The Romantic

by Barbara Gowdy

  It’s an old theatre converted into a tavern or a coffee house,“ear pit,” the mauve neon sign says. The brick is painted a washed-out pink, the door a purplish brown. I suppose you’re meant to think along the lines of ear tunnel, pathway into the unconscious. Then I discern the unlit B. Oh, it’s the Bear Pit, where Abel was on that Sunday night he didn’t phone me.

  Across the front are four vaulted windows clogged on the inside with potted plants. I press my face to the window farthest from the door and peer through the foliage. (Here I am again, peering through foliage.) I make out a big space, fluted pillars, small round tables, each bearing a little candle. There seem to be a lot of hippies sitting around and drinking from paper cups. Facing me at the table closest to the window, a girl with the word Love inked on her forehead and with daisies stuck to her hair inserts a cigarette between her lips and leans forward to light it at the candle. When she glances up I move to the next window and see, against the back wall, an orchestra pit, or the bear pit I guess it is. It houses an electric keyboard, a couple of microphones and an electric guitar leaning against a bar stool. A red footlight lends the tableau a private, innerrecess feel. An ear-tunnel feel.

  From this window I can also see booths along the wall to my left. It’s brighter there owing to the illuminated red paper lanterns that hang above each table. I spot Gary, his orange Afro. He is sliding into a seat.

  And now I see Abel, standing a few feet away. A blond girl wearing a full-length red cape tries to steal his apple and he tosses it up for her to catch. She misses. Her laugh pierces the window glass. A petite brunette sinks against him in a theatrical swoon, and even though I can tell by the respectful way he eases her upright that there is nothing going on between them, a vein of jealousy opens in me and alerts me to my claim on him.

  I decide to go inside. “I’ve got nothing to lose,” I think. I don’t know what I mean, it seems I have everything to lose. I put on some lipstick while continuing to peer through the window. An elderly black man wearing white trousers, a white dress shirt and a white homburg strolls up to Abel. Mr. Earl, I’m guessing, the old saxophonist Abel talked about a couple of times. He offers Abel a flask. Abel accepts, takes a long swig and then opens his mouth and shakes his head as if he’d just drunk gasoline. Mr. Earl nods like a physician witnessing the desired effect. Does he know that Abel is only seventeen? His hand alights, big as a raven, on Abel’s shoulder, and the two of them head over to Gary’s booth, Mr. Earl getting in first, Abel sliding in next to him.

  Abel is now faced away from the door, and this calms me somewhat, as it means I can put off the showdown a little longer.

  There is a cover charge of two dollars. I pay and slink over to the only empty table in sight. It’s behind a pillar that blocks off most of the orchestra pit, but I can peek around it to see Abel, who, as I sit, is taking another drink from the flask. I blow out my candle. A moment later a waitress strolls by. “Oh,” she says,“bummer,” and extracts a lighter from the pocket of her jeans.

  “It’s okay,” I say, placing my hand over the wick.

  For drink there is either apple cider or grapefruit juice, for food only peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches. I order two sandwiches and a large cider. Meanwhile, somebody is tuning the guitar and talking into a microphone, so I move my chair until I can see the orchestra pit without putting myself in full view of Abel. The guitarist is a delicate-looking Art Garfunkel type, frizzy blond hair transformed into a rosy vapour by the footlight. He starts off playing straight blues, then bursts into a wilder Jimi Hendrix sound. There aren’t any lyrics, unless his off-key groaning counts. At every slide up to a high note he winces, and I am disturbed by what seems to be a spastic expression of my dread inflicted on his features without his even realizing.

  In the middle of a climactic segment of repeated wails my order arrives. I begin devouring the sandwiches. The sense I have is not of eating or even filling a cavity but of stanching a hemorrhage, packing on the gauze, more gauze. I stare at Abel, who, when the piece ends, applauds by slapping the table, since his other hand is occupied with tipping the flask at his mouth. Why is he drinking so much? Nobody else seems to be, not even Mr. Earl.

  “For my next tune,” says the guitarist,“I’m going to be joined by a cat who is no stranger to the Pit. Abel Richter, last heard …”

  The rest is lost in whistling and cheers. I can’t believe it. As a kid, Abel suffered almost paralyzing stage fright when he had to perform in front of an audience. Well, no wonder then, no wonder he’s fortifying himself with liquor.

  He gets to his feet and starts coming this way. I look down, now not being the moment I want him to spot me. When I look up again he is descending the pit stairs and I perceive the old shyness in his bowed head and then, once he is seated at the keyboard, in the studious hunch of his back. Immediately, as though the least deliberation will change his mind, he sets down a series of soft chords.

  It’s another lyric-less blues-rock piece. Abel remains in the background, submitting quiet responses to the flashy guitar licks. Every note the guitar fires off, he catches on a cushion of sound, and I am reminded of when we netted dazzled moths and set them free in the ravine; there is, in his playing, that same quality of a fragile transaction being intelligently and lovingly undertaken. I glance at Mr. Earl. He nods to the beat. Across from him, Gary also nods but at a higher frequency and one not obviously associated with the music.

  I look back at Abel. His face is hidden behind his hair. Floodlit as he is, in red and from below, his arms appear sunburned and oddly, childishly tubular. I seem to unknot and fall toward him in a sheltering sprawl, the whole room banked his way. The piece ends and he comes to his feet. I come to my feet. People yell,“More!” The guitarist says,“He’ll be back next set!” Abel leaves the pit and I walk around the tables and through applause like gunfire, whistling like rockets. I imagine myself to be blazingly conspicuous and wonder at his failing to notice me.

  He appears to be headed for the toilets. I follow. When he gets to the corridor, however, he strides past the washrooms, past the kitchen, then out an exit door, which is ajar.

  Light shrieks in through the gap. Over the noise of traffic and ventilation equipment I think I hear him talking. I strain to listen but the voice goes silent. I tiptoe forward and peek around the frame.

  He is about ten feet away, across a narrow alley. His back is to me and he embraces a girl. The girl’s arms dangle. She holds a half-eaten apple. Next to her head (which I can’t see, only a plank of ash-blond hair at Abel’s left shoulder), hooked on something protruding from the wall there, is a red cape. A siren howls nearby and I think she must have fainted or hurt herself and Abel is propping her up until help arrives.

  I am puzzled by her managing to keep hold of the apple. No, there it goes, she drops it. Both her hands slip under Abel’s shirt. He bends his head. “He’s kissing her,” I think, still without comprehension. He begins to stroke her hair and my own scalp tingles and it’s as if from this sensation, as if from extrasensory signals, that I finally grasp what I’m looking at.

  He’s kissing her.

  I step outside, onto the stoop. His hand moves down to her waist. How can he not feel how close I am? I could be anybody: an axe murderer, a heavenly host. I am dying behind his back and he has no idea.

  There is then a moment like death, a pop in the atmosphere, and I believe that even if he looked around he wouldn’t see me. I go back inside, down the corridor into the Babel and cigarette smoke, the struggling candles. I put a ten-dollar bill, more than five times what I owe, on my table. “Is that yours?” a girl says as I start to walk away. She is pointing at my overnight case. I pick it up and leave the building. Where should I go? Anywhere. Home. I start walking east.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I’ve always thought of them as angels because they’re beautiful and young and delicate, although I say this without ever having seen them straight on, only glimpses at the edges of my vision. I say it
, what’s more, having suspected for years that they are auras brought on by my migraine headaches.

  When they arrive—drifting down like scarves—I sense a purity and a kind of indifference, a strange emptiness as if they were moths drawn by the atmosphere surrounding me rather than by me specifically. Only the one I call the Angel of Love seems to have any stake in my affairs.

  She is both brighter and wispier than the others. She first turned up about a month before the Richters moved to Greenwoods, by which time I’d been seeing angels for years and I took for granted, almost, that they were a hard-to-believe phenomenon akin to germs and the sound of dog whistles. I had a feeling I wasn’t the only person they showed themselves to, and so for all that I hoped to attract Mrs. Richter by virtue of my negative charms—scrawniness, unkemptness, friendlessness, motherlessness—I appreciated that pity can’t compete with enchantment and that if she could see the Angel of Love I would be lit up in the general irresistible glow. This would also help the angel, who required Mrs. Richter to love me in order to come fully alive. With only my love to draw on, she drifted and was flimsy.

  Not that I ever thought about her too directly. I never spoke of her. She was unspeakable, a nearly imponderable subject, the frail nucleus of love. But there, in whatever lustrous or sorry or refurbished state. The moment my passion leapt from Mrs. Richter to Abel, she vanished (a folding of wings, a dissolving), to be instantly replaced by another, who, with the enhanced sensitivity of a newer version, smashed into houses or glided on air currents depending on how he and I treated each other.

  That intricate scrap of grace fluttering between us. I’d like to think of her as incapable of feeling pain, but I can’t.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I’m not so stupefied that I imagine I can walk all the way back to Toronto, though the idea has its epic, drastic appeal. I picture myself trudging up the Rockies, sleeping in caves, then slogging across the Prairies, through walls of wheat. I get lost in a corn row. I give birth in a barn, in the hay, the cattle are lowing and dipping their big slab heads over my stall.

  To hold my course, this one in Vancouver, I rely on the sun and the occasional street sign with East in its name. I have a sense of going in and out of radio frequencies as the mood of one street gives way to the next and as certain houses and stores clamour with the possibility of a life that might have been mine. Might still be mine. I could live in that clapboard bungalow, put up with the canary-yellow trim and red mailbox that says “THE BINGLES” in cockeyed yellow letters, be the wife of strapping Mr. Bingle over there with his brush cut and hedge clippers. That girl in the grocery store, the cashier spinning dreamily on her stool? I could be her.

  When I finally stop walking, it isn’t because I’m tired, it’s because for some time I’ve been noticing blood oozing out of the open toes of my shoes, and the thought that this should concern me has become a distraction.

  I look around. I’m in the middle of a block of shops that are just now closing for the day. Behind me a woman turns a crank to roll in a green canvas awning. A man comes out of the neighbouring cigar store, tilts the wooden Indian back against his chest, lifts it off its pedestal and drags it inside like a hostage. I think of sitting on the vacated pedestal, then I spot the bench across the street, in front of Dory’s Five and Dime, and go over there. Taking off my shoes releases more blood than seems right. My feet are a mess: at least five open blisters on each one, and deep cuts around the big toes. I dab at the blood with Kleenex and when I’m out of Kleenex, I twist around to see if Dory’s is still open. The lights are off, but a lady in hair curlers is doing something behind the counter. I hobble to the door, knock on the glass. The lady squints in my direction.

  “Do you sell Band-Aids?” I call.

  “We’re closed!”

  “I just need some Band-Aids! I’m bleeding!”

  She slams shut the cash register and hurries toward the rear of the store.

  I return to the bench, feeling bolts of pain now. There’s blood everywhere, a smeared trail to the door and back. What would Abel think? I wonder this casually, out of old, despondent habit. I imagine him walking by here a week from now, and even though the stains have darkened and almost worn away and everybody else passes them by, Abel, being Abel, takes an interest. “Human blood,” he says to whomever he’s with, that blond girl. The two of them try to figure out what happened: Somebody got stabbed or shot. A drunk fell and cracked open his skull.

  I start to cry. I do it silently, although I’m making no effort to be quiet. It’s as if I’ve been scoured out, the breath pouring straight through because of no internal organs to get snagged on. No bones, nothing.

  “What did you do? Step on glass?”

  I look up. It’s the lady from the store. Dory. Or maybe she’s Mrs. Dory. A tall, auburn-haired, ledge-bosomed woman in a navy shirtwaist dress that would have been fashionable fifteen years ago. And I was wrong about the rollers—that’s just how her hair is arranged, in Shirley Temple spools. She looks to be about fifty, maybe older.

  “Those your shoes?” she says.

  I wipe my nose on the back of my hand. “They don’t fit. They’ve rubbed my skin off.”

  She shifts a paper bag to her other hand, the one holding her purse, and pulls a handkerchief out of her sleeve. “Here. Blow your nose.” The edges are lace. It looks more like a doily than a handkerchief. “Go ahead,” she says. “I’ve got a drawer of them at home.”

  Her voice is penetrating without being loud, the severe, slightly beaten voice I associate with farm women. She starts extracting things from the bag. “I got you your BandAids,” she says. “And some iodine and cotton batting to clean yourself up with first.”

  I put everything in my lap and reach for my purse. “How much do I owe you?”

  “Oh, forget it. It’s all free samples.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’d throw those shoes straight in the garbage if I were you.”

  I look at my shoes, the howling red mouths of the toe-holes. I fumble with the wrong end of the Band-Aid box.

  “Here—” She moves my overnight case onto the sidewalk and sits herself down. “I’d better fix you up. If you do it wrong and get an infection, you could end up with gangrene. Give me that one,” indicating the foot nearest her.

  There’s no question of objecting. I twist sideways and lift both feet onto the bench. She picks up my purse and hands it to me and says,“Tuck that in there,” and I realize that with my knees bent she can see my underpants. I shove the purse against my crotch. She tears off a wad of cotton batting and opens the bottie of iodine. She has long red fingernails you’d think would interfere with pushing cash-register keys. No wedding ring. “Brace yourself,” she says, then presses the wad to my big toe. “How’s that?”

  “Fine.”

  “Doesn’t sting?”

  “A little.”

  Only a little. I’ve gone dull and meek, and these sensations deepen as I watch her work. She seems to know what she’s doing, which end of the Band-Aid you tear, how to pull off the tabs simultaneously. Maybe she used to be a nurse, a statuesque, unflappable army nurse. “Talk to me, Dory,” the soldiers would beg, but she’s no talker. Other than asking,“How in the world did you walk on these feet?”—a question I can’t answer—she says nothing until she’s done and then she says,“I take it you don’t have another pair of shoes in that suitcase there.”

  I shake my head.

  “You’d better have mine, then.”

  I look at her feet. Astonishingly, she has on the black leather ballet-type slippers that are just now coming into style and that I would have bought instead of the pumps except I didn’t think they were appropriate for out of doors. I say I can’t take her shoes and she says sure I can, she has another pair just like them at home, and no—she sees me going for my purse—she doesn’t want my money. She asks where I’m headed to.

  “The airport.” Eventually, I suppose, I am.

  “I’ll
give you a lift. It’s not so far from where I live.” She then peels off the slippers and puts them on my feet, and I’m so swathed in Band-Aids they almost fit.

  “They’re nice,” I say.

  “My new discovery.” She tightens the laces. “Easy on the bunions, and I’m lucky my arches don’t need support. Unlike certain other parts.” She laughs—a one-note squawk that jolts me like gunshot.

  We go to a lane behind the store. She carries my overnight case and strides blithely over the gravel in her nylon-stockinged feet. I hobble behind her, carrying the bloody shoes and my purse. When we get to her car she tells me to put the shoes on the floor, not to ruin my skirt. During the drive she says very little, which is fine with me. I’m holding up shakily. Even if I weren’t, I’d feel no obligation to make small talk. She is a familiar presence: a cross between Aunt Verna, Alice and even (the laugh and fingernails) my mother. Now and then she alerts me to her next move—“I think I’ll take Marine Drive”—as if I know the city, but she doesn’t ask me my name. Or where I’m flying to, until we arrive at the airport and then she asks only so that she can pull up in front of the right airline entrance.

  “Are you sure about the shoes?” I say, opening my door.

  “Oh, forget it.”

  “Well, thanks a lot. You’ve been so nice to me. I don’t know what I’d have—” I swallow down a sob.

  She pats my leg. “Whatever’s the matter,” she says,“whatever it is, it’ll get better.”

  “Not necessarily,” I think as I limp into the airport. “There’s no guarantee.” It’s as if she were delivering a message from Abel, whose faith in my resilience has, it appears, erased any guilt he may have felt about not phoning me.