Don't even start that, Erin, said Sean.

No, I'm just saying, putting aside your theory for a minute, a person can't really see where they're going in there.

Especially when a person is hurling herself down the stairs.

They were in Belize. They were at this ridiculous resort on Ambergris Caye. n.o.body else was at the resort except for the wedding party, even though the place was huge. If not for the resort staff, it would feel like some kind of post-apocalyptic celebration - all other humans vaporized. They had it to themselves because Frank was the owner and because it was off-season, and because her father was Frank's biggest investor.

Did you notice, she said to Sean, how Frank wears a diamond in either ear? He looks like a lunatic.

He is a lunatic, agreed Sean, allowing her to change the subject. Talk to him. Whole other planet. Did you talk to him?

No, said Erin. I didn't get a chance to talk to him after he hurt me.

Which was a stupid thing to say because it led them directly back to the topic at hand.

This was Erin, Sean had come to understand. This was what Erin did. Help me; get away from me; ow that hurt; come here.

SEAN DIDN'T THINK it was that she didn't want to be getting married to him. He had his theories, but he didn't think that was it. He thought it could be attributed to how her father was running the wedding like one of his golf weekends, and also relationship issues leftover from Ames.

Ames was the man with whom Erin had spent her twenties "being hippies together," as she described it. It had been such an obvious move of rebellion against her father it was embarra.s.sing - Erin herself said that. Listening to Erin talk about her past, you would think she was the most self-aware person on the planet. Which is to say, not someone p.r.o.ne to hurling herself down flights of stairs and blaming it on the lighting. So she and Ames lived in a cabin on the Sunshine Coast, grew vegetables and kept bees. They weren't dropouts, they told themselves, dropping out was negative, a turning away, and this was a turning toward. They wanted to live authentically, like Henry David Th.o.r.eau, whom Ames was very into. Ames kept journals like Th.o.r.eau did, and made money working up and down the coast doing carpentry for his fellow authentic-livers, often getting paid in loaves of bread and baskets of blackberries that he could have picked himself in about twenty minutes basically anywhere on the coast.

He called himself a "woodworker," never a carpenter. This was Erin's scornful joke. She'd had a lot of grim fun, in the two years Sean had known her, at Ames's expense. Erin told Sean that, authentic living aside, Ames had nurtured ambitions to be an actor. Ha ha. He thought Hollywood was bulls.h.i.t, as you do, but great acting, like woodworking, was a marriage of craft and art. Ha. And, okay, the truth was, acting was not an entirely unreasonable ambition for Ames. He was, Erin admitted, "beautiful," all rangy limbs and the obligatory mid-nineties s.h.a.ggy dishabille, a look that still made Erin a little giddy, like when she came across old photos of Kurt Cobain or the Soundgarden guy. Every once in a while Ames would take the ferry to Vancouver to audition for something or another, but all he got was extra work and the occasional gay come-on. Gays loved Ames, confided Erin. I mean, of course they're going to love a good-looking guy, but there was something about Ames, they just adored him.

It went to Ames's head, long story short. He finally met, claimed Erin, one too many people who just adored him. There was an agent who promised to get him modelling work, and actually accomplished this. Ames returned to the coast one day with a pair of $400 sungla.s.ses holding back his hair.

We have to move the hives, Erin told him, the bear is back.

G.o.d, said Ames, removing the sungla.s.ses and gathering his hair into a ponytail at the back of his skull. It was a gesture meant to get across great depths of torment. I can't deal with the hives anymore. I mean, Jesus, Erin. As if the hives were her fault.

Then Ames sat Erin down and described all the ways he had become unhappy with her.

It was embarra.s.sing because of how Erin had renounced everything for Ames and his sinews and the vegetables and bees and their lame voluntary-simplicity cliche. Erin remembered being twenty-two and telling her father she pitied him in response to his telling her she was being s.l.u.tty and throwing her life away. Then her father decided to say what he did, and she said what she said in response. It was one of those detonator moments - a conversation that implodes time and s.p.a.ce and opens up a kind of portal, like in video games. You pick up a coin or open a chest; you say the right thing, or say the wrong thing. And next thing you know the world around you shudders and gives way, depositing you into a completely new dimension, an otherworld.

What happened was that Erin's father, Ron, decided to impart to his daughter the axiom about no one wanting to buy a cow that gives its milk away for free.

Maybe, Erin told him - vibrating like a kettle on the boil - maybe the cow just wants to get milked.

You have to know Erin's family to understand how a comment like this would land.

You are never going to understand anything about real life, Erin told her father in the strangled, white-lipped silence that followed. It was a silence that would endure and thicken between them for the next five years - that was the portal she had tipped them into. The portal to a silent world. You are so caught up in your traditionalist dogmas, she said to dumbstruck Ron.

Tra-dish-onalist dawg-mas, Erin said to Sean, that was my big phrase back then. I thought it was just so clever. When Erin described herself saying things like this now, she did it as a parody. She adopted her "lumpy granola" voice, a grating singsong delivery, nasal with self-righteousness - as if every sentence she uttered should end with an emphatic "man" or "dude." Sean found it a little ruthless. Stop it, he laughed. You can't beat yourself up for being young.

You weren't being an idiot when you were in your twenties, Erin accused.

I was being my own special kind of idiot, answered Sean. In fact, at the start of his twenties, Sean worked at a UPS call centre that had opened the very spring he graduated from university, and counted himself lucky. He banked his paycheques and rented a studio apartment in a concrete high-rise and took the bus to work. He applied for promotions within the company and bought mutual funds and had his first house by the time he was twenty-six, just in time to get married to a woman from his office to whom he now referred by no other name except "The Beast." Later, after he divorced and went back to school, he met people like Erin, people who structured their twenties around s...o...b..arding trips and the obtainment and usage of pot and had gone to Burning Man and had multiple s.e.x partners and had taught in j.a.pan and volunteered in Africa and sailed in sailboats around the Gulf Islands, and that's when he started feeling like his own special kind of idiot. Now he was forty-two.

By their second year of living together, Sean was spending every weekend tricking out their bas.e.m.e.nt dungeon. It was his engagement present to Erin. But from the moment he set it up, he found the busywork of tinkering around down there gave him almost as much pleasure as the purpose it was intended for. He liked puttering and experimenting in his time off, looking up stuff online, inventing new things for them to try. Erin started calling it Satan's Workshop. He'd ordered plans for bondage furniture and so far had built his own whipping chair, and he'd also bought an old church confessional pew from the antique mall and sanded and stained it, drilled holes and added hooks and straps and turned it into a kind of sicko kneeling structure which Erin, with her Catholic background, loved. Now he'd moved on to a Saint Andrew's Cross, which was the biggest thing he'd ever done. He'd held off on this project for a while because the dungeon had metastasized to such a degree after Erin moved in, and was getting harder to pack up whenever they had friends over wanting their inevitable tour of the house. The last time Erin's parents had come to visit, it had taken all weekend to find a hiding place for everything. Her father had insisted on seeing Sean's "workshop" and then laughed at Sean as he looked around at the pristine tools hanging on their hooks.

This place is immaculate, Ron said. Give me a break, please, Sean. You don't so much as lift a hammer down here.

Sean had no idea what he would do with the Saint Andrew's Cross when the time came. Likely he would just end up throwing a tarp over it and hoping no one got curious.

DID YOU AND Ames ever do this kind of stuff? Sean wanted to know after Erin moved in.

Ames and I had twenty-something s.e.x, she said. Where you do it constantly and think you must be having a blast.

You weren't enjoying it? You don't have to say that, you know.

You think you're enjoying it, said Erin. There isn't a lot of difference, at that age, between thinking you're enjoying something and actually enjoying it.

Then how do you know the difference? said Sean.

You know later, once you're really enjoying it.

Then how do you know you're ever really enjoying it? They were lying in bed, having one of the lazy, pointless conversations of which they had so many early in their relationship. Where the actual subject under discussion didn't matter because all they really wanted was to feel each other's voices buzzing in their bodies.

How do you know you don't still just think you are enjoying it? said Sean. Like right now?

Because of having an o.r.g.a.s.m, said Erin.

But, come on. You had o.r.g.a.s.ms!

Erin stretched then, sending her limbs in all directions like the da Vinci drawing. I didn't even know what an o.r.g.a.s.m was in those days.

Sean understood she wasn't being literal. He knew he was paying more attention to the conversation than Erin was; than it really merited. But he wondered: Is this a compliment? Or what is it?

OKAY, STOP STOP stop, said Erin. They were celebrating one year of being engaged and it was their first time using the bas.e.m.e.nt in a serious way. Sean could tell that she meant it. They didn't have a safe word, because that made it seem too hardcore. Too much like people who dressed up in masks and rubber, who said mean things to each other, like in movies.

Motherf.u.c.ker, said Erin. Whoo.

Sean looked at the cane in his hand. I didn't do it hard, like at all, he said.

Whoo. It really hurt, said Erin.

They had just bought it. Erin read about it online. It was fancy and expensive - rattan with a leather grip. Sean had offered to slap together something similar in his workshop, but Erin said it couldn't just be some stick from out in the yard; it had to be rattan.

But I thought - Ha ha, yes I know, said Erin. But it really hurts.

It should only hurt a little bit? This alarmed Sean, because it contradicted the rules as he understood them up until now.

No, said Erin. It should hurt. But it shouldn't really hurt.

This made Sean think back to their conversation in bed in the early days of their relationship. Really versus not really.

Let me up, said Erin, becoming restless. I have to pee, sweetie.

ERIN WENT FOR a walk by herself along the beach the morning of the wedding. Frank's two dogs, a pair of excitable, flap-eared mutts who had the run of the resort, came with her uninvited. They were the happiest dogs in the world, it seemed - they couldn't believe their luck, living here on the beach with Frank, meeting new people all the time, having each other to play with. They managed to accompany Erin and play frantically with one another throughout her entire walk. It was not as peaceful and meditative as she'd intended it to be. The dark one would chase the light one, then the light one would whip around and they would face off, crouching in the dried seaweed, communicating with lolling tongues. The next instant, the light would be after the dark. They'd jump in the surf, cool off, splash, pretend to bite one another. Then they'd notice Erin had gone a bit farther down the beach than they preferred her to be, and would run to catch up.

You guys are exhausting, Erin said.

Approaching the resort, she ran into Frank. Erin and Frank hadn't warmed to one another at the reception the night before as a result of Frank crushing her hand. He'd steered clear of her the rest of the evening.

There she is, said Frank now. They were the only two people on the beach. Our child-bride.

Erin was thirty-eight. Hi, she said.

Frank was as bald as a stump and the size of the diamonds in his ears really did make him look crazy. He looked like a big bald infant wearing lady's jewellery. The dogs were overjoyed to see him and capered, whining, about his shins.

How are you liking the place? Frank wanted to know, waving his arms down around his knees to make sporadic contact with the dogs.

It's beautiful, said Erin. And it was, kind of. But she was coming to believe she wasn't a Caribbean sort of person. It all looked great from a distance but the turquoise ocean turned out to be warm as urine and when she got in it her eyes and mouth burned with salt. Also the white sand made her impatient. She found it hard to believe it wasn't artificial - silicone or something. She was tempted to ask Frank if they manufactured it somewhere and had it shipped in, but when she'd mentioned this possibility to Sean the night before he'd laughed until he couldn't breathe.

You have to be honest with me now, said Frank, spreading his arms toward the ocean. Does it get any better than this?

No, said Erin. It doesn't.

Frank stooped to palm a coconut and the dogs went even crazier, perhaps thinking he was going to throw it for them, or maybe just because he'd put his face, momentarily, at their level.

Your opinion as a bride is very valuable, Frank told her, frowning as he straightened, either to indicate sudden seriousness or else back pain. So I appreciate hearing that. I plan on weddings being the engine that makes this little operation run. And it's all about making the bride happy, after all.

I think people will love it, Erin told him, which was not a lie. She didn't love a lot of the things everybody else seemed to love. She used to think that had to mean other people were wrong. But she didn't believe that anymore, Erin realized-at some point she'd stopped a.s.suming she was right and everyone else was wrong. Now she figured she was likely as wrong as the next person. But Frank took her statement kindly and beamed his stumpy sunburned pleasure at her, diamonds sparkling on either side of his head. He held the coconut aloft.

I will plant this for you, Frank declared. The first bride to grace our Caye. He began to clamber up a dune in search of an appropriate tree-planting spot as the dogs freaked out at his feet.

We'll call it - I'm so sorry, what's your name again, dear?

Erin, said Erin.

We'll call this "Erin's Tree," announced Frank.

She watched as he negotiated another dune and then, for no obvious reason, fell over into the sand.

The dogs went mad and leapt upon him.

Oh my G.o.d, said Erin, darting forward, holding her arms out as if to pick him up.

Frank writhed in the fake white sand, fending off the ecstatic dogs, who licked him as if he'd dropped to ground precisely to give them this opportunity. With grat.i.tude and abandon.

I'm all right, Frank a.s.sured her. I have a bad hip. It just gives out sometimes - poof.

But Erin could see the reality of pain in Frank's face, there was real pain there now, clouding up the sunny madness, pain the dogs were doing their best to lick away. Frank's hat had been knocked from his head and he lay there, bald and bejewelled, looking more like a helpless infant than ever.

ERIN WENT BACK to the hotel room to find Sean and see if she could talk him into a quick pre-wedding spanking. He'd refused to raise a hand to her since they arrived, for fear a chambermaid or relative would overhear and get the wrong idea. I need you to spank the weird out of this place for me, she told him.

Sean said he was too self-conscious. The walls were like onion skin.

So Erin went for a swim and five minutes into it came face to face with a small stingray. She'd petted one when they'd gone snorkelling a couple days ago, but that time the guide had been holding it still for her.

And clambering up onto the dock to escape the stingray, she tore her thigh open on a spike. What was the spike doing there? It was errant, poking out at an impractical angle, and the only such spike on the dock, but Erin had found it.

SHE DIDN'T END up needing st.i.tches but Sean told her, a few minutes before they got married, that maybe to be on the safe side they should ask one of the waiters to strap her to a trolley and wheel her down the aisle.

I like the being strapped down part, she joked back. Do I get to pick my own waiter?

She decided not to let Sean know how angry the comment had made her. At this point, she just wanted to limp down the f.u.c.king aisle, say the stupid vows and get drunk and then get on a plane home so they could be together in the way they always were. Belize was a mistake. Accepting the resort package as her father's wedding gift - which had made her feel so mature at the time, so above it all, so water-under-the-bridge - was a mistake. It had become a TV wedding. The waving palm tree fantasy of some fourteen-year-old daddy's-little-princess.

She'd been kidding herself. She thought this as she kissed Sean at the reception, after everyone began tinking their forks against their gla.s.ses at them for what had to be the twenty-seventh time. She hadn't exited the field of battle with her father. She'd surrendered.

SEAN GOT DIVORCED at a Starbucks. He and The Beast met every week at the Starbucks at the West Edmonton Mall, the biggest mall in North America. They had a DIY divorce because Sean was still, at the time, his own special kind of idiot. Why not part amicably, he thought. There was no need for a lawyer - a lawyer was cold and impersonal, a lawyer would introduce an unnecessary adversarial element to the proceedings and why do that? Hadn't they had enough of being adversaries? Good faith, therefore. Plus it wouldn't be fair, because he could afford a lawyer and The Beast could not. So he and The Beast hashed a deal out together, at Starbucks, using doc.u.ments from the internet. She drank Frappuccinos and he drank whatever the featured brew happened to be that day.

The Beast was unemployed except for the knitting lessons she gave and the crafts she sold every summer at the farmers' market and online. She came up with some impressive stuff - The Beast could knit food, perfectly recognizable olives and hamburgers and ice cream cones. Years ago, he had encouraged her in this; he made good money at UPS, so why shouldn't she follow her dreams, quit her soul-killing administrative job and knit food all day?

And now, therefore, it was his fault she had been out of the workforce for so long. Out of guilt, and a desperation to get away, he gave her everything.

DON'T BE SO hard on yourself, Erin told him, on the plane back to Canada. It seemed like there was no other way of dealing with the terrible wedding on the fake white sand against the swimming-pool ocean, not to mention their hangovers, but to talk about how terrible their previous relationships had been.

They'd heard each other's stories many times before. They always ended up, these stories, with one of them telling the other: Don't be so hard on yourself.

But you guys weren't miserable, argued Sean. You and Ames. You didn't cohabit in complete and utter misery for ten years and just, like, stick with it because you figured it was the right thing to do. You stayed together because you were happy. And then you broke up once you weren't happy anymore, like reasonable human beings.

No, said Erin.

Yes, said Sean, who had heard about it enough to feel comfortable contradicting her. Ames just came home one day and said he wasn't happy.

Yes, said Erin. But it doesn't mean we were happy right up until that exact point.

Well, that's kind of how you've always described it.

Erin looked past Sean out the window. It showed a wall of cloud the colour of cement.

But I knew that he resented me, she said. For a long time. I just didn't know what to do about it. And when he came home that day with the sungla.s.ses, one of the things he said made him mad was how I resented his acting career. And I couldn't figure that out, because I was the one who helped him get his resume and headshot online, I was the one who found him an extras agent. I was always trying to find him work. So I didn't understand what he was saying. And it wasn't until quite a few months after he moved out that I got it. He wasn't mad because I resented his career, he was mad because I was the thing that wasn't his career - I was the anti-career. So he couldn't imagine me doing anything but resenting it. I was the thing on the other side of the ferry crossing that had nothing to do with what he wanted anymore.

Sean was beginning to fall asleep. He'd made the mistake of thinking this was another one of their lazy conversations.

But you guys were happy, he insisted with his eyes closed. Up until then.

I was, said Erin. I was the one who was happy.

She seemed to sneeze in slow motion into her hands. Sean opened his eyes and sat up. The whole time he had known Erin, she had never done this. She wasn't a crier.

It's just this whole past week, she told him. The wedding with all the family and everything.

But it's over, said Sean. He put his arms around her.

When we get home, Erin whispered after a moment, I want you to beat the living s.h.i.t out of me.

They'd never gone a week without before.