What she’s really waiting for though is the aftershave. Which one will he pick, and where will he put it? Ah! Nothing too seductive, just some stuff he got in England, heather or something. The outdoor mode. And nothing below the neck. Roz sighs with relief.
She does love him. She loves him still. She can’t afford to go overboard, is all.
But maybe, underneath, she loves him too much. Maybe it’s her excessive love that pushes him away.
After Mitch is out of the bathroom Roz continues with her own preparations, the creams and lotions and perfumes that should never be seen by Mitch. They belong behind the scenes, as at theatres. Roz collects perfumes the way other people collect stamps, she’s a sucker for anything new that comes out. She has three rows of them, three rows of cunning little bottles, sorted into categories that she thinks of as Flower Arranging, Executive Briskness, and Heavy Petting. Today, in honour of her lunch with Mitch, she chooses Shalimar, from the Heavy
Petting section. But it’s a bit too sultry for the middle of the day so she cuts it with something from Flower Arranging. Then, suited and made up but wearing her bedroom slippers and carrying her high heels, she descends to do her mother routine in the kitchen. Mitch, needless to say, is already out the door. He has a breakfast meeting.
“Hi, kids,” says Roz. There they are, all three of them, bless their greedy overnourished hearts, gobbling down the Rice Krispies with brown sugar and bananas on top, supervised by Dolores, who is from the Philippines and is, Roz hopes, beginning to get over her culture shock. “Hi, Dolores.”
Dolores fills Roz with anxiety and misgiving: should Dolores be here? Will Western culture corrupt her? Is Roz paying her enough? Does Dolores secretly hate them all? Is she happy, and, if not, is it Roz’s fault? Roz has had spates of thinking they shouldn’t have a live-in housekeeper. But when they don’t, there’s no one to do the kids’ lunches and handle the illnesses and last-minute emergencies except Roz, and Roz becomes over-organized and can’t pay enough attention to Mitch, and Mitch gets very short-tempered.
Roz makes the rounds of the kitchen table, bestowing smooches. Larry is fourteen going on fifteen and embarrassed by her, but he endures. The twins kiss her back, briefly, milkily. “Mom,” says Erin. “you smell like room freshener.”
How wonderful! How exact! Roz glances around the kitchen, done in warm wood panelling with chopping-block counters where the three school lunches sit in their matching lunch boxes, blue for Erin, green for Paula, black for Larry, and she lights up within, she glows! This is why she goes through it, this is what it’s for! All the holy hell with Mitch has been worth it, for mornings like this, to be able to walk into the kitchen and say “Hi; kids,” and have—them continue scarfing down the breakfast food as if she’s practically not there. She extends her invisible wings, her warm feathery angel’s wings, her fluttery hen’s wings, undervalued and necessary, she enfolds them. Secure, is what she wants them to feel; and they do feel secure, she’s certain of it. They know this is a safe house, they know she’s there, planted solidly, two feet on the ground; and Mitch is there too, more or less, in his own way. They know it’s all right, so they can get on with whatever they’re doing, they don’t have to worry.
Maybe she’s wrong about Mitch, this time. Maybe there’s nothing going on. Maybe he’s finally settled down.
XLI
The lunch is at a restaurant called Nereids. It’s a small place, a done-over house on Queen East, with a large wellput-together stone man without any clothes on standing outside it. Roz has never been to it before, but Mitch has; she can tell by the way the hostess greets him, by the way he looks around with an amused, proprietorial eye. She can see too why he likes it: the whole place is decorated with paintings, paintings that twenty years ago could’ve got you arrested, because they are all of naked women. Naked women, and naked mermaids too, with enormous and statuesque breasts: not a droopy boob among them. Well, naked people, because the naked women do not lack for male company. Walking to their table Roz; gets a cock right in the eye, and averts her gaze.
“What is this?” she whispers, alight with curiosity and appalled glee, and with the sheer pleasure of being taken out to lunch by Mitch. “Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing? I mean, is this a porn shop, or what?”
Mitch chuckles, because he likes to shock Roz a little, he likes to show that he’s above her prejudices. (Not that she’s a prude, but there’s private and there’s public; and this is public. Public privates!) He explains that this is a seafood restaurant, a
Mediterranean seafood restaurant, one of the best in the city in his opinion, but that the owner is also a painter, and some of these paintings are by him and some are by his friends, who appear to share his interests. Venus is featured, because she was after all a goddess of the sea. The fish motif accounts too for the mermaids. Roz deduces that these are not just naked people, they are mythological naked people. She can deal with that, she took it at university. Proteus blowing his conch. Or getting it blown.
“Oh,” says Roz; in her mock-naive voice. “So this is capitalA Art! Does that make it legal?” and Mitch laughs again, uneasily, and suggests that maybe she should lower her voice because she wouldn’t want to hurt people’s feelings.
If anyone else told her to lower her voice, Roz would know what to do: scream louder. But Mitch has always been able to make her feel as if she were just off the boat, head wrapped in a shawl, wiping her nose on her sleeve, and lucky to have a sleeve at that. Which boat? There are many boats in her ancestral past, as far as she can tell. Everyone she’s descended from got kicked out of somewhere else, for being too poor or too politically uncouth or for having the wrong profile or accent or hair colour.
The boat her father came over on was more or less recent, though far enough back to have arrived before the Canadiarr government walled out the Jews, in the thirties and during the war. Not that her father was even a whole Jew. Why do you inheritJewishness through the mother’s side? Tony once asked Roz. Because so many Jewish women were raped by Cossacks and whathave-you that they could never be sure who the father was. But her father was Jewish enough for Hitler, who hated mixtures more than anything.
The boat on her mother’s side was much further back. Famine caused by landlessness caused by war drove them out, a hundred and fifty years ago, Irish and Scots both. One of those families set out with five children—and arrived with none, and then the father died of cholera in Montreal and the mother remarried, as fast as she could—an Irishman whose wife had died, so he needed a new one. Men needed wives then, for such enterprises. Off they went into the semi-cleared bush, to be overtaxed and to have other children and to plant potatoes, and to chop down trees with implements they’d never used before, because how many trees were left in Ireland? A lot of legs got chopped into, by those people. Tony, who is more interested in these details than Roz is, once showed Roz an old picture—the men standing in metal washtubs, to protect their legs from their own axes. Low comedy for the English middle classes, back home, living off the avails. Stupid bogtrottersi The Irish were always good for a smirk or two, then.