Ellen in Pieces Read online

  In the dream, Charles must have been working on a model, but as the details were released to Ellen intermittently throughout the morning in mortifyingly erotic little fragments, the toy plane eventually disappeared and only the screwdriver remained.

  “For God’s sake,” Ellen muttered to herself.

  Then even the screwdriver vanished and she and Charles were entangled in coitus. It was very, very good, exquisite even. Because of his cock. There was something special about Charles’s cock, something ecstasy-inducing, but Ellen couldn’t remember what. In the kitchen kneading raw onion and garlic into a bowl of ground beef, she both wanted to remember, because she was curious, and didn’t.

  At just that moment, with Ellen torn between curiosity and embarrassment, in strolled Charles. Ellen yelped, tossed her head so her braid swung over her shoulder, then fled, awkwardly, her smocked belly leading the way to the bedroom, her arms up—don’t shoot!—because of the hamburger stuck all over her hands.

  She closed the door with her hip. She’d only been standing there a second when a car pulled up outside. The cab. Mimi, playing in the front yard in an inflatable pool with her cousins, started singing, “Dada, dada, dada!” Ellen heard her through the window and, relieved, opened the door again.

  Charles! Right there in the hall. He was a tall, pointily featured man who wore dress socks with sandals, and now this look of wounded bafflement. Ellen brushed past him.

  “Ellen?” Charles bleated.

  She ducked into the bathroom.

  With Yolanda performing a vigorous in utero callisthenic routine, Ellen scrubbed the E. coli off her hands. She heard everyone troop inside, Moira directing Larry to the spare bedroom, asking about the trip, and the besotted cousins chasing Mimi back outside under the suggestively clouded sky.

  One of the not-best things about Larry was his moodiness. Later, after Ellen started in publicity, she came to realize that most artists walk a zigzag between pathetically insecure and egomaniacal, except for the really good ones, who are quite normal. That day, preventing Larry from acting like an asshole with her sister overrode her fear of running into Charles. She stepped into the hall again and, thankfully, he was gone.

  “Baby,” she said from the spare room doorway.

  Larry was sitting on the bed talking to Moira. He looked up at Ellen, cringed. He’d forgotten she was pregnant, just like she’d forgotten he’d cut his hair and shaved. But while he looked better for this—tanned, dark curls held back by sunglasses on top of his head, a linen suit jacket she’d never seen before over a T-shirt she’d also never seen—after a ten-day separation Ellen only looked more of the barnyard.

  Ellen came over and they kissed, her dissatisfied tongue stirring in her mouth. A good little tongue, tucked behind her teeth. Then she remembered the hamburger on the counter.

  “I’ll put it way,” Moira volunteered.

  As soon as Moira was out of the room, Larry stood and emptied his pockets onto the bureau. He tossed the linen jacket on the bed.

  “This is nice,” Ellen said, sitting carefully beside the jacket, but not touching it lest she wrinkle it further. It was hard to believe that Larry had purchased this jacket, but of course he had meetings. He couldn’t schlep his scripts around L.A. dressed like a hobo.

  She settled on her side and arranged her top so as not to look like a nursing sow. Or a cow. Larry hadn’t specified which farm animal. “How was the trip?”

  “Exhausting,” Larry said. He stripped while Ellen watched.

  “How’s your mother?”

  “Good.”

  “It wasn’t broken?”

  “What? No. Sprained.”

  “Come here,” she said.

  “I really need a shower. Where is it?”

  “Down the hall.”

  How quickly showers became essential when for two winters he had uncomplainingly sponge-bathed in diaper water. When in summer, they’d hooked a hose to a tree.

  Larry stepped out of his jeans and there it was, his cock, so longed-for and pink, seemingly innocent, like something you’d cradle in your palm and feed from a dropper. He moved toward the door. Ellen gestured severely to the clean towels folded nearby on a chair and Larry, smiling for the first time, covered his nakedness and left.

  And she remembered what was so special about Charles. He had two.

  Two cocks.

  She got off the bed, cumbersomely, and began to gather Larry’s clothes off the floor, also cumbersomely. She sniffed the T-shirt, but it hadn’t absorbed his scent, not even in the armpits, which smelled like deodorant. Honestly, though, she was weary of pong. She wiped the door handle with a tissue, then tidied the bureau strewn with his passport and wallet and various paper scraps including his boarding pass, which she looked at twice before the inconsistency registered.

  He returned, hair dripping, face shiny from Moira’s Lady Schick. Ellen was still holding the boarding pass. Strangely, she wasn’t angry, not yet.

  “You didn’t even go to Florida. Is that why you didn’t want me to pick you up?”

  Larry, using the towel from around his waist to dry his hair, looked like an abashed schoolboy. “I was going to tell you, babe. Really. I just thought that we should get through this party first. Can we?”

  SO for the first time in more than twenty years, Ellen phoned her sister Moira. She phoned in the middle of the day, when everyone was likely to be at work. “The good news is they’ve already moved him to this other ward. For geriatric cases. It’s much, much better.”

  In the psychiatric assessment ward all the other patients had been young. Jack McGinty, who would not leave his cupboard, had seemed worse off than them, except when Ellen ventured to the open kitchen to make herself a cup of tea and saw all the apocalyptic drawings fixed to the fridge door with ladybug magnets.

  Someone has spent the last thirty years trying to make me crazy and they have more or less succeeded!!!!

  But yesterday the friendly nurse with all the piercings told her Jack McGinty was upstairs in the Geriatric Psychiatric Centre. Ellen found her father there, glassy-eyed but miraculously sitting up.

  “Oh!” she said.

  “They gave me something last night, I don’t know what. It sure worked.”

  For the first time in nine weeks, he’d slept more than two consecutive hours.

  When Jack McGinty was better, Ellen told Moira’s voice mail, she would put him on a plane to Calgary, if that was what he wanted. But first she needed to know what had happened to reduce him to such a state. No doubt that would set Moira screeching. She also apprised her sister of the Power of Attorney, the joint accounts, the unchanged will, so Ellen wouldn’t be accused of anything underhanded. It took three calls to say all this because she kept getting cut off.

  “What do you mean by accusing us?” Moira called back to yell, not screech. (The hatred in her sister’s voice had diminished several decibels from that first call.) “Who’s been looking after him for the last twenty years? Not you, that’s for sure.”

  “I would have,” Ellen said meekly, “if someone had told me I was allowed to.”

  Moira huffed.

  “You can’t have it both ways, Moira. You can’t expel me from the family then say I never helped.”

  “We don’t want anything to do with you.”

  “I understand and respect that. And let me say one more time that I’m sorry. I said it then. I wrote you fifty letters. I’m saying it now. I’m sorry. But the fact is, Dad’s here. If we could cooperate on this? That would be big of you. Huge. I’ll never ask for anything else.”

  “You took everything already,” Moira said.

  “Did I? I mean, Moira, come on. Are you still married to Charles? Dad says you are. Am I married to Larry? No. I’m married to nobody.”

  Ellen took off her glasses and squeezed the bridge of her nose. She hoped she didn’t sound pathetic or manipulative. She was startled by how matter-of-factly she had said it. I’m married to nobody. She flinched, but sh
e didn’t howl.

  A long pause followed. Ellen expected Moira to hang up, but she didn’t. She let Ellen sit alone with her pain. Eventually it passed, like a contraction.

  “How’s Mimi?” she finally asked.

  “Good.”

  “I heard she got into drugs.”

  Ellen sighed. “She’s fine now. She’s in Toronto. She’s a dancer. Yolanda has a five-year-old. There’s another on the way.”

  “Jenny had a baby too! Finally!”

  Ellen looked at her watch. Four minutes and Moira was still on the line.

  A whole team combined forces to get Jack McGinty back to normal—psychiatrist, psychiatric resident, social worker, O.T., not to mention the cheerful army of nurses in their coloured Crocs, dispensing laxatives. And Ellen McGinty, who came twice a week. With this gap of days between visits, his improvement showed; the jaw movements grew less ferocious, his hands a little steadier. These were withdrawal symptoms, Dr. Tung (older, Chinese, moderately cute, she noted for when Georgia asked) explained. Nortriptyline, Felodipine, Quetiapine, Loxapine. Ellen knew she should try to understand the pharmacology, but after this ordeal, she wasn’t going to suggest taking him off anything.

  Soon Jack was taking his meals in the dining room. One afternoon she found him there with three crones, the women slouched at one end of the long table, walkers and canes stationed nearby, Jack at the other suddenly seeming the junior to everyone, flush-faced and alert, a box of tissues within reach. He brightened when he saw Ellen and she reciprocated.

  “You’ve got mail.” She waved it.

  It was a knife-free ward so she used the handle of a plastic spoon to slit the envelopes. The first contained a cheque.

  “It’s a reimbursement from my drug plan,” he said.

  “You’re rich,” Ellen said.

  “Put it in the TD account.”

  Ellen tucked the cheque back in the envelope and wrote TD on it. Jack blew his nose.

  “Do you have a cold?” she asked.

  “I’m fine.” He handed her the tissue.

  “I should deposit this too?”

  “Moira called. Tell her not to call here anymore. It’s long distance. I’m fine. Tell her not to come.”

  “She’s coming here?” Ellen said, astonished.

  “I don’t want her to. I’m fine.”

  “She told me Charles had nothing to do with switching your meds. She says it was her. She thought it was time someone updated them.”

  “It was Charles!”

  Ellen leaned away from her father’s vehemence. Just then a silver-haired man with a showy belt buckle breezed through to announce gold was up. The three crones did not react.

  “Thinks he’s a big investor,” Jack whispered. “Hogs the TV. Always checking his stocks.” He passed her the cable bill. “Pay that.”

  “Please?” Ellen hinted.

  How annoying Jack was today, she thought as she nosed the car out of the hospital parking lot into rush-hour traffic. Do this, do that. Empty the dishwasher. Clean your room. His old, order-barking self. What was she, his secretary? And why did he keep blaming Charles? Poor Charles.

  It got dark so early now. Clouds, shiftless, loitered over the city, accumulating moisture, then sidled off to drop their load on the North Shore. After she sold the house she was going to move into a mirrored downtown tower high above all weather systems. She’d get rid of the car too, but in the meantime here she was, peering through the liquid smear, hoping vainly to merge onto the highway.

  She Morse-coded with the brake lights: dot dot dash dot - dot dot dash. F.U. Would no one let her in? Ever?

  Finally, one of those yacht-sized American guzzlers slowed. Ellen gunned it, merged, then waved broadly to communicate her thanks. All she could see of her rescuer in her rear-view mirror was white hair.

  He was old. Old and chivalrous.

  YES, Jack McGinty was on the mend. He was becoming himself again—brusque, taciturn, but not unloving, it turned out. Growing up, Ellen had misinterpreted his stiffness. She felt profoundly sorry for him now, for how do you express love when in a perpetual state of emotional incapacitation? Emoting for her was effortless. The opposite—holding her feelings inside—impossible. Even thinking of it made her curl up in a cramping ball.

  No laxative for that.

  He’d loved her mother, that was for sure, and on his fiftieth birthday he’d still looked young. Why didn’t he remarry, she’d wondered that summer when she took Mimi to see him in the Nose Hill house.

  Yet just a few days later, when Jack showed up for his party, Ellen barely glanced at the guest of honour. She’d just found out that Larry already had an L.A. mistress. She didn’t know yet that he’d also bedded half the female population of Cordova Island, including friends of hers. Larry would tell her that later, when she insisted their actions cancelled each other out—what Larry had done with that slut was equal to what Ellen had done with Charles—so they should just forgive and forget and get on with their marriage.

  Larry didn’t want to. He didn’t want to be married to Ellen anymore.

  When her father came through Moira’s door the day of the party, Ellen hugged him. Her belly, taut with life, pushed into his and he recoiled. Larry stepped forward and shook Jack’s hand, clasped it warmly, more warmly than he ever had before because he’d probably never see the man again.

  “Happy birthday, Jack,” he said.

  Moira touched Ellen’s shoulder, beckoned. In a trance, Ellen followed.

  “What’s wrong?” Moira asked.

  Instinctively, Ellen clutched her unborn child. “What do you mean?”

  “Charles thinks you’re mad at him.”

  The dream, forgotten in her shock, came back, the two cocks and their mysterious configuration. Side by side, or forked with a single shaft for the two heads?

  “I’m not mad,” said Ellen, who was just now thawing, feeling the first tingles of a stupendous rage.

  “Did he do something?” Moira asked.

  “No!”

  “So go talk to him.”

  “I don’t want to talk to him!”

  “You are mad!” Moira said. “You seem really mad. What did he do?”

  “Nothing!”

  Ellen left Moira in the living room and went to find Mimi, who was in the backyard on her faithless father’s lap, stroking his smooth face. All her life Mimi had had his long beard to tug and scratch; now he was a new, fascinating toy. Jack sat in the matching Muskoka chair, Charles on the swinging love seat with the awning because he sunburned easily, the three men with beers already in their clasp, failing at small talk. Ellen came across the grass in her bare feet, feeling exactly how Larry thought she ought to feel, like a cow that had broken through a dozen suburban fences to end up here.

  Jack and Charles stood. Charles said, “I’ll get you a chair, Ellen.” He sounded bashful and eager to set things right.

  “I’ll sit here beside you.” She smiled at him. It must have been an evil smile because he dropped his gaze in confusion. As the love seat set sail under them, a bit of urine gushed from her. Still no one spoke except Mimi, cooing, “Dada soft, Dada soft …”

  Ellen stared desperately at Larry, but he refused to meet her eye. Then, without really meaning to, she glanced at her brother-in-law’s crotch where the khaki fabric was bunched up. Another gush. She was turning to liquid, the milk collecting in her readying breasts, the crotch of her panties dampening even more.

  “Oh God!” she cried, and finally, Larry looked at her. Coldly. A warning. She struggled to get up, but couldn’t with the love seat swaying.

  Charles sprang to his feet and offered his hand.

  Ellen passed Moira as she stumbled through the kitchen. “Charles, did you light the briquettes?” Moira asked.

  In the bedroom, Ellen shut the door and, leaning against it, tried not to scream.

  On the other side, Moira said, “Go in and talk to her. Go. Are the briquettes lit?”

  Cha
rles knocked. Ellen felt it in her back, his timid tapping sending out ripples of lust, and this combination—lust and fury—propelled her to the middle of the room. “Yes?”

  Pink with embarrassment, or sunburn, Charles entered.

  “Close the door,” Ellen said, and he closed the door.

  “Come here.”

  He came over. Why didn’t I fall for this kind of man, Ellen thought, the kind who does everything you ask?

  “I dreamed about you,” she said.

  “You did?”

  She seized his ears and drew him angrily to her mouth. Naughty, naughty tongue. And Charles, in his astonishment, kissed her back.

  Ellen snatched his hand, like she would snatch Mimi’s away from something dangerous. But Charles was allowed and she employed him, used his hand the way she’d been forced these last months to use her own. He let her, then took over, kneading her breasts, stroking her round belly, a fortune teller fondling the future. He touched her wet cunt through her clothes and said her name.

  She unbuttoned his shorts.

  “Ellen?”

  “Shh.” She yanked the shorts down hard, like she did with Mimi when trying to get at a soggy diaper. An erection bulged in the briefs, singularly, and as Ellen freed it from the elastic waistband, she used her other hand to wriggle out of her shorts, urgently, like in the dream. Like she was in the grip of a furious maenadic ritual, Charles backing away, she moving forward until she trapped him against the dresser.

  “I can’t, Ellen, I can’t.”

  She ground against him. He was panting, she was panting, Ellen naked below the waist except for her underwear ringing one ankle, pulling on his ordinary cock like it was an elastic she was stretching out long, long, and bringing back. Between them, Yolanda floated upside down.