Small Change (16 page)

Over dessert he went on about a party he had gone to the night before. He stressed what good talkers and interesting people his friends were, that he too had been pretty funny. I was too insecure and self-absorbed to understand the edge to his remarks. I felt the edge without understanding it. I felt hurt. I felt diminished in comparison, and compared deliberately, as I made conversation and he didn’t listen.

The street was almost deserted. Toronto at ten on a Tuesday night. We walked to the corner and paused.

He said, “I don’t know what I said over dinner, but something I said bothered you.”

I shook my head. “The best thing you can do for me is not to pay attention to all of my moods.”

He didn’t walk me home. That was the aberration.

At my desk, ten feet from Leonard, I keep my eyes on my work. The office is bright. Several large windows look east and provide a home for long-legged and untended plants. An
old office with old paint and old desks, a peaceful office when he isn’t here. I type on soft green carbon paper and feel myself topple behind my skin.

How empty and sad to be in a B movie, playing the sort of mild blonde who appeals to mild men. I feel myself going – about to behave badly, bang the table, sulk, tumble apart as the pins holding me together pop.

The office is in the centre of town. From time to time Leonard still asks me to have dinner with him. At the end of the meal he always says, “I tip big,” as he tips small.

This is the scene of our long, pathetic, unconsummated courtship which is variously a courtship and not a courtship in his mind, and variously a courtly friendship and a burden in mine.

“He was in love with you,” Susan told me years later. We were in a restaurant with a wagon-wheel motif eating oversized New York sandwiches, slowly.

“Maybe. Until he fell in love with someone else.”

“No, I don’t think so. I think he changed because you got married.”

The wedding took place on a lawn under a tent and towards evening it began to rain. For a while Leonard sat beside me. He seemed wistful but not unhappy. He came late and didn’t stay long.

At this stage, the summer of the wedding, I couldn’t read him any more. He was still friendly, still attentive, but not as much as before. It was hard to measure, but I measured it
somehow, sensed it. Later, when I pieced together his withdrawal, I found nothing overt, just a gradual diminution of attention, my sense of humiliation, and déjà vu.

I asked X about it. He had known Leonard longer than I had and one day I found myself talking about him. We were on Bloor Street walking towards Yonge. X was wearing sandals, summer pants, a white shirt open at the neck, and sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He always looked casually graceful to me. As usual my seriousness made him bemused and a little bored. I said, “You see, Leonard makes me feel so lonely.”

“Explain.”

At the corner of Yonge and Bloor he stopped to buy an ice cream bar from a street vendor. Only after buying it did he ask me with a look whether I wanted one. I shook my head.

“He’s such shifting ground,” I said. “His attentions are so hard to assess. Sometimes he’s more attentive than other times. I mean it’s always platonic, you know that, but his attentions fluctuate and that makes me less certain of myself and where I stand, and it makes me terribly lonely.”

“I don’t really understand that.”

“Well, I’m being so inarticulate.”

But of course my confusion was the message, and my need to be reassured that Leonard was the one who was screwed up.

“It’s embarrassing talking this way. But I might as well.”

“Of course.”

“Lately he’s drawn away from me. I think it’s because I’m getting married.”

“No. I noticed it before that.”

“Then why?”

“It could be two things, no three. I have three hypotheses,” and X smiled at me. “First, he doesn’t like you as much any more. Second, you responded too warmly and that scared him away. Or third, he exchanged his crush on you for a crush on Susan.”

The humiliation was complete.

So there was no defining moment as such. My friendship with Leonard turned over time, until finally all it was was something turning in my mind.

In the wagon-wheel restaurant Susan pushed her plate to one side, and I stared at the nearly untouched brisket, itching to eat it, but too, too what? The word timid hardly covers the territory. She fingered the collar of her shiny pink blouse, a practical successful woman whose self-sufficiency appals her friends – leaves us gasping at her feet like fish.

She said, “You don’t really care about Leonard, do you?”

I looked away, over the heads of everyone in the restaurant to the corridor filled with shoppers. The restaurant was below ground in one of those huge office buildings on Fifth Avenue. It should have been in Calgary. What were wagon wheels doing in New York? She repeated her question. “You don’t really care?” I was thinking about the half-life of old friendships, the residue. In my mind the friendship was still something, but out loud it was less than nothing.

“You have to understand that we were buddies,” I said. But maybe we were buddies only in my mind.

Then I said something else, and my voice was so hard and angry that Susan smiled.

“I hate Leonard Brooks. I hate how he treated me. I hate how I behaved. I should have had more self-respect. You did.”

“He was in love with you,” Susan repeated.

I looked at her.

“I could tell by the way he talked about you.”

I grabbed on to this. It mattered more than anything to me. Why should it matter so much?

Why should it matter? An odd sad competition, this one of who cared most and in what way. I’ve spent so long looking for an explanation that will show me in a better light and always I come to the same conclusion. I did Leonard’s bidding as a friend and I do his bidding as a non-friend. What is it about me – this is the question – that draws his sort of attention?

My words were
I hate Leonard
. And Susan smiled.

“I’ve always thought of Leonard as a victim,” she said. Which made me a victim’s victim.

I leave the window and walk down to the Rideau River. It smells old. Runners go by, their feet on soft dirt. I find a bench out of the wind and watch sparrows peck the ground until someone shoves a leaflet into my hand. I look up, the man moves on. A religious tract with a picture of Billy Graham in a pulpit. Leonard loved Billy Graham, not the message so much as the power to move a crowd. That was Leonard’s skill – manipulative innocence – playing now to an empty house. I wasn’t the only one who got tired of him.

There was the time he wanted a western sandwich on brown and wanted someone to accompany him while he got
it. He came up to me, put his arm around my shoulder and jerked me towards him. No, I said. He laid his head on my shoulder and looked up at me with dog-pleading eyes. I wanted to swat him. I said
no
and I pulled away.

He apologized later. Not in so many words. He came up to me in the afternoon and with a gentle smile talked about baseball and Bob Hope.

At a baseball game the smell of the lake blew over – between cigar smoke, peanut smell, Leonard’s breath – caught by the wind and blown into my face.

I saw him again. Again I was in the library. I was coming out of the stacks and I spotted a woman I knew waiting at the librarian’s desk. I paused to remember her name and saw Leonard standing to one side and in her company. My mouth open with the unsaid hello, I dodged behind a pillar.

Behind the pillar my thoughts took this form: You are the most cowardly shit on the face of the earth. Suppose they know you’re here? Suppose someone else knows? You are a grown woman. How can you be such a coward?

Nevertheless, I stayed behind the pillar. I even pretended to read the announcements pinned to its surface. When I had collected myself sufficiently to face them – to go out and greet them both – they were gone.

A month went by and it was June. One evening on Wellington Street a friend and I got caught in a sudden
thunderstorm: it pounded the sidewalk with such force that by the time we reached the library our pants and feet (my brown suede shoes) were black with water. In the lobby I looked up after lowering my umbrella and Leonard was five feet away: he was coming out of the cloakroom and he saw me the moment I saw him.

“Leonard.”

“Now why did I think,” said he, “that I might see you here?”

I smiled. He smiled. I kissed him on the cheek and he began to talk, a steady patter into my ear and not a word to my friend. In the auditorium I sat between them, knees spread slightly apart because so wet, shoes sopping, waiting for the author who came on stage and read, strangely enough, about Peter Rabbit’s shoes. In the story a five-year-old girl sits under a lilac bush reading
Peter Rabbit
. She looks up and sees Peter, who asks her about his lost shoes. She just happens to have them in her hand. Peter and his shoes have come off the page.

We stood in the lobby, dripping wet, and compared our shoes. “And mine are suede,” I said twice. But Leonard was too busy talking to listen. He remained talking all the way into the auditorium, up the aisle and into our seats. Talk, talk, talk into my ear so that I couldn’t even turn to my friend (though once, in mid-Leonard sentence, I touched her arm and asked stupidly, “Are you still wet?”) and so my friend was forced into silence by Leonard’s talk and my complicitous listening. Out of courtesy, I was rude.

And always the question. How do we extricate ourselves? How do we get to the gate?

I looked down at his little black shoes – a small man, how small I’d forgotten – and his pant legs wet to the knee. He claimed not to have noticed how wet he was while my friend and I couldn’t notice anything else, so wet were we. “And mine are suede,” I said.

I had never seen us so clearly. Never seen so clearly his nervous insecurity, his self-centredness, his profound rudeness. Bachelor hustle yes. Spoiled yes. But not how he took me over. Monopolized me. Staked his claim.

Not just my passivity, but his active claiming.

Am I right to think it was nervousness that kept him speaking? His running chatter about a piano, his running anecdote about a concert, his well-shaped monologue which I chose to contradict. And right to think that my contradiction was responsible for his retreat?

We were in the garden, our feet soaking wet from the rain, hiding in flower pots and trying to escape. After the reading we moved out into the aisle. I moved ahead with my friend, Leonard fell back. I took care not to notice where he went and he vanished without a trace.

Never without a trace. Several more months went by and I attended a party for a friend who was moving away. I entered the living room and Leonard was standing there in his grey-green suit. He said, “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” in a tentative-meaningful way that made me smile.

There he was, affectionate, intrusive, unsettling: the qualities that marked our friendship virtually from the beginning, and from which I withdrew over time and courteously, then over more time and less courteously, so that in the end it seemed to me that he was the one who withdrew and I was left to feel pained by the very outcome I had worked to create.

We sat side by side on the off-white sofa in the off-white living room with the fireplace blazing and various glass tables sending off reflections. A prosperous and successful setting for two people who always think of themselves as poor. It was easy to fall into the old shoe of each other’s company. I asked him what movies he had been watching, then began to tell him about seeing
A Country Girl
when I was five, but he stopped me. “I remember you speaking about that,” he said. “Clifford Odets, 1954.”

“Ah yes. I was thinking Terence Rattigan.”

“No. Terence Rattigan wrote
Separate Tables
and,” he added with a heavy sigh,
“The Browning Version.”

I did what was expected of me.
“The Browning Version?”
I asked, my voice soft, interested, receptive. I coiled into his ear and for the next half hour he retold the story of Crocker-Harris, the failed schoolmaster about to retire early because of heart trouble. The joke among the students is that the Crock, who has no heart, has heart trouble. Only one student, Taplow, shows any compassion. On the last day of school Taplow brings him a gift, Browning’s version of the
Agamemnon
. The Crock – who has learned only minutes before that the school has refused him a pension, and has known all along that his
wife Millie is having an affair with Frank the science teacher – is so moved by the gift that he breaks down. He cries.

Until this moment Leonard has been telling the story in summary. He is seated in the corner of the sofa, his hands folded on his crossed knees, his small head slumped into his small shoulders, lost in the recollection of a movie and not unaware that he has the perfect audience in this not-so-young woman who has let him down. “You always had this effect on me,” he will say later after retelling the story has reduced him to tears. “You always had this effect on me,” in a tone of nostalgic reproach.

He catches his breath, stops speaking, then picks up again, this time with Millie’s words when she learns that the gift is from Taplow.

“Let me see,” she says. Then: “The artful little beast!”

“Why
artful
, Millie?”

Leonard gives the words Michael Redgrave’s intonation. Redgrave is a good actor and Leonard is a good storyteller.

“Because, my dear, I came in this morning to find Taplow giving an imitation of you to Frank here. I don’t blame him for trying a few shillings’ worth of appeasement.”

Leonard takes her speech very slowly for emphasis, and is undone. I watch him, but he doesn’t look at me. He stares ahead, eyes blinking, mouth working a little, fingers laced together across his knee. I watch from my vantage point on his right, perched slightly forward on the sofa and turned towards him.

He recovers and continues, step by step through the movie, to the climax where the Crock gives a farewell speech in front of the school. He has prepared a speech but once on
stage he loses its thread. Faced by a sea of students and teachers who despise him for being a failure, he finally says, “I am sorry for letting you down.”