The Romantic (29 page)

Back in Mr. Fraser’s office I set down his cup and he hands me two client files, two new ones every day, from which I am to remove any correspondence pertaining to the Ontario Securities Commission. For about a week I almost believe there is some kind of investigation to be conducted, but as the correspondence mounts in a tray on his desk, I let that notion drop. I am touched by his meting out of the files. I feel that he isn’t so much prolonging the work as limiting the amount of time I spend on any one unnecessary activity, taking care that I don’t get too bored. It may be he also hopes to acquaint me with the business, because you can’t read so many letters without picking up a few things, such as that a stock is a certificate, not, as I had imagined, a metallic bar or a plaque. You can’t read so many letters, written over
so many decades, without learning about his family, either. Presumably he means for me to know that his wife’s name was Pam and that she died five years ago of a heart attack. That Jonathan is a chartered accountant. That there was another, older son, Eric, who was killed in a car accident on January thirty-first, 1960, which, coincidentally, is the same day my mother disappeared.

I usually finish the files at around twelve-thirty, twelve forty-five. At five to one Debbie phones to ask if I’m ready, and I meet her at the reception and we take our sandwiches to the underground mall where we each buy a carton of juice, then find a bench to sit on. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays we are joined by Lorna Lawton, a snide chainsmoking girl who works in the retail sales department and whose lunch hour changes on Tuesdays and Thursdays for a reason so infuriating to her she can’t seem to speak of it. We talk about the other employees, or Debbie does. She is indiscreet and conspiratorial and charitable. Lorna is hateful, blowing smoke and muttering “that bitch” and “that bastard.” Sweet, humming Hank from the mail room is “that moron.” Mr. Fraser she is a little easier on, in my presence anyway; him she calls, with something approaching tolerance,“the hunchback.”

I wonder why Debbie is friendly with someone like Lorna, but then I also wonder why she took so immediately to me. The very first day, as I was leaving to go home, she said,“I have to tell you, you’re not at all what I was expecting.”

“How do you mean?” I asked fearfully, thinking she meant unqualified, but she said,“Oh, you know, young, on the ball.”

The second day, introducing me to Lorna, she said,“Louise is nobody’s fool,” and again I had no idea what she was talking about let alone how, after scarcely more than an hour in my presence, she could make such a claim. It reminded me a bit of Don Shaw, the groundless presumptions, except that with Debbie I get the feeling she thinks I am smarter and better than I am, as opposed to darker and sexier. She flatters me excessively and maybe insincerely and yet I sense no harm in her. Quite the opposite. She says she loves my hair. I tell her she’s crazy, my hair is horrible, it’s lank. She smiles as if we both know better. She says she wishes she had my figure, and urges me to try on clothes I can’t afford. This is after we’ve eaten, when there’s still time to window shop. Lorna, who is also skinny and lank haired, tags along, snarling. I take for granted that I’m included in her list of enemies, although back in the office she always walks me to my alcove while resuming some earlier rant. At my desk she seems affronted when I sit down, she acts rudely dismissed.

“See you later,” I say to her back.

I work on shorthand exercises. At two-thirty Mr. Fraser returns from the Baron, a steakhouse where he has eaten lunch since the end of the Second World War. As he hangs his hat on the coat rack he asks how I’m doing, is everything working out? I suspect that the question comes at this time of day because he’s had a drink and is loosened up.

I tell him I’m fine.

He says he’s glad to hear it. His woebegone, radiant eyes are a little tired by now, a little slow to take me in.

In the afternoons I photocopy any articles he circled
from the morning papers. Then I go through his A-F Rolodex and type up fresh cards and throw out the old ones, unless there’s a red D written beside the name, standing for Deceased. These cards, which represent not even ten percent of the total (apparently the system stopped being updated decades ago), are to be removed and placed on his desk. What does he do with them? Tucks them away somewhere, 1 suspect.

At four-thirty I water Betty’s African violets and rinse out the cups and saucers in the executive kitchen. At five I poke my head into Mr. Fraser’s office to say goodnight. Often he is reading from a volume of his twenty-four-volume set of the
Encyclopaedia britannica.
“Oh, Louise,” he says, as if returning from a dream. “Goodnight, my dear. And thank you.”

Evenings.

My father has been by to stabilize the Murphy bed (a matter of tightening screws) and to show me how to work the stove. I now turn on the burners with aplomb. For a couple of nights I listened to classical music on the radio, as in my old fantasy, but against a backdrop of violins and harpsichords the apartment took on a spinsterish aspect, so I switched to the FM rock station. Dinner is scrambled eggs or spaghetti. On Wednesday or Thursday—half a week away from Mrs. Carver’s Sunday roast and the leftovers I brought back to make sandwiches with—I treat myself to meat: a fried pork chop or a Salisbury steak cooked under the broiler. I eat sitting at my desk. After stacking the dishes in the sink (to be washed as needed), I rinse out my pantyhose and hang them, like a girl in a French movie, over the
shower rod. Then I brew a pot of tea and drag the chair to the kitchen window so that I can look at the five-storey apartment building across the drive.

I have assigned the residents occupations and names. The place where the windows are always open, even when it’s raining, where the long grey curtains stream out and hang against the brick and nobody is ever home, the guy there—it must be a guy—is a bartender, maybe a cab driver, named Ed. The middle-aged, big-breasted, red-haired woman who vacuums in a see-through negligée and whose windowsills are lined with books, she is Madame Broulé, a high-school French teacher. Directly beneath her is Glenn, the lowly government clerk brooding over his glory days as a varsity football star; this from a silver cup on his sill (it looks like a trophy) but also from how he always seems to be sitting at his kitchen table, smoking cigarettes in the gloom, a big man wearing a tie and sports jacket and smoking for as long as I watch.

When the teapot is empty I drag the chair back to the desk and spend an hour or so working on my office wardrobe, making small, updating alterations to cuffs and collars. Then I iron whatever outfit I plan to wear tomorrow. At nine-thirty I get into my pyjamas, pull the bed out of the wall and lie down to read Jane Austen. By ten-thirty I’m asleep.

Saturday nights aren’t so manageable. I get agitated, I feel I should be out at a movie or a restaurant. Except I don’t want to go alone, and who could I call to go with me? Debbie plays contract bridge Saturday nights (as well as Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday nights, one of the reasons, she
admits, her dentist husband left her for a divorcée ten years his senior, but Debbie didn’t care because he was so depressed all the time, crying on the toilet, wishing he was a glass blower or wood worker and yet terrified of being poor). That somebody with the opposite of a poker face could be a card sharp seems unlikely, but apparently Debbie is well known in bridge circles. She thinks I could be a card sharp, too. “You’ve got a quick mind,” she says. ‘You’ve got the competitive spirit.” I do? She has said I’m always welcome to kibitz, which means watch her play. Maybe one night I will. Not on a Saturday night, though; I can’t imagine just sitting quietly, hour after hour, on a Saturday night.

Who else is there? Alice Keystone. A few weeks after I moved in, Alice phoned to tell me she’d got a part-time job selling religious children’s books door-to-door. She hinted at wanting to drop by one evening, but I pictured her in that teacup-patterned dress she used to wear and it made me feel panicky, as if I could be pulled back to high school and the misery of last year, and I put her off, I said,“It’s so hectic at work, I just come home and eat something and fall into bed.” I promised to phone her when “things let up.”

There’s Lorna. Who spends her Friday and Saturday nights drinking at a bar called the Pigskin, where motorcycle-gang types try to pull her onto their laps, but “if you tell them to go fuck themselves they back off.” The bartender is a friend of hers, that’s why she goes, he gives her free drinks and lets her pee in the lane outside the kitchen door so she can avoid the disgusting toilets. “You should drop by,” she has said more than once.

There’s Abel.

Sometimes I change into black jeans and a black sweater and go out and buy cigarettes at the corner milk store, then walk around the block smoking and coughing and feeling nauseated and intriguing. One night I ride the subway and try to cheer myself up by seeing everybody through Abel’s eyes. It’s hard at first, but I get the knack. You have to tell yourself that there’s a saving grace, it’s there somewhere. Forget the big ears, concentrate on the shiny hair, the luscious lips. Don’t see fat, see robust, see an intelligent face. The smelly drunk snoring in the corner, what’s he got going for him? A Roman profile, red socks—a debonair touch—although maybe they’re the only pair he owns.

Eventually my mood lifts enough that I don’t mind going back to my empty apartment. I get off at Yonge Street and transfer to the northbound platform. I imagine Abel somewhere in the city, on a street or even on another subway platform, wafting along on this same feeling of brotherly love.

And then a crazy-looking man hurries down the platform and stops right beside me, so close that our shoulders touch. I step aside. He holds up to his ear a transistor radio, which is blaring static. He switches the radio off and says into the speaker,“Headquarters, come in, come in.” I move farther away. He follows. He turns the radio on again and listens to more static, then turns it off and says,“Suspect approximately five foot five, light brown hair, slight build.” He brings back the static. “Roger,” he says decisively and comes up to me and puts a hand on my shoulder.

I jerk free. “Don’t.”

“I’m afraid I have to bring you in for questioning, Miss.”

“Leave me alone, please.”

He fumbles with the radio, not so adept now, catching fragments of music. Flustered, he switches it on and off. I walk quickly down the platform. “Suspect resisting arrest,” he says, hurrying after me.

He reaches out a hand, and I lurch to one side, banging my thigh against the arm of a bench.

“Shit,” I say.

“Let me help you, Miss.”

I swing around. “Go fuck yourself!”

He swallows. The other people on the platform ignore us. Do they think we’re having a lovers’ quarrel? He rushes away, muttering at the radio. I am close to tears. “Go fuck yourself,” I think. It sounds so vicious. Maybe it’s true that motorcycle-gang members back off to hear it coming out of the mouth of a woman. We skinny, lank-haired, angry young women, our awful power.

Later, around midnight, sitting at my desk, I open the phone book to the R’s. Richardson, Richmond. Richter.

Karl. 241 Grenadier Road.

So they live out by High Park. I lie on my bed with the knowledge in me like a serum. My leg, where I hit it on the bench, throbs. I fall asleep wearing my black clothes.

The next day, Sunday, I take the eastbound subway to the end of the line. Out on the street I sit on a bench and wait for my father. It’s late October, cold and windy, dead leaves rattling down the sidewalk. I carry my dirty laundry in a white plastic basket. My father pulls up in Mrs. Carver’s wreck of a car, he says his own wouldn’t start. As we’re driving north I watch a glove-shaped cloud creep across the sky. Mrs. Carver is at the house, cooking dinner. She’s
always there now but never overnight, if the two of them are to be believed. I think they are. We eat roast pork, sweet potatoes, green beans, a lemon meringue pie for dessert. My father drives me back downtown. Somehow the bag of leftovers ends up under my clean clothes, at the bottom of the hamper. I don’t realize until the next morning. I don’t realize that the dress I wear to work still gives off a smell of pork even though I’ve sprayed it with perfume. Troy Warren tells me this a couple of years later. He says,“I fell for you anyway.”

Because of all the unlikely incidents that lead up to Troy and me running into each other—which we do literally: he hits me with his car—you could say that either we were fated to meet (his sentiment) or (mine) we met despite fate.

He tells me he almost never acts impulsively, and yet that morning, he makes a sudden decision to drive to his old girlfriend’s house on the off chance that his watch is still in the alley where she threw it the week before. (His clean shirts and changes of underwear, also thrown out the window, he managed to retrieve at the time.) We’ve had rain since then; even if the watch is there it’ll probably be ruined, and even if it’s there and not ruined, she won’t have left for work yet and might catch him prowling around. Nevertheless, he goes, only to lose his nerve once he pulls up in front of her house. Another urge strikes him then: to drive past the apartment building he lived in when he first came to Toronto four years ago. A quarter of an hour later, driving up Yonge Street, he passes a donut shop and gets a craving for a chocolate eclair. Which is how he happens to be turning right onto Wellesley at nine-twenty in the morning.

My day begins badly. The hot water runs out while I’m taking a shower, and then, on the subway, I fall asleep. By the time I open my eyes I’ve missed my stop by so many stations that the train has gone to the end of the line and is
now travelling north again. I get off and race across to the other platform. Five minutes go by, ten. Finally an announcement comes over the
PA
that the southbound line is experiencing electrical problems, so I go up onto the street and start walking. It’s almost Halloween, there are pumpkins and skeletons in store windows. Despite my hurry I stop at one window that has a pumpkin carved to be a beauty: cat’s eyes, slits for long eyelashes, two tiny triangular nostrils and a rosebud mouth holding a cigarette. It reminds me of my mother … the eyes, the cigarette. “Don’t open until ten,” a voice behind me says, and a legless man on a trolley wheels himself closer and extends a can of pencils. I choose one, pay for two, then start walking again, twirling the pencil like a baton, reminded now of Abel lacing a twig through his fingers. I’m crossing a street when the pencil flies out of my hand and falls straight down into the nickel-sized hole of a sewer grate, such a perfectly aimed shot that I stop, and a car turning right hits me.