The Equations of Love (8 page)

Seven days are in a week and Vicky has to fill them. Take away the day’s work and there remain only the evenings, occasional Saturday afternoons, and Sundays to be filled. Mercifully, she eats and sleeps. She prepares her evening meal in her room – no, not a meal, it is just something to eat. Then, if the season is summer and the day still light, she will walk down to the waterfront – it is not far – and watch the seagulls. They, too, are as anonymous as the crowd of people on Hastings Street and make no demands upon her. How pleasant it is to lean against the rail, down by the cpr dock and watch the seagulls wheeling, alighting, taking off again, and filling the air with their cries. And as if that were not enough, behold the waters of Burrard Inlet, different in colour tonight, and the ships – little and big – coming and going, and across the water the houses and buildings near the water line of the North Shore, all lit up by the evening sun, and the twin spires of the old Indian church by the water, and behind all this the mountains; and behold the sky! Against the peaceful backdrop of mountain, sea, and blue clouded or gloomy sky, there is something moving, always moving. The eye follows the seagull, the floating log, oil on the water, the busy launch,
the two squat ferries that ply between the two shores of Burrard Inlet, the big docking ship. One is entertained as in a dream.

Vicky is never alone, leaning on the rail above the water. There is a drifting population that leans against the rail, mostly men, but she does not observe them and they do not observe her. Some are people from the prairie who are actively interested in this scene that lies before them. They comment upon the smell of the salt and the diurnal miracle of the tides which never fails to surprise them. But most of the people come down here because, vaguely, they like it; or because they have nothing whatever to do; or because they are on their way to somewhere else and it won’t hurt to stop for a minute.

One man comes fairly regularly. He is not vague. He comes because he has an affinity with the scene, and particularly with the seagulls. He thinks he knows and recognizes some of these calculating active birds which have little to recommend them except their strength, their fine coarse beauty, and their wheeling flight, and that is enough. It is improbable that he knows and recognizes them. He has enormous curiosity about the seagulls. He would like to be one, he would indeed. He checks by the Post Office clock – because he has no watch – the time of the first flight westwards in the evening. Then he watches the regular evening flight westwards of the seagulls. How they pour forth from all the waterfront through the draw of air above Stanley Park. The seagulls cease their wheeling and crying; their behaviour has changed; and now in their evening flight they go, steady, purposeful, silent, flying in ones, twos, threes, and companies, to where they will spend the night. And where is that? Is it at the mouth of the Fraser River? Is it on the western rim of Sea Island? Or Anvil
Island? And why do they go, nightly, and return at daybreak? Could they not spend the night here? No, they leave together and fly steadily westwards together, not one turning back.

The man who watches the seagulls with perception is called old Wolfenden, but that is not his name and it never was. He is old and he is obviously poor. He has a scrubby beard. In the summer time he lives in a hollow tree in Stanley Park and will continue to do so until the police discover that he is doing this. Then they will turn him out, but not unkindly. He expects that day.

In the meantime he enjoys outwitting the police because they are young and handsome in their leggings, because they have elegant horses, and motorcycles, and fine prowler cars equipped with devices for finding out law-breakers (he approves of all this, the law should be kept), and he is only an old man with a false name and a dirty copy of
King Lear
in his pocket, and for half the year he outwits these handsome men. The rest of the year, or at least when the weather turns bad, old Wolfenden has a bed in a rooming house in the East End that used to be kept by a Japanese, but is now kept by a Swede; he gets bronchitis and is sent into the hospital. Although old Wolfenden is as alone as Vicky Tritt who often leans on the rail beside him without observing him, he is not lonely. He can, and does, look back along a sorry procession of years which he does not regret. If he regards these years philosophically, and he does, he sees them as a descent from the pride of five months spent on the staff of the
Manchester Guardian
thirty years ago to his present condition. His troubles have been the wrong women and the wrong drinks and himself; he knows this and he spends no time in regretting it. As recently as last year he was paid for a bit of work by a Vancouver newspaper, but as a journalist he has long been unreliable, washed
up. “Old Wolfenden? Where is he now? Is he dead?” No, he is not dead. He is living in Stanley Park in a hollow tree, with a copy of Montaigne and some old journals that the man in the newsstand near the cpr station gives him sometimes, and some blankets and some scraps. He is leaning on a rail, looking at seagulls and at the other people who lean against the rail. He sees them with the old habit of a writer’s eye. He speaks brusquely to an insipid-looking character, a woman, who often comes here. She is, indeed, as regular as he, and seems to watch the seagulls. Why does she come. He says (because he wishes to know) “Why do you come here?” Vicky Tritt is surprised and alarmed. It is one kind of fear if a woman speaks to her. It is another kind of fear if a man speaks to her. She will not commit herself, but says ridiculously enough, “Oh, I just happened …”

Liar, thinks old Wolfenden contemptuously, people are fools.

Vicky need not move away, as she soon does, because old Wolfenden has dismissed her; she is too stupid; and now he is watching the
Princess
glide round the corner of Stanley Park, sailing sweetly into Burrard Inlet, entering the harbour.

On Friday evening Victoria May buys one magazine. It is a movie magazine and it does her for the weekend. She buys it according to the face on the cover. She enjoys the life of the movie stars, in which passion or some counterfeit of passion seems to take up a great deal of time. She is pleased when she reads of one of her favourites – whom she knows better than she knows anyone in Vancouver – settling down in her third, fourth or fifth marriage to the true innocent joys of cosy domesticity, found at last. What a hope. On Friday night she looks at the pictures, but she does not allow herself to read the magazine until Sunday morning, in bed. That is part of
the routine, and provides a pleasant residual feeling of something enjoyable ahead. Saturday night is her big night, for then she has her dinner at a ca
fay
, and goes to a show. Mrs. Ravoli goes to the shows and so does Mrs. Pavey on the lower floor of the rooming house, and during the week Vicky hears by chance which are the best shows. She likes to go to a show in one of the big movie houses on Granville Street where all the neon lights are. The neon lights are swell and are a show in themselves; but if she has had to buy some aspirin and stockings that week she goes to one of the cheaper houses.

On Sunday morning she rests in bed and reads her movie magazine. On Sunday afternoon she walks down to Stanley Park. On Sunday evening she goes to St. James Church on East Cordova Street, and on Wednesday night she goes there, too. She goes on Wednesday night partly because she happened to go once and liked it, and because of the goodness which emanates from Father Cooper and Father Whitehead and touches her and leaves her serene, and partly because it is something to do. On spare nights, she picks up a newspaper from a discarded pile that lies in the basement of the rooming house and takes it upstairs with her. This is not pilfering, because the paper has been discarded. It does not matter that the paper is old because she is not interested in the news, but she does enjoy the advertisements. As she is not going to buy anything mentioned in the advertisements, it does not matter that the paper is out of date. She sits, often wearing her coat, and with her knees wrapped in the comforter, and reads about the important residence overlooking magnificent view, all floors in quarter cut oak, den with fireplace, two master bedrooms on the second floor, three bathrooms, owner leaving city. Two master bedrooms; what can that signify! No wonder this house is important. She reads
Mr. Jollivet’s jibing advertisements and pities the object of them, who is called Mr. Mackenzie. She projects herself – or some braver person – into the skin of a girl – or widow – seeking companionship or matrimony, and vicariously meets, marries and discards three or four men in turn in the course of the evening, but without desire or envy. She takes – and leaves – several positions. She loses herself in the funnies. She goes to bed. Her routine is successful, and prevents her from too often being aware of the desert of loneliness in which she dwells, underneath her small shelter of routine. And sometimes, but rarely, she drops in to see Myrtle, almost hoping that Myrtle will be out and that Mort will not be in.

One Tuesday evening – it was the evening that old Wolfenden had spoken to her and had driven her away from the railing above the cpr dock – she turned eastwards, towards home, and then she went on as she decided to go and see Myrtle. The sudden dark was descending. The dark would give her an excuse for leaving almost before she arrived. She climbed the stairs and knocked timidly on Myrtle’s door. There was no answer. She waited. She would knock once more, and if Myrtle did not come to the door, Vicky would turn and go down the stair, well satisfied. She heard movement and a voice within. She would like to have gone away, but having said to herself that she would knock again, she knocked. Myrtle came to the door. She was not looking pleased, which made Victoria May wish that she had never come. However, when, in the uncertain light of the doorway, Myrtle saw that it was only her timorous cousin standing there, she seemed to brighten and said with something like heartiness “Come in, Victoria May.”

Victoria May crossed the threshold and, looking into the room, saw the luscious Mrs. Emblem rocking to and fro.
(Oh dear me, I
do
wish I hadn’t come!) Mrs. Emblem smiled at Victoria May in her usual pleasant easy manner but thought of the times after Mrs. Tritt’s funeral when she had tried to draw Victoria May into her genial orbit, when she had tried to be nice to her, and warm and cheer up this poor spinstery wintery thing. But no, Vicky had shrunk from her, and Mrs. Emblem was sagacious enough to know that Vicky would shrink again from any advances. So that was why Mrs. Emblem said nothing. Vicky stood, stiff, slight and awkward; Mrs. Emblem rocked and regarded her with her lazy golden smile but did not speak; Myrtle stood there waiting; the frying beef smelled good.

“Come in,” repeated Myrtle.

“Oh no, I couldn’t come
in
,” said Victoria May; it seemed important, but impossible to explain, that she should not go in.

“Well, come in,
come
in,” said Myrtle a little impatiently. “You’d better stay and have some supper. Aunty Emblem can’t eat any, she’s got gas.”

How many thousand times the same fear had descended on Vicky that now had descended upon her – the old familiar fear that the girls were going to pick sides for games, and no one would pick her, and at the end she would be left over and one of the captains would say to the other captain “And
you
’ll have to take Victoria May Tritt,” and she would have to be taken; the fear that came as she looked from girl to girl; the malaise that came at the end of school and at the end of Sunday school, when all the other girls ran off home together or walked together, heads bent together, in twos or threes, all talking at once and then saying to each other “You come over to my place,” “No, you come over to my place;” the fear that made her cross the road to avoid speaking to someone she knew; the same fear that came when her mother used to dress
her in her good dress and make her go out to a party to which all three Tritt girls had been invited (“Oh
Motherr
, do we
haff
to ask the youngest Tritt girl, she’s a lemon!”); that familiar fear of people and their ways which possessed her.

“Oh no, I couldn’t,” said Victoria May quite terrified now by this prospect of spending an evening with Mrs. Emblem and with Myrtle who tonight seemed a little impatient, “I only called by to enquire.” There, that was sufficiently well said. Something came into her throat as it often did when she was especially nervous, and she said huskily, “Well, goodnight, all,” and turned and shot down the stairs, safe from them and alone in her timorous world.

“It beats me,” said Mrs. Emblem, “how a person can grow up, and act like that. That cousin of yours always reminds me of some poor dawg that nobody wants.”

“Well, I guess nobody does,” said Myrtle frankly and went on preparing supper.

Down the darkening street went Victoria May feeling greatly relieved, and yet she was familiarly unhappy, too, because she was not as other people are, freely talking, laughing, even quarrelling together. She could not do those things any more than swim, and she could not swim. She walked home quickly, her head poking forward as in haste, along Powell Street, along Cordova Street, up Homer Street, as though she had an appointment; but she had no appointment. (How could she have an appointment?) When she reached the house she went down to the basement. There was the customary pile of old newspapers beside the furnace. She took one; she took two; she went upstairs to her room. She felt around in the darkness and found the electric light bulb hanging small and naked in the middle of the room. She turned on the light, locked the door, took an apple out of a bag, pulled a chair under the light,
sat down and began to read, peering a little. She read “The Census taker asked a Scotchman named Mackenzie how many children he had. 4 was the reply, and that’s all I’m going 2 have. Why? Well, I read in the Almanac, said Mack, that every 5th child born is a Chinaman.” She read to the end of Mr. Jollivet’s jibing advertisement, and then on to Information Wanted. “Will Mildred Jabowski née Fink, or anyone knowing her whereabouts, contact Box 803, Confidential.” Oh who is Mildred Jabowski and where can she be. Does some fortune await her. Or some threat. Oh Mildred Jabowski, is it safe for you to reply?