Small Change (23 page)

This is such an old fear, the fear of being unrecognizable to yourself. And such an old desire, to make up, smooth over, have peace. I’ve said that I wrote to Lorna a year after we last saw each other. I’ve never written to Maureen and never will. Instead, I make up things that never happened, trying to
regain control over a friendship whose reins I so lamentably gave away.

Maybe this is the truth: things don’t get old and disappear, they remain in hiding and reappear. I look down at my son’s face and see the colour of old anger and messed-up love, the movement of shadows under a stupid and forgivable past; I look at myself and see Sophie; look out the window and see summer fading and winter approaching and held between the two, squeezed till red in the face, the small body of fall. I put on rouge. It’s called Rose Glaze and it must have cost Sophie a pretty penny. You apply it with a small retractable brush and it glistens slightly on your cheeks, like frost.

I can see the sort of writer I am, an emotional bag lady dragging along old friendships, old failings, old makeup and using them to keep myself warm in a shabby sort of way.

Sophie married her man of commerce dressed in an antique wedding dress, lacy and white, at a large and fancy wedding to which she invited all of her old friends, none of whom had anything in common with the new husband. Before the wedding she offered to give me all the Clinique cosmetics she no longer used, having switched to the European brand more suitable, she said with her wonderful laugh, for “mature” women. I didn’t expect her to send the stuff, and she didn’t. She was too busy with the last few years of her life. There were two miscarriages, the first caused by the medication she took for arthritis, the second
when she discovered she had cancer and needed chemotherapy.

She must have got as far as putting my name and address on the box of old makeup, then stumbled across it towards the end; and filled it with everything else.

L
ate one afternoon about ten years ago, T leaned against the door of my office and looked at me. His eyes – his whole face – looked bruised. “I have to talk to you,” he said, “somewhere private.” We went down the hall to an unlit office where he sat on the desk, a dark slender figure wearing a light blue shirt and grey pants. I stepped between his spread-out knees and kissed him.

His wife had found one of my letters. He had been packing, she had come into their bedroom with my letter in her hand, she had said: You won’t want to leave this behind.

He said to me, “I felt my heart go right out of me,” and I saw him sinking down onto the edge of the bed away from the letter hovering in the hand of his suddenly underrated wife. He told me that he had moved out anyway, he was staying with his friends Roy and Joanne, but he needed time to think; maybe he hadn’t given his wife a fair chance. Two
weeks later he went back to her. Several months after that he left her again, but not for good.

One night, out late with my friend David and walking home, I led us off course by two blocks and rang T’s bell. David didn’t try to stop me. We stood on the sidewalk at one in the morning, a street without trees in a commercial section of town, and I rang the bell again. A bus went by. There was a streetlamp just beyond the door. T had moved to this building after leaving his wife a second time.

“Did he say to wait?” David asked.

But I wasn’t listening. We went into the building, up a flight of stairs, and knocked on T’s door. He opened the door. He had on a dark brown dressing gown and stood to one side when we entered.

This time it was less obvious to me that something was wrong. We spoke for a few minutes, then I went to the bathroom. On the way down the hall I noticed that the bedroom door was closed. I turned on the bathroom light and on the back of the toilet saw a pair of earrings, gold loops, side by side.

His wife was in the bedroom. She was lying on the bed watching the line of light under the door brighten as the bathroom light went on, and fade as the door closed. She heard the toilet flush, my footsteps, our voices. She heard the apartment door shut. She lay there waiting for him to come back.

For a long time the scene with the earrings was the one I remembered most vividly. Now the one in the darkened
office comes forward in my mind: the almost Biblical darkness of a man found out by his wife.

After that the light changed. I came out of that dark office overexposed. A snapshot passed around.

Years later in New York, a friend and I went to a reading in a café downtown. The writer read a story she had written about a bush pilot whose plane crashed in a tropical forest. The pilot was not a mediocre man, she read, because he didn’t have the quality that mediocre men share: he never had a sense of dislocation.

The sentence stayed with me as did the image of the wrecked plane being turned into earrings by the Indians who found it. I didn’t understand the sentence, and after the reading I went up to the writer and asked, “What did you mean?”

“Well,” she said, “I was thinking about the ability to possess a place with one’s attention. The pilot was a man who, no matter where he was, was totally present.”

That was the way the writer talked.

I nodded, and went back to join my friend and to think about all the mediocre men I had known and about myself as mediocre. I wondered if that was how the writer wanted us to feel. She wanted us to feel that we were mediocre and she was not. I knew the writer. She was Danny’s new lover, and I had introduced them.

After the reading Danny kissed my cheek, affable and ingratiating as ever, his eyes searching the room for anyone
important. He was always on the make, that man. Maureen wasn’t there.

My friend and I ordered another cup of coffee. There was a reproduction on the wall of Picasso’s
Jacqueline aux mains croisées, 1954
. Picasso was eighty in 1954. Jacqueline was his last, most beautiful wife. In the portrait her hair is a crown of thorns, her neck is grey and pillar-like, her left eye has produced a tear.

“Maybe luck in love should be redefined,” I said to my friend. “It isn’t just a matter of who falls in love with us but who dumps us. I’ve been lucky in the men who dumped me.”

“You should write about that,” she said.

And so I am.

A few friends vied with each other to be the most upset about the breakup of T’s marriage. Isabel threw up in a public toilet. She took chicken soup to the suffering ones, and called more frequently. But most friends remained by us and fell away, intrigued but quickly bored by the sameness of his indecision and the sameness of my waiting. It was surprising that we were having an affair, but we were having the sort of affair you might expect.

One friend had known all along. T had confided in Susan who then spoke to me. She said, “Tell me a secret.” And I told her.

She advised caution. “Stay away from each other,” she said, “until you’ve sorted out your marriages.”

We followed her advice for the most part. Once the letter became public she lost interest. She cut us loose to
fend for ourselves, moved by superstition, I think, as much as boredom; she didn’t want to be contaminated by our bad luck. I understood. I also believe that stories spill from one person to the next.

A few months after the reading Danny dropped the writer. Her name was Evelyn. I had met her while taking that film course I’ve already mentioned. I knew she was in a bad way, she had called several times, so I went to see her one Saturday afternoon. Her apartment was high and quiet with an excellent view of the harbour – her parents had money, they paid the rent – but Evelyn was a mess. I stepped into her physical presence: jeans, rumpled shirt, uncombed hair, tired face, coffee-to-go; and into her amusement. She was amused at the state she was in. She alternated between amusement and panic.

“I am training myself,” she said, “just to enjoy Danny when I see him.”

A few weeks later she called me to say she had just phoned Danny to tell him she wasn’t going to phone him any more. She said, I thought you’d be glad to know this. It was late on a Sunday afternoon and already dark, I had been working when the phone rang. Evelyn talked at length about Danny and I listened. I even said his name from time to time, knowing that that was what she wanted to hear. I felt pity, curiosity, a certain horror at how familiar all this was, and then I felt resentment. Evelyn was using up my time. Ted came back from the park with the kids. Their faces were red, their hands icy. Annie leaned against me and I stroked her face. It was time for supper and she said so.

It’s hard to have patience with friends who make the same weak mistakes you’ve made. I interrupted Evelyn to say that silence sends the strongest message and that stopped her in her tracks for a moment. I remember there were days when I swore I wouldn’t call T. I would even congratulate myself for not picking up the phone, only to reach for it two minutes later. I would wait for his voice to soften when he heard who it was, and I would fill myself with the pleasure of this.

In the bathroom my eyes shifted from the earrings to the toothbrushes, the vanity bag, the pale green circle of birth control pills. The bathroom light illuminated the dark office of several months before: I realized how little he had told me and therefore how little he had told his wife. Seated on the desk, he had said, “I could have told her there were other letters. I wanted to say to her you should read the other letters …”

But he hadn’t told her.

In the living room I said to David that we had to go. T followed us down the stairs to the lobby where he sent David outside to get a cab, his tone that of a man used to giving orders. But when he turned to me his voice was small and piteous. He said, “I am the unhappiest man alive.”

I hit the wall with my hand and he jumped. I pounded it with my fist. He was thin and startled in his dressing gown, I was stupid and angry in my dress.

“I don’t know,” he kept saying when I asked him what was going on. “I don’t know what I’m going to do, my life is so complicated, I’m so unhappy.”

Then the rush of cold air. David had been quick.

That night I slept on David’s sofa and in the morning we went for a long walk. The magnolias were in bloom, we touched several large blossoms and David said, “Why is it so exciting to see white after months and months of snow?”

T left his wife and went back, left again and went back, left a third time and appeared to be going back. I think I was better, but I don’t expect anyone to agree with me.

Once I saw his wife in the street. She had a certain yeasty look that I would see again in Evelyn and Maureen – pale, left too much to her own devices, tired, nervous, over-full of dread and hope. She was wearing the earrings – same shape but much larger than wedding bands. She heard his dependence, overlooked the rest.

Oddly, or maybe not so oddly, Evelyn looked like Maureen. She was older and her skin was drier and more lined, but her colouring was the same and her features were similar. One afternoon she came for tea. She was wearing Guatemalan earrings and so was I. Mine came from a small stall in the market in Guatemala City, a glass cabinet full of old jewellery worn by women who may have died a natural death but very possibly not. Evelyn’s earrings were a gift from Danny. She stroked them with her fingertips, then rubbed her lips which had small dry indentations made by her teeth. In the late afternoon light her hands had the dusty shininess of a pair of old kid gloves. She said, “I know Danny loved me. I’m sure he still does. He took me to the country, he bought me clothes, he gave me these earrings. So what
was all that about?” Her tone was upbeat, even defiant, and the mixture of hope and hopelessness took my breath away.

How did he happen, that itinerant jeweller, to have earrings in such abundance? I wear mine while I sleep. Sometimes they snag on the pillowcase like persistent dreams.

Once I dreamt that T was coming out of a lake. He walked to shore in a swimsuit, then stretched out on the sand in some sort of mating position. That seemed to be the idea. As usual he wanted to make love and I, very attracted, said no.

We have all remarried. He and his wife, my husband and I. We all have children from these new marriages. None of us has seen each other in years, no contact. Just the odd thing I hear from Susan. I’m always reluctant to ask, afraid she’ll think my curiosity a continuing attachment when it’s only curiosity, I want to say, I’m curious about everyone I’ve met.

In one dream I saw him in the subway. He was on a lower platform, dressed in a trench coat. I went down to say hello, he turned and glanced at me, then resumed his conversation. It wasn’t that he hadn’t recognized me.

In another dream we crossed paths in an airport. I was going through a revolving door on my way to a bus, he was heading in the opposite direction. I felt my face light up. Instantly I regretted it. Again we didn’t talk.

Another time I greeted a friend on her front steps and saw T in one of the wooden lawnchairs on the deep verandah. My friend put her arm around me saying, “You know someone here.” She led me right past him to someone else. I woke up laughing.