say my back yard is just junk, well I say look again.” He took the two planks and leaned them against the fence on a sloping angle, so that their midpoint was on top of the fence, like the midpoint of a teeter-totter. Grunting and cursing from brute effort, he slid the base of the trampoline onto the planks, then up the planks— with more grunting—until the whole thing teetered atop the fence. Then with a last Herculean push the planks tottered over, and the trampoline lumbered down them onto Betsy’s side, crash-landing in a flowerbed of yellow Lion’s Bane and purple Foxglove.
“Don’t wreck the flowers!” Betsy screamed.
“Too late for that,” he muttered. He climbed the stepladder against the fence and looked over to examine the damage. “It’s barely touched them,” he said proudly. “No harm, no foul—and more importantly, the brilliant part is, the thing looks absolutely level, perfectly placed for you to test it out. Climb aboard!”
9
Having banished Betsy to the deck, Seth and Meghan moved to the living room for their talk. “I hate having to raise my voice to her like that,” he said as he settled onto the couch. “But it’s the only thing that gets her attention. I’ve been very sharp with her at our place. The house, I mean. Used to be our place. I still call it that.”
Meghan sat in a chair across from him. “She doesn’t like being there, she’s made that clear. It makes her feel creepy to be there and I’m not,” she said. “Her biggest complaint is when she tries to go to sleep at night she has to listen to you and your girlfriend in bed in the next room, giggling and God knows what else. Couldn’t you at least make sure she’s fallen asleep before you go at it?”
“Yes, well, it’s a bit of a moot point, really,” said Seth. “Soon enough there’ll be plenty more night-time noises to disrupt her, because what I came by to tell you, in person, is, Irena is pregnant.”
Seth was a professor of comparative literature at York University, and Irena had been one of his undergraduate students. She’d flirted with him, and he’d encouraged it, but had known better than to act on it while she was still enrolled in one of his classes. On the first day after term ended and the marks were in, she was at his office door. “Now you’re free to see more of me,” she’d said. Soon enough they were meeting almost daily, at his office, her apartment, even at the house near Lawrence and Yonge he and Meghan had bought with a generous down payment from his parents. Meghan never caught on—it was Irena who forced Seth’s hand, making him choose between her and his wife, and by that time he was addicted to her—the affair stirred his blood, and made him feel alive and virile. So Meghan moved out, Irena moved in, and he had a lot of explaining to do, to friends, family, and colleagues. He liked to say Irena was a “mature student,” all of twenty-six, so there could be no stigma about it. He was forty-one. And now he was going to be a father again.
Meghan stared at him, but he avoided her eyes.
“Oh Jesus,” she said.
“Yep. We’re going to have a baby, we’re going to get married, the whole bit.”
“You sound so enthused,” she said sarcastically.
“I want to be. I should be. The timing’s not great.”
“You stumble from disaster to disaster,” she said. “Or maybe you repeat things on a ten year cycle.”
There did seem to be a pattern to it, or at least a repetition. A little more than a decade earlier, when Meghan was twenty-one and an undergraduate, she’d taken a course in creative writing at U of T, led by Seth, who was then a PhD student. He came from money, and seemed tremendously sophisticated, well-travelled and worldly to her, a girl from small-town eastern Ontario—Fenolen Falls to be exact. It was an evening class, and a bunch of students went out afterward to a place where undergrads shared pitchers of beer. Seth joined them, and talked almost exclusively to Meghan, and later took her back to his place, where they made sloppy, drunken love. Three nights later they did it again, only sober this time. Prior to this her love life had consisted of a few casual and unsatisfying dorm party hook-ups, so she was feeling like Seth was a major advance, a breakthrough—her