The Imposter Bride (25 page)

By late afternoon they were in Montreal. “It does look lovely,” she said when she saw the green mountain that formed a backdrop to the city centre. Yet she felt nothing inside but a low, tugging anxiety.

Boris got her suitcase down for her. As she picked it up with her right hand, he took her left hand in both of his. She remembered how her father had carefully cupped his hands around the occasional frightened bird that had flown into their house, carrying it to the door in that way to release it.

“Good luck to you, Lily Azerov,” he said.

“And to you, Boris Ziblow.”

CHAPTER 12

I
met Reuben at McGill’s Redpath Library the winter that I turned nineteen. We were sitting at the same table, studying. My leg was moving up and down in a sort of nervous tic, a movement that disturbed him, or would have, he told me later, had he not liked the looks of the girl to whom the offending leg was attached. He sent a note across the table: “Your leg seems nervous. Would a cup of coffee help?” I liked his approach, his face, the beginning of the smile lines that were forming around his eyes.

We went to the student union and drank thin, bitter coffee out of Styrofoam cups. I complained about the coffee. “It’s hot,” he said, as if that were enough. I asked him if his apparent satisfaction was a sign of a positive attitude or just a lack of standards, and he laughed. “I save my standards for things that matter,” he said. He met my eye and I felt he was talking about me.

He took a sip of coffee and made a face. “It
is
awful,” he said. “But I hate the stuff even when it’s supposedly good.”

“So why did you ask me for coffee, then? If you hate it, I mean.”

“What should I have asked you for instead?” he responded, a question that, had it been delivered with a suggestive smile, might have carried us to a very different place. Reuben, though, asked it with a complete absence of innuendo, as if he were just trying to determine my tastes.

“I don’t know,” I answered. “A rum and coke?” And when he didn’t respond with any visible enthusiasm to that: “You don’t drink alcohol either?”

“Not really,” he admitted.

“So what are you, a Mormon?”

He smiled. “Just a boring Jew.”

We talked then about the usual things: where we lived, where we’d grown up, our respective majors—chemistry in my case, biology in his, though what he’d really wanted to study was music, a choice that his parents had vetoed on the basis of it not leading to anything. Chemistry was what I’d always wanted to study, I told him, but I wasn’t as sure about that now.

I remembered my family’s pride the previous spring when I had told them I was going to major in chemistry. We were all gathered at Bella’s for a meal. It was a special dinner to celebrate my admittance to McGill, so instead of the usual roasted chicken, Bella had cooked a brisket in her famous sauce of ginger ale and ketchup, and we were all drinking sweet Hungarian wine, a straw-coloured syrup that was Bella’s libation of choice for happy events. “Chemistry!” Elka responded to my announcement, her pride evident in her face and her voice. Most of the girls in my class were going into sociology, even Carrie, though she was a better student than I (and would
ultimately become the first female among our cohort to graduate McGill law school.) “Our own little Madame Curie,” Nina said, just as she had when my father had given me my first chemistry set, and my father refilled our glasses as Sol proposed a toast to the future winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Bella, allowing herself a proud smile, had gone so far in her celebratory abandon as to clink her glass with everybody else’s instead of warning us all about the pitfalls of counting unhatched chickens. And Ida Pearl actually winked at me as she lifted her glass to her lips in my honour.

“It’s not anything like what I expected,” I told Reuben now.

“What did you expect?”

“I don’t know,” I said, thinking about the experiments I had performed with my childhood chemistry set where solutions changed colours before my eyes. “Poetry, I guess.”

He smiled. “Maybe you just haven’t learned the language yet.”

“Maybe not. Do you like biology?”

“I will,” he said. He seemed remarkably unconflicted for someone on a forced detour away from what, presumably, had been his real passion.

“But you wanted to study music,” I said. “What instrument do you play?”

“Piano.”

“And your parents didn’t support you continuing in that?”

“Not as a profession. No.”

“And you don’t mind?”

“That they’re paying for my entire education and would just as soon not throw that money down the toilet? No, I don’t particularly mind.” His smile at that moment, though charmingly rueful, didn’t convey any of the bitterness of deep regret. “The truth is, I’m not good enough and never would be.”

“How do you know that for sure? Without even trying?”

“What makes you think I didn’t try?” And then, before I could answer, before I could even identify and adjust to the subtle shift of his tone: “Shall we move on now from my failed aspirations to our continuing exchange of basic facts about ourselves?”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He was the eldest of seven he told me. Three boys and four girls. “Religious,” he added, possibly to explain his parents’ fecundity. “And you?”

“Agnostic. Though I was raised religious. For the most part. I went to day school, anyway. Young Israel.”

He smiled. “I meant how many brothers and sisters.”

“Oh. None. My mother left when I was a baby.” I looked to see his response to the fact that my existence had been insufficient to bind my mother to me, that I had failed utterly and completely at the first task of personhood, which is to make your mother love you enough to stick around to care for you. “She wasn’t entirely normal,” I said before he could state the obvious.

“What’s normal?” he asked, the way people do when they come from normal and think it’s boring and overrated.

“Loving your own baby, for starters.”

“Why do you assume she didn’t love you?” His tone was so purely curious that I answered without the usual self-consciousness I felt when I talked about my mother, without my usual alertness to the possible responses of others.

“The evidence,” I said.

“The evidence,” he repeated. “And is there some …
evidence
that you haven’t mentioned?”

“You mean apart from walking out when I was three
months old and never coming back? No. Not really. A few rocks over the years.”

“Rocks?” Now he looked quizzical, so I found myself describing the rocks she’d sent me. He listened, nodding, no longer smiling but not grim or pained either. When I was finished he was quiet for a minute before responding.

“It’s like the stones people leave when they go to visit a grave,” he said.

“But I’m not dead,” I pointed out.

“It was just the first thing it made me think of.”

“She was from Europe,” I told him. “She lost her whole family in the war.”

He nodded. “So you don’t have any family?”

“I have my father’s side.”

He nodded again.

“Are your parents from here?” I asked him.

“My mother is. My father’s from Poland, but he came when he was young. Before the war.”

Neither of us said anything for a while as we watched another student put a quarter into the machine that had just dispensed our coffee, then shake the machine and finally kick it as it failed to deliver the wretched liquid we had just ingested.

“He should be thanking that machine,” I said.

Reuben smiled. “Did you ever think about trying to find her?” he asked.

“I’ve thought about it.”

Reuben nodded, but didn’t push for more.

“I used to get teased in school about her being off her rocker,” I said. “Because of the rocks … Off her
rocker
.”

“I get it.”

“Which made me think I must be off my rocker too.”

“Why?”

I remembered how I would hold each rock when it came and how an image of her would come to me. And how at night sometimes, when I couldn’t sleep, I would take out the rocks and pick each one up and imagine her holding the same rock in her hand. Images and sensations rose in me then and I felt comforted, calmed somehow just to think that my mother had held the same rock and had shared the same sensations. I told Reuben about that. “It’s like I could feel her presence through each rock that she sent me. It’s almost like she was talking to me in her own language that no one else in the world could understand, but she knew I’d understand.”

Reuben nodded as if he also understood, and I didn’t go into my usual routine about how strange I knew it all was, how bizarre.

A silence opened up between us then. I say opened, because that’s how it felt: spacious somehow, comfortable, like the cool, dark air pockets I used to create and inhabit during the summers of my childhood and early teens by capsizing a canoe in exactly the right way and swimming up from under the surface of the water into the domed quiet space. A few minutes passed in that way. There was no feeling of awkwardness, no pressure to speak, to re-emerge into conversation.

“Just how religious are you anyway?” I asked after a while. I had known the second I saw him that the wool cap he wore—had not removed despite the adequate level of heat in the student union building—served a function unrelated to warmth or style.

“Enough that I won’t mention your agnosticism when I tell my mother about you.”

“So you’re already planning to tell your mother about me?” I asked, flattered but also a little taken aback.

“I’m planning to marry you.”

“Right.”

“I’m serious,” he said.

“We just met.”

He shrugged as if that were a minor detail.

“You’re being crazy,” I said. “You don’t even know me.”

“I know you,” he assured me. “My first instincts are infallible.”

IT WAS THE SORT OF MARRIAGE PROPOSAL
that would have put off some women. Carrie, for example.

“What an arrogant jerk,” she said. We were in her bedroom, propped up by pillows on opposite ends of her bed.

“He’s not a jerk.”

“He has one conversation with you and decides on that basis that he knows you and is going to marry you—never mind that he hasn’t even bothered to find out if you have any feelings whatsoever for him—and you don’t think he’s a jerk?”

“I know he isn’t.”

“So what would you call him, then?”

“I’d say he’s someone who trusts his instincts.”

Carrie looked at me for a moment. “Only a psychopath trusts his instincts in that way,” she said.

“Not necessarily.
You
did.”

“
When?
”

Carrie had walked up to me on the first day of grade one, as I stood against the chain-link fence, surveying but not yet ready to enter the mob of yelling children who would henceforth be my classmates and friends, and announced that she would be my best friend. It was an opener not entirely unlike
Reuben’s in its certainty, its instant and unambivalent embrace of me—but when I pointed this out to Carrie, she looked at me again as if I’d lost my mind. “We were six then, Ruthie. Remember? There’s supposed to be some level of psychological and emotional development between the ages of six and nineteen.”

She reached for her cigarettes, took one out and started tapping the end of it on her night table, the first step of a ritual that would go on now for about ten minutes.

“Do you love him?” she asked me.

“I don’t know yet. I just met him, remember?”

“If you were falling in love you’d know it.”

There was no sensation of
falling
, I had to admit, just a feeling of extraordinary calm and comfort in his presence.

“That would be great if he were a shoe,” Carrie said when I tried to explain this to her. “But we look for different things in men than in shoes.
Comfort
, for example, is supposed to come later with potential husbands,
after
the falling in love part.”

How could I explain to her that the comfort I felt with him was more compelling to me than the sensation of falling over a cliff? How to explain the appeal of his instant and unambivalent embrace of me, to Carrie especially, who loved the thrill of uncertainty because she had never known the dread of real doubt? I couldn’t because I didn’t fully understand it myself at that time, had always imagined
the real thing
would be more of a thunderbolt than a feeling of safe arrival.

Carrie had now moved on to the actual smoking of her cigarette, an act she would manage to perform in its entirety while technically adhering to her parents’ rule of no smoking in the house. She would do this by holding the cigarette out the open window of her bedroom, extending her head outside
every time she inhaled or exhaled, and waving around her free hand—which was inside the room—to disperse any smoke that had blown back in. I waited to speak until her head was in the room.

“I trust it,” was all I said, and she nodded as if she understood, but I knew that she thought her own first instincts were as infallible as Reuben found his, and that nothing had budged her from thinking he must be an arrogant jerk.

“
I HEAR YOU’VE MET SOMEONE
,” Nina said when I met her for coffee a couple of weeks later. I had started seeing her more regularly now that I was downtown every day for school. Often we met in her apartment, which was just a few blocks from McGill, but that particular afternoon we were sitting in one of the Hungarian cafés downtown where they served flour-less tortes and coffee so strong and rich that it bore almost no resemblance to the watery beverage we brewed at home.

“Word travels fast,” I said. Reuben and I had just had our fifth date the previous Saturday night.

“Elka said it’s serious.”

“She hasn’t even met him. He’s only ever picked me up at my father’s.”

“She says she sees a big change in you.”

“What kind of change?”

“She thinks you seem happier, more mature.”

“Talk about wishful thinking.”