For a few days I waited with considerable urgency. I was convinced this business with the air filter signalled something important, a shift, a rope thrown between two ships. Perhaps it meant that Emma missed me so profoundly that she was seeking an excuse, no matter how indirect, to contact me. I thought of phoning her. Who knows? Maybe the danger was real. Maybe the thing might actually catch on fire!
But it didn’t. It never did anything. I didn’t get around to replacing the air filter for years, five or six at least, and nothing ever happened. Nothing whatsoever.
A month went by. It was August. I wrote a paper on the irony of genius—I had Céline in mind—which was accepted by the Harvard Quarterly. But this time out it offered me only the most momentary distraction. I had forgotten about it by dinner of the same day.
Coming home one summer night, I opened my mailbox at the side of the house. By now I was waiting for a letter from Emma. It was maddening, but I knew I’d never be free of her, that I’d keep on waiting, stupidly, pointlessly, until I knew she’d slept with someone else. I was sure she knew that. When it happened, she’d tell me. But there was nothing there, and in a cloud of self-pity I kicked open the side door of my house. “I have a shit life,” I said to anyone who was listening.
To comfort myself I rented the video of Gooseberries, the first movie I’d seen with Emma. When I got to the part where I remembered her slipping her forearm over the damp armrest, I stopped the movie and retreated to my bedroom, from which I emerged moments later clear-headed and hungry. I dreamt about her all night and in the morning sadness sat on my chest. I could hardly drag myself from bed. I took the movie back to the store and dropped it in the overnight box like an out-of-date passport.
Around this time, after loathing him for years—a sissy and a momma’s boy—I found myself fascinated by Marcel Proust. I reread Un amour de Swann as if I were reading my own gravestone, obsessed to know, for I had long forgotten, if he got the girl in the end. For his fate would be mine, I was sure of it.
Some nights, sweating, my calf twitching as if tiny aliens were moving about under the skin (for a while I believed it happened when Emma was making love to someone, that the nerves in my leg were like some invisible antennae that picked from the very air the vibrations of her betraying me ten blocks away), I’d find myself sinking down into sleep. But when I’d almost arrived, was almost beyond all reach, I experienced a kind of physical halting, as if I had landed on a subterranean roof or, more precisely, had come to the end of a thick elastic band that pulled me suddenly upwards, a small, almost punitive bounce, as if to say, no, you shall think about Emma some more.
I recalled somewhat bitterly that the February she left me, I had fussed about all sorts of things. Being passed over for the keynote speech at a Lisbon symposium. A crack that Serrault made, impugning, I thought, my affection for the poetry of Jacques Prévert. Ce genre de connerie. All nonsensical pricks and stabs. How odd that of all the catastrophes I nursed, it was that one alone that never occurred to me. Like a train, I suppose, the sound appearing to come from the other direction. Suddenly there it is, black and seven storeys high and upon you.
Lord, it was hot that summer, rivulets of perspiration running down my chest, morning and night, my face puffy from the heat. Tree branches flopped over like bad hair. From my porch I watched my neighbour’s yellow cat batting the lower bushes for moths. One motionless evening I caught a whiff of myself running up the stairs from the laundry room. I was starting to smell like Emma.
I went to a psychiatrist, a former Princeton professor, something of an addiction expert, on disait. But he chain-smoked, and when I commented on it, he informed me briskly that there were plenty of psychiatrists in the city who didn’t smoke. His appearance was strange enough, the long jaw, that dank hair so peculiar to English intellectuals, but his voice, my Lord, high-pitched, like air escaping from a baboon’s anus. How such a creature had been called, much less encouraged, into the business of mental health eluded me. But not everyone apparently. Serrault had recommended him. Thought he was un type intéressant.
“You’re a man whose exquisite pet has run away,” said the doctor in his strange whale voice.
“But I loved her!” I insisted.
“People love their pets,” he said.
An exquisite pet? Emma? My Emma.
I listened; I disputed. Terrors spewed from my mouth like pus from a lanced boil.
“Look at the state you’ve got yourself into,” he declared, and gave me a pill to put under my tongue. When I left his office, it was with a handshake and a light step that carried me to the elevator and down nine floors and out onto the street where dusk gathered in the corners of red brick buildings. It was remarkable. I could feel my appetite return. I called a friend to meet me for dinner. I picked a restaurant Emma and I had often gone to. I felt invulnerable, as if somehow, by talking so candidly, I had flushed the poison from my system. I showered. I dressed in a snappy blue shirt and dark slacks. Rooting through my cupboard for a pair of fancy shoes, something to gild the occasion, I suddenly remembered the pill I’d taken in the doctor’s office. Surely not. I phoned his office, but he had gone for the day. I phoned a pharmacy and asked how long such and such a drug would last, its effects. An hour at most, they said. I looked at my watch. Look—it was almost two hours. I must be free of it. Cured!
I went for dinner. I talked merrily. The city, the streets were mine again. It lasted until bedtime. Then, like a fast-growing rust, the kind you might see on speeded-up film, the nervous jangle came back. I took another pill. I put it under my tongue and lay motionless in the dark, and it was as if a black beast was slowly backing out of my bedroom, the snorts and the scratch of claws on the wooden floor growing fainter and fainter.
Three days later, having burned through an entire month’s prescription, I returned to the baby-voiced doctor for an encore. We tried something else, I forget its name, but it made me perspire like a madman at night. I woke up two, three times to find my T-shirt soaked, the sheet under me dark with sweat. For a while I wondered if I’d contracted AIDS. For a while, and this is shameful to say, I sort of hoped I had.
We tried Valium, then Lectopam, then a green tablet that left a bitter taste in my mouth as it came on. I used to look forward to that taste. I’d take the tablet in a café at the foot of my street. I’d nurse a beer and a cigarette and then that funny taste came on and I’d pay up and hurry home through the warm air and get into bed before it wore off. But I’d wake up an hour and a half later. My terror, my loneliness, the haunting absoluteness with which Emma had vanished from my life (sometimes she was so near I felt like I could open up my eyes and she’d be there, breezy and sunny, come back from the store or the library; she was so near I could almost touch her) cut clean through the drug.
They came at me very hard, those moments; they clutched my heart till I had no breath in my body. Once I took a graduate class to the film of Émile Zola’s Germinal. Movies are not for the heartbroken, I had forgotten that. The eyes rest on the vivid images, but instead of being absorbed by them, they use the screen as a sort of trampoline for private, painful imaginings. The stillness in the theatre, the privacy that comes from being in the dark give rise to a focused torture. I imagined myself floating like a disembodied soul through Emma’s new apartment. It was just before dawn. I glided over her black running shoes inside the front door, her daybook on the front hall table with that small handwriting. I moved through the kitchen with its stubby fridge, pictures of her and her friends stuck to the door with magnets. No picture of me. I hesitated at the bedroom door, heard the swish of a limb rubbing against a sheet. I went in, passing between the wooden molecules until I was on the other side. Grey daylight covered her hairbrush, her watch, her rings on a chair beside the bed. Why would she remove her rings? I peered through the darkness. She lay on her back, her arm crooked over her head, her knees up, supporting the sheet like a tent. During the night the sheet had fallen to her waist. It must h
ave been a warm night, even for summer. But why had she removed her rings? Suddenly, involuntarily, I saw her hand, those delicate fingers wrapped around something obscene, pumping it slowly up and down while she sought her boss’s eyes. Do you want to see my cunt?
Rising from my seat as if I’d been violently pinched from below, I hurried down the row, stepping over legs, sorry, so sorry, and rushed up the centre aisle. Bursting into the lobby, I took the escalator downstairs, ran along the hall to a kiosk and bought a package of cigarettes. I sat down at the back of a café. I opened the pack with trembling fingers. I struck the match once, twice, three times. But my fingers were too damp. I pulled another match loose. It lit, I puffed, the tobacco caught. I inhaled a deep lungful. But then, as if I’d just heard an unexpected noise, like a deer alerted in the forest, I had the alarming certainty that I was moments, seconds from an encounter with Emma’s friends. I imagined a group of them walking quickly through the mall; they’d be on their way to a summer camp reunion, or buying a present for a friend’s wedding, and they’d notice—it’d only take one of them—they’d notice me puffing like a madman in the Café Sweet Time. Of course, they’d stop to speak to me. They were like that. Polite with the overcheerfulness of former students. They’d come over, the whole bloody bunch of them. Alison and Robin and Susan and Trish and Emily Jane. Emily Jane? What kind of fucking name is that? The missing Austen sister? They’d tell Emma they saw me smoking cigarettes. He doesn’t smoke, does he? No, I didn’t think so. Mystified, knowing glances. He must be a mess, poor man. And Emma, shaking her head with concern, no, no, that’s true, he doesn’t smoke. Mind you, I haven’t seen him for ages.
I am leaning in the direction of not being in love with you any more.
I left the café and went around the corner to a bank of pay telephones. And there, hunched over the last phone, my back to the world, a phone line humming expectantly in my ear, I puffed and puffed and puffed.
C H A P T E R 5
Someone moved into the house next door. He had two dogs, terriers or something, and in the morning when he went to work, he left them in the backyard. All day long they went yip, yip, yip. I was in my study preparing for a graduate seminar on Symbolism and Impressionism (the course had been dropped on me at the last moment) when it began to irk me. One never knows why, at a certain moment, neither the one before nor the one after, the nervous system suddenly, like an eel peeping forth from his crevice, takes note of an intruder.
Taking a different tack this time, a concession, no doubt, to my evolving sense of community, I slipped a note in the letter box mentioning, very politely, the racket and how, after a couple of hours, it “got on the nerves.” I didn’t leave my name or a phone number, but I was, as I said, énormément poli. I got a peek at the dogs, too. They were small, hairy beasts tied to a long leash. None too bright either. They stood in the middle of the yard, looking at the back door and barking, as if their master might emerge at any second and let them in.
After my note I waited a couple of days. Nothing happened.
Yip, yip, yip.
So I wrote another letter, this time on a colleague’s computer. I used an unusual typeface not found on my system. I said, in no uncertain terms, that his dogs were becoming a bother, that if he didn’t find some way to “clam them up,” I was going to call the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. I considered the expression “clam them up” a prudent choice. In the event of something untoward happening, no one would give me a second look. After all, why would a man of my stature use a cretin’s turn of phrase?
I dropped the note in his box, this time after dark. I didn’t want the neighbours spotting me. I live in a Portuguese neighbourhood and those women, once their husbands die, do nothing but snoop at the window.
I heard barking the next morning. I woke up instantly, as if my body had been waiting, like an animal in the dark. It wasn’t even six, I could tell by the light. There’s a lonely clarity to sunlight when it’s too early. He—I assumed it was a he—must have let the hounds out early, a kind of middle finger to whoever wrote the note. I went to the other end of my house and got into the bed in the guest room. I like the way the sheets smell in there; it’s comforting, like a hotel. Still, I didn’t get to sleep until I figured a course of action. Then I went under as if dropped overboard with an anchor around my ankles.
I didn’t want to go to a hardware store in my neighbourhood, so I took the streetcar to Parkdale. I had a flat out there years ago, but my memory isn’t what it used to be and I got off at the wrong stop. Everything seemed moved around. Finally I found the place (next door to where that red-haired girl worked in the donut shop—what a foolish business that was) and waited in the paint section for the attendant to free himself. He was an effeminate black man, very good at his job and he knew it. I explained I had a rat in my basement; I wanted to dispatch him, painlessly if possible.
“Shoot him,” the man said, “only watch out for the ricochet.”
I had the impression he had said this before and I allowed myself a small riposte. “We don’t want to kill all the rats down there after all.”
“Right,” he said, and laughed the way people do when they don’t follow you. Or don’t think you’re funny perhaps, although in this case I’m confident it was the former. He knew precisely what I wanted and where it was in the store, as I suspect he knew the whereabouts of everything. He led me to a shelf of small, chocolate-bar-sized packages in different colours, for ascending lethalness, I assumed. I bought the yellow pack, went to a butcher’s on Roncesvalles and bought a pound of fatty hamburger—fat makes the hamburger more flavourful—and came home, picking up some tenderizer at the corner.
After putting my purchases on the kitchen counter, I locked the door and lowered the living-room blinds. I unwrapped the bar. It was a colourless wafer, very hard. I tried to snap it in half but couldn’t. My face reddened; the effort left white indentations in my fingers. Finally I sawed it in two with a serrated paring knife and grated it into a fine yellow powder. I scrubbed the grater myself afterwards in soapy hot water and rinsed it thoroughly. The notion of accidentally killing myself with a poisoned omelette made me smile. I wished I had someone to share the joke with. I thought of one of my students, Edmond, his plump legs lounged over the edge of a chair, high on God knows what, tapping his prominent Adam’s apple. Only the other day he asked me why I didn’t just quit, go off somewhere and write poetry. Really, sometimes I have a mind to throw him out of my office and tell him to come back in four years when he’s not so bloody naïve. But I think I’d rather miss him. Besides, he’s quite right: Thérèse Raquin is bullshit.
Anyway, while drying the grater and hanging it back on its proper hook, I felt a kind of energized purpose, and I realized it had been some time since I’d felt it.
Near five that afternoon I cooked up a pair of patties, rare, saignant even, but perhaps a little overspiced, and put them in a plastic bag. I pulled my car in front of my house and made a great production of “preparing to leave for the weekend.” I left the car doors open, Rachmaninov thundering on the radio while I trundled out a small suitcase and a half-dozen thick books, which I laid carefully in the back seat. A working weekend.
My neighbour from across the street drifted out onto his patio and joined me on the sidewalk. He’s a lawyer now, but until recently he was a local politician, some say a bagman for the incumbent party, but I know nothing of these matters and besides, I couldn’t care less. In his socks and sandals and blue shorts he looked like a high school teacher. We exchanged pleasantries, but he kept throwing little glances at my new neighbour’s house, and finally he asked me what I made of it. I asked, of what? “Those fucking dogs,” he replied.
This was good, but it was also important to play it right. I paused theatrically and then, as if I had just caught a faint sound, a sound as remote as electricity passing through the wires overhead, I said agreeably, “Oh yes, you’re right.”
Right about what
? It was intended to flatter, but he looked mildly irritated with me. “Come on,” he said, pleasantly unpleasant. “You must have heard them.” He sounded rather peevish and for a second I thought I saw what the voters had seen when they tossed him out of office.
“I’m sure they’re just getting used to the neighbourhood,” I said.
This expression of exasperating—and idiot—goodwill struck entirely the right note. It was succinct and easy to remember. When I turned the corner at the foot of my street, I caught a glimpse of my neighbour, his arms crossed, glaring at the house next door.
I drove north. It being a Friday, the traffic was heavy until I cleared the city and then a sad, golden light spread over the farmhouses and the gorgeous fields. The air smelt clean and young, and I remembered taking Emma out to these fields once just after we’d met and snuggling in a sleeping bag under the bright sky. “I don’t give a shit about Verlaine,” she said. “I just want to pump your cock till you faint.” Quite the nature girl, my Emma. But it was so lovely out there. Particularly after the fireworks, after Satan had withdrawn and she’d become human again. You could smell the damp earth that night and the air and Emma’s saliva-wet face; you could hear the night sounds of a farmer’s field. It was so raw, it seemed as if a finger passed through your chest and touched you in some humming place.
It was after dark when I heard the stones crackle under the wheels of my car as I left the highway and followed a gravel lane for a quarter of a mile, a slow, curving route, the trees rising on each side, hundreds and hundreds of little circular leaves glimmering like coins in the headlights. After gliding to a stop in a dark parking lot, I turned off the car lights and the radio and found myself thinking, quite incongruously, of a waitress who had served me years ago on an outdoor patio. She had the oddest name, Constance something. Someone had phoned, I gathered, a customer, claiming to have left behind a handbag under my table, and she had come over and while searching the floor had rested her hand very gently on my shoulder to keep her balance. There was something about her touch, a combination of absolute lightness and at the same time familiarity, as if she had touched me many times, knew me well, was very comfortable doing it. I flushed with pleasure and desire, like a cat stroked by his master. Moreover, I had the sensation that only someone who loved me could touch me like that. Constance Guitar, that was her name. I’m sure she never gave me another thought, not from the moment she turned her back on my table, but now, out in the parking lot, I experienced a ghostly longing for her. The hotel rose up before me, floodlit and purring with people, and I caught myself daydreaming that she was with me, that the two of us were coming here for the weekend together. How happy that would be. What fun. With her turned-around baseball cap and that curiously theatrical voice, she’d have enjoyed this place.
Sparrow Nights (v5) (epub) Page 4
