Fatal Light Awareness

by John O'Neill

  Leonard had met his wife while in the drama program at University College, University of Toronto, specifically when it was going through a loose, experimental phase, purple echo of the sixties. Leonard remembered their first date; they had met on the steps of the soaring, penitential Robarts Library at U of T. She was wearing orange stretch pants with loops for her feet and a blue cloth jacket. Her neck-length hair was curled under, adorable red bob. They went to a movie, Leonard couldn’t remember the name, about a poet who accidently kills himself after spending the movie attempting to do so and failing. Afterward, they’d driven in Cynthia’s brown Lada to the all-night Fran’s restaurant at Yonge and College and eaten greasy burgers and talked for hours and watched the midnight people drift by. They spent the next two years playing small parts in various, experimental productions at the University College playhouse, also attending lectures and surviving on coffee and striving over essays and making love in Leonard’s A-shaped, top-floor bedroom on Euclid Avenue. They managed to finish their degrees, and reached the point where it was either split up or officially invite friends and family to help launch them into the future, together. Leonard knew that his characterization of his marriage, of the funk he was in, was unfair. He had said: “Yes, yes,” every step of the way and his wife had always encouraged him to maintain some of the edge of their university days. Two years earlier, Cynthia had bought them both season tickets for the Tarragon Theatre, so Leonard might keep up on the Toronto theatre scene. But he argued that his teaching job more than satisfied the artistic side of his nature, that the bohemian in him had a small but perfect appetite. Cynthia attended most of the plays by herself or with a girlfriend.

  Alison seemed to be calling his bluff. But he felt, by the intensity with which she made the suggestion, how she gripped her knees and leaned forward, made fists then flowers with her hands, that this encouragement was part of a subtle invitation to another lifestyle. That was just a first step for Leonard of divesting himself of Cynthia and the suburbs.

  They talked, moved to the dining room table. Alison made reference to Fellini’s The Clowns. He countered with Antonioni’s The Passenger. Leonard mentioned a Ric Burns documentary on the Donner Party. Alison came back with R. Crumb. She suggested that Leonard could establish a film course at his school. He suggested she could teach dance.

  “All art is divine shit,” she said.

  She told him how much she liked living in the Annex, about how well she got on with her roommate Beverly, a friend from the film program. Leonard went to make tea. When he returned, with a zebra-striped teapot and two striped cups looped on his fingers, Alison was stretching, tilting her head from side to side, pushing her hands flat toward the floor. He sat in the chair nearest, and studied. When Alison began to speak, her words were quick, but arrived late in his ears.

  “What play you doing next year?” she asked, still stretching.

  “I’ve no idea. I’ll decide during fall semester.”

  “Right on. That last one, what was it called, was great. Famous to see that in a high-school.”

  “Night of Broken Glass. I have no interest in doing Oklahoma or Guys and Dolls. How are big American musicals relevant to a Canadian teenager in 2003?”

  Leonard was aware he was speaking too loudly. In mid-sentence, he adjusted his tone and volume.

  Night of Broken Glass was a play the students had written, based on a series of improvisations, that explored issues associated with the Holocaust. In it, a Holocaust survivor is shot and killed during a convenience store robbery. It happens that a student at the local high-school suspects she knows the perpetrator, a nasty acquaintance of her boyfriend. But, for various reasons – peer pressure, low self-esteem, her unhappy relationship with her own parents, the intoxicating sense of conspiracy – she doesn’t come forward. The play was a bit precious, didactic, obvious, yet the librarian at Leonard’s school, an electric little brunette named Marla Bal, came up to him after a performance and complimented him, saying the play was dark, poetic, disturbing, something she would have expected to see at Tarragon or The Factory Theatre. It occurred to Leonard, as he recalled her comments, that part of his motivation for doing small, original, socially relevant plays was that he had a distinct audience in mind, the kind of edgy crowd of which Alison was a part. Suddenly, even his history, his seeming idealism in choosing dramatic projects at school, shifted into the theatre of his lust, his need.

  They ordered pizza. Mushrooms, garlic, roasted red peppers for Alison. For Leonard, pepperoni. They hadn’t discussed how long Alison planned to stay, and he kept expecting her to tell him she had to leave, had another engagement. He was grateful when she announced she was famished. Sweet water in how she said the word. He phoned for the pizza and checked the time. Four hours had elapsed since he’d picked her up. In the dining room window, the ghost light had narrowed to a smear of purple. They took their pizza and cans of Coke into the shadowy backyard. They sat in white plastic chairs on the small patio, watched, above the ferns that twisted against the back fence, the first stars in the evening sky. Alison commented on the beautiful garden. The flowers were monochrome in the failing light. Leonard said: “That’s all Cynthia.”

  As he began to comment on how he had no interest in gardening, that sometimes he and Cynthia quarrelled over this point, Alison’s cell phone rang: grating, annoying trill, needling as mosquitoes.

  Instantly, she was elsewhere. “I’m good. You? Absolutely. I can’t right now. Right on. No, that’s no problem, but. I’m on my way. See you in a bit.”

  She poked the horrid creature and slid it back into her pocket. Leonard reached for another pizza slice. Alison said: “This has been cool, but. I gotta go. Mind dropping me off at the subway?”

  Before he could answer, she extended her arms above her head. Tufts of black in her armpits, little puffs of smoke. She dropped forward, touched her fingers to the patio. Leonard worried that her need to stretch had something to do with where they were, as if the suburban streets, their patent order, made her muscles seize up.

  He stood, dropped the slice back into the box. Ran his tongue over his teeth. Stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jeans. Moved closer to her.

  “Of course not. Just wish you didn’t have to go.”

  He regretted his words. Alison looked at the sky, and said: “So do I. You’ve no idea.”

  “Alison, do you mind, if, I hug you, before we go?”

  In the hesitation, Leonard decided to retreat. But then Alison extended her body, projected wholly into him; and though her arms were thin and strong, her shoulder blades sharp and hard, she was in motion – he felt that her slimness might escape his grasp and slide upwards. As if she were some warm thermal current that could accommodate and cradle a bird that was lost in the sky. It was like studying, for the first time, a detail in a constellation, binary star, something exact but elusive, with the strange purchase of memory.

  Her fingers were on his neck. She cupped one of her hands, and her fingernails bit him. He stepped away.

  “You all right? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Just a tad light-headed.”

  “You scared me, but.” Alison stepped forward, touched his shoulder. “I thought I’d done something.”

  “You did,” he said. He leaned down, picked up the pizza box, gathered the napkins and cans. Evenly, he said: “I’ll meet you at the car.”

  After shutting the house down, extinguishing it, and giving it to the darkness, Leonard locked the front door with a decisive twist.

  Across the street, windows glowed. He wondered if any of the neighbours were watching, were studying the diminutive woman in the driveway who was lifting her arms behind her. He imagined his closest neighbour peeking through the lace curtains and that same image repeated all down the block.

  He unlocked the passenger door. Alison got in. He walked to the driver’s side. The car was something different now, freeing and restrictive, a comfort and a provocation, like a bed. He crawled ins
ide, put the key in the ignition. Sat with his thumbs hooked over the steering wheel.

  “What’s wrong?” Alison said, again. As she spoke, she curled toward him. Her scrutiny, her closeness, her exaggerated regard, justified his desire. He didn’t hesitate before answering: “It’s nothing. I’m very attracted.”

  She turned away, glanced toward the house, then in the rearview. For a moment, Leonard believed he had offended her. He wagged his head and closed his eyes.

  Before he could speak, or apologize further, she said, almost inaudibly: “Why don’t you kiss me?”

  He opened his eyes, didn’t look at her, stared straight ahead. Placed both his hands on the steering wheel: 10 o’clock and two. She broke his hold, put a hand behind his head, turned it, opened his mouth with her tongue, and slid sideways so that she was halfway on top of him, wedged between him and the wheel. The season had discovered him. He was pulsing with recognition. His pale arms were floating, weightless as ash. The humidity, sultry nights, waves of heat that had radiated all summer like firelight from the countless Scarborough pavements, all of it gathered in that front seat, and found a place to live in their limbs, their manoeuvring together.

  He worried about his breath. Worried that this glorious proximity would reveal that he’d not brushed his teeth thoroughly enough, and that his body smelled.

  Before long, their embrace took on the aspect of farce. Both of them laughed when Alison’s head smacked the rearview mirror and her elbow stabbed the horn. She climbed back into the passenger seat. He started the engine. They required only a few minor tugs and adjustments to erase the physical evidence. Alison smoothed his shirt, patted his hair, straightened her own top, as Leonard backed out of the driveway. He felt a surge of panic when he realized he hadn’t checked for oncoming cars. He saw a truck t-boning them, his last sight the bulldog logo on the truck’s grille, his wife at his funeral, bulldog-faced, searching among mourners for the woman he’d been with. And the animal wasn’t even injured. But the street was empty. It wasn’t until they approached Warden Station, the glass bridge crossing St. Clair, that one of them made reference to what they’d done.

  They arranged to see each other again. Not seeing her, not prolonging his surrender, seemed an impossibility. His intoxication had spawned a new person. But who was he? An element perhaps, like fire. The idea of Alison was like another heart in his chest: a double heartbeat, twin set of flames. On the drive back to the house, his hands felt different on the steering wheel. He looked at them, imagined they weren’t his own, concluded the car could steer itself back to the driveway.

  Hands in his lap, he let his car drift into the oncoming lane. At not quite the last moment, headlights approaching, he pulled it back.

  4

  ASHOLE

  He unlocked and ignited the house again, quickly made for the downstairs bathroom with a brief detour to a bookshelf in the den. He washed his hands, dropped his pants and sat on the toilet seat. Opened the school yearbook to where Alison smiled up at him from a page of graduates. He tried not to look at all the other scrubbed, ribboned, black-capped faces. He tried not to picture himself as he was: hunched over, pants around his ankles, polo shirt hiked up, heavy leather yearbook balanced in one hand. He tried not to think of the scorching emptiness that would claim him once he’d finished. Not to think of the journey of the rest of the night.

  He came, and went. Guilt manifested itself in a monologue Leonard half sang as he wiped himself, a two-syllable word repeated over and over like the hot strokes of his hand: asshole, asshole, asshole, asshole. It was an incantation, a circular word. He whispered it, hollered it, elongated the round final vowel sound while in different positions. Leaning over the toilet seat, tissue in hand. Over the sink, scrubbing his palms with the blue glycerine bar of soap Cynthia always bought. He slammed the yearbook back into its place. Asshole. The word was a kind of confession, as if such self-loathing might substitute for atonement, and that self-knowledge might compensate for betrayal. Asshole. The word shortened, changed, his weariness, now, simplifying it: asshole, ashole, asole, sole, soul. He thought about the word soul, his soul, touched by some tremor of significance. Then he recalled a particularly dim student he’d once had in his senior drama class, an amiable, unjustly talented jock whom he’d overheard saying to his girlfriend in a tone that suggested he’d just discovered plutonium: “Isn’t it freaky that God spelled backwards is dog?”

  He yelled it one more time, laughed, fell exhausted onto the living room couch.

  “I’ll work my way gradually into the bed,” Leonard said, aloud again but displeased at the sound.

  His wife’s smell on the sheets, glint of her jewellery on the dresser, her shoes parked by the door, history of her style in the closet, all would speak to him with soft, sad words, with Cynthia’s voice, and prevent sleep.

  Yet he hadn’t slept with Alison. No promises were exchanged. The lawnmower would growl again; the flowers in Cynthia’s garden would trumpet their colours as if they’d merely witnessed the brightening, fading of stars at night, or the birds thumping against the kitchen window, now lingering in the bushes. He could avoid Alison, at least for a time. His decision would not be whether to leave Cynthia, but whether or not to tell her what had happened. He had a few days to consider it before she returned from England. But Leonard knew he’d see Alison again. He wanted, with an urgency that bordered on panic, their crude, comic, thrilling embrace in the front seat of the car to be the beginning of something, anything, rather than this banality.

  He, too, had a recurring dream: I’m walking through a forest: cold, autumnal, the wetness of the season dragging on my legs. I begin to discern around me, between the glistening trunks of trees, what appear to be human forms – here, the outline of a head and shoulders; there, a splay of open hands. Human shapes, but all plastered with coloured leaves, each in a suit of mulch and vein. I’m reminded of an art project from elementary school, our whole class slathering glue over various discarded household items, old shampoo bottles, tin cans, milk jugs, then fastening them with leaves. As I continue walking, aware of the spongy wetness of my shoes, I see a tremble of white amidst some trees. Then a flash, like a watch face catching the light. I investigate. Pushed up against the trunk of a birch is an animal, wolf or coyote, sitting almost humanly. There’s a leg-hold trap on its right hind leg, the metal teeth interlocked, but partly obscured by the extravagant sunburst of fur and blood. The animal looks at me with indifference, then curls its black lips, snarls and bends double, takes one of its free legs into its jaws, begins to huff and chew. Confused but unafraid, I walk right up and put my hands on the trap. The animal falls back, surrenders. I have no trouble prying the trap’s teeth apart, dragging the whole apparatus off the leg. I spin and toss the machinery like an Olympic athlete hurling a hammer. When, though, I look back, the animal is facing me, its four legs planted firmly, tail down, ears flat. Its fur bristles. The animal lunges and I can’t move, weighed down by the wetness that’s crept up from my feet. And the feeling that persists, after I wake, instinctively flip over to let the sight of Cynthia reassure me, is that I’m responsible for the animal’s suffering.

  Leonard ran his hand over the empty bed. His cock stirred again at the thought of Alison wedged between him and the steering wheel; and as memory’s looping soundtrack, the phrase from Cynthia’s dream, keeping the rest of his night sexy, sleepless: 40 is too young to die, and the animal wasn’t even injured.

  5

  SCREEN DOOR

  Leonard’s parents had recently moved to the city. Down from the place they thought would be their waiting-to-die retirement home, a tiny winterized cottage near Jackson’s Point on Lake Simcoe. Both his mother and father were frail after nearly 20 sedentary years. His mother had spent most of her mornings and afternoons in her nightgown, watching game-shows and soap-operas on their balding couch, avoiding consideration of what she was going to serve her husband for dinner. Or, she’d flip through old photo albums, pick at
the black corner tabs, go rainy-eyed over pictures of her in the days when she’d worked as a vocalist, fronting a number of bands with her deep, smoky contralto. She’d found some success doing this at the very end of that era, when the large Glenn Miller/Tommy Dorsey-like orchestras had been whittled down, for economic reasons, to combos; and just before rock and roll changed everything. She still sang but now performed over a sinkful of dishes, or while slicing carrots or basting a turkey, awaiting the arrival of a visiting son or daughter. Sometimes, as she stood there, she’d imagine musicians around her, and would go so far as to conjure the look of the pianist’s grey pant cuffs in her peripheral vision; the basin of a tuba; bell of a trumpet. She felt connected, then, with a sense that she and her band were subtly moving forward, note by note; that the smoke of the club was the occult mist of a splendid river journey, whose destination was vague, but always fortunate. But the destination never included this sleepy isolation, alone in a claustrophobic cottage on a shrinking lake, a world their two children agreed to enter only after being pestered by pleading phone calls, a lonely mother’s sad negotiations.

  Leonard’s dad spent most of those same afternoons in a dank, beery, dark wood-panelled and flag-draped corner of the Sutton Canadian Legion Branch watching other members’ children and grandchildren shoot pool and drink. Leonard assumed that James went there mostly to avoid the distance in his wife’s eyes. Among an ever-shrinking group of veterans, all wearing blue-and-gold Legion jackets, lapels sporting the medals or citations they’d received half a century before, James would rant – amidst mostly acquiescent nods – about how the offspring of vets only frequented their sacred Legion hall to guzzle the cheap beer, and only knew of the Canadian involvement in the First and Second World Wars from high-school textbooks, or from tributes that ran on television every Remembrance Day. He was perturbed that there hadn’t been enough wars to keep the true Legion membership strong.