The Romantic Page 25

  I say,“Me, too.”

  Not quite the truth. What I want is for him to be nothing like Abel.

  Which isn’t quite true either, since they are both sweet tempered and intelligent. It’s in the specifics that I can’t bear similarities. As a child Troy collected insects, and on our walks, if he identifies a beetle or a butterfly, I turn away. For the same reason, I won’t listen to Bach piano music, not with him. Troy’s theory is that the more he seems to resemble Abel, the more risk there is, in my mind, of his fooling around on me. When he says this, however, even when he reassures me without mentioning Abel’s name, all that does is remind me of what’s really going on. I can’t bear the resemblances because I can’t bear the discrepancies, how Troy comes up short: the collector of dead insects versus the venerator of live ones, the music lover versus the musician. The person with a hundred acquaintances and no close friends versus the person whose every acquaintance is a close friend. All so unjust and depressing. As an antidote I immediately launch into a mental cataloguing of Troy’s virtues, starting off with his devotion to me, his loyalty, and often that’s as far as I have to go before he steps out of Abel’s shadow and is himself. His good, deserving self.

  Four years pass. When I think “four years” I have a sense of time unaccounted for and ungraspable as in a dream that takes only a minute to tell although it seemed to last all night. “The years slip by,” old people say. I now know what they mean: nothing much changes. Troy and I stay together. I keep working for Mr. Fraser, the two of us maintaining, just barely, the ruse of productivity. Twice I have plodded through the files, reading, organizing, trying to distinguish living clients from dead ones. I was considering going through them again and typing up fresh labels when Mr. Fraser summoned me into his office and asked had I ever seen the movie Days of Wine and Roses? I told him no.

  “With Lee Remick and Jack, uh … Jack …”

  “I never saw it.”

  “Jack … You know who I mean. Talks fast. Twitches his head around.”

  “Jack Lemmon?”

  “That’s it. Jack Lemmon. Now, then. There’s a girl, the Lee Remick character, smart as a whip. Secretary in a big, fancy firm, advertising, if I’m not mistaken. But the fellow that hired her can’t keep her busy enough, so what she does is, she sits at her desk reading an encyclopedia of world literature, one volume at a time. Not the literature itself, mind you.” His look sharpened. “What author are you at?”

  I’ve told him how I’m working my way through the great novels in alphabetical order according to author. “George Eliot,” I said. “Silas Marner.”

  “E. M. Forster coming up. There’s a writer for you.”

  “I’ve got to get through William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald first.”

  “A Passage to India. Room with a View.” He seemed to lose his train of thought.

  “Lee Remick reads the encyclopedia,” I prompted.

  “That’s right. You see, she never went to university. The way she figures it, by the time she has worked her way through to the end of the last volume she’ll have a bachelor’s degree in English literature under her belt.”

  “Without the certificate.”

  “Nothing but a piece of paper.”

  ‘You could say the same of a stock certificate.”

  “Don’t get smart with me, young lady. The knowledge is the important thing, doesn’t matter a whit how you come by it. Now, then. Novels are all well and good, you know my feelings on that score, but people see a girl reading a novel at her desk and they think she’s dillydallying. An encyclopedia, on the other hand—a girl reading an encyclopedia, how do you know she isn’t researching something or other?”

  He pulled himself to his feet and shuffled, all bent over, to his bookcase and removed the first volume of his set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Clutching it in both hands, he came back and dropped it on the desk. His look was very intent. “Now, then. You read your way through all twenty-four volumes and, by golly, there’s a Ph.D. in general knowledge, right there.”

  Eight months later, I’m at the end of volume three, which puts me among the fir’s: Brahms, Braille, Brain. Because I’m taking this seriously, trying to memorize key facts, progress is sluggish. And yet even at my most bored I never consider quitting or applying for another job within the company. How could I desert Mr. Fraser? Not that anyone aside from Lorna ever suggests I should. The draft dodgers think I have it made. As a secretary I’m nothing to them, but as a secretary who does nothing, I’m a subversive, and now that I’m spending my afternoons reading the encyclopedia—at my boss’s insistence, no less—I’m a star. A performer. “Ask me about any subject that starts with A or B,” I say,“up to Boswell.”

  “Ares!” they shout. “Attila the Hun!” “Bismarck!”

  Draft dodgers with warmongers on the brain.

  I sometimes wonder if I’m living the life I’ve been waiting for or the one I’m making do with. Is a person meant to be content? I can’t believe I’ve entered a lasting state of mind. And the truth is, it does wear thin. Toward the end of every August, I start to feel anxious, which I realize is partly a hangover from when I used to get so upset about going back to school, but it’s more than that, it’s an accumulation of guilt and confusion over not moving in with Troy, resisting his patient, jokey pleas. Suddenly I’m restless for I don’t know what … something wild, a swerve from the straight and narrow.

  In this mood Lorna becomes a kindred spirit. She says,“One day I swear I’m going to throw my typewriter out the window,” and instead of ignoring her, as I normally would, I say,“The windows here are unbreakable.”

  “Okay,” she says,“down the stairs.”

  “Can you imagine?” I say, because I can. You pick up your typewriter, lug it to the stairwell, you peer down those thirty-seven flights to make sure the coast is clear and then you … just … let go.

  I dream about having sex with Abel. When I wake up, before I gain full consciousness, I’m aware of the Angel of Love flickering in the corner by my dresser. “Go away,” I think weakly.

  Call him, she urges. Call him.

  She’s hard to resist. The first year that I was going through this anxious period, I looked up the Richters’ phone number again. On the verge of dialling I grabbed the newspaper and flipped through to the Classifieds. A new apartment, that’s what I needed. Something bigger, quieter.

  I take it back, then, about nothing having changed in four years. Where I live has changed three times. And yet—I suppose because my furniture always comes with me—I never seem to experience any real upheaval. That is to say, upheaval is the point: fixable, household upheaval created to distract me from myself. As to where I end up, that hardly matters, I’m so rarely at home. Still, on the day of the move I always get vague, unreasonable expectations of greater fulfillment. Which are soon enough dashed. The first place I rented, a one-bedroom flat in an old Victorian mansion, had a prostitute living in the attic, clients always lurking on the porch, pounding on my door if they found hers locked. The second place had poisoned mice that staggered upstairs from the restaurant below and crawled into my shoes. A year later I was back in an old mansion, on the second floor this time, looking out onto a blue spruce tree that a cat burglar climbed so he could break into my living room and steal the record player and speakers Troy had given me as a house-warming gift. A house-warming gift! Though I never told Troy about my moving plans until after I’d signed the lease, he always took the news valiantly, more so each time, since with every move I migrated several blocks closer to his apartment.

  “Pure coincidence,” I said the third time.

  “Pure, unconscious desire,” he said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  “Abel, you know what I don’t understand?”

  “What?”

  “If everything and everybody is perfect, why do you drink?”

  A pause and then,“Everything is perfect in itself.”

  “Whether you drink
or not.”

  “Right.”

  “But more perfect for you when you drink.” Another pause.

  “We don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to.”

  “Maybe that’s it.”

  “What is?”

  “That it’s more perfect.”

  “But is it?”

  “Louise, I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  “What you feel. The truth.”

  “I’m not escaping, I don’t feel that. I’m not looking for perfection.”

  “Are you looking for anything?”

  “Sure.”

  “What?”

  “Whatever’s there.”

  “You mean, whatever you see.”

  “Right.”

  “I’m just trying to understand.”

  “I know.”

  “You don’t make it easy.”

  “I know.”

  “That’s okay. Nobody’s perfect.”

  A few days later, Saturday afternoon, I fall asleep on the chesterfield and have a dream about Tim Todd. We’re sitting under a weeping willow. There are things he wants to show me but he’s hesitating, afraid I’ll be dismissive. These things are in a brown paper bag, so they can’t be fish, at least not live ones. In any case I’d prefer not to know. Finally he says,“Well, do you want to take a look?” and there is such wistfulness and despair in his voice that I almost relent.

  “Some other time,” I say.

  I wake up on the verge of tears. “Tim Todd,” I think, wondering if I cared about him more than I ever realized. No, this is belated guilt, it’s regret over having hurt him. Which is not to say that, under similar circumstances, I wouldn’t hurt him again.

  And then something else occurs to me—about why Abel drinks—and I get up and go to the window, uncertain whether I’ve had this thought before. I suspect I have but that I let it go. Probably I was still hoping that the reason lay outside of him, in the form of an awful memory, say, or an abstract philosophy, and that he could repudiate it if he really wanted to.

  I guess I’ve used up all of my faith because suddenly it seems obvious that he drinks out of sheer helplessness. If life means doing harm, making decisions, choosing one person over another, then he’s not cut out for it. And doing nothing isn’t the answer; that’s just making a decision by default. Better to be nothing than to do nothing.

  Is that how he sees it? He knows how much his death will hurt us, so he must be under the impression that by staying alive he’ll eventually hurt us even more. Maybe we should pretend we’ve stopped caring what he does. Say,“We’ve given up on you, Abel. You don’t matter.” Well, that would gratify him, our falling in line with what he has been telling us for months. How do we get around that? How do we persuade him that he’s entitled to cause pain and, what’s more, that he has a responsibility to bear the pain he causes?

  If only I could say, ‘You’re worthy of your own life,” and make him believe me. Too late. Too late. He seems completely enraptured now by the idea of no longer existing. I think he imagines the space he’ll vacate, the actual physical space, and there we’ll be, his parents and I, waving our hands around trying to find him, but at least we won’t come up against any resistance. There won’t be anything to collide with, only air.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  On a Friday night in August of 1973, Mr. Fraser dies. I find out when I arrive for work on Monday. Debbie is sobbing into her hands, while Lorna, from the other side of the desk, tries to man the phones. It’s Lorna who tells me. Her sympathetic tone is almost as shocking as the news. She says that Mr. MacLellan wants me to go straight to his office.

  Mr. MacLellan is the president. “Please,” he says, indicating a chair, then handing me a box of Kleenex, though my eyes are dry. He perches on the corner of his desk. “You’ve heard.”

  “Just now.”

  “If it’s any comfort, he went peacefully.”

  “How do you know?” I don’t mean to be insolent, I just wonder how he can say that, if Mr. Fraser died alone.

  He touches the knot of his tie. Maroon, with gold flecks. He is tall and suave, somewhere in his late fifties, salt-and-pepper hair, the sort of man who could never be anything less than a president. “He was found in bed,” he says. “Saturday morning by the cleaning lady. It appears that he died in his sleep. Heart failure, most likely, but we don’t yet know.”

  He says that the funeral will be held Wednesday afternoon. Until then, and afterwards for as long as I want, I can take a leave of absence. In the meantime, Personnel will find me something suitable at the same salary. I hardly listen. I am still thinking of Mr. Fraser in bed, fighting for breath.

  “I’m the executor of the will,” Mr. MacLellan goes on,“which was revised only last month. I can tell you that you are a beneficiary.”

  I look up.

  “Mr. Fraser thought very highly of you. He has left you fifteen thousand dollars and his twenty-four-volume set of the Encyclopaedia britannica.”

  I don’t cry until the funeral, and then I cry so much that the daughter-in-law keeps glancing around. It was meeting the grandsons for the first time, it was how much the oldest resembled Mr. Fraser, the same brown eyes, the same quick smile suggesting immediate comprehension, and the poignancy and mystery of that, as if Mr. Fraser were somehow conscious in the boy. At the reception, which is held in Mr. MacLellan’s mansion, Pat Penn of Personnel asks in her listless way when I’ll be coming back to the office, and the prospect of resurrecting myself as a secretary to some other vice-president is suddenly unthinkable.

  “I’m not,” I say. “I’m not coming back.”

  “Well,” she says, unfazed,“let me know your new phone number.”

  Because, of course, she assumes, as do I, that because it’s August I’ll be moving soon. I haven’t found an apartment yet, or even given my notice, but I’ve started reconstructing the flattened boxes from my last move.

  A few hours later, over at Troy’s place, I wonder if I spoke too hastily. I say,“It’s not as if I need the money. But I need to work. I need to do something.”

  “I could always use you in the store,” he says.

  “You could?”

  “Why not? You know music. You’re easy on the eye.”

  “I’m charming. I’m friendly.”

  “We can work on that.”

  “Maybe I should break down and live with you, too,” I say, in a burst of infatuation. “Maybe we should spend every waking minute within shouting distance. I could have both spare rooms, right? My own private bedroom and living room?”

  “Whatever you want,” he says carefully.

  “Oh, well, I’ll think about it.”

  “Will you?”

  “I guess. I don’t know. I’ll see how I feel tomorrow.”

  I feel worse. I wake up late and with a headache. “Mr. Fraser is dead,” I think. I can’t believe it. He was so old and weathered, like a tree or rock. He had earned his right to be here, more than I’ve earned mine. I think of the times I’ve felt sorry for myself and am ashamed. There he was, returning home every evening to an empty apartment, his days numbered, his dead wife and dead son waiting at the end of his thoughts. I imagine him eating supper alone, a linen napkin, good silverware. Rolling up his sleeves to wash the dishes. What did he do then? I suppose he read the newspaper or maybe a hardcover novel or a book about sailing ships. He must have gone to bed at a decent hour, considering what an early riser he was. I imagine him, in blue cotton pyjamas, setting his alarm clock, which would have been an old-fashioned wind-up kind. Did he set it the night he died? He once told me that on Saturday mornings he visited somebody in a retirement home, an aunt or cousin on his wife’s side (I remember being struck by his loyalty to such a distant relation). Oh, it’s wrenching to think of him setting the alarm, allowing himself the modest assumption that he would need waking up.

  I look at my own clock. A quarter to eleven. I decide I should probably go into the office t
o clean out my desk, get that over with. An hour later, just as I’m about to leave, the phone rings. It’s my father, calling from his office. He asks how I am, how the funeral went, and then says he’d like to drop by.

  “Now?”

  “If you’re not busy, not on your way out somewhere.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Just some news.”

  “Bad news. I can tell by your voice.”

  “Don’t worry. Listen, I’ll pick us up some lunch, a couple of egg-salad sandwiches, how’s that?”

  His office isn’t far, he arrives within half an hour. “On the move again,” he says, noticing the boxes.

  “Tell me.”

  “Let’s go into the kitchen.”

  He puts the bag of food on the table, then sits and takes a folded piece of paper from his inside jacket pocket. “This arrived yesterday,” he says, handing it to me.