Everybody Has Everything - By Katrina Onstad Page 0,31

he liked most, maybe, was that once he had Ana, once he could lean close to her and watch other men’s eyes flutter in defeat – what he liked most was that he meant it. That he did actually love her. She was strong, but she could be very still, and he craved that. She was never desperate for anyone’s approval, and casually comfortable in the demimonde she’d grown up in. They attended parties with her mother’s friends, artists and poets, in the kinds of book-lined downtown houses that James had dreamed about from the distance of his suburban childhood. Ana’s mother could make her daughter laugh just like James could, teasing her for being the sell-out daughter, beloved and feared for her efficiency.

And when he wasn’t with her, he still got the glances, still pushed at the edges of his manner to see if he could get the woman to bend her head back, a throaty laugh, the slight spreading of the fingers around a glass, or the knees in a skirt. James knew: If I wanted it … He fed on that If, even now that the women he saw most often were the wives of his friends, or the aging producers at his old office. A line from a poet he’d interviewed: “A naked woman my age is just a total nightmare.”

The women he considered his peers were changing; he had noticed a shift in silhouette, a meatiness between the ass and the knee that didn’t exist before, the shape of a traffic cone. Soon they would revert to their ethnic stereotypes, these once exotic Italian and Portuguese women. In a decade or so, they would look like snow-women, circles on circles. His mother, once petite, now sported the body of an old Yugoslavian woman in the hills. But not Ana, with her hollows. Not Ana.

It didn’t matter how gorgeous his wife was, because he needed, still, the collective giggle of the young women whose lives were just beginning, and who let him in under the mistaken assumption that he had some grown-up wisdom to impart about what came next. He needed it through the wedding, and the rise and fall of Ana’s attachment to him, the wane of their sex life, the renovations of the house. He needed that small, cooing possibility.

So how had he missed the moment when it stopped? He couldn’t pinpoint precisely when his presence in a room began to generate boredom, or when the women got even younger, and the Jessicas became Emmas. At the staff party last Christmas, the handful of pretty young girls were text messaging the whole time, heads bowed. They couldn’t keep eye contact. In the months before he was let go, one of them, Ariel, had begun doing segments for his show. She pitched gauzy academic takes on lowbrow subjects: Is Hip-Hop Dead? Teens and Sexting. Why We Need Cute Animals on the Internet. She had a blog, Sly told him. She “repurposed content.”

During interviews, she seemed to be always laughing, or on the cusp of laughing. She was furiously short and wore an array of coloured scarves, shooting her own work on a handheld camera, writing and producing herself. James remembered when he was surrounded by a cadre of writers and producers and directors and cameramen, a different person for every job. They were all expected to be one-man-bands now. What had happened to those guys? Technology had shrunk the world. He made a mental list of all the things that had vanished because of the Internet: newspaper boys; breathless first meetings; the slips of paper he used as a teenager to withdraw money from the bank. These were all things Finn would never know, and that these girls had already forgotten.

At the party, the young women’s eyes had skimmed his body with tolerance, stopping on Sly – those ties! those tasselled loafers – with flat-out revulsion. They all had long straight hair, as if there had been a conference to decide, a hairstyle colloquium. James, wearing an Arcade Fire T-shirt under his blazer, had caught a glimpse of himself in a window and found he had no idea what he had been trying to achieve. He’d left the party early to watch the Leafs on TV.

James drank his second Americano of the day. He filled in a sheaf of forms Bruce had given him at the daycare: phone numbers and emergency contacts. Parent/Guardian. He circled the latter. Below his and Ana’s numbers, he put his