The Romantic Read online

  “Yes,” I say. “A lowly secretary with even more lowly ambitions.”

  He glances at me, smiling. He has a nice face, a quizzical cast to his constantly changing expressions, as though you are meant to take him with a grain of salt. Not that he seems insincere; he seems, if anything, like somebody trying to cover up for too much sincerity. I can imagine saying to Debbie,“He’s handsome in an unconventional way.” I find myself telling him about Debbie and about Mr. Fraser and Lorna and then about my apartment and the people I watch every evening in the building across the lane. I fit it all in within seven blocks. He eggs me on with just the right questions and reactions. We are stopped in front of my office building before it occurs to me to ask him what he does.

  “I have a record store.”

  “Really?”

  “Just a small one. No big deal.”

  “But it’s yours? You own it?”

  “It’s mine.”

  “That’s a big deal.” I try to guess his age. Under thirty. “What’s it called?”

  “Warren Records.”

  “After Warren Beatty?” I joke.

  “After Warren Peace.”

  I laugh.

  ‘You’re pretty cheerful,” he says,“for someone who just got hit by a car.”

  ‘You know, I think I’ve seen it. On Bloor, right?”

  “Drop by sometime.”

  “I don’t have a record player.”

  ‘You don’t?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “And why should you, after all, a girl with your lowly ambitions?”

  We smile at each other. The car behind us honks, and I say we’re blocking traffic and he says would I have dinner with him some evening and I say,“I’m free tonight,” and he asks me for my address and arranges to pick me up around seven.

  At lunch, with Lorna and Debbie, I say,“He’s got these neat grey eyes, really sweet and kind of … I don’t know … ardent.”

  “Ah,” Debbie breathes. “Ardent.”

  “What does that mean?” Lorna says.

  “Warm.”

  “Why didn’t you just say that?”

  “I feel like I could tell him anything.”

  Lorna snorts. “Do yourself a favour. Don’t.”

  But I do. We aren’t in the restaurant half an hour before I admit that I had sex with the last man I worked for. He has already told me about his old girlfriend throwing his shirts and boxer shorts and antique watch from a third-floor window because he turned down her proposal of marriage. Is he upset? About the breakup, no, he’s relieved, he saw it coming. He isn’t happy about having hurt her, of course. She was his first friend when he came from North Carolina. She found him a place to live and a job teaching music theory at a night school.

  I ask him what instrument he plays. If it’s piano, I may as well get up and go home.

  “Oh,” he says,“I’m not a musician. I took a few music-theory courses at college. My students all knew more than I did.”

  I reach for my wine.

  The waiter poured out a glass for each of us, although I ordered a Coke. It’s an Italian restaurant, red-and-white-checkered tablecloths, candles in chubby, wicker-covered wine bottles, the waiter old and slow and possibly shortsighted. I say to Troy,“How does he know I’m not underage?”

  “Are you?”

  “By two years.”

  “That’s about where I put you.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “So you’re into corrupting young girls?”

  “Is that what I’m doing?”

  His smile may not be heart-stopping but it’s irresistible. I say,“I guess we’ll find out.” I raise my glass. I feel flirtatious and confident, like a southern belle. “Tell me all about yourself,” I say. “Do you have brothers and sisters? Is North Carolina where you grew up?”

  It is. Near Fayetteville, on a prosperous tobacco farm. No brothers, two younger sisters still living at home. His mother, who is ten years older than his father, is lovely and tender-hearted but eccentric—“something of a scatter-brain.” When he was a boy she would go around gathering up his favourite clothes and toys, his treasured books, and then drop them off on the front steps of the poor and occasionally even at middle-class homes, so that the housewives, who knew where the boxes had come from, were obliged to cart them all back and suffer through one of her embraces, another of her peculiarities being to take people in her arms and hold them for embarrassing lengths of time. The father was worse: a wooden-legged man who told wooden-legged jokes and then turned stony and murderous if you laughed too loud. He had lost the leg in the Second World War, and that made him a hero. A few years later he shot to death a tramp he surprised carrying a lead pipe out of the cellar (no charges laid, not against a veteran claiming self-defence), and that made him a hero you took care never to cross. No one knew this better than Troy, so for the most part he and his father got along even to the extent of exchanging civilities before the father strapped him on the back of his legs, five strikes to each calf and hard enough to raise welts.

  “Are you ready, son?”

  ‘Yes, sir.”

  “It’ll be over with before you know it.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  What had Troy done? Oh, shown up a few minutes late for supper, played a record too loud. Then came college and coffee houses and protest songs and returning home with new ways of looking at things but keeping silent for the sake of keeping the peace and, frankly, to protect his allowance and tuition. The showdown took place after college, when his father decided that before Troy started putting his business degree to use, he should enlist in the Marines. Troy was stunned. True, his father supported the war in Vietnam, but many times he’d said that the actual fighting was better left to boys with low IQS and no prospects, which Troy took to mean,“Not you, son.” Now what? Troy didn’t know, he couldn’t think, so he just blurted out the truth: “Sir, I can’t do that. I am a pacifist.” His father, after a long moment, left the room, came back with his shotgun, pointed it at Troy’s head and said,“Son, what you are is a coward, I always knew it. I’m giving you five minutes to get out of my sight. That’s five counts of sixty, starting now. One, two, three …” Barely time for Troy to grab his wallet and a bag of clothes and run. Out on the front lawn his mother caught up with him and wrapped him in her inescapable embrace, while his father, gun aimed, stood on the porch and counted out the last of the five minutes: “Forty-eight, forty-nine …” Would he have pulled the trigger? Apparently his mother thought so because at fifty-three she undraped herself and backed away. Two days later Troy was in Canada, convinced that had he remained in the States, his days as a civilian would have been numbered.

  I can’t match that for a life, or for a delivery, either—he made it all sound hilarious—but I give it a go with stories of my mother, her cleaning mania and pyromania (burning my sweater) and then her disappearance. I tell him how my father thought she’d run off with some lady’s man. “I never thought that,” I say. “I figured she just wanted to be free.”

  “Maybe,” Troy says. “And maybe she just couldn’t bear the competition of a beautiful daughter.”

  I feel my face heat up. “Oh, that wasn’t it. I was no threat to anybody, least of all her. Believe you me.”

  “No, I don’t think I will believe you.”

  “One day I’ll show you a picture of her.”

  He reacts slightly, a brief fixity of expression, and I realize I’ve just said that I expect us to go on seeing each other.

  By ten-thirty we’re at his apartment. He rents the entire second floor of a refurbished turn-of-the-century building, right on Bloor Street and only a block west of his store. On the third floor is a model-train club, men walking around until all hours fabricating miniature level-crossing gates and those tiny broccoli-like trees, one of which Troy has on his kitchen table from the time they invited him up. It was eerie, he says, not just how extensive and intricate the ra
il lines were but the serious, quiet atmosphere, as though something of great consequence was going on.

  “How do you know it wasn’t?” I say.

  I am wandering from room to room, glass of Kahlùa in hand, and he is following and apologizing for the unwashed dishes, the clothes draped over chairs. “Don’t worry,” I say,“I’m no fan of immaculateness.” I can’t believe how much space he has. Three huge bedrooms, kitchen the size of a living room, bathroom the size of a kitchen. Two of the bedrooms are given over to boxes of records, overflow from the store. His personal collection takes up an entire wall of bookcases in the living room.

  “Are they in any order?” I ask.

  “An inscrutable order. The store is where all my ordering talent goes.”

  “Where did you get the money, anyway, to buy a store?”

  “I borrowed it. I’m drowning in debt.”

  “This furniture didn’t come cheap either, I’ll bet.” I look around approvingly at all the blond wood and creamy leather. “Is it new?”

  “Fairly new.”

  “Is it for sitting on?”

  “You’re welcome to do whatever you want on it.”

  I drop onto the chesterfield. “Are the records for listening to?”

  “What would you like to hear?”

  “Put on something you like. What kind of music do you like?”

  “All kinds. Classical, country, bluegrass, jazz, musicals …”

  “Musicals?”

  “What’s funny about that?”

  “Like Oklahoma!?”

  “You bet.”

  “Do you have that?”

  It takes a while but he finds the record and puts it on as I help myself to more Kahlua. He sits across from me, holding his beer in both hands. “Too loud,” he says and gets up to turn the volume down. I look at the back of him. Square shoulders, not as wide as Abel’s, and he’s not as tall or as lean, either, but that’s fine, that’s good. He returns to his chair. I drain my glass, and refill it.

  “How do you know if a musician is drunk?” I say.

  “Is this a joke?”

  “He can’t get by the first bar.”

  “That’s pretty bad.”

  I tell him about A Thousand and One Side-Splitters, which I still occasionally leaf through. “The funniest part,” I say,“is how it’s organized. Alphabetically by theme. Alcoholics, Cooking, Taxes. But then they’re all cross-referenced. So under Alcoholics, it says, See Clergy, Lawyers. Under Sex—” I start laughing. “Oh, God, under Sex it says, See Epileptics.”

  “It doesn’t.”

  “It does! Under Epileptics, it says, See—” I am laughing too hard to go on.

  He laughs. “What?”

  “Clergy!”

  “What does it say under Clergy?”

  “See Alcoholics, Dwarfs, Egg Farmers—”

  “Egg Farmers?”

  “Cows, Pregnancy. Oh, God. Oh, God.” I drain my glass and set it down harder than I mean to on the coffee table. I want to say,“Why don’t you sit here beside me?” but what comes out is,“I had an abortion,” and a shudder of grief goes through me such as I have not felt in a year.

  Thus the night deteriorates. Periodically he tries to withdraw the Kahlùa bottle, but I clutch it to my chest. “Don’t worry,” I say. “This isn’t like me. I’m never like this.” The drunker and more weepy I get, the more urgency I feel about making him understand who Abel is and why I loved him. Laved. I am as careful about using that word in the past tense as I am about holding on to the Kahlua bottle. Even when I throw up, I won’t let it go. I bring it home, though by then it’s empty. He delivers me into my apartment, strips me down to my underwear and puts me to bed. I have no memory of anything beyond staring at the holes in his kitchen-sink drain and thinking how uniform they are, how heartless.

  I expect never to hear from him again, but the next afternoon he phones me at work and asks how I’m feeling.

  “Horrible,” I say. I tell him I’m sorry, I don’t know what got into me.

  “Well,” he says,“we could always give it another try.”

  “You’re asking me out again?”

  “I believe I am.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Crazy enough, I guess.”

  On Saturday night, on his big squeaking bed, we have sex. I am anxious to make amends. He is adoring and languid, he won’t let me hurry things. We go on for hours, with breaks to drink pineapple juice out of yellow plastic glasses and to eat Jiffy-popped popcorn and canned peach slices. Sometime after midnight I hear a train whistle from upstairs and realize I’ve dozed off. We both have. I get up on one elbow and touch my finger to his mouth. He doesn’t stir. It’s a fleshy, generous mouth. His whole face has a soft, generous look, a bit thrown together, the nose listing to the side, one ear sticking out more than the other. But it’s as if that’s the point, as if his face were made to serve its expression, which, even in sleep, is droll and welcoming.

  I wonder if I love him. I don’t see how I couldn’t.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Abel and I have both reached the stage where we talk about his death matter-of-factly, but that can only be because we have no idea what we’re talking about. As he himself once said, your own death is never more than a rumour. Every time I open the front door and listen for his breathing, I don’t really expect not to hear it. The not hearing is unimaginable, infinitely deferred. He is still in his own apartment, he drinks, blacks out, revives himself, washes the floor. You can’t go from that to death. There are phases, emergencies. There are miracles.

  One day I find that I have also reached the stage where I can bring myself to ask why he never said he loved me. Why he could never say the words.

  “I said them,” he whispers.

  “Once. You said, ‘I love you too much,’ as if it were a curse.”

  “You always knew how I felt.”

  “I thought I knew when you were with me. But when we weren’t together, I had no way of knowing how you felt.”

  “The same.”

  “You can’t even say it now. You can’t say, ‘I love you, Louise.’”

  “I love you, Louise.”

  “In a court of law you could claim that you were merely repeating what I’d just said, merely considering the idea.”

  “I love you, Louise.”

  It’s Saturday, late morning. He’s still in bed (though he assures me he’ll get up soon,“everything’s fine”) so I have taken off my clothes and gotten under the blanket to lie with him. “Have you lost your voice?” I ask. He won’t answer directly; he says,“I feel like whispering today.” His breath is sweet. Maybe he has switched to drinking liqueurs, or maybe it’s because his lips have stopped bleeding. His face is nearly translucent; you can see the finer veins as if, at this late date, what was hidden may as well start showing itself. Overall, he’s beginning to resemble a delicate child.

  I tell him this, and he says,“I used to think that if living in the world was natural and good, then living should rejuvenate you. I couldn’t understand why we didn’t start out old and decrepit and end up young and perfect.”

  “That was before you realized that old and decrepit is perfect.”

  He nods.

  “Because everything is perfect.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m not agreeing with you. I’m quoting you.”

  ‘You’re merely considering the idea.”

  “How do you choose between things, then? Why buy this and not that? Why be with this person and not that one?”

  “It’s natural to be drawn to certain things and people more than to others.”

  “So what’s wrong with being drawn to one above all others?”

  “It isn’t wrong.”

  I give his hand a small squeeze. “So why couldn’t you love me above all others?”

  “I love you above all others I love.”

  “You mean, if all your girlfriends were all drowning and you
could only save one, it’d be me?”

  He smiles. “You’re a good swimmer.”

  I have to smile back. “I’d save you. I’d sacrifice anybody for you.”

  “When I’m out of the way, that will change.”

  “It won’t. You’ll take my love with you.”

  “Don’t let that happen. Keep it for yourself.”

  “What if I can’t? What if you take it anyway?”

  He rolls onto his back and looks up at the ceiling. “I’m not taking anything. I’m travelling light.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  With Troy, I am the one loved unconditionally. I can go around with dirty hair, be boring and bad tempered. If I make an effort—and most of the time I try to—it’s for the luxury of giving pleasure to someone I don’t need to make any effort for. I still think about Abel off and on, and then there’s a hollowness in my chest, but after a while it is only the Abel feeling, supplanting all the other feelings I ever had for him, even love. That’s what I say, and believe. Talking about him with Troy, I take on a wry tone, not intentionally, it just creeps into my voice. Troy is such a sympathetic listener and so sure of himself that the worst he’ll say of Abel is,“He sounds complicated.” One time he said that he thought the two of them could have been friends.

  “Of course you could have,” I said. “Everybody’s his friend. The town drunk is his friend. The local rapist is his friend.”

  “Well, there you are,” said Troy, taking no offence.

  And so he continually wins me.

  He has a double-jointed right arm he can rotate at the shoulder, and he pretends to twist it off, it’s mine if I’ll be his bride. “Marriage is a dying institution,” I say. How about moving in with him, then? “Out of wedlock?” I say, feigning shock. He knows I’m not ready, he doesn’t push. Besides, we see each other at least four nights a week. He cooks me supper—Shake ‘n Bake chicken, or chili con carne—and then we watch TV or listen to records or go to a movie. We make love all over his apartment, on rows of boxes, on every Danish-modern chair. Thursday nights he stays late at the store, which gives me a chance to catch up on my laundry and reading. Friday nights he meets a group of fellow draft dodgers at a Hungarian restaurant where the talk around the table is the anti-war movement and an underground literary magazine called Rant that they all seem to write for and that he partly finances, since he’s the only one with a steady job. Sometimes I drop by to listen to the passionate conversation, which I find far more comprehensible than any of their published poems and articles. On the weekends, Troy and I drive around in his car, maybe take a walk in the Beaches or out on Toronto Island. I still go to Greenwoods most Sunday afternoons, and a couple of times a month he joins me. My father and Mrs. Carver can’t praise him enough, nor he them. “Affable,” my father says in a tone of wonder. “The word for Troy is affable.” (Obviously he thought I’d end up with some hostile misfit.) And yet for all his affability and humour, Troy has no close friends, I’m not sure why. The draft dodgers find him a little too straight, I suspect. Aside from them, there’s only a belligerent record collector named Sammy, who browbeats us into smoking hash with him in the back room of the store. When it’s just Troy and me, by ourselves, we never smoke pot and we drink only the occasional beer or glass of wine. Troy says he wants to experience me with a clear head, he wants nothing in the way of his senses.