1970s to 2004, Toronto, Ontario

By Leanne Gowdy

I didn’t care anymore that he was dying. At this moment, I wanted to kill him. Instead, I told him that he had one week to find somewhere else to live.

Suspicious of his activities, I had installed a keystroke-logging program on our computer. Arnold spent hours in our upstairs office. He covered his tracks, clearing his search history from the computer.

After I obtained his password with the program, I hacked into his e-mail. It was masochistic, but I read everything. Plural. Affairs. Two women. For months. One was married to the man who was publishing his next book. It was romantic to be involved with the dying writer. There were others too - more casual encounters.

I was mute. I drank a few glasses of the champagne I had been saving for a special occasion, and barely coherent, confronted him with the evidence.

Where did he get the energy? Arnold had, optimistically, four months to live, unless he received a transplant. He had been on the waiting list for more than two years; cadaver livers are not easy to come by.

Doctors said he had one hope: if he could find a live donor, they could take a piece of the liver and transfer it to his body. The liver regenerates, and he would be blessed with a new life. His sister was not a match, and I was ruled out, since I had breast cancer a few years before.

I had ignored the signs. He’s too sick. He’s depressed. Then why is he dragging his sick body to the library?

He could not write at home. “Too noisy,” he said.

“No one is home during the day,” I said.

“I hate this house,” he said.

“You hate taking the subway downtown,” I said.

“How do I know you are where you say you are?” he said, turning the tables.

Our relationship was strained, our sex life nil. I worked long hours as a private investigator, on surveillance. I met Arnold in the late ’70s, in a bar. He said he was a writer.

“Everyone in here thinks they’re a writer.” I said.

He brought me two books of his poetry. He was living with a woman who supported him, but he treated that fact like background noise. I refused him, smart enough not to fall in love with a former heroin addict, alcoholic, philanderer. We both married other people.

We met again in 1995, at another bar, where I was having an exhibition of my photography. He drank juice and said he had been sober since 1983. Too late to save his fibrous and nodular liver, under attack by hepatitis C.

The color of his hair had changed over the years from blonde to brown, with a trivial touch of gray at the temples. Ask all the women who have felt Arnold’s hair brush against their inner thighs how soft it is. Thick enough to grab two handfuls as they pull his face up to theirs.

His eyes were hazel, but the iris had been soured yellow by toxins. His mouth, slightly crooked, was not to be trusted. His left bicep was inscribed with the name of his second wife. It was a heart struck through with a dagger. The right bicep was tattooed with the face of the Grim Reaper surrounded by the numerals of a clock.

A month later, he called. “I know what you’re like. I was living with someone, so I waited until I moved out to call you. But we’re still kind of involved.”

I later learned that Arnold always overlaps relationships. He won’t break up completely until fully ensconced in another relationship with “the woman of record.” The one who would take care of him, house him, support him.

He continued to pursue me, and then he broke up with her. Well, he said he broke up with her.

I still fell hard. Enough in love with him to have his name tattooed on a part of my body that no one except him and a proctologist would see.

His exes said we were perfect together. He had never been this way with anyone else. He had changed. They had never seen him so in love before. He became a wonderful stepfather to my sons.

I relaxed. After all, if those women, who had been left by him, could say those things, they must be true. And I was a private investigator. Would he dare?

He could not believe that I kicked him out. No one else had ever done this to him. He would never forgive me.

The publisher called me with his suspicions, which I confirmed. He told his wife about the other women, and then she dumped Arnold too.

He blamed me. He stayed at the home of another ex-girlfriend, and it was her boyfriend who saved Arnold’s life.

Without Arnold’s knowledge, he offered to be a donor. Everything was a match, and the operation was scheduled.

Because he had such a good relationship with my teenage sons, I did not tell them the truth. I said the stress was tearing us apart.

We had been through so much together. I was worried that I would wake up to find him dead beside me. That I would have to rush him to the hospital when he became very ill. And now, finally, came some hope. I had to put my bitterness aside and be there for him so that my sons could also be there for him.

The day of the operation, the waiting room was full. There were five women who had all had claim to Arnold’s body at one time or another, plus his sister, my sons, and their girlfriends. Plus the women he had been having the affair with. I spent eight hours in the room with one of them.

My close friend Kathleen, also an ex, said, “To kill time, let’s all get up and talk about the worst thing Arnold ever did to us.”

The worst thing Arnold ever did to me - that woman - was sitting across the table, but I remained silent.

All the women in the room smiled but said nothing.

I had just peeled an orange, and the juice was running between my fingers, when the doctor came in. He said Arnold’s new liver was already working to remove the toxins from his blood. My hands were sticky with orange and salty with tears, and the smell of oranges will always remind me of that moment, when he told us that Arnold had a new chance at life.

One hour after the operation, we were allowed to see Arnold. Only relatives. The other women deferred to me. Even she did.

There was a large tube coming from his jugular vein on the right side. Other tubes were bringing substances in and out of him. A respirator was doing the breathing for him. The nurse said he may have the respirator for a few days.

No one could silence Arnold for that long, and by the next day, it was out, and he was flirting with the nurses.

The nurses, mostly women, clued in right away to the fact that the parade of middle-aged women lined up for visits were not relatives. No one was acting like Arnold’s sister, except his sister. But they didn’t try to stop them. It gave them something to talk about.

During the two weeks he was in the hospital, I found myself in the position of having to console the woman he had been having the affair with. They had an argument, and he told her not to come to the hospital.

“Get used to his moods,” I told her, “and get used to the fact that there will always be someone else. You’re not as special as you think.”

She knows that now. That was three years ago.

After the operation, Arnold said he was going to change. He was going to be a different man. Faithful. Then he realized that was folly. He had a whole new life stretched in front of him; why commit? He said he will never live with another woman, so he can be free to do as he pleases.

Some members of the Arnold club think that he is truly a sex addict. He has overcome all his other addictions, but not this one. Since that time, Arnold he has had a number of girlfriends, including a girl the same age as my younger son. He can be very charming. It doesn’t work on me anymore.

My kids grew up and moved out, and I sold my house and bought a loft downtown. I love being single. I feel free and am not ready to give that up to be with someone else. Arnold and I will always know each other, and we will always have the boys in common, but he can’t hurt me anymore because I am not in love with him.

After a year of mourning our relationship, I had the tattoo of his name covered with a skull. It signifies the death of something. Not him, thank God, but still, something that died.

Leanne Gowdy’s short fiction has been published in literary magazines and a book of short stories. She is using a pseudonym.

Posted by Common Ties on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 | Email This Post

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