The Romantic (15 page)

Abel taps out a beat on the bedpost and then stops and looks at his hand as if startled by its dexterity. He has told me he still occasionally “fools around” on the piano, but whenever I’m here the lid is down and there are books and an ashtray on top. “Yeah,” he says. “Every once in a while I pray.”

“To God?”

“No. No, not God.”

“To who, then?”

“To the ether, I guess.”

“What do you say?”

“Give me faith.”

“What else?”

“That’s it. Give me faith.”

“In what?”

“Faith in whatever is happening.”

“Why don’t you ask for strength?” In one form or another we’ve been having this argument for years. Me on the side of fighting, him on the side of surrendering.

“God would know you need strength,” he says,“if His plan is for you to survive. If that’s not His plan, it’s faith you need. You need it anyway.”

“Except you don’t believe in God.”

“No, I don’t.”

From upstairs comes a scream.

Abel looks at the ceiling. “Okay,” he says,“I do.” He smiles.

I won’t smile back. “So what do you believe in, then? Other than giving up.”

“Giving
in.”

“To weakness,” I say miserably. I don’t even have the satisfaction of offending him. You can’t offend him with personal insults, other than in the roundabout way of signalling you’re upset. “Just giving in to what comes easiest.”

“Giving in to what is.”

“Oh, come on. What is, is what you decide it should be.”

“Did you decide to be born? To be a girl?”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“But those are the facts of your life. They are what is. Did you decide you’d have a mother who’d walk out on you?
Did you decide you and I would live down the street from each other? Did you—?” He falters.

Did I decide I would get pregnant? Was that the next question?

Maybe not, but a list of the big events in my life is bound to invoke the ones we try not to talk about. As he must have just realized. “I decided I would
punish
you,” I say. “I decided to act as badly as I felt.”

He frowns. I can’t offend him but I can hurt him.

He leans toward the desk, careful not to disturb the cats, opens the drawer and pulls out the cigar box in which he keeps his tobacco pouch and a few emergency joints. On the bed, using the surface of the box, he starts to roll a cigarette. He has the bowed back of an old man. The trembling of his hands, because it seems sure to defeat him, makes a performance of the activity.

“Did you decide to be an alcoholic?” I ask.

He smiles. “Was I born an alcoholic, did I achieve alcoholism or was alcoholism thrust upon me?”

“Why do you joke about it?”

“I don’t know if I made any conscious decision. I don’t think I did.”

“You’ve decided to kill yourself, though.”

“No.”

“All right, you’ve decided to die.” When he offers no response, I say,“You’ve decided not to live. By not saving yourself, you’ve decided not to live.”

He gets the cigarette lit. “I haven’t decided anything,” he says, looking at the ceiling. The woman is moaning now, or singing.

“There’s one thing you
have
decided,” I say. “Which is to let the people who love you suffer.”

He looks down and strokes Flo’s head.

“It’s true,” I say.

“I don’t want that.”

“Are you happy?”

“It isn’t a question of happiness or unhappiness.”

“Then what
is
it a question of?”

He shrugs.

“Oh,” I say. “Right. Giving in. We’re back to that. You know what I think? I think it’s a question of your wanting to drink no matter what. You don’t want to stop, so you’re not going to. It doesn’t make any difference what I say, what your parents say, what the doctors say. You don’t care. You
can’t care.
You’re an addict.”

“Maybe.” He sighs. “Maybe that’s it.”

“Okay,” I say. “Good. Now we’re getting somewhere.”

No, we aren’t. If he can agree with me so readily, then I don’t agree with myself. This could just be him surrendering on another front: giving up trying to explain. Giving up, at least temporarily, his own complicated ideas of himself.

“I’m going to do it,” I tell Alice when we arrive at my locker.

She nods, tight-lipped. “When?”

“This morning, I guess. Now. Why not? I haven’t eaten anything yet today.”

“Are you sure you feel up to it?”

“I’m okay. I need a bottle.” I glance around as if there might be one lying in the hall.

She opens her lunch bag and extracts a jam jar filled with mashed potatoes. “Here,” she says in a low voice. “Empty it in the washroom. Clean it really well with soap and then rinse away every last smidgen of the soap with hot water and then dry it with a paper towel. It should be as sterile and dry as possible. If I were you, I’d wait until after the bell. You don’t want anyone seeing.”

I take the jar. Again, she has astonished me. I feel like a novice spy being briefed by the head of the agency.

“Oh, God,” I say. “What if I’m pregnant?”

“Not so loud!”

“I’ll have to have an abortion. I’ll have to go to that Dr. Jekyll guy in Buffalo.” According to Nola MacDougall, a girl in my home-room class whose cousin has been pregnant at least twice, there’s a mad-scientist doctor in Buffalo who will give you an abortion for next to nothing because he needs fetuses for his experiments.

‘You won’t have to do any such thing,” Alice says, close to anger. “Don’t think that way. All you have to think about right now is scouring that jar, doing your business in it and taking it to the drug store. Okay, how much money do you have?”

I dig through my purse and find my wallet. Five dollars and fifty-five cents.

“That might not be enough.” She snaps open her purse, removes her wallet, unzips a pocket behind the empty credit-card section and withdraws a folded ten-dollar bill. “Take it. No, take it. Just in case. You can pay me back later. I’ll go to the office and tell them you were feeling poorly and went home.”

Only now, at the prospect of deception, do her cheeks redden.

“I’ll tell them,” I offer.

“No, no, no. They’ll phone your house and ask Mrs. Carver to come pick you up. Oh, gosh, I hope they believe me and don’t phone anyway. But it’s true, isn’t it? You
are
feeling poorly.” She squares her shoulders. “Well, I’ll just have to
make
them believe me, that’s all there is to it.”

Parker’s Drug Store is in a plaza about a half mile north of the school, behind a block of high-rise apartments. Walking there, I start fretting about the jam jar tipping and leaking all over my purse. I take it out, wrap it in Kleenex and hold it in my hand. If I’m pregnant what will they find in the urine? I imagine some kind of marine life, not sperm but a corrupt offshoot. For my seventh birthday my mother bought me a goldfish that I called Judy Garland and carried from the store in a clear plastic bag. I am now reminded of this. We
had Judy Garland only a couple of weeks before she slipped down the drain while my mother was cleaning the bowl. “She’ll be happier in the sewers,” my mother said. “Who wants to live in a goldfish bowl anyway?”

“A goldfish,” I sobbed.

“Judy Garland was going round the bend,” my mother said.

My mother’s name—Grace Hahn—is the one I give to the pharmacist.

“Telephone number?” he says.

“Oh, I’ll wait.”

The pharmacist (Mr. Parker?) looks like Liberace. It’s hardly reassuring that the verdict should be left in the hands of a liver-spotted old man wearing a rust-coloured toupée and lipstick. Or am I hallucinating? He slaps a label on the jam jar. “Two hours.”

“I’d like the quick service, if that’s all right.”

“Two hours is the quick service.”

I wait in a donut shop across the road from the plaza. I order a Coke float but can’t drink it because my stomach is still queasy. “Please God,” I pray, although I’m no longer sure what it is I want. To be pregnant is an event, a crisis. It is either a trip to Buffalo or Abel and me living together. Not to be pregnant is going back to my empty life before the summer, emptier for containing no hope and no boy, not even Tim Todd.

The waitress has a sympathetic, motherly manner. She calls me sweetie. Maybe she know’s why I’m here, maybe this is where all the pregnancy-test girls wait out their two hours. There is a
Miss Chatelaine
magazine on the counter,
and I leaf through it, page after page of beautiful, happy, unpregnant models. I try to read an article called “Looking Super on a Shoe String” but keep getting distracted by the architecture of the letters, the needless dots above the i’s and j’s, the gaping c’s and u’s, the alien, insolent z’s and all the words in this article that start with z: zingy, zip,
zest.
When the two hours are up I return to the drug store, certain that the worst is going to happen. Except I still don’t know what the worst is.

The pharmacist says nothing, just hands me a receipt with “Positive” written across it.

I expel a relieved breath. So it must be that I don’t want a baby after all. “Thank you,” I say.

“Positive,” he says,“means you’re pregnant.”

“Pardon?”

‘You’re pregnant.”

For a moment, owing to his toupée and unnaturally red lips, I think he’s toying with me. “But positive—”

“Means you’re pregnant.”

“Are you … Is it ever wrong?”

His hound-dog eyes look me up and down. “Not when it’s positive.”

A moment later, made weak in the knees by a boy at the cash register who, from the back anyway, could be Abel, I decide to go to Vancouver and tell him. Spring it on him, face to face. If I’ve somehow scared him away, then my belly—I push it out and already it seems enormous—then
this
should scare him back.

I leave the plaza almost happy. I’m going to see Abel. My earlier misgivings (he’ll marry me only out of duty, I’ll be
stuck in his basement) I don’t revive. I picture Mrs. Richter cooing at the bundle in her arms. I picture Abel playing Brahms’ lullaby on the piano. I even picture giving birth, insofar as I envision thrashing my head on a white pillow while Abel paces in an adjoining room. I’ll have to quit school, of course. The thought exhilarates me. Goodbye, Maureen Hellier and her cohorts. Adios, chemistry, geography.

Since it’s too early to go home, I head for Matas Parkette. The back of the bench I sit on is so scored with initials and hearts it’s like grille work. When Abel and I were kids I wanted him to carve our initials into the magnolia behind his house, but he wouldn’t take a knife to a tree. I feel heartened, remembering this. Light funnels along the grass, and everywhere black squirrels—the lucky kind—leap like frogs, and this also gives me hope.

I devise my travel plans.

The money should be no problem. In my bank account I have over two thousand dollars, more than half of it deposited by my father for my university education. Provided I can reserve a seat on the Saturday-morning flight, which is the one Abel recommended back when we were talking about my visiting him at Christmas, I’ll arrive around nine in the morning Vancouver time, before he has left the house. I’ll phone from the airport and have him pick me up. No, I’d better take a taxi—Mr. Richter might already be out somewhere in the car. We’ll spend Saturday together, and part of Sunday. What will I tell my father? Oh, anything. Some story about going to visit the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa with my civics class. Such an outing is, in fact, scheduled for the spring. He’ll be all for it. I’ll say I
can save money on the chartered bus to the airport if he gives me a lift.

At the milk store in Matas Plaza I change a quarter for two dimes and a nickel and then use the pay phone outside the restaurant. A few quick calls and I’ve made my flight reservations. Next, I go to my bank, two doors down, and without raising an eyebrow the teller hands me,
me—
a strung-out-looking hippy girl—seven hundred and fifty dollars in ten-and twenty-dollar denominations. Mrs. Carver would say I have the black squirrels to thank. Maybe so. But I also feel that everything going so smoothly is a sign I’m on the right track. Less than four days from now I’ll be with Abel. He’ll put a hand on my belly.

“A little you in there,” I’ll say. I’m already sure it’s a boy.

I now know that most people have to drink hard for at least a couple of decades before they’re in real danger of killing themselves. Of course, you can die at any time from blacking out at the wheel of your car. You can stumble around a ravine until you fall down a slope and break your neck.

Abel had been drinking for only nine years when an ulcer in his stomach ruptured and he hemorrhaged. He did try to stop drinking. It was his decision—nobody pushed him—to live at the treatment clinic, and he stayed there for two months. But as soon as he checked himself out, he headed for the liquor store, and six months later, while driving his taxi, he hemorrhaged again.

He would have gone into shock if his passenger hadn’t taken over the wheel and raced through red lights getting him to the hospital. The Richters and I only heard about it once he was back in his apartment and then only because the passenger, who happened to be an eighty-year-old retired police chief, told his story to the
Toronto Star
as part of an article about heroic senior citizens. We had assumed Abel was off visiting some French-Canadian friend from the clinic. I’m not saying he lied to us. He took care never to lie outright.

Not even to himself. Better than we did, he knew his symptoms, and his odds. At the clinic he’d read all the
pamphlets, attended all the sessions, and when he was still strong enough to drive a taxi, he spent part of every afternoon taking notes at the University of Toronto’s medical library. You couldn’t get him to talk about those notes, but one day I looked at some of them (he’d gone to the bathroom, and I pulled a few pages out from under a stack of musical scores) and what I read was “life-threatening complication of portal hypertension,” “black tarry stools,” “convulsions,” “poor prognosis.” On the second page was a list of words: “bewilderment, denial, fear, anger, grief, mistrust, aversion, apathy, alienation.” When he returned to the room I held up the list and asked,“The range of your feelings?”