The Romantic Page 19

  You see what I’m driving at. He isn’t Abel. He can’t be anything like Abel, and most of the time he doesn’t even exist. I finish my coffee and go back inside and sit in a wingback chair and read a Jane Austen novel, or it could be that I’m already at Dickens. (I’m working my way through the great literary works in alphabetical order according to author.) The odd time that I do keep things going with the guy from downstairs, that I accept his invitation and let the night advance until we’re kissing, the movie always flaps off the reel.

  If this is loyalty to Abel, I’m tired of it. I admit that I love him. My love is a fact, like the law of gravity. But it doesn’t change anything. What am I being loyal to? What is there left to betray?

  All I want is to go out on dates with nice young men anyone would approve of. Maybe I want to sleep with them. I’m so lonely sometimes. Sometimes at the store I have such a desperate, pent-up feeling I wonder if I’m turning into Don Shaw. I try to concentrate on my shorthand exercises but I keep glancing up at the window and willing every half-decent-looking guy under thirty to come through the door. I lower my standards to include the short, the squat. And then one of these guys does come in and he heads straight for the pornography section. Predictably enough. The store is in the middle of a block of pawnbrokers and plumbing-supply outlets. Two buildings down is a hard-drinking bar called the Morgan, and when I leave at ten o’clock there are always a couple of middle-aged men swaying on the sidewalk. They wear cheap suit jackets. An inordinate number have full heads of hair, neatly combed. Some have ducktails. Every so often I get one of these guys in the store, and either he’s just a friendly drunk or he starts pestering me and crashing into the shelves, and I have to grab the broom and herd him out. It’s not as frightening as it sounds. It can be funny in a pathetic way. There’s one guy (an exception in that he’s completely bald), he calls me Slim, and after I throw him out and lock the door he pounds on the glass yelling,“Slim! I love you! Hey, Slim, let’s get married!” and the only thing that upsets me about this is, I know how he feels. I know that urgency.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  By the middle of July I find myself questioning how much time I spend on buses and subways going to and from work. Although my plan was to wait until the spring before looking for an apartment downtown, I start wondering if I shouldn’t find a place a lot sooner than that.

  Also in the middle of July, perhaps because I can’t think of leaving home—leaving my father—without thinking of what my mother did, I start having dreams about her. The sweetest, saddest dreams. She’s dead but has come back to life to pick up something, a blouse or a pair of shoes, and before she goes away again we sit at the kitchen table, just the two of us. She’s the age she was when she left: thirty-three. I’m the age I am now. She’s always dressed oddly—in a majorette’s outfit, a hula skirt. One time she has on Mrs. Dingwall’s baggy red pants. She is serene. Her eyes seem crushed, they’re like chips of ice. I think she may be blind. I ask her how she died and why she left but can never get an answer, or I can’t hear it. Sometimes I cry, and she strokes my hair. In one version, I’m curled up in her lap. The dream is just awash in love, mine for her, hers for me.

  When I wake up, it takes me a few minutes to remember that she isn’t dead, or isn’t as far as I know. I wonder about the love in the dream. One morning it strikes me that I may be summoning feelings from infancy, and at breakfast I ask my father,“What was Mom like when I was a baby?”

  He looks up from the newspaper. “A baby?”

  “Was she happy?”

  “Happy?” The question seems to terrorize him.

  “Did she like being a mother?”

  “Of course. Of course, she did.”

  “Well, she wasn’t crazy about other people’s babies. I remember when Gord and Ward Dingwall were born, she wouldn’t even look in the carriage.”

  “They weren’t hers. They weren’t her flesh and blood.”

  “So—” I’m suddenly shy. “So, she was happy back then, anyway.”

  “She was never what you’d call carefree or contented, she was never the cheerful type. I suppose it would be more accurate to say she had a sense of purpose. Looking after a baby, her baby, that was an important, worthwhile job. She took it very seriously. There was a right and wrong way to do everything. The diaper had to be folded just so, just so.” He frowns, obviously remembering his many failed attempts.

  “I’ll bet she changed it every ten seconds.”

  He sets down his coffee cup. ‘You were an occasion,” he says. ‘You were an occasion she rose to.”

  An occasion she rose to. The phrase stays in my mind for days. What does it mean? I think I know, and then I don’t. It begins to take on a venerableness, as if I’d read it on a plaque. By the end of the week I believe I’ve been offered a clue to my destiny. In dreams about my mother (during this time I have several more) I still feel her love, and still wonder about it when I wake up, but now I also feel her ambition.

  You might think, as a consequence, I’d reconsider going to university. That never once occurs to me. In fact, I find myself even more convinced that making humble plans is the right thing. I have a destiny. No matter what I do, it will arrive. Now that I have cleared the way, it can start arriving.

  Believing this, I start to calm down, generally. At the same time I grow watchful. Any incident may be the one from which this second stage of my life takes its direction. A handsome guy walks by outside the store window, and instead of becoming tense and predatory, I fall into a languorous study of him as a possibility. Either he’ll come through the door or he won’t. Either we are ordained to meet or we aren’t.

  I don’t discount the effect of the weather on my state of mind. Since the first of August we’ve had ninety-degree temperatures and afternoons pounding with thunder and then, just as I’m leaving for work, there’s a brief downpour that only makes the air more humid. The least activity—removing a book from the shelf—becomes a marathon. I am bound to be less keyed up and yet the heat can’t account for my conviction that my life is about to change. I keep thinking of that sweltering August down in the ravine when there were thunderstorms every day and they seemed so portentous, when what finally happened was, I fell out of love with Mrs. Richter and in love with Abel. Not that I now expect to fall out of love with him, that won’t be it. I might love somebody else, though. A little.

  During the mornings and early afternoons I practise typing on my father’s old Remington, seating myself directly in the wind from a pair of powerful electric fans that I place at opposite corners of the study. Here, too, I am aware of being both more relaxed and more alert to my surroundings. I seem to anticipate the ringing of the phone, but I never answer it. I get up, open the door and strain to hear Mrs. Carver’s “Hello?” What if it’s Abel? Sometimes I’m certain it is, I have a premonition. I cling to the door frame until I realize it’s only Mrs. Carver’s daughter, or her friend Mrs. Sawchuk, and then I sink to the floor and tell myself that this feeling, this punch in the ribs, is relief.

  Around noon my father sometimes calls to see how I am. When we’re through chatting, he has me put Mrs. Carver back on the line. Now that I’m no longer home in the evenings she stays to eat supper with him. I only recently learned this, although my father claims to have told me weeks ago. I’m tempted to eavesdrop on the extension, but they’d probably catch me because there’s an echo when both phones are off the hook, so I hang up and tiptoe down the hall to gather what I can from Mrs. Carver’s intermittent noises of sympathy and interest. Often she laughs, a dry coughing sound rarely heard otherwise. One day she comes out with this complete and astonishing sentence: “I wouldn’t turn down a glass of sherry.”

  “What do you talk about?” I ask my father that night.

  “Oh, what’s going on at the office. All the shenanigans, the gossip. She seems to get a kick out of that kind of thing.”

  “Are you … would you ever take her out?”

  “Tak
e her out?”

  “On a date.”

  “A date?”

  “She’s only three years older than you.”

  He looks dumbfounded. “I’m still a married man.”

  “Not really.”

  “In the eyes of the law, your mother and I are still man and wife. And Mrs. Carver, she’s … she’s …”

  I wait.

  “Well, she’s a decent, respectable, proper—”

  “All right, all right. So, will she stay on, then? After I move out?”

  A pause. He doesn’t like to talk about my moving out. “I haven’t thought about it. I suppose she will. For a while.”

  “I hope so. I don’t want to have to worry about you.”

  “You know …” He looks off. “She’s smarter than I ever gave her credit for. Uniquely informed. Learned, really.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “All that medical esoterica, those folk remedies of hers. They’re not just Irish, they’re from around the world. China, Turkey. She has me drinking a tea.”

  I go rigid.

  “For my arthritis. An ancient Turkish brew. Some old woman in a delicatessen on Bloor Street sells her the ingredients. Under an oath of secrecy, all very clandestine.” He flexes his fingers. “Tastes like the devil, but darned if it doesn’t seem to be doing the trick.”

  Upon reflection, I decide I don’t have to worry about Mrs. Carver telling him. Why would she? There’s nothing to be gained by it, and she, of all people, is hardly likely to let anything slip. Besides, from how she has been acting, you’d never guess there was an abortion between us. She never refers to it, I never get any unusually anxious looks. Apparently she has a gift for putting unpleasantness behind her.

  If so, lucky her. And lucky me, for not having to worry about her worrying. All the same, there is an abortion between us, a squalid light. There are moments when everything about her—the bargain-basement clothes, the cheap hair dye, the whispering, the teas and superstitions, even the back-to-normal behaviour, implying, as this does, an overfamiliarity with matters bloody—is a reminder. I know how unfair I’m being. I can’t help myself. When I arrive home from work, I am bewildered to think I still live in this house, with these people. Sometimes I open the door to the fronthall closet just for the sake of depressing myself with the sight of all my mother’s hats. I hear her voice—not the tender one of my dreams but the sardonic one of my memories—saying,“Crap! Throw them out!”

  I start reading the classified ads and making appointments to look at unfurnished flats. Usually I know within two seconds of the landlord’s opening the front door that I’m wasting my time. Still, I climb the stairs into realms of heat I can’t believe are safe for humans. Cracked plaster, a crying baby somewhere, peeling wallpaper, a room under the eaves only a five-year-old could stand up straight in—what the ad meant by “cozy.” The whole place painted a high-gloss, institutional cream means “newly decorated.” “Bright” means not pitch dark. I’d been avoiding basements, but lured by the phrase “high and dry,” I end up standing in one, hunched under a pipe whose steady drip the landlord tries to pass off as condensation.

  According to Don Shaw I’m never going to find anything, not in my price range, not where I’m looking. He keeps telling me about apartments for rent in this neighbourhood. “You’d love living around here,” he says.

  I laugh.

  “Oh,” he says. “The heartless laugh of the young girl.”

  One day a furnished place comes up for rent in his building. “It would be perfect for you,” he says. “Quiet, right at the back. All you’ll ever hear is the sparrows in the maple tree.”

  I tell him to forget it.

  “Everything within walking distance,” he goes on. “Streetcar stop out front, laundromat downstairs, grocery store on the corner.”

  “Hookers on the corner.”

  “That’s right. Hookers keeping the sex addicts occupied so that pretty girls like Madame Kirk can walk around unmolested.”

  Pretty. Except for Abel nobody has ever called me pretty. I feel myself blushing. Don Shaw smiles to himself.

  That night, as I’m closing up, there he is, walking through the door.

  “Don Shaw,” I say, surprised.

  “Madame Kirk.”

  “Did you forget something?”

  “I did not.” He smiles at his shoes, which are shined. His hair is also shiny, he’s used some sort of oil and combed it straight back. And he’s wearing cologne—Old Spice. I can smell it from here.

  With a touch of unease I say,“What’s the occasion?”

  He looks up. Pats his hair. “Oh … I, uh, I met a friend, an old friend, for dinner.”

  I don’t believe him. More than once he has described himself as a recluse. I turn and crouch to open the safe, which is recessed into the wall.

  He says,“I was on my way home and thought that, since I was passing by, I’d drop in and make you an offer.”

  My heart launches into a dull pounding. I put the money pouch in the safe, shut the door, spin the combination.

  ‘You are obviously disinclined to view the apartment on your own,” he says,“and so I’m here to offer myself as your escort.”

  I straighten. Still with my back to him, I open the ledger and write down the afternoon’s take: seventeen dollars.

  “Well?” he says.

  I turn around. “Right now?”

  He dangles a key. “The current tenant is out of town.”

  “And you just happen to have the key.”

  “I’m the superintendent.”

  “You are?”

  “I told you that.”

  No, he didn’t. It doesn’t matter. I retrieve my purse from under the counter. “I don’t know. I’m really tired.”

  “It won’t take long.”

  “But I’ll miss the ten-fifteen bus.”

  “The buses run until two a.m.”

  I sigh. I wonder at my lack of forcefulness.

  “Live dangerously,” he says.

  It’s still hot out. On the steps of the Morgan four men, my bald admirer among them, argue over something they keep trying to grab from each other. A deck of cards or a pack of cigarettes. “Slim!” my admirer yells. He stumbles over. His head is a sphere. “I love you!” he yells.

  “Go on, get back,” Don Shaw says, waving a hand, but the head rides like the moon alongside my right shoulder. At the intersection, it falls away. I look around. He is spooling backwards into traffic. “Marry me!” he yells.

  We turn left onto a block of darkened thrift shops and second-hand furniture stores. A store called Bargain Shoes displaying nothing but frilly organza dresses for little girls. Then an empty lot, blue chicory flowers mysteriously vibrant in the gloom. We don’t speak. He steps over the legs of a woman lying in a doorway and muttering to herself. I am shocked that it’s a woman and that he seemed hardly to notice her. I glance at him. His expression is strained. His slicked-back hair makes it look as though he’s wearing a futuristic helmet.

  At the comer we pass two girls in miniskirts and heavy make-up, they’re about my age, maybe prostitutes, maybe just a couple of bored girls escaping hot apartments. We pass a coffee shop, light as day inside, only one customer, a wizened version of Brigitte Bardot: the pout, the teased blond hair under a red polka-dot scarf. She sits at the window, smoking.

  The building next door is where we stop. It’s an old, haphazard brick mansion painted iron red. A laundromat consumes half of the ground floor. “This is it,” Don Shaw says. “Willow House.”

  There is no irony in his tone. There are willows in the yard. I look up at the higher stories and try to spot the charm I must be missing. A couple of turrets, yes, but they’re wrapped in brown shingles, and most of the woodwork is lost under aluminum siding.

  “Well, what do you think?” he asks.

  I see no sense in humouring him. “It’s ugly.”

  “Ugly.” He tries to hold on to his smile. “That’s no
t the word that leaps to my mind. But if, to you, living history is ugly, if an accretion of eras is ugly, then …”

  “Then,” I say,“it’s ugly.” I gesture at three possible front doors. “Which one?”

  The middle one. Inside, in the large foyer, a dim naked bulb hangs by a cord. Directly underneath, two wooden chairs face each other. “What’s this?” I say. “The interrogation room?”

  He picks the chairs up and sets them against the wall. “The kids move them around.”

  “What kids?”

  “A brother and sister in apartment three. Good kids, just nowhere to play.” He indicates the staircase.

  “Go ahead,” I say.

  I don’t want him looking at my rear end. When he starts climbing, I try not to look at his: the womanly girth of his hips. The stairs are the original hardwood, pale and worn to a velvety texture, sagging in the middle, a first indication, in this house, of its ghosts. I ask how many tenants there are.

  “Ten. Six apartments. One on the first floor, mine. Three on the second, two on the third. Yours is on the second at the back.”

  “Mine?”

  “The apartment that uh, that, uh—”

  “That’s for rent,” I finish.

  He can’t get the key to turn. “Come on,” he mutters.

  Once we’re in, he loosens up, flicking on the overhead light. “Eight-foot ceilings. All the original mouldings. New linoleum.” He turns in a circle. ‘You get a cross breeze with the two windows.”

  Maybe so, but it must be a hundred degrees in here. And the linoleum has a fake-brick pattern, and there’s just this one tiny room, apparently, since everything is in view: a single bed, a kitchen alcove, a brown-corduroy chesterfield, a card table and four chairs.

  “Is there a bathroom?” I ask.

  “Bathroom!” He strides over to what I took for a closet door and throws it open. “Toilet. Sink. Bathtub. Shower.”