyway. Franklin was openingthe door of our house. He did not call out in surprise or relief, not even when I had left the car and was out and going towards him. He just came down the house steps in a measured way, and his words held me off as I reached him. He said, “Wait.”
    Wait. Of course. She was there.
    “Get back in the car,” he said. “We can’t talk out here, it’s too cold.”
    When we were in the car he said, “Life is totally unpredictable.”
    His voice was unusually gentle and sad. He didn’t look at me but stared straight ahead at the windshield, at our house.
    “No use saying I’m sorry,” he told me.
    “You know,” he went on, “it’s not even the person. It’s like a sort of aura. It’s a spell. Well of course it is really the person but it surrounds them and embodies them. Or they embody—I don’t know. Do you understand? It just strikes like an eclipse or something.”
    He shook his bent head. All dismay.
    He was longing to talk about her, you could see that. But this spiel was surely something that would have made him sick, normally. That was what made me lose hope.
    I felt myself getting bitterly cold. I was going to ask him if he had alerted the other party to this transformation. Then I thought that of course he had and she was with us, in the kitchen with the things she polished.
    His enchantment was so dreary. It was like anybody else’s. Dreary.
    “Don’t talk any more,” I said. “Just don’t talk.”
    He turned and looked at me for the first time and spoke without any of that special wondering hush in his voice.
    “Christ, I’m kidding,” he said. “I thought you’d catch on. All right. All right. Oh for God’s sake, shut up. Listen.”
    For I was howling now with anger and relief.
    “All right, I was a little mad at you. I felt like giving you a hard time. What was I supposed to think when I came home and you were just gone? All right, I’m an asshole. Stop. Stop.”
    I didn’t want to stop. I knew it was all right now, but it was such a comfort to howl. And I found a fresh grievance.
    “What is her car doing here, then?”
    “They can’t do anything with it, it’s junk.”
    “But why is it here?”
    He said it was here because the non-junk parts of it, and that wasn’t much, now belonged to him. Us.
    Because he had bought her a car.
    “A car? New?”
    New enough to run better than what she had.
    “The thing is she wants to go to North Bay. She has relatives or something there and that’s where she wants to go when she can get a car fit to take her.”
    “She has relatives here. Wherever she lives here. She has three-year-old kids to look after.”
    “Well apparently the ones in North Bay would suit her better. I don’t know about any three-year-olds. Maybe she’ll take them along.”
    “Did she ask you to buy her a car?”
    “She wouldn’t ask for anything.”
    “So now,” I said. “Now she’s in our life.”
    “She’s in North Bay. Let’s go in the house. I haven’t even got a jacket on.”
    On our way I asked if he had told her about his poem. Or maybe read it to her.
    He said, “Oh God no, why would I do that?”
    The first thing I saw in the kitchen was the sparkle of glass jars. I yanked a chair out and climbed up on it and began putting them away on top of the cupboard.
    “Can you help me?” I said, and he handed them up to me.
    I wondered—could he have been lying about the poem? Could she have