The Romantic Read online

  From the first crisis until the end took a little over a year, and during that time I saw him almost every morning, dropping by his apartment on my way to work. Usually he was still in bed, but he’d get up and I’d light him a cigarette while he stood swaying in his navy-and-white-striped pyjamas that made him look like a prisoner of war. They were clean, though, no buttons missing, a tear at the shoulder neatly repaired by his own hands, which, as he took the cigarette, trembled so badly I had to steer it toward his mouth.

  I couldn’t watch him smoke. I’d wander around and be heart-stricken by the vacuum-cleaner tracks in the carpet, the emptied-out ashtrays. He’d always been fastidious but this was different, this was him not wanting us—his parents and me—to worry any more than we already were.

  He was so frail, so thin. Not gaunt, just sharper boned, his face suddenly sculpted, as if offering a preview of the handsome older man he would never become.

  Why couldn’t I save him? And if I couldn’t, why couldn’t Bach or astronomy, why couldn’t trees? “I’m not important,” he’d say, and it didn’t help, my saying that he was, or,“All right, I’m important, what about me?” He’d give me a look that made me feel as though I were begging him not to run off with another woman. He loved me, he pitied me, I could see he did, but there was a wash of absence over him like nostalgia for a future he was already living in.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A hot windy night in late June of 1968 and I am on my way to a party where I’ll get pregnant.

  Not that I know this or intend it.

  My date is Tim Todd, son of Big Ben Todd, who used to drink all the rye at my parents’ annual charades tournament and then invite the other husbands to punch him in the stomach. Since he was their boss, a partner in the law firm, they were all obliged to take a turn. Of course, they pulled their punches, which only made Big Ben more belligerent. “Come on!” he’d bellow. “Put some muscle behind it!”

  Tim is small boned and careful, more like his mother. He is my age, seventeen, almost eighteen, but with his drawn face and hollow eyes he could pass for twenty-five. He drives slouched in his seat, brooding. Whenever I’m turned away from him, as I am now (leaning out my opened window to imagine I’m in a convertible), he thinks my mind is on Abel. Usually he’s right. I can ignore his sullen spells. What I dread are the apologies: long, pained speeches, ambiguously tied to the writings of Ayn Rand or General Ulysses S. Grant, about why, in fact, he actually respects my attachment to a boy I haven’t seen or heard from in years. It drives me crazy.

  The truth is, very little about him doesn’t drive me crazy. I have developed the habit of punching his arm, a persecution he takes unflinchingly, in the tradition of his father. When we arrive at the party and he rings the bell, I go to punch him just as he turns toward me, and somehow I end up socking him in the jaw.

  “Oh, sorry,” I say. “Are you okay?”

  “What was that for?”

  “The door’s open. We’re supposed to go right in.”

  Poor Tim Todd with his nursery-rhyme name and bad-tempered date. He is wondering what the two of us are doing here when we could be playing backgammon in the light of his tropical fish tanks. He’s aggressively unsocial, but then so am I, or was, until yesterday on the Victoria Park bus when I sat beside a spectacularly beautiful girl who was inviting everybody around her, including the driver, to a party at her house in one of the wealthiest sections of the city. “Bring some cool guys,” she said, addressing me specifically.

  By which I knew she meant guys with long hair. Not Tim Todd, in other words, but as I thought I’d have nobody to talk to, I dragged him along.

  I wish I hadn’t. “Mafia money,” he says when we enter the white marble foyer. He’s still rubbing his jaw. When we enter the crowded living room and I say,“I wonder where Gena is,” he snorts and says,“Not greeting her guests at the door.”

  The music, Grace Slick singing “White Rabbit,” blows in from somewhere else, another room or from outside. “Oh,” I say,“I love this song.”

  “Since when?” Tim says.

  “Since right now.” I start swaying to the beat.

  “It’s like an oven in here,” he mutters. He lifts his chin and sniffs. “Is that marijuana?”

  “I don’t smell anything.”

  “I think it is,” he says tightly. “I think it’s marijuana.”

  “So what?”

  He blinks at me, surprised.

  “Why don’t you get something to drink,” I say.

  “I’m not thirsty.”

  “Well, then go look around.” I start squeezing through the group of people in front of us. “Try and find the aquarium.”

  “They have an aquarium?”

  “Rich people always have aquariums.” I give him a wave. “See you later.”

  I make for the marijuana smokers, a circle of them passing each other a pipe the size of a clarinet. One of the smokers (it’s hard to tell from the back if it’s a girl or guy) has hair like an explosion, bursting out in coils. The guy relighting the pipe wears a Che Guevara bandanna. A rush of desire goes through me, not just for him, for all of them, they’re so shocking and nonchalant. I stand closer and inhale the smoke drifting my way. Maybe in a little while I’ll work up the nerve to join the circle. I’m in a strange, reckless mood tonight. I have a tremendous feeling of anticipation. A girl cradling purple lilac blossoms taps me on the shoulder, and because she looks at me in a haunted, searching way, I think she has something important to tell me, me personally. But she only hands me a blossom and strolls off.

  I bring the blossom to my nose. It smells like mystery, glamour. I glance back at Tim, who is standing with three other short-haired guys and cocking his head at an earnest listening angle. I turn before he can catch my eye. Holding the lilac like a cigarette, I walk toward a pair of open French doors and through them onto a veranda.

  The music has switched to something bluesy featuring a flute, and down on the lawn about twenty people, Gena among them, do solitary dances around a fountain in which naked female statues pour water from jugs. The water shoots sideways into sashes, I can feel the spray all the way to where I’m standing. I go to the railing, and there is the whole golf-course-sized lawn, perfectly round bushes ranged across it like planets, causeways of white lights streaming overhead from the eaves of the house all the way to the aristocratic old willows that thrash at the back of the property. In order to get down the stairs I have to step over the legs of girls sprawled against boys and wearing dresses so short you can see their underpants in the veranda lights. They’re friendly, these girls. “Sorry,” they say, shifting sideways. “Can you get by?”

  I go to the fountain and sit on the edge. Gena’s dance is more like the dance of her long hair, which is really remarkable, jet black and sleek, like tar. While she slowly sways, it whips around in the wind. At one point she opens her eyes and looks in my direction and I lift a hand but I don’t think she notices. I get up then, and make my way along the edge of the property. When I reach the willows I see water farther along, behind a stone wall, so I keep going. A gate is in the wall, and I pass through it and walk over to a wooden bench that is next to a wrought-iron replica of an old streetlamp. I sit and kick off my shoes. You can feel the coolness of the water gusting off the pond. There are water-lily buds like candle flames. Ducks, stationary as decoys, rock on the waves.

  But they’re not ducks, as I realize after a moment. They’re geese. And the pond … the pond is a wide place in a creek.

  “Nothing is what it seems,” I think. I find this to be a deeply exciting idea. I sense a faint flash of light to my left, and I hold my breath, wondering if it’s angels. For as long as I can remember I’ve been prone to seeing scarves of white light out of the corners of my eyes, especially when I’m keyed up, and I call them angels because the air around me seems to get somehow purer and emptier, a really spooky feeling. I have this feeling now. I turn.

  Nothing. There’s nothing.
r />   No. There’s a boy, tightrope walking along the peaked stones that form the top of the wall. Shoulder-length dark hair, bare muscled chest shining like tin. A tall, lean boy with a white cloth in one hand and a beer bottle in the other. When he gets to where I am he jumps, and that’s how I know him, by the graceful landing.

  “So it was you,” he says. The same soft, hoarse voice, only deeper. He comes and stands in front of me. The cloth is a T-shirt. At my eye level a silver belt buckle catches the light.

  I swoon.

  He grabs my shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  I nod.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I just got a bit dizzy.”

  He must think I’m drunk or stoned.

  “Can you stand?”

  “Why?”

  “I want to show you something.”

  I come to my feet, dropping the lilac, and he tucks the T-shirt into his belt and takes my hand.

  We go over to the wall. “There,” he says, releasing me to point.

  Up and down the stones, in the chinks, are dozens of green embers.

  “What are they?”

  “Glowworms. Look at them all.”

  “Glow worms,” I say, remembering that they are the larvae of fireflies and that he showed them to me once before, down in the ravine. I say,“They’re like little Christmas lights.”

  He twists around, his expression young and happy, and in his eyes I see him. There he is. He blinks and seems suddenly shy.

  “I spotted you on the lawn,” he says. “The back of you. I wasn’t certain. But the walk. I thought, ‘I know that walk.’”

  I can’t look at him. I look at his cowboy boots, his bell-bottomed blue jeans, the long slice of his thigh. In my mind, I’d kept him boyish, or at least not so tall. Handsome, of course, but not this handsome. I feel shaky, on the verge of tears. I move back to the bench and sit. “What are you doing here?” I say.

  “The hostess is a friend of a friend’s.”

  He has friends.

  “How about you?” he asks.

  “What are you doing in Toronto?”

  “Oh.” He sits beside me. “My dad flew out on business. I tagged along.”

  His dad. I imagine him bent over and feeble by now. When they left Greenwoods, Mrs. Richter said it was because the Vancouver climate would be better for Mr. Richter’s rheumatism.

  “How is he?” I ask.

  “Fine. Working too hard.”

  Tears start streaming down my face.

  “Hey.” He touches my shoulder. “Are you crying?”

  “I guess.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s just that …”

  “What?”

  He offers me his T-shirt and I take it and wipe my eyes. “It’s just that I never thought I’d see you again.”

  He glances at me and then down. He grips the bottle in his lap.

  “I can’t believe it,” I say.

  “It’s been a long time,” he says.

  “Four years.”

  He takes a sip of his beer.

  “Why didn’t you ever write? I wrote you all those letters and you never once wrote back.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “But why didn’t you?”

  “I’m not …” He sighs.

  “What?”

  “I’m not good at writing letters.”

  He looks so tormented that I soften and say,“Oh, well, you’re here now. Out of thin air.” I take his hand and lift it. “Abel Richter. In the flesh.”

  He sets his beer on the grass and brings both of our hands closer to the lamp. His hands are big, his long fingers cool from the bottle. My fingers are thin and bony but I know he likes them because he said so once, he said I had the hands of a tarsier, which is a small monkey. Another time, in the same fascinated voice, he said my hair was like milkweed tuft.

  Frowning, very intent, he runs a finger over the scar on my thumb. All the nerves in my body are flocked there.

  “How’d you get that?” he says.

  “Slicing onions.” Without even thinking, I say,“I still love you.”

  The finger halts. We look at each other. And then we’re kissing.

  It’s a long, un frenzied kiss. I never knew you could kiss like this, holding each other so lightly, nothing moving except for your mouths. When it’s over, I say,“We love each other. We never stopped.”

  He nods.

  “We never stopped.” I stroke his hair, feeling an immense tenderness.

  He reaches for the bottle. “Want some?”

  “No, thanks.”

  I nestle against his chest. Behind us, at the party, people sing along to “All You Need Is Love.” Down here, the ringing of crickets rises like an electric mist I can hardly distinguish from the quivering of my own body. I feel as if I have been lifted out of my life. Only a few hours ago I was sad and unlucky; now I’m one of the lucky ones. The miracle of him being here washes over me like a spell, like voices murmuring into an anxious dream,“You’re all right, you’re all right.” In a kind of trance, feeling immune now to anything but happiness, I start unbuttoning my blouse.

  “What are you doing?” he says quietly.

  “Taking off my clothes.”

  I stand and remove the blouse and drape it over the back of the bench. “I want us to be together,” I say. I reach around and unhook my bra and let it fall on the grass. I am very serene, but excited, too. I know what he sees. Me fearlessly undressing. How white I am, the breeze off the water raising goosebumps on my skin.

  He stands and faces me. He looks almost frightened. Hasn’t he done this before either? “You’re so pretty,” he says, as if he wishes I weren’t.

  Nearer the creek, away from the light, we lie on the grass. Just before he enters me I am seized by a bursting feeling and I cry out, startled, then lose myself as the feeling branches down my legs in delicious, subsiding jolts. The pain of penetration is like a hundred tiny bones snapping, but it lasts only seconds.

  “Are you all right?” he gasps. “Is this okay?”

  Afterwards, after we have our clothes on, we smoke a joint. Holding our shoes, we walk across the creek and climb the bank onto a neighbouring lawn where we lie down and watch the sky, our old occupation. There it all is: the Milky Way, the North Star, the Little Dipper. He says Polaris, Cassiopeia, Ursa Major and Minor, Hercules, names he’d taught me and I’d forgotten.

  What I see, though, isn’t constellations, but a code, like Braille, all the stars positioned so as to tell us something. I ask him what he thinks it is and he says it’s,“Look. Look up.” Only that. He rests a hand on my belly. I pull him toward me.

  And then Tim Todd is hovering over us with his white spaceship face. He’s the one who, driving me home, says,“How do you know you’re not knocked up?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Greenwoods takes its name from the oak and maple forests that the developers have bulldozed, and like any other Canadian subdivision, it has the bungalows, the wide looping streets, the young housewives with their herds of children. As an only child I am regarded as strange and spoiled, and while I can’t argue with strange, the presumption that I get whatever I want couldn’t be more wrong. All I get are clothes. Which I never wanted.

  Clothes is my word. My mother rarely uses it, she’s more specific—she says “your tunic,” “your organdie,” “your pink cotton empire.” Speaking of my clothes all together she says “wardrobe”—“Let’s consult your wardrobe.” Which we do, daily. We fret over it, tend to it, expand it, weed it out.

  It contains at least twenty outfits, one for every school day in a month. Certain outfits are the child’s version of the lady’s. I have the leopard-patterned skirt and jacket, my mother has the leopard-patterned coat and Juliette hat. How do we afford this? My father isn’t a full-fledged lawyer, he’s only a law clerk, and yet he doesn’t seem to worry about money. Where we get the clothes I know well enough. From the Eaton’s catalogu
e, which guarantees our satisfaction. If something fails in the tiniest detail, such as a slight swerve in a line of stitches, back the outfit goes. The ease of these transactions strikes my mother as hilarious and unsound. She’ll wear a dress for an entire day and then return it the next day to “those suckers.”

  My heart sags when the Eaton’s truck pulls up and the driver climbs out and starts unloading. To spend an entire morning or afternoon watching my mother pose before her full-length mirror while she leans against the door frame or cha-chas with one hand on her stomach would be entertaining if I didn’t know that my turn would come next. Never do I feel more like a scrawny genetic aberration than when I slowly twirl before my raving beauty of a mother while she laughs at how awful I look. “Like a pinhead!” Or,“Like Zazu Pitts!” Whoever she is.

  Some of the girls at school get their clothes from Eaton’s as well, which I realize when Julie MacVicker shows up in a reversible tartan kilt exactly like mine, but their mothers never go so far as to buy the matching blouse and jacket, the beret, the gloves. And nobody owns the volume of outfits I do. In my class, girls tend to wear the same dress at least twice a week. Girls with older sisters wear hand-me-downs. Small wonder I gall them.

  Well, I don’t, I am too unremarkable; it’s my wardrobe that gets them worked up. And as soon as they hear about my mother’s disappearance it’s my wardrobe they seek to comfort. They pat my angora bolero sweater, my rabbit-fur coat, they beg me to wear my sailor dress and my umbrella-patterned flare skirt. A big bossy redhead named Maureen Hellier tells me a vote has been taken and I am now allowed to join a club she formed called the Smart Set Club, whose members do nothing except leaf through catalogues and magazines, cut out pictures of the models and paste the pictures into scrapbooks. At the Thursday-afternoon meetings, I pretend to gush over the child models my mother must have wished I looked like, the woman models she does look like. In the most recent Eaton’s catalogue some of the models have on clothes I own, as Maureen never fails to notice. The captions, which she reads out loud, are especially excruciating for how they include descriptions of the outfit’s ideal wearer: “Swirl-skirted charmer to suit a pert little miss.” “Glamour cardigan for the young sophisticate.”