Dancing Girls (9 page)

But the thought of Louise out there in the windswept institution grounds with nothing and no one she knew bothered him in twinges, like a mental neuralgia, goading him finally into the section of the city that passed for downtown: he would buy her a gift. He selected a small box of water-colour paints: she ought to have something to do. He was intending to mail it, but sooner than
he expected he found himself again on the wide deserted entrance driveway.

They met once more in the visitors’ cubicle. He was alarmed by the change in her: she had put on weight, her muscles had slackened, her breasts drooped. Instead of sitting rigidly as she had done before, she sprawled in the chair, legs apart, arms hanging; her hair was dull and practically uncombed. She was wearing a short skirt and purple stockings, in one of which there was a run. Trying not to stare at this run and at the white, loose thigh flesh it revealed, Morrison had the first unmistakably physical stirrings of response he had ever felt towards her.

“They have me on a different drug,” she said. “The other one was having the wrong effect. I was allergic to it.” She mentioned that someone had stolen her hairbrush, but when he offered to bring her another one she said it didn’t matter. She had lost interest in the circle and her elaborate system and did not seem to want to talk much. What little she said was about the hospital itself: she was trying to help the doctors, they didn’t know how to treat the patients but they wouldn’t listen to her. Most of those inside were getting worse rather than better; many had to stay there because no one would take the responsibility of looking after them, even if they were drugged into manageability. They were poor, without relations; the hospital would not let them go away by themselves. She told him about one girl from further north who thought she was a cariboo.

She hardly glanced at the water-colour paints, though she thanked him sluggishly. Her eyes, normally wide and vivacious, were puffed shut nearly to slits and her skin appeared to have darkened. She reminded him of someone, though it took him several minutes to remember: it was an Indian woman he had seen early in the fall while he was still searching for a place to have a civilized drink. She had been sitting outside a cheap hotel with her legs apart,
taking off her clothes and chanting, “Come on boys, what’re you waiting for, come on boys, what’re you waiting for.” Around her a group of self-conscious, sniggering men had gathered. Morrison, against his will and appalled at her, the men, and himself, had joined them. She was naked to the waist when the police got there.

When he rose to say goodbye Louise asked him, as if it was a matter of purely academic interest, whether he thought she would ever get out.

On his way out to the car it struck him that he loved her. The thought filled him like a goal, a destiny. He would rescue her somehow; he could pretend she was his cousin or sister; he would keep her hidden in the apartment with all his dangerous implements, razors, knives, nailfiles, locked away; he would feed her, give her the right drugs, comb her hair. At night she would be there in the sub-zero bedroom for him to sink into as into a swamp, warm and obliterating.

This picture at first elated, then horrified him. He saw that it was only the hopeless, mad Louise he wanted, the one devoid of any purpose or defence. A sane one, one that could judge him, he would never be able to handle. So this was his dream girl then, his ideal woman found at last: a disintegration, mind returning to its component shards of matter, a defeated formless creature on which he could inflict himself like shovel on earth, axe on forest, use without being used, know without being known. Louise’s notebook entry, written when she had surely been saner than she was now, had been right about him. Yet in self-defence he reasoned that his desire for her was not altogether evil: it was in part a desire to be reunited with his own body, which he felt less and less that he actually occupied.

Oppressed by himself and by the building, the prison he had just left, he turned when he reached the main road away from the city
instead of towards it: he would take his car for a run. He drove through the clenched landscape, recalling with pain the gentle drawl of the accommodating hills east and south, back in that settled land which was so far away it seemed not to exist. Here everything was tight-lipped, ungiving, good for nothing and nothing.

He was halfway to the zoo before he knew he was going there. Louise had said it was kept open all winter.

Not much of the day was left when he reached the entrance: he would be driving back in darkness. He would have to make his visit short, he did not want to be caught inside when they locked the gates. He paid the admission fee to the scarfed and muffled figure in the booth, then took his car along the empty drives, glancing out the side window at the herds of llama, of yak, the enclosure of the Siberian tiger in which only the places a tiger might hide were to be seen.

At the buffalo field he stopped the car and got out. The buffalo were feeding near the wire fence, but at his approach they lifted their heads and glared at him, then snorted and rocked away from him through the haunch-deep snowdunes.

He plodded along the fence, not caring that the wind was up and chilling him through his heavy coat, the blood retreating from his toes. Thin sinister fingers of blown snow were creeping over the road; on the way back he would have to watch for drifts. He imagined the snow rising up, sweeping down in great curves, in waves over the city, each house a tiny centre of man-made warmth, fending it off. By the grace of the power plant and the gas plant: a bomb, a catastrophe to each and the houses would close like eyes. He thought of all the people he barely knew, how they would face it, chopping up their furniture for firewood until the cold overcame. How they were already facing it, the Koreans’ fishes fluttering on the clothesline like defiant silver flags, the woman downstairs
shrilling “Whispering Hope” off-key into the blizzard, Paul in the flimsy armour of his cheap nationalism, the landlady holding aloft torchlike her bar of soap stuck with artificial flowers. Poor Louise, he saw now what she had been trying desperately to do: the point of the circle, closed and self-sufficient, was not what it included but what it shut out. His own efforts to remain human, futile work and sterile love, what happened when it was all used up, what would he be left with? Black trees on a warm orange wall; and he had painted everything white.…

Dizzy with cold, he leaned against the fence, forehead on mittened hand. He was at the wolf pen. He remembered it from his trip with Louise. They had stood there for some time waiting for the wolves to come over to them but they had kept to the far side. Three of them were near the fence now though, lying in its shelter. An old couple, a man and a woman in nearly identical grey coats, were standing near the wolves. He had not noticed them earlier, no cars had passed him, they must have walked from the parking lot. The eyes of the wolves were yellowish grey: they looked out through the bars at him, alert, neutral.

“Are they timber wolves?” Morrison said to the old woman. Opening his mouth to speak, he was filled with a sudden chill rush of air.

The woman turned to him slowly: her face was a haze of wrinkles from which her eyes stared up at him, blue, glacial.

“You from around here?” she asked.

“No,” Morrison said. Her head swung away; she continued to look through the fence at the wolves, nose to the wind, short white fur ruffled up on edge.

Morrison followed her fixed gaze: something was being told, something that had nothing to do with him, the thing you could learn only after the rest was finished with and discarded. His body was numb; he swayed. In the corner of his eye the old woman
swelled, wavered, then seemed to disappear, and the land opened before him. It swept away to the north and he thought he could see the mountains, white-covered, their crests glittering in the falling sun, then forest upon forest, after that the barren tundra and the blank solid rivers, and beyond, so far that the endless night had already descended, the frozen sea.

I
’m feeling better. For once the sky is out, there’s a breeze, I’m walking through the ellipses and arranged vistas of the park, the trees come solidly up through the earth as though they belong there, nothing wavers. I have confidence in the grass and the distant buildings, they can take care of themselves, they don’t need my attention on them to keep them together, my eyes holding them down.

The steam-covered mothers and shrill, hyperthyroid children of yesterday’s trip to the zoo are far away, the traces they have left in me are faint as grease smudges and scratchings of twigs on window panes. That was a risk I shouldn’t have taken, it would have been cleverer to have waited, but I managed it. I even made it through the Moonlight Pavilion, darkened tunnels full of screaming, the goggling rodents and shrunken foetal-headed primates deluded by the grey light into going about their lives, so publicly, behind the soundproof panels. I enjoy knowing I can do it without anyone to help.

I pass the 7-B greenhouse: it glitters, it beckons. Inside are the plants that look like stones, their fleshy lobed leaves knuckle-sized and mottled so that they blend perfectly with the pebbles. I was
pleased at first to have discovered them. I think with a kind of horror at myself of the hours I’ve spent watching them, all of us keeping quite still. Today, however, the greenhouse has no attraction: I walk on two legs, I wear clothes.

In the street outside the station I go shopping. It feels new, my legs ripple as though I’ve just gotten out of a wheelchair. I buy little brown paper parcels and stow them away inside my serviceable black bag with handles on it like a doctor’s. Bread and butter, grapes, greengages which he has probably never had before but we must all try different experiences. Before I zip the bag I rearrange the packages to safeguard the rose, encased in plastic wrap with stem swathed in wet toilet paper. Redundant. It’s a gift though and I’m proud of myself for being able, we don’t do much of that. I cut it in the garden, which isn’t mine. I admire roses but I’ve never wanted to be one, maybe that’s why I’m not worrying much about whether the stem hurts.

What part of a rose bush is the body? Last night I dreamed I had a baby which was the right size and colour. It’s a healthy sign, maybe I’ll be able to after all, the way other women are supposed to. Usually when I dream of babies they are scrawny as kittens, pale greenish and highly intelligent; they talk in polysyllables and I know they aren’t mine but are creatures from another planet sent to take over the earth, or that they are dead. Sometimes they’re covered with fur. But last night’s was pink and reassuringly illiterate; it cried. He ought to find this promising, he wants to have sons. I’ve thought about it, I’ve even gone so far as to read a couple of books on exercises and what they call natural childbirth, though having a gourd or a tomato would surely be more pleasant and useful these days than having a baby, the world has no need of my genes. That’s an excuse though.

I put the bag on my knees and keep hold
of
the handles. It’s playing house, we both know I can’t cook him anything till he gets
his stove repaired, which somehow he postpones; still it’s the first domestic thing I’ve ever done for him. He ought to approve, he’s obliged to approve, he’ll see it’s getting better. I’m feeling so good I even look at other people in the train, their faces and clothes, noticing them, wondering about their lives. See how kind I am, what a cornucopia.

The cement stairway going down to his door smells of piss and antiseptic; I hold my breath as usual. I look in through the letter flap: he isn’t up, so I let myself in with my key. His two-room flat is more untidy than last time but it’s been worse. Today the dust and litter leave my skin alone. I set my black bag on the table and go through to the bedroom.

He’s on the bed, asleep in a tangled net of blankets, on his back with his knees up. I’m always afraid to wake him: I remember the stories about men who kill in their sleep with their eyes open, thinking the woman is a burglar or an enemy soldier. You can’t be convicted for it. I touch him on the leg and stand back, ready to run, but he wakes immediately and turns his head towards me.

“Hi,” he says. “Jesus I’m hung over.”

It’s rude of him to be hung over when I’ve come all this way to see him. “I brought you a flower,” I say, determined to be calm and cheerful.

I go out to the other room and unwind the rose from its toilet paper and look for something to put it in. There’s a stack of never-used plates in his cupboard, the rest of the space is books and papers. I find a lone glass and fill it with water at the sink. Forks and knives, also unused, are rusting in the drainer. I list to myself the things he needs: a vase, more glasses, a dishtowel.

I carry the rose in to him and he sniffs at it dutifully and I set the glass beside the alarm clock on the improvised table, two chairs and a board. He would really like to go back to sleep, but he compromises by pulling me down beside him and involving me in the blankets. His
head seeks the hollow between my shoulder and collarbone and he closes his eyes.