The Romantic (33 page)

Everyone—my father, Mrs. Carver, Troy—perked up. Whose marriage? Whose baby? (I had already surprised my father and Mrs. Carver with the news that Troy and I were moving in together.) But I was only offering the prospect of future developments in exchange for refusing to even consider a scattering ceremony. It was all I could do to
take
the ashes.

“Well, it’s for you to decide,” my father said, with a glance at Mrs. Carver, whose idea it probably was. Some gesture of appeasement toward my mother’s spirit.

In the car I hold the urn by what feels like its hips and try to recall if my mother ever said where she’d like to be scattered. The only time I can remember ashes coming into the conversation was when she told Mrs. Bendy some story
she’d heard, and found hilarious, about a woman discovering that her dead husband had been unfaithful to her and so she used his ashes as cat litter. I tell this to Troy, who shakes his head. “Where
will
you scatter them?” he asks.

“I don’t know. I don’t have a cat.”

“Hey, that’s your mother you’re talking about.”

“Who was the least sentimental of women.”

For the rest of the ride home we don’t talk. I can guess from his pensive expression that he’s mulling over what I said about marriage and babies. When he pulls up in front of my apartment he offers to help me pack dishes, since it’s only nine-thirty, but I’m afraid he’ll launch into a discussion of our future, and I tell him I just want to go to bed.

“Don’t forget to call your landlord,” he says. To give my notice, he means. As I’m walking away, he calls out,“Pick you up around nine,” and I remember that he’s taking tomorrow off so we can start painting the rooms.

Upstairs, sitting on my bed, I try the rings on. A perfect fit. My hands are her hands, without the manicured nails and cigarette. It’s weird though, wearing her rings, it’s too personal, like trying on her underwear (something I never did). I return the rings to the envelope and put them in the top drawer of my dresser. The urn I carry into the kitchen and set down on the table. After looking at it for a minute, trying to see it as a centrepiece, I stick it in the fridge, out of sight. Except what if I forget it when I move? I take it back out and prise up the cork-lined stopper. The smell is the smell of ash from any fire. I pour out a bit onto the kitchen table. Grey powdery chunks. I rub the powder between my fingers, expecting to feel … I don’t know, a rush of sadness
or repulsion, but I can’t make the leap from what is essentially dirt, to her. I go into the living room and sit at my desk. Ash is all down the front of my sweater, which used to be her sweater. “So she
has
come back for her clothes,” I think, not cynically, not bothering to wipe the ash away.

I open the phone book to look up my landlord’s number. His last name is Salter. I leaf through as far as the R’s, then slow down. Ralston. Richie.

Richter, Karl. 241 Grenadier Road. Above that: Richter, Abelard. 249 Ontario Street.

My heart starts pounding. I put my hand on the phone. I lift the receiver. If the Angel of Love is here, she’s keeping her distance. I dial the first number, a nine. The subsiding clicks sound explosively loud. I press the receiver against my shoulder while I dial the rest, then bring it back up to my head in a kind of horrified trance, as though it were a gun.

He answers on the second ring. “Hello?” His unmistakeable hoarse voice.

“It’s me. Louise.”

There is shouting and laughter in the background. “Hello?” he says again.

I clear my throat. “It’s Louise.”

“Louise?”

“How are you?”

A pause, and then,“Fine. I’m fine. How are
you?”

“Oh, I’m … I’m okay, I guess. I just wanted to see how you were.” Now, on a piano, somebody is playing
Chopsticks.
“Do you have company?”

“Just the usual uproar.”

“Is there another phone? I can hardly hear you.”

“Where are you calling from?”

“My place. My apartment.”

“Where’s that?”

Obviously he never looked up
my
name in the phone book. “Spadina and Dupont.”

“Would you like to meet somewhere near there?”

“What, now?”

“Or I could come to your place.”

“Right now, you mean?”

“Unless you’d like me to call you back later, when it’s a little quieter around here.”

“No. It’s okay. You can come here.”

I give him the address. After hanging up, I go on clutching the receiver for several minutes. Then I run into the bathroom and brush my teeth and put on some lipstick. I figure it will take him about three-quarters of an hour if he comes by streetcar and subway, but he arrives within twenty minutes. He has ridden a bike and brought it up the stairs. A bizarre, rusty, high-seated, wide-handled contraption.

“Where’d you get that?” I say. The first thing I say.

“In the basement of the house where I’m living.” He wheels it in and leans it against the wall.

I can hardly look at him. His eyes. His hair, still long. He’s wearing a green T-shirt. Blue jeans. He’s taller but maybe not, maybe it’s only that I’m used to Troy.

In the bike’s wicker carrier is a large bottle of rum. “It’s already mixed,” he says. He notices the boxes. “Do you have any glasses?”

“Somewhere.” I find the box marked “Good Dishes” and unwrap two wine goblets. He fills them to the top.

“I don’t have any ice,” I say. “I mean, my freezer is one big block of ice.”

“This is fine.”

He looks around, at the leaded-glass windows and builtin bookshelves, the brass light fixtures. Through his eyes, I’m suddenly impressed by what a great place it is.

“Why are you leaving?” he says.

“I’m not. I’ve changed my mind.” Just this second I have.

“That’s good.” He smiles. It dazzles me. I sit on a box of books.

He sits on the box across from me. “So,” he says, and I look at him, and the roar of everything we know about each other and have done to each other seems to pass between

“Oh, Abel—” My voice breaks. I put my drink on the floor.

He puts his on a box. He reaches for my hand. The thrill races up my arm into my chest. I can’t speak for a minute, and then I say,“That letter I sent you …”

He lets out his breath.

“It was so cruel,” I say.

“No.”

‘Yes, it was. It was vicious.”

“I didn’t read it that way.”

“You didn’t?”

He shakes his head. He studies my fingertips.

“It must have hurt you, though.”

“I was hurt for you. For what you felt you … had to do.”

“I saw you with that girl.”

“You really flew out, then?”

“How do you think I knew about her? I spied on your house, all one morning, in the park across the street. I followed you downtown. I heard you play the piano in that bar. The Bear Pit.”

“Why didn’t you come up to me?”

“Why did you stop phoning me?”

He bites his lip.

“Well,” I say,“when I finally worked up enough nerve to come up to you, I found you kissing that girl. Who was she, anyway?”

He shrugs. “A girl.”

“Did you love her?”

He gives his head such a noncommittal shake that he may only be shaking off the question.

“I don’t know,” I say, agitated. I draw my hand away. “Maybe I’d have had an abortion no matter what you did. Maybe I didn’t want a baby.”

He looks at me and then down. I look at his face. His full, crisply defined lips, his cleft chin, which is so familiar and dear to me, like his mother’s kitchen in Greenwoods, or the ravine. I pick up his hand again and bring it to my lips. I move it down my neck, down to my breasts.

We make love on the floor, among the boxes. I start crying, and we go into the bedroom, and this time the love-making is more deliberate, almost formal, restrained by our mutual amazement. “Do you have a girlfriend?” I say afterwards, believing that, now, I can bear to know.

But he says he doesn’t.

I turn to face him. “Is there a girl who’s under the impression that she’s your girlfriend?”

A small smile. “No.”

“I love you, Abel.”

I dream that Troy’s father is stomping around the Hungarian restaurant, shooting draft dodgers in the legs. I open my eyes. It’s morning. Somebody is knocking at the front door.

“Louise? It’s me!”

I yank at the sheet, which is bunched under Abel’s legs. He opens his eyes. I jump out of bed and grab my bathrobe from the chair. I am groping to find a sleeve when Troy appears in the doorway.

He looks me. At Abel.

Abel pulls a corner of the sheet over himself.

“Sorry to intrude,” Troy says with a tight smile. He walks away. I wait for a slam. It doesn’t come. Only the faint click of the lock catching.

“Who was that?” Abel says.

“A friend. He was going to help me pack. Oh, God, I should have phoned him.” I hear how natural I sound: embarrassed, but not extremely. Just a little guilty. It’s as if I’ve tapped into some emergency reservoir of cunning.

“Maybe you should go after him.”

A car door shuts. An engine starts up. “Too late,” I say.

An hour later I am scrambling the four eggs that I found at the back of my fridge. Abel is examining the ashes, a small pile of which are still on the kitchen table from when I showed them to him last night.

He says,“The unbelievable complexity that was your mother reduced to this,” and I am suddenly struck by the
miracle of his being here, in my kitchen, without his shirt on. All I had to do was phone. All I had to do was stop resisting.

I go to put the plates on the table, but he makes me hold off until he has brushed every last speck back into the urn. Watching him, weak with love, my hands start to tremble, and I set the plates back on the counter. “If she were here,” I say,“she’d just wipe them up with the dishcloth.”

“If she were here confronting her own ashes,” he says. “Wouldn’t that be something?”

He leaves right after breakfast. He’s having coffee with some filmmaker friend and then he’s playing piano for another friend’s dance rehearsal. Later, around five o’clock, I’m meeting him at a bar, where we’ll have dinner together.

It isn’t until I hear the front door of the house close that I allow myself to think of Troy. I sink into a kitchen chair as the awfulness of what happened settles over me. The way he just stood there.
Sony to intrude.
I cover my mouth with my hands and start to cry.

I’ve got to talk to him right away, explain everything, how I never planned any of it. I, of all people, I know how it feels to be betrayed. Why would I want to put him through that? I didn’t want to. I wanted to love him.

I take a taxi to his apartment. Although I have a key, I knock. No answer. I knock again, then let myself in.

“Troy?” I peek into the bedroom. It’s as if I’m playing the part he played a couple of hours earlier. But in this version, the bed’s empty.

I look everywhere, just in case. In case what? I don’t know. I check the bathroom, kitchen, the two spare rooms.
My heart drops to see that he has lain down newspapers in preparation for a day of painting.

“Oh, Troy,” I say. “Where are you?”

I go back to the kitchen and look out the window, and there’s his car, parked in the lane. I phone the store. Ginny, his sales clerk, answers. “Yep, he’s here,” she says cheerfully. “Should I put you through?”

“No, it’s all right, it’s not important.”

I hang up, stunned. He’s okay. He’s at work, behaving normally. Still, I’ve got to talk to him. ‘You’re better off without me,” I’ll say. “I never wanted to hurt you. I’m so grateful to you.” Nothing I can think of won’t sound like something I got from an old movie. But it’s all true, and if it goes unsaid, then what do I leave him with?

When I arrive at the store, Ginny, who is serving a customer, points to the back. I squeeze past boxes of records lining the aisle. In the doorway I stop. He’s at his desk, rifling through a pile of receipts. He seems smaller, older. His ears poke out of his hair.

He glances up.

“Hi,” I say, and my eyes fill.

He looks down. “What are you doing here?”

“I went by your apartment. I thought you’d be there.”

“Was that Abel?”

‘Yes. He …” I was going to say “He phoned me,” but I haven’t the heart to lie. Or to tell the truth, either.

He picks up a pen and appears to study it. “Are you going to see him again?”

“I’m sorry.” I step past the threshold. “I’m so, so sorry. I—”

“How long has it been going on?”

“Just last night.” I fish a Kleenex out of my purse and dab my eyes.

“That was the first time?”

“The first time I’ve even talked to him, since—”

“Would you have told me if I hadn’t caught you?”

“Of course I would have.”

He balances the pen across his coffee mug. “So you want to be with him?”

I can’t bring myself to answer.

“In other words, you do. And I take it he feels the same way.”

“Yes,” I whisper.

“You’re sure of that, now?”

I don’t say anything.

“Jesus.” He bows his head.

“Troy …” I touch his shoulder.

He seizes my hand. “Don’t do it.” He looks up at me. His eyes are red-rimmed. “Please. Please. Don’t do it.”

“I’m sorry.” I start to cry.

The phone rings. He drops my hand and grabs the receiver. Slams it down. He picks it up again and dials a few numbers. He shuts his eyes.

“I never wanted to hurt you,” I say.

“Jesus,” he says furiously. He hits the side of his head with the receiver. “Jesus.” Hits himself again, harder. “Jesus.”

“Stop that!” I grab the receiver and place it in the cradle.

His shoulders slump.

I kneel beside him and take hold of his arm. “We don’t have to stop seeing each other. We can still—”

He lets out a bitter laugh. “Don’t say it.”

“What?”

“We cannot still be friends. I don’t want to be your friend.” He stares at the phone. “I just want …” He withdraws his arm from my grasp. His sleeve brushes a receipt, which falls onto his lap. He picks it up and sets it in the file tray. “I just want you to go,” he says quietly.