The Love of a Good Woman

agreeable voice—as if he prided himself on not being shocked, not objecting or pleading—Brian cracked open. He said with contempt and fury and no concern for whoever might hear him, “Well then—what about the kids?”
    The receiver began to shake against Pauline’s ear.
    She said, “We’ll talk—” but he did not seem to hear her.
    “The children,” he said, in this same shivering and vindictivevoice. Changing the word “kids” to “children” was like slamming a board down on her—a heavy, formal, righteous threat.
    “The children stay,” Brian said. “Pauline. Did you hear me?”
    “No,” said Pauline. “Yes. I heard you but—”
    “All right. You heard me. Remember. The children stay.”
    It was all he could do. To make her see what she was doing, what she was ending, and to punish her if she did so. Nobody would blame him. There might be finagling, there might be bargaining, there would certainly be humbling of herself, but there it was like a round cold stone in her gullet, like a cannonball. And it would remain there unless she changed her mind entirely. The children stay.
    Their car—hers and Brian’s—was still sitting in the motel parking lot. Brian would have to ask his father or his mother to drive him up here today to get it. She had the keys in her purse. There were spare keys—he would surely bring them. She unlocked the car door and threw her keys on the seat and locked the door on the inside and shut it.
    Now she couldn’t go back. She couldn’t get into the car and drive back and say that she’d been insane. If she did that he would forgive her, but he’d never get over it and neither would she. They’d go on, though, as people did.
    She walked out of the parking lot, she walked along the sidewalk, into town.
    The weight of Mara on her hip, yesterday. The sight of Caitlin’s footprints on the floor.
    Paw. Paw.
    She doesn’t need the keys to get back to them, she doesn’t need the car. She could beg a ride on the highway. Give in, give in, get back to them any way at all, how can she not do that?
    A sack over her head.
    A fluid choice, the choice of fantasy, is poured out on the ground and instantly hardens; it has taken its undeniable shape.
    • • •
    T HIS is acute pain. It will become chronic. Chronic means that it will be permanent but perhaps not constant. It may also mean that you won’t die of it. You won’t get free of it, but you won’t die of it. You won’t feel it every minute, but you won’t spend many days without it. And you’ll learn some tricks to dull it or banish it, trying not to end up destroying what you incurred this pain to get. It isn’t his fault. He’s still an innocent or a savage, who doesn’t know there’s a pain so durable in the world. Say to yourself, You lose them anyway. They grow up. For a mother there’s always waiting this private slightly ridiculous desolation. They’ll forget this time, in one way or another they’ll disown you. Or hang around till you don’t know what to do about them, the way Brian has.
    And still, what pain. To carry along and get used to until it’s only the past she’s grieving for and not any possible present.
    H ER children have grown up. They don’t hate her. For going away or staying away. They don’t forgive her, either. Perhaps they wouldn’t have forgiven her anyway, but it would have been for something different.
    Caitlin remembers a little about the summer at the lodge, Mara nothing. One day Caitlin mentions it to Pauline, calling it “that place Grandma and Grandpa stayed at.”
    “The place we were at when you went away,” she says. “Only we didn’t know till later you went away with Orphée.”
    Pauline says, “It wasn’t Orphée.”
    “It wasn’t Orphée? Dad used to say it was. He’d say, ‘And then your mother ran away with Orphée.’”
    “Then he was joking,” says Pauline.
    “I always thought it was Orphée. It was somebody else then.”
    “It was somebody else connected with the play. That I lived with for a while.”
    “Not Orphée.”
    “No. Never him.”

RICH AS STINK

    W HILE the plane was pulling up to the gate on a summer evening in 1974, Karin reached down and got some things out of her backpack. A black beret which she pulled on so it slanted over one eye, a red lipstick which she was able to apply to her mouth by using the window as a mirror—it was dark in Toronto—and a long black cigarette holder which she held ready to clamp