Burning the Night

by Glen Huser

  When I suggested I might sketch her in chalks, though, she chided me, saying something about a bus driver’s holiday, finished a second cigarette, and allowed me to prepay her cab home. It was only later that I realized, with a kind of horrid embarrassment, that the little smile I detected as she kissed me goodnight, was a smile of bemusement, or possibly even worse, pity.

  When I invited her to have coffee with me after drawing class the next Monday, I sensed a hesitation before she agreed. It was warm in the coffee shop and she slipped her hooded coat away from her face and shoulders, while still allowing its deep blue wool to frame her blond hair and bare arms. Like Aunt Harriet, she had long, graceful hands that managed to make the lighting and smoking of a cigarette into something of a performance.

  I invited her to join me at a Film Society screening later that week at UBC. She set her coffee cup down and took my hand in hers.

  “You want to be in love, don’t you?” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You are, I think, being someone else. Acting.”

  I withdrew my hand.

  “I’m just not …” I felt embarrassment and a kind of anger that I was forced into a position of explanation. “Not very experienced,” I said.

  “So I am now your experience?” She laughed softly. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  “Ah,” she said, drawing the monosyllable in with a drag on her cigarette. “You are so very young and yet very old to be making sex for the first time.”

  “I don’t know.” The afternoon was darkening and a light winter drizzle made little, erratic trails of water down the window by our booth. “Maybe it’s Canadian. We’re probably a bit slower in Canada than in Poland.”

  “You’re funny,” she said, finishing her coffee and stubbing out her cigarette. “But I think it is best not to get in …” she searched for a phrase, “the depth.”

  “The depth?”

  “The deepness. Like a little brother, you are sweet and I am happy to be your beginning experience, but you are, I think, filled with some uncertainness.” She put on her coat and drew the hood, tucking her hair back carefully. It made her look older and I realized that she might have done this deliberately to accentuate the fact that she was, indeed, five years my senior.

  She squeezed my shoulder as she left.

  I sat with a coffee refill, trying to cover the pain of rejection and to show an air of indifference to the world. I turned pages in my art history textbook as if I were actually reading them, and then headed out in the rain to the bus that would take me back to my basement apartment off Cambie Street.

  There had been times since Magdalena had charitably eased me away from my virginity, when I felt the stirrings of desire, when I longed to be part of a world where people held hands and listened to romantic songs, arranged weddings, planned for children. But the barrier of my shyness remained solidly present. It was easier to live vicariously in a world of films, books, and plays. And if the brooding, troubled eyes of Marlon Brando made me as dizzy as the shining, haunted gaze of Vivien Leigh, this was a secret I kept to myself. Phillip Pariston smiled across the years at me; Harriet’s hand brushed against mine.

  Truly in love?

  Jean crept in, rearranged the afghan, and poured me another cup of tea. It was tepid but I drank it slowly and brushed crumbs from a piece of her shortbread off the open journal where they left a small, buttery stain.

  November 25, 1916

  When Harriet finished work I took her home by cab so that she would have time to change for the concert without rushing. For a while I convinced her to sit in her housecoat and we drank some coffee Per had made earlier. She is so beautiful, my Hat, and against the indigo throw on the sofa, and the elusive blues of her wrap, her skin warmed to a golden, almost apricot hue. I did a quick sketch in chalks I had with me, but I failed to capture the colour. Too orange somehow. Hat laughed and said I made her look like a pumpkin. After we made love, I noticed my fingers had left chalk marks on her skin, a touch of blue on her breast, a smudge of crimson along her shoulder blade. Perhaps it is the way to truly interpret the female form.

  HE WOULD HAVE WORN A VEST, I THOUGHT. I COULD SEE her unbuttoning it, her large hands working to release the fastenings, slipping suspenders over starched cotton, finding the smaller shirt and collar buttons, releasing the tie, finding the smooth skin of his chest. It would be smooth, a pale November smoothness, and the large hands trailing fingertips along his chest as he undid other buttons. The indigo throw would have been a gift from him, would have borne them like a sea in their abandonment.

  Aunt Harriet stirred and one of her hands moved in a small tremor as if it were rediscovering that lost afternoon. There would be the reassembling of garments. Hat getting into her concert clothes. In a photograph of the Vancouver Women’s Musical Society I tracked down in an archive, they posed in white waists and dark skirts. The blouses were high-collared and there would have been a complexity of buttoning. He would help her with the back of her blouse, her dress boots. His own slim hands would have been deft with bows, retying his cravat, helping secure the splash of ribbon that kept her hair back and away from the manoeuvring of the violin.

  Jean came in and tapped my shoulder.

  “I think I’ll just let her sleep awhile,” she said. “She sometimes does. It’s so hard for her to move from place to place now.” She walked me to the door. “Thanks for coming, sweetie.” She grasped my arm. “She’s been asking about you. Phip will be in town tomorrow for a week or two. It’s about time,” she muttered.

  IN ADDITION TO A NEW ART PROJECT FOR MY 9D CLASS, a motley assortment of rejects from the school’s options in music, home ec and shop, I had a grade eight English class to prepare for, but I took my time, choosing to walk home across the High Level Bridge rather than take a bus. The fall colours of the riverbank were muted by the early dusk except where the odd street light revealed bouquets of poplar gold or the more intense reds of chokecherry and saskatoon bushes.

  As I walked, it seemed that I could feel the unforgiving starch of Phillip Pariston’s collar against my neck, and I found myself rubbing my fingers against my jacket lapels, as if ridding myself of the residue of chalk. For an instant I felt I could even smell the salt of sea air. Was I insane? I stopped and grasped a cold railing of the bridge, looked out to the winding expanse of the North Saskatchewan River, and breathed in the crisp inland air from a breeze that had begun to build, a breeze that plucked laughter from my lips and sent it scattering into the autumn night.

  THE DAY AUNT HARRIET DIED, I’D SPENT THE NOON HOUR meeting with my art club, a few students who came in once a week for additional drawing lessons, and to make posters for school functions or design graphics for the yearbook. This day in late November, I’d challenged them to create a pencil sketch, focusing entirely on negative space, of an antique three-tiered plate stand I’d borrowed from a heap of items donated for a PTA rummage sale. I’d put the club through the paces of many of the design exercises I’d worked through in my art options at the U of A or during my year at the Vancouver School of Art. We’d already completed a series of contour drawings and gesture drawings, and some exercises in negative space were next in a sequence in one of the sketchbooks I’d kept.

  These eight or nine students were good, most of them mature beyond their junior high years, although a couple of the grade eight girls were given to small fits of giggling, particularly if they caught the attention of Wolfgang, a grade nine boy who looked a bit like Ricky Nelson.

  I placed the plate stand on a table, letting it stand in relief against a wooden screen draped with rumpled canvas.

  “The space surrounding an object can, in many ways, be as crucial, as telling as what we might consider the obvious focus of a picture. I want you to explore with your drawing pencils the space around the plate stand, shade it, using cross-hatching or layered shading if you want to. Try to get a sense of the texture and wrinkles of the backdro
p. Think of the space behind the object, between the verticals of the spooled legs, around and within the handle, the circular edges as the actual picture.” I demonstrated by sketching in one corner of a piece of poster paper I’d tacked up.

  “We call this negative space,” I told them, “and you might think of it as a kind of ‘nothing’ area, but your compositions will be stronger if you think of it as … well, having a life of its own.”

  As they ate their sandwiches and worked on their drawings, I was called over the PA system down to the school office.

  Jean was on the phone. “She’s gone, Curtis.” There was hardly any volume to her voice. “She just slipped away, the poor dear.”

  I could sense her struggling to keep from crying, and I discovered I could barely speak myself. Finally I managed to tell her I’d be over as soon as classes dismissed for the afternoon.

  Back in the art room I busied myself finishing the demonstration piece. The negative spaces grew in definition, became continental masses, each a dark geography—unique, suggestive, associative, a kind of small homage to the spaces Aunt Harriet must have been encountering in all of the years of her blindness. The spaces I kept finding in her life story.

  CHAPTER 8

  I WAS SURPRISED MY PARENTS CAME TO AUNT Harriet’s funeral.

  “I thought you didn’t care for her,” I said to my mother as she pinned into place a liver-coloured felt hat.

  “How can you say such a thing?” She smiled at me and, catching sight of lipstick trespassing on her teeth, blotted it with one of the tissues from a box on my hall-stand. “It’s true we were never close, but it was mainly distance that separated us. If Hartley could selflessly devote himself to such a—” She began checking her handbag as if the right word were somehow temporarily misplaced with house keys and pill bottles. “Such an incapable person, I’m sure I’ve always stood behind him.”

  “If you don’t get a move on, we’ll be late.” My father waited in limbo, halfway in and halfway out of the apartment door.

  “It doesn’t start for an hour,” I said, slipping into the black trench coat that I’d recently purchased but couldn’t afford. I had rationalized that it would last close to a lifetime. Aunt Harriet would have approved, I felt, its gabardine smoothness.

  “I don’t want to park a mile away.” My father glowered at my mother who had decided she didn’t like the angle of her hat and was repinning it.

  We were the first to arrive at the chapel, except for Phip who was busy sorting things out with an organist, a bilious young man who eventually hunched into position and began pumping out music, themes I recognized from recordings Aunt Harriet had in her collection.

  Spotting us, Phip came over. He had thickened in the years since he brought his first wife, the bounteous June, to meet us, but I recognized the long, slender hands of his mother now, and something in the set of his face, perhaps the high cheekbones that Aunt Harriet also had.

  My mother managed one of her few hugs and apologized for Bradley being unable to take time from work to come to the funeral.

  I hugged him too.

  “Thanks,” Phip said to me, “for being with her so much over these past few years.”

  My mother looked at me oddly.

  “You didn’t tell me you spent a lot of time with Harriet,” she said after we’d found a place to sit that afforded a good view of the casket and a reasonable vantage for watching those who entered the sanctuary. I wondered if the white roses that engulfed the casket had been chosen deliberately by Phip for their lack of colour, a reminder of a life lived largely without the sensibilities of colour and linear form. I would have chosen red, the red of the claret Aunt Harriet enjoyed with our dinners, a red that I felt infused the darkness that had enveloped her over the past forty years.

  “You have secrets,” my mother noted with an aggrieved air.

  “No,” I said. “But I’ve been away from home for seven years. I didn’t think you’d want to know everything I was doing.”

  She sighed and patted my hand. “I don’t mind. You can have as many secrets as you want. I don’t expect that you should tell me everything. Oh, look.” The liver hat swivelled. “There’s what’s-her-name. My god, she looks awful.”

  Jean seemed to have shrunk in size, if that were possible. With Phip now at her side, they looked like a giant and a dwarf, a circus couple. He escorted her to an empty pew at the front.

  “You’d think that Noreen and the children might have come.” My mother noted the absence of Phip’s wife and his two daughters. My father grunted.

  An usher came over with late-arriving programs. On the cover was the sketch of a young woman’s face, and I recognized a detail from the chalk drawing Phillip Pariston had made of Phip’s mother, the nude on the living-room wall. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched my mother’s face for some sign of outrage but she failed to associate the face with the sketch that had so irked her on that visit when Bradley and I were children.

  “You’d think they’d have put a photo of Harriet on the cover,” she whispered loudly to my father and me. “Maybe it’s a Toronto thing.”

  The melancholy young man at the organ allowed a chord (something by Bach, I thought) to swell and sink before moving into an air that was more familiar to me. Obviously not something written for the organ but something transposed.

  “What an odd-sounding thing,” my mother poked me. “That’s a hymn I’ve never heard before. Do you have any idea what it is?”

  “It’s an air,” I said, “that Harriet once played at the Vancouver Women’s Musical Society.”

  I HAD SUPPER WITH PHIP A FEW DAYS LATER. HE WAS catching a plane back to Toronto the next morning.

  “On me,” he said, waving his hand like a benediction over the menu. We were at the MacDonald Hotel, chosen, I suspected, because of the times he had eaten there as a younger man with his mother and Uncle Hartley. “You’ve been very caring and I want you to know how much I appreciate that.” His words were a bit flannel-edged, but I thought he had earned the right to get drunk this evening if he felt like it. The waiter finished a bottle of wine with the filling of our glasses and Phip nodded when he asked about a replacement.

  “To Aunt Harriet.” I raised my glass, “She was very caring to me too—at a time when I needed it.”

  “Mother.” Phip accepted my toast.

  He told me about his week as we worked our way through the steak specials. The house had been sorted through with the help of a tearful Jean; a real estate agent had been acquired; and Jean herself had been settled into a senior’s complex. Over baked Alaska, he brought me up to date on Noreen, who was teaching again, while his daughters attended a private school in the city.

  “They weren’t that close to Mom. I guess if we’d visited more ... But Noreen’s so attached to her own mother. And Mom absolutely refused to move again, come back to Toronto after Hartley died.” He signalled the waiter to refill our glasses.

  “She left you a few things.” He snapped open a briefcase that had been parked by his chair throughout our meal. “Jean gathered them together into this envelope.”

  I recognized Jean’s cribbed writing in the words scrawled on the outside of the envelope. “For Curtis.”

  “A letter and a few photographs. I think she hoped I’d have been more interested in them myself. Yeah …” His face became flushed with the wine, and fatigue had settled into lines I hadn’t noticed before, around his eyes and mouth. “I used to look through this stuff. But I couldn’t live it the way she did. Day in and day out.” He pushed the package toward me. “I had copies made of the photos.”

  “She never had any photos of your grandfather Ahlstrom, did she?” I caught myself tracing my fingers around the edge of the manila envelope. “I wonder if you have his features.”

  “Could be. Nobody’s ever seen a picture of him. I’ve had people ask me if I was Danish or German. I guess …” He stopped in mid-sentence to light a cigarette. “I guess I don’t really car
e. I got really tired of living in the past. I think Dad—Hartley—did too, but he was such a patient man. I think it was especially hard for him.” He paused, surveyed the room, caught the waiter’s eye, and ordered brandies.

  “Hard for him?” I made an effort to make my hands settle on the envelope, unopened on the table. I couldn’t decide whether I should open it in Phip’s presence or not.

  “Well, you know, hard that he was never really the love of her life.”

  “He knew that?”

  Phip snorted and lit another cigarette. He held a smoke the way she did, the cigarette seeming to become an extension of his long fingers.

  “He knew. Thank god he was willing to settle for what she was willing to give, I guess. Affection certainly. She was fond of him—and grateful. You can go a long way on gratitude.”

  The brandies arrived in warmed snifters and, when I inhaled, the fumes caught and burned inside, making me gasp, bringing tears to my eyes. Phip laughed and, reaching over, slapped me playfully on the back.

  “I can see why she liked you,” he said.

  “Really?” I sputtered.

  “You have kind of another-world air about you. I don’t mean that unkindly. You look to me like someone who’s right at home listening to long-hair music at the Jubilee on Sunday afternoon. I never was, you know. Sooner go to the ball game with Hartley.” He rummaged in the briefcase and brought out another manila envelope. “Thought you might want to have these too. Bits and pieces of the sketches she kept, you know, like holy relics. I guess you know the stories behind these.”

  “Are you sure…?” My hand caressed the envelope.

  “I kept a couple of the more complete ones, but you can have the rest.

  “You kept the diary, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah. She wanted that in the family.”

  “She let me have it copied.”

  “Good. Maybe you can do something with it. Historical interest and all that.” He was searching in his briefcase again. “Ah, the final part of her bequest to you. Now, this I wouldn’t mind owning. I wonder if she had any idea what these little sketches are going for these days. However, she’s very definite in her will, the Tom Thomson for Curtis.”