Nova Scotia Love Stories Read online

  “Yes,” said Hal and Reeve.

  “I’d like to have a date with Miranda by myself. I think I’ve got the hang of it now.”

  “Supper at our place first, then you can have her all to yourself. As long as you have her home by midnight.”

  Miranda rolled her eyes. “Knock it off.” She walked Trip outside to his truck. “You can kiss me goodbye.”

  It was early August and Trip and Miranda were bedded down on the rooftop. It was too hot to sleep in the apartment. Miranda thought they might see shooting stars. The earth was flying through the Perseid meteor shower.

  They were exhausted from the effort of cramming the mattress through her kitchen window and over to the roof. It almost hadn’t gone through and it might never go back. Their stomachs hurt from laughing so hard. Trip stared up at the sky. “Are you sure there are stars up there? Looks like fog to me.”

  “Yes, there are stars. The ambient light is making it difficult to see them. The curse of the city astronomer.”

  “You sure it’s not just bad weather moving in? You sure it’s not going to rain?”

  “Nope. The weatherman said not.”

  Trip found Miranda’s faith in weathermen touching, but idiotic. “If you say so.”

  Across the alley, from a roof three stories higher, nightjars flung themselves between the buildings in power dives. “There’s a nest up there,” Miranda said. “The parents taught the babies to hunt and now they’re all doing it.” There was a whoosh, a zhoooooomm though the darkness, a crack of air, and the bird was back on the roof again. “That bug never knew what hit him.”

  “Sounds like a knife ripping through a tarp,” said Trip.

  “Like shears ripping though silk,” said Miranda.

  “Like if the night didn’t seal up right behind him, in the morning the sky would be hanging down everywhere in strips.”

  “That’s a very poetic thought. You have a very poetic imagination.”

  “Pee-yah,” screeched the nightjar.

  “Pee-yah,” answered Trip.

  “Very distinctive. Very visual.”

  “So, you guys got some free time coming up, Reeve says.”

  “You’re no good at accepting compliments, are you?”

  “So, what’re you planning to do?”

  “Sleep. Sleep, sleep, sleep. Clean the apartment. Get my teeth cleaned. Buy many new shoes. Why?”

  “I thought, since and how I’m always coming to the city to see you, you might want to come and visit me for a change. See my house and boat and meet my friends. I’ve met yours.”

  “All the ones in this city. There are more, in other cities, working in other theatres.”

  “It’s not like you’re promising to marry me or anything.”

  “Well, since you put it like that, sure, why not? Will you let me drive your boat?”

  “You don’t drive a boat, you steer it.”

  “Right. So when do you want me there? Tomorrow?”

  “How about next weekend? That’ll give me enough time.”

  “To what? Clear out your other women?”

  “No, just dung things out a bit.”

  “How much dunging is your house going to require?”

  “Not that much. Clear out some things. Put legs on the bed. Fix the shower. Sweep and stuff. I’ll come get you Saturday morning.”

  “That’s silly, you driving all the way here to drive right back again. I’ll take the bus. Pick me up in New Glasgow.”

  “No way. Guys on the bus will be all over you, trying to pick you up. I’m coming to get you.”

  “I won’t be here. I’ll be on the bus.”

  “I’ll flag ’er down and drag you off.”

  “Throw me over your shoulder and speed away in your pickup?”

  “You got ’er.”

  “Pee-yah!”

  “It needs a lot of work. I’ve got the kitchen and the bathroom insulated but not much else. Got to quit messing with the insides and get the roof insulated next. Should have done that first. Last winter I near froze.”

  “You’re a better housekeeper than I am. This kitchen positively shines.”

  “I’d like to take the credit, but I miss things sometimes, and I wanted it to be … Jackie says I’m a slob because I don’t get all the crumbs.”

  “Male-pattern blindness. That’s what my mother calls it. The inability of men to see gunk in corners, crumbs on the periphery, socks under the bed, dirt in the cracks. My father has it. My brother’s the subject of a study at Dalhousie.”

  “What?”

  “I made that up. Who’s Jackie? She the one you bum-rushed out of here because I was coming?”

  “Jeeze. No. She’s Mitch’s wife. Mitch and me are best friends, since we were born, almost. I told you about Mitch and Jackie.”

  “And you dragooned that poor woman into cleaning for you?”

  “Are you crazy? You don’t know Jackie. She gave me the number for Molly Maids and told me to call or else you’d run straight out of here and never come back. Couple of girls came in and went through the place like a forest fire. Smoke coming off their rubber gloves. I just wrote the cheque and stayed out of the way, made sure they didn’t vacuum up the dog. The lasagna’s from Jackie. She said I shouldn’t make you my baked beans first thing if I’ve a brain in my head. We’re invited over there for supper tomorrow. This is what I did for you.”

  “What?”

  “Come look.”

  The bathroom walls were newly gyprocked and crack-filled, but not yet painted. “You can pick the colour,” he said, warming the cockles and muscles of her heart. The fixtures were shiny clean, the towels were bright red and brand new, the double-sized shower stall gleamed. “That.” He pointed to the stall. “I’ve been showering over at Mitch’s, but I figured you wouldn’t want to be running back and forth so me and Mitch put it in. Just got it all hooked up last night. Want to try it out?”

  “Now?”

  “We could baptize it, together.”

  “I hate taking showers with people taller than I am. They get all the good water, I just get the leftover soapy stuff that drips off them. I can never get my hair rinsed properly.” She looked up at him. He looked like he’d just been told there was no Santa Claus. “On the other hand, if you just want to let it run while we have wild wet sex, I’m your girl.”

  “How fast can you get your clothes off, woman?”

  “Faster than you.”

  “Loser has to …?”

  “Something naughty. I’ll decide later.”

  Miranda woke up on April Fool’s Day and knew with a queasy certainty that the pills she’d thrown up during a bout of flu in February, and those stupid green, textured, obviously leaky condoms she and Trip had been fooling around with had joined forces to sabotage her life: she was pregnant. Her subconscious had been nagging at her for days, making her irritable and distracted. It had finally claimed her attention with a technicolour dream, wherein she gave birth to a green lizard with Trip’s blue eyes, except once she’d peeled off the stupid condom, it was a baby. The baby opened his mouth to howl. Except it was really Fiddle, the cat, howling for breakfast.

  An egg and a sperm had been furtively, furiously engaging in simple math as she had gone about her daily business. Division. Multiplication.

  “Shut up,” she yelled at Fiddle. She crawled out from under the bedclothes and stumbled over to the mirror on the closet door. Her naked body didn’t look that different. Yet. She wanted to burst into tears, but her shell-shocked eyes told her that it was already too late for that sort of histrionics.

  “What the hell do I do now?”

  She couldn’t come up with an answer. Her feet were cold, so she sat down and pulled on fuzzy striped socks, pulling them up to her knees. I have to think. But after fuzzy socks: nothing.

  Both cats were screaming now. That was something she could do, she could feed the cats. They horked down chunks of meat product and wiped their reeking mouths against her so
cks in approval. She opened the kitchen window and heaved them out onto the fire escape. “Go play in the traffic,” she said. Trip was coming the next day for the weekend. What was she going to say? What was she going to do? She called Reeve.

  “Holy Hannah,” he said. “Holy sweet fucking Hannah. Holy sweet mother …”

  “Shut up and give me some good advice.”

  “Stick to bottled beer – no, that’s for strange parties – um, when in doubt, do nothing.”

  “While I do nothing the blob is growing body parts! I can’t do nothing!”

  “Wait until you’ve seen a doctor. It might be a cyst.”

  “I didn’t dream a blue-eyed cyst!”

  “You can’t think now. You’re in shock. I’m in shock! Let’s just take this time to be in shock together and then we’ll be really practical and explore all your options.”

  “What do I tell Trip? It’s his blob, too.”

  “He’s definitely one of the options. Have you had breakfast?”

  “No. I fed the cats. They were screaming. Does that mean I’d be a good mother?”

  “Are you having kittens?”

  “Oh, God. I’ll be a horrible mother.”

  “Not what I said. Right now you need breakfast. Meet me downstairs in fifteen minutes and I’ll take you out for something nourishing.”

  Miranda and Reeve sat at a small table on the sidewalk. The awning overhead flapped gently. It was unusually mild, and the last of the slush on the street was melting in the sun and gurgling down the storm grates. Their table was littered with crumbs and smears of black currant jam. Miranda drained her second double cappuccino.

  “This isn’t calming me down.”

  “It wasn’t meant to calm you down. You said you felt like you were sleepwalking and wanted to wake up. The only other option was to slap you alongside the head, and I’d like to keep my teeth. They cost more than my education.”

  “Maybe I should switch to milk.”

  Reeve snapped his fingers. “Garçon! A litre of milk for Milady.”

  “Keep that up,” said the waiter.

  “Sorry,” said Reeve. “I’m sorry. Please, may we have some milk?”

  “Miranda can. You’re cut off.”

  “So, let’s run down our list of options,” Reeve said when the waiter had gone back in.

  “I thought we were waiting until I see a doctor.”

  “Let’s just assume you are with child.”

  “I am.”

  “You’re good at this assumption stuff. Wasn’t that the Virgin Mary’s gig?”

  “You’re thinking of the Annunciation. The Assumption was when she floated up to heaven. I think.”

  “No floating. No copping out. You’re staying right here. Option 1: abortion.”

  “Philosophically, politically, yes. Realistically, emotionally, no. It’s not the blob’s fault, after all.”

  “Option 2: having the baby.”

  “Is there another option?”

  “You could be cybernetically flash-frozen and kept in a giant thermos for a couple hundred years until they can thaw you, transplant the blob into an artificial uterus, and send you on your merry way.”

  “Can’t. I’ve got tickets to see Dylan in the fall. Shit, I’m having a baby. There really should be another option.”

  “Part 2: disposal of the child: your parents.

  “No.”

  “Sister Pammie, brother Rufe?”

  “No and goddamn no.”

  “Adoption.”

  “Maybe. No.”

  “Be a poor but wonderful single mom, with help from your friends and poor, but loving and supportive cousin. You’ll have to quit swearing, you’ll be such a bad influence.”

  Miranda looked desperately around, saw the waiter, and waved him over. She pointed to her coffee cup, “Hit me again.”

  “Here’s another option. Marry Trip and raise it with him. From the blob’s point of view, two parents are the best option. You still have to give up swearing.”

  “We’re good in bed. We’re really good. We’re great friends. I don’t want to get married. He doesn’t want to get married. We’ve never talked about it. We’ve never even tried to live together. We like visiting. He hires Molly Maids. If I moved in he’d expect me to Molly Maid for him. The bastard.”

  “So give the baby to Trip.”

  “What makes you think he’d – yes, he would, goddamnit. And they’d be a chummy little twosome and I’d be the visiting girlfriend. His mother would dress my child in cartoon characters and try to turn him against me. Fuck that.”

  “You really are going to have to stop swearing.”

  “You know,” sighed Miranda, “I can’t decide on my own. I’ve got to let Trip in on these decisions. It’s going to matter to him, it’s really going to matter.”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s the job I’ve got lined up in Toronto with the National Ballet. Trip figures he’ll come and visit me but, realistically, long-distance relationships hardly ever work. This isn’t what I had planned!”

  Reeve, despite the coffee jitters, was quiet. He bit down three or four really clever, wise-ass retorts because he loved Miranda and he wanted to help her more than he wanted to be witty. “Things work out,” he said. “They always do. It will be all right.”

  Miranda saw pregnant women everywhere. The city streets bloomed with big stomachs. Maybe she’d just never noticed, maybe she’d just assumed those women were fat. She opened doors for them, gave them her seat on the bus, picked up their dropped parcels and smiled protectively as they waddled down Spring Garden Road. Occasionally, as she watched them, tears pricked her eyes. Goddamn hormones.

  Then there were the babies in strollers. They stared holes in things and grabbed at everything bright and moving. She watched how they slept, like small frogs at the bottom of a river of sound and motion. They didn’t seem to breathe at all, their fat little faces were loose and serene. She supposed you had to trust that their small lungs would keep working and their little hearts keep pumping, even if you didn’t monitor them constantly. Everyone said they were tougher than they looked. Well, they’d have to be, wouldn’t they? Look at how many people there were in the world. Billions of them.

  She examined herself in the mirror every morning. Nothing seemed so terribly different. If a laboratory test hadn’t confirmed her doctor’s prodding and poking, she might have persuaded herself the whole thing was the product of an overblown imagination. She would stop in the middle of the sidewalk, trying to feel. Foot traffic would part and rejoin beyond her. She would concentrate on her stomach, waiting for some kind of flowering, some sort of blood message to well up to her brain. She examined the ends of her fingertips, waiting for them to tell her something. She thought they should look different, and the world should feel different when she touched anything in it.

  She was going to turn down the job offer in Toronto. She was going to stay in Nova Scotia and move in with Trip – probably for a very long time. She was about to become very dependent on him, and that scared her a little. On principle she thought it a bad thing for a woman to do, to park her career and move into a man’s territory, but there didn’t seem to be any way for her to continue working in the theatre in Halifax and still make a family with Trip in Caribou. Trip and Mitch, meanwhile, were on a mission: insulating and drywalling like madmen. If only the baby would co-operate by making her feel truly pregnant. She felt as if she was making crucially important decisions for two people and one of them was out of the room and not paying attention.

  “Where are you?” She shook her belly, just a little. Poked it tenderly. “This is your mother speaking. Wake up and do something. Give me the thumbs-up. You have got thumbs, haven’t you?”

  It was alarming how much the idea of moving to Toronto without Trip had come to depress her. Something had moved in and taken a seat in her heart without any of the emotional uproar she associated with love affairs. How had that happened? Half of her marri
ed friends had already gotten divorced and most had remarried. Some of them had children they rarely saw. She didn’t want that for her child. How long did they have?

  As long as it takes, she thought. We have a baby to raise. In twenty years we’ll either be sick of each other, or we’ll be bonded at the hip. No way of knowing at all.

  Some Girl I Met at a Party Somewhere

  William Kowalski

  Here is a true story of love and attraction, set amidst the excitement of New York City and the perfection of Nova Scotia.

  In 1999, I was twenty-nine years old and living in New York City, which is one of the greatest places in the world to be a bachelor. My life then seems so distant that it’s as if it was lived by another person, perhaps someone I read about it a novel. I remember it the same way I remember having lived in nineteenth-century France, or on the planet of Tlön.

  Typically, after a night out in Manhattan, I woke up around ten or eleven. I lay in bed until I mustered the energy to wander down the block to a little Italian bakery, where they made strong, fragrant coffee and buttery croissants stuffed with chocolate. Then I spent the morning and afternoon writing in my Brooklyn apartment, drinking more coffee and smoking cigarettes as if youth was eternal and I had a new set of lungs on standby. As the sun went down, I headed back into Manhattan to get some dinner, and to see what trouble I could stir up.

  I had been living in the city for a year by then. Life was pretty good. I had made several interesting friends. I’d just published my first novel, and I had a little bit of money. Since I’d never had any money before, I mistook it for a lot of money, which I spent freely in restaurants and bars all over town. I took cabs instead of walking, I bought rounds of drinks for perfect strangers, and I stayed out until three in the morning if I felt like it. I had no one to answer to except myself. I thought that the city was mine, in the way a person who finds something beautiful by accident thinks it’s his – no doubt in the same way Columbus thought America belonged to him.

  New York is filled with all kinds of people, but it’s especially full of beautiful young people from all over the world who have come to seek their destiny, or maybe just to have a good time. All of them are full of ambition and energy, and often of themselves, too. They work hard all day in offices and restaurants, and at night they congregate in clubs and bars, where they dance, eat, and drink, and sometimes take drugs, and as often as not go to bed with each other. For those people, and for me, New York was the centre of the universe. It seemed that anything that was of any importance happened there, and if it happened elsewhere, it didn’t matter. I loved the constant movement, and the surge of raw power flooding throughout the city. I felt like a corpuscle being pumped through a vast, thumping heart.