Livio didn’t know what to do. There was a button missing on the teacher’s jacket sleeve, and Mr. Beale stood twisting the loose nub of thread. He seemed to be waiting for some snide little word from Livio, sure that it was coming, but then Livio suddenly reached out and took Mr. Beale’s hand. His own blue wide-open eyes had a vulnerable look, yet his grip on Mr. Beale’s hand was firm. “I don’t hold no bad feelings, Mr. Teacher,” he said. “You neither, I think, eh?”
“No, no. Of course not, Livio,” he said stiffly, as if sure he was being mocked in some new way by a boy who deeply disliked him.
“Sir, it’s only a trick,” Livio said, fumbling for the right words. “I practise. You practise, too, sir, eh?” And he took the dime out of his pocket and put it in Mr. Beale’s hand, the one he was holding. “Take it, sir. Friends now, eh?”
“Well, now, see here…” Mr. Beale began, his face flushing again, and because of the way Mr. Beale was staring at him, Livio felt uneasy. Mr. Beale looked lonely and disappointed, a look Livio had seen in the eyes of men slouched around his father’s fountain, and he wondered if the teacher knew that stones never sleep, and sometimes are heavy because they’re full of water that you could hear if only you listened..
“Livio,” Mr. Beale began, and then his hand tightened on Livio’s, the grip so tight it was painful. “Thank you. Thank you very much.” Looking at the coin he said quickly, “Yes, Livio, I’ll hold on to this.”
A DRAWN BLIND
Oldham Amis lived in a yellow-brick house with a peaked slate roof and a pillared front veranda. He’d inherited the house from his father, a seemingly cheerful man, who had made a small fortune through a company he’d called Tubs-R-Us.
“What do people want?” his father had asked. “They want to cover things up, that’s what. Like they’d never been there.”
He’d gotten rid of claw-footed, cast-iron old bathtubs for customers by encasing them in plastic baths instantly moulded into place.
“The baths look like nothing special but they fit where you want ’em to fit.”
He had freely spent his money on travelling, going on expensive cruise ships “with the boys.” He’d put a lot of money into a chain of retirement homes for the elderly. “They’re the future,” he’d said. He’d also bought a dozen very expensive stone grotesques carved by a friend in the mortuary business, decorating the front lawn with stone unicorns, fawns, lion cubs, and grimacing dwarfs. Inside the house, he’d insisted on hanging a brass barometer on the wall over the tub in the bathroom, saying, “Good to know what pressure we’re under and when.”
Mrs. Amis had kept to herself through the years. She’d her own easy chair where, night after night, she’d sat with scented handkerchiefs in her sleeves, which she’d used to touch her temples while she’d read romances by Mazo de la Roche. When her husband, whom she always called “Mr. Harold,” died of a heart attack in a gay Church Street sauna, she’d gone out to the garage, gotten a tire iron, and smashed all the stone animals on the lawn. Oldham, in his early twenties, had come home to find her sitting under the barometer, running boiling water into the open tub, the room dense with steam. Harold had left his estate to his son, not to his wife.
Oldham, who had a part-time position lecturing in history at an evening college, had kept his mother company in the late afternoons, and had tried reading aloud the gossip in newspapers, but she’d become, like other widows on Walmer Road, a secret drinker, and her mind had wandered as she’d sat wrapped in a blanket on the veranda, drinking Baileys Irish Cream from a china cup, pretending it was tea. He’d sat in silence, his long legs crossed, because there was little more he could say to her. She’d only cared about Slavs and Jews and their noisy children who had been moving onto the street from the South Market.
“Don’t you see,” she had cried out one evening, touching her temple with a little white lace handkerchief, “we’re all fakes, like Mazo de la Roche. Did you know her actual name was really Mazie Roche? They’re overrunning us, those scum. Listen to them. And we deserve it, no backbone, any of us.”
Sometimes when the children were playing street hockey she’d call the police and in a little while a patrol car would ease around the corner and a cop would tell the noisy kids to get off the street.
“That’s all that’s left to count on,” she’d say, “the police.”
When his mother died he was certainly financially secure but he kept on teaching the history class every Wednesday night. He liked talking to the class about the mistakes generals made, how history, especially when men were at their most optimistic, was always in decline. In a small book about a courtesan who’d inexplicably committed suicide, he found the epitaph he had carved on his mother’s headstone: TIRED of THIS ETERNAL BUTTONING and UNBUTTONING. His father’s old friend, the mortician, was offended, but he didn’t care. He began to collect books of epitaphs as a special kind of history, and when he found out that the hill his college was on had been called Gallows Hill, because the blue clay had been used to make the bricks for the first death house in the city, he felt a warm confirmation of his sense of how things secretly hung together, and that was the pleasure he sought in all his books, a confirmation of how he felt about life. Outside the college class, he didn’t talk to many people and didn’t change his mind about many things. His house was filled with all kinds of books and their clutter irritated him. He didn’t want to reread them and yet, because they had been expensive, he couldn’t bring himself to give them away or throw them out.
Then, in a subway station, he saw the ticket-taker in the glass cage reading a paperback novel. The man, rather than set the book down and mark his place, would just tear off the cover and then tear off the pages as he finished them, dropping them into a waste can, whittling the book down to nothing. This seemed so sensible to Oldham that from then on he read only paperbacks, and even when he sat reading on the front lawn, he placed a little waste can down beside his right shoe.
One evening while he was listening to a baseball game, the sun filtering through the silver birch trees, the living room in a lovely rose wash light, he sat drinking brandy in his Sheridan armchair beside the old upright radio and he wrote notes to himself in a neat cramped hand in a book bound in black leather. For nearly three months he’d been keeping a journal, not what he did from day to day, but quotes and small reflections. Listening to the ball game and Mudcat Grant, who was pitching a no-hitter, he wrote: “The deepest root desire we have is to project totally ourselves, cookie-cutter shapes of who we are; hence, Adam’s rib becomes Eve so that he can copulate with his image of himself, and the Virgin, she conceives her son out of herself; love thyself as thy neighbour…”
He took off his round steel-rimmed glasses and sat with his eyes closed, half-brooding, half-listening. By the seventh inning of the ball game he was so caught up in Grant’s no-hitter that he suddenly realized he was sitting in total darkness. He wanted to share his excitement because he was on the edge of his chair, hanging on every pitch, but he found himself touched by a bitter sweetness and surprise and a flutter of panic because he’d never seen himself as so absolutely alone. He stood up, remembering the time as a boy that he’d gone sailing with his father in a rented boat in Toronto Bay. He’d lain down behind his father at the wheel, refusing to look at the heavy waves that smashed the boat broadside, and with his eyes shut he’d repeated, “Jesus Mary and Joseph,” just like he’d heard his mother moaning one late evening alone in the kitchen, but on the boat his father kept calling out, “Nothing can go wrong, Oldie, old kid,” and nothing had gone wrong. Old-ham had been ashamed but his father had said, “You got to feel the pressure of fear to find out what it is and once you know, then you know how to handle it.” Now Oldham, in the dark of his living room, smiled, feeling buoyant and unafraid and at ease. He went out for a long walk, forgetting about Grant and the baseball game.
The more he thought about being alone, the more he liked it. He didn’t want to talk to women for too long and he was glad he didn’t
have to get to know his once-a-week students. Standing in a crowd or sitting at a bar, his sense of his own apartness gave him a feeling of security, as if he couldn’t be touched, and also a sense of self-discipline. Of an evening, after delivering a paper to his class – looking back, his favourite was about tombstone jokes – he’d go to the movies or a club if there was a good Dixieland band on the stand. Once a week he had supper in the Oak Room in the King Edward Hotel, usually milk-fed veal or medallions of beef in wine and mushroom sauce. Then he walked along to the Dundas Street strip-joints, watched a show, and hired one of the hookers who lined the lounge walls every night. He liked his no-nonsense approach to the whole matter, and though he kept his little notes to himself in his leather-bound book, he was sure too much reflection, too much analysis of the self, was a kind of self-hatred. He was delighted one night when he found a quote, unattributed, in a collection of epitaphs: “Nowadays not even a suicide kills himself in desperation. Before taking the step, he deliberates so long and so carefully that he literally chokes with thought. It is even questionable whether he ought to be called a suicide, since it is really thought which takes his life. He does not die with deliberation, but from deliberation.”
Late one night there was a soft rain, more like a mist, and when he went to sit on the veranda around midnight, the street lamps glowing up in the caves of maple leaves touched him with an almost sensual longing, not for anything lost in the past, because he had no particular regrets, but it was a kind of projected homesickness for the future – a wondering whether in the midst of his calmness he was already into his decline, a wondering whether he was going to end in a fog like his mother or die in a wrong place like his father. He tried not to think about how and where his father had died.
As he sat with his arms folded across his chest, hugging himself because he felt an evening chill, he stared at the houses across the road, thinking they were like a row of crypts in the night. He looked up and down the street for lights in the windows, looking for some sign of what went on in all those darkened rooms, because the big old homes were now rooming houses filled with blacks and haggard whites.
He started walking late at night when the streets were empty, nearly everyone asleep, except for those few random lights in windows with the blinds always tightly drawn, making the light seem secret and more mysterious. He found himself making up little scenes, imagining what was going on behind those blinds, as if he’d walked quickly by an open doorway in one of the downtown hooker hotels and seen bodies caught in a flash of light and then they were gone, no names, forgotten. This left him with the same feeling as he had sitting down to supper in the Oak Room, where he was part of the place and yet apart. He didn’t want to meet any of the people who lived in the houses any more than he would have spoken to people in those rooms in the hotels, but he liked thinking that there were transient lives being lived in the half-light of those rooms, lives as mysterious as his own, because he thought with a sudden rush of satisfaction that if anyone were to pay any particular attention to him, surely he would seem a mysterious self-enclosed man to his neighbours. Motorcycle policemen going by slowly at one and two in the morning gave him quizzical looks as he sauntered along the sidewalk in his tweed jacket.
One night, he heard the low, mournful wail of a horn, and as he stood listening it sounded like someone playing The Last Post. He went out into the street just in time to see a woman in slacks running away through the shadows toward Dupont Street. There was a light in the big front room on the second floor in the house across the street. Someone was pacing back and forth behind the drawn blind. Out on the balcony, a man stood playing a trombone, the horn angled up into the air. A short bald man dressed in slippers and a dressing gown sidled up to Oldham on the lawn and said, “Must be up there, I bet.”
MERMAID
He woke up hearing the ocean. He closed his eyes as if he were still asleep and listened because he was nowhere near an ocean. He had been born in a concentration camp, survived the camp, and made a life for himself selling insurance. Now sixty years old and having never been to an ocean, he was in bed with a woman who thought she was old because she was thirty-eight, and he thought she was young because she was thirty-eight. It was her bed; the pillows were of soft down.
“Do you hear the ocean?” he asked. He had never slept all night in anyone else’s bed.
She opened an eye. Her left eye. It was a pale ice-blue. It was a blue clock, he thought.
He couldn’t remember her having blue eyes.
“Yes,” she said. “I love swimming in the ocean.”
“You do?”
“Yes.”
He was worried that if she opened her other eye it would be blue, too.
“I was sure you had brown eyes,” he said.
“Right. Because I’m a mermaid,” she said. “All mermaids have brown eyes.”
She laughed. Her teeth were very white and the tip of her tongue between her teeth was pink. She drew his head down to her belly, between her thighs. He took a deep breath.
He could smell the ocean.
He tasted the ocean.
“Only great men have ever slept with a mermaid,” she said and opened her other eye.
It was blue.
“You’re no mermaid,” he said.
“Welcome to the real world,” she said.
“No, no,” he said.
He was still strong, lean, and muscular. He made a fist and showed her the inside of his forearm, a tattoo.
It was a mermaid.
“You’ve got a mermaid tattoo on your arm,” she said.
“No, look very hard,” he said, and he drew her head down to his arm.
She said his skin smelled like smoke, she had smelled it all night. He said, “No, just look, look hard.”
She looked and at last she said, “Numbers. There’s numbers inside the mermaid.”
He said, “Yes, they disappeared in my little mermaid.”
“Why’d you do that?” she asked as she lay back in her soft bed.
She looked almost unbearably young to him.
“Because I am alive and she is now my real world. She has brown eyes, and those others who gave me the numbers are dead and they had blue eyes,” and he leaned over her, lightly kissed her eyes closed, and said, “Now we make love again.”
EVERYBODY WANTS TO GO TO HEAVEN
A man can die of fright in his dreams. That’s what Cecil said he did, describing how he had died and how being one of the living dead was just like doing the dead man’s float, face down into the water, drifting with his eyes open. He’d sit in his chair for hours, staring straight ahead, slumped where his wife sat him every morning before she fed him cornflakes, a poached egg, and toast. Once a day she mourned for him. She stood in the kitchen with her eyes closed and rocked back and forth on the balls of her feet, holding a slice of bread before she put it in the toaster, moaning low, a deep moaning for a woman so small. Sometimes she crooned to him. He seemed to like that, which wasn’t surprising since he’d always been a crooner around the house himself. She still dressed him in his green golfing slacks and canary yellow sweaters and the shoes with the little leather tassels. He’d been an actuary for an insurance company. Cecil Klose, the actuary, calculating the odds on death. “I’m always the first man in with the odd man out,” he’d said. “Cecil,” she said, “you were a heroic man. Until the day you died you lived a totally boring life.” She chucked him under the chin.
He didn’t look at her. He didn’t blink. Then he said, “Transfer, please. Transfer. I want to change cars.”
“I work hard looking after you,” she said, glaring at him. “I’m steadfast to you, and I always was, working hard like I was about to go out of my mind, and now you talk to me like you’ve gone out of yours.” She stroked his damp brow with a terry cloth hand towel. “You may have died to all intents and purposes,” she said, “but I know you’re still in there, thinking.” She stirred a glass of orange juice that had been standin
g so long that the pulp had sunk to the bottom. “Real fresh-squeezed,” she said, stirring the juice with a swizzle stick. “Good for the vocal cords.”
He had always sung around the house, especially after closing an insurance contract. “You want to know who stands between the beginning and the end?” he’d always said. “It’s me, Mister In-Between,” and then he’d stood crooning like Frank Sinatra, “Don’t mess with Mister In-Between.” He had a dozen Sinatra albums. “It’s not the voice, it’s the timing, the phrasing,” he’d said. “It’s like me doing a deal, the nuance is everything.”
She made him drink the orange juice and then wiped his lower lip with her finger.
She took a deep breath.
She puckered her wet lips and ran her hands along the inside of her thighs as if she were aroused. She was not aroused. Both of them now slept in the winterized back porch that was just off the kitchen – he, on a sofa bed that hadn’t been closed back into itself for a year, and she, on an old camp cot. She sat down beside the small back porch windows. There were streaks of sunlight on her face. The square windows were screened by climbing sweet peas and hollyhocks, and there were coloured wicker baskets full of thimbles and balls of wool on a pine table. She put brass thimbles on the fingers of her right hand. She started thrumming on the table, a steady rolling as if trying to find a tune, something maybe he would remember and like, The Boulevard of Broken Dreams. She began to whine as she thrummed, and this whine became a low keening wail. Then, with a nod to no one, she pulled the thimbles from her fingers and lifted his arms so that they stretched, open-handed, straight out from his body. “Time to do something useful. Time to do the wool.” She dropped a loose coil of red wool over his left hand, and then across the gap, over his right hand. In a dry whisper, he said, “I’ll tell you how I died…” She drew the skein of wool taut. “No,” she said, “not now, there’s work to be done. Three balls to get done this morning, red, yellow, and green.” She glanced at the huge hamper in the corner. It was full of balls of wool. “I’ll tell you how I died,” he whispered. She tried not to look at him. There were tears in her eyes. “You can die later,” she said. “This is not a game.”
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