Small Change (17 page)

Last night I watched the movie. It was late and I was just as tired as I used to be in the days when Leonard and I worked those long hours together. How much, I wonder, is everything that goes wrong a factor of fatigue? Would we feel so many doubts and humiliations if we could just get a good night’s sleep?

The movie ended at midnight. I took a sleeping pill, drank a cup of hot milk (lying back against two pillows with the hot white cup between my fingers) and went to sleep. In the morning it was raining. It had been dry for weeks and now it wasn’t any more.

I woke thinking of the applause the Crock received for being an object of pity. He stood nakedly speechless, then humbly honest in front of everyone, and received louder and more sustained applause than the cricket hero who spoke before him. These dramatists. How they set us up. Next I’ll be watching
Moulin Rouge
.

A few tears came to my eyes, for what they’re worth. Some sympathy, for what it’s worth. But in general I felt calm. Not exactly wise to Leonard, not exactly wise to myself, not exactly out of danger, but uninvolved and unalarmed.

It’s still raining. Trees are in half-leaf, tulips wide open. Reality is a wonderful thing, it seems to me. Daylight, and Leonard in the flesh. He has come out of my side and is standing, now, on his own small feet. For a moment he removes his glasses and
wipes his eyes with his fingertips. “You always had this effect on me,” he says.

Is this what soothes me? His admission that I have had an effect? Because I feel soothed.

I sit close to him, our knees almost touch, in a room where we have more in common with each other than with anyone else. But I’m not drawn in. I feel him come out of my side and almost hear the tiny pop.

Little more than a stone’s throw away, across the bridge and down a tree-lined street, he comes out onto his balcony. It has stopped raining and the air is sweet. I can’t see him, but I know he’s there. He can’t see me, but he knows I’m here. He leans against the railing and then he raises his arms. His Loneliness raises his arms and blesses all those gathered below. After being blessed, they walk away.

This is the image I have in my head. I don’t know whether it’s my wishful thinking or Leonard’s. I don’t know whether it’s cruel or kind.

A
t Christmas I watched a beautiful woman use Nivea cream and a month later I bought some for myself. Ten years earlier I watched a friend fall in love and weeks later I was falling in love with the same man. Ten years before that I watched a dark-haired woman in Paris lean towards a man while she was eating salad, the soft pouches of skin below her eyes shining with some ointment that I assumed all Parisian women used. Now, on a day in February, I see the same effect in the mirror and realize the woman must have used Vaseline. I will continue to use Vaseline because women in Paris (I believe) used it when I was a girl.

Does it all come down to gullibility? Do things move forward in a line of cause and gullible effect?

I am in Paris, fifteen years old and faced with a slab of white butter which I confuse with cheese, unable to speak French and blushing deeply before my hosts. Easter break,
daffodils in the Bois de Boulogne, wet shininess around the eyes of an elegant woman who is seated across from a man and manoeuvring enormous forkloads of salad into her mouth, a woman of middle age (I thought at the time) and of experience.

How do women get to be that way? In control and glistening with experience?

Bread torn rather than sliced, wine watered for children no matter how small, white butter like a certain skin-type: lard-like, carvable and thick.

Now here I am, years later, reconnecting through some sort of necessity with the woman in Paris. I cannot afford anything, these days, but Vaseline supplemented with Nivea. Even at $4.99 I wondered, turning the blue jar in my hands until persuaded by the memory of the beautiful woman at Christmas in whose bathroom I saw the same jar and from which I took a stealthy sample, applying it across my cheekbones and under my eyes, worrying about the telltale smell. At home, after my purchase, I am disconcerted by how heavily the cream lies on my face (like lard), until I remind myself that this was what the beautiful woman used.

Bakers use shortening on their hands. I know, having asked a young woman whose arms were dusted with flour. Crisco, she said.

That would be even cheaper, but without romance.

Perhaps my deep strain of gullibility comes from watching too many movies: from watching people fall in love on the screen and following suit in my mind. What could be safer? Then why did my friend emerge unscathed, while I continued to carry a torch for a man – X – who didn’t appeal
to me at all until I saw how much he appealed to my friend?

He has just called me. This is the first time he has called me in many years. He has called from Montreal, where he lives, to ask a favour for a friend who lives in Ottawa, where I live. His friend is dying. He’ll be dead, the doctors say, in a matter of days. I listen to X in the dining room, seated next to the small telephone table. His voice is always the same no matter how much time has gone by, his light husky voice suggests that you have never left his thoughts. This is charm. I see the harm inside charm because of my old friend X. Listen to him go. He is telling me how he and his dying friend met, how long they have known each other, how many things they used to do together. He is telling me that his friend’s wife believes their two small sons should speak at the funeral, not in person, he hastens to say, that would be too hard on them, but on tape. A family counsellor made this suggestion and so a few months ago the mother taped the boys talking about their daddy. The last time X saw her he asked what he could do and she said, Here’s something you can do, you can edit this tape. And she put it into his hands. He took the tape home only to discover that it was unusable, the boys’ voices were too far away and only the mother’s questions were understandable.

Will you go to the boys’ school? X is asking me. Will you go to their classrooms and interview them about their daddies? You’ll have to interview several of the kids so you don’t draw attention to the two boys. You’ll have to get them to talk in such a way that your voice can be removed and their comments can stand on their own.

Our Christmas tree is up in the corner of the dining room. In three days we’ll be leaving to spend Christmas in
Massachusetts. I tell him that. I tell him I’m willing to do this for him, but not until early January. No, January is too late. It has to be done now. I’m sorry, he says. I know it’s a lot to ask. I don’t know who else to turn to.

He gives me the name and address of the school, he gives me the names of the two boys, he says they are five and seven. He says again that he’s sorry, but his friend has only a few days left.

He says, “I just want to serve the family.”

I say, “You mean you want
me
to serve the family,” but my voice is tender, amused, friendly. For the first time his voice becomes stiff. He says, “Well, his wife is counting on it.”

About his voice there is always the presumption of intimacy, as though he is speaking from the next room. Hi, it’s me. A huskiness I find appealing, and a subdued liveliness. From his voice I know that he is pleased with himself for going to such lengths for the sorrowing wife. But he isn’t going to such lengths. I am.

I drive across the city the next morning, thinking less of the favour than the person asking the favour, thinking of the phrase
you know I can never refuse you anything
, which indulgent mothers say to their sons. I am a poor woman not being paid, though he offered to pay for my taxi if I took a taxi, knowing I wouldn’t. I am driving, looking for the school, keeping track of how much time all this takes, but good-humoured because, after all, I have agreed to do this and therefore I am implicated. I could have said, “This is a bizarre mistake. You would serve your friends better if you told them so.”

It is December 22nd, nine in the morning, and somewhere, I’m not sure where, although I have lived in this city for three years. There’s the hospital, I recognize that, and now I recognize nothing at all, peering past windshield wipers and through snow for the name of the street. And here it is. Inside the school I wait for the principal. I have nothing to read, which is another big mistake.

The next day my husband will say, “He wouldn’t have asked anyone he respected to do such a thing.”

The day after that I say, “What do you mean by respect?”

My husband turns to look at me, we are driving south, he shifts his eyes back to the road.

“He thinks he can ask you to do anything and you’ll do it. He thinks you’re lucky to know him.”

I stare out the window but Vermont is very grey and I close my eyes. I feel foolish and sad in the passenger seat while the kids sleep peacefully in the back seat and my husband drives and drives. He is thinking that I am never so soft with him, I never let him get away with this sort of murder. Who is this guy? And out loud he says, “Drop him.”

My feeling of foolish sadness isn’t new. I don’t even mind it that much. But it does throw a light over everything. I have been in a small skit and now I am in the audience. The lighting is jerry-rigged for a church basement and I am the only one watching. X is nowhere to be seen.

The principal was a short, sensible, imaginative woman by the name of Muriel who sized up everyone she met within seconds. She sized up the woman on the fool’s errand and let me know, kindly, that while everyone thought the children’s mother magnificent they also thought her addled. The
principal told several anecdotes about the lengths to which the mother had gone to make the daddy’s death momentous, then said: children handle death far better than adults; during circle time one child might say, “My daddy died,” and the next child will say, “And my fish died too!”

We both knew the mother’s request was a mistake. What good would it do the boys to have their taped voices played at the funeral? No good at all. This gesture was for the mother, another way to milk emotion and garner sympathy. Or, to be more fair, it was the result of bad advice and confused thinking in the face of the tragedy she felt everybody was watching, when, in fact, everyone wanted to look the other way. Or perhaps that’s exactly what she knew, and out of some instinctive aggressiveness she wouldn’t let them look away.

Years ago I watched a young mother in a schoolyard talk compulsively to everyone about her baby’s death. The baby had died only two weeks before, something accidental, I never learned what, but I watched the mother talk greedily to anyone who would listen. A young woman with a long dark ponytail and red lipstick.

The two boys came in to be interviewed one at a time, the five-year-old first. I told him that I was talking to children with special daddies, barely aware of the lie, determined not to leave empty-handed since I had come this far. We used the vice-principal’s office. The small boy sat in a big green leather chair, I sat in a chair beside him holding the microphone, its head wrapped in soft black foam, and interrupting so that he would speak in sentences. He said who he was and who his father was, what they liked to do together and what
they did at bedtime. After two minutes of this he said, “Can I go back to my room now?”

The second boy came in. He looked exactly like the first boy except that he was taller and wore a blue sweater instead of a red sweater. He also spoke into the microphone, saying who he was and who his father was. Then he said, “My daddy’s sick. He’s going to die, and I’m scared.” And then he started to cry.

The principal was waiting for me. Sensible, perceptive Muriel looked at me and offered me a sweetmeat. That was the word she used, gesturing to the boxes of Christmas cookies on the counter. I ate two sweetmeats, then I went away with the image of the short, smart, soft-faced principal in my mind.

X’s hair is grey now. When I last saw him five years ago, I teased him about it. He seemed surprised that I thought it grey but there wasn’t a trace of any other colour. I teased him even more, but he didn’t laugh. In fact I was harsh in a joking way as if to prove that he couldn’t get to me any longer. But there was disquiet beneath my jokey toughness since, even in the moment of proving, I knew I was failing to prove by virtue of having to prove.

There is an expression and I’m trying to think of it, something about better judgement. He got the better of my judgement. Is that it?

I knew it at the time. Just as I knew the mother’s request was a mistake. I was reminded of a wedding I had gone to once, the opposite side of the same coin, where the ceremony
was equally prolonged and baroque, as if there were some insecure need to prove to everyone how much in love the couple was. It simply made me suspicious of the couple, then suspicious of myself. Perhaps I had never loved anyone so deeply. Certainly I have never had to face a husband’s death.

I am always suspicious but never at the right time.

At home I phoned X and told him exactly what had happened. I told him that when the older boy began to cry I offered him a tissue and patted his shoulder, but I left the tape recorder running, and when he recovered I finished the interview. I told him the interview wasn’t very good, but there was enough there to work with. I told him that on no account were we to do this to our children. I told him that I felt like a hack.