Next Year, for Sure Read online

  Of course, says Kathryn, unable to think of an alternative. They embrace like friends.

  Kathryn wasn’t going to be here for this. She was going to be at the video store picking out a movie too stupid for Chris. Now she is hugging this woman, her boyfriend’s date. She’s a nice hugger, though, Emily is. Solid and living and real. Kathryn can feel the heat rising from Emily’s neck.

  So you’re coming to dinner with us? Emily says.

  I can’t, Kathryn says.

  Oh no! says Emily. Why not? She looks genuinely disappointed.

  I rented a movie, says Kathryn. A lie. That was one of the rules. No lying.

  Oh please come, Emily says.

  Kathryn doesn’t know what to say. She looks to Chris for help. He has spent all week thinking up smart things to say.

  You should come, Chris says. It’ll be fun.

  He’s smiling. Emily is smiling. Already they are teaming up against her.

  —

  The sidewalk isn’t wide enough for three. Kathryn keeps getting edged into the wet grass until she drops back behind the other two, and then can’t follow what they are talking about. Something captivating. Kathryn scans for large objects she might duck behind and disappear while the other two walk on, oblivious.

  After a block or so, Emily falls back to join Kathryn, then Chris does the same, and then the whole shuffle starts again.

  On the bus, there aren’t enough seats together and they are quickly separated—Kathryn and Chris herded to the back, Emily stranded up front. They’re an hour ahead of schedule and it’s rush hour, thanks to Emily.

  Kathryn feels for Chris. She always hates to see one of his plans unravel. He puts so much into them and then can’t let go. It’s painful to watch, and Kathryn cannot at this moment bring herself to look at his tender face and what might be happening there.

  Kathryn can see Emily at the front of the bus. She is talking with a chatty old walrus in a fishing hat. Emily lowers her ear to his mouth and listens for some time, then she says something directly into the old man’s ear. A gummy smile spreads across his face. Kathryn watches them charm each other for twenty blocks. She can talk to people, this one. This is not someone with a list of conversation topics in her pocket.

  Kathryn turns now to face Chris. His eyes are closed, his back very straight.

  Sorry about your date, Kathryn says.

  He smiles and opens his eyes, gives her a kiss on the cheek. It’ll be fine, he says, his eyes closing again. He appears to be solving a puzzle in his head, like there are little sliding tiles behind his eyelids. He seems good, actually. Adaptable. But also, a little, like a Chris that Kathryn doesn’t know.

  —

  At the restaurant, Chris and Emily confer over every item on the menu. Chris seems very invested in the options for someone who only ever orders the aloo gobi.

  Kathryn watches Emily. How she gazes at Chris, full on. How she plops her menu down every time they land on a new appetizer or entrée, as if each dish were a Shakespearean tragedy they might discuss at some length. Emily’s hair is going on greasy and exquisitely dishevelled. She talks out of one side of her mouth, which could be adorable or irritating.

  Kathryn imagines that mouth pressed up against Chris’s. At first that feels tolerable. It looks like a clean mouth. Kathryn pictures the mouths opening slightly, pulling at each other with little nibbles and tugs. Now a wave of nausea rolls in and Kathryn backs the mouths apart. She holds them there for a moment, separated, then eases them together again, trying to find the edge of nausea.

  Emily is saying something to her.

  Kathryn, you’re a vegetarian, right?

  I eat mostly vegetarian.

  If I order veggies, do you want to share?

  Sure, Kathryn says. She feels woozy. She has found the edge of nausea.

  Emily decides on channa masala, which is in truth Kathryn’s favourite, leaving Kathryn to order saag paneer. The words sound full of sorrow when she says them out loud to the waiter: saag paneer.

  —

  Chris is different with Emily, but how? That’s what Kathryn is trying to figure out. With Emily, he orders the vindaloo. And he keeps touching his face. When he listens to Emily, he rests his fingertips on his mouth like he is trying to keep something in.

  With Emily, he tells his same stories differently. The facts are unchanged, but they’re given different weights. The tone shifts and wraps itself around Emily, more sensual, more mysterious, but without the familiar ache and ambivalence that had so spoken to Kathryn when she first heard these stories.

  When he tells Emily about the whales and his family asleep in their tents, Kathryn can see the whales, really see them for the first time, the water rolling down their glistening skin. She can feel the little boy’s heart filling with a sense of belonging. But she can’t taste the sadness of the story. It isn’t being told for her.

  With Emily, there are openings in the stories like crevices in coral. Emily reaches into these openings, sometimes up to her shoulder, and pulls things out. Emily says things like, But why didn’t you wake them?

  I don’t know, Chris says.

  What would have happened? she asks.

  Chris looks at Emily and blinks. Seven times he blinks.

  It would have given my mom another reason to love my dad, he says. It had been their one and only camping trip as a family, his dad’s idea, and it had been going badly. Chris didn’t want his dad to get credit for the whales.

  Chris and Emily study each other in the glow of this insight. Kathryn wonders if the food will ever arrive.

  So Emily, what is it you do? Kathryn says, sounding, she realizes, like someone’s uncool mom.

  Oh god, says Emily and laughs, and it seems like she would like to leave it there.

  But for some reason, Kathryn cannot leave it there.

  —

  Emily has jobs.

  On weekdays, she walks a springer spaniel named Cornelius whose owners Emily has, to this day, never met. She inherited the job from a friend, she says, who had never met them either, but every afternoon there is a fresh twenty-dollar bill on the dining room table. On weeknights, she sometimes babysits a six-year-old boy whose parents are in a jazz trio called Tall Weather Theory. Chris nods, like he has heard of them. Maybe he has. He’s always making Kathryn CDs full of undiscovered new bands and obscure old ones he knows she’ll love. On Mondays, Emily cleans the house of a woman with three small children and a clinical depression. Emily found her depression workbook under the bed, incompletely filled in. The house is always frustratingly clean when Emily arrives and Emily suspects, she says solemnly, that her real job is being there to find the body, if it ever comes to that, before the children get home from school. There are other jobs, too, that Emily lists, but Kathryn can’t hold on to them.

  So are you an artist of some sort? Kathryn says.

  An artist?

  Or something. Are you juggling all these jobs so you can do something else?

  No, that’s what I do.

  Oh. Cool, says Kathryn and feels awful. There is a terrible moment of no one saying anything.

  I’d like to be a house cleaner, Chris says into the silence. He’d be good, too, Kathryn thinks. She abdicated most of the cleaning to him years ago.

  I think I might use the washroom, Emily says.

  —

  Did that sound mean? Kathryn says.

  I don’t know, says Chris. Were you trying to be mean?

  I was trying to get to know her. I was trying to show an interest in this person that you think is so amazing.

  Two waiters appear with the entrées and spend some time arranging and rearranging them on the table. Kathryn waits. When the waiters retreat, she speaks.

  You do know what I mean, though?

  No, says Chris. I don’t know.

  Think about Tight Mike, Kathryn says.

  Tight Mike had been a semi-acquaintance from their film society days who had spent three years on his kitc
hen floor making a stop-motion re-enactment of The Shining funded entirely by pharmaceutical trials and occasional night shifts at the rendering plant. When Chris and Kathryn eventually saw his strangely lyrical film, they wished they had invited him over for dinner as he got thinner and paler.

  Or what about Rebecca, says Kathryn, or Hector before he started teaching. They had known a lot of people, years ago, who were doing one thing so they could pursue another thing.

  I think she’s just living her life, Chris says.

  The waiters are back with rice and various chutneys. Again there is much maneuvering and shuffling of the little silver dishes. What does Chris mean, just living her life? Does he think Kathryn is not living her life? Is he thinking his own life might be more lived? And how did Kathryn end up in the wrong here? She gave him what he wanted. She put her feelings aside. And now she’s the selfish one?

  Are you angry? Kathryn says when the waiters finally leave. She isn’t sure what angry looks like on Chris. Usually, whenever it looks like they might disagree about something, Chris takes her side.

  I just don’t know what we’re doing, he says.

  They wait for Emily, their arms at their sides, and watch the food steaming.

  —

  Emily returns buoyant and unruffled. Everyone tastes everything and says something.

  So how did you two get together? Emily wants to know, once they are eating in earnest.

  Chris tells a nice story about how they’d been friends for a long time first, how they met at the film society where he was the weekend projectionist, and where Kathryn came in most Saturdays to copy-edit the next month’s program, and how sometimes when she was done for the night she’d come up to the projection booth and watch the last hour of the movie with him through the little square window, though mostly they had talked, and how they had to whisper in the booth, making everything they said to each other for the first year feel like a secret.

  Emily is listening so hard she barely eats. She has many questions. Did you guys know right away? Why did Kathryn want to watch from the booth in the first place? What did you talk about up there?

  I didn’t know right away, says Chris. Did you?

  Kathryn shakes her head no. She had thought Chris too good to be hers.

  Chris tells Emily that the reason that they didn’t know right away is that they were both in relationships, messy relationships with people who didn’t like them for who they were, and that that’s what they talked about in the booth. They would sit on the floor and listen to each other and say, You deserve better, until they gradually convinced each other that was true.

  We rescued each other, Chris says.

  —

  That’s what Chris always says: They rescued each other. The fact is, he rescued her. All she did for him was open an unlocked door.

  It was Chris who sat on the floor of the booth and listened to her complain about Geoffrey. How Geoffrey withdrew his enthusiasm for something as soon as Kathryn began to enjoy it, how he used self-improvement as a weapon, how he drove away her friends with a quiet contempt, how he insisted on double-checking the deadbolt because one time she had forgotten to lock it, how he convinced her that it was dumb to like Sarah McLachlan, that it was immoral to take long showers, that it was pathetic to sleep so much, and that it was in every way wrong to be the way she was.

  Chris had never whispered a hard word about Penny.

  Chris just listened and said, That’s not okay, and told Kathryn that she was amazing and deserved to be with someone amazing. It was Chris who said, once, That sounds like abuse.

  But Kathryn said no. Because she didn’t feel entitled to that word, though it was constantly there in her head.

  Then, to her surprise, Chris said okay. He did not come at her with a dictionary. He did not drag her to a website that would prove he was right. He said okay, and he put his hand on the floor next to hers.

  Two months later when Geoffrey called some woman on the TV a dumb twat, Kathryn got up and walked out of their apartment and walked downtown and walked into the projection booth and said, Can we go somewhere?

  They got a hotel room, Chris and Kathryn, and spent the night on top of the covers. The next day, Chris went alone to Kathryn’s apartment with a key and a list and got her clothes, her reference books, and her journals and brought them to the hotel.

  That night, they played canasta like old ladies and a week later they moved into an apartment together—broke, friendless, and in love. They were driven out of the film society, where most of their former friends rallied around Penny. But there would be new friends, a new life. And whenever people would ask how they got together, Chris would say, as he is saying now, that they rescued each other, although what he really thinks, Kathryn is not sure. They don’t discuss it much. They each have their own ways of feeling bad about how it happened.

  —

  Well fuck those people, says Emily.

  Kathryn laughs, a loud surprised honk.

  No seriously, Emily says. Fuck them. She raises her water glass to toast. Chris hoists his, then Kathryn does, too.

  To people who love you for who you are, Emily says. They clink glasses, the three of them.

  Chris has loved Kathryn for who she is, for nine years now. He has joined her in her long showers. He has valued her penny-pinching. He has admired her ability to sleep in. He has loved her in a way that she didn’t know was possible.

  And now he needs this one thing that he doesn’t even know he needs. Something to do with this girl with the clean-looking mouth and the astute questions. When was the last time Sharon asked questions like that? This girl who makes time speed up and slow down. The restaurant is emptying already. This girl who makes Chris come alive in ways Kathryn has never seen: Chris is proposing now that they go somewhere for coffee. He doesn’t like coffee, she knows. He doesn’t like being up this late. But he doesn’t want this night to be over. He needs something. Is Kathryn going to be the person to stand in his way?

  —

  Chris is in the restroom, possibly going over his notes. Kathryn and Emily look at each other across the stained tablecloth. There is still time, Kathryn thinks, to say something. To be magnanimous. To get the upper hand.

  Emily is lifting single fennel seeds from a tiny bowl and placing them in her mouth.

  He really likes you, Kathryn says at last.

  I really like him, Emily says.

  Kathryn watches Emily’s mouth move as she says this and imagines it, again, pressed up against Chris’s, fresh with fennel.

  What movie were you going to watch? Emily asks.

  I hadn’t actually picked one.

  Ah, says Emily. Another seed disappears behind her smile.

  You didn’t know this was a date, did you? Kathryn says.

  I knew it was a date, Emily says. I think it’s going great, don’t you?

  OCTOBER

  CHAPTER 5

  Second Date

  It’s not a date.

  Chris doesn’t like to call it a date. It’s a walk. They’re going on a walk, he and Emily. And along the route are seven of Chris’s favourite used bookstores. And in between the bookstores, seven specific restaurants, each with a particular item on a theme. He has it all planned. From the salad rolls at Mekong Palace to the cherry cream tarts at Leo’s Floral & Sweets, it’s a seven-course meal in finger foods.

  That’s a date, Kathryn says as he’s putting on his shoes.

  We’re hanging out, says Chris.

  Mm-hm.

  We’re getting to know each other.

  Yeah. On a date.

  She teases him like this, needles him almost, which is new. It unnerves him. Twice this week he has decided to call the thing off, whatever it is, this thing with Emily. Just go back to before, when he and Emily would bump into each other sometimes, coming out of a store or crossing the street, and then Chris would spend a week regaining his equilibrium. They could go back to that. He’d survive. Everyone would survive.r />
  But then Kathryn sells it to him again. How she wants him to do this, at least once, without her in tow. How it feels important.

  And the fact is they are kissing more these days, Chris and Kathryn, since their dinner with Emily. There has been more pawing and pouncing, more lather in the shower, more love attacks.

  I’ll be back by eleven, Chris says. It’s almost two thirty now.

  Kathryn grabs his nose and holds it.

  Don’t set a time, she says. Just come home.

  —

  Emily is already at the park when Chris crests the hill. He recognizes her from blocks away, before she is even recognizable, really. But there she is, an unmistakable dot amongst the smudges.

  He angles across the park toward her. It is early October and children are playing in coats and boots.

  Emily is sitting on a bench by the jungle gym. A wobbly child is carrying pebbles from the playground, one by one, and handing them to Emily. Why thank you, Emily says when the boy drops each small offering into her hand. The boy smiles and charges off to find another.

  Chris sits down on the bench, off to one side, like a stranger. He doesn’t say any of the things he’d been planning to say. They don’t speak at all, in fact, but sit and watch the little boy select the perfect pebble and run back to hand it to Emily. People want to give her things, Chris thinks, and wishes now that he had brought some small something to put in her hand.

  Why thank you, Emily says. Do you think my friend here could have one? she says, and gestures over to Chris. The boy looks at Chris and considers. He seems uncertain, but totters away and, at some length, selects a stone he considers fitting.

  Why thank you, Chris says when the boy returns with the find. Chris makes a point of admiring the pebble, which is in fact quite beautiful, but the boy has already run off in search of more.

  Should we go? Emily says. She hops to her feet and throws her arms around Chris. Hi, she says.

  They head out of the park, heading west. He has a bottle of champagne in his backpack in case they make it to the ocean.

  —