The Girlfriend
by Ann Fischer
Art by Loic Morvant
THE OBJECT OF HIS AFFECTION
When I was a teenager, and he was a little younger, my brother gave me a ring with a zircon stone in it for my birthday. It sparkled, like a real diamond, when it caught the light. I think he thought it was a kind of engagement ring. He loved me that much.
We were close then. I told him everything I couldn’t tell anyone else, and I knew he’d never tell.
When he was going through his hippy stage, smoking weed and playing backgammon all day—long before he amassed a fortune in commercial real estate—he moved into my apartment, and it just felt so good to be where he was. Even though he was younger than I was, he always seemed older, wiser, stronger.
And when I was leaving my first marriage in my early twenties, he came to the Caribbean where I was living, flew back home with me and my daughter, and moved us into the place where he was living with a bunch of friends—all smooth as silk.
I used to tease him about getting all the best of the family DNA. With his dark curly hair, dimples, and beautiful aquamarine eyes: he was gorgeous. And he had the same dark sense of humour I did. We were both straight shooters who loved to laugh at the crazy things people did, not excluding ourselves. He loved motorcycles and took me for my first ride on a Harley. He raced cars. He loved nature. He loved me.
Once when I had broken up with a boyfriend, one he didn’t particularly like, I called him, and he came to where I was and let me cry my heart out, even though he wasn’t comfortable with that kind of emotion. He just hugged me and patted my back, while saying he wished he could be more like me, but didn’t know how. He was the only boy in a family of girls and, from the age of eight or so, had been our protector when our dad was on his terrifying drunken rampages. Somewhere in those years, he lost the ability to cry. Or even appear to be weak—lest my father ridicule him.
GOLD OBJECTS and SECRETS
The Girlfriend and my brother have a lot of secrets. They like to make us guess whether they are married or not. I doubt that they are, but they both wear gold bands. When we ask about the rings, they just laugh and say they aren’t going to tell us one way or another. I don’t remember my brother ever playing these kinds of guessing games before. It’s one more reason I miss him as—more and more—they retreat into a private world.
When we asked them where they met, they said ‘at a gas station’ and wouldn’t elaborate, but gave each other sly looks and laughed. My brother drives, but she doesn’t. Maybe she was just walking by. Or waiting for someone in an expensive car to pull up and then ask for the time. Or maybe it was a different kind of meeting. We don’t know. Or care. We just want him back in our lives again in a much bigger way than he is now.
With her short dark hair, flat stomach, tight rear end, and tiny breasts, she’s not remarkable looking at all, but she is younger than he is by at least a decade, maybe more. If I look at her closely, I can see something of a film noir-like woman of the 30s say, a cigarette in her mouth, smoke curling around her face, possibly wearing a tuxedo. And her Eastern European accent underlines it all. Maybe he likes his girls more like boys. Which is fine. I can tell my brother is smitten. He can’t take his eyes off her.
Shortly after they met, he asked her to move in with him, although they barely knew each other. She’d been living with her sister and said her sister’s husband scared her. But that same brother-in-law showed up for Christmas not all that long afterward, laughing and joking with them. It was hard to imagine him as a threat, but by that time she was rearranging the décor in my brother’s townhouse. The simple lines and neutral colours I’d always loved had been replaced with red velvet drapes and large pieces of furniture covered in unusual prints with lots of gold tassels... And the pictures of his kids from his marriage to my sister-in-law and our family had been removed from the sideboard in the dining room, where they’d always been.
WE OBJECT
As the years go by—six, seven, eight years—he recedes further and further into the background of our lives. It’s almost as though he’s living in another country. He doesn’t call; we don’t get together. Sometimes he and the Girlfriend even skip Christmas, saying she has a cold.
The one time I asked her if she could nudge my brother to call my daughter more often because she missed him so much, she said, “No, he has a new family now.” I wanted to slap her, shake her, do something to make her stop, but I knew where that would go. And things were hard enough as my brother slipped away. I didn’t understand what was happening. It seemed beyond being absorbed in a romantic relationship after so much time. I suspected there was something dangerous happening, but couldn’t put my finger on it.
LOVE LANGUAGE OBJECT
While I was knitting my way through the end of my second marriage, I asked my brother if he wanted me to make an afghan for him, and what colour he’d like. “Ask the Girlfriend,” he said. I was so sad that he’d said that, I no longer wanted to make one for him. But he didn’t even notice. I cried for my lost marriage and my lost brother and knitted a blue one—his favourite colour—and gave it to someone else.
MEN AS OBJECTS or MEANS TO AN END
Over the years they spend together, we find out that the Girlfriend has been married twice before and both husbands died on her watch. This isn’t encouraging news. Especially now that my brother has asked my sister-in-law for a divorce after many years of amicable separation. My daughter and I start making pathetic jokes about Black Widows.
CANCER AS OBJECT IN THE DISTANCE
I’m standing at a bus stop from where I can see the hospital where my brother lies after surgery to remove a brain tumour. I work near the hospital. If he hadn’t said he didn’t want anyone to visit him after the surgery, of course, I’d be there, and so would everyone else who loves him. It wouldn’t matter that I’ve barely seen him since that first Christmas with the Girlfriend many years ago. My daughter and my sisters haven’t seen much of him, either.
I’d left my marriage two weeks before the Christmas at their place which signaled the beginning of the end of my relationship with my brother. I had moved back to the city, where I grew up, to be closer to my daughter and my aging mother. Maybe, I was looking a little lost and sad or even jealous. They were all over each other then, in that way that new lovers are. Who knows what the Girlfriend saw or didn’t see, but afterward she told my brother that my daughter and I made her uncomfortable ‘in her own home.’ I had no idea what that meant. I’d barely spoken to her as there were so many people there, but I’ve always had my feelings written all over my face and noticed everything. I do remember my daughter trying to hand her a gift, which wasn’t acknowledged right away. Maybe that was it
And from then on, she found a way to have him push me way out to the periphery of his life where we were unlikely to cross paths unless it was a family gathering where he barely acknowledged me. And he was going to fewer and fewer of those.
I know his two boys and the Girlfriend will be at the hospital, so it’s not like he’s alone, but how things have changed since he met her. He’s now like someone in a cult and my sister-in-law, his ex-wife and a friend of mine, has told her kids to make friends with the Girlfriend or they might never see their dad again. So, they do.
MATERIAL GOODS AS OBJECTS
There is a lot of spending. Canada Goose coats, a brand new red Volkswagen convertible, trips to the Caribbean, jewelry, clothes from the most expensive stores on Bloor Street. Weekend road trips, New York trips, across the Atlantic trips. A beautiful house in one of the best areas of the city, then a country house on a river.
Eventually, he starts living in the house on the river, hours away from the city, but the Girlfriend doesn’t like it much there, so they now have two homes. He makes pit-stops at the condo in the city, and she occasionally goes to the country, but they seem to be leading separate lives a lot of the time. Things begin to look like the relationship might be coming to an end, at least that’s what some of us are hoping for, but then he finds out his cancer has spread and moves back to the city to be close to doctors and hospitals.
SURVIVAL AS OBJECT(IVE)
There are numerous attempts to stave off the cancer. There‘s a controversial clinic in Texas that he tells me makes him feel like a total mark because it’s so hugely expensive, although the doctor there has had some astounding success with patients who have similar kinds of tumours. But the doctor wants to combine his treatment with traditional chemotherapy, and my brother balks at that and returns home. Then, there’s a trip to Germany for experimental thermal therapy.
He goes on the latter with one of his sons, and without the Girlfriend who tells him she’s so stressed out from his illness that she needs a vacation. She goes to the Dominican Republic for some rest and relaxation. We don’t learn about this until much later when my nephew lets it slip that my brother was both hurt and disappointed.
He returns from Germany no better than he was before he left, but he still refuses to do chemo and follows an alternative regimen of vitamin C infusion and supplements, a no-sugar diet, and other therapies that I’m probably not even aware of. Finally, he starts radiation, probably at the request of his kids, who are worried about the outcome of these ineffective treatments, and things go sideways. They give him too much, and he rolls into a kind of early dementia that turns him into a grown-up child playing with puzzles and watching America’s Got Talent all day. We are shattered.
The Girlfriend is quickly tired of my mother and my sisters and my daughter and I coming to their place to be with my brother, so she finds an expensive furnished suite somewhere and moves out. We are shocked but not. Has my brother even noticed? We don’t know.
The condo they once shared, and sometimes still do, becomes a busy place with an endless stream of caretakers, including a live-in nurse. She is wonderful and orchestrates the collection of massage therapists, personal support workers, alternative healers, and family members as she would a successful small business. He likes her, and they share a lot of laughs considering the circumstances.
The Girlfriend fires all the pretty caretakers and makes the lives of the rest of them miserable, as well as throwing all the homemade meals the family makes into the garbage (there might be sugar), but fortunately she’s not there very much. And when she is, she’s usually smoking on the terrace.
This former maverick business whiz has forgotten a lot now, but the good news is he remembers me; forgets that he’s supposed to be ignoring me, and we have a few hours—here and there—that are bitter-sweet. He has lost his voice, and the cognitive decline is ongoing, so we can’t really talk about anything much at all but just to see him smile at me or give me his reading glasses when I can’t find my own, if only to check the TV schedule, seems like a gift. One day, he decides he wants to walk across the room with an aide and I helping him, and when he falls—and we fall with him—we all end up on the floor laughing. Later, I find out I’ve damaged two vertebrae, and the pain that comes and goes for years afterward feels like a kind of tattoo of that time lying on the floor with him, like we were kids again.
We have Christmas at his place with a big, under-decorated tree and a beautifully catered buffet dinner, but no one really feels like eating. We take turns visiting him in the bedroom where he lies like a king in state. In and out of sleep. Features even more chiseled because of all the weight loss. Eyes still that beautiful blue. The dimples and cleft in his chin still there. Almost as handsome as ever.
He is in and out of the hospital, and then, finally, in one that specializes in palliative care. The Girlfriend pops into his room from time to time carrying boxes of new baubles from her Bloor St. shopping binges—amazingly unembarrassed. Even as he loses the ability to swallow, she brings him pizza.
My daughter starts to spend nights there to the point where the nurses think she is his wife or girlfriend.
The Girlfriend must have other things on her mind. Maybe more shopping for jewelry and/or lawyers. She must want to know what’s in it for her, after all this time, when my brother’s no longer here.
When he dies in early summer, my daughter makes all the funeral arrangements with no input from the Girlfriend. I’m not sure why. My mother just wants it to be Catholic. Something that would make my brother cringe. Just as the Girlfriend thought he should be buried in a suit. As his ex-wife said, “If he wasn’t dead already, that would’ve killed him.”
The image that stands out from the funeral is the hearse covered in flowers, pulling away from the church with my brother in the back. My ex-sister-in-law and I stand side by side with lumps in our throats and tears streaming down our faces.
None of us can believe this is real. Not the family, not his friends, none of us.
Weeks later there’s an interment ceremony where his ashes are buried near my father’s grave. The Girlfriend doesn’t bother to come. I can’t remember much about that day but I do remember that his sons made sure none of his ashes were in the pouch given to her. All she got was dirt.
A few months after the funeral, my nephews were informed that the Girlfriend was suing my brother’s estate for half of everything he had. She’s hired a high-powered female attorney who specializes in that sort of thing. The monthly stipend he’d left, which was in the area of what you’d expect to see in a Hollywood split, is apparently not enough, but she's still getting it while she's challenging it. My nephews tell us that she is meeting with them and their lawyer all but wearing a babushka and shawl as she pleads her case.
Unbelievably, she wins. She’d been around long enough to be considered a common-law wife.
And then, without even a goodbye to my mother, who loved whoever my brother loved, she is gone.
And I begin to heal.
BIO: Ann Fischer is a writer and a photographer living and working in Toronto. Her writing has been published in literary magazines both online and in print and her photography has been exhibited across the province. Her current focus is non-fiction, including 100-word stories.