Vital Signs by Tessa McWatt

reach-reaches … My wife is spinning inside. My lust rises, then stalls when I recognize how unnecessary I am just now. Her face tightens and her eyes roll back.
    And there. Just there. My naked wife, with a lethal, peanut-sized swollen vessel in her brain dictating the entire history and future of her being, comes.
    She comes to the hum of the washing machine.
    I stumble forward, halfway to my knees, but quickly right myself and disappear to the kitchen with my shame.

FIVE
    I am wrong to say Sasha was never sick again. There was another time, another visit to the hospital, but the circumstances were very different, and that time I was the one with the fever.
    As I lie in the hot dark with Anna asleep beside me, a chorus of tree frogs breaching the dense blackness outside, I remember the events leading up to Egypt, a dozen years ago. Those last few moments of my innocence.
    “What do you think of these?” Anna had asked me, enthusiastically, as she posed on the stairs. She was wearing a dress cut above the knees, and she twisted to show methe back of her calf and the thin seam of her romantically old-fashioned stockings. I felt my stomach lurch, but it wasn’t a pleasant feeling.
    “What are you doing?” I asked, and giggled nervously.
    “I’m wearing stockings,” she said, turning back to face me, her excitement now deflated. She stood with her arms at her sides, waiting to see if I would say more. I stared at her legs; though still slim, there was a sagging at the knees that I hadn’t noticed before. She was turning forty-seven, and the dress she wore was the “little black dress” she had decided she needed to celebrate this birthday, “before it’s too late.”
    She had become anxious about the idea of closing in on fifty, as though suddenly sensing her mortality. “Oh my God,” she’d say when she noted friends and colleagues who were reaching the milestone that year. When Susan had turned fifty in July and Anna threw her a special party on our back lawn, my wife seemed to take on the half-century as if it were already her own. My job as host was to put steaks on the barbeque, and I was happy to have a specific task and not to have to engage in small talk about education cuts and increased class sizes. As I was tending to my duties, I overheard Anna make a flippant comment about old ladies, and I was touched and amused by the response she received from the teenaged Charlotte. “Mom, you still smell nice,” she said. “Old ladies smell weird.”
    For the night of her birthday I’d suggested a dinnerout at Canoe, a chic restaurant on the fifty-fourth floor of the TD Bank tower, which Susan had recommended. Anna had made an effort with the black dress, which showed off not only her legs but exposed her arms as well. I tried not to notice the looseness of her triceps as she raised her arms to push her hair behind the ears.
    “You look great,” I said, hoping to restore her enthusiasm and recapture mine.
    “It’s a full moon,” she said, and I knew that the confluence of moon and birthday was significant to her, that it meant something magical, which she wanted me to share in; but I was too tired for magic.
    I desperately needed a holiday. Our children—18, 16 and 13—had filled our house with grunge and garage music, had insulted me too often with their that’s-so-seventies-Dad opinions, and I was starting to feel undervalued at work. Undervalued and slowly withering. I had shone in the years of new standards in international pictograms, a craze that had begun with the Munich Olympics and continued through to Montreal 1976, for which I had perfected the curve of a man boxing, the distinction of a figure playing volleyball or badminton, and the angle of an alpine slalom. That craze had begun to subside. The standards for public information, culminating in ISO 7001, were being set in place. While I branched out and created designs for an ever wider variety of firms, my creativity was consumed by