“I was washing,” he said, “taking a shower, the steam piling up, clouds…”
“That’s no fun, talking about that, not now, Cecil. No games.”
He’d been good at games. He’d liked dressing up in his green slacks to go out and play golf. He’d liked to play games with children.
His favourite game with the children on the street had been to stand on the sidewalk and let them see a cellophane-wrapped peppermint candy in his hand. In his open hand. He’d held his hands over his head like a boxer being introduced. He’d shown them his closed fists, and then his open hands, empty, and he’d laughed heartily, always pleased when the children had reached for his empty hands, pleased that once again he’d fooled them. “They know I’m a fun guy,” he’d said. “I fooled them.”
“Fun?” she’d cried once. “What the hell is fun? What is fun?”
“Fun,” he’d said, looking at her as if she were crazy, “is when you feel good and you feel good when what’s good for you gets done. The trouble is,” he’d said, staring directly at her, “some people like to feel bad and feeling bad spreads around like the common cold. The next thing you know, you’re in bed for a week, or for life.”
“In these arid hours,” she’d said.
“What?”
“These arid hours.”
“Arid, arid, what kind of word is arid?”
She had never answered that question. She took a deep breath and still didn’t answer the question. She kept unwinding wool from the skein around his hands, making a ball. She looked through the porch glass into the tendrils of sweet peas and morning glories. She saw petals of light. Radiant light. And delicate stamens held in the silence of the light in the glass. She knew how to hold on to silence. She could keep silent for days. “You’re a windsucker for silence,” her father had told her when she was a girl, “but so is God with His Word in these arid hours.”
She again took a deep breath.
“His Word? What’ll it be like?” she’d asked her father.
“It’ll be like one of those water bugs you see on a dead calm day on a pond, coming at you like a snub-nosed bullet…”
“I stepped out of the steam,” Cecil said. “I stepped out and took a towel and wiped a big circle clean in the mirror and suddenly I was enclosed, enclosed by the circle so that I didn’t know where I was except I was gone… Just like that, I was gone, into a dream. I knew it was a dream because I’ve never felt so right about anything in my whole life, like everything was where it was doomed to be, so I was terrified.”
“Terror,” she said. “What do you know about terror?”
He said nothing. She said nothing. He stared straight ahead, his hands wrapped in another coil of wool, yellow. Often when they sat like this, so still that she thought she could hear dust falling in the sunlight through the windows, she would begin to laugh, quietly, a dry crackling laugh, and then her laughter would become deep and throaty. When he had first known her he’d thought that every time she laughed she was going to tell him a secret, but she had never told him anything, not anything he thought was a secret, not anything deep, nothing dark or shameful. He had yearned to hear something shameful. But there’d never been anything dark about her. She had beautiful pale skin and pale blue eyes and was sparrow-breasted.
“Little birds for breasts,” she’d said ruefully after they’d made love on their wedding night in a motel, “and I don’t think they’ll ever sing.” He’d sat alone in the toilet until dawn, getting drunk on a mickey of Alberta Premium rye whisky, and then he’d told her that a bird in the house means a death in the family and as far as he could see she had twin death for tits. He’d fallen asleep, snoring. She’d put a quarter in the vibrating machine and watched him shake on the bed for twenty minutes. She was angry because she couldn’t find any more quarters in her purse. She remembered her mother had told her, “You want to set a man straight, you give him a good shaking.” She had cried for three days as they’d driven through the countryside from inn to inn, honeymooning, and for three days he’d said over and over again, “I don’t know why I wanted to sound like I hate you. I don’t.” She’d stopped crying and said, “You do. You hate me. Why did you marry me?” Trying to laugh, he’d said, “You were the only woman I ever saw who wore open-toed shoes – your big toes sticking out, painted red.” He’d laughed. He had a measured laugh. Like a metronome. Heh huh, heh huh. She’d said, like she was suddenly talking about something else, “Remember Jayne Mansfield?” And he’d asked, “Why?” And she’d whispered, “Decapitated. She had the biggest birds in America and she got decapitated in a car accident.”
“Heh huh.”
“At times like this it’s just best to take a deep breath,” she’d said. “Breathe in, breathe out, like a breath of wind in the garden.”
She sat, breathing deeply in, deeply out.
“The garden’s full of nests,” she told him, peering through the porch glass and the climbing flowers, as if she were announcing a discovery.
“And I could hear a bird that morning, after I showered,” he said, staring straight ahead. “I could hear one lone bird once the circle had closed and it wasn’t singing, it was whispering. Everything was all steamy white and there was a bird whispering and the bird was so big that all the whiteness was inside the beak of the bird. I could see the sun in the bird’s throat. But it didn’t give off any light, only a glow with no reflection, and then it went out, so there was only a dim, gold, band-like rim. Though there was no sun I could still see walls of sheer ice a way off in the distance. I knew they were the walls of the universe. I knew I was in the mind of God. I was so scared I wanted to cry, but everything was so brittle in the cold that I was afraid to cry because my bones would break if I even breathed. Then I saw how lucky I was, because I knew I had died and nothing could be worse than being afraid of God, being dead and not knowing that you had died.”
“I’m not afraid of dying,” she said. “And I’m not afraid of God.”
He said nothing. There was a little spittle at the corner of his mouth. She tossed two balls of wool into the hamper and wiped the spittle away from his mouth. She wiped his brow with a damp cloth. He had always been meticulous and now she was meticulous with him. There was an Arborite tray attached to his chair. She put both his hands on the tray, palms down, fingers spread, and then unzipped a small black leather pouch, taking out scissors, tweezers, and a short pearl-handled nail file. She began to clean his nails, to probe under the nails and to push the cuticles back, so fiercely that thread-lines of blood appeared along two of the cuticles. She dabbed the blood away with cotton batten. “No, God means nothing to me,” she said as she stood up, went to the sink, and took down a mug, soap, and a straight razor. She had learned how to strop a blade. He had always used an electric shaver, but she liked the sound of stropping. There was something sensual about it. It aroused her. And she liked to strop the blade in front of him, though he never altered his gaze, never looked at the leather or the blade. But once she’d got a lather in the mug and had brushed it onto his jaw, what she really loved was shaving him – the clean track through the white lather, the feel of the sharp blade against the stubble, the rasping sound. It was the sound, and the feel of the sound in her fingers, that she loved best, as she shaved his throat clean, particularly around a mole that was over his Adam’s apple, a mole she’d never noticed until she’d had to shave him.
“I don’t know how I never saw that mole,” she said.
There was so much about his body that she had never noticed, had never seen before. “Transfer, please,” he said. “Transfer, I want to change cars.” She took off his slippers and put on his brown shoes with the leather tassels. She changed his clothes every morning after breakfast and every evening just before the eleven o’clock TV news. She also washed him on the porch before bed, washed him and examined every part of his body, surprised each time by the hard boniness of his feet, the yellow of his toenails, the patch of black hair in the small
of his back. She had spread his legs and stared for a long time at his scrotum and penis, soft and shrunken back into his body. He was not circumcised so she’d drawn the skin back, washed him with a small face cloth, and found herself smiling at his limpness, and one testicle hanging lower than the other. It was the left one. Her mother had told her that a woman’s left breast was always lower than her right because of the sorrow and disappointment in a woman’s heart. She wondered if the hanging testicle was the mark of a man’s sorrow and disappointment, too. She suddenly bent down and gave his penis a pecking kiss. She’d never kissed his penis. He’d never asked her to. Now she kissed and stroked him but nothing happened. She couldn’t arouse him. She was enraged. “Look at you. Mr. In-Between, Mr. Fucking In-Between,” she said, astonished at hearing herself say fucking. She had never said the word aloud in her life, she had only mouthed it in the dark. Standing up, she folded her arms and began to moan and sway and rock back and forth on the balls of her feet as if in deep pain, a pain in her marrow, and then she slowly drew the blanket up over his still body stretched out in the sofa bed, tucking the blanket to his chin as she said bitterly, “Death was always in you.”
“Transfer, please.”
“No, you don’t get off that way.”
“Transfer, I want to change cars.”
“No, you’ve got to live with the truth just like I’ve got to live with it. The truth is the truth. You can’t change the truth. We can’t change anything else, why should we want to change the truth? That baby died in my womb. That baby had death in him, the death that’s been in your seed from day one, the death that you’ve got in you.”
“Transfer, please.”
“That life in me, that breathing life was dead before it had half a chance. You’re a carrier. I miscarried because you’re a carrier.”
“Transfer, please, heh huh. Transfer.” He blinked, blinked again, and began to sweat.
“Oh Cecil, Cecil,” she said, suddenly laughing and patting his hand. “It’s all in the phrasing, isn’t it?” She let out a piercing scream. And then another. And another.
The phone rang. It was an automated voice, the telephone company offering new long-distance rates. Stay on the line for further information… “No, thank you,” she said and hung up. She stood drumming her fingers on the phone’s cradle.
“And I stood waiting, waiting,” he said, calling her away from the phone. “The bird was whispering but it wasn’t words, and then I saw what I knew was one of God’s thoughts, a thought for me. It was right there, standing in front of me, in front of the hollow sun. It looked like a wolverine, one of the animals of His mind, who’d come to have a word with me, slavering, an amber light in his black eyes. For such is my beloved. That was the word, the words I heard as the wolverine drew his claw like a razor from my throat to my gut and opened me up, hauling my innards out, and then the animal entered into me, closing the wound behind him, until I could feel it, this living cannibal thought, possessing me from within, devouring me, until at last I knew I was seeing nothing with my own eyes, I was no longer me. I was terrified and dead and born again as this wolverine, and I knew that the landscape I now saw was blood-red, as red as it had been white, and I heard the word, live in the blood, knowing I had died, that my body was like that gold rim of the sun, a closed circle, empty at the core…”
He lifted his hand and drew a circle in the air. She put her hand up and touched the line of the circle. He’d always loved circles. That’s why he’d always given children on the street soap-bubble blowers. “There,” he’d said as children surrounded themselves with the diaphanous globes, “is perfection in the air.” He’d also been able to draw perfect circles and he’d always carried newly sharpened HB pencils in his breast pocket, and whether he’d been at work or whether he was watching reruns of The Honeymooners on television on Sunday mornings, he’d always drawn circles on a legal-size pad, saying, “Leonardo da Vinci could draw perfect circles. He was a southpaw, too. Said it was the sign of the greatest artist in the world, freehand circles.” And he’d carried three stainless-steel half-shells in his suitcoat pocket. His insurance clients had loved to play the shell game, trying, as he’d moved the pea around under the shells, to guess where the pea was. He’d been very quick. “The pea is like your heart,” he’d said. “If you could find the pea real easy, there’d be no mystery.” That’s why, when he’d held candy in his hands over his head, he had told the children, “Go ahead, find my heart.” He’d happily shown them an empty hand after they had guessed wrong. Then, to make them feel foolish and grateful, he’d always given them the candy anyway, with his little laugh, heh huh, heh huh.
“That’s really what I can never forgive you for, Cecil,” she said as she lifted his arms and began to wind more wool.
“I’ll tell you how I died,” he said.
“Never mind,” she said.
“Doing the dead man’s float.”
“Grateful, Cecil, you wanted me to be grateful.”
“I’ll tell you how I died…”
She wound the wool taut. “When I wash you, clean you, I don’t want you to feel grateful.”
“Transfer, please.”
She took the wool from Cecil’s hands and put his hands down in his lap. She listened for the postman’s step. It was very quiet. She listened hard. The postman didn’t pass by. The disability cheques were late. She was angry. She looked at his fingernails. They were clean. She thought she might cut them back even closer. She began to hum, and then sing:
Love and marriage,
love and marriage,
go together like a horse
and carriage…
He stared straight ahead, a little spit at the corner of his mouth. The spittle reminded her of one of her spinster schoolteachers. The spittle disgusted her, the more she looked at it. She was seething with anger and screamed, “Wipe your mouth.” He didn’t move.
She took off her gold wedding band. She was surprised at how easily it came off. His ring was more difficult. She yanked it over the knuckle. She weighed the two rings in the palm of her hand and then held them up to his eyes between her thumbs and forefingers, like spectacles. “Look,” she cried. “Look. Just like the sun, just like the sun you saw in God’s mind. Empty. What do you think about that?”
“Please,” he said.
“What?”
“Please. I want to get off.”
“Oh, yes, I bet you would like that, wouldn’t you? Instead of being on this stupid porch.”
“Transfer, please.”
“You’d like me to really look after you, wouldn’t you?!”
“Please.”
“But I can’t kill you, you’re already dead.”
“Heh huh, heh huh…”
“What else can I give you?”
“Such is my beloved,” he said, and she laughed and crooned, “I can’t give you anything but love.” Then she sang:
Dream awhile,
scheme awhile,
you’re sure to find,
happiness, and I guess…
He began to growl. He had never growled before. He sounded like an animal, an angry animal. He was wide-eyed with no expression on his face, growling.
“Stop it,” she yelled.
He growled again.
“You stop it,” she said, as if warning an animal. “You better stop it.”
His growl turned to a guttural snarl.
She got up. She thought she should make some toast before sleep. And tea. And take a deep breath. Instead, she went to the kitchen drawer beside the dishwasher. Years ago, he’d put a handgun in the drawer. He’d been worried about someone breaking into their house in the dark. But no one had ever threatened them, almost no one had ever knocked on the front door at night. The gun had never been fired. She wasn’t sure if there was a bullet in the chamber.
She stood facing him with the gun in her hand. “I’m telling you to stop it,” she said, “to go away with your growling.” She looked h
ard into his eyes. They were bloodshot. The snarling grew louder, there was drool at the corner of his mouth.
She lifted his left hand, because he was left-handed, and put the gun in it, closing his fingers around the butt, and then she turned the gun back toward his mouth. “I’m warning you,” she said, “for the last time.” He curled his lip, snarling. She pushed the snub-nosed barrel into his mouth, her hand on his, her finger on his, up against the trigger. “Stop it,” she cried. His head was tilted, his eyes wide open, and she was sure that she saw him hiding down a deep hole inside the dark pupils of his eyes. “Cecil,” she said, “I knew it. I can see you. You’re in there. There you are.”
The bullet blew off his jaw. There was blood all over the chair but none on her. She stepped back, leaving the gun in his hand. “Cecil,” she said, “Cecil, dear Cecil.”
The police found her standing on the front porch wearing only her kimono, holding a feather duster. She was dusting the air. The open kimono had slipped off her shoulders, so that she was naked to the policemen as they came up the walk, startled by her being naked, by her big bush of black hair for so small a woman, and how boyish her body was, and one of the cops said, “Jesus, she’s got no tits at all.” She was crooning quietly:
I can’t give you anything but love, baby,
That’s the only thing I’ve plenty of, baby,
Dream awhile…
WILLARD AND KATE
Willard Cowley lived with his wife, Kate, in a sandstone house. There was a sun parlour at the back of the house and the windows of the parlour opened onto a twisted old apple tree.
“Everything alters,” he often told her, “under the apple tree. One by one we drop away.” He was a well-known scholar, big-boned and tall, with closely cropped grey hair. “It’s the job of wizened old teachers like myself,” he said, smiling indulgently at his students, “to tell the young all about tomorrow’s sorrow.” He was officially required to stop teaching, to retire. He was sixty-five. Kate came down to his office. “You needn’t have come,” he said, but he was comforted to see her. She said the sorrowful look in his eye made him even more handsome than he was. “A lady killer, Willard, that’s what you are.”
All the Lonely People Page 31
