Blind Assassin (97 page)

I was not married from Avilion, but from Winifred’s half-timbered fake-Tudor barn in Rosedale. It was felt to be more convenient, as most of the guests would be from Toronto. It would also be less embarrassing for my father, who could no longer afford the kind of wedding Winifred felt was her due.

He could not even afford the clothes: Winifred took care of those. Stowed away in my luggage—in one of my several brand-new trunks—were a tennis skirt although I didn’t play, a bathing suit although I couldn’t swim, and several dancing frocks, although I didn’t know how to dance. Where could I have studied such accomplishments? Not at Avilion; not even the swimming, because Reenie wouldn’t let us go in. But Winifred had insisted on these outfits. She said I’d need to dress the part, no matter what my deficiencies, which should never be admitted by me. “Say you have a headache,” she told me. “It’s always an acceptable excuse.”

She told me many other things as well. “It’s all right to show boredom,” she said. “Just never show fear. They’ll smell it on you, like sharks, and come in for the kill. You can look at the edge of the table—it lowers your eyelids—but never look at the floor, it makes your neck look weak. Don’t stand up straight, you’re not a soldier. Never
cringe.
If someone makes a remark that’s insulting to you, say
Excuse me?
as if you haven’t heard; nine times out of ten they won’t have the face to repeat it. Never raise your voice to a waiter, it’s vulgar. Make them bend down, it’s what they’re for. Don’t fidget with your gloves or your hair. Always look as if you have something better to do, but never show impatience. When in doubt, go to the powder room, but go slowly. Grace comes from indifference.” Such were her sermons. I have to admit, despite my loathing of her, that they have proved to be of considerable value in my life.

The night before the wedding I spent in one of Winifred’s best bedrooms. “Make yourself beautiful,” said Winifred gaily, implying that I wasn’t. She’d given me some cold cream and some cotton gloves—I was to put the cream on, then the gloves over it. This treatment was supposed to make your hands all white and soft—the texture of uncooked bacon fat. I stood in the ensuite bathroom, listening to the clatter of the water as it fell against the porcelain of the tub and probing at my face in the mirror. I seemed to myself erased, featureless, like an oval of used soap, or the moon on the wane.

Laura came in from her own bedroom through the connecting door and sat down on the closed toilet. She’d never made a habit of knocking, where I was concerned. She was wearing a plain white cotton nightgown, formerly mine, and had tied her hair back; the wheat-coloured coil of it hung over one shoulder. Her feet were bare.

“Where are your slippers?” I said. Her expression was doleful. With that, and the white gown and the bare feet, she looked like a penitent—like a heretic in an old painting, on her way to execution. She held her hands clasped in front of her, the fingers surrounding an O of space left open, as if she ought to be holding a lighted candle.

“I forgot them.” When dressed up, she looked older than she was because of her height, but now she looked younger; she looked about twelve, and smelled like a baby. It was the shampoo she was using—she used baby shampoo because it was cheaper. She went in for small, futile economies. She gazed around the bathroom, then down at the tiled floor. “I don’t want you to get married,” she said.

“You’ve made that clear enough,” I said. She’d been sullen throughout the proceedings—the receptions, the fittings, the rehearsals—barely civil towards Richard, towards Winifred blankly obedient, like a servant girl under indenture. Towards me, angry, as if this wedding was a malicious whim at best, at worst a rejection of her. At first I’d thought she might be envious of me, but it wasn’t exactly that. “Why shouldn’t I get married?”

“You’re too young,” she said.

“Mother was eighteen. Anyway I’m almost nineteen.”

“But that was who she loved. She wanted to.”

“How do you know I don’t?” I said, exasperated.

That stopped her for a moment. “You can’t
want
to,” she said, looking up at me. Her eyes were damp and pink: she’d been crying. This annoyed me: what right had she to be doing the crying? It ought to have been me, if anyone.

“What I want isn’t the point,” I said harshly. “It’s the only sensible thing. We don’t have any money, or haven’t you noticed? Would you like us to be thrown out on the street?”

“We could get jobs,” she said. My cologne was on the window ledge beside her; she sprayed herself with it, absent-mindedly. It was Liu, by Guerlain, a present from Richard. (Chosen, as she’d let me know, by Winifred.
Men get so confused at perfume counters, don’t they? Scent goes right to their heads.
)

“Don’t be stupid,” I said. “What would we do? Break that and your name is mud.”

“Oh, we could do lots of things,” she said vaguely, setting the cologne down. “We could be waitresses.”

“We couldn’t live on that. Waitresses make next to nothing. They have to grovel for tips. They all get flat feet. You don’t know what anything costs,” I said. It was like trying to explain arithmetic to a bird. “The factories are closed, Avilion is falling to pieces, they’re going to sell it; the banks are out for blood. Haven’t you looked at Father? Haven’t you
seen
him? He’s like an old man.”

“It’s for him, then,” she said. “What you’re doing. I guess that explains something. I guess it’s brave.”

“I’m doing what I think is right,” I said. I felt so virtuous, and at the same time so hard done by, I almost wept. But that would have been game over.

“It’s not right,” she said. “It’s not right at all. You could break it off, it’s not too late. You could run away tonight and leave a note. I’d come with you.”

“Stop pestering, Laura. I’m old enough to know what I’m doing.”

“But you’ll have to let him
touch
you, you know. It’s not just kissing. You’ll have to let him…”

“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “Leave me alone. I’ve got my eyes open.”

“Like a sleepwalker,” she said. She picked up a container of my dusting powder, opened it, sniffed it, and managed to spill a handful of it onto the floor. “Well, you’ll have nice clothes, anyway,” she said.

I could have hit her. It was, of course, my secret consolation.

After she’d gone, leaving a trail of dusty white footprints, I sat on the edge of the bed, staring at my open steamer trunk. It was a very fashionable one, a pale yellow on the outside but dark blue on the inside, steel-bound, the nail-heads twinkling like hard metallic stars. It was tidily packed, with everything complete for the honeymoon voyage, but it seemed to me full of darkness—of emptiness, empty space.

That’s my trousseau, I thought. All at once it was a threatening word—so foreign, so final. It sounded like
trussed
—what was done to raw turkeys with skewers and pieces of string.

Toothbrush, I thought. I will need that. My body sat there, inert.

Trousseau
came from the French word for
trunk. Trousseau.
That’s all it meant: things you put into a trunk. So there was no use in getting upset about it, because it just meant baggage. It meant all the things I was taking with me, packed away.

The tango

Here’s the wedding picture:

A young woman in a white satin dress cut on the bias, the fabric sleek, with a train fanned around the feet like spilled molasses. There’s something gangly about the stance, the placement of the hips, the feet, as if her spine is wrong for this dress—too straight. You’d need to have a shrug for such a dress, a slouch, a sinuous curve, a sort of tubercular hunch.

A veil falling straight down on either side of the head, a width of it over the brow, casting too dark a shadow across the eyes. No teeth shown in the smile. A chaplet of small white roses; a cascade of larger roses, pink and white ones mingled with stephanotis, in her white-gloved arms—arms with the elbows a little too far out.
Chaplet, cascade
—these were the terms used in the newspapers. An evocation of nuns, and of fresh, perilous water. “A Beautiful Bride,” was the caption. They said such things then. In her case beauty was mandatory, with so much money involved.

(I say “her,” because I don’t recall having been present, not in any meaningful sense of the word. I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be said to exist at all, is composed only of what I remember. I have the better view—I can see her clearly, most of the time. But even if she knew enough to look, she can’t see me at all.)

Richard stands beside me, admirable in the terms of that time and place, by which I mean young enough, not ugly, and well-to-do. He looks substantial, but at the same time quizzical: one eyebrow cocked, lower lip thrust a little out, mouth on the verge of a smile, as if at some secret, dubious joke. Carnation in the buttonhole, hair combed back like a shiny rubber bathing cap, stuck to his head with the goo they used to put on back then. But a handsome man despite it. I have to admit that. Debonaire. Man about town.

There are some posed group portraits, too—a background scrum of groomsmen in their formal attire, much the same for weddings as for funerals and headwaiters; a foreground of clean, gleaming bridesmaids, their bouquets foaming with blossom. Laura managed to ruin each of these pictures. In one she’s resolutely scowling, in another she must have moved her head so that her face is a blur, like a pigeon smashing into glass. In a third she’s gnawing on a finger, glancing sideways guiltily, as if surprised with her hand in the till. In a fourth there must have been a defect in the film, because there’s an effect of dappled light, falling not down on her but up, as if she’s standing on the edge of an illuminated swimming pool, at night.

After the ceremony Reenie was there, in respectable blue and a feather. She hugged me tightly, and said, “If only your mother was here.” What did she mean? To applaud, or to call a halt to the proceedings? From her tone of voice, it could have been either. She cried then, I didn’t. People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible. But I was beyond such childishness; I was breathing the high bleak air of disillusionment, or thought I was.

There was champagne, of course. There must have been: Winifred would not have omitted it. Others ate. Speeches were made, of which I remember nothing. Did we dance? I believe so. I didn’t know how to dance, but I found myself on the dance floor, so some sort of stumbling-around must have occurred.

Then I changed into my going-away outfit. It was a two-piece suit, a light spring wool in pale green, with a demure hat to match. It cost a mint, said Winifred. I stood poised for departure, on the steps (what steps? The steps have vanished from memory), and threw my bouquet towards Laura. She didn’t catch it. She stood there in her seashell-pink outfit, staring at me coldly, hands gripped together in front of her as if to restrain herself, and one of the bridesmaids—some Griffen cousin or other—grabbed it and made off with it greedily, as if it were food.

My father by that time had disappeared. Just as well, because when last seen he’d been rigid with drink. I expect he’d gone to finish the job.

Then Richard took me by the elbow and steered me towards the getaway car. No one was supposed to know our destination, which was assumed to be somewhere out of town—some secluded, romantic inn. In fact we were driven around the block to the side entrance of the Royal York Hotel, where we’d just had the wedding reception, and smuggled up in the elevator. Richard said that since we were taking the train to New York the next morning and Union Station was just across the street, why go out of our way?

About my bridal night, or rather my bridal afternoon—the sun was not yet set and the room was bathed, as they say, in a rosy glow, because Richard did not pull the curtains—I will tell very little. I didn’t know what to expect; my only informant had been Reenie, who had led me to believe that whatever would happen would be unpleasant and most likely painful, and in this I was not deceived. She’d also implied that this disagreeable event or sensation would be nothing out of the ordinary—all women went through it, or all who got married—so I shouldn’t make a fuss.
Grin and bear it
had been her words. She’d said there would be some blood, and there was. (But she hadn’t said why. That part was a complete surprise.)

I did not yet know that my lack of enjoyment—my distaste, my suffering even—would be considered normal and even desirable by my husband. He was one of those men who felt that if a woman did not experience sexual pleasure this was all to the good, because then she would not be liable to wander off seeking it elsewhere. Perhaps such attitudes were common, at that period of time. Or perhaps not. I have no way of knowing.

Richard had arranged for a bottle of champagne to be sent up, at what he’d anticipated would be the proper moment. Also our dinners. I hobbled to the bathroom and locked myself in while tie waiter was setting everything out, on a portable table with a white linen tablecloth. I was wearing the outfit Winifred had thought appropriate for the occasion, which was a nightgown of satin in a shade of salmon pink, with a delicate lace trim of cobweb grey. I tried to clean myself up with a washcloth, then wondered what should be done with this: the red on it was so visible, as if I’d had a nosebleed. In the end I put it into the wastepaper basket and hoped the hotel maid would think it had fallen in there by mistake.

Then I sprayed myself with Liù, a scent I found frail and wan. It was named, I had by this time discovered, after a girl in an opera—a slave girl, whose fate was to kill herself rather than betray the man she loved, who in his turn loved someone else. That was how things went, in operas. I did not find this scent auspicious, but I was worried that I smelled odd. I did smell odd. The oddness had come from Richard, but now it was mine. I hoped I hadn’t made too much noise. Involuntary gasps, sharp intakes of breath, as when plunging into cold water.

The dinner was a steak, along with a salad. I ate mostly the salad. All the lettuce in hotels at that time was the same. It tasted like pale-green water. It tasted like frost.

The train trip to New York the next day was uneventful. Richard read the newspapers, I read magazines. The conversations we had were not different in kind than those we’d had before the wedding. (I hesitate to call them conversations, because I did not talk much. I smiled and agreed, and did not listen.)

In New York, we had dinner at a restaurant with some friends of Richard’s, a couple whose names I’ve forgotten. They were new money, without a doubt: so new it shrieked. Their clothes looked as if they’d covered themselves in glue, then rolled around in hundred-dollar bills. I wondered how they’d made it, this money; it had a fishy whiff.

These people didn’t know Richard all that well, nor did they yearn to: they owed him something, that was all—for some unstated favour. They were fearful of him, a little deferential. I gathered this from the play of the cigarette lighters: who lit what for whom, and how quickly. Richard enjoyed their deference. He enjoyed having cigarettes lit for him, and, by extension, for me.

It struck me that Richard had wanted to go out with them not only because he wanted to surround himself with a small coterie of cringers, but because he didn’t want to be alone with me. I could scarcely blame him: I had little to say. Nonetheless, he was now—in company—solicitous of me, placing my coat with tenderness over my shoulders, paying me small, cherishing attentions, keeping a hand always on me, lightly, somewhere. Every once in a while he’d scan the room, checking over the other men in it to see who was envying him. (Retrospect of course, on my part: at the time I recognized none of this.)

The restaurant was very expensive, and also very modern. I’d never seen anything like it. Things glittered rather than shone; there was bleached wood and brass trim and brash glass everywhere, and a great deal of lamination. Sculptures of stylized women in brass or steel, smooth as taffy, with eyebrows but no eyes, with streamlined haunches and no feet, with arms melting back into their torsos; white marble spheres; round mirrors like portholes. On every table, a single calla lily in a thin steel vase.

Richard’s friends were even older than Richard, and the woman looked older than the man. She was wearing white mink, despite the spring weather. Her gown was white as well, a design inspired—she told us at some length—by ancient Greece, the Winged Victory of Samothrace to be precise. The pleats of this gown were bound around with gold cord under her breasts, and in a crisscross between them. I thought that if I had breasts that slack and droopy I’d never wear such a gown. The skin showing above the neckline was freckled and puckered, as were her arms. Her husband sat silently while she talked, his hands fisted together, his half-smile set in concrete; he looked wisely down at the tablecloth. So
this is marriage,
I thought: this shared tedium, this twitchiness, and those little powdery runnels forming to the sides of the nose.

“Richard didn’t warn us you’d be this
young,”
said the woman.

Her husband said, “It will wear off,” and his wife laughed.

I considered the word
warn:
was I that dangerous? Only in the way sheep are, I now suppose. So dumb they jeopardize themselves, and get stuck on cliffs or cornered by wolves, and some custodian has to risk his neck to get them out of trouble.

Soon—after two days in New York, or was it three?—we crossed over to Europe on the
Berengeria,
which Richard said was the ship taken by everybody who was anybody. The sea wasn’t rough for that time of year, but nevertheless I was sick as a dog. (Why dogs, in this respect? Because they look as if they can’t help it. Neither could I.)

They brought me a basin, and cold weak tea with sugar but no milk. Richard said I should drink champagne because it was the best cure, but I didn’t want to take the risk. He was more or less considerate, but also more or less annoyed, though he did say what a shame I was feeling ill. I said I didn’t want to ruin his evening and he should go off and socialize, and so he did. The benefit to my seasickness was that Richard showed no inclination to climb into bed with me. Sex may go nicely with many things, but vomit isn’t one of them.

The next morning Richard said I should make an effort to appear at breakfast, as having the right attitude was the war half won. I sat at our table and nibbled bread and drank water, and tried to ignore the cooking smells. I felt bodiless and flaccid and crepey-skinned, like a deflating balloon. Richard tended me intermittently, but he knew people, or seemed to know them, and people knew him. He got up, shook hands, sat down again. Sometimes he introduced me, sometimes not. He did not however know all of the people he wanted to know. This was clear by the way he was always gazing around, past me, past those he was talking with—over their heads.

I made a gradual recovery during the day. I drank ginger ale, which helped. I did not eat dinner, but I attended it. In the evening there was a cabaret. I wore the dress Winifred had chosen for such an event, dove grey with a chiffon cape in lilac. There were lilac sandals with high heels and open toes to match. I had not yet quite got the hang of such high heels: I teetered slightly. Richard said the sea air must have agreed with me; he said I had just the right amount of colour, a faint schoolgirl blush. He said I looked marvellous. He steered me to the table he’d reserved, and ordered a martini for me and one for himself. He said the martini would fix me up in no time flat.

I drank some of it, and after that Richard was no longer beside me, and there was a singer who stood in a blue spotlight. She had her black hair waved down over one eye, and was wearing a tubular black dress covered with big scaly sequins, which clung to her firm but prominent bottom and was held up by what looked like twisted string. I stared at her with fascination. I’d never been to a cabaret, or even to a nightclub. She wiggled her shoulders and sang “Stormy Weather” in a voice like a sultry groan. You could see halfway down her front.