Storm Glass (5 page)

L
ater that evening he took off his shoes. He tossed them casually under the grand piano and began dancing. Although he began dancing, he did not stop drinking. He was capable of balancing a full glass of wine on his forehead. He did that now; balancing and drinking, balancing and drinking. The removal of the shoes helped him with the balancing. It also helped him with the dancing. He didn’t need any help with the drinking.

The carpet was a soft grey colour and was made of pure wool. Wine from unbalanced glasses had formed permanent purple stains on its surface. But they were mementoes of another time, before he had become polished, practised, professional; before he had learned all there was to know about balance and before he had learned the little that he knew about dancing. He hadn’t spilled a drop for months now, except into his open mouth. What was more, he had become able, by a simple bending of the knees, to refill his glass without removing it from his forehead. A master indeed!

She watched him, with some embarrassment, from her wheelchair in the corner. She thought he looked ridiculous, then she thought he looked charming, then she thought he looked ridiculous again. She wondered if balancing acts like this were part of the awesome responsibility one assumed when one was able to move about of one’s own accord; that is to say, without the chair. She thought of balancing her teacup on her own forehead but realized that dancing was a necessary, and for her impossible, part of the routine.

Ah, but he was charming dancing there in her living room, moving precariously from step to step like a Niagara daredevil. But oh, there was such tension when he lurched forward or backward in order to prevent a tumble or spill. After a full evening of it she would be exhausted for days; lacking the strength to play show tunes on her piano, lacking the strength to whistle. In fact, she dreaded these performances, which caused her emotions to swing wildly from pleasure to tension and back again. And yet she was somehow addicted and, perhaps because she felt inwardly that no home should be without one, he danced for her often. And balanced too.

Although his neck was beginning to ache, he moved cautiously across the room to the shelf where the records were kept. The third album on the left towards the bottom was the original cast recording of
Annie Get Your Gun
. He admitted the music was dated and silly but he liked it none the less. There was, after all, no business like show business. He was living proof of that. He executed an awkward pirouette, took a healthy swallow of wine, and felt for the record like a blind man reading Braille. He fumbled with the cover and then with the machine. A few minutes later he was moving his arms in time to the tune as if
to imitate enthusiastic singing. He did not remove the glass from his forehead.

She was beginning to find the sight of his Adam’s apple a bit disconcerting, but positioned as she was, in a room with staircases at every possible exit, she was unable to remove herself from the somewhat uncomfortable scene. She wondered if turning her wheelchair to face the wall would be interpreted as a violent gesture. She decided that, at the very least, it would appear discourteous. She began instead to sing halfheartedly along with the song. “Your favourite uncle died at dawn,” she sang quietly. “Top of that your Ma and Pa have parted / you’re broken-hearted / but you go on,” she continued. And as she continued his acrobatics seemed charming again, even the lurches. Such is the mysterious power of even the mildest form of participation.

He thought about the ceiling. When he was balancing it filled the entire sphere of his peripheral vision. The ceiling, he decided, was to him now what the floor had been at dancing school; the floor where he had watched his shoes collide with the patent leather attached to the feet of the girls in the class. They who were so much more graceful than he, they who were so much taller. From then on he attributed most of his problems with women to an inability to keep his feet in places where patent leather wasn’t. It had soured every relationship and chipped away at his confidence until he had avoided dancing girls altogether. And then one day he had discovered the lady in the wheelchair, and slowly he had begun to dance again, and not only to dance but to balance.

She thought about the hospital and how there was no music there; just the public address system constantly uttering the monotonous names of doctors. There weren’t any balancers
either. Not unless you took into consideration those few unsteady individuals who had recently been released from crutches. They had practised a kind of delicate, fumbling dance, as if their very bodies were as fragile as the glass this man carried on his forehead. They should have had some music, she concluded in retrospect, while listening to the tune of her own vocal cords increase in volume.

He began to hear her song above the strings and trumpets of the recording. It sounded small and feeble, but it was there none the less. My goodness, she knows the words, he thought as he performed another lurching pirouette. He bent his knees beside the table, refilled his glass, quickly drank the contents, and filled it again. “There’s no people like show people,” he heard her warble in a voice that seemed to be getting stronger and then, “they smile when they are low.” He cracked his knuckles once or twice to show her that balancing wasn’t the only thing that he did well.

By now there was no doubt in her mind that she liked the song. There was also no doubt in her mind that she liked singing the song. Even his Adam’s apple was no longer an unpleasant sight when she was singing. In fact, it began to resemble the cheerful bouncing ball of a sing-along film. “Even with a turkey that you know will fold, you might be stranded out in the cold,” she sang with great vitality. As her mind discovered rhythm her hands beat time on the leather armrests of her wheelchair. She moved everything she could; her mouth, her forehead, her shoulders, her eyebrows, her arms, her stomach. She thought it was a shame that she couldn’t tap her patent leather shoes. Just after she had shouted “next day on your
dressing room they’ve hung a star” and was about to bellow “let’s go on with the show,” his glass fell to the floor.

The next morning he was gone. This was no surprise to her. He was always gone the next morning. Gone, gone, gone. She counted the stains on her one-hundred-percent-wool rug … ten … no, eleven now. The most recent pool was a deeper, richer crimson than the rest, not having had the benefit of time to soften it. She was unable to understand why he had wept when his glass tumbled to the floor the previous evening. Surely not out of consideration for the carpet. Compositionally, in fact, this particular spill was rather well placed and enhanced the general scheme. He’ll get over it, she decided. He always did, and as far as she could gather, he always would.

Then she noticed the shoes. He was gone but his shoes were not. They lay, under the piano, where he had so casually tossed them just before he started balancing. You could tell that they had been abandoned. The laces looked tangled, confused, miserable. The tongues lolled obscenely like those of hanged men. One shoe lay on its side and looked as injured and pathetic as an animal that has recently been struck by a car. The other sat bolt upright as if listening for its master’s voice. How on earth, she wondered, did he ever get home?

Beyond her window lay a fresh, consistent inch of snow. It must have fallen while she was sleeping. It covered the lawns and the sidewalks. It covered the roofs and the roads. Although it was a cloudy day, reflected white light created the illusion of sunshine and brightened the interior of her home. It added a cheerful overtone to the spectacle of the deserted shoes.

His car had made tracks in the snow. The tracks moved out of the driveway, arced briefly, and advanced toward the end of the street. The long scars they made on the white surface of the road allowed bits of the asphalt to show through—indicating that this was not a cold, definite snow, but one that was likely to disappear by mid-afternoon. She thought that, perhaps, its only function was to remind her of the season and to illustrate the fact of the man’s departure: the empirical proof of something she had learned long ago through experience. A kind of resignation settled over her spirit.

Then, as she was about to turn from the window to begin her day, something familiar caught her eye. Pressed into the snow, which lay on the pathway leading from her door to her driveway, were two, long, continuous lines. They might have been made by two children riding bicycles side by side in the snow. They might have been made by a sled. They might even have been made by a baby carriage. But she knew, as surely as she had walked across the room to the window, that they had been made, early that morning, by a departing wheelchair.

She pirouetted once on her patent leather shoes. Then she danced joyfully into the kitchen to make her breakfast. Later that day she would skip to the supermarket to buy a spray can filled with rug shampoo. But not until she’d taken his shoes to the Salvation Army.

A
s
might be expected, her wedding-night dreams were both weird and eventful, taking her in and out of countries that she didn’t even know existed. She would later attribute these flights of fancy to the after-effects of the food served at the reception. But that night the dreams gave her no time to ponder the reasons for their arrival. They just kept happening, one after another, until the one about the wheelchairs woke her up, shouting.

But not in fear, or at least not from any worry about her safety. She had felt, in fact, during the course of the dream, remarkably detached, as if she had been watching a play in which she had only one line; a line that was spoken from the wings. But when it came time for her to speak that line she was aware, even in the dream, that it came from some other, surer part of her brain, from those same heretofore-unrecognized countries.

“Don’t forget your seatbelts! Don’t forget your seatbelts!” she cried, waking both John and herself.

“Seatbelts!” he said. “What seatbelts?”

She confessed her dream. All the men she had known in her relatively short life had been presented to her in series, like credits at the end of a film. They were all in wheelchairs, but such wheelchairs! Suspended on thin strong ropes they gave their occupants the opportunity to swing back and forth against a clear blue sky. The men involved had looked to her like strange trapeze artists or happy preschool children on playground swings. They were having, it appeared, a wonderful time. Then for reasons unknown even to herself, the cautionary business of the seatbelts had grabbed her vocal cords.

Having no personal use for interpretation of any kind John pronounced the dream absurd and therefore boring. She agreed; they laughed and fell easily back to sleep.

The next morning they jogged two miles along the beach. She was always surprised by the response that the sight of a naked pair of male legs awoke in her. It was honest visual pleasure combined with admiration for a supple functioning form bereft of excess. Male excess was distributed elsewhere, in the face, around the middle, but rarely in the legs. They were holy territory, uninhabited by fat cells. They were perfectly fabricated systems designed, perhaps, to carry primitive hunters quietly and swiftly through some complicated forest. Now they carried John across the sand, through the wind, and along the frothy edges of the sea. Later, in the city, they would carry him through the labyrinth of street and subway to an office every weekday for the rest of his life. She watched the large muscle at the back of his thigh flex and relax with the rhythm of running.

Over lunch, which was served on the terrace of the hotel, they discussed the gifts they had received and divided them into
three categories: lovely, passable, and impossible. Yellow was her favourite colour, so all of the yellow paraphernalia slipped easily into the “lovely” category. The steadily increasing profusion of yellow objects had been, in fact, a great comfort to her in the week or so preceding the wedding. She imagined the one-bedroom apartment they had chosen filling up with radiant sunlight like the gold-leaf backgrounds she had seen in old paintings. She pictured herself bent over a sewing machine stitching yellow gingham curtains while stew bubbled in the yellow enamel pot on the stove. There was also in this picture an image of John, threading his way through the subway system, coming home, on his long lithe legs, to her. At night, she imagined, they would rub themselves all over with the gift of giant yellow bath towels, just before they slipped between the gift of flowered yellow stay-press sheets.

She thought of John’s legs rising without a ripple from the yellow bath mat at his feet.

In the category of “impossible” they placed such items as Blue Mountain pottery and salt and pepper shakers with the words
salty
and
peppy
burned into them.

In “passable” they placed such items as electric frying pans and waffle irons.

This kind of classification game was one they played often. It had the twofold positive effect of supplying them with conversational material and providing them with a well-ordered private universe. Where categories were concerned they agreed on everything: from music to cocktails, from politics to comic strips, from airports to laundromats. Their value systems were as assured and as tidy as the Holiday Inn at which they were staying. It was all very comforting.

Games notwithstanding, they were neither of them children. He had practised law for a full five years and had, just recently, been offered a partnership in the firm. In his usual practical, deliberate way he had waited a week or so before saying yes to the proposition. It was the same week that she had handed in her resignation to the paper, giving marriage as her excuse. She felt little regret at the prospect of abandoning her career. Although it had been the job she wanted, the job she had studied for, it had quickly passed through a phase of novelty and into the hazy realm of habit—like most of her affairs. A few days before she left, the girls in the office held a small shower for her. A lot of the accumulated yellow objects were a result of this event.