Consent Read online

  ALSO BY ANNABEL LYON

  Oxygen

  The Best Thing for You

  The Golden Mean

  The Sweet Girl

  Imagining Ancient Women

  PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

  Copyright © 2020 Annabel Lyon

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2020 by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  An early version of Chapter 2 was first published in Room of One’s Own, Vol. 28:4 (2005).

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Consent / Annabel Lyon.

  Names: Lyon, Annabel, 1971- author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200187686 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200187694 | ISBN 9780345811455 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780345811479 (EPUB)

  Classification: LCC PS8573.Y62 C66 2020 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  Text design: Kelly Hill

  Cover design: Kelly Hill

  Cover images: (lipstick stain) © Andy Roberts, OJO/Getty Images; (spider) © Ilka & Franz, DigitalVision/Getty Images; (pink glass) © Five Object Shop, Shutterstock.com

  a_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Annabel Lyon

  Title Page

  Copyright

  1977

  1998

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part Two

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part Three

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  About the Author

  1977

  The baby doesn’t cry but Sara’s mother cries. Everyone is tired and Sara is tired of playing nicely in the plash of sun on the carpet, the dust motes turning, while her mother feeds the baby and rocks the baby and mumbles into the phone, the swaddled baby in the crook of her arm. Sara misses the crook of her mother’s arm and the smell of her, the honey-wood smell that comes from the faceted glass bottle on her dresser. She doesn’t like the milk smell on her mother or the milk-shit smell on her sister.

  Visitors wear brave watery smiles, and try to elicit brave watery smiles from Sara’s mother. Something about the baby and the baby’s placidity, Sara gathers, is not quite right. The baby is too quiet, the baby sleeps too much. People are gentle and kind and hand the baby back quickly to her mother, who does not rush to take her.

  They bring big gifts for the baby and small gifts for Sara, which is unfair and absurd and makes Sara impatient. Sticker sheets and socks and little books that she is encouraged to read to the baby, which is unfair. Sara can’t read. She has to turn the pages by herself in the plash of sunlight, the dust motes spinning endlessly, because her mother cannot. She just cannot read to her right now.

  When Sara’s father comes home, Sara’s mother goes to bed. Then her father holds the baby in the crook of his arm and scrambles Sara’s eggs with one hand. He reads the new books with her and puts the baby on the floor more than Sara’s mother does so he can play with Sara. She appreciates this. He smells sourer than her mother, and his cheek is rough. She doesn’t want to shift allegiances, not really, but what choice does she have?

  A chokingly sweet-smelling older woman comes to visit. Sara’s great-aunt. That sounds very grand. She brings another pink bear for the baby but a big gift for Sara: a Barbie doll and a child’s suitcase filled with clothes. Some of them are the cheap things that came with the doll, plastic netting crinolines and pink pretend silk dresses and white plastic shoes that snap onto her feet. But some were hand-sewn by the great-aunt herself for some distant child who is grown up now. Real silk, real velvet, real wool, even real fur: scraps from real fabrics used to make real clothes. The stitches are tiny, like an elf would make. Fur-trimmed hooded capes, rickrack edged gowns, little two-piece suits, a tiny bouclé peacoat. Sara sits in her plash of sunlight, turning the little clothes this way and that, dressing and undressing the Barbie. She is a very good girl.

  “That scent is roses,” her mother tells her once the great-aunt has left. The difference between roses and her mother’s honey-wood fascinates her. She sniffs back and forth from the doll’s clothes to her mother’s sleeve, again and again, trying to recapture the bursting surprise of a beautiful thing that has nothing of her mother in it. The next day her father brings her a little bottle of scent for her own self from the drugstore because her mother asked him to. Then she loves her mother again.

  1998

  You’re not the boss of me, they used to tell each other as children. Saskia and Jenny, Jenny and Saskia. Same size, same face, same stubbornness. Their own father couldn’t reliably tell them apart until they were five. You’re not the boss of me.

  “Yes, twins,” their mother would tell strangers who stopped to admire their dark eyes, their curls. Their mother was always smiling tiredly. She wasn’t the boss, either, though she knew them better than their father. Knew them well enough that when she sat on the sofa as the afternoon light drained away, and Jenny would say, “Jenny’s upstairs, Jenny’s hurt,” their mother would sip from her glass without looking at her and say, “That’s very funny. Nice try.”

  “Really, I’m Saskia,” Jenny would say.

  “I’m resting, okay?” their mother would say. “Try to understand.”

  “She didn’t fall for it,” Jenny would tell Saskia upstairs, where she lay on the bed, pretending to be Jenny. Saskia had known she wouldn’t fall for it, but it was easier to let Jenny play her games.

  “What do you want to do now?” Jenny would say, jumping up. “I know! Let’s try on her clothes. We can put music on and dress up and pretend to—”

  “I want to read.”

  “That’s boring. Play with me. You have to play with me or I’ll set your book on fire.”

  She would, too, in the bathroom sink, with the barbeque lighter. She had got a spanking last time, but it would not deter her from doing it again. Only Saskia could save her, by giving in. That was her one power. Still: “You’re not the boss of me!”

  A lie. Jenny always got what she wanted, always. She could twist Saskia into any trouble she wanted.

  Jenny’s eyes sparkled. Saskia was serious. That was how you told them apart.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Fall 1992

  When the letter came, Sara took it straight to her mother.

  “The University of Toronto,” her mother said.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you hate us?”

  There was money, a burst of money from the death of the great-aunt the year before. Now her mother was crying into the sink.

  “I’ll come back,” Sara said.

  Then it was August
and she was on a plane.

  “Eighteen,” the man next to her said. “I remember eighteen. What are you going to study?”

  “French.”

  “Magnifique, honey,” the man said.

  He was from Squamish, and was going to Toronto for a business opportunity. Something to do with resorts, with skiing. He personally didn’t ski, but.

  “Oh, interesting!” Sara said. She opened her magazine.

  “Eighteen,” the man said again, but Sara was reading.

  The magazine was the New Yorker. The article was about Proust. Sara had a Vogue in her bag, too, and a granola bar: breakfast. It was a 7:00 a.m. flight.

  “Oh, you do not want to be an interpreter,” her mother had said. “Since when? You’ve only ever wanted to teach music, since you were little.”

  Sara had not wanted to teach music since before her father’s death, from a heart attack, when she was ten. “With French I could go into government. The foreign service. Law.” Though, in truth, she had already decided to go into fashion. What did that mean? She wasn’t sure. She hated the mall. She wasn’t pretty. It had something to do with taste, money and taste and books and, of course, eros. She had another book in her bag, one she was ashamed of and couldn’t read in public, even with her mother and sister dwindled to pinpoints thirty thousand feet below and behind her.

  They landed mid-afternoon Toronto time. The man next to her wished her luck, and asked her if she had a place to stay.

  “With friends,” she lied.

  She’d won the school prizes for French and English back in June, but had lost calculus and the sciences to her friend David Park. At the prize ceremony he had performed one of his own compositions on the violin and received the school’s top graduating scholarship. Sara had got a scholarship, too, for $150, and a hardcover dictionary stamped with the school crest.

  “You should play with me,” David had said beforehand.

  “Accompany you,” Sara corrected him.

  “I hate that word. The parts are equally difficult.” David was the child of immigrants who spoke Korean at home and relied on him to be their link to the new world. He suffered the classic schisms Sara had read of in novels: the conflicting loyalties, the alienation, the guilt.

  “I get too nervous,” Sara said.

  He shook his head. “You don’t practice enough.”

  They went out a handful of times the summer after graduation. Sometimes they took Mattie with them, to the free lunchtime concerts in the art gallery, or the movies if it was a matinee and a comedy. Afterwards David Park would stay for supper. Sara’s mother tried Chinese recipes on him—chicken with peeled almonds, strange yellow curries—that she’d never made before and never would again. They weren’t good. Her mother also spoke to him too loudly and slowly, and would always bleach the bathroom after he’d left for the evening. But he was polite and Mattie adored him, holding his hand most everywhere they went, which he claimed not to mind. Sara suggested increasingly forbidding outings—a Cindy Sherman exhibit, Kieślowski’s The Decalogue at the Pacific Cinémathèque—so that they’d have a reason to leave Mattie at home.

  He drove her home after the Cinémathèque and, as she was removing her seat belt, asked if he might kiss her. Dry lips, mint—some anticipatory candy or other. So that was out of the way. She was leaving in two days.

  “I’ll keep an eye on Mattie for you while you’re away,” he said. But Sara had no intention of returning either to her mother’s pious bigotry or to the life of self-improvement that dating David Park entailed. She told him there was really no need for him to do that.

  She had booked a room for a week at a budget hotel with a free airport shuttle, downtown, near Maple Leaf Gardens. Her hotel room was a smoking, not what she had requested, with a mustard-coloured duvet. She spent a while thinking about mustard colour, and whether it wasn’t worse than cigarette smell. Really she was avoiding having to go out and get a newspaper and something to eat. She was afraid to leave the room.

  She took her secret book to the bathroom and locked the door. It was a memoir by a woman who had worked as an editor at French Vogue. She was classy and acid and opinionated. One did not collect T-shirts; one owned pieces. One wore perfume, like a grown-up, and had an ongoing relationship with a competent tailor. The author peppered the book with reminiscences of her childhood in Saigon and then Paris, of watching her mother buy clothes, have them altered, have them cleaned, and finally get ready to go out in them for the evening. Her parents were not unreasonably wealthy, but her mother had taste and chic, and would rather have one expensive scarf than five cheap ones. That, the author said, was the correct attitude, the correct approach. Even after her charming rake of a half-British father had drunk up the family money and deposited her and her mother in a seedy hotel while he pursued increasingly nebulous business opportunities, her mother had kept her priorities straight. She had sold the paintings and the first editions, but not the Diors. Fortunately, by then, the author was old enough to pass as old enough to model, and soon she and her mother were comfortable again. (Her father had gone to work as a Hollywood screenwriter, and had started another family there. The author never saw him again.)

  If a fourteen-year-old could support her family, Sara could leave her awful room. At a corner store she bought a Star for the rental listings. She walked on down the street, stomach growling. She’d adored the chapter on the editor’s affair with the famous perfumer, and wanted to reread it with something to eat.

  Months later she would walk the same sidewalks, now through slush like filthily gravied and peppered mashed potato. She had found a room in a decrepit mansion in the Annex, a mansion subdivided and rented to students like herself. In her room she had a bed and desk and chair, a fridge and a hotplate and a toaster. She ate a lot of toast. By now—early December—she had her routines. She woke early to a frugal breakfast and went to class. Then she went to the library. There were two or three cafés she would choose between for her afternoon coffee. There were three or four used bookstores she cycled through each week, and then of course there was Simenon.

  The bell above the door tinkled. There was a bell above the door. That was Simenon: stained glass at your knees, then seven steps below the street and a bell above the door. Silks and furs and dust in the wavering blue-green stained-glass light. The assistants down there were mermaids, drifting green and lovely through the gloom, but their queen was the one Sara feared and hoped for: a hag not five feet tall with the ugliest face, gaping drooping mouth too wide and eyes like kelp bulbs. She was probably younger than she looked. The first time Sara saw her, she assumed the woman was homeless. It took a closer look to notice her ripped black coat was Comme des Garçons and there were pheasant feathers on her shoes. Her glasses—when she put them on to sit at the ormolu desk and handwrite a receipt—had spiked rims. She smelled of pepper and smoke, not a perfume in the conventional sense.

  “Ne touchez pas, Mademoiselle,” she had said the first time Sara visited the shop and reached for a price tag. Her eyes skimmed over Sara, her demure September skirt and sweater. By October the woman watched while Sara fingered this and that, finger and thumb only, never overstaying. It helped that she wore the vintage wool peacoat she’d bought from one of the mermaids on her first visit to prove herself, or at least to prove the reach of her wallet. November had been a dung-coloured silk scarf. When she returned the following week, the queen noticed she’d cut off the tassels.

  “I didn’t like them,” Sara said. “Je ne les ai pas aimé.”

  “I do not know why we do not speak the one language or the other,” the queen said. “I speak to you in English, you attempt French. Why?”

  Sara touched a silk blouse with one finger.

  “That is too small for you, Mademoiselle.”

  She touched another.

  “That one also.”

  The queen went away and came
back with a hideous green-and-orange knit dress that would have cost Sara a month’s rent.

  “This is for you,” the queen said.

  She was waiting on Sara herself. That had never happened before. Sara felt rather than saw the mermaids at the periphery of the store, behind the racks, hiding in the seaweed.

  The queen walked into the change room with her and told her what to take off. She would not allow Sara to handle the thing, but dressed her herself and fussed over the buttons. When Sara reached to tug the fabric under one arm, the queen practically slapped her hand away and fixed it herself. She smoothed the fabric over Sara’s hips and breasts with both hands, briskly, professionally, and stood back to examine her.

  “Ce n’est pas mon goût,” Sara said.

  The queen led her from the change room to the shop, where she stood Sara in front of the big mirror. The mermaids drifted over. The queen murmured under her breath to one of them, who nodded. Sara understood they were disparaging her shoes. Her eyes went to the rack the queen kept behind her desk, where she kept her rarest pearls: a Poiret cocoon coat, a bias-cut gown from Madame Grès, a leather harness and leash from Vivienne Westwood. And something new: a black dress.

  “What’s that?” Sara asked.

  The queen nodded at one of the mermaids, who retrieved the black dress and held it just out of Sara’s reach. She reached anyway, then let her arm fall.

  The queen nodded, and the mermaid came closer.

  Sara reached again, but hesitated. “That’s a deWinter.”

  The queen flicked her chin, and the mermaid returned the dress to the rack behind the desk.

  “I’ve read about that dress,” Sara said. “I’ve seen the photos.”

  They returned to the change room, where the queen supervised her undressing.

  “I want to try it on,” Sara said.