The Romantic Page 18

  He sighs and switches the light off.

  “It was only a bat,” I say.

  “It knew how to fly,” he says. “It knew how to navigate by sonar.” He starts switching the flashlight on and off. “If I hadn’t touched them,” he says,“maybe the baby would have let go of her after a while and another mother would have come down and rescued it.”

  “Do they do that?”

  “If you leave things alone, that’s better. There are scientists who think that. They think you should never interfere.”

  He sounds so intelligent and lost. I say,“When I called you stupid. Before. I was just angry. You’re not stupid at all.”

  He looks toward the mouth of the cave. “It’s stopped raining.”

  “Are we going to bury them?”

  “I guess.” He releases a shaky breath that goes straight to my heart. He says that if I wait here he’ll get the trowel.

  As soon as he’s gone I switch on the flashlight and study the corpses. Fan out one of the mother’s wings. It’s like cooked chicken skin. “Poor thing,” I say, trying to summon more pity than I feel because I want to be as grief-stricken as he is.

  Because I am furious with love. I am in love with him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Sixteen days after my return from Vancouver, I miscarry. It’s three a.m. The alarm under my pillow has just gone off to wake me for my middle-of-the-night tea drink, and as I pull myself to a sitting position I feel the wetness between my legs. Four days ago, just in case, I began wearing sanitary napkins, but I’ve already bled through to the sheet. The cramps—is it possible?—are gone.

  For what remains of the night, I sit at my desk and bleed. Every half-hour or so, after changing napkins, I investigate the soiled one for evidence of rudimentary life. What do I expect to find? A half-formed foot? An eyeball? There are promising clots. I sit back down at the desk and catch up on my math homework. My mind is lucid, the absence of pain as sharp as a recovered sense.

  At eight o’clock I dress for school and eat breakfast, but as soon as my father leaves the house I return to my desk and do more homework until Mrs. Carver arrives. When I tell her the news she rushes to get a juice glass and has me hold it between my legs so that she can collect a sample. In the kitchen she adds water to the blood and then drains off the diluted portion and we both look at what’s left. She points to a yellow blob. “Placenta.”

  It’s over. Still, I bleed heavily for three days. During this time I continue to go to school. I feel an urge to pay close attention, I take reams of notes. At home I inventory my wardrobe. All the clothes of my mother’s that I can’t see myself wearing again—anything too fussy or pastel coloured—I return to her closet. I work fast. I walk fast. The time-bomb click of my heels going down the halls at school is an unexpected gratification.

  On Friday night, with the bleeding almost over, the cramps return, as Mrs. Carver said they might. She said I wasn’t to worry, though, it would only be my womb shrinking.

  The pain wakes me about an hour after I’ve fallen asleep. Next door I hear my father rattling his newspaper. I picture him holding a baby in his arms, his awkwardness and joy. My throat constricts.

  “I killed it,” I think, awed. “I killed my own baby.”

  I cry weakly, hampered by not wanting him to hear and because I have no right to this grief, which seems to be convulsing straight from my womb. How can Abel not feel something? How is it possible that his baby and I have been caught up in a bloody fight to the death and he hasn’t even felt the twinge that would drive him to pick up the phone?

  I go to my desk and turn on the lamp. Pull down my underpants. From an exercise book I rip out a page and wipe one end of it between my legs.

  The smear is like a banner. No, it’s like a rag! A rag of dark red.

  I wait a few minutes, waving the page and blowing on it, then I pull up my underpants, sit down, and where the now-dried smear is I write the word “Romance.” There’s no need to refer to Rimbaud’s poem—from reading Abel’s letter a hundred times I know it down to the exclamation marks. In flowing, coiling letters intended to parody his calligraphic script, I write:

  I

  When you are eighteen, you aren’t really suspicious.

  —One fine day, you’ve had enough of waiting and morning sickness,

  And the Bear Pit Café with its crappy lanterns!

  —You go walking beneath the green neon signs of the promenade.

  The neon signs smell bad on lousy afternoons in September!

  The air is so hard sometimes, you open your eyelids;

  The alleyway, full of noises—the lying bastard’s not far away—

  Carries odours of pot, and odours of booze …

  II

  —Then you see a very long rag

  Of dark red, framed by a loud slut,

  Pierced by a local rock star, who is running away

  From soft little babies, small, perfectly dead …

  I read it over and start to laugh … a breathless, trembling, unnatural sound. I cover my mouth with my hands. I glance toward the mirror on the closet door and see a skinny, hunched-over person, eyes big as bowling balls, naked except for oversized underpants. Have I lost my mind? I don’t care. I grab the pen again and at the bottom of the page scrawl: “? WAS PREGNANTI I FLEW ALL THE WAYOUT TO TELL YOU AND CAUGHT YOU NECKING WITH THAT SLUT!! SO I HAD ABORTION!!” I draw an arrow to the smear,“HERE’S WHAT’S LEFT OF THE BABY!!”

  I put the page in an envelope, address it and go back to bed. Despite the cramps, I sleep.

  I mail the letter the next day. A week later the phone calls start, two and three a night for five nights straight. My father, instructed to say,“She doesn’t want to speak to you ever again,” then slam down the receiver, listens and makes sympathetic noises, says,“I’ll tell her, son, but she still won’t come to the phone,” and,“Maybe you should give her some time to sort herself out, some breathing space, I hate to think what all these calls must be costing.”

  “Hang up!” I hiss, frantic in case Abel mentions the abortion.

  He doesn’t, although his concern for my health begins to strike my father as odd. “In bed?” my father says. “No, no, she’s up and around.” To me, he says,“I know he’s the one who broke it off, but he couldn’t be more worried about you. He couldn’t be sorrier.”

  “He’s too late.”

  “Well, he’s in the slough of despond by the sounds of it. And you’ll probably bite my head off for saying so, but you don’t seem to be all that happy and gay yourself.”

  “Happy?” I say, uncomprehending. “Gay?”

  A week later the letters start arriving. I cry to see my name on the envelope in his handwriting. I weaken. I don’t open the envelope though. I burn it in the metal wastepaper basket. Watching the flames, for those five or six seconds, I let myself wonder about the contents: the poem or drawing, the plea, the explanation. “He doesn’t love me,” I say, so that I won’t be tempted to put the fire out.

  Sometimes it goes out on its own. “He doesn’t love me,” I say and light another match.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  I graduate from high school with a seventy-six percent average. The year before, my average was ninety-three, but that was back when I still cared. Seventy-six strikes me as improbably high, considering how I never once raised my hand during class and how completely unprepared I was for the final exams. As long as I passed, I kept telling myself, that was all that mattered. I had no plans for going on to university. In fact, I’d already landed a full-time job at a second-hand bookstore downtown.

  I write my last exam on a Monday morning in June. That same day, at four o’clock, I start work AT BOOKS! BOOKS! books! My hours are from four until ten, Monday to Saturday. By the end of the first day I know all there is to know, which is next to nothing. By the end of the first week, I feel as if I’ve been there for years. I feel secure and unpressured. Hours go by when I don’t think of Abel at all. />
  There is only one other employee, Don Shaw, who is also the manager. He is in his mid-forties, about my height. He’s a bachelor, he never married. He has small clever eyes, narrow shoulders and wide hips. His hair is beige and dense, like sod. One day a mentally ill man comes into the store and calmly starts taking books from the shelves and throwing them on the floor, and when Don Shaw says,“I think you had better leave,” the man says in an aristocratic English accent,“I think you had better buy yourself a new hairpiece,” then strolls out. Afterwards Don Shaw sees me glancing at his hair and he leans toward me and says, slyly,“Pull. Go ahead.”

  He’s always inviting me to touch him, feel how icy his hands are, feel how the hard tubular lump on his forearm moves around under the skin like a loose battery. He also has things he wants me to touch, such as the leather upholstery on his hundred-year-old divan. He lives only a few minutes away in a low-rise apartment building adjoining a laundromat. The vibration from the washing machines tilts his pictures, the steam from the dryers pours through his heating vents and bakes the plaster. He says,“It’s like living in the belly of a beast.”

  He says, based on nothing,“You’d love it.”

  He craves warmth. He wears thick-ribbed corduroy pants, grey or brown, and drab sweater-vests from some bygone era. On the most sweltering days, the shirt under the vest might be short-sleeved, but not necessarily. He looks like what he is: a failed man of letters. During his shift, which is ten in the morning until I show up, he reads textbooks from the philosophy section. At night he devotes himself to writing poems he calls Exhalations. I ask if he has been published. He seems not to hear. And then he says,“When you refuse to rupture the flow of your thought with line breaks and punctuation, you find that even the most enthusiastic editors, who once compared you to Joyce and Wallace Stevens, stop returning your phone calls.”

  A muscle twitches in his cheek. He could say more, but won’t. He hoards his injuries. He is bitterly amused by his own thoughts. When I arrive at the store he smiles to himself as if to suggest he knows exactly why I’m late or early or right on time, and for a moment I wonder if it isn’t true that my small, careful life isn’t actually reckless and silly.

  “Madame Kirk,” he says.

  “Don Shaw,” I say.

  Our greeting ritual.

  Even talking about him to other people I say Don Shaw, both names. Don on its own is too informal. And Mr. Shaw, if I called him that he’d think I was being sarcastic.

  The name of the man who owns the place is Ernie Watson. Him we call the Fire Chief, owing to the fact that our paycheques arrive (via special delivery mail) in Halifax Fire Department envelopes. For the five years that Don Shaw has worked at B?OKs! BOOKS! BOOKS! he has never once spoken to the Fire Chief let alone met him. Any money left over in the safe at the end of the week goes into a numbered bank account; the utility bills are handled long distance. Occasionally there’s a problem that can’t be overlooked (the toilet flooding, the lock on the front door jamming … both occur during my first week) and then we have to phone a panicky old woman named Beryl. “Oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear,” she says rapidly, as if it were one long word. She sends her husband, Buddy, who has tearful eyes and the loveliest hands, narrow and white; while you’re explaining what’s wrong he holds them up in the manner of a surgeon waiting for his gloves.

  Don Shaw has no doubt that the Fire Chief bought the store because of the frayed wiring and the towers of yellowing books in the basement, the ancient oil furnace down there, that he’s just biding his time until, without any outright foul play on his part, this tinderbox burns to the ground and he can collect a multi-million-dollar insurance settlement.

  “So if it happens,” I say,“it’ll be in the winter when the furnace is on.”

  Don Shaw gets my drift. “By which time,” he says,“our Madame Kirk will have gone on to bigger and better things.”

  I applied for this job because the ad in the newspaper said “easy-going atmosphere” and I thought I might have a few free minutes, here and there, to study shorthand. I was overly pessimistic. Here and there I have hours at a stretch. Hardly anybody comes in, and those who do sit on boxes of recently arrived books (no sense unpacking them when the shelves are already crammed) and read for hours at a time, we don’t care. How the store works is, we buy used books at ten percent of the cover price, any kind of book, university textbook, government manual, pornography, the only criterion being reasonable intactness. Hardly anybody shows up with just a boxful; the stuff arrives by the carload—some dead pharmacist’s reference library, or a housewife’s complete Harlequin Romance collection. “You’ll buy it all?” the person says, wide-eyed at such luck. Yes, we’ll buy it all. Then we’ll sell it at fifty percent of the cover price. But since, in fact, we won’t sell it, since we take in ten times more stock than we get rid of, the system is mad. Furthermore, as Don Shaw admitted during my interview, the Fire Chief has no way of keeping track of all this inventory. We could be stealing half of it for resale to some other second-hand bookstore.

  “You don’t have to be smart to work here,” he said. “You don’t have to be charming and full of pep. You just have to be trustworthy.” He scanned me up and down, a relay between my breasts and mouth, as if in these features lay the clues to my integrity. When he stopped to meet my eye, his expression was shrewd and bereaved. I thought I must remind him of some old flame. He said,“How trustworthy is Louise Kirk?”

  “Extremely,” I answered. “Perfectly.”

  It’s true, I am. A year earlier, before the party and Vancouver and the placenta in a juice glass (a sight I wished I’d been spared), I probably would have helped myself to the odd paperback novel, because why not? I lived by no overriding principles. What governed my behaviour was how hopeful or hopeless I felt on any given day. I’d have stolen the paperbacks on days when my horizons seemed to have shrunk to the next moment. I’d have felt myself entitled.

  Now, with my horizons as narrow as they’ve ever been, I feel entitled to very little. I want very little, only to earn some money while teaching myself how to type and take shorthand, and to go out occasionally, to go out on a date. Without Abel, I’m nobody, I have nothing, I’m resigned to that. All I have is the oxlike instinct that shoves you toward the next moment. If I’m not going to jump off a cliff, and I guess I’m not, then I may as well try to make my life bearable. I can’t imagine ever again being wildly happy, but maybe I can be happy enough.

  I can at least try to stay out of trouble, and with that in mind I go the Hassle-free Clinic in Yorkville and get myself a prescription for birth control pills. Another secret to be kept from my father. Although, that same day, I confess to him why it is I haven’t heard back from any universities: I never mailed in any applications.

  He is crestfallen. I am surprised to discover what big plans he’d had for me. Lawyer. Professor. Biologist. Diplomat.

  I say,“Diplomat! Are you kidding? I’m the most undiplomatic person you know.”

  He throws around his arms. “You could see the world! Meet fascinating, exciting, cultivated people. Learn new languages. New ways of life!”

  I say,“I want to learn how to type.”

  I have a movie in my head of my near future. It’s very detailed, in the beginning anyway, influenced by the layout and atmosphere of my father’s office and by Aunt Verna’s stories of her years working downtown for the president of a large brokerage firm. The opening scene has me taking dictation. My boss is in his forties. He is a good-natured, portly man, not the brains of the company, but in no danger of losing his job. It’s winter, the end of the day, the streetlights have just come on. In the windows of the building next door you can see secretaries putting the covers over their typewriters. In the office where we are, there’s a cozy feeling, a winding down of efficiency. My boss loosens his tie. I uncross my legs. I wear a tweed skirt and white tailored blouse. I close my notebook and say,“I’ll type these up first thing in the morning.”

/>   He waves his hand. “No hurry.”

  On the way back to my desk, I pass the desks of other secretaries. We say goodnight to each other. A few of us regularly eat lunch together at the snack bar of a department Store. Grilled-cheese or clubhouse sandwiches, apple pie à la mode. Afterwards we stop at the cosmetics counter and slash our wrists with lipstick and say,“Is that too red?” “What do you think?” Occasionally one of us breaks down and buys a tube. To buy almost anything aside from food and nylons is to splurge.

  I take the subway home. I am an expert at the origami folding that keeps the pages of my newspaper out of other people’s faces. I read “Dear Abby” and do the crossword. Near my stop there’s a fruit stand, and every evening I buy a fresh navel orange for tomorrow’s breakfast. The walk to my place is about ten minutes, not long. I live on the top floor of a Victorian house, two rooms plus a bathroom with a clawfoot tub. There is a cat—grey, fat, shy. There is an asparagus fern on top of the refrigerator. A two-burner stove. For supper I scramble eggs or heat up a can of spaghetti and meatballs. The kitchen table is an old wooden drop-leaf pushed into a corner.

  Suddenly, in this movie, it’s summer. I have changed out of my office clothes and into white shorts and a blue-and-white-striped T-shirt. I wash the dishes listening to classical music on the radio, then I make a cup of coffee and take it out onto the fire escape. The view is of the roofs of other such houses and of treetops and stars coming out.

  One night the new guy in the second-floor apartment also happens to be on the fire escape. We start talking, and he invites me down for a glass of wine. He’s a medical or engineering student, or he’s studying for the bar. He’s about five foot nine, nice looking, not too handsome, not too straight but not a hippy, either. Blond or sandy-haired. Maybe he wears wire-framed glasses. His friends are few and close. His interests lie outside of the visual arts and music and science. So he’s not a medical student, then. A law student, that’s better. The kind of person who takes sides, who fights for what he believes in.