I searched in my car, under the seat, under the dash. I banged my head on the mirror. To calm myself I sat very still and took a number of deep breaths. I could feel the magma changing colour in the centre of my head and I made a decision to let the wallet go, to go inside that very second and initiate the next tedious set of phone calls. I opened the car door and a passing Jeep, which had come up soundlessly during my reverie, took the door off at the hinges. The car screamed as if its arm had been torn away.
A half-hour later, after some belligerent give-and-take with a very unattractive woman—the driver of the car—I called a tow truck company, and twenty minutes after that a dirty-fingernailed, tabloid-reading thug pulled up in a half-ton with a crane on the back. He wanted to be paid in advance. I didn’t have a credit card, so I had to take a taxi to the fucking bank while he waited in the driveway with his meter on. His words, not mine.
I was making the hurried withdrawal, the cab still waiting, when the teller, a dark-eyed Pakistani woman, interrupted her calculations with an upward glance and a short, “Oh!” I had the unaccountable feeling that I should brace myself.
“Your friend Emma?” she said, her voice rising in a singsong.
I felt the blood leave my face. “I haven’t seen Emma for ages,” I replied coldly.
“Come on,” she said, and gave me an impertinent wink as if I were a well-known scoundrel contriving to pull a fast one.
“No,” I said quite deliberately, trying to control my voice, trying to control the impulse to punch her in the face, “I haven’t.” But the question—and my attempt, my need, to convince this cunt of my insouciance—left me quite breathless. I was sure she could hear it and I had the impression that my face was changing colour, a beacon to communicate to the world that I had been whipped raw by a young woman and that even the mention of her name still made me yelp with discomfort.
“Then you don’t know she’s pregnant?”
“How wonderful,” I said, and as the words came from my mouth I heard myself thinking, Good, I sound convincing, a lover of babies and forgiver of betrayals. And as for you, I thought, looking at the teller, at her bovine brown eyes, her beefy hips, you I’ll fix later. It enraged me that a teller had presumed to accost me on such a personal matter. Surely she had been seeking to wound me, to embarrass me.
“I suppose you’ll be sending your congratulations,” she said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your congratulations to Emma for her pregnancy?”
I had the sensation of time slowing down as I’ve heard it does for a great athlete. A kind of murderous calm took hold of me. There was no hurry now.
“What I can tell you,” I said with deliberate slowness, “is that I don’t want to discuss my personal life with a teller when I come to do a piece of simple banking.”
She looked at me as if I’d just laid an exotically veined dildo on the counter alongside my bank book. Inexplicable as it may sound, I felt terrific, as if I had just struck a blow against an oppressor or scored a goal in the last second of a hockey match. They were childlike sensations of delight and surging pleasure. I was back in the taxi and ten blocks away before I understood what it was that had so pleased me. It was relief. For the first time since Emma left me, I had given public utterance to my rage for the pain that had been visited upon me. For the fact that she had never called or written or come to see me. That I could have been swinging from a rope in my house, my throat slashed, my shirt stiff with coagulated blood, and she had never so much as stopped by to see if I was alive. And that I should hear such a thing—she was having a baby!—from a teller. How curious an end stories and people and love affairs come to.
From a teller.
I came home, paid off the tow truck driver, fetched a bottle of wine, some cheese and a few cigarettes, and took them out on the porch for a bit of a think. I was waiting for the shock, I suppose, from the news of Emma’s pregnancy, the bang that comes from a sniper’s rifle a moment after you’ve seen the puff of smoke. But it didn’t come, and I assumed it meant I’d already given up on her.
It was rather interesting out there, actually, plopped in my wicker chair, feet on the balcony, watching the goings-on in the street: the neighbours coming in and out of their houses, cars parking, cars pulling away, dogs running down the street, children passing by. Like watching one of those educational movies of a plant growing. I found myself thinking about all sorts of things.
Near eight I went down to the corner for a drink. I felt like being in the presence of human bodies, but I didn’t like the company there; something rather irritated me about the place, about the foolish opinions that spilled over into my range of hearing. Silly people with silly ideas. I drifted along Bloor Street, stopping here and there, never quite satisfied, when suddenly I threw up my arm and flagged down a cab. I had a hunch there was something downtown for me.
I got out on College Street and started walking west. Crossed that little street by the bank machine. Without knowing why, I went into an upstairs blues club. I hadn’t been there for years. The girl on the door let me in for free, a sign, I assumed, that I was meant to be there. I sat at a corner table. A band was playing. The air was thick with blue cigarette smoke and happy chat. At the table next to mine a young man, reminiscent of someone I had known in university, held forth, his companions, both boys and girls, leaning forward with a look of anticipatory pleasure on their young faces. How generous they seemed, giving over the floor to him; how unbegrudging, how uncompetitive, their open-lipped smiles, the girls tapping their cigarettes on the side of the ashtray and exchanging elated looks. I had the impression of treading water in a tank full of beautiful fish, red and gold and blue and silver. Such youth and beauty and energy, talking of love and boyfriends and girlfriends. Does anyone ever think of anything else? I wondered. Is there anything else?
I looked around at the beautiful children and their bright summer clothes and realized abruptly that I didn’t belong in this part of town any more. This was, as Dupré might intone, the domain of the becoming.
Still, I remembered. The soaring, the sailing upwards, like the boy at the spellbound next table.
I yawned abruptly. It was time to move on. But where to? Where was I supposed to go? The wind tugged at me. I went down into the subway. When I got to the southbound platform I noticed there was no one about except for a young woman only yards away. She was standing near the tracks, looking down, lost in reverie. About a boy, I assumed. Or maybe a girl. They were everywhere that spring night, those girls that make you slightly pale. She had dark, short hair, jeans and leather moccasins, and wore a silver necklace so delicate you could barely see it. I sat down on the bench and stared at her. Stared and stared. I think she knew I was staring and I expected her to move off, but she didn’t.
The train arrived. I heard it rumble at the far end of the tunnel, saw its bright central light snap into being; I got on board and sat where I could watch her. I imagined introducing myself. What would I say? I would say, Have you read Maupassant? Pas du tout? Why, there’s a story about a young girl just like you and a man on the train, just like me, who watches her. Watches her and watches her and … Well, I hope you’ll forgive this impertinence, but I’d like you to read it. Read it and think of me. And then I would give her my card: Professor Halloway, Ph.D. (Chicago). I’d write my home phone number on the back. Dear me, what good joke could I make? Something about Baudelaire. Verlaine maybe. Perhaps even that bit about Jarry walking the lobster on a leash; that had never really had its proper day. And then, with slightly bashful goodbyes, we would separate, there on the subway platform. How smart I would be not to presume. Weeks would go by; I’d forget about her almost entirely. And then one evening, when the fall air blows under the back door and I have to lay down a rolled-up towel to keep the draft from blowing under the crack, on such a night as that, the children dressed as hobgoblins ringing my doorbell, on such a night as that she would call …
But I smelt of a
lcohol and I didn’t want her to think I was that kind of person. She looked up and tilted her head, just so, as if she were reading a slightly puzzling billboard across the tracks, or perhaps so I could see even more clearly how beautiful she was, her pointed chin, her wide forehead. I looked for a flaw, but the more I stared the more beautiful she became, until I felt quite ill. I imagined kissing her exquisite neck. I closed my eyes and imagined touching my lips to her skin, right there, below her ear.
A man in a brown suit and a wig got on the train. Standing discreetly to the side, he looked about, here, there, like a mouse in a dark room, until he caught sight of her, and then he too stared at her, the both of us. I had the impression that, coming in, he had seen her and found a place where, like me, he could observe with impunity. But each second I looked at her grew more painful; it said to me, you’ll never have her, never be with her, that part of your life is over. And suddenly I could hardly wait for her to leave the train.
She got out at Union Station. Looking this way and then that, she moved down the platform. The train started up. I tried to force myself not to look at her as we passed because I knew I’d be looking for her to be looking back into the train and she wouldn’t be, a clear sign that she hadn’t even noticed me. But as we drew abreast I had to look. What if she had been looking back? What if that was the point of the evening?
The train rattled on through into the tunnel.
It was half past eleven when I came up my street. In the park a clutch of teenagers sat on the knoll smoking cigarettes. The wind gently stirred the branches overhead; you could hear them whisper, swish, swish, swish. Suddenly I was very tired, my head ached, my eyes felt as if tiny grains of sand were rubbing against the insides of my eyelids.
I don’t remember going to bed. Sometime near morning I had a dream about Emma. And such a dream! I’d had it before. Let me explain, please. I had two Emmas in my life. One was the Emma who had left me a good while ago and in the interim had become an anecdote. She was, and here I’m being ingenuous, a wound I believed to be long since healed. But then there was another Emma, the one who dwelt in my heart. This was the Emma I had slept beside for nearly three years. Sometimes in the middle of the night I would slip my hand under her arm and then return my fingers, now smelling of her, to their resting place between my face and the pillow. Sometimes, only half awake, she raised her thin arm, just an inch or two, to help me. When I thought about that Emma, it still filled me with hollowing grief, as if a creature were moving around my chest seeking a point of exit.
Anyway. My dream. I dreamt that we were in a country house, her friends there; young, affluent couples, glib young men; Emma and I friendly and talkative (Emma the anecdote); everything going swimmingly; no one aware, it seemed, of the incongruity of us—Emma and I—not being together any more, of her being with someone else. Not even I. She had crossed her legs, I remember, and was picking distractedly at the side of her loafer, but her restlessness, her shifting attention, set me off. Suddenly, sickeningly, she became the second Emma. And the simple, ungraspable fact of her absence woke me from a dead sleep with the conviction, the certainty, that someone had just shouted something in my ear and then vanished from the room.
“Emma?” I whispered, looking around in the dark.
I could feel the sensation of her presence moving away like footsteps down a hospital hallway in the middle of the night. It was of such a bewildering immediacy, it seemed that she had just left the room, that the air still moved where she had passed.
It was nearly noon when I awoke, but I was fearsomely hungover. I planned my day. I would get up and brush my teeth and have a cup of coffee and put on my shorts and sweatshirt and go for a run up in my old neighbourhood. I’d run and run, and by the time I got back, maybe forty-five minutes later, I could start the day.
But I didn’t do that.
Instead, I got up and brushed my teeth and put on a pair of pants, an old work shirt and a pair of loafers. I didn’t bother with socks. I walked up to Dupont and headed east, and just the notion that I didn’t have to jog, that I wouldn’t have to face the day-long, roller-coaster swings of a hangover made me feel almost healthy. By the time I burst through the doors I was in a fine mood.
“Never underestimate the joys of jogging to the liquor store,” I announced to the bewildered patrons.
I returned a moment later to the cashier with a Mondavi Reserve, the doctor having advised me that it is better to drink expensive wines than cheap ones. Then I hesitated. Surely, by buying only one bottle, I was asking for trouble. If you have one bottle, you’re constantly aware of running out, of being halfway there, two-thirds the way there, and so on right down to the last glass. It’s not a melodramatic craving for liquor; rather, it’s the nuisance of having to go back to the liquor store. Whereas if you buy two, you always have more than you need. You can have another glass or not without having to deal with the implications of where that leaves things, the imminent “Damn, I’m running low.”
I bought four bottles and then stopped off at the Hong Kong variety store and bought a package of cigarettes. Coming down the street, bottles clanking like a ship’s bell, I ran across my Australian neighbour. That clipped, lughead accent. He lived in a mildly depressing house. I can’t say exactly why it was depressing, perhaps the small windows or the gloomy porch, but a sense of ennui fell over me whenever I passed by. Today he was out on the front lawn plonking in the garden. He was a gutty, red-faced fellow who felt a compulsion to accompany even the simplest greeting with a put-down of some kind. He did this, I think, so that you took him seriously. You may be a professor of literature, mate, but I’m up to your game any day of the week. Not just up to it either, but on to it as well, because there was, in his sly questionings about my life, the implication that I was pulling a scam that he alone was sophisticated enough to perceive. That he might ruffle feelings or even hurt them in his quest to be taken seriously apparently never occurred to him.
For the past few months I’d had a feeling that we were moving into dark waters and had tried to duck him. But today, pulling weeds from his flower bed, he must have heard me coming, because he looked up with a cunning smile. For some reason I veered straight at him, stepping off the sidewalk and crossing the street. Clank, clank, went my little black friends.
“Getting an early start?”‘ he said.
“Never mind that, sissy boy. Just get back to your weeds.”
He stepped back, understandably astonished. It was a bewildering non sequitur delivered with such venom that even his dog, working alongside him, looked up. He issued an explosive laugh. I could see I’d alarmed him, and in my worsening mood I experienced a kind of epiphany. Now that I had abused him, however mildly, he would suddenly, without knowing why, find himself admiring me; people like him develop a sort of mutt-like affection for the very people who give them a good smack on the beak with the evening paper. But while he may have cried out for it, the discomfort shooting across his features somewhat curdled my pleasure. I had thought it would be more fun than this. So, having stuck it in, I now hurried to take it out.
“Have you ever had one of those days when you just give up?” I asked. From my tone of eager curiosity it sounded as if I put a very high premium indeed on his response.
He nodded cautiously.
“I’m having one of those days,” I went on, this delivered with what appeared to be candour and chatty vulnerability.
“I thought you had a bit of a slag on,” he said.
Ugh. A professional Aussie. Rien de plus emmerdant. Honestly, it made me want to have another go at him. Furthermore, I couldn’t help noticing a glob of dried egg on his chin. He’d neglected to wipe his face after breakfast. A knob’s knob. Still, I had a feeling that from now on our chit-chats would take a more formal tone. A great thing, formality. What those pampered little prickweeds in the sixties never understood—spoilt, parasitic bottom-lickers that they were—was that in many cases, and certainly when it comes to people exp
ressing their real feelings, repression is a good thing.
Arriving home, I discovered that I was no longer in so grand a hurry to throw off my hangover. Just the proximity of the four bottles, the fact of their absolute availability, comforted me. I opened the California to let it breathe. I found an ashtray, opened the cigarettes, laid them on the counter, tidied up the kitchen, put the dishes in the dishwasher, got the place shipshape so that in the eventuality of another hangover I would at least find myself in a tidy madhouse. Speaking of which, I was on my way into the bathroom to check on my supply of sleeping pills when the telephone rang. I picked up the receiver, but there was no one there; the line hung open and with a click the hum resumed. Idiotically, I wondered if it was Emma Carpenter. I could see her holding the phone, her sharp nose, her dry lips. I could see her standing motionless in an empty house with the phone in her hand, and with that image I had a rather frightening sensation that there was something moving toward me, like a shadow in the water, slowly and surely closing off the yards; that all I had to do was wait, to stay put, and it would reveal itself.
But while I pondered this thing that moved slowly toward me, it suddenly occurred to me that it might have been Passion who phoned. Passion and her bank robber boyfriend calling to see if I was home, setting up my house for another hit. I went down to the basement and got my gun from behind the furnace. I cleaned off the cobwebs with a rag, brought it back upstairs and rested it on the foyer table.
Sparrow Nights (v5) (epub) Page 10
