The Romantic Read online

  “Somebody from the church phoned my parents.”

  “What church?”

  “Where I lived. Before I was adopted.”

  When he was eighteen months old, his mother left him at an orphanage that operated out of the basement of a downtown Toronto church. Mrs. Richter was the one who told me this. She spoke of the place with a kind of reverent amazement, how clean and quiet it was, the high polish on the tile floors and the whiteness of the bed linen. ‘You could hear a pin!” she said, and, of course, she meant you could hear a pin drop, but for many years I imagined such a divine hush that the pins in ladies’ hats and orphans’ clothing hummed like tuning forks.

  “I guess she still went there sometimes,” Abel says. He reaches down and picks up a twig and begins rapidly threading it through his fingers—from forefinger to baby finger, back to forefinger.

  “Did they tell you how she died?”

  “No.” Dropping the twig.

  “But you think she drank a lot.”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t know why I said that.”

  “Well, at least they told you she died. At least you know.”

  He nods.

  My heart is bursting. I slip my hand around his waist. “There’s a park near here.”

  He perks up. “Where?”

  “In the next block.”

  Not a park so much as a lawn from when there were houses on this side of the street. A huge tree is growing in the middle, and we go over to it. “Oak,” I say to impress him. I’m sure it’s an oak.

  “Beech,” he says. He is gazing up at it, a passionate look on his face, and it occurs to me that out of all the millions of kids who are acting like nature-loving pacifists, he is one of the few with credentials. After the stitches came out of his forehead, when I was plotting revenge against Jerry Kochonowski, he kept making excuses for him, saying that Jerry’s older brothers must have put him up to it, that Jerry hadn’t meant to throw the brick so hard, and finally—a revolutionary admission for a boy back then—that he didn’t like to fight.

  He runs his hand along the tree’s smooth bark. “Doesn’t it remind you of those silvery living-room drapes from when we were kids?”

  I embrace him from behind, pressing my face against his back.

  There are some overgrown forsythia bushes in one corner of the park and we hide among them to smoke a joint, then lie on the grass. He kisses the corners of my mouth, which feels lovely but seems too sophisticated somehow, too practised, and although I dread sounding possessive, I draw back and say, as casually as I can,“Are you going to tell your girlfriend about me?”

  “What girlfriend?”

  “In Vancouver.”

  “I don’t have a girlfriend.”

  “You don’t?”

  He comes up on his elbow. “What about your boyfriend? What did you tell him?”

  “Tim?” As I say his name, I can’t even picture his face. “Oh, don’t worry, that’s over.”

  “He seemed pretty upset.”

  “We weren’t even really going out together. Just dating sometimes. I never slept with him or anything.”

  Abel takes this in. “Last night was your first time?”

  “You deflowered me,” I say dramatically, with a little laugh. “You robbed me of my maidenhood.”

  He flinches slightly. Had he really thought I wasn’t a virgin? Or is it just that I’m being too flippant? I used to think I could read his mind. “You love me,” I told him years ago, before he even realized. “You love me very, very much.”

  Now, although I’m not as certain as I was last night, I say,“It was your first time, too.”

  He nods.

  “Then we’re even.”

  “So.” He plucks at the grass. “So, are you on the pill?”

  “No, but it’s okay. It’s the wrong time of the month.”

  He glances up.

  “I can’t be pregnant. It’s impossible.” I tug on his arm. “Come on—” pulling him back down.

  We kiss. With the chance of somebody walking by, that’s all we can do. We kiss and talk.

  Or, from my end, it’s more like an interrogation. Has he ever had a girlfriend? (He has gone out with a few girls, nothing serious.) Did they look like me? (One of them did, a little.) Was she thin? (Not as thin.) Does he still play the piano? (Every day. He teaches it now, too, gives lessons after school.) Does he still paint? (Not as much as he used to. He’s doing a lot of pen-and-ink drawings, though.) Did he ever think of me? (All the time.) Why didn’t he write to me, then? (We went through that last night.) What’ll we do now? (He doesn’t know.) What if, every Sunday night, seven o’clock his time, ten o’clock mine, when the longdistance rates go down, we phone each other, taking turns, he phones me one Sunday, I phone him the next? (Sounds like a good idea.) What if I visit him at Christmas? (Could I do that?) I have a part-time job at a women’s clothing store in the Greenwoods Shopping Plaza. I could save for the plane fare.

  He says,“You’d love Vancouver. It’s so beautiful.”

  “In that case,” I say,“maybe I’ll stay on. I’ll live with you and your parents. We’ll tell people I’m your sister.”

  His face goes blank. I’m being too pushy, I think, and then I hear a clock chiming somewhere and realize he’s reacting to that.

  He looks at his watch. “I’d better get going.”

  “I love you,” I say.

  He runs his finger along each of my eyebrows. In the intolerable silence.

  “Do you love me?” I say finally.

  The finger moves down my jawline. “Can’t you tell?”

  “I need you to say it.”

  He taps my bottom lip.

  “Say it. Say you love me very, very much.”

  “I love you too much.”

  I stare at him. ‘You can’t.” I grab his hand and start kissing it. ‘You can’t. You can’t.”

  “Louise, I’ve got to go.”

  ‘You can’t love me too much. I’m a bottomless pit.”

  He smiles. “There’s no such thing.”

  We walk to the subway. Every blade of grass, every red brick in the Victorian slums on the other side of the road is distinct and worthy. I know I’m stoned, but I feel as if I’m looking out through his eyes. He always saw the world as a lit-up place, a spectacle, and when he was with me, I did, too. But when he moved out West everything turned drab. Without him, I had nothing, whereas he had insects, lizards, cloud formations, music, whatever he turned his attention to. Still, if he loves me too much, then he has suffered more than I could have hoped for, and that makes his going back to Vancouver a romantic parting. Bearable.

  CHAPTER SIX

  When I dream about opening a box, and inside is nothing but another box, and that box contains another box, which contains another, and so on, I am more relieved than disappointed. In the same vein, when I see rows of vacant benches in abandoned sports stadiums and choir lofts, I don’t try to picture them filled. Empty seats in empty rooms starde me with a feeling almost like love. It’s not a sight I long for or am comforted by, it’s a sight I seem to know. Deeply know.

  I suspect this has something to do with how sparsely furnished our house in Greenwoods was. We had chairs and tables and lamps, just enough, and there were a few framed pictures and the beauty-queen trophies, but while my mother lived with us, all available surfaces were free of what she called crap and other people call vases, souvenirs, plants, knick-knacks. Her cluttering the refrigerator door with a goodbye note surprised me nearly as much as the note itself did. A few years earlier I’d taped a drawing of a farmer there, done in crayons at school and praised by my teacher for including eyebrows and a piece of straw sticking out of the farmer’s mouth. My mother immediately took it down. “This isn’t an art gallery,” she said, dulling the wound with indirect praise (as she often dulled praise with an indirect wound).

  If her disappearance is also behind my affinity for empty chairs and rooms, then the fact of my being an
only child might be, too. For a couple of years I fantasized about having a sister, a younger one, but I found it hard to hold on to any clear idea of what she’d be like. Not like me. Not too beautiful, though, either. I couldn’t even settle on a name. Kitty? Nadine? Laura? Kittys were clever and daring, and sometimes that’s what I wanted her to be. But when I thought about combing her hair, I wanted her to be Laura, a name I’d got from a song I heard on the radio: “Laura! But she’s only a dream …” I’m not sure where I got Nadine from. I liked the “ine” part of it; I thought it sounded glamorous.

  I didn’t need to ask my mother why she’d never had another baby. For as long as I could remember she’d been going on about women like Mrs. Dingwall overpopulating the world. But then one day I learned that there had been another baby. Almost. I found out only because my mother told Mrs. Bendy, she just casually mentioned it as if it were something I already knew.

  On Thursday afternoons Mrs. Bendy and my mother would sit at our kitchen table and drink coffee, whisky-spiked in Mrs. Bently’s case (she brought her own flask), and go through a large jar of Planters peanuts. My sitting with them, as I occasionally did if Mrs. Bendy was still there when I returned from school, appeared to affect the conversation not in the slightest. Mrs. Bendy went on using foul language and complaining about Mr. Bendy, who was twice her age, bad-tempered and confined to a wheelchair. Why had she married him in the first place? I’d wonder. Except for her skin (she had a pock-marked complexion) she was beautiful in a dark, sharp-boned way, almost as beautiful as my mother.

  About my father, my mother’s habitual and sole complaint was that he let people walk all over him. “He’s a doormat,” she said. “He’s the nice guy who finishes last.” Mostly, however, she and Mrs. Bendy tore to shreds other women and imagined their sex lives. When it came to their own sex lives they were cagey, although once Mrs. Bendy said,“Hell, I’d rather eat an apple.”

  The closest my mother got to mentioning sex with my father was the time she told Mrs. Bendy about this other baby. She said that right after she brought me home from the hospital, my father couldn’t keep his hands off her, and when I was six months old she thought she was pregnant again. It turned out to be a false alarm, but in the days before she went to the doctor she lived in terror.

  “I swear I could feel it growing,” she said. “I knew it would be a girl. I could even picture it. Sawyer’s bulging eyes and sallow skin. What a nightmare. I remember standing at the sink, washing the dishes and crying my heart out.”

  “I can’t imagine you crying,” Mrs. Bendy said,“let alone your heart out.”

  “Well, I did,” my mother said, sounding amazed herself. “I remember the tears falling into the dishwater.”

  As soon as Mrs. Bendy was gone, I asked my mother what she would have called that baby if it had been born.

  She shrugged. “Who knows?”

  “Grace?”

  “I hate people who name their kids after themselves.”

  “Phyllis?” After Mrs. Bendy.

  “Are you kidding? She’d grow up to be an alcoholic with a face like a can of worms.”

  “How about Laura?”

  “What’s with the third degree?”

  But I couldn’t stop now. “Okay,” I said,“what if I die? Then you might have another baby. What will you call her?”

  She gave me a long, empty look. “Louise,” she said at last. “I’ll call her Louise.”

  “Who?” I was confused.

  “Who do you think? The baby.”

  “But that’s my name.”

  “It’s the only name I like. Why waste it?” She stabbed her cigarette in the ashtray. “Anyway,” she said sternly,“you’re not going to die.”

  The idea of my dying disturbed her! This was such unexpected, heart-swelling information (oh, I knew she didn’t want me dead, I’d just never imagined her having much stake in my being alive) that the little-sister fantasy dropped from my mind completely. It never returned.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  On Valentine’s Day, my father’s older sister, Aunt Verna, comes up from Houston to take over the housekeeping and to help find my mother. As a young woman, Aunt Verna quit her well-paying secretarial job to go to Houston and look after her parents (my father’s parents, too, of course), who, in the belief that extreme heat thins the blood, had retired there six months earlier. They both died of heart attacks anyway, within weeks of Aunt Verna’s arrival and only three days of each other. Grandma and Grandpa Kirk. Mutt and Jeff, my father says when we look at the black-and-white photograph of them on their wedding day, Grandpa being at least a foot taller than tiny Grandma. They were well matched in attractiveness, however, he with his dark hair and high cheekbones and she with her plump little face under a heap of blond hair stacked up like a temple. In the wedding photo they each hold a hand over their own heart, to seal the marriage pledge, so my father says, but to me that gesture, in combination with their severe expressions, has always been them warning the future,“Our hearts will kill us. You’ll see.”

  After the funeral, Aunt Verna stayed on in Houston and got a job working as a secretary for a private investigator named Mr. Crimp. It was her idea to trim his business cards with pinking shears, and this so delighted my father that he took to keeping one in his wallet, along with a colour snapshot of her being kissed on the cheek by the actress Sophie Tucker, whose kidnapped Siamese cat Aunt Verna single-handedly located, bound and gagged but alive, in a hotel laundry hamper.

  People he shows the picture to invariably say, ‘Your twin sister?” and who can blame them? If he had hair the colour of concrete, short kinky hair identical to poodle fur, he would be her. I can’t quite believe she isn’t a man. Over six feet tall, spindly, no bosom, no make-up, not even lipstick, knuckles as big as grapes. Her three skirts, one beige, one brown, one dark green, are all made of some heavy, bristly material I’ve only seen before on chesterfields. Her luggage is the steamer trunk my grandfather brought as a young immigrant from Cheltenham, England, and when we first spot her at the airport she’s carrying it on her back, people twisting around to gawk at the strong woman.

  On the way to the parking lot she and my father each take one of the trunk’s side handles. “What’s in it?” I ask.

  “Makeshift office!” she shouts. She shouts all the time and has a southern drawl, although she lived in Toronto until she was twenty-five. She calls me Lou-Lou and honey. It turns out I have met her once before, when I was three years old. ‘You were crazy about my varicose veins,” she shouts. “Kept wanting to touch them.” She holds out one pole-thin, stubbled calf entwined with what look like purple worms. “Well, honey, there’s more to love now.”

  I step back.

  She sleeps on the bed-chesterfield in my father’s study. Her feet overhang the end, her snores travel the air vents and wake me from nightmares of heavy machinery operated by men trying to break into the house. She works in the kitchen, zooming from the phone to the table to the sink in a wheeled wooden chair she brought with her because the slatted back bows inwards and supports her creaking hips. To fit it into the steamer trunk she took off the legs, which she re-attached using her own screwdriver. My father has a typewriter, a Remington, but there was room in the trunk for her Underwood, so that’s here, too. She says,“I’ve been banging on this bunch of keys so long they know what I’m going to write before I do. Like the old horse that always knows its way back home.”

  I ask (thinking of Texas),“Do you have a horse where you live?”

  She guffaws. “I’m the horse where I live!”

  I now remember my mother saying,“Verna’s a card.” So she is, but of a kind I’m not used to in that the jokes are on her. She’s goofy, she crashes into the furniture, she buttons up her blouse wrong and wears different-coloured socks on each foot, and when I draw these mistakes to her attention she slaps her own face and bellows,“What a lamebrain dame!” She burns our suppers. Grease splatters the walls, the ceiling, pots boil over, t
he spaghetti clumps into one sticky ball “resembling a brain,” as she herself points out. “I could scorch ice!” she roars. When she laughs, her lips ride up her long teeth and show a span of gum I look away from with a shuddering feeling of having glimpsed nakedness.

  But I’m glad she’s here. She is so obviously devoted to keeping our spirits up, although I’m hardly the pining orphan she thinks I am. She clamps her big Texan’s hands on my shoulders and blares,“I’m on the case!” At least once a day she says,“Don’t be glum, chum.”

  “I’m not glum,” I say.

  I ask, what if she finds my mother, and my mother tells her to get lost? “Some people don’t want to be found,” I say, quoting the police detective.

  “Depends whether or not she left of her own volition,” Aunt Verna says crisply, professionally.

  “Whether she got lured away, you mean?”

  “Somebody or something might have balled up her good sense.”

  “Fancy Dan,” I offer.

  “Maybe some snake in the grass, maybe not. Maybe a blackmailer. Maybe narcotics.”

  “What are narcotics?”

  Her face slams shut. She didn’t mean to let that slip.

  Whereas I am careful never to let anything slip. I believe, even if nobody else does, that my mother left simply because she hated Greenwoods. She was always saying she did. One day, off she went, with a man or without, what does it matter, nobody ever bossed her around. Why should she have to come back? We’re doing fine without her. We play Scrabble every night after supper, we watch television, and nobody ridicules the actors or the way the women in the commercials are dressed. When I wake up with a migraine headache, instead of forcing aspirins down my throat, Aunt Verna rubs my temples until I fall back to sleep. The possibility of my mother returning sickens me in the same way that the brewing end of the summer holidays always does, and to postpone and even extinguish the possibility, I am not above planting the odd false lead. When Aunt Verna asks,“Did Grace ever mention a place she had her heart set on going to?” I answer,“Australia.”