The Love of a Good Woman (19 page)

She phoned up Ray and told him I was trying to steal her bed linen. She complained that I was telling stories about her up and down the street. She had opened the door to make sure I could hear, and she shouted into the phone, but this was hardly necessary, because we were on the same line and could listen in anytime we wanted to. I never did so—my instinct was to block my ears—but one evening when Chess was home he picked up the phone and spoke.

“Don’t pay any attention to her, Ray, she’s just a crazy old woman. I know she’s your mother, but I have to tell you she’s crazy.”

I asked him what Ray had said, whether he was angry at that.

“He just said, ‘Sure, okay.’”

Mrs. Gorrie had hung up and was shouting directly down the stairs, “I’ll tell you who’s crazy. I’ll tell you who’s a crazy liar spreading lies about me and my husband—”

Chess said, “We’re not listening to you. You leave my wife alone.” Later he said to me, “What does she mean about her and her husband?”

I said, “I don’t know.”

“She just has it in for you,” he said. “Because you’re young and nice-looking and she’s an old hag.

“Forget it,” he said, and made a halfway joke to cheer me up.

“What is the point of old women anyway?”

W
E
moved to the new apartment by taxi with just our suitcases. We waited out on the sidewalk with our backs to the
house. I expected some final screaming then, but there was not a sound.

“What if she’s got a gun and shoots me in the back?” I said.

“Don’t talk like her,” Chess said.

“I’d like to wave to Mr. Gorrie if he’s there.”

“Better not.”

I
DIDN’T
take a final look at the house, and I didn’t walk down that street, that block of Arbutus Street that faces the park and the sea, ever again. I don’t have a clear idea of what it looked like, though I remember a few things—the alcove curtain, the china cabinet, Mr. Gorrie’s green recliner—so well.

We got to know other young couples who had started out as we did, living in cheap spaces in other people’s houses. We heard about rats, cockroaches, evil toilets, crazy landladies. And we would tell about our crazy landlady. Paranoia.

Otherwise, I didn’t think of Mrs. Gorrie.

But Mr. Gorrie showed up in my dreams. In my dreams I seemed to know him before he knew her. He was agile and strong, but he wasn’t young, and he didn’t look any better than he did when I had read to him in the front room. Perhaps he could talk, but his talk was on the level of those noises I had learned to interpret—it was abrupt and peremptory, an essential but perhaps disdained footnote to the action. And the action was explosive, for these were erotic dreams. All the time that I was a young wife, and then, without undue delay, a young mother—busy, faithful, regularly satisfied—I kept having dreams now and then in which the attack, the response, the possibilities, went beyond anything life offered. And from which romance was banished. Decency as well. Our bed—Mr. Gorrie’s and mine—was the gravelly beach or the rough boat deck or the punishing coils of greasy rope. There was
a relish of what you might call ugliness. His pungent smell, his jelly eye, his dog’s teeth. I woke out of these pagan dreams drained even of astonishment, or shame, and fell asleep again and woke with a memory I got used to denying in the morning. For years and years and surely long after he was dead Mr. Gorrie operated in my nightlife this way. Until I used him up, I suppose, the way we use up the dead. But it never seemed to be this way—that I was in charge, that I had brought him there. It seemed to be working both ways, as if he had brought me there, too, and it was his experience as much as it was mine.

And the boat and the dock and the gravel on the shore, the trees sky-pointed or crouching, leaning out over the water, the complicated profile of surrounding islands and dim yet distinct mountains, seemed to exist in a natural confusion, more extravagant and yet more ordinary than anything I could dream or invent. Like a place that will go on existing whether you are there or not, and that in fact is still there.

But I never saw the charred beams of the house fallen down on the body of the husband. That had happened a long time before and the forest had grown up all around it.

T
HE
game they played was almost the same one that Eve had played with Sophie, on long dull car trips when Sophie was a little girl. Then it was spies—now it was aliens. Sophie’s children, Philip and Daisy, were sitting in the backseat. Daisy was barely three and could not understand what was going on. Philip was seven, and in control. He was the one who picked the car they were to follow, in which there were newly arrived space travellers on their way to the secret headquarters, the invaders’ lair. They got their directions from the signals offered by plausible-looking people in other cars or from somebody standing by a mailbox or even riding a tractor in a field. Many aliens had already arrived on earth and been translated—this was Philip’s word—so that anybody might be one. Gas station attendants or women pushing baby carriages or even the babies riding in the carriages. They could be giving signals.

Usually Eve and Sophie had played this game on a busy highway where there was enough traffic that they wouldn’t be detected.
(Though once they had got carried away and ended up in a suburban drive.) On the country roads that Eve was taking today that wasn’t so easy. She tried to solve the problem by saying that they might have to switch from following one vehicle to another because some were only decoys, not heading for the hideaway at all, but leading you astray.

“No, that isn’t it,” said Philip. “What they do, they suck the people out of one car into another car, just in case anybody is following. They can be like inside one body and then they go
schlup
through the air into another body in another car. They go into different people all the time and the people never know what was in them.”

“Really?” Eve said. “So how do we know which car?”

“The code’s on the license plate,” said Philip. “It’s changed by the electrical field they create in the car. So their trackers in space can follow them. It’s just one simple little thing, but I can’t tell you.”

“Well no,” said Eve. “I suppose very few people know it.”

Philip said, “I am the only one right now in Ontario.”

He sat as far forward as he could with his seat belt on, tapping his teeth sometimes in urgent concentration and making light whistling noises as he cautioned her.

“Unh-unh, watch out here,” he said. “I think you’re going to have to turn around. Yeah. Yeah. I think this may be it.”

They had been following a white Mazda, and were now, apparently, to follow an old green pickup truck, a Ford. Eve said, “Are you sure?”

“Sure.”

“You felt them sucked through the air?”

“They’re translated simultaneously,” Philip said. “I might have said ‘sucked,’ but that’s just to help people understand it.”

What Eve had originally planned was to have the headquarters turn out to be in the village store that sold ice cream, or in the
playground. It could be revealed that all the aliens were congregated there in the form of children, seduced by the pleasures of ice cream or slides and swings, their powers temporarily in abeyance. No fear they could abduct you—or get into you—unless you chose the one wrong flavor of ice cream or swung the exact wrong number of times on the designated swing. (There would have to be some remaining danger, or else Philip would feel let down, humiliated.) But Philip had taken charge so thoroughly that now it was hard to manage the outcome. The pickup truck was turning from the paved county road onto a gravelled side road. It was a decrepit truck with no topper, its body eaten by rust—it would not be going far. Home to some farm, most likely. They might not meet another vehicle to switch to before the destination was reached.

“You’re positive this is it?” said Eve. “It’s only one man by himself, you know. I thought they never travelled alone.”

“The dog,” said Philip.

For there was a dog riding in the open back of the truck, running back and forth from one side to the other as if there were events to be kept track of everywhere.

“The dog’s one too,” Philip said.

T
HAT
morning, when Sophie was leaving to meet Ian at the Toronto airport, Philip had kept Daisy occupied in the children’s bedroom. Daisy had settled down pretty well in the strange house—except for wetting her bed every night of the holiday—but this was the first time that her mother had gone off and left her behind. So Sophie had asked Philip to distract her, and he did so with enthusiasm (happy at the new turn events had taken?). He shot the toy cars across the floor with angry engine noises to cover up the sound of Sophie’s starting the real rented car and driving away. Shortly after that he shouted to Eve, “Has the B.M. gone?”

Eve was in the kitchen, clearing up the remains of breakfast and disciplining herself. She walked into the living room. There was the boxed tape of the movie that she and Sophie had been watching last night.

The Bridges of Madison County.

“What does mean ‘B.M.’?” said Daisy.

The children’s room opened off the living room. This was a cramped little house, fixed up on the cheap for summer rental. Eve’s idea had been to get a lakeside cottage for the holiday—Sophie’s and Philip’s first visit with her in nearly five years and Daisy’s first ever. She had picked this stretch of the Lake Huron shore because her parents used to bring her here with her brother when they were children. Things had changed—the cottages were all as substantial as suburban houses, and the rents were out of sight. This house half a mile inland from the rocky, unfavored north end of the usable beach had been the best she could manage. It stood in the middle of a cornfield. She had told the children what her father had once told her—that at night you could hear the corn growing.

Every day when Sophie took Daisy’s hand-washed sheets off the line, she had to shake out the corn bugs.

“It means ‘bowel movement,’” said Philip with a look of sly challenge at Eve.

Eve halted in the doorway. Last night she and Sophie had watched Meryl Streep sitting in the husband’s truck, in the rain, pressing down on the door handle, choking with longing, as her lover drove away. Then they had turned and had seen each other’s eyes full of tears and shook their heads and started laughing.

“Also it means ‘Big Mama,’” Philip said in a more conciliatory tone. “Sometimes that’s what Dad calls her.”

“Well then,” said Eve. “If that’s your question, the answer to your question is yes.”

She wondered if he thought of Ian as his real father. She hadn’t asked Sophie what they’d told him. She wouldn’t, of course. His real father had been an Irish boy who was travelling around North America trying to decide what to do now that he had decided not to be a priest. Eve had thought of him as a casual friend of Sophie’s, and it seemed that Sophie had thought of him that way too, until she seduced him. (“He was so shy I never dreamed it would take,” she said.) It wasn’t until Eve saw Philip that Eve could really picture what the boy had looked like. Then she saw him faithfully reproduced—the bright-eyed, pedantic, sensitive, scornful, fault-finding, blushing, shrinking, arguing young Irishman. Something like Samuel Beckett, she said, even to the wrinkles. Of course as the baby got older, the wrinkles tended to disappear.

Sophie was a full-time archaeology student then. Eve took care of Philip while she was off at her classes. Eve was an actress—she still was, when she could get work. Even in those days there were times when she wasn’t working, or if she had daytime rehearsals she could take Philip along. For a couple of years they all lived together—Eve and Sophie and Philip—in Eve’s apartment in Toronto. It was Eve who wheeled Philip in his baby carriage—and, later on, in his stroller—along all the streets between Queen and College and Spadina and Ossington, and during these walks she would sometimes discover a perfect, though neglected, little house for sale in a previously unknown to her two-block-long, tree-shaded, dead-end street. She would send Sophie to look at it; they would go round with the real-estate agent, talk about a mortgage, discuss what renovations they would have to pay for, and which they could do themselves. Dithering and fantasizing until the house was sold to somebody else, or until Eve had one of her periodic but intense fits of financial prudence, or until somebody persuaded them that these charming little side streets were not half
so safe for women and children as the bright, ugly, brash, and noisy street that they continued to live on.

Ian was a person Eve took even less note of than she had of the Irish boy. He was a friend; he never came to the apartment except with others. Then he went to a job in California—he was an urban geographer—and Sophie ran up a phone bill which Eve had to speak to her about, and there was a change altogether in the atmosphere of the apartment. (Should Eve not have mentioned the bill?) Soon a visit was planned, and Sophie took Philip along, because Eve was doing a summer play in a regional theater.