Small Change (24 page)

In each of these dreams I walked to meet him with noticeable eagerness.

For a while the dreams, so much more forgiving than I am, interested me more than anything else. He always appeared in an attractive light, his wife never appeared at all. The dreams seemed to be saying that what happened didn’t really matter, not the way I thought. Something had happened and the memory lived on at night, but there was a fluidity to it, a looseness, that suggested many other things might have also happened and might be understood in as many ways. The dreams turned all of these old wounds into a mild form of entertainment, and they continued for quite a while.

I
dream about Cary Grant. We share a table in a restaurant and discuss where we’ll next travel together. While we talk I write a letter in my head to Jill. A waitress walks past saying to another waitress, “Have you seen the bathroom?” I’m not sure whether she hasn’t noticed him, or is so used to his presence that it doesn’t interfere with her work. He is the Cary Grant of
Charade
, disconcertingly old and carefully lit. I never do see him all that well.

I wake with the happy, fulfilled feeling that I am entertaining him by being with him, and entertaining Jill by writing to her.

We used to watch his movies together. She would come in from Long Island for treatments at Columbia Presbyterian, then come to us for a few hours before going home. I set up pillows on the sofa and she lay back, weak and grateful. At
the end of
North by Northwest
she sighed, “Too bad he was bi,” and Maureen and Danny floated through the room.

Jill said she always knew which actors were gay. I said, “You
always
know?”

“Well,” she said, “Laurence Olivier was a surprise.”

“And Danny? Did you always know he was gay?”

“No. Just that something was wrong.”

January, and snow falls like the flecks of light once popular in women’s glasses. The sun is out, the street is wet. I walk downtown past the used bookseller’s on Hawthorne and catch a glimpse of him in the window.
An Evening with Cary Grant
. I watched him again last night. The scene in the nightclub with Audrey and the oranges, when his look hooks into hers and they stop still. His face (the extra flesh, the widened softened features of age) comes into focus and the younger man – the young Cary – is suddenly visible. Desire brings his face into focus. Desire, interest in another, concentrates the mind. Audrey was wearing black, and Cary dark grey.

“Here you are,” he said, opening the old-fashioned elevator door.

“Where?” asked Audrey.

“On the street where you live.”

This question of where. I came home after being away for eight years and thought, I don’t want to be anywhere but here, in this city where tall women go barefoot and strange children come knocking on the door to play, in this house with its cool evenings and long Martinis, long evenings and more Martinis,
where people introduce themselves and bid you welcome. I walked from room to room, upstairs and downstairs, out through the back door and in through the front. I found my son on the verandah at seven in the morning with a bowl of Cheerios in his lap, staring out at the trees.

After dark I sat on the verandah and watched the moon rise and reminded myself to clip from the paper the times of its rising and setting. I went over phone calls in my mind. X’s inflection barely changed when I identified myself, he could have been talking to anyone. Susan said it was hard to believe but she wouldn’t have time to see me for a month. “However,” she said, “I’m sure we’ll get a chance to know each other.” We had known each other for twelve years.

That’s all right, I said to myself. It’s not a crime not to be in demand. Don’t let them know how you feel, don’t be a burden and don’t expect much. But I felt myself go small under the moon, and pained.

Isabel was tense, preoccupied, almost startled. “We can talk for two minutes,” she said. “Where are you?”

And I told her.

The delicate and not so delicate fences went up, the veils of polite discourse designed to keep you at bay. But I had expected this. The return, the absence and the return, were significant to me but not to others; their lives had continued without me, while my life had stayed tied to theirs. I stopped making phone calls and wrote letters instead.

Outside the gladioli were dying. Inside the dahlias were sturdy in a vase. The house was perfect for keeping flowers – with each floor the temperature dropped five degrees and there were three floors; going downstairs was like approaching
a cool riverbank. In this soft Canadian neighbourhood people stopped and spoke to us, but not for long. They came in for a beer but didn’t overstay. They were civil and friendly. But there is always the hunger for more.

In November, I finally saw Susan. We had dinner together and I asked about old extinguished friends. I said, “You’ll have to tell me the gossip about T and about Leonard.”

“Not much gossip,” she said. “T and Veronica are very happy. Leonard is Leonard.”

I suppose the humiliation came from letting current friends see the failure of old friendships. There was humiliation, and a sense of failure, and an absence of pride, and it had to do with Susan’s quick dismissal of my question and her way of not looking at me.

By December I was drinking Martinis straight from the freezer and thinking about the dilemma of being somewhere which turns into nowhere, and someone who turns into someone else. I met my name-alike just before Christmas. The other Beth – the new and younger Beth – was sitting on the floor of my old office at the
CBC
. Her hair was the same colour as mine, her face was not dissimilar. She was wearing the very sweater I had had on my back for three weeks. That night I shoved the sweater into the back of the closet. I told friends that I was changing my name to Ingrid Bergman. I began to watch Cary Grant movies repeatedly.

What do I find irresistible? The way he walks across a room, his size and stride, his face. The sense he conveys that he knows more than he says. The humour, the careful
(couched) desire, and the impression he gives that his distance, this delicately balanced distance, will turn to love.

Pure affection can’t begin to hold our interest the way ambivalence can. Ambivalence, ambiguity, so that we back away even as we approach. The gap between what we want to feel and the real feelings that lag behind – this doubt – is what he was so good at.

On the night of the eclipse I was doing the dishes, I was reading to my children, I was helping them into their pyjamas and brushing their teeth, I was tucking them in, and I was thinking: Susan never calls; she doesn’t call, she never calls, she never will call. I was thinking that I had turned into Maureen.

My children’s playmates had gone home and that was a relief. I had bundled them up and taken them outside to see the eclipse and to end their quarrel. They disappeared into the schoolyard and climbed the play structure (by day red, yellow and blue, but now black) and Ted came down the street.

I said to him, “I don’t understand how we can be in the moon’s way if we are seeing it.”

The moon was high in the clear dark sky and we were on the sidewalk, side by side, looking up.

“How can it be us throwing our shadow on the moon if we can still see it?”

We watched for a long time. When we went inside Ted took a grapefruit, an orange and a lemon and explained that the grapefruit was the sun, the orange the earth, and the lemon the moon. “The earth goes around the sun,” he demonstrated with the orange and the grapefruit. “The moon goes
around the earth, and when they’re lined up like this,” he said, “like this,” adjusting the fruit, “the earth is in the way of the sun’s light shining on the moon.”

But somehow the visual logic escaped me. I couldn’t picture the earth blocking the moon. And then for a moment I did. I felt the sun on my back, mistaken sun and a raw memory from childhood. I was sitting halfway down the front steps, thinking how wonderfully hot the sun was, until I realized Dougie Lumley was peeing on my back. He was laughing his head off and shooting down arrows of pee. My mother was in the garden and didn’t see.

I was the earth blocking the sun from my mother’s view. I was the pissed and pissed-on earth.

The sun has become a large basket, the earth remains the orange, “but over here,” Ted says, putting it far away from the basket, and the moon – he searches in the cupboard and removes one bean from a jar of black beans – “This is the moon. The moon is to the earth as the earth is to the sun.”

I watch the black bean circle the orange and my thoughts spin endlessly around various friends, and it occurs to me that this is what I do all the time. The shadow I throw blocks my view of everyone I see.

Now I wait for three people to call – a friend, an acquaintance, and a woman I would rather not see again – convinced that the woman will call, the acquaintance will call, but the friend will not.

Is it the weather? The middle of January, the continuing rain, the lack of any true season. A need to befriend and be
befriended, so that I call someone I vowed not to call, afflicted with a surge of forgiveness that makes weeks of resentment fall away. Is it a trick of the Martini to alter the landscape so slightly and yet so completely? To make me buckle under the need for love and not mind buckling? I sit in the canvas chair beside the phone and call Isabel but she isn’t home. I call X and he is home but not especially welcoming. And so I have to waltz. I waltz over his mild surprise and indifference, and over my own disappointment, trying to appear entertaining and engaging and diverting and okay. I could say I called because I’m lonely and a little drunk. But I’m sure he doesn’t want to know, or knows and chooses not to let on.

And so I shouldn’t drink and I shouldn’t call. People are busy (he was washing the dishes and didn’t stop) and no more interested in me than I usually am in them.

How has it come to this? That on a Sunday night, while Ted bathes the kids, I sit downstairs and make phone calls to people I’ve written off?

And now it’s Monday morning and I’m afraid that no amount of reassurance will ever be enough. I woke in the middle of the night convinced that my daughter had stopped growing.

Outside rain turns snow into a milky-blue platter holding the rain.

My kids are loyal to New York. They listen to
West Side Story
morning, noon and night.

“Tony fighted with the gang,” says Mike.

“No,” says Annie, “he never fighted.”

“Just in the rumble?”

“Yeah. To help out his team.”

Mike says, “Bernardo killed Riff, and Tony killed Bernardo, and Chino killed Tony.” His eyes wide.

During the music he asks Annie, “Is this the rumble? Is it the rumble now? Is this before the rumble? Annie! Is this before the rumble?”

And during the rumble Annie will say, “Who’s dead now? Who’s dead?” And she will start to cry when we can’t tell her. We don’t know at what moment Bernardo is killed, and at what moment Riff. She cries with angry frustration that we can’t give her the answer she wants, stirred up beyond all measuring by the music and the story, and sourly peevish at any snags in the flow of emotion.

The gunshot echoes through the house repeatedly (Annie covers her ears), the music forming a chaotic romantic punchy backdrop against which they play, eat, and fight so that the gunshot gets muffled and Tony dies and Maria tries to sing against the shouts of playmates who have come to visit.

Annie says, “Tony’s already killed ’cause I heard the bullet.”

Mike says, “Yeah, and the bullet went right in.”

Annie says, “I like the beginning, the snapping, and ‘New York,’ and Officer Krupke.’”

“Officer Krupke is the cop.”

“Yeah.”

Mike says, “I like when Tony’s killed, and the rumble.”

“Why?”

“’Cause I like the bullet noise.”

“But do you like what Chino did?”

“No. I just like the noise the gun made. Three people get killed in
West Side Story
. It’s Tony, Bernardo, and Riff. Right? No one else got killed.”

“I like ‘Oh So Pretty.’”

“How about ‘America’?”

“I do like ‘America.’”

“Do the Jets and the Sharks have mothers and fathers?”

“Yes.”

“Then they have to teach them not to do those things.”

“Mike, let me tell you something. Riff has to live with Tony’s mom because his mom doesn’t want to have him. That’s how bad she is.”

Sometimes I think that if I could only smell the out-of-doors I would know where I am. If I could only pick up a whiff. And then, when it gets really cold, I do. On the very cold nights when the air crunches like the first apples of the season and things creak and squeal and are very still, then I smell the air. I smell it in the street and on anyone who comes inside, an almost sweet smell of frozen wool and fur and skin.

On such a night my little boy decides to go out and find the planets. Saturn, Neptune, Mercury, Mars. On the coldest night of the year, while I run a bath for him and his sister, he takes the celestial map he got at nursery school, puts on his boots and goes outside. I fill the bath and call them. Annie comes but not Mike. I go downstairs and search the rooms. A