Melanie had quit her job at the Queen. For my sake, I suppose. The boss had been really ticked off and knew that it was somehow my fault.
“So what happened between you?” he asked me.
“We lost it.”
“Lost what?”
“Whatever we had.”
Carl looked dubious. “Too much sex. Young people make too much of it. Every night. You grow up too quick that way. Kids need to keep some secrets. Otherwise marriage is no surprise at all.”
Melanie found a job at a classier theatre that showed only first-run films — Academy Award winners, films with directors who were British and demanded extravagant introductory footage. The summer wore on like a long, tedious drug. The inexorable movies at the Queen played over and over in my head even after I had left the cinema. Richard did his best to get me interested in dames (he had started calling them that). I tried, but my heart wasn’t in it. Most nights, he and I would sit up and take in one or two late showerers. It was a great disappointment: mostly dumpy, flatulent women in their mid-twenties who looked like chubby ghosts through the infrared lens. The night showerers. The men were all pudgy and broken-down-looking. Night people. I wouldn’t allow Richard to spy on Ella. She was sacred.
“An Earth Mother,” Richard called her. After a week, the voyeurism just become boring. We would cruise the town once after I got off from work, say that it was a dead scene, and go home, fall asleep, wake up the next day and see it as just that, the next day. We both started looking forward to college. “You won’t believe what I heard about college girls,” he’d say, then relate a number of improvised fantasies. It all added up to the same thing.
I was parked in front of the Household Finance office one afternoon in late August. I had just made my final payment to Donovan, who greeted me with a sour face each time I actually arrived on time with the money due. Melanie came out of nowhere and hopped into the seat beside me.
“Get out,” I said. I could sense the old pain dripping into my nervous system as if someone had tapped my spine with a needle and was squeezing in a deadly poison.
“I’ll be gone soon, Fred. You’ll never see me again.”
“That’s not such a bad deal.”
“I’d like to make love with you again, one more time. For old times’ sake.”
“God.”
“Is that a good God or a bad God?”
“An existential one.”
“Anywhere you like. You pick the geography.”
So I drove her out toward the north end of town, out to the town dump, a vast, smelly plain of discarded crud and garbage settling into a forgotten marsh. I parked between two mountains of refuse and stopped the car.
“Nice ambience,” she said. She wanted me to pretend that nothing bad had ever gone down between us. Melanie was all soft shoulders and sad eyes. I had seen that face before.
“Out,” I told her.
“What?”
“Get out or I’ll throw you out.”
She let herself out and slammed the door. I started to pull away, then came back.
“What is Brian gonna do when you go off to school next week? When you fly off to the West Coast?”
“I haven’t told him yet.”
With that I let out the clutch, spitting gravel as I drove away from her.
x x x
It had been left to Brian and me to finish up with Apartment X. We got drunk together there on the thirty-first of August and then we left the place much as we had found it. The Apeman came to see if we had done any damage and said that it was in our lease that we weren’t allowed to paint the floor. He would keep the deposit. I went upstairs to say goodbye to Ella. She was sitting at a table drinking a beer with her superintendent boyfriend.
“You look better in daylight, kid. Go have a good life. Try to forget the bad stuff. Don’t let gravity get you down.”
“Yeah. Have a good fucking life,” her boyfriend added, punctuating it with a beer belch.
Brian had been informed at the eleventh hour of Melanie’s exodus. He simply insisted that he was going with her. He would work, she would go to school. I wanted to talk him out of it, but he was the new Brian. “It’s good, man. She and I are good together. I’m still sorry to have kicked you in the head.”
“Forget it.”
x x x
And then the summer was over, a dead roman candle extinguished, charred and spiralling toward the sea. I drove Richard off to his dorm, where, it turned out, he was rooming with the son of a wealthy Mexican who owned a tequila distillery. Richard showed him the infrared gunsight and explained its potential uses. They were immediate friends.
Then somewhere in the middle of a confused transitional September, feeling isolated and lost in a large public university where every guy but yours truly seemed paired with a girl, I started losing interest in school, parties — everything. I was depressed, aching to be somewhere else. But most of all I was dead lonely. Lonely enough to call Melanie’s mother and ask for her phone number out west.
When I called her up, Melanie said she was really glad to hear from me. Brian, she said, had driven them in my old VW all the way across the country in less than a week. They’d had a fantastic time. Everything had been going well, but Brian never did find a job as planned. So she moved into the dorm while he stayed at a YMCA. Then suddenly she lost contact with him. It was all very strange, she said. A week went by and she hadn’t heard from him. Not a word.
Finally, she was called by the police to identify the car. Somebody had driven my old wreck off a pier straight into the Pacific Ocean, at night, with no one around. When the divers found the car, the window had been rolled down, but there wasn’t a sign of anyone, dead or living. The police never found a body, but the investigation was still open.
“Other than that,” Melanie said, “things are going pretty good. I’ve applied to do a year at a university in Ghana — part of an exchange program. For next year. My chances of getting accepted look pretty good. And they say there’s lots of volunteer work I can do with children while I’m there. I can’t wait.”
I didn’t know what to say to her after that. I began to feel the miles stretch out into a big empty continent between us. When I said goodbye I was pretty sure I would not speak to her again. Melanie would go off to Africa without Brian. Without me. And I stood there in the phone booth at my dorm feeling as if I had been torn apart by a nuclear blast. Melanie’s casual attitude seemed inconceivable. And now she would try to save the world.
Richard’s school was only about fifty miles from mine, and I drove down there many times over the following months. He was adapting to life after Apartment X much better than I was, but he remained loyal enough to humour me as I analyzed and dissected every morsel of what had transpired that summer. We would stay up until two or three in the morning creating elaborate theories as to what had become of Brian or wondering if he was alive at all. Richard’s Mexican roommate would cover his head with his pillow and eventually beg us to shut up and go to sleep.
Over the winter I grew sullen, but I became a very good student due to my lack of interest in the real world waiting for me outside of books and classrooms. I eventually gave up on feeling sorry for myself and recognized the practical decisions to be made about my life ahead. And when Richard announced that he had settled on a career as an optometrist, I announced that I would become, of all things, a chemical engineer.
Before the year was out, Richard observed that we had both miraculously become more mature in the way we dealt with everything. When I told him I was thinking about selling the MG because it was costing too much in repairs, he said that he was surprised I had held on to it for so long and that, no, he didn’t want it.
The past was behind us. We were on the road to becoming what he called “civilized,” on our way to becoming normal. We took our time about it, making a few detou
rs along the way, and I gradually concluded that gravity was an ally, after all, not an enemy.
Lesley Choyce is, by all accounts, Canada’s Renaissance man. He is the author of more than 50 books, the founder and publisher of Pottersfield Press, a part-time professor at Dalhousie University, the host and co-producer of Vision TV’s Off the Page with Lesley Choyce, the front man of the band The Surf Poets, and a former Canadian national surfing champion. Born in the US, he migrated to Canada in the 1970s and now makes his home at Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia.
The Summer of Apartment X Page 10
