Things as They Are (15 page)

At the end of those two weeks, Pam left him. Ray came home late from work and found a fat envelope resting on the kitchen table with his name on it. The long letter inside explained that it had nothing to do with him and everything to do with her. The last two months of auditions, rehearsals, and the show itself had been a process of awakening from an interminable, dreary sleep. At last she knew what she must do with her life. She must act.

What was important for Ray to understand was that this was nobody’s fault. Their marriage had been doomed from the beginning because it had linked two incompatible natures, the practical and the artistic. Only the suppression and denial of her true, artistic nature had permitted the marriage to survive. She did not blame Ray that this relationship had nurtured him while she withered like a plant denied light and water, nothing was to be gained from finger pointing. But now they must go their separate ways. The cruellest thing he could do would be to try to dissuade her from “following her bliss.” There was more in the letter, dealing with the practical matters that were supposed to be his specialty. Pam had withdrawn half of the money held in their joint account and suggested that the house be sold as soon as possible so the proceeds could be divided. She could not see him but he must promise to take care of himself.

Ray took this badly but also, as was his habit, very quietly. In private he sometimes grew frantic, turning this way and that
in his mind, seeking a way out, but his gaze always came to rest on a blank wall. When he studied a column of figures or read a newspaper or made himself a meal in the tiny bachelor apartment he rented after the house was sold, the wall was there, forcing its blankness upon him. Ray’s face grew haggard and grey from twisting his neck in a futile effort to see beyond and behind the wall, to wherever Pam had gone. In time, this failure turned his stare apathetic and rubbed the innocence out of his face.

Nobody knew his wife had left him. If he had a friend, Ray would not likely have said anything to him anyway, because he could not believe this was happening to him. He would get Pam back. People in the office saw very well what was happening to him, that he was losing weight and making mistakes at his work that no one would have believed Ray Matthews capable of. Most of all, they noted the haunting change in his face.

When things were at their worst, he heard Pam’s voice in the kitchen one morning when he was shaving. It was months since he had seen or heard her and the sound of her voice made him shake so violently that he had to lay his razor down so as not to slash himself. Then it came to him what it was. Pam hadn’t come home to him. She was being interviewed on the local
CBC
morning radio show.

Ray stood absolutely still, intent, and as he listened to the disembodied voice of his wife, something strange began to happen. He heard the electrical whir and chatter of wheels speeding over flimsy rails, the clink of ice rocking against the sides of a tumbler, his father shouting funny things to him in a raw voice, the laughter of a small boy who could not guess or imagine the harsh territory his father had crossed to find himself standing where he stood that night. Ray could guess now, having been on a similar journey, now completed.

Pam’s voice returned from the other room, talking about some man called Ibsen. Over all the months of separation her voice had changed, or his way of hearing it had. Coming out of the void, how false, how insincere it sounded, how
actressy
. It
struck Ray that the owner of such a voice might not know all there was to know. Something more
had
passed between him and his father, borne on his dead brother’s train, than a mere exchange of drinks and loose change. What, was for him to decide.

With that thought, Ray picked up his razor and set about uncovering his face.

1957
WAS THE YEAR
the Americans arrived. The men came first, engineers, accountants, managers, shift captains to organize and oversee the construction of the mine. Their wives and children would follow later, when proper, suitable houses had been built for them.

Del Cutter, his wife Marge, and their son Sammy were the Americans’ closest neighbours and saw all of it, from the beginning. In the time before the Company, an open field had faced the Cutter place, a three-room house sided in imitation brick they had lived in ever since Sammy was born. Then the Company bought the field opposite for a housing site, earth-moving equipment roared and rumbled, tracing roads, crescents, bays. Next the water mains were laid. By June the basements were dug and the old pasture where Sammy had wandered about collecting burrs and fox tails in his socks was dotted with heaps of brown earth thrown up by the excavations. Concrete for the basements was poured and the carpenters started framing the houses. The shriek of power-saws, the hammering, the shouting of men back and forth went on for as long as there was summer light to work by. Only on Sundays was the site deserted and quiet. Sundays, the Cutter family crossed the road to admire the new houses.

They would walk the hard-packed dirt roads and gaze at the Americans’ houses, split levels and ranch-style bungalows
mostly, the kind of houses their owners had grown accustomed to in New Mexico and Texas. Time after time Sammy’s mother would halt dead in the middle of the road, shade her eyes with her hand and stand motionless, staring at the unroofed frame through which the sun could be seen sinking, burning between the ribs of the skeleton house like a fiery heart. Then she would fold her arms underneath her breasts and walk on to the next house like a woman moving from picture to picture in a gallery, deep in contemplation.

On these outings Sammy sensed something strange in the air. He couldn’t put a name to it but the feeling was like the happy expectancy that came with waiting for Christmas. Perplexed by his excitement, he ran about, showing off, scrambling up the big piles of dirt, screaming “I’m the king of the castle,” then crazily tearing down, arms pin wheeling, an avalanche of clods and stones bouncing at his heels. Or he’d quietly burrow his hands into the sand which was dumped in driveways to be used for mixing concrete, working his fingers past the dry, hot crust, deeper and deeper until the sand grew cool and surprisingly moist to the touch. And whether he was noisy or silent, his mother paid him not the slightest attention, but walked the raw, empty streets as if she were half-asleep. Sometimes she asked his father questions.

“When do you think they’ll come?”

“Who?”

“The Americans.”

Her husband always squinted his eyes when considering a question, in the fashion of country people. “Beats me,” he said.

Not until they had gone up and down each street once, sometimes twice, did they turn back to their own house and beds.

What people said was that Del Cutter was a hard man to figure. He was a dandy worker but it didn’t do him much
good because he never took go-ahead jobs. Winters he was the caretaker at the rink and an acknowledged wizard at pebbling a sheet of curling ice, none better. But almost any job would have paid more than caretaker at the rink. Summers he mostly worked out on farms. If a farmer got behind with his seeding, or fencing, or summer fallowing, Del Cutter was there to give him a week’s worth of solid work before moving on to the next man who needed a hand. But it was the same thing all over again. It didn’t pay. Still, Del never complained. The job at the rink suited him because there was nobody over him there; he was his own boss. And the way he worked summers suited him because with so many bosses he could always tell one to go fuck himself if he felt like it. Cutter was a proud, hot, touchy sort. He preferred not being tied to any one man’s pleasure or displeasure. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket was how he reasoned.

One morning, up early to get a few poplar sticks from the wood pile to kindle the breakfast fire in the woodstove, Marge Cutter paused and studied the men outlined against the cloudless blue sky, roofing the houses. Later in the day, while pumping water at the well to do her laundry, she overran the bucket and soaked her shoes because she had forgot what she was about, mechanically driving the handle up and down while studying the New Houses. That was how she spoke of them now, with capitals in her voice. She could hardly wait to see them finished, everything of the very best, clean and bright and shining.

The following Sunday, on their tour of the New Houses, Marge up and entered one of them, without so much as a by your leave. Del was taken quite aback because it was not in Marge’s nature to be a forward woman, with anyone else but him she was shy and retiring. Although steps to the front door weren’t installed yet, she’d reached up, clutched the door jambs, pawed at the threshold until her foot caught a
purchase, and then boosted herself through the doorway. “That’s trespass,” Del had called after her, watching her disappear. He called out to her again and when she failed to reply he waved Sammy into the vacant house, looked doubtfully up and down the street, and then sprang up after his wife and son.

The house was still nothing more than a shell, outside walls and a roof, rooms partitioned off. Del hardly recognized the voices of Marge and Sammy echoing in the back; the hollow house made them entirely different, the voices of ghosts and strangers. He tracked their unfamiliarity through several doorways and discovered wife and child in the kitchen, Marge holding forth on the layout to the boy as if she had drawn the blueprints with her own hand.

“And this is the counter,” she said, pointing, not looking at Del when he came in. “And these holes here are where the double sinks will go in. And over there, in front of that big window is where the stove’ll go. Electric.” She brushed past Del, Sammy trailing after her, and turned into a hallway. Her husband hesitated and then followed the two of them. “Here’s the indoor toilet,” she said to Sammy, “and it’ll have everything, a sink and a bath. All that.” She trooped them through the three bedrooms, talking in a high-pitched, nervous, eager way that Del hadn’t heard before.

“Look at the size of it!” she exclaimed to Sammy when they entered the master bedroom. Sammy said it didn’t look so big to him but his mother explained that was how an empty room always appeared. It was a funny thing, the more you put into an empty room, the bigger it seemed to get.

She ended her guided tour in the living room, counting off on her fingers. “Kitchen, three bedrooms, bathroom, living room. How many rooms is that? Six, isn’t it? Six rooms. And the kids’ bedrooms are nearly the size of my kitchen,” she said wonderingly. She took her son by the shoulders, steering him directly in front of the enormous rectangle cut in one of the living-room walls. “You know what that’s called, Sammy?” she asked. “That’s called a picture window. It gives you all of outside to look at, the whole big picture. Just look at that view.”

The three of them regarded solemnly and reverently a vast open expanse, the same view that they had been able to enjoy from their front yard before these very houses had been raised to stand between them and what they now admired. But neither Sammy nor Marge remembered this. Standing where they stood the landscape was changed, was charged with an unfamiliar, heart-rending beauty. A limitless stretch of brome grass billowed in the evening breeze, the slanting rays of the evening sun glinting upon it each time it bowed down before the wind. When the wind ebbed, the grass sprang upright again, swaying and shuddering, a deep green tide surging against the dam of pale sky. And here and there, isolated amid the grass, islands of red willow turned a sad, dusky rose in the dying sun, and poplar bluffs were crowned with swarming, shimmering light.