The Romantic (13 page)

I can’t phone him, I won’t. There’s still time. It’s only five o’clock in Vancouver. He could have got held up at school or at a piano lesson.

I reread his two letters, for clues, for hope. They just
upset me more. How can he say I’m not alone and shouldn’t be lonely and then abandon me? The “Eternity” poem now seems to be a warning with all its flying off and fleeing and diverging. Why, though? Why would he want to flee? Or maybe it isn’t that, maybe when we’re so far apart he can’t hold on to me somehow. Out of sight, out of mind.

I return the letters to the bedside table and get up and go to the window just as the streetlights come on. After a few minutes a moth appears beneath the light on our property. It circles, ascending. “Don’t, don’t,” I think. But up it goes. When it hits the lamp it drops almost to the ground, recovers itself and starts another climb. I know, because Abel told me, that moths navigate by the moon, and so big moonlike objects tend to throw them off course. On summer evenings we used to capture lost moths in his butterfly net and release them down in the ravine. Once, to rescue a luna moth that had been bashing itself against the lamp for at least a half-hour, we solicited the help of my father, his long arm. “Blind faith,” my father observed as the three of us stood looking up and waiting for the moth to fall within reach.

Now, watching this moth, I think that maybe it isn’t a matter of faith. Or of hope, or even guesswork. Maybe it’s just that certain moths decide to smash themselves to death. Who knows why? Or maybe what’s going on is that moths don’t understand shades of resemblance. To them, if a thing looks enough like another thing, it
is
that other thing. All lights are the moon. The moth is all other moths, and all other moths are the moth. There is one human, and he is everywhere.

There is one human, and he is nowhere.

Why doesn’t he phone?

The next morning I throw up again. Quietly this time, into my bedside wastepaper basket. In the bathroom I rinse out the basket, then undress and step into the shower. I look down at my body. “Not
as
thin,” Abel said about the girl he dated who looked like me. Was I wrong to take that as a compliment? I feel my breasts. They seem heavier, but maybe not, I can’t tell. They’re a bit sore, though. I move my hands down to my belly. Sdii flat. I can’t be pregnant. Since Abel and I were together I’ve had two periods and, besides, I’m fairly certain that morning sickness starts earlier than this. I’m a nervous wreck, that’s all. Nervous wrecks throw up.

But what if I
ami
The thought sends another wave of nausea through me, pure fear. I imagine quitting school, the scorn, my father wild-eyed and helpless, Aunt Verna arriving to hammer together a crib and be the midwife. I imagine dropping the bombshell on Abel: “Sorry to bother you, it’s just that I thought you should know …” Would I move out to Vancouver and marry him, then? Set up house in his basement, the two of us and the baby? And Lenny? No, we’d get rid of Lenny. Abel would keep going to school while I hung around with Mrs. Richter, chopping cabbage, planting tomatoes, as in my old fantasies. It wouldn’t be so bad. Abel and I would be together, at least.

Whether he wanted me or not.

I start to cry. He doesn’t want me. He’d pretend he did, out of decency, and pity. He might even
love
the damn baby.

I think of myself as having no friends at Greenwoods Collegiate, but that’s probably not fair to Alice Keystone, the girl I walk to and from school with. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, because our lunch hours coincide, we eat together in the cafeteria.

Alice gives the impression of being a worrier until you discover that she isn’t constantly wringing her hands, she’s moisturizing them. The family-sized jar of Jergens lotion she carries in her purse (along with the pickle jars of leftovers that hold her lunch) would weigh down a less robust girl. Not that she’s big, she’s sturdy: thick calves and wide hips, about my height. “I can’t stand touching paper if my skin gets too dry,” she told me shortly after we got to know each other. Before then I’d thought she was vain about her tapered fingers. It turns out she’s far from vain; she seems to have no idea how pretty she is. You look at her—her round blue eyes, small white face—and see a doll. When a teacher asks her a question, a red circle the size of a silver dollar materializes on each of her cheeks and her resemblance to a doll becomes even more pronounced.

Our understanding, Alice’s and mine, is that we have almost nothing in common aside from our unpopularity and that this glaring fact will go unmentioned between us. I wouldn’t mind talking about it, gloating over it sometimes,
but I’m fairly certain Alice would be crushed by even the most oblique suggestion, from me anyway, that she’s an outcast. Of course, she must know that she is. I know lam, and why. People think I’m weird and sarcastic. Alice herself has said a few times,“Oh, you’re so sarcastic!” Let it burst out after I’ve made a remark as self-evident and unscathing as “That girl sure is tall.”

I try to be careful around her. Not only is she easily scandalized, she’s also deeply religious, a junior Sunday-school teacher and a volunteer Bible reader at the old-folks’ home. When I was dating Tim Todd (she referred to him as my fella: “There goes your fella”) I would talk about what movie he and I had seen on Saturday night or what his tropical fish were up to, but I would no more have told her that he had touched my breasts than I would have told my father. Even to say “breasts” would have been going too far.

She lives only two blocks from me, in a newer part of the subdivision, and yet we rarely run into each other on weekends or holidays. This past summer I caught sight of her just once. I was waiting for a bus to go to my job, and her father’s station wagon pulled up at the red light and there she was in the passenger seat, the baby in her lap, her three little sisters in the middle seat and, behind them, in the back, her little brothers. Alice was holding the baby’s wrists to make it clap. She seemed to be singing to it. From what she has told me, she’s her mother’s right hand, she’s the one who puts all those kids to bed and dresses them for church. “What drudgery,” I thought as the car drove away. By then I’d had sex with Abel and could hardly imagine having had anything to do with somebody so straitlaced.

But when the first day of school came round and from my living-room window I saw her waiting at the bottom of the street, I didn’t sneak out the back door, partly because I was working at being a nicer person, partly because I thought that my new look would come between us anyway. It occurred to me she must have figured we were of one mind concerning fashion in that, up until a few months ago, everything I wore used to belong to my mother and was therefore at least ten years out of date. But this hardly constituted an expression of taste. It was laziness, practicality, it was me saying to my father,“She’s never coming back,” and it was also, I suppose, a reluctant appreciation of the fine fabrics and designs. Alice’s clothes were
deliberately
out of date, not to mention new, cheap, homemade and spinsterish: sack-like dresses, high-necked cotton blouses and full skirts past the knee, all plain pastel, or if there was a pattern, it was some wallpaper motif of horses or windmills. Her one concession to style, and even that looked old-fashioned, was her teased hair. Neither of us wore make-up.

Now here I was traipsing toward her in a tie-dyed tank top and a skirt that barely covered my rear end. Bare legs, no bra, and I wore leather sandals and a navel-long necklace of wooden beads I’d bought from a street vendor downtown. I had on lipstick, pale pink, almost white, and black eyeliner so thick that at breakfast my father, usually wary of provoking me, steeled himself into asking,“Don’t you think you should tone that down a little for school?”

“I toned it
up
for school,” I said with less annoyance than I felt, fantasizing that Abel could hear how tolerant I was
being. But my father kept casting me alarmed looks, kept palming back his oiled, thinning hair, and I couldn’t resist muttering,“Some people are so uptight.”

“Talk about uptight,” I thought now, as I watched Alice clutch her purse to her chest. “Hi!” I called. She lifted one hand.

When I reached her she said,“I hardly even recognized you.”

“I’ve gone through some changes. I’m not going out with Tim any more, for one thing.”

“Oh. I didn’t know.”

“It was never very serious.”

“What happened? If you don’t mind my asking.”

I hadn’t intended to go into detail, but the sight of her exasperated me, her matronly teacup-patterned dress, her bouffant hairdo
(she
hadn’t changed), and I found myself wanting to give her a shock. “Oh,” I said,“I ran into my old boyfriend at a party and we ended up smoking pot and making out on the neighbour’s lawn, and then Tim came along, I was so stoned I forgot he was even there, and he caught us rolling around half naked.”

I walked off, sure she’d stay put. But no, here she was, trotting up alongside me. “By rolling around,” she said, not looking at me, cheeks aflame,“do you mean what I think you mean?”

“We went all the way.”

She sucked in her breath.

“It’s not like it was a one-night stand or anything,” I said more gently. “Abel and I—that’s his name, Abel, it’s
German—we’re in love. We’ve been in love ever since I was eleven.” My voice thickened to be telling somebody this pure, true thing. “Seven years.”

Alice’s expression eased. “That’s a long time.”

We didn’t speak the rest of the way to school. “Bye for now,” I said once we were inside the front doors, adding “for now” only to be civil, as I had no doubt that our friendship really was finished. I felt her big, uneasy eyes on my back as I went down the hall to my home room. I felt other eyes as well. “Is that Louise Kirk?” Everybody thinking it so loudly I could hear.

Still, no one talked to me, other than to say hi, ask how I was doing, the mechanical acknowledgements I’d always gotten. But the pity, the condescension, that was gone. Maureen Hellier, passing me, turned right around to keep gaping. So did a couple of boys, sliding their eyes up and down my body. For the first time in my life I knew what it felt like to hold a little power in my hands. My mother used to say, ‘You are what you wear.” She was right.

And I was wrong. About Alice, that is. After school she called “Wait up!” as I was crossing the parking lot, and when she was beside me she started right in with a report on who else she’d noticed dressed like a hippy: “Beverley Bowman was wearing, I guess you’d call it a psychedelic skirt, did you see her? Down to the floor, all sorts of swirling colours. Very eye-catching. And Steve Plath, his hair is longer than yours, I’ll bet. It must have grown like crazy over the summer. He had on a kind of Indian bracelet, you know, those woven straps with the coloured beads. And then that fella who plays the drums … oh, gosh, what’s his
name? Brent something. Brent Coren, that’s it. He was wearing one of those Beatles jackets with the collars that stand up.”

“A Nehru jacket,” I said, stunned. Who’d have guessed that not only would she completely absorb the shock of how I looked and what I’d told her but that a few hours later she’d be delivering a bulletin apparently meant to spur me on.

“It was really very smart,” she said. “Gold buttons and red brocade trim.”

We began walking.

“I bet you all end up chumming around together,” she said.

“I’ll bet we don’t.”

Funny she came out with that, though. Since the night of the party I’d occasionally fantasized about being part of a group of like-minded people, but I accepted that there was something incurably offputting about my personality, and however agreeable I tried to be I’d still end up irritating everybody. Anyway, this outfit I had on, my make-up, they weren’t intended to be lures. They were me saying,“I have Abel. Who needs
you?”

“I just thought …” Alice said. “Birds of a feather …”

It dawned on me that she was seeking reassurance. “I don’t want friends,” I said. “I mean, I don’t want
more
friends.”

I wanted Abel. Even though we were together I still tended to think of my love for him and my loneliness as inextricable. He had always been the real difference between me and the rest of the world, the real tragic loss in
my life next to which the
supposed
tragic loss, the one that garnered all the pity, counted for nothing.

“I’ve never been one for the social whirl myself,” Alice said. She was going after her skin cream, slipping her hand in her purse, unscrewing the lid, scooping out a dab, screwing the lid back on, all without breaking stride. She cleared her throat. “Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”

“What?”

“Well …” She briskly rubbed her hands. “It’s about you and your fella, you know, Abel, about the two of you.” Out popped the red circles.

“About us what?” I thought I knew where she was headed but I wanted to see if she’d actually say it.

“I’m sticking my nose in and I won’t blame you if you tell me to mind my own beeswax. It’s just that my mother has had seven kids and I know how darned easy it is …”

She turned on me such a stricken face I decided to rescue her. “It’s all right, Alice. He lives in Vancouver. We only had the one night together, and I have a feeling I’m not going to get pregnant over the phone.”

“Vancouver? I didn’t realize—”

“Anyway, I have no intention of being stuck with a baby.”

She released a shaky laugh. “Oh, I love babies. But they’re oodles of work, believe you me. Oh, gosh!”

A few months before he died, Abel told me he had never believed in God or heaven or any kind of metaphysical salvation, but I found that hard to believe considering what a fanatical optimist he’d always been. “Don’t worry,” he’d say, when panic was the only sane response. “Don’t get yourself down,” when you were scraping your soul off the pavement. Right up until the last days of his life he tried to assure me that we’d both be okay.

“You
won’t be,” I said. “A dead person is not okay.”