Anne is implicated, folded into his black mood like dry ingredients into wet. Together they make a pudding. A black pudding. Not the delicious kind. Not figgy pie. David claims that Anne has an anger problem. He mopes on the couch. Innocent, and manipulative. Anne waters the garden. She likes to watch things grow. David’s depression grows. Anne prefers watching the hydrangeas grow. Hydrangeas are saxifrages, rock breakers, which means they are tougher than they look. Still, they need a lot of water.
David does not shout, but Anne does. Or David says she does. Or, more accurately, she did not shout, until she did, until recently, when she gave it up. Not David though, he does not shout. He leaves.
“What should we do with the beets that came in the box?” Anne asks. She opens the crisper and rescues the beets from a soupy mess of organic rot. She will have to clean it out. Later.
David scowls and leaves the kitchen. Normally, Anne would follow. She would beg to know what she had done, but, like shouting, she has given up following. Tears burn in her eyes.
“Go on then. Run.”
Better to have said nothing. Nothing is always better. If she says nothing, in about three or four days, David will need her. He will see her coming down the stairs in black leggings and want sex. Things will fix themselves.
“What was that? What did you say to me?” He is shouting. This is new.
“If you could bring yourself to say what is wrong.”
“With me?” Incredulous eyebrows make him ugly. Wiry strays—the ones Anne first found endearing and sometimes even smoothed with a fingertip—spring everyway unhinged.
“Do you have an appointment this week?” Anne does not believe in therapy, but she hopes David will continue his.
“I told you, Anne, I am grieving.”
“Grieving what? No one died.” Anne goes out to water the hydrangeas. The lawn is in trouble, like the scalp of a middle-aged man. Anne resists pruning the hydrangeas. Last year she cut them back in the spring and they hardly bloomed. Now she knows all you have to do is snap the deadwood occasionally and presto, blooms galore.
When she comes in through the sliding door, the house is quiet. Quieter than sulking quiet. She goes upstairs. She goes downstairs. She checks the dining room clutter for a note. She checks her phone. She goes to the basement where David has been sleeping in the guest alcove. Not quite a bedroom. The exposed brick wall helps. The pile of dirty underwear, socks, and pit-stinking shirts does not. She bends over to peel a quarter-inch yellow sticky from the heel of a threadbare sock. David’s thrift extends to decades-old briefs with butts blown out and wretched socks like this one. He cannot let go of things. The note does not say he has gone to the store. The note is not for her. The note, in David’s pinched hand, says, happier finding someone else? Without warning, the laminate floor pitches at an acute new angle, but Anne clings to the question mark—the question mark is something—and shoves the note into her pocket.
In the kitchen, she peels the beets. Crimson bleeds into the tiny grooves of the cutting board. Drips from the blades of the peeler. Stains her fingers. Beyond peeling, she has no plan. Not for the beets, nor for dinner, nor, if pressed, for life. She considers pouring a glass, putting the needle down on Giant Steps, relaxing her way into cooking. But dirty dishes crowd the counter. The cutting board is hemmed in on all sides. The space too cramped for improvisation. She stares past the counter at David’s so-called conservatory. On the floor, crumpled tissues from his latest cold. Jam, yogurt, and toast crumbs harden in blobs around the armchair where he eats breakfast. In and around the bay window, discarded clay pots, potting soil, and a few infirm stalks. A barren tomato plant, desiccated basil. The avocado, healthiest of the whole sick lot, reaches up tapping the middle pane as if sending an SOS.
Anne halves the beets with a paring knife. She is startled when her phone buzzes on the countertop. She lets it buzz a second and third time. David messaging something conciliatory like I’ll pick up the dry-cleaning, or sushi, or condoms. Before rinsing her hands to check the message, she draws a dilatory finger against the cut edge of a beet and, in childish letters, inks her initials onto her right hand, A.B. Marked she thinks looking at the fat stain. She does not ask what for. What should she tell him about dinner now that the beets are cut?
But it is not David.
It is Benny. Dogged Benny. Good, good Benny. Anne has maintained radio silence for three years. Benny stays true. He texts to remind her. She never answers. He had wept over but forgiven her first marriage. Before their time. Benny and his bro’ code. What would he say now?
Three messages: blush-faced emoji.
Hoppy St. Patrix day loverly.
Triple shamrocks. Heart.
Benny’s bleeding heart. It is mid-May, not March at all. He must be at the Bushmills and Danny Boy again. Reminiscing on his ma’s potato-famine ancestors. His spelling no surprise. Orthography, he’d have on his own terms, sure.
But his tenacity zaps Anne with nostalgia for devotion, for recklessness and a ciggy. What a stopover! Four years of Benny dropping everything for her: work, his boys, that pitcher of sangria staining his already filthy shag carpet. Chain-smoking, late boozing, long dancing. Beats lighting the way at Roxy Blu and Footwork. The swell of the music, the moment the beat dropped and the roof came off. Drunken tirades from opposite political poles. Peter-fucking-Kropotkin, you mothafucking asshole, she would yell.
You don’t know what I could have been, he would scream back.
The sloppy, boundless, gorgeous hell of it all.
Has she been paying for therapy so David can plot the discovery of happiness with someone else?
“Never trust a man in therapy,” Benny had said once.
“Why not?”
“Too smitten, too gaga over himself, too—”
“Narcissistic?”
“Exactly, Beans! Exactly. Too narcissistic to be any good.” Benny waxed philosophical without books or Proto-Indo-European. You’re my refinement, Beans, he would say.
Anne catches herself daydreaming. The dissected beets bleed on the cutting board. A failed operation. Without deliberating, she goes for the keys in the hall table. The drawer jams like it always does, like it was never meant to nest in its own damned groove. She leaves it and the front door agape.
She boots across town, purpose blind. Stops in her old neighbourhood. Buys a pack of Belmonts. After their first date, she had quit cold turkey to stop David discovering her part-time chain-smoking and near alcoholism. On movie nights, they split a tallboy over pizza.
The car takes her up Christie and down a familiar alley. Sure Benny still lives above Ned’s on the Corso. She goes in through the back. Climbs the rusty fire escape to his apartment. Is met by pots and pots of blooming tomatoes breathing fresh green air. Benny, on his dad’s side, could grow a tomato in the crack of a sidewalk. His nonna had taught him how to coax the yellow blooms into ripe red fruit. She had also taught him the secret to a perfect Puttanesca. He passed this on to Anne. “You have to fry the anchovies until they disappear into the oil. The oregano has to be fresh not dried. Everything pungent as a whore’s you know what.”
She stops to press a tomato leaf between her fingers. Inhales its deep green on the narrow walkway, the gangplank, they called it. She should go. David will wonder why the front door is open, why she left beets to stain the cutting board, why the car is gone. He might worry.
And just as she is thinking, let him fucking worry, there is Benny at the screen, barrel trunk tottering over pin prick ankles, glacier blue eyes boring into her, eating her whole like you might an apparition of someone you lost once. “Oh fuck. Fuck me,” he says. Biting his first and second knuckles the way he does to mark disbelief, or lust. “Fuck, Beans! I don’t know should I ravage or slap you.”
“I got married.”
“Slap it is.”
“Benny.” Her resolve flies. Fallen soldiers, vodka empties, line his recycling bin ten-deep. Benny had embraced the worst parts of her. She takes his hands in hers. Lifts his arms out sideways. Points her nose down at the width of him. “Benedetto! How fat you’ve grown!”
“Doc said I had to give up the boozerexia.”
They laugh. He folds her into his belly. Presses her face into his chest. Folded home like fresh linen. Safe to cry in. And once she starts, she cannot stop. Benny prods her side and whispers. “My, Beans, you’ve got some ’splainin’ to do.” But Benny does not need an explanation. He knows why she is here, like he always knew. For all his bravado, his buona figura, Benny is no fool. He knows Anne for the scared little chicky she is. And still, she has him by the balls.
His boys had never forgiven her this indignity. Bringing their tough Benny low like she did. “Mosey yourself back uptown, princess.” One had whispered in a drunk, dark corner. Fool could not see Anne loving Benny. In the end, of course, she shuffled off.
“Did he hurt you?” Benny takes Anne by the haunches.
“Not like you think.”
“In that case, Beans, you don’t gotta go home, but you gotta—”
“Get the hell outa here. I know, Benny. You’re not gonna piss in another man’s bed.” She will always have him, but he won’t take her married. Not Benny. No way.
He wipes her tears with his thumb. He does not ask her in. They stand talking on the gangplank awhile longer before he presses her to the fire escape. She takes the steps hard like her legs won’t go.
“Your wheels, Beans?” Benny leans over the railing.
“Mmhm.”
“You’ve come up in the world, honey bunny. Lie in the fresh green bed you made.”
Anne looks up to see Benny biting his first and second knuckles. He paces the iron walkway. But soon disappears.
She should go home but cannot. You don’t gotta. She texts David, sorry had to run out. Home later. Twenty minutes pass. Anne waits in the car behind Benny’s apartment. Another ten. Her phone buzzes.
Ok.
Ok? Anne needs a hindrance. More than a weak-lettered ok. A solid thing to bump up against. To prevent dissipation. To stop the slow leak before she dies of it. She drives south as if free falling down the map. Gravity pulls her to the bars on College.
At Souz Dal the staff has turned over. She recognizes no one. Used to be she knew all their names, and they her drink. Vodka martini with a scotch wash, extra olive, and a twist. The twist started as a joke, to pique the interest of a cute bartender. But Anne soon acquired a taste for brine up against the tight-lipped citrus.
Behind the bar a twenty-something smiles millennial sunshine like the world and everything in it is all for her, like irony is stone-aged, and everything gorgeous. She beams at Anne who orders, unsmiling. But the girl is beautiful and the bar quiet.
“No way you were at Bar Italia’s launch. That had to be what? 2000?”
“1996.”
“The 90s? You’re so lucky. I wish I’d been around then. Love, love, love Green Day. And the Chili Peppers. You give me that funny feeling in my tummy. Rollercoaster of love—”
“Are you in love?” asks Anne.
“With life!” The girl laughs full hearted, head back, throat and lace bra exposed.
Anne sees Benny biting his knuckles.
Buoyed by martinis, she feels five pounds lighter. The more she drinks the more she would also like to go home with the bartender. To hold happy-go-lucky on the edge of pleasure. To watch her transit its peak.
By ten o’clock the narrow bar is full. Anne remembers the cigarettes in her pocket. She palms them on the bar in glib consideration of her lungs. She is about to hop off the barstool. To head for the back patio when a man to her right catches hold of her hand. He holds it up for inspection in the bar light.
“A. B.? Seriously?” he says. “A.B.?” He traces the A with his finger. Slowly.
Anne does not withdraw her hand. She sees the outline of his biceps through bespoke twill. Impeccable salt and pepper dreadlocks brush his shoulders. Over one, a Toronto Public Library tote. He believes in books for everyone. Probably does not shop Amazon. All mise-en-place for a bright confection.
“These scarlet letters you’re wearing are my initials. Mine.”
“Liar.” Anne laughs. She does not in fact care that he is lying. She is happy for him to keep on lying. He is solid. Smells good. Is looking at her.
“No, for real. Adam Barnes.” He reaches for his wallet. Pulls out his ID. Leans against her barstool, so close she can feel the warmth of his cologne rising in delicious, green notes. Vetiver and sage. Maybe something blooming. Something floral.
“Ok, A. B. Who marked you for me? Serendipity? Fate?”
“Beet juice. Distraction. Botheration.”
The weekend she left Benny for David, they had baked cinnamon rolls. Anne had wanted decadent globs of cream-cheese icing. David had wanted them dry. His frown—sweet and boyish then—and the added promise of sober domesticity won. She sat sipping tea without caffeine, hardly tea, at the breakfast bar where the beets now lay. She watched David knead the dough and loved him. She conceded the icing, then other things.
“Botheration! You’re a fun one, aren’t you, A?”
“Anne. I’m married.” She does not withdraw the hand marked and tucked in his.
“A lot of people are.”
Anne and Adam order another round of clear drinks—vodka and gin—and get transparent themselves. He has two cats. Waters his house plants. Will never marry. Does not shop Amazon. Has read Hawthorne. Was not expecting her. She leaves men for other men.
“Marriage, loneliest place you can be never alone.” Anne’s trips soppily on her fourth martini.
They close the bar. Anne does not go home with Adam. He does not ask. They do not exchange numbers.
In the morning, she comes down the stairs in black leggings. David has a look in his eye. Anne thinks of going back upstairs. Letting him follow. She does not. He slumps in his armchair with a plate of bagels propped against his stomach. She swallows a headache pill and goes out to water the garden. The hydrangeas are rushing to bud. A fledgling jay chirps on a low branch. Its mother swoops cawing at Anne. In a mass of green-globed heads, Anne spots a lone beauty already blooming snowball white. She stands there marvelling at its audacity.