Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (17 page)

We lived then in a community called The Huts, on the edge of the campus. They were in fact old army huts, used as married students' quarters. I was reading
The Magic Mountain
, all one winter, I would fall asleep with it across
my stomach. Sometimes I would read aloud to Douglas, when he was too tired to work any more. When I finished
The Magic Mountain
I meant to get us through
Remembrance of Things Past
. We stumbled to bed with our arms around each other, united in our longing for sleep. But occasionally I would have to get out of bed, later, and go into the bathroom to put in my diaphragm. If I looked out the top half of the bathroom window, through the gap in the plastic curtains, I could see lights on in some of the other bathroom windows in the colony, and I would imagine other wives risen in the night on a similar errand. Creatures of daily use, inseparable from infants, stoves, and tubs, turned now to our nightly use, with its connotations—rapidly fading—of sin and splendor. I remembered from far back—from four or five years back, actually, that seemed a long time to me—how sex had seemed apocalyptic (we read Lawrence, many of us were virgins at twenty). Now it had shrunk to this brisk, unvarying, satisfactory, localized exchange, contained appropriately enough in these domestic quarters. I felt nothing so definite as dissatisfaction. I simply registered the change, as I would still register the diminished glamour of Christmas. I believed such changes had taken place because I had grown up and become at home in the world. I was young enough to think that, we all were. A word we often used was “mature.” We would meet somebody we had known a few years ago and we would report that this person had greatly matured. You know, everybody knows, the catalogue of delusions we subscribed to in the fifties; it is too easy to mock them, to announce that maturity was indicated by possession of automatic washers and a muting of political discontent, by addiction to childbearing and station wagons. Too easy and not the whole truth, because it leaves out something that was appealing, I think, in our heaviness and docility, our love of limits.

There was no infidelity in The Huts, or none that I knew of. We lived so close together, we were poor and too
busy. Few flashes of lust at parties; perhaps we could not afford to drink enough. You say you were in love with me and I reply that I was in love with you, but the truth was surely different. More likely we got a glimpse of something, through each other, that we had not been thinking about—had put aside, in your case, or not yet discovered, in mine.

I remembered the same day you remembered, when we met two years ago totally unexpectedly in a city where neither of us lived. We spoke of it after we had drunk a lot of wine at our spur-of-the-moment lunch.

“One day we went for a walk. I had to lift that thing—”

“Stroller. I had Jocelyn in it then.”

“Over rocks and mud. I remember.”

A sunny day, beautiful hot day, in spring, April or maybe even March. I had gone to the drugstore in the campus shopping center wearing my winter car coat, because I did not believe it could really be as warm a day as it looked. As soon as I saw you I wished I could go home and start over again, comb my hair more carefully and put on a brushed-wool, dark gray sweater I had. I could not take off my coat because I was wearing the T-shirt Jocelyn had spilled orange juice on.

I did not know you well, you lived at the other end of The Huts. You were older than most of us, you had come back to university as a graduate student, from the real world of work and war (a mistake, you didn't stay, you left and got a job with a magazine soon after that day we took the walk). Your wife drove off every morning to teach at a dancing school. She was little, dark, gypsyish, emphatically confident, in comparison to the blurred and sleepy, stay-at-home wives.

We talked in front of the drugstore and you said it was too nice a day to go on working, we ought to go for a walk. We did not head for the campus, with its wide easy paths, but for that wild, partly wooded patch of land above the river, where students—the unmarried ones, of course—went to make halfway love in the daytime, all-the-way love
at night. Nobody was there that day. It was too early in the year, the munificence of the weather had taken everybody by surprise. It was an awkward place to walk with the stroller. As you said, you had to lift it over rocks and muddy stretches of the path. Our conversation had to be hauled over similar difficulties. We said nothing of importance. We never touched each other. We became more and more uncomfortable as it became apparent that our walk was not going to accomplish what we pretended we wanted it to do—give us an hour's easy company in the pleasure of the day—or what we really wanted it to do. This kind of tension was new to me then. I could not gauge and manipulate, as later with other men. I could not even be sure it extended beyond myself. I said good-bye to you feeling as if I had behaved awkwardly, uninterestingly, on a date. Next day, or the day after, when I was reading as usual on the couch, I felt myself drop a lovely distance, thinking of you, and that was the beginning, I suppose, the realization of what more there could still be. So I said to you, “I was in love.”

Would you like to know how I am informed of your death? I go into the faculty kitchen, to make myself a cup of coffee before my ten o'clock class. Dodie Charles who is always baking something has brought a cherry pound cake. (The thing we old pros know about, in these fantasies, is the importance of detail, solidity; yes, a cherry pound cake.) It is wrapped in waxed paper and then in a newspaper.
The Globe and Mail
, not the local paper, that I would have seen. Looking idly at this week-old paper as I wait for my water to boil I see the small item, the modest headline
VETERAN JOURNALIST DIES
. I think about the word
veteran
, does it mean a veteran, someone who fought in the war, or is it a simple adjective, though in this case, I think, it could be either, since it says the man was a war correspondent—Only then do I realize. Your name. The city where you lived and died. A heart attack, that will do.

I am in the habit of carrying around your last letter
in my purse. When the next letter comes, I replace it, I put it with all the earlier letters in a box in my closet. While it is fresh in my purse I like to take the letter out and read it at odd moments, for instance if I am sitting having coffee in some little café, or waiting at the dentist's. Later on I never take the letter out at all, I grow to dislike the sight of of it, folded and dog-eared, reminding me what weeks, what months, I have been waiting for the new letter. But I leave it there, I don't put it in the box, I don't dare.

Now, however, after I have taught my class, lunched with my colleagues, met my students, done whatever else is required of me, I go home and remove this letter, this last letter, from my purse, put it with the others and shove the box out of sight. Deliberately, almost painlessly I do this, having thought the act out beforehand. I make myself a drink. I continue with my life.

Every day when I come back from teaching I see the mailbox and to tell the truth I experience something pleasant, a lack of expectation. For two years that tin box has been the central object in my life, and now to see it go neutral again, to see it promise and withhold nothing very much, that is like feeling a pain gone. Nobody knows I have lost anything, nobody knew that part of my life, except in a general, rumored way; when you came here we did not see people. So I am able to continue, as if it never happened, you never happened. But after a while I do tell somebody, a man I work with, Gus Marks. He has recently separated from his wife. He takes me out to dinner and we drink and tell each other our stories, then mostly on my initiative go to bed. He is hairy and sad, I am frenzied. I surprise myself. A few days later he asks me for coffee and says, “I've been worried about you, I've been wondering if maybe you should—see somebody.”

“A psychiatrist, you mean?”

“Well. To talk.”

“I'll consider it.”

But I laugh at him to myself, for I am absorbed by
another plan. As soon as the term ends, in late April, I mean to go to visit you, to visit the city where you have died. I have never been there. It was never suggested. Looking forward to this trip, I become remarkably cheerful. I buy some fashionable sunglasses, some new, light clothes.

Love is not in the least unavoidable, there is a choice made. It is just that it is hard to know when the choice was made, or when, in spite of seeming frivolous, it became irreversible. There is no clear warning about that. I remember sitting at lunch with you, and when you said, “I loved you. I love you now,” I looked past you at myself in the restaurant mirror, and I felt embarrassed for you. I thought, God knows why, that you were being gallant; I did not take the words seriously, and I thought that in a moment you would look at me and see that you had said this to the wrong person, to a woman who had abandoned the whole posture, the vocabulary, for dealing with such tributes. I had some time before this given up on intrigues, on anxious subplots. I had stopped using a dark rinse on my hair and I no longer put white of egg, or oatmeal-and-honey, or hormone creams, or blush stick, or anything much at all, on my face.

Then I understood that you meant what you said and it seemed to me more than ever that you must be mistaken.

“You're sure you're not remembering somebody else?”

“My mind has not deteriorated so much as that.”

Before this we had talked easily. I asked about your wife.

“She doesn't dance any more. She had an operation on her knee.”

“It must be hard on her not to be active.”

“She's busy. She has a store. A bookstore.”

You asked about Douglas and I told you that we were divorced. I told you the children were away, both away this year for the first time. You told me you had not had any children. I was a little drunk and I even told you how in the last couple of years Douglas talked all the time to himself. I would hide behind the curtains and watch him talking
to himself, and chuckling, making faces of recognition or distaste, while he cut the grass. And what a furiously interested private flow of conversation he would keep up while he was shaving, supposing his voice to be masked by the sound of the electric razor. I told you that I realized, finally, that I did not want to find out what he was saying.

My plane left at four-thirty. You drove me out of town towards the airport. I was not unhappy at the thought of leaving you and never seeing you again, though I was very happy to be with you in the car. It was November, the day was dark soon after three o'clock, car lights were on.

“You could take a later plane, you know.”

“I don't know.”

“You could come to a hotel with me and phone up and cancel, and get yourself booked onto a later flight.”

“I don't know. No, I don't think I can. I'm too tired.”

“I am not so strenuous.”

“No.” We were holding hands all the way, in the car. I freed my hand and made a gesture meaning I was tired of something else—experience?—and easily put it back. I was not sure what I meant myself but expected, rightly, that you would understand.

We made a turn on to a freeway north of the city. As we came off the access road we faced west. The streaks of sky between the clouds were a fiery pink. The lights of the cars seemed to stream together, mile after mile. It was all like the kind of vision of the world—a fluid, peaceful vision, utterly reassuring—that I used to get when I was drunk. It said to me, why not? It urged me to have faith, to float upon the present, which might stretch out forever. And I was not drunk. I had been drunk at lunch but I was not any more.

“Why not?”

“Why not what?”

“Why not go to a hotel and phone up and get a later flight?”

“I hoped it might be that,” you said.

Was that when the choice was made, do you think, when I saw the sky and the car lights? It seemed light-hearted, nothing much. The hotel/motel was built of white blocks. The walls were the same on the inside as the outside, so that the rich-looking curtains and carpets, the heavy imitation-Spanish furniture, seemed to have been set up incongruously, in some temporary, barren sort of shelter. The picture we could see from the bed was of orange boats, dark and orange buildings, reflected in blue-black water. You told me a story of a man you knew who painted exclusively for motels. He painted boats, flamingoes, and brown nudes, nothing else; you said he made a lot of money at it.

Planes screamed overhead. Sometimes I could not hear what you said, with your face pressed against me. I could not ask you to repeat, I would have felt ridiculous, and anyway such things are usually not repeatable. But what if you asked me a question, and hearing no answer were unable to ask it again? This possibility tormented me at a later time, when I wanted to give you every hoped-for answer.

We both trembled. We barely managed it, being overcome—both of us, both of us—with gratitude, and amazement. The flood of luck, of happiness undeserved, unqualified, nearly unbelieved-in. Tears stood in our eyes. Undeniably. Yes.

If you had been a man I had met that day, or at that time in my life, could I have loved you? Not so much. I don't think so. Not so much. I loved you for linking me with my past, with my young self pushing the stroller along the campus paths, innocent through no fault of my own. If I could kindle love then and take it now there was less waste than I had thought. Much less than I had thought. My life did not altogether fall away in separate pieces, lost.