The Romantic (34 page)

I stand. “Should I call you later?”

He shakes his head.

“Tomorrow, then?”

He looks up. There’s a distance to his expression, an inattentiveness, as if I have distracted him from a grief that has nothing to do with me. “Louise,” he says,“you are free. I release you.” He picks up the receiver and starts dialling.

From looking up their number in the phone book I already know that Abel and his parents moved back to Toronto in 1969. He tells me it was the end of June. He had just graduated. In September, around the time I began working for Mr. Fraser, he entered the University of Toronto. He started out taking courses in general humanities before deciding to major in English literature. Three years later, as opposed to the usual four, he graduated with an honours B.A.

“I always thought you’d end up studying music or science,” I say.

“That was all I knew,” he says,“music and science.”

He lived with his parents during those years. Monday and Tuesday nights, to earn pocket money, he played jazz piano in the bar of a seedy downtown hotel called the Sherwood. It was like being paid to practise, he said, since nobody really listened. At least that’s how it was in the beginning. Within a couple of months the regulars were his friends, and for them he played fifties rock-and-roll. The manager wanted to hire him full-time, but Abel resisted until he had his degree, and then, with no other job prospects on the horizon, he started working six nights a week.

He rented a room in a nearby house. Most of the other tenants were people from the bar. After only a couple of weeks he took over collecting the rent for the whole place,
something to do with the landlord threatening evictions. When he tells me this I say,“Oh, no,” because I have a feeling that, to him, a rent collector is somebody who lets people pay what they can and then makes up the shortfall himself. He admits as much but says,“It works out. I cover someone’s rent, he covers my drinks.”

I could never live in that house, put up with the clamour and intrusion, friends of friends arriving and heading straight for the fridge or strolling into the bathroom to urinate while you’re crouched in the tub. Dogs barking, cats spraying the walls, and in the middle of the night somebody banging on the piano.
His
piano. How does he stand it?

By relishing it, that’s how. In the mornings he cheerfully vacuums the mutual hallways and picks up the endless litter of beer and liquor bottles. Mr. Clean he’s called by the other tenants, who all have nicknames for each other, like a bunch of boys in a tree house. There’s His Honour (a sixty-year-old judge with a chronic gambling habit), Mop (a skinny, frizzy-haired former typesetter who lost his left hand trying to repair a lawn mower), Happy (a morose would-be playwright), Mr. Fix-it (the house handyman, a former jockey), Cleats (a would-be tap dancer) and Jimbo (a big, happy guy … I don’t know what he does).

They have names for each other’s rooms, as well. Abel’s impeccable room is the Shrine. It’s right at the top of the house and has a large picture window looking out onto a mature horse chestnut tree. He says that if he owned a decent camera, he’d set it on a tripod in front of the window and every morning at the same time snap a picture, and then, when he had a year’s worth of pictures, all of them dated,
he’d mount them at eye level in a ring around the room.

“Would you take them when you leave?” I ask.

“They wouldn’t work anywhere else. The point is, you look out the window on any given day one year down the road—September fifteenth, nineteen-eighty, say—and you see that the chestnuts are still green. Then you look at the picture that was taken on September fifteenth five or six years ago—however long it’s been—and you see that back then the chestnuts had already turned brown. Then and now … you live in both at once.”

“What a great idea,” I say happily, although it’s not the idea I’m happy about. It’s that he didn’t bristle at the suggestion of moving out of here eventually. He didn’t say,“Leave? Why would I leave?”

He is obviously so settled in, especially in this room, which is very much like his room in Greenwoods: the same shade of olive green on the walls, the same bookcases, the desk and easel. And his four-poster bed with its dark green chenille spread. For me, lying on that bed is the fulfillment of a childhood fantasy. I often lie on it and read when he’s working at the bar. I wedge his chair under the door handle to keep people from barging in, then choose a couple of poetry books, because that’s mostly what there is. He shelves the books in order of height, tall ones top left, short ones bottom right, so a search for any particular tide or author requires the investigation of many spines, some of them seductive enough that I usually get waylaid. (He swears his ordering system is purely for visual effect, but I think he set it up, unconsciously or not, in order to interfere with the tyranny of a predetermined choice.)

This comes later, though, this solitary reading. For the first couple of weeks I try to be with him every minute. Most days he rides his bike to various rundown bars and I tag along on one of the derelict bikes always to be found in the front hall. Awaiting us will be a person with some big plan to start a publishing house devoted solely to books of rhyming poetry, or to open a vegetarian restaurant pet store with glass-topped tables that double as terrariums. One guy—Abel calls him the best photographer in Canada—wants to make a twelve-hour documentary about the minute-to-minute existence of some insect.

“A spider might be better,” Abel says.

“What kind of spider?” the guy asks.

“Female black widow.”

“Can they be found locally?”

I snort.

“You’d have to go further south,” Abel says, as if it were a reasonable question. “Florida or Kansas.”

“I’ll need a travel budget,” the guy says.

How does Abel know these people? From school, from bars. Some are grey haired, some are younger than we are, some seem to have mental problems, some are obviously brilliant. All are male, I’m relieved to discover (except for a terrifyingly intense woman who plays bagpipe jazz and who wants Abel to make a record with her, but because she is plain and at least thirty, I don’t consider her a threat). The one thing they have in common is their earnestness. They apply for government grants. They haul out diagrams and résumés, take notes. At first, Abel just listens, but after two or three beers he starts doling out ideas. These people
depend on him heavily, you can tell. I’ve never seen supposedly heterosexual men look at another man with such hunger.

It’s the same at the hotel bar. Except there, half of the adoring fans are women, and instead of picking his brain they light his cigarettes, buy his drinks. Most are middle-aged boozy types. A few are pretty, though, my age or a bit older. Rough, sexy girls with husky voices. Has Abel slept with any of them? He refuses to answer directly, which I take for yes and which obliges me to be at the bar every night to make sure I’m the one he leaves with.

By closing time he’s drunk. Not slurring drunk but wistful, a soft, suffused look on his face. We walk the three short blocks to his house. Going to my apartment is out of the question. There are never any taxis around, and I won’t let him get on a bike, not in his condition. He staggers a little. I have restricted myself to one draft beer; I’m sober. I’m tired, though, and if I’ve been at the bar for more than a couple of hours, I’m coughing from the cigarette smoke. Still, I take a few puffs of the joint he lights. Marijuana gives me energy, and it’ll be hours yet before we sleep. This walk alone takes a good twenty minutes. While everyone who started out with us disappears in the distance, we gaze at the stars and contemplate shadows on the sidewalk. If we hear a cricket, we have to pinpoint its location. All stray cats must be hailed and won over. “O, masters of profundity!” Abel calls to them, quoting Neruda. “Secret police of the neighbourhoods!”

At the house, in the enormous kitchen with its homemade barnboard table, its purple walls and its curling-up,
starlight-patterned linoleum floor tiles that one of the dogs is steadily eating, a tile or two a week, he fixes us something to eat. Sandwiches or fried leftovers. Whoever is still up and wanting conversation gets it. So there goes another hour. Then we wash and dry the dishes, ours and a dozen other people’s. Finally it’s time to go to his room. First, though, he pours himself a large rum and Coke. “Can I make you one?” he always asks and I always say no, it’ll give me a headache. He never suffers from hangovers. I find this commendable. His appetite for liquor and drugs I see as life-embracing and poetic.

At around five o’clock we finally fall asleep. At seven, the judge gets up and wakes me with his coughing. Abel is comatose until his alarm goes off at nine, and then he hops out of bed, refreshed. I try to doze a while longer, but it’s next to impossible. Doors are slamming, the vacuum’s roaring.

Four hours may be enough sleep for him, but I need twice that much, and within a couple weeks I’m so exhausted I can barely finish a sentence. He buys me iron pills. He urges me to take naps. ‘You don’t have to come to the bar every night,” he says. Yes I do, but maybe I don’t have to be there for the entire five hours. I start showing up around midnight. I eat supper at the house, ride one of the bikes to my apartment, sleep, shower, ride back downtown, read in his room, then walk to the bar to bring him home unmolested.

The only night we stay over at my place is Sunday, his night off. Sunday mornings we walk in High Park, then go to his parents’ house for lunch. His mother hugs the breath out of me. On my first visit she wept. So did I, glad that Abel could witness how much like a daughter I am in this
household. She looks like an old lady, with her white hair, but she still wears it long and wound around her head. She still dresses flamboyantly and still wanders the streets at all hours, though in silence now, presumably.

Late Sunday afternoon I take the subway out to Greenwoods. I don’t ask him to come. My father and Mrs. Carver are reeling from my breakup with Troy; it’s better that I go on my own. When I return to my apartment, and there’s his bike in the hallway, the magnitude of my relief is another kind of weight. When will I start taking it for granted that he’ll show up? Usually he’s sitting at the kitchen table, a glass of rum and Coke by his hand, a volume of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
opened in front of him. He looks up, his mind still caught by whatever he was reading and finding fascinating and won’t forget. If he were me, he’d be way past the B’s by now.

One night he says that the fifteen-thousand-dollar inheritance may have been Mr. Fraser’s way of buying me time. “He gives you the encyclopedias, he gives you a couple of years’ wages. Maybe he was trying to tell you that just because he’s gone doesn’t mean you’re out of a job.”

And maybe Abel is trying to tell me that I’m wasting my days, following him from meeting to meeting. I know I am. And yet it frightens me to think of us being apart for too many hours. If only he’d swear never to betray me again. But I can’t bring myself to ask it of him. It’s one thing to say,“Have you slept with her?” and pretend to be only teasing and curious. To say,“Promise never to sleep with her” … there’s no rescuing that. I’d sound like the clinging, terrified despot I am.

As a compromise, I start lugging the encyclopedia around with me, the third volume with its endless
Br’s.
While he has his meetings, I sit at another table and read. I find it hard to concentrate, though. I’m accustomed to the cave quiet of Mr. Fraser’s alcove, and even if I weren’t I can’t not listen when Abel talks. In an entire afternoon I’ll be lucky to get through a single entry. I begin to feel anxious.

And then, in the middle of October, I am told something that gives me release. It comes from Howie, the retired jockey everybody calls Mr. Fix-it but I call Howie, out of respect. I like him more than I do any of the other tenants, mostly because, apart from Abel, he’s the only one who doesn’t strike me as being deluded or self-destructive. His riding career ended when a horse fell on him and shattered his knee, and now he works as a groomer at the Woodbine racetrack. Here in the house, he repairs leaky taps and falling-off door hinges, and if anyone asks where something is, he knows. “Third drawer down,” he says in his clipped voice. He is chivalrous, fanatically so. He jumps up to open doors and to pull back my chair. He scolds the other men for using language he thinks I might find offensive. “We have a lady present,” he says.

It’s a Tuesday morning. Abel is doing his laundry down in the basement. I’m in the kitchen with Howie, who has Tuesdays off. At one end of the table I read a three-day-old newspaper and drink coffee; at the other he eats his bacon and eggs. He’s a quiet, diligent eater. I almost forget he’s there, and then he says,“I hope you don’t consider me too forward if I tell you what a fine couple I think you and Abel make.”

“Gee, thanks, Howie,” I say, touched.

He is frowning. “About time he found the right girl.”

“We’ve known each other a long time.”

He doesn’t seem to hear. “Some of the girls he used to bring around,” he says,“they couldn’t hold a candle to you.”

My heart quickens. “Girls from the bar?”

“Oh, they’re likeable. I’ve got nothing against them personally. Only they don’t have your kind of class. You’re more Abel’s type, the intellectual type.”

“Well,” I say,“I hate to admit it, but I worry about those girls. The way they flirt with him. You’ve seen them. He’s a pretty easy target when he’s had enough to drink.”

“You have nothing to worry about. Abel knows what’s what. That girl Bonnie? The redhead? The other night, you weren’t there, she goes to sit on his lap and he says, ‘I’m taken, Bonnie,’ and she says, ‘Not right now, you’re not.’ And you know what he says to that?”

“What?”

“He says, ‘Now and forever.’”

“Really?”

“‘Now and forever,’ those were his words. ‘Now and forever.’ He was dead serious. You have nothing to worry about. You take it from me.”

And so I do take it from him. I decide to trust his instincts over my own. I remind myself that he knows where everything is in this house, and such is my craving for reassurance it seems possible that he may also know—through the same uncanny avenues open to Mrs. Carver—how everybody
feels
in this house.