The Marriage Bed (15 page)

“No. When he died I was just about destroyed, if you want to know.” She turned her head away. Her voice sounded thin and desolate, like the voice of a very old woman.

“Why do you think we kept on the move? – why was it always by the sea? Because I liked to look out and see no limits anywhere. That way I could think he was still
somewhere,
even if – Well, the only way I could keep going was to meet new people all the time in pubs and trains and places like that. Have a few laughs and keep sex casual. And in a way it’s still like that. Although I’m very fond of Max, as you know.”

I tipped down the last of my drink, though it had been clear for some time now that it was doing me no good whatever. My head felt unpleasantly disturbed, as if too many new ideas had crowded into it at once. I turned to Billie, but before I could speak, bedlam broke out in the next room. Of course, the only surprise about that was that it hadn’t happened sooner. With a groan I got up and jerked open the dining-room door. Hugh had fallen (or more likely been pushed), and lay on his back howling and kicking in frustration, while Martha stamped around him chanting, “Crybaby cry! Crybaby cry!” At the sight of my expression she added in a small, pathetic voice, “He took my book.”

When I hoisted Hugh up, I found he was indeed clinging to her book, a rather disgusting washable but unwashed affair depicting kittens. It was a book he liked, but this was rare self-assertion, and I muttered “Congratulations” as I plucked it away from him. I put it on the sideboard out of reach, feeling for a moment disoriented
and a little dizzy. I didn’t want to go back into the sitting-room. I didn’t want to see Billie or remember what she’d told me.

Wiping off Hugh’s face, I perched him on my arm and gave him a kiss. He was too warm. Temperature going up, without a doubt. Pull yourself together, I told myself, and said to the kids, “Come along and say hello to Billie.”

“Has she got presents?” demanded Martha, cutting off a yell halfway.

“No, you horrible child, she has not. But you can have a nice mushroom thing. Let’s go.”

Billie, with a fresh drink in hand, had recovered enough equanimity to greet them with her usual rueful, ironic warmth.

“Don’t touch my dress, sweeties,” she warned them. “Sit down somewhere over there and I’ll give you both something terribly nice.” She then produced from her handbag two small boxes of maraschino chocolates, of all things. They tore off the ribbons and wrapping and at once began to stuff their mouths.

“I believe in giving people things that aren’t good for them,” she said with satisfaction. “What else are presents for?”

I looked at her and softened. With Billie, frivolity sometimes reached the point of wisdom.

“Thank you, Billie,” I said loudly to the children.

“Sink you, Billie,” murmured Martha behind a mask of chocolate. Hugh’s smeared face beamed at us joyfully. Just in time, I prevented him from wiping his hand on the carpet.

“Disgusting little brutes,” she said. “I’ll just trot off to the little girls’ room till they’re finished.”

The instant she was out of sight, I took the boxes away and tried to clean up their faces and hands. Martha immediately hurled herself prone and began to drum her head and heels on the floor. Billie, when she came back, looked so genuinely appalled at
this performance that I dragged my child out of the room by one arm – rather more hoping to dislocate it than not – and in the kitchen doused her with a glassful of cold water. It didn’t do much for the kitchen floor, but it cut off the tantrum like magic. Martha sat for a moment astonished in the puddle. Then she began to laugh in great, hoarse guffaws. Hugh tottered in, coughing, and his filthy face broke open in a wide grin that showed all his little chipmunk teeth.

“Well, sweetie, this seems like a good time to say goodbye to Sunnybrook Farm,” said Billie, appearing in her smart little leather hat. “I’ll catch a cab at the bottom of the street; there are always lots down there. So clever of you to live downtown. By the way, Max sent you his love, and he’ll be in touch. Oh, is this for me? Thanks, doll. That reminds me, here’s a little thing I picked up for you – something nice and useless.” She thrust into my hands a small box labelled Nina Ricci and, on a waft of her own spicy scent, made an exit uncomplicated by any embraces.

Miserably I wondered why our afternoon had been such a total and disturbing failure. Knowing I was in the right about Santa Lucia did nothing to comfort me. Just the same, as I lifted out the perfume bottle to sniff its faint, sweet fragrance, I too began to laugh weakly. Sunnybrook Farm. My dear Billie. Let’s never really quarrel. Please, let’s never.

T
he kids dawdled listlessly over their supper, and I felt too fagged myself to urge them to eat. I had no appetite either. The cheesy smell of the casserole vaguely depressed me, for no reason that made any sense except that I associated it with Karen, Bonnie’s onetime roommate. Yes, that was it; the night I moved in to share their apartment, they were eating grilled-cheese sandwiches.
There I stood at the door, loaded down with suitcases and typewriter, all wide-eyed and keen to begin my university education at last. I don’t know what I expected, exactly – a cloistered hush of young intellectuals deep in great thoughts or what – but it was rather a surprise to find the place full of people eating, smoking, arguing, and laughing.

“Come on in,” said Karen, with a wave of her cheese sandwich. “We’re just getting the term off to a good start. Dump your stuff in your room and come meet people.”

I did this very willingly, pausing only to smooth my hair briefly at the mirror. One swift glance around had already suggested to me that I should have spent more of Max’s clothes allowance on clothes, instead of saving up for a microscope. Not that anyone there was dressed up; but I’d been in Canada nearly a month by then – long enough to know the high price of those corduroy trousers, denim work-overalls, and casual blouses. It cost a lot of money to dress like the poor. Not to mention the fee for having one’s hair cut into layers or permed into a frizzled blonde curtain like Karen’s. When I edged shyly into the sitting-room, I was unhappily aware that my jeans were not the expensive pre-faded and tattered kind everybody else wore. Still, my new sneakers looked all right – or would when they got dirtier. At least I’d had the sense to get rid of my black lace-up oxfords. The standard school shoe all girls of my age wore in England were seen here only on old women with corns.

Bonnie thrust a can of beer into my hand and said buoyantly, “Happy days, Anne. Want something to eat? Hey, everybody, this is Anne Forrest, from London, England.”

“Is there any other London?” I wondered in my innocence. But there was no time to ask; Bonnie was rapidly reeling off names; faces were turning to me and people were saying “Hi,” to which I
replied “Hi,” having already learned that “How do you do” was considered stuck-up, like the English accent I was trying to lose for the same reason.

“Well, what d’you think of Canada, eh?” asked a tall girl in tight imitation-leather trousers.

“Oh, it’s great. I mean literally. I can’t get over the huge
size
of everything … cars and motorways and all that. And these enormous high-rise buildings. Doesn’t it sometimes make you feel awfully dwarfed?”

“Not at all,” said the leather girl coolly, and I remembered too late that when Canadians ask what you think of their country, they don’t want an answer, they want a compliment.

“What courses you taking?” inquired a thin boy with a pipe that kept going out. He had dark hair and very blue eyes, but I hadn’t caught his name. Ross something, was it? “I’m in General Science. Heading for Botany; I’d like to take the honours course.”

“Ah. You’ll get old Prof. MacAvey, then. He’s really great, even if he does pinch girls’ asses. Can’t turn your back on him for a second, Karen says. Must liven up the lab a whole lot. We get no fun like that from the faculty at Osgoode Hall, believe me.” He winked at me in a friendly way and moved off, knitting his fingers through Karen’s.

Nobody else seemed to have any questions to ask me, and though I diffidently made a few approaches to various people, they always soon returned to their own group or their partner’s inchat, which was sometimes as baffling to me as a foreign language. Eventually I wandered along to the kitchen to look for a glass to drink my beer out of, but amid all the casual chaos of used crockery on the counters I could find nothing clean at all. The smell of grilled cheese made me vaguely hungry, and I opened the huge, humming fridge which was crammed with food; but just
then Bonnie danced in, hand-linked to a handsome West Indian.

“Don’t bother with that leftover junk,” she said. “We’re sending out for Chinese. Here, dance with Charley; I’m going to the can.”

I did dance with Charley, it being easy and fun to copy his loose, happy gyrations. Later I danced with one or two others, including the leather girl, who, it suddenly occurred to me, might actually be a boy. Eventually the Chinese food arrived in a number of warm cardboard containers, and everybody sat on the floor or on the arms of chairs to eat. Conversations bubbled all around me, and I was happy to listen (in so far as I could follow it) to a long and vigorous argument about
ESP
and the occult generally.

“It may sound crazy to you,” Karen said, “but I know this girl got involved with a bunch of guys in one of the fraternities running séances, and one night she just stood up in the middle of it and started to scream and scream. They caught her running down St. George Street like some kind of crazy, and it was days before she came out of it. I mean, it can be freaky, that kind of thing; it scares me.”

“Aw, I know that kid; she was just having a bad trip.”

“No, you’re right, it can really blow your mind. One of the psych professors told a guy I know – you mess around with the subconscious and it can like trigger some kind of latent psychosis. No kidding, that chick spent a month after that locked up in Queen Street.”

“And couldn’t tell the difference from Vic College, I bet.”

There was laughter and several people began to talk at once. Just then a bat fluttered in through the open window and began to blunder clumsily against the walls and the ceiling. There was a general outcry from the girls. Various people flapped things at it to drive it out again, but these attempts only terrified it into swooping wildly around the room.

“Let me out of here,” shrieked Karen, clutching her perm.

“Don’t be dumb, they don’t get in your hair. That’s an old wives’ tale,” someone told her, but she disappeared, saying, “I believe it, I
believe
it.” Several other girls went out with her. A Japanese boy began to swat at the creature with a folded magazine.

“Oh, don’t, you’ll hurt it,” I protested. “Hold on a second – let it settle somewhere, and I’ll catch it.”

We waited a minute or two; then the bat lighted, clinging with its small claws to the top of the curtains. Having plucked off my shoes, I nipped up onto the sofa and with a vigorous swoop captured the beast. It struggled in my grasp, and its mouth stretched wide to let out a high, hissing little shriek of fear. Its agonized pulsing filled my hand. It tried to bite me with needle-sharp teeth.

“Look at that mean face, man,” somebody said, stepping back.

“No, they’re perfectly harmless. Better than that – they eat mosquitoes. Let me put it out quickly – I shouldn’t hold it like this, the tribe might reject it or something, for smelling of people.” One or two of them gave me an odd look at this, but nobody interfered when I leaned well out of the window and released the bat into the warm air that smelled of city dust and decaying leaves. It disappeared with a flick into the darkness. I wondered where it would go, and whether it would remember its invasion of another world; whether by some freak of taste it might have taken a fancy to living in the light, and might try to come in again, welcome or no.

By then it was well after one in the morning, and people began to drift toward the door for home. Absently I returned any goodnights that came my way. Thinking about tomorrow’s nine-o’clock lecture in chemistry, and my pile of new textbooks, I hugged a delicious anticipation. Tomorrow the adventure would really start. The long, empty preamble of my childhood would be over at last.

When the three of us were left alone, I began to pick up some of the party débris, but they said, “Forget it, Anne; not your first night. Tomorrow we’ll work out a system, but tonight we’ll clean up. You go get some sleep.”

“Well, thanks … goodnight, then.”

But I was too wound up to sleep, even after unpacking all my books and other belongings. In the kitchen just down the hall, Bonnie and Karen clattered dishes and laughed. Outside in the sultry September air a late tram ground along its track; cars squealed at intersections; a
TV
movie blattered. The apartment was full of unfamiliar smells – fried rice, beer, toasted cheese, and a sweetish kind of smoke. I lay on my back and tried to doze, but the room seemed terribly hot, even with the window wide open. No wonder; hopping up, I discovered that the radiator was sizzling. The place was even hotter than the Don Mills apartment Max and Billie had just moved into. But she adored central heating, while I found it oppressive.

Suddenly I felt a qualm that could only be an absurd kind of homesickness. I wondered, not for the first time, why Max had been the first to suggest I find a room or share digs downtown instead of staying with them. “You won’t want to waste a couple of hours every day on buses,” he said. “Besides, it will be a hundred times more fun for you, being on your own,” added Billie. I agreed entirely with both of them, and yet … well, it was very late, and I was tired. Once more I tried to settle down, but the room was so unbearably stuffy that I finally got up and opened the door, hoping a little cooler air might find its way in. Back in bed, I turned on my side and curled up, only to find that the conversation of Karen and Bonnie in the kitchen was now too close for comfort. Especially since it was soon apparent they were talking about me.