The Equations of Love (7 page)

Mort continued stomping and roaring up and down over their heads. Old Mr. Raskob subsided in a chair and put his hands to his ears. “Every day every day!” he said. “It’s driving me crazy. Don’t they never have no bedroom slippers?” Mortimer went on stomping and dragging things about.

Mr. Gluck took the broom and banged upon the ceiling, glaring upwards.

Myrtle and Mortimer, upstairs, became united by a glance. Mort changed the direction of his temper.

“Who do they think they are?” he said, as Mr. Gluck banged with fury.

“Yes, who
do
they think they are anyway?” said Myrtle.

“Who do you think you are, hey?” shouted Mort, bending down to the floor. “Who’s paying this rental anyway?” he roared to the two old men below. “Tell me that! Tell me who’s paying this rental! We got a right to live as well as you!”

“We are very considerate, I’m sure,” said Myrtle who never thought of the two old men below except at such a time as this. She looked superior.

Mort gave the chair a final bang and then he sat down on it back to front, leaning over the chair-back. When Mortimer sat down on the chair the worst of the noise ceased. The two old men remained silent and nervous below. (Pity us, pity us, the civilized ones, who live on shelves, one below the other, one above the other. Pity Mr. Gluck and Mr. Raskob, living in that old house, under Myrtle and Mortimer Johnson. Pity those who live in crowded areas, one below another, one against the other. We live on shelves one below the other because we are so civilized.) Now that Myrtle had caused
Mort to stomp about, and Mortimer had vented his rage, and Mr. Gluck by knocking on the ceiling had united Myrtle and Mort against Mr. Gluck and Mr. Raskob, Myrtle and Mort’s irritation was a good deal purged, and they began to feel better.

But Myrtle saw again the flowers. “Where’d you get them flowers?” she enquired suspiciously. “Looks like you’d been doing something queer, spending money on flowers. And that was a pretty funny way to give me flowers, I’ll say! I want to know …”

“Now, Queen …” began Mort.

“
Don’t
call me Queen …”

“Now, hon,” said Mort, placatingly, “I didn’t spend no money on flowers! I got them” (he checked himself. Suddenly there seemed an impropriety, unnoticed before, in bringing Myrtle flowers from the undertakers. He would have liked to tell Myrtle about all those coffins, but just now she wouldn’t understand.) “from a friend of mine. Got a big place out Kingsway. Nothing would do but I must go see his place. And nothing must do but I must take some flowers to the wife. He was puffing up his gladioluses for the winter …” the picture lay clear before Mort’s eyes – Pork in his beautiful garden, tidying up against the winter; Pork offering Mort gladioluses for the wife in his beautiful garden. Myrtle listened to this, her eyelids averted. It sounded all right. Then she remembered Aunty Emblem and her anger rose again.

“Mew,” said a kitten, and ran out from under the sink and rubbed itself, arching and purring, against Myrtle’s ankles.

Myrtle looked down surprised. “Where’d that come from?” she said, checked in her temper.

“Musta come in with me,” said Mort. “Give it here. I’ll put it out.” He still looked upset.

“It’s cute,” said Myrtle forgetting how angry she was and bending down to the kitten. “Say,
isn’t
it cute!” The kitten, as pretty and graceful as could be, rubbed and rubbed against Myrtle, and uttered its little mews. They watched it.

“That cat’s crazy about you,” said Mort ingratiatingly.

“Sure is,” said Myrtle, and she picked up the kitten. “If it’s a tom I’d like to keep it. We got mice. I don’t want no cat families round here but I’d like a tom. Some people say you can tell by their noses if they’re a tom,” and Myrtle held up the kitten and looked at its innocent face and its inscrutable pink nose.

“They crazy. How could anyone tell a cat’s sect by its nose! I can tell dogs but I can’t tell cats and I’ll bet you you can’t tell a tom by its nose.”

“And a party told me,” continued Myrtle, upending the kitten who clawed the air this way and that, “that if it’s a she, they’s a place shaped like a violet under its tail….”

“That’s a hell of a place to look for a violet, under a cat’s tail,” said Mort. But he bent forward, his hands on his knees, and scrutinized the kitten. “That don’t look to me like no violet, but I wouldn’t know.”

“Then’s it’s a tom … that’s certny no violet … Morty, you just take that box the onions are in and dump them out and go down and run across to Baxter’s garden and get some dirt.”

“That’s a hell-of-a-note,” said Mort, grumbling a bit but getting the box just the same, “me going across to Baxter’s the middle of the night to get a box a dirt for any old cat.”

“You go right along, Morty,” said Myrtle as she set down a saucer. “Isn’t that a cute kitten! Look, it’s lapping!”

“What do I get the dirt with?” asked the gardener and landscaper.

“Use your hands … take a spoon … I don’t care …” said Myrtle, and Mort clumped down the stairs and out into the dark, with the box and a cooking spoon.

When Morty came back having put down the spoon and left it in Baxter’s garden he set the box on the floor. “Mroo, mroo,” said the kitten, and with croons of delight ran to the box, scrambled up the side, scratched in the dirt, and sat down. The kitten’s face took on a look of blissful angelic abstraction. The kitten wore the same distant ineffable look as does a young child occupied in the same business.

“Well, whaddaya know!” said Mort smiling down at the kitten.

“Say, he’s trained! Isn’t he the cutest thing!” said Myrtle, smiling down, too. The kitten was irresistible in its bland innocence.

And now, because the dispositions of their minds were turned towards each other, so were the dispositions of their bodies.

Myrtle went to bed. Mort cut himself a couple of sandwiches and then he went to bed too. The dispositions of their bodies were towards each other and the bed springs – which sagged, and the mattress – which was thin and resembled a hammock, impelled them one to another so that, when they slept, they slept as one, together, and Mort’s arm clipped Myrtle as it did most nights when Myrtle was not out of temper. Thus they slept as one the whole night through, and their angels, tired, slept profoundly within them. Some angels undergo continual strain. It is too bad.

The kitten, who was not a tom, felt her way about in the dark which was, to her, transparent, and learned the room. Feral, wise, with her inscrutable little hunter’s nose and
whiskers she felt and explored and recorded each chair leg, each table leg, each corner. She prowled and prowled on silent paws, and sometimes she stopped to wash. When she was satisfied, she accepted and adopted the room. Then she slept fitfully. She slept anywhere, lightly yet deeply, waking and moving often. Chiefly she slept on Mort and Myrtle who lay deep in sleep, warm and approved by her. But sometimes she awoke, remembering something pleasant. Then she jumped lightly down and ran to her box. She scrambled up the side of her box and sat down, quivering, still, looking into the transparent dark with bliss.

V
ictoria May Tritt had been, for as long as she could remember, the youngest Tritt girl, nothing more, conveniently anonymous. If one should attempt to record the life of anyone as unnoticed and as unimportant and as timorous as Victoria May, the words “anonymous” and “anonymity” are bound to occur inconveniently often. It was in Smith Falls that Vicky had been the youngest Tritt girl. In Vancouver, now, to her landlady for purposes of rent and to her employer Mrs. Ravoli for purposes of wages and instructions, she is Miss Tritt; to other people she is nothing, anonymous. Life on such terms as these is arid, one thinks, but it suits Vicky.

After the eldest Tritt girl married and went to live in Duluth, and after the middle Tritt girl – Bertha – married and went to live in Vancouver, and after Mr. Tritt died and was buried in Smith Falls, Mrs. Tritt and the youngest Tritt girl came West to be near Bertha. And then Bertha’s husband went to Moosejaw, followed by Bertha and the children, and Mrs. Tritt and the youngest Tritt girl stayed on in Vancouver. They stayed there for lack of any motive power to do anything else;
and because the climate of Vancouver was fairly easy to live in; and nominally – but not actually – because Mrs. Tritt’s brother’s daughter, Myrtle Hopwood, came to Vancouver at about that time, and the theory was that it would be nice for Myrtle. It turned out to be neither nice nor nasty for Myrtle who had an anaemic disdainful prettiness and subjugated and then married a pleasant no-good man called Mortimer Johnson, and thereafter did not see very much of Mrs. Tritt and the youngest Tritt girl. Mrs. Tritt and Victoria May really stayed in Vancouver because, however insipid, or unimportant, or anonymous you are, your humanity imposes upon you certain conditions which insist that you spend twenty-four hours a day somewhere, and that you spend, somehow, twenty-four hours a day; and so, as they were already in Vancouver, they stayed there.

Victoria May had her small job in the little notions shop on Commercial Drive. She neither enjoyed nor disliked her job, but because she was neat, silent and congenitally honest, she was useful to Mrs. Ravoli her employer. Mrs. Ravoli ended by taking Victoria May for granted, as just another notion in the store, and Victoria May would have been distressed had things been otherwise. If Mrs. Ravoli had died, Victoria May’s plight would indeed have been desperate, as her timidity would have prevented her from finding a new place without making efforts which would have been painful to her. Fortunately Mrs. Ravoli did not die.

Mrs. Tritt, however, did die. The youngest Tritt girl was helped through the bewilderment of the funeral by her cousin Myrtle Johnson and by Myrtle’s maternal aunt Mrs. Emblem whose embracing kindness drove Victoria May away in flight from Mrs. Emblem and thus repelled Mrs. Emblem. When the funeral was over, Victoria May retreated from her benefactors
in case they might want to show her some more alarming unnecessary kindnesses, only emerging sometimes to see her cousin Myrtle who after all was a cousin, and did not bother very much about her one way or another, which was as Victoria May liked it.

Mortimer Johnson, Myrtle’s husband, alarmed Vicky in a pleasant masculine fashion. She thought him handsome, noble, and kind, like a movie star, which he was and he wasn’t. He was a jokey kind of man. When Morty arrived home and found Vicky sitting nervously in a chair as if she were about to get up, or standing by a table as if she were just about to leave, he always greeted her warmly in his hoarsely pleasant voice and asked her what was her hurry. The enveloping masculinity of Mort excited Vicky in a pleasing unfamiliar way, but caused her to desire to leave as quickly as possible, which she did; and as she escaped down the stairs she always felt an uneasy glow from Mort’s presence and from the kind words that he had tossed to her. She had never seen Myrtle demonstrate her thoroughly bad temper with Mort, and so it was she thought humbly that Myrtle and Mort were an ideal couple. These little incursions into life last her for some time. She wants no more. She could not have less. She receives no mail. She writes no letters. At Christmas time she selects two cards and sends them to her married sisters. She receives, latterly, two cards.

By the time, now, that Vicky Tritt is thirty-nine, she is little Miss Tritt who has drawn her cloak of anonymity so closely about her that the dreaming eye does not observe her. She is anonymous, as a fly is anonymous. To the alert and glancing eye she is like so many others that she is indistinguishable, but is recognisable when seen repeatedly in the same place, as, behind the counter where she sells the notions; or customarily leaning against the rail down by the docks watching – as you do‐the
seagulls; or sitting, withdrawn, in a pew at St. James Church; but you will not know her again when you see her in another place; the place has to be united with the person before Miss Tritt exists as Miss Tritt. This satisfies her. She has not thought all this out, but she has so ordered (if that definite word may be used) her timorous life that she is able to avoid all notice on the part of potential acquaintances, or, worse than that, of friends. She is sufficient unto herself, in a parched way, and yet she is sometimes lonely with a vast loneliness that for a dreadful moment appals. She goes her way by day and by night and all is well enough; and then suddenly she is aware of a loneliness which is insupportable. What makes her suddenly aware and alone? It is not the crowd in the street, for the anonymity of the continually passing crowd suits her; it is, perhaps, the greeting with delight of woman with woman, of man with woman – not of man with man, which stirs nothing; it is the ascending again of the stairs and going into her bedroom and feeling in the dark for the light which hangs small and naked in the middle of the room; it is the emptiness of time and occupation, the desert that lies between now and sleep; it is the inexplicable fusion of something within her and something without. Yet she does not desire company; like the fakir who has for so long held his arm unused that it is now atrophied, so Miss Tritt’s power of friendship is vanished, gone. The fakir forgets his useless arm; Miss Tritt forgets, on the whole, that she is lonely.

But this special loneliness, which at unexpected times overwhelms her because it seems as though it will never end – and it will not – is as it were a revelation of something vast which lies concealed behind a curtain. It is insupportable, like the sorrow of humanity, and one dare not look, for, like the sorrow of humanity, it is there. This much she knows from
the frightening glimpse which she for a moment sees. She averts her gaze and must at once busy herself with small tangible objects. She will walk. She will devise activities to keep her hands and body occupied. So she hastens to avoid the revelation of her insupportable loneliness by means of small physical activities which at last – through the similar years – become a routine. This routine at length rules her life, though not unpleasantly. From this routine, arid as it may seem to those whose lives, fortunately for them, can hardly contain their fullness, there grow, at least, small pleasures, and, at last, a continuing blessing.