Six Songs

Another wee piece I wrote for my Sunday afternoon writers' group.


*

Six Songs

Evan hums during sex.
I hear the words come out of my mouth and know that if I was in full possession of all my faculties, I’d be royally embarrassed. This is not a piece of information that anyone ever needed. Not even Hallie.
Let’s face it, when it comes to tell-all time, I’m not like Hallie. She seems to feel it’s her God-given duty to keep me up-to-date about her guy-of-the-moment’s hairy ass (Richard) or stamina between the sheets (Joel) or fondness for sucking on her toes (Daniel). Me, I tend to keep such details to myself.
But thanks to two bottles of shiraz and a pledge to Hallie that tonight of all nights I will not under any circumstances remain sober, I’m not even remotely humiliated by the foolish confession.
In fact, I’m kind of amused.
Hallie, who’s slouched in the far corner of my squashy couch, starts to laugh. There’s nothing musical about a Hallie laugh. It involves a great deal of snorting and snuffling and gasping for air in a most unbecoming fashion. Hearing her laugh has made me laugh ever since we sat side-by-side in Mrs. Craddock’s Grade 1 class, when she was still the smallest girl with the biggest name (Heather Alexandra Leonora) and before we’d become the Hallie-and-Allie show.
Tonight is no exception. I can feel my face burning – the uncontrollable blush is the curse of us pale-skinned, ginger-haired sorts - but I can’t help myself from laughing too. Especially when Hallie stops laughing abruptly and leans towards me with the eager, big-eyed look that always makes her look a bit like a puppy whose tail ought to be wagging furiously.
“What songs?”
I’m not sure if it’s the suddenness of the question that does me in or the undisguised curiosity in her brown eyes. But I start giggling again and just keep on giggling until the tears are running down my cheeks and I’m snorting almost as much as Hallie.
Then I tell her.

*
Mozart. Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.
It caught me somewhat by surprise when I realized in a hazy way that the background sound that was accompanying the tangle of limbs and growing pile of clothes on Evan’s dorm room floor was, in fact, the sound of Evan humming.
It was a little off-putting. To be honest, I was kind of miffed. It struck me that humming is something you do when you’re absent-minded and distracted. Not when you’re busy peeling the clothes off a woman who has made a special trip to La Senza to buy the exact right black lace bra with pink trim. And a matching bit of black lace that barely qualified as panties. (Not that I was counting on anything. But it was the fifth date, after all, and, well, it never hurt to be prepared.)
Evan’s hands, however, were busily exploring the bits of black lace, tracing delicate circles on my breasts and thighs, and I found it difficult to remain miffed for long.
His hands were so big and warm and strong and a little rough against my skin but not so rough as to be scratchy, just rough enough to suggest that he was a man who occasionally used his hands for outdoorsy kind of things, like maybe he could paddle a canoe and chop wood and make fires if you needed one, and he probably wouldn’t ever let you get cold or go hungry, he’d always look after you, and besides being strong and rough his hands were big and it did sort of make you wonder whether it was true if big hands meant anything and all of these things and a whole bunch of other ones raced around in my brain all together in a jumble until pretty soon the hands became more insistent and they were joined in their journeys by a tongue and I kind of stopped thinking altogether.
Evan hummed the whole time.
I didn’t mind.
*
Ronan Keating. When You Say Nothing At All.
It was the kind of schmaltzy ballad that, in his normal moments, Evan would make fun of. Even when we’d been on the dance floor just a few hours before, he hadn’t been able to resist whispering snide comments in my ear about my choice of first dance songs. (Needless to say, everyone watching just saw his shock of blonde hair bend towards me and his big blue eyes gazing at me, and they all assumed he was bending down to whisper loving things into the ear of the freshly minted Mrs. Forrester.)
But, in the hotel room, it was Evan who took up the tune.
I’m pretty sure he didn’t even know he was humming.
It started as a whisper-soft background noise the moment I emerged from the bathroom after what seemed like an endless time pulling bobby pins out of my updo and scrubbing unaccustomed makeup off my face.
I was garbed in the ivory lace bustier, garter and stockings I’d bought at the French lingerie store on Queen Street, where I’d spent precisely twice as much on my wedding-night attire as I had on my wedding dress.
(Hallie’s doing, naturally. When I objected to her that it seemed foolish to spend a fortune on something that wasn’t even new, since Evan had seen me naked hundreds of times before, she just shoved me towards the change room. “It’s your wedding night, Al,” she reminded me. “You only get one. Don’t you want it to be special?”)
She was right, of course.
Because the moment Evan laid eyes on me in the ensemble, When You Say Nothing At All became the soundtrack of the evening.
As sex went, it wasn’t earthshaking. It wasn’t the loudest or wildest or most acrobatic we’d ever been.
But there was something different about it. Something tender that wrapped me in an all-enveloping warmth and flooded me with the certainty that whatever was to come in our lives together, Evan and I would never lose the feeling we had just then.
I hummed along that night.

*
Neil Diamond. Song Sung Blue.
It was the first time he had reached for me in weeks. Seven, to be exact. I had been counting despite my insistence to myself that such things couldn’t be measured. That it was perfectly normal to end up falling asleep so far away from the centre of our soft queen-size bed that both my arms and all of my toes were hanging over the edge. That it was fine to not roll over in the night seeking the warmth of Evan’s body next to me. That it was fine that he never rolled over to seek me either.
It wasn’t fine.
I don’t know when it stopped being fine, exactly.
Was it the first time he called and said he was running late? Or maybe it wasn’t till the time I called his cell on one of his late nights and Sara answered the phone. Giggling.
I knew Sara , tall and long-legged and dark-haired. We talked at parties. She smiled a lot. But I’d never heard her giggle before.
Evan didn’t even seem offended when I demanded to know what she was doing there. I could hear the edge in my voice, but Evan’s answering tone was casual.
“You know she works with me, Al,” he said. “We were going over case notes.”
I believed him. I did.
I tried not to call when he was working late. I didn’t want to appear to be checking up on him. I even made a point of talking to Sara the next time I saw her – at a drinks party to celebrate one of their fellow associates’ birthdays – and she was as friendly as she always was.
Although I wondered if it was really necessary that she sit so close to Evan. And if he was really being so funny that she had to giggle loudly at nearly all of his comments. And if everything she had to say was really so interesting that Evan could hardly take his eyes off her.
I was quiet on the way home.
Evan didn’t seem to notice.
When I climbed into bed that night, still quiet, he just kissed the side of my head and said good night.
There was no humming.
I think that was when it started to fray. Like the tiniest little thread on the inside of a cuff that doesn’t even seem important until you start to tug at it and before you know it a sleeve is coming apart at the seams.
Nothing ever happened. He never came home with lipstick on his collar or smelling of Sara’s woodsy perfume. I never caught him in indiscreet phone conversations or found any unexplained charges for flowers or hotel rooms on the Visa bill.
We just drifted, almost without noticing, into a pattern where he’d come home and talk about his day and I’d come home and talk about my day but it was like we were conducting two separate monologues and never really communicating at all. Every time her name entered his monologue, my monologue got a little shorter. Till before we knew it I wasn’t talking at all. It was just him keeping up a stream of conversation and me saying nothing.
I didn’t do it on purpose. It wasn’t like one of my silent sulks, where I’m so angry that I just zip my mouth and refuse to open it until someone apologizes. I wasn’t angry at all. I was afraid. I didn’t dare talk because if I did I might ask the question that I’d been wanting longing dying needing to ask but whose answer threatened to rock the foundations of my marriage.
It was Evan who broke the silence.
After one more long, silent week he arrived home on Friday with two bottles of wine in his hands: a chardonnay (his favourite) and a shiraz (mine). He took two of our large goblets (our fishbowls, we called them) out of the china cabinet and filled up one for each of us. Then he led me to the living room, nudged me gently onto the couch and sat down beside me, putting my wine glass into my hand.
“Drink,” he said, so gently that the fear I’d been barely keeping at bay burst into full flame and nearly made me gasp for breath. “We need to talk.”
Then he told me.
He kissed her.
That’s it. It was one of their late nights at the office and they were laughing as they always did and flirting a little as they pored over paperwork and no one meant anything by anything but she reached out for a paper at the same time as he did and their hands touched and there was a moment of something and he looked at her and she looked at him and then they were kissing.
And he pulled away and she apologized and they went back to work.
“And that’s all that ever happened, Al.” Evan turned the full force of his blue gaze on me, and the sheepishness in his eyes told me he was telling the truth. “It was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done, and it’s never happened again, and it never will happen again. I love you, Al.”
He didn’t get off that lightly. I got mad. I told him off for ignoring me at the pub and for letting a stupid flirtation with a co-worker jeopardize his marriage. I cried a lot too.
But in the end all it took was Evan reaching out and wrapping his large strong hand around mine and tugging me gently to my feet.
I followed him to the bedroom and stood quietly as he unbuttoned my shirt, slid my jeans down and pushed me gently back onto the bed.
Song Sung Blue suited my mood just then. Not sad, exactly. But lulled by the melody of my hurt and my tears and the something that had never really happened and the rain sliding in ceaseless streams down the bedroom window into a state of wistfulness.
He hummed me to sleep that night.

*
Deep Purple. Smoke on the Water.
We’d been drinking rather copiously at the wedding of one of Evan’s office colleagues. I’d been caught up in conversation with one of the other law wives, a short, slightly overweight blonde who rarely had a word to say for herself. That night, however, she was in high spirits, giggling merrily at just about everything.
“You’re in a good mood tonight, Marsha,” I remarked. “Enjoying the wine, are you?”
I brandished my own nearly empty wineglass at her with a grin, but Marsha shook her head. She held up her own water glass in my direction with a smile.
“Nope. I’m off the sauce. For another seven months or so, at least.”
It took my wine-soaked brain a moment. Then I gaped slightly foolishly at her as she nodded enthusiastically, and before I knew what happened the whole table was drawn into our conversation, showering Marsha and her beaming husband Allan with congratulations and testosterone-laden comments about the now-proven virility of lawyers.
Evan didn’t contribute a lot to that part of the conversation. Which I didn’t particularly notice, because we soon got caught up in making spectacles of ourselves on the dance floor and didn’t talk much for the rest of the night.
In the cab on the way home, Evan was silent for the first two minutes.
Then, abruptly, he turned towards me and grabbed both my hands in his.
“So, should we join them?”
I stared at him, confused.
“Join who? Matt and Jen, in Cuba? I don’t think they want us on their honeymoon.”
He shook his head impatiently. “No, silly. Allan and Marsha. In parenthood.”
His tone was casual, but his blue eyes were wary as they watched my face for an answer.
I kind of wanted to milk the moment. Pretend I was thinking about it. Considering the pros and cons of the proposition. But I couldn’t stop the smile from coming, and Evan’s blue eyes danced in answer.
He reached over and started to kiss me with such conviction that the driver glowered at us in the rear-view mirror.
“Hey, hey, buddy, take it easy. Make a baby if you want to, but don’t do it in the back of my cab.”
We broke apart, giggling. But only till we’d gotten safely through the door of our condo. Whereupon Evan picked me up and deposited me none-too-gently on the couch, tugging his pants down with one hand while reaching for my skirt with the other.
It all seemed reasonably successful till he started humming. Then something about his choice of song – yes, Smoke on the Water – struck me as funny, and I started to giggle.
I’m not sure whether it was the fact that I laughed at him, or the fact that he’d consumed more than his fair share of the table wine, but it turned out Evan wasn’t exactly up for babymaking right at that instant.
Not that it mattered, I told him. We had lots of time for that.
We fell asleep in a happy haze, wrapped around each other on the couch.

*
The Kinks. Lola.
I would rewrite that one if I could. Make it more poetic somehow. More symbolic. More romantic or more sweet or more loving or more likely to evoke in me any emotion other than the irritation I felt when Evan’s soundtrack started that night.
It was just an ordinary Friday ending just an ordinary week. We weren’t in bad moods, nor in particularly good ones. We weren’t angry or upset at each other, but we weren’t feeling particularly passionate or amorous either.
We just fell onto the couch in that end-of-a-long-work-week way and half-heartedly watched Die Hard (a compromise movie we could both agree on – Evan for the action, and me for Alan Rickman). Evan fell asleep before John McClane leapt over the edge of the Nakatomi Plaza attached to the end of a fire hose. I watched the final credits roll with half-open eyes, then woke him up enough to lead him by the hand to the bedroom.
Where we both rolled lazily towards one another as Evan started in with the evening’s chosen background noise. Which I almost, but not quite, managed to tune out throughout the ensuing proceedings.
I went to sleep annoyed that I couldn’t get the L-O-L-A tune out of my head.

*
Silence.
I was alone in the much-too-big bed. Lying flat on my back. Staring at the ceiling. Trying not to think. Trying just to breathe in and out and in and out and in and out again.
Hallie had gone, at my insistence.
She’d been at my side all day. She walked into the church with me and slid into the pew next to me and held my hand tightly as if she were afraid that if she let go for even an instant I might just evaporate into thin air. When the organ struck the first chord of Amazing Grace, she drew herself up to her entire five feet one-and-a-quarter inches and sang so loudly that others were drawn in too.
And when my father and Evan’s joined his best man and three of his college roommates at the sides of the brown wooden box (oak, I’d chosen from the list they provided me, as if it mattered, as if it was possible that the box could have anything at all to do with Evan), it was only Hallie’s small arm around my waist that prevented me from falling.
She stood next to me at the reception while well-meaning Catholic Women’s Leaguers pressed cups of tea into my hands, while uncles and school friends and associates murmured meaningless phrases about the shock of it all, while aunts squeezed my hand and told me how brave I’d been, how well I’d been coping since the night of the accident.
I didn’t tell them there was no such thing as coping. That there had been nothing but trying to remember to breathe, repeating inhale-exhale-inhale-exhale to myself till I nearly went crazy with the monotony of the mantra, since the night I’d answered the buzzer and found myself face to face with the police officer.
Hallie hardly said a word the whole time. She went with me everywhere. She dealt with everything, with my parents and Evan’s and the funeral home and Father Devlin. But she never said anything to me.
Until that day, after it all ended, and she drove me back to the condo I could no longer think of as home.
She came inside with me and stood uncertainly in the doorway as she watched me sit down on the edge of the couch.
“What can I do, Al?” Her voice, unusually for Hallie, was small and uncertain. “Please say there’s something I can do.”
I didn’t answer. For a long moment I didn’t move. Then, in one fierce movement, I flung myself across the room at her and grabbed her so hard that I nearly knocked her over. No one but Hallie could have held me then, her small arms gripping me so fiercely that I couldn’t have escaped if I’d tried.
I didn’t try. I held onto her even harder than she was holding onto me.
I don’t know how long we cried.
I just know that when I went to bed that night, I could hear nothing but the sound of my own breathing. There was no answering breathing beside me. And no humming.
Sometimes silence is so loud it hurts.

*
It is Evan’s birthday.
He is thirty-four today.
I know this is not true. I have known for every one of the last one hundred and thirty-one days and one hundred and thirty-one silent, hum-free nights that Evan is not here and that he will not be here again.
I am not okay with this. I have cried. So hard that my head ached for days and my eyes burned at the slightest hint of light. I have hidden in my bed for days on end and refused to get up or shower or change or eat until Hallie bullied me into it. I have punched pillows and thrown plates at the floor and raged and yelled. At Evan. At God. At whatever malign universal power brought my husband’s life to an end at the age of thirty-three. At the fate that decided my dream of a baby and a happily ever after would end on the highway on a rainy November night at the hands of a recklessly speeding driver with a blood alcohol content of .12.
But for today – just for today – I am doing none of these things.
Hallie and I have declared that the only way to cope with what would otherwise me a messy, emotional, maudlin day is to treat it as though Evan is simply out for the evening. He is out with the boys and I am mad at him. So Hallie and I have stocked up on shiraz and agreed that we will tuck in with our fishbowl goblets and never let them get empty as we hash over all the reasons why I am mad at Evan and why he just irritates me beyond all telling.
We have been through most of his bad habits.
His lateness. His addiction to the Space Channel and sci-fi novels. His chronic inability to learn that dirty socks and underwear are meant to go into the hamper and not onto the bedroom floor.
We’ve raked him over the coals for forgetting to call me the night he decided to go out drinking with Frank and Nelson after work and for the time he forgot our anniversary and for the time that he actually thought a new toaster would be a good Christmas present.
“But it’s bagel-sized,” he protested in wounded innocence when I fell into one of my silent sulks. The next day, he fought the Boxing Day crowds at the malls and came home with a big box of chocolates, a fluffy pink fleece robe, the new Maeve Binchy novel, a pile of Hugh Grant movies on DVD, a gold heart pendant and a promise that he would go shopping every day for something else until I told him he had atoned for his sins. I had to laugh despite myself. He hummed Sweet Caroline that night.
That last detail is the part of the memory that gets me onto the tangent that leads us here. Onto my couch, goblets in hand, with Hallie making wide-eyed faces at me over her wineglass while I feel my face burn with belated embarrassment at the realization that I have, in fact, now told my best friend about some of the most intimate moments of my life.
And revealed the fact that Evan hummed during sex.
A fact that Hallie finally manages to stop laughing about long enough to stare thoughtfully at me.
“You know, Al, it could be worse.” She waves one hand in a gesture of magnanimous dismissal. “He could have hummed the Hallelujah Chorus. That would have been just too frigging arrogant altogether.”
Then she catches sight of my face.
“Ohmygawd, Al, say it ain’t so.” She shakes her head slowly. Mournfully, it seems. “Tell me he never actually hummed the Hallelujah Chorus!”
“It was only once!” I rush to Evan’s defence with a heated protest, momentarily forgetting that I am meant to be mad at him. “Well, twice. Okay, a few times.”
Then I regard Hallie seriously over the top of my fishbowl goblet and give her my best attempt at a raised-eyebrow leer.
“And I’ve gotta tell ya, Hallie, it was damn good. There were several hallelujahs involved for me, if you know what I mean.”
Hallie splutters on a mouthful of shiraz. But, fortunately for the fate of my beige suede couch, she doesn’t spit it out.