The Romantic (26 page)

“My throat hurts sometimes.”

“I’m sure smoking helps.” I wring out the dishcloth. “How bad does it get?”

“Not too bad.”

Which I take to mean
really
bad. “How do you stand it? By drinking?”

“I tell myself there’s a portion of pain in the world, a daily portion, and it has to go somewhere. When I’m in pain, somebody else isn’t. A child dying of bone cancer in New Jersey. A man being tortured in Kampala. For the space of time that my throat burns, their pain lifts.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re a masochist.” I carry the bucket to the sink, dump out the water. “Would you drink some orange juice?” I ask this without hope.

But he cocks his head, intrigued. “Orange juice. Why not? The juice of an orange.”

His glass has flowers in it. I find a plastic measuring cup and use that.

“Orange juice in a measuring cup,” he says happily. I hold the cup to his mouth. He turns his head. “I’ll drink it later. Thanks.”

I set the cup on the table, between the flowers and ashtray, and look at my watch. Eight-thirty. I’m going to be late for work. It doesn’t matter, my boss is on holiday. I sit on the floor with my back against the bed, my shoulder against his calf. Outside the window, which is up by the ceiling, two pigeons strut back and forth. A truck rattles by.

“I could stay here forever,” he says.

I pat his foot.

But he doesn’t mean here with me, in this moment. “At the teetering point,” he goes on. “Knowing any second I could fall off the edge. The paradox is, if I knew I
had
forever, even a good chance of another six months, in my mind I’d be somewhere else.”

“You
could
have another six months,” I say helplessly. “More.”

“When you’re just about to take off, you look at everything for the last time, as if you could hold on to it somehow.”

“Stop it. You’re scaring me.”

“Everything is exactly what it is. Everything is …”

“What?” I say finally.

“Itself. Everything is itself.”

He sounds so captivated. There’s no retrieving him. I say,“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“The pigeons,” he says. “They’re not trees or cats or measuring cups. They’re pigeons. They moan, they make their flimsy nests, lay their white eggs. They aren’t right or wrong or important or unimportant or anyone’s name for them. Out of oblivion came these nameless
things.”

“And then came a name for them.”

“The snake in paradise. You say to yourself ‘pigeon’ and the pigeon before your eyes is corrupted by everything you know about pigeons. You see your
idea
of a pigeon.”

“Because you can’t help it. Because out of oblivion came a mouth. And vocal cords. And a brain.”

“And then one day the names drop away. They don’t matter. They don’t tell you anything.”

“What is
this?”
I take hold of his foot.

“My foot.”

I’ve missed his point. He isn’t disputing that things
have
names. “Your
cold bony
foot,” I say, letting it go. I twist around to look up at him. “Try harder. Okay? Be strong. Why can’t you be strong?”

“I’m not very good for you, am I?”

‘You’re horrible for me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Be infuriated.”

“Be like you.”

“That’s right. Be like me. Be exactly like me!”

Although I suspect Don Shaw knows it is over between us, everything is, including my job, I want to make sure he has no excuse for phoning me at home, so after rushing out of his apartment I head for the store.

I leave the lights off. (I can see clearly enough in the pulsing glow from the plumbing-supply store across the street, its eternally dripping neon tap.) I go to the counter, find a piece of paper and a pen and sit on the stool. Between my legs I’m still wet. The spicy smell of his cologne is on my clothes. I think of the way he looked when he came, that deathly grimace, and it seems so funny and horrible. How could he have been surprised that I ran out? I feel guilty but also a little used, more than justified. Overall I have an efficient, virtuous feeling, as if I’d cleaned out a closet.

What should I write? How about a rendition of my mother’s goodbye note? “I have gone, I am not coming back, Buddy knows how to work the adding machine.” Or,“The truth shall make you free.” Just that. Let him, who thinks he knows me so well, wonder.

In the end, I write: “Dear Don Shaw. I’ve decided to take your advice and ‘Live Dangerously.’ Sorry about leaving you in the lurch. Here’s my paycheque back as partial compensation. Goodbye and good luck. Best wishes, Madame Kirk. P.S. Last night was beautiful.”

The P.S. to compensate for the “best wishes.” Not even as a formality can I bring myself to write “love.” By “beautiful” I mean the night we walked through—the chicory flowers, the woman in the coffee shop. Of course, he’ll think I mean the sex. That’s all right.

I fold the note and put it on top of the ledger. Outside, after I’ve locked the door, I drop the keys through the mail slot. The jangle of them hitting the floor gives me a moment’s pause in which I see myself living with Don Shaw, married to him, stuck at home with our chubby, sod-haired children. Could I bear it? Probably, somehow. All my futures, including these first meagre samplings, must be bearable, it seems to me, if I can picture them.

In the middle of September, I find a place to live. A studio apartment on the top floor of a three-floor building and in a corner at the front, so there are windows on two sides. It’s not much bigger than the place Don Shaw tried to foist on me but it’s in a far better neighbourhood and close to a subway stop. It has more character, too: dark wainscotting; one of those old, round-shouldered refrigerators from the fifties. And a bed that drops from the wall when you open a pair of double doors. “A Murphy bed!” exclaims my father upon seeing it. He says its creator, William L. Murphy, also invented the grip in the hairpin, a comment that draws a scornful huff from Mrs. Carver, and I remember that her dead husband, the genius whose every idea got stolen out from under him, invented the electric curling iron.

The huff is telling. She used to be so nervous around my father, dashing out of rooms he ambled into, clutching her
heart when he exclaimed. Whether he realizes it or not, they are starting to act like a married couple, and if that leads them backwards into romance, I won’t mind. I’m already being mistaken for her daughter. On the day of the move, my landlord refers to her and my father as “your parents,” and I let the assumption ride. For the rest of the afternoon I find myself looking at her, this energetic little woman who is helping lug boxes into the elevator, and I think, as if I were the landlord, that you can see where I got my dark eyes from.

Anyway, thank God my father has someone at home. Though he watched me pack, my actual departure stuns him. Though I told him I had rented a U-Haul trailer to transport my dresser, desk, chair and the glass tea table from the basement, when he sees the trailer parked in the driveway, he says,“Now what do you suppose that’s doing there?” Only the Murphy bed perks him up. Otherwise he sighs and observes that I’m leaving the nest, striking out on my own, sallying forth into the big world. Twice he gets out his wallet and starts peeling off bills, and I push his hand away, telling him I’m fine, I have plenty of money. I have a job!

Not yet, I don’t. But I applied at a brokerage firm the Friday before and felt I made a good impression on the personnel manager, Miss Penn, a glum woman who, for most of the interview, sat turned toward the window, gazing out. That I barely passed the shorthand test was apparently not a concern. “Oh, well,” she said, dropping my transcription into the garbage pail. Also she spoke witheringly of my two competitors: a university graduate with “a chip on her shoulder the size of that typewriter” and a “love child” with “hair
out to here and dirty fingernails.” Still, I didn’t think much of my chances until, in answer to the question “Why do you want this job?” I came out with,“My aunt, who was like a mother to me, she worked in a brokerage firm”
(Was
this the reason? I wondered as I spoke), and Miss Penn, smiling wanly in profile, said,“Yeah, I had an aunt like that.”

She phones Thursday with the news. I’m to start on Monday. I use the time to practise taking dictation from newsreaders on the radio and to let down the Scotch-taped-up hems of my mother’s skirts and dresses, which I emptied out of her closet while my father looked on without comment (the most telling sign, so far, of a turn in his romantic affections). The man I am to work for, Mr. Fraser, is a senior partner whose secretary of thirty-seven years died after a long batde with cancer. I have some apprehension about filling her shoes but don’t think too much about it until Sunday night when I’m in bed and then I try to picture myself on the job and can’t get past turning on the typewriter. How many copies of a letter are you supposed to make? Do you use carbon paper or the photocopying machine? What is a stock, exactly? What kind of
thing?
And what’s the difference between a stock and a bond? Between a stenographer and a secretary, for that matter? I writhe around and the Murphy bed bounces on its thin metal legs and I start to worry that it’s going to flip back into the wall and crush me.

My illuminated bedside clock says ten to one. Ten to ten out West. I hate it that Abel is still so much with me that I half live on Vancouver time. I’ll be eating breakfast and think of him asleep. Around noon I’ll imagine him loping
off to school or sitting at the piano in his pyjamas, picking out some moody piece. I can’t stop doing this. It’s a form of obsessive, psychic voyeurism. No, it’s more active than that, more depraved, it’s me trying to control him through long-distance hypnosis. I veto sex and girls but not melancholy. The melancholy I exaggerate.

I get up and go into the kitchen to make myself a cup of warm milk and honey. Warily, keeping weil back (the only other time I used the stove I singed my hair), I turn on a burner. Flames fly up. I turn it down, but that just turns it right off. I turn it on again, and now there’s only hissing. I try another burner. More hissing. The pilot light, wherever that is, must be out. I turn everything off, including the kitchen light, leave the milk in the pot and go sit at my desk, on my only chair. The church clock across the street tolls the hour. I picture Abel sprawled on his chesterfield and listening to a record, something dismal and intellectual. Eric Satie. A phone rings next door. Five, six, seven rings before it stops. I look at my own phone. I chose a black model because white or pink—the alternatives—seemed too frivolous for the possible instrument of my undoing. It would be so easy to call him. Nobody to overhear, no incriminating Vancouver number turning up on my father’s bill.

I lift the receiver. In drifts the Angel of Love. I dial zero and immediately the operator comes on, startling me. I answer her questions, act as though I really intend to make the call (I’ll hang up as soon as she puts me through), but at the other end, instead of ringing, somebody starts talking.

“Pardon?” I say.

“Your party must have moved,” the operator says.

“Moved?”

“Changed residences.” She repeats the name and number I gave. “Is that right?”

‘Yes, but—”

“If you hold one moment I can find out if they left a forwarding number.”

In the pause, I fight for breath. I envision their abandoned ranch-style Vancouver house, the blank curtainless windows.

“It’s a local number,” the operator says. She starts to reel it off.

“No,” I say. “That’s all right.”

“Don’t you—?”

I hang up. Frozen, I wait for her to call back. When that danger seems over, I stand and go to the window.

He’s here, in Toronto. And all these months I’ve been monitoring his life in Vancouver. I feel foolish, outmanoeuvred. Why hasn’t he tried to see me? Oh, I know why. If he called, if my father gave him my new number and I picked up the phone and it was him, would I even let him talk? Maybe. But he doesn’t know that.

Just as well.

I stay at the window, looking at the empty intersection. The streetlights go on changing. A cat crosses against the red. I count the seconds allotted each colour; I have nothing better to do. I am alone, cut off, living in an apartment whose bed, oven and phone can’t be trusted. In a few hours I will start a job from which I’ll almost certainly be fired. I’ll wear a pleated yellow skirt and matching bolero jacket that went out of fashion twenty years ago.

Does he ever think about me? Does he look at the sky and think,“Louise is seeing the same sky”?
Then you see a very tiny rag of dark blue, framed by a small branch, pierced by an unlucky star.

I go to the front-hall closet and take down my jewellery box from the top shelf. I have no jewellery, I don’t wear it. What I keep in here are the two letters he sent me before I went out to Vancouver. I don’t know why I’ve saved them. I haven’t looked at them in almost a year.

I read them both through, expecting to feel something different this time but getting caught up in the same old irritation and perplexity. Why
these
poems? And why tell me that beauty is truth, truth beauty, and that the truth shall make me free? The truth, when I stumbled upon it, made me suicidal.

Then I get to the drawings. The sea anemone. I never really appreciated it before, but it’s quite beautiful, so intricate. Well, he’s talented, I never said he wasn’t. The other drawing is the one of him and me dressed in monks’ robes: “Abelard and Hell-Louise,” as he’s written underneath.

“No, we aren’t,” I think. “We’re not them.” Abelard and Héloïse’s love was indestructible, and everything they suffered came from outside that love. With Abel and me, the assault came from within. From him.

“He doesn’t love me,” I think. It’s a thought I’ve had so many times I hardly hear it any more as a statement of fact. It has become a kind of mantra, what I say to remind myself never again to get my hopes up.

I return the letters to the box, put the box away, then pull my blanket and pillow onto the floor. I lie on my back, looking up at ribs of light fanning in through the blinds onto the
ceiling. I’m not worried any more. I’m not even irritated. I suppose I ought to feel lost, or depressed, and maybe I do underneath. All I’m aware of feeling, though, is a tender curiosity about the person I’ve become, a recaptured calmness that vindicates this room and this night but isn’t influenced by them. It begins with me. I can feel it leaving my body in waves, like a signal.