Fever by Sharon Butala Page B

succeeds.
    “No,” he says, “in Vancouver. She married again. She phones sometimes about the kids.”
    “Should I chop the almonds?” Janet asks. Sometimes, when they are together in his apartment the phone will ring and he will talk a little longer than is polite. Somehow she always knows when the caller is a woman. Is it his manner then?
    “I bought slivered almonds,” he says. “Bad form, I know.” They smile at each other in a playful way, suddenly intimate again, and a little shiver runs down Janet’s back.
    “I’ve never been married,” she says, leaning on the cupboardstill holding the knife, watching him as he works. “I wish I had been.”
    “Hah!” he says. “Don’t wish that.”
    “Why not?” she asks, teasing, setting down her knife. He is working with the chicken now, stripping the skin off the pieces and setting it in a pile to one side.
    “Because,” he says slowly. “Because it’s … pretty hard, to be married.”
    Janet reflects on this, on the way he has spoken so carefully without looking at her, keeping his voice light, stripped of emotion, which reveals to her all too clearly, how deeply he feels, although about precisely what, she doesn’t know. He glances at her then, and smiles again. “Time to put it all together,” he says, stretching out his hands to take the celery, and now he speaks in an entirely different voice, the one she is used to hearing.
    “So,” Livie says. “You’ve been getting it on with my friend Baker.” Her voice borders on unfriendliness, so that Janet looks up from her salad and studies Livie cautiously, who doesn’t look up from hers. Janet can’t think what to say to Livie in response. Yes?
    “I like him a lot,” she says, finally. “I think he’s a nice man.” She eats a little salad. “How are things with you and Nathan?” This seems like a strange thing for her to say, and she can’t think why she did, except because of that funny tone in Livie’s voice.
    “Yeah, he’s a nice man,” Livie says. “Nathan and I’ll probably get married one of these days.” When Janet looks up, surprised, smiling at her, Livie adds hastily, “Well, it’s no big deal. We’ve been living together for almost a year. You know that. And we’ve both been married before, so it isn’t exactly first love.”
    “I suppose,” Janet agrees after a minute. For some reason she finds herself feeling like crying. Livie suddenly relents, or else the emotion that Janet has sensed her to be full of today, ever since they sat down to eat, can’t be contained any longer.
    “I … we’ll get along fine. We really care for each other,” Livie says, “and I … he … he’s a nice man.” The two women smile tentatively at each other, although Janet is thinking that Livie had meant to say something else.
    “A nice man,” Janet says, and laughs. “Well, he is,” she says.
    “Nathan or Baker?” Livie asks in a careful tone. She is looking at her salad again, and Janet can’t figure out what’s the matter with her.
    “Both of them,” she says, shrugging, not smiling now. “Nathan for sure,” Livie says. “Baker, not so sure.” But she refuses to explain or elaborate when Janet questions her.
    “I think you must have had an affair with Livie,” Janet says to Baker. They are driving somewhere in Baker’s old car through the late fall evening, and Janet thinks that now and then she can smell the old dead leaves, like smoke drifting through the silent air.
    “Didn’t you know that?” Baker says, surprised. “No,” Janet says.
    “I took it for granted she would have told you. Don’t women always tell each other things like that.”
    “Yes,” Janet says, and sighs. She cannot imagine why it is whenever she gets news she’d rather not hear that her whole insides go dead. Her bowels feel as if they have turned to cement, her stomach loses all hope of sensation, and she feels as if she will be forever unable to rise from wherever she is