Tangled Passions Pt. 01 Ch. 10-12

Two years earlier, at seven and nine years old, their daughters Lucy and Lisa had been on a crosswalk, heading to school one morning when a courier van involved in collision with a left turning vehicle had careened into them, killing both girls as well as the adult crossing guard and one of three other children there. The two others were seriously injured.

Why were their little girls killed? Some acquaintances had actually had the audacity to say to him that it was God's will. "We'll pray for you," they had said. How could they pray to a god that killed innocent little girls? What kind of terrible being would do such a thing?

He had never been devout, but it was at that moment that Matt realized there was no God; help and comfort from above would not be forthcoming. In having finally come to that conclusion, Matt began to see that the world was filled with evidence to disprove the existence of God. The endemic starvation and destitution world wide; Chernobyl; Bhopal; even there, in Vancouver, where a pretty young college girl was killed with a crossbow bolt by her jilted boyfriend. The authorities knew who did it but they couldn't do anything because they hadn't got proof that would stand up in court. If there was a decent, moral and merciful god, that would be taken care of, but the guy was still walking free. No, there was no god.

After the accident they had received a one point three million dollar award. It was called a settlement, but how, Matt often wondered, could anyone ever imagine that the deaths of their daughters could ever be settled? At first he couldn't bring himself to accept it; blood money! On the other hand, as Jenn had quietly suggested, refusing the money wouldn't bring the girls back. Perhaps, with it, they could find some meaning in the remainder of their lives – some sort of equilibrium. Their lawyer pointed out that they could do with it what they liked – set up a foundation, donate it to charity, go away, or anything – and that they didn't need to decide what to do with it now, or ever. Matt was still somehow disgusted with himself when they finally did accept it – six hundred fifty thou per child; oh, but they had been worth so much more – so very, very much more. It was months later – months after the accident when they were finally summoned to their lawyer's office to meet the insurance company's man and receive the cheque – an out-of-court settlement. Although there were no tears left to cry, Matt remembered having to force himself to extend his hand, force himself to take the proffered cheque, force himself to shake the hand of the insurance agent – just a cog in the tawdry payout.

Through omission, they had eventually just put the whole thing away – out of sight and out of mind. Jenn had simply deposited the money in a secure and rather anonymous bank account – with the cryptic ID code '4-LISA-N-LUCY'.

They couldn't initially bring themselves to leave their home, as filled with memories and reminders as it was. Those painful memories became part of them, part of their lives, integral in their very existence for the next two years – until that moment.

"We should move into a condo in another part of town." Jenn's voice was distant, not quite flat, but hollow. "We really don't need this big old house any more."

Their forty-year-old home stood up on the south side of Capitol Hill. The view of the city was panoramic. They could see from the mountains of West Van and Point Atkinson, over Vancouver harbour with Stanley Park and the apartment forest of the West End – the whole metropolitan sprawl of the city. On a clear day, beyond that, they could see the Gulf Islands with Vancouver Island lying like a ghost in the smog, and from Point Roberts to Surrey, with Mount Baker rising majestically from the hazy distance. But with no one to play in the yard, no voices to peal in laughter or dismay above the soothing city sounds, no innocent eyes to appreciate it, the marvelous view and the comforting susurrus of the city seemed to be wasted.

XII.

Selling up, disposing of all but the most precious of their children's memorabilia, was a surprisingly quick process. They were brutal, allowing their sentiment only a fraction of what both of them could easily have hung onto. They were finally shedding the constrictive skin of grief, and shedding it with a vengeance. And once they had begun to lighten the burden of the past, the changing perspective seemed to take on a force of its own. They had entered another room in their lives – another room with other windows and other views, other closets and other wardrobes. It was frightening and exciting. Jenn suddenly hated her car – the Mom-mobile, a metallic blue '97 Jeep Cherokee. She traded it in on a new red Mazda Miata.

The regrouping – re-establishing took up nearly all of their time. Matt's thoughts strayed only occasionally into the halls and rooms of The Club. His visits there dropped to a fraction of their former frequency, while their conjugal sex flourished; still, if either of them consciously noticed, neither commented. They were too busy. The intensity and suddenness of their changing circumstances occupied them both for the duration and they were, once again, eminently happy together. It had been a long time.

Jenn found a suitable condominium in a South Coquitlam high-rise. Situated on the south slope above the traffic of the Lougheed Highway and the freeway, it was not far from where Patsy's wedding had been the summer before. Its glass south wall offered not so much a view as an open privacy. High on the seventeenth floor, the only eyes that might see into their apartment would be racing past on the freeway or in New West or Surrey – miles away. It was a large, new, irregularly shaped block with lots of corners and curves, many of which were not right angles. They purchased a spacious one-bedroom suite on the southeast corner. A living-dining room occupied much of the south side with a huge open kitchen against the east wall. The master bedroom on the west side shared its balcony. A windowless storage room or den on the north side bracketed the entry hall with the kitchen and a large, opulent bathroom served as a hub to the roughly circular passage. Its relentless asymmetry leant a certain mystique to the place.

Matt had the feeling it would take them some time to accept that the strange new apartment was theirs but it would be worth it in the end. It represented a lifestyle far removed from that to which they had vainly clung for the past two years. Still, Matt agreed with Jenn that the change could easily be justified, and, while their new digs were classy, they were not ostentatious.

Jenn had even found that her new routes to work were, in fact, more direct than before. She continued as a substitute teacher – a teacher-on-call, as she had been fairly steadily for the past year. She had cut back in the last few months, but, as they settled in, she began to work more or less regularly once again. Matt thought the upheaval – the new start – had made her more relaxed; more settled; more resigned to, maybe even accepting of the blow that fate had dealt them. He also felt the soothing effect of her newfound fortitude. For a while he began to frequent his office more often. His wife and his job offered, if only temporarily, a sort of stability to his life. And an even keel reduced his need for escape through the living fantasies of The Club. Reduced, not eliminated, for like the forbidden fruit that it was, once tasted he could never completely forget the thrill, as much as he thought he should.

Nevertheless, during those weeks following the move, their love regained some of its tenderness. No; that's not exactly correct. The tenderness in their love had remained constant throughout. It was their sex – their mutual lust that regained some of its former comfort and security.

As a teacher on-call, Jenn had to get up early in order to be ready for a call to just about any school in the district. Not long after they had moved, after she had gotten back into the substituting routine, Jenn had gotten up and gone into the kitchen to make coffee and prepare croissants for breakfast before she was called. They had made love the night before and, Matt thought to himself, it was definitely getting better again. He lay in bed with visions of their intercourse running across his mind while the aromas of brewing coffee and baking croissants wafted into his awareness. He had noticed before the sensual, aphrodisiac quality of the smell of good fresh coffee, and certainly that morning its effects were becoming increasingly apparent below the sheets. Slipping out of bed, Matt crept down the hallway, his erection bouncing as he moved. Stopping in the entry hall, he peeked into the kitchen. Jenn, oblivious to his presence, stood at the counter, her back to him, singing rather tunelessly with the radio while she constructed lunches for them both. Her thin robe, clinging to the backs of her thighs, accentuated their voluptuousness. As Matt edged forward, determined to make her jump, he detected the pungency of their earlier love. From her or from himself he couldn't be sure, but it rose between them to mix with the redolent coffee and ignite afresh his roiling passion. Grabbing her waist firmly, he elicited a small squeal of surprise from her, before whirling her around to seize a handful of pubic beard. Recovering quickly from the start, she dropped the knife and threw her arms about his neck, mashing his lips with her own. For a long moment they teetered in an almost stylized lingual embrace before losing their balance and tumbling to the floor. Jenn's vagina wept copiously against Matt's hand as his own rigid cock sought warm entrance somewhere – anywhere. Without the slightest foreplay, nor the need for any, Jenn rolled onto her back and spread her knees as Matt jabbed himself into her, up to his pubes. Their climaxes were quick and violent, leaving them lying sweaty and panting on the floor. Once they had caught their breaths, Matt rose.

"Thanks," he whispered, blowing her a kiss.

"Thank you too," she replied, lying a moment longer, her matted hair framing her flushed face. Slowly she rose and gathered her robe together before returning her attention to the lunches. Matt padded back to the bedroom to retrieve his own robe.

They ate amidst a satisfied silence that neither of them was wont to break. When they spoke, they did so in hushed voices not wishing to dispel the electricity that seemed to linger. While they sipped appreciatively at their coffee the atmosphere was rent by the ringing phone. As Jenn answered it Matt smiled slyly, and dove once more into her still sensitive, still excited muff. Resisting her attempts to push him away, he fastened his lips to her puffy clitoris and proceeded to wiggle it with his tongue, his hands on her legs holding him solidly in place. Fortunately, getting her call for the day didn't require her to say much, for her arousal was evidenced by her quickening breath and her uncontrollably quivering thighs. An audible sigh escaped her lips, but she managed to disguise it as a cough and quietly excuse herself to the caller. With great difficulty she succeeded in receiving her day's job placement before exploding into another orgasm just as she replaced the receiver.

When Matt had met her, Jenn was in second year Education at SFU. They had become an item fairly quickly but waited until after her graduation to get married. She had subbed – taught on call – for almost two years before getting pregnant; hence, she had never had a class to call her own. After the girls had started school she got herself activated on the sub list once again and worked infrequently, but enough to keep her hand in it. Then, for most of the first year after the accident she found that she just could not face a class full of children – any children. She spent much of that time in a rudderless state of hopelessness. It was a therapist, whom she saw a few times, who suggested that it might be time to try again. To her surprise, she found that cruising through the schools, usually a different class every day, was, indeed, therapeutic. Matt had been skeptical but, as she had told him, there was a kind of twisted logic to it. "I get to be among children," she had explained, "but never long enough to forge too strong an attachment." That was what she really feared, growing to love some little child who would just up and leave. "No," she had said, "working on call is just fine, thanks." Their lives seemed to be finally getting back into the grooves.

But now, as they, once again, settled into the routines of daily life anew, the same nagging dissatisfaction returned to haunt Matt. Once more, he began to think that his position at the firm was nothing but a sham. Again and again he'd find himself sitting aimlessly at his desk, trying to see through the nothingness that he felt engulfing him. Subtly, insidiously he began, again, to frequent The Club, and increasingly so. He knew that it was no more than an attempt to exorcise his own demons. What else could he do?

Of course, much of Matt's dissatisfaction arose from the untimely deaths of his daughters. He thought about them at various times, the thoughts often coming into his head unbidden and at inopportune moments. He thought about them as the children they had been, and in the adolescence and adulthood they would never know. Sometimes their memories or projections would visit him during masturbation. It disgusted him that he could profane their exquisite memories that way; nonetheless, the visions of his girls as young adults, making love to various anonymous beaus never failed to excite his stroked approach to climax.

Despite their 'new lives' – their 'having turned to a new page and started again', Matt and Jenn still visited the graves, sometimes – often on grey days – leaving flowers or dolls or small toys on the tiny headstones. Although both Jenn and he had decided, and requested through their wills that they, themselves, be cremated – "Leave the land for the living," Matt was wont to say – they couldn't bring themselves to consign the bodily remains of their daughters to a fate that was so closely associated with hell. They had been so small and innocent, so fragile. They didn't deserve such an early death; they didn't deserve to burn. It was one of those irrational thoughts that Matt and Jenn knowingly shared. They knew deserts had nothing to do with life – or death. They knew that death was final. Still, it was just two small graves; it didn't make much difference in the end.

Matt had, in his own way, been just as shell-shocked as Jenn. He really only began to get back on track when he met Dara and his life had taken – was still taking – some very strange, twisty and unpredictable turns. While Dara had now been consigned to his own private history, her legacy, The Club itself, made his path far from either straight or narrow. He couldn't even begin to anticipate what truths and realities his future would reveal or destroy. Furthermore, he wasn't even sure enough of his own feelings to know whether he should complain or rejoice.