The Romantic (18 page)

Light shrieks in through the gap. Over the noise of traffic and ventilation equipment I think I hear him talking. I strain to listen but the voice goes silent. I tiptoe forward and peek around the frame.

He is about ten feet away, across a narrow alley. His back is to me and he embraces a girl. The girl’s arms dangle. She holds a half-eaten apple. Next to her head (which I can’t see, only a plank of ash-blond hair at Abel’s left shoulder), hooked on something protruding from the wall there, is a red cape. A siren howls nearby and I think she must have fainted or hurt herself and Abel is propping her up until help arrives.

I am puzzled by her managing to keep hold of the apple. No, there it goes, she drops it. Both her hands slip under Abel’s shirt. He bends his head. “He’s kissing her,” I think, still without comprehension. He begins to stroke her hair and my own scalp tingles and it’s as if from this sensation, as if from extrasensory signals, that I finally grasp what I’m looking at.

He’s
kissing
her.

I step outside, onto the stoop. His hand moves down to her waist. How can he not feel how close I am? I could be anybody: an axe murderer, a heavenly host. I am dying behind his back and he has no idea.

There is then a moment like death, a pop in the atmosphere, and I believe that even if he looked around he wouldn’t see me. I go back inside, down the corridor into the Babel and cigarette smoke, the struggling candles. I put a ten-dollar bill, more than five times what I owe, on my table. “Is that yours?” a girl says as I start to walk away. She is pointing at my overnight case. I pick it up and leave the building. Where should I go? Anywhere. Home. I start walking east.

I’ve always thought of them as angels because they’re beautiful and young and delicate, although I say this without ever having seen them straight on, only glimpses at the edges of my vision. I say it, what’s more, having suspected for years that they are auras brought on by my migraine headaches.

When they arrive—drifting down like scarves—I sense a purity and a kind of indifference, a strange emptiness as if they were moths drawn by the atmosphere surrounding me rather than by me specifically. Only the one I call the Angel of Love seems to have any stake in my affairs.

She is both brighter and wispier than the others. She first turned up about a month before the Richters moved to Greenwoods, by which time I’d been seeing angels for years and I took for granted, almost, that they were a hard-to-believe phenomenon akin to germs and the sound of dog whistles. I had a feeling I wasn’t the only person they showed themselves to, and so for all that I hoped to attract Mrs. Richter by virtue of my negative charms—scrawniness, unkemptness, friendlessness, motherlessness—I appreciated that pity can’t compete with enchantment and that if
she
could see the Angel of Love I would be lit up in the general irresistible glow. This would also help the angel, who required Mrs. Richter to love me in order to come fully
alive. With only my love to draw on, she drifted and was flimsy.

Not that I ever thought about her too directly. I never spoke of her. She was unspeakable, a nearly imponderable subject, the frail nucleus of love. But
there,
in whatever lustrous or sorry or refurbished state. The moment my passion leapt from Mrs. Richter to Abel, she vanished (a folding of wings, a dissolving), to be instantly replaced by another, who, with the enhanced sensitivity of a newer version, smashed into houses or glided on air currents depending on how he and I treated each other.

That intricate scrap of grace fluttering between us. I’d like to think of her as incapable of feeling pain, but I can’t.

I’m not so stupefied that I imagine I can walk all the way back to Toronto, though the idea has its epic, drastic appeal. I picture myself trudging up the Rockies, sleeping in caves, then slogging across the Prairies, through walls of wheat. I get lost in a corn row. I give birth in a barn, in the hay, the cattle are lowing and dipping their big slab heads over my stall.

To hold my course, this one in Vancouver, I rely on the sun and the occasional street sign with East in its name. I have a sense of going in and out of radio frequencies as the mood of one street gives way to the next and as certain houses and stores clamour with the possibility of a life that might have been mine. Might still be mine. I could live in that clapboard bungalow, put up with the canary-yellow trim and red mailbox that says “
THE BINGLES
” in cockeyed yellow letters, be the wife of strapping Mr. Bingle over there with his brush cut and hedge clippers. That girl in the grocery store, the cashier spinning dreamily on her stool? I could be her.

When I finally stop walking, it isn’t because I’m tired, it’s because for some time I’ve been noticing blood oozing out of the open toes of my shoes, and the thought that this should concern me has become a distraction.

I look around. I’m in the middle of a block of shops that
are just now closing for the day. Behind me a woman turns a crank to roll in a green canvas awning. A man comes out of the neighbouring cigar store, tilts the wooden Indian back against his chest, lifts it off its pedestal and drags it inside like a hostage. I think of sitting on the vacated pedestal, then I spot the bench across the street, in front of Dory’s Five and Dime, and go over there. Taking off my shoes releases more blood than seems right. My feet are a mess: at least five open blisters on each one, and deep cuts around the big toes. I dab at the blood with Kleenex and when I’m out of Kleenex, I twist around to see if Dory’s is still open. The lights are off, but a lady in hair curlers is doing something behind the counter. I hobble to the door, knock on the glass. The lady squints in my direction.

“Do you sell Band-Aids?” I call.

“We’re closed!”

“I just need some Band-Aids! I’m bleeding!”

She slams shut the cash register and hurries toward the rear of the store.

I return to the bench, feeling bolts of pain now. There’s blood everywhere, a smeared trail to the door and back. What would Abel think? I wonder this casually, out of old, despondent habit. I imagine him walking by here a week from now, and even though the stains have darkened and almost worn away and everybody else passes them by, Abel, being Abel, takes an interest. “Human blood,” he says to whomever he’s with, that blond girl. The two of them try to figure out what happened: Somebody got stabbed or shot. A drunk fell and cracked open his skull.

I start to cry. I do it silently, although I’m making no
effort to be quiet. It’s as if I’ve been scoured out, the breath pouring straight through because of no internal organs to get snagged on. No bones, nothing.

“What did you do? Step on glass?”

I look up. It’s the lady from the store. Dory. Or maybe she’s
Mrs.
Dory. A tall, auburn-haired, ledge-bosomed woman in a navy shirtwaist dress that would have been fashionable fifteen years ago. And I was wrong about the rollers—that’s just how her hair is arranged, in Shirley Temple spools. She looks to be about fifty, maybe older.

“Those your shoes?” she says.

I wipe my nose on the back of my hand. “They don’t fit. They’ve rubbed my skin off.”

She shifts a paper bag to her other hand, the one holding her purse, and pulls a handkerchief out of her sleeve. “Here. Blow your nose.” The edges are lace. It looks more like a doily than a handkerchief. “Go ahead,” she says. “I’ve got a drawer of them at home.”

Her voice is penetrating without being loud, the severe, slightly beaten voice I associate with farm women. She starts extracting things from the bag. “I got you your BandAids,” she says. “And some iodine and cotton batting to clean yourself up with first.”

I put everything in my lap and reach for my purse. “How much do I owe you?”

“Oh, forget it. It’s all free samples.”

“Thank you.”

“I’d throw those shoes straight in the garbage if I were you.”

I look at my shoes, the howling red mouths of the toe-holes.
I fumble with the wrong end of the Band-Aid box.

“Here—” She moves my overnight case onto the sidewalk and sits herself down. “I’d better fix you up. If you do it wrong and get an infection, you could end up with gangrene. Give me that one,” indicating the foot nearest her.

There’s no question of objecting. I twist sideways and lift both feet onto the bench. She picks up my purse and hands it to me and says,“Tuck that in there,” and I realize that with my knees bent she can see my underpants. I shove the purse against my crotch. She tears off a wad of cotton batting and opens the bottie of iodine. She has long red fingernails you’d think would interfere with pushing cash-register keys. No wedding ring. “Brace yourself,” she says, then presses the wad to my big toe. “How’s that?”

“Fine.”

“Doesn’t sting?”

“A little.”

Only a little. I’ve gone dull and meek, and these sensations deepen as I watch her work. She seems to know what she’s doing, which end of the Band-Aid you tear, how to pull off the tabs simultaneously. Maybe she used to be a nurse, a statuesque, unflappable army nurse. “Talk to me, Dory,” the soldiers would beg, but she’s no talker. Other than asking,“How in the world did you walk on these feet?”—a question I can’t answer—she says nothing until she’s done and then she says,“I take it you don’t have another pair of shoes in that suitcase there.”

I shake my head.

“You’d better have mine, then.”

I look at her feet. Astonishingly, she has on the black
leather ballet-type slippers that are just now coming into style and that I would have bought instead of the pumps except I didn’t think they were appropriate for out of doors. I say I can’t take her shoes and she says sure I can, she has another pair just like them at home, and no—she sees me going for my purse—she doesn’t want my money. She asks where I’m headed to.

“The airport.” Eventually, I suppose, I am.

“I’ll give you a lift. It’s not so far from where I live.” She then peels off the slippers and puts them on my feet, and I’m so swathed in Band-Aids they almost fit.

“They’re nice,” I say.

“My new discovery.” She tightens the laces. “Easy on the bunions, and I’m lucky my arches don’t need support. Unlike certain other parts.” She laughs—a one-note squawk that jolts me like gunshot.

We go to a lane behind the store. She carries my overnight case and strides blithely over the gravel in her nylon-stockinged feet. I hobble behind her, carrying the bloody shoes and my purse. When we get to her car she tells me to put the shoes on the floor, not to ruin my skirt. During the drive she says very little, which is fine with me. I’m holding up shakily. Even if I weren’t, I’d feel no obligation to make small talk. She is a familiar presence: a cross between Aunt Verna, Alice and even (the laugh and fingernails) my mother. Now and then she alerts me to her next move—“I think I’ll take Marine Drive”—as if I know the city, but she doesn’t ask me my name. Or where I’m flying to, until we arrive at the airport and then she asks only so that she can pull up in front of the right airline entrance.

“Are you sure about the shoes?” I say, opening my door.

“Oh, forget it.”

“Well, thanks a lot. You’ve been so nice to me. I don’t know what I’d have—” I swallow down a sob.

She pats my leg. “Whatever’s the matter,” she says,“whatever it is, it’ll get better.”

“Not necessarily,” I think as I limp into the airport. “There’s no guarantee.” It’s as if she were delivering a message from Abel, whose faith in my resilience has, it appears, erased any guilt he may have felt about not phoning me.

Where does faith like that come from? How do some people live their entire lives trusting everything to turn out for the best? “The darkest hour is always before the dawn,” they like to point out. Even if that’s true, so what? Nature isn’t the same as human nature. They say,“Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Really? Tell that to a starving child.

Or at least clarify it, say,“Whatever doesn’t kill you
might
make you stronger if it doesn’t kill you.”

And yet.

And yet, in the women’s washroom, I shut myself in a stall and sit crying on the toilet, flushing to muffle the sound and telling myself,“It’ll get better, it’ll get better,” and eventually a thin cloud of optimism falls over me. I leave the washroom and sit on a bench where I look at people with a tenderness I don’t remember ever having felt before. “They were all babies once,” I think. When the bleakness strikes (after seeing one too many couples kiss each other goodbye) I return to the stall and cry until another cloud of
optimism falls, then I sit on the same bench and get back to watching people lovingly. At some point I search out the restaurant and buy a grilled-cheese sandwich and a glass of root beer. The shaggy hair of an elderly man seated several tables away makes me think of the mad-scientist doctor in Buffalo. I keep forgetting about him and the possibility of having an abortion. It’s a lifeline, but a gory one, like being thrown somebody’s intestines.

Around ten o’clock, with the airport almost empty, I lie on a bench and try to sleep. I can’t get comfortable. I go outside to the taxi stand and ask a driver to take me to a nearby hotel. He takes me across town to a pink-stuccoed place called the Water’s Edge. “Everywhere close is all booked up,” he says.

I don’t bother asking how he would know. I say,“Are we by the ocean?”

He waves his cigarette at the passenger window. “Ocean’s that way.”

The Water’s Edge is all booked up, too. “Except for the ridiculously overpriced not to mention hideous honeymoon suite,” says the effeminate clerk. “And I don’t suppose you’d be wanting that.”

“As it happens,” I say,“I would.”

He turns the register toward me and hands me the pen. “Don’t say you weren’t warned.”

I write my mother’s name. “Is it an ocean view?”

“Oh, brother. Here we go.”

I wait.

“Oh, it’s not you. It’s the owner. His name is Waters, James Waters, so in his deranged mind he had every right to
give this dump its misleading name. Can you believe the gall of the man? People who’ve booked from out of town, some of them just blow up. At me, of course: ‘What do you mean, five miles from the ocean!’ I could just shoot him in the head. Many times.” He hands me my key. “Top floor. Room ten-fourteen. You can’t miss it—the door’s plastered in little red hearts. I do
not
recommend the full-service breakfast.”