The Romantic

by Barbara Gowdy

  “A plumbing extravaganza.”

  He slides me a combative smile. “I believe I told you it was snug.”

  “Snug. That’s not the word that leaps to my mind.”

  “I see.” Nodding at his shoes.

  “So—” I move toward the door. “Now I suppose we go down to your place and you show me your etchings.”

  I say this out of impatience for whatever experience I’m meant to have this evening, but also because I’m discovering that when I hurt him, and then pity him, he becomes almost attractive.

  The muscle twitches in his cheek.

  ‘You can offer me something to drink,” I say.

  As soon as he opens the door to his apartment, I feel the humidity.

  “Oh,” I say. “It’s big.”

  It’s lovely. Who would have thought? Floor-to-ceiling wooden bookshelves, a worn Oriental carpet, antique furniture, not refinished (I notice stain marks on the coffee table, battered chair legs) but tasteful. When he turns on a lamp I see his desk and, next to it, an upright piano. ‘You have a piano,” I say, and feel a sudden, breathless grief. I could be standing in the Richters’ living room in Greenwoods.

  “I don’t play,” he says. “Do you?”

  I look at him. His laughable hair. I detect the throb underfoot from the laundromat machines. “No. I had a boyfriend who played. Really well.” I drop into a maroon armchair. “It’s like a steam bath in here.”

  He hurries across the room and raises the Venetian blinds. A fan is revealed. He switches it on.

  ‘Your books must be ruined,” I say.

  “I’m not a collector. I buy books for what’s in them. I only hold on to these because I have the shelves.”

  He goes into the kitchen. From the chair I glimpse a clean white tile floor and blue cupboards. He moves around quietly. When he emerges it’s with a tumbler of ice water in one hand and two wine glasses and a corkscrew in the other. The bottle is under his arm.

  I press the tumbler to my cheek, my forehead. He sits across from me on the divan and starts uncorking the wine.

  “I’ll touch it in a second,” I say as he fills our glasses.

  He looks up quickly.

  “The divan. You’re always telling me I should touch it. So here I am. Ready to touch.”

  He purses his lips, unsure of how to take this, and yet game, and why wouldn’t he be? I’m where he’s been trying to get me for two months. I’m frail and fainting, alluding to seduction. Seeing his confidence rise, however, my interest drops, and so I inspect him for something to be … not aroused by, that’s out of the question, something to be moved by.

  His eyes, I decide, the intelligence and suffering not entirely extinguished by all that craftiness. I need more, though. I survey the apartment. The desk is a rolltop. Nothing on it except for a leather-bound binder stuffed with papers.

  I set down the tumbler and pick up my wine. “To poetry,” I say.

  He pauses a moment before raising his glass.

  “Will you read me something?” I ask. “Of yours?”

  He takes a drink. “No.” Quietly. “I don’t think I will.”

  I get up and sit next to him.

  Our thighs touch. On the back of my knees I can feel the softness of the leather. “It’s like skin.” I run my hand over

  His face is empty.

  I reach across his chest and turn off the lamp.

  He trembles. Or it’s the vibration from the washing machines. I kiss him. His breath smells faintly of mushrooms, a relief from the overpowering briskness of the cologne. I shut my eyes. His lips are as soft as the divan. His desperation, though I sense it twisting inside him, stays contained. He puts down his glass and brings his arm around my shoulders. I let myself sink back. I sink into the kiss but not so deeply that I forget it’s Don Shaw’s mouth, it’s Don Shaw’s fingers unbuttoning my blouse.

  We make love there on the divan. As if I were a sleeping child he kisses my forehead, my throat. Lingering, gentle kisses meant to relax me. But they’re not working. I shift my inner gaze to his, and that’s better. The trick is to imagine what he feels, to see it all from his point of view. I am only a girl, too young and pretty to be here. I am a gift. Nobody would believe it.

  He comes in a sudden, single spasm. I open my eyes to his grimacing face. Almost frightened, I roll out from under him, onto the floor. He collapses. I get up and grab my clothes. My stomach is slick with his sweat. I step in front of the fan but before I’m dry I start dressing.

  “What’s your hurry?” he gasps.

  “I’d better go. My dad will start worrying.”

  “Why don’t you phone him?”

  I button up my skirt. “Where’s my purse?”

  He sits up and switches on the lamp. “Hey,” he says.

  I glance over … at a chubby, middle-aged man with oily, beige hair sticking out in horns.

  “Stay,” he says. “Just for a few more minutes. You haven’t even drunk your wine.”

  “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  He reaches for his shirt. “I’ll walk you to the bus stop.”

  “No!” I spin around.

  He goes still.

  “I’ll be okay.” I spot my purse beside the maroon chair and I rush over and pick it up. I feel as though a crime has been committed, some harmless prank, lighting matches, and now the house is on fire.

  “Well.” He nods at the floor.

  I can’t afford to start pitying him again. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I say.

  He doesn’t look up. “I take it you won’t be renting the apartment.”

  “No.”

  More nodding.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I say again.

  I want to convince him. Not to offer false hope but because it irks me to think that he has already resigned himself to something I wasn’t certain of until this moment.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Before settling down to hard drinking, Abel turns the deadbolt. If you keep knocking, and he’s still conscious, he may slide out one of his ready-made notes. Either CALL YOU LATER (How? His phone has been disconnected), or THANKS, JUST LEAVE IT (whatever you’re shouting you’ve brought: the bag of groceries, the milk that will go sour in his overheated hallway) or STILL ALIVE! (the exclamation mark for your sake, to applaud a circumstance he himself finds merely interesting). It used to be he would occasionally talk to you through the door, but after all the vomiting and damage to his throat his voice is too soft, and, anyway, all he ever said was along the lines of call you later, or just leave it. That he was still alive, you gathered.

  He didn’t write the notes himself. He had Joyce, a waitress from his piano-bar days, do it. Three lots of fifty each. During the Depression, Joyce won a national penmanship contest, and when you pick the note up off the floor and there’s her lovely flowing script and the faint pencil line she drew to keep the words straight, you feel that at least you’ve been dismissed with some ceremony, as if by a butler. He keeps each lot in a different pocket of his army greatcoat, but he gets them mixed up anyway, he gives you the THANKS, JUST LEAVE IT note when you’ve arrived empty handed. Sometimes the STILL ALIVE! note is already waiting for you. I tell him he can’t make such a sweeping claim, that he should at least write in the time: STILL ALIVE! AT 4:30 or 6:00 or whenever. And so he tries. He finds the pen. With a wobbling hand he adds the numbers, and you stand there wondering, is that a nine or a seven, a three or an eight?

  If he isn’t drinking hard—and he can go for two days restricting himself to what he calls therapeutic hits—the door is usually ajar. People walk right in. Old friends from the piano bar. Cindy, the beautiful manicurist from across the hall, taking a break between clients. Archie, the superintendent, beer in hand. There being nowhere to sit, Archie leans against the refrigerator and tells jokes in a grim, rapid-fire manner. Abel, lounging on the bed, nods as if to jazz. Cindy laughs, but at things in general, to promote optimism. Upon entering the apartment she announces herself ch
eerfully with,“I’ve had it up to here,” or,“Don’t even ask,” referring, supposedly, to her failing business. Her smile veers on the hysterical, which is why I think her high spirits are for show, for his sake.

  I come by every day now, on my way to work and then, if I can, on my way home. His parents come after supper, making the hour-and-a-half trip from Waterloo where Mr. Richter, now in semi-retirement, teaches chemistry. Even they don’t always get in. At least three mornings a week I arrive to find a bag of groceries and Tupperware containers of cooked food still out in the hall. Mrs. Richter brings flowers from her garden—daisies, black-eyed Susans, tea roses—bundling the stems in a wet rag and, over that, plastic wrap. Once, the rag was torn from the orange-and-red skirt she had on the first time I saw her.

  I know he wants me there in the mornings, but it’s always a relief when I’m not shut out by the deadbolt. The second relief is the sound of his raspy breathing. I go to the bed. He sleeps on his back, the book he was reading before he dropped off—Blake’s Complete Poems or Yeats’s Selected Poetry—often still opened on his chest. I think,“One day I might be looking at a corpse.” I try to imagine it, but the rush of dread this produces seems too familiar to be anything other than the outskirts of a feeling there’s no preparing myself for.

  I put away any groceries. If his mother brought flowers, I throw out the old bouquet and arrange the new one in his only drinking glass. The cats cry at my feet, I don’t know why, their bowls are full, they recoil when I try to pat them. He goes on sleeping. It isn’t until I throw back the covers that he opens his eyes. “Louise,” he says as if we’ve been parted for years. I help him to his feet. He tells me what he was dreaming about: another planet, its mauve atmosphere and plates of light, a glass airplane hangar filled with swallowtail butterflies the size of zeppelins. He often dreams we’re making love. So do I. In my dreams we are children again. In his, our bodies are surreal. I have three breasts or I’m covered in nipples. He has hands like tree branches, infinitely fingered, he has a penis that extends out of telescopic sleeves.

  “Far out,” I say.

  “It was,” he says, ignoring the sarcasm. “It was beautiful.”

  While he sways and trembles, I open the cigar box. Usually there’s a cigarette inside, already rolled. I light it and insert it between his lips, wincing along with him at his first inhalation, which he admits scalds his throat. He looks to make sure the ashtray is nearby; he wouldn’t want to spill ashes on his clean carpet. His mother has told me (in a tone of hopefulness, taking it as a positive sign) that his blackouts never last more than a few hours. So it must be during the intervals that he puts himself and the apartment back together. Still, I glance around for damage—splinters of glass, whisky splashed on the wall. I scan his face and arms for bruises. One morning, catching me at this, he says,“I drink in the bathtub.”

  “You have a bath?”

  “I don’t run the water.”

  I light his cigarette.

  “I know when I’m going to black out,” he says.

  “How?”

  “I hear wailing.”

  “Like somebody crying?”

  “Like a siren. Far off.”

  “A blackout siren,” I say.

  He smiles as if this were a staggering witticism. “Louise,” he says.

  “I’ve got to get going,” I say, irritated. “I’m late.”

  His candour terrifies me. Only a couple of weeks ago, he would never have raised the subject of his drinking, not to me. I’ve been lecturing him all year to face the truth and fight back, but this seems to be facing the truth only for the sake of proving that there’s nothing alarming about it, nothing you can’t casually dismiss.

  One morning I open the door to find him scrubbing the carpet. The sleeves of his pyjama top are rolled up, and for the first time in months I see the shocking thinness of his forearms.

  “What happened?” I say. The water in the bucket is pink. “Oh, God, did you hemorrhage?”

  He continues scrubbing with both hands, one to steady the other. He’s using a nail brush. “Just a bit of blood.”

  “I’ll drive you to the hospital.”

  “I’m all right. I took my blood pressure.”

  “Abel, please. For my sake.”

  “I’m okay. I feel fine now.”

  “Well, then let me finish this.”

  “It just needs rinsing.” He goes to the bed and sits.

  I empty and refill the bucket, then find a dishcloth. “Wait!” I say when I hear him fumbling for a cigarette. I hurry over to light it.

  ‘You’re so fierce,” he says. ‘You’re like a mongoose.”

  He means this as a compliment. I go back to the bucket and kneel down and start dabbing at the stain. “Doesn’t it hurt?” I say.

  “What?”

  “Everything. Vomiting.”

  “My throat hurts sometimes.”

  “I’m sure smoking helps.” I wring out the dishcloth. “How bad does it get?”

  “Not too bad.”

  Which I take to mean really bad. “How do you stand it? By drinking?”

  “I tell myself there’s a portion of pain in the world, a daily portion, and it has to go somewhere. When I’m in pain, somebody else isn’t. A child dying of bone cancer in New Jersey. A man being tortured in Kampala. For the space of time that my throat burns, their pain lifts.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re a masochist.” I carry the bucket to the sink, dump out the water. “Would you drink some orange juice?” I ask this without hope.

  But he cocks his head, intrigued. “Orange juice. Why not? The juice of an orange.”

  His glass has flowers in it. I find a plastic measuring cup and use that.

  “Orange juice in a measuring cup,” he says happily. I hold the cup to his mouth. He turns his head. “I’ll drink it later. Thanks.”

  I set the cup on the table, between the flowers and ashtray, and look at my watch. Eight-thirty. I’m going to be late for work. It doesn’t matter, my boss is on holiday. I sit on the floor with my back against the bed, my shoulder against his calf. Outside the window, which is up by the ceiling, two pigeons strut back and forth. A truck rattles by.

  “I could stay here forever,” he says.

  I pat his foot.

  But he doesn’t mean here with me, in this moment. “At the teetering point,” he goes on. “Knowing any second I could fall off the edge. The paradox is, if I knew I had forever, even a good chance of another six months, in my mind I’d be somewhere else.”

  “You could have another six months,” I say helplessly. “More.”

  “When you’re just about to take off, you look at everything for the last time, as if you could hold on to it somehow.”

  “Stop it. You’re scaring me.”

  “Everything is exactly what it is. Everything is …”

  “What?” I say finally.

  “Itself. Everything is itself.”

  He sounds so captivated. There’s no retrieving him. I say,“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  “The pigeons,” he says. “They’re not trees or cats or measuring cups. They’re pigeons. They moan, they make their flimsy nests, lay their white eggs. They aren’t right or wrong or important or unimportant or anyone’s name for them. Out of oblivion came these nameless things.”

  “And then came a name for them.”

  “The snake in paradise. You say to yourself ‘pigeon’ and the pigeon before your eyes is corrupted by everything you know about pigeons. You see your idea of a pigeon.”

  “Because you can’t help it. Because out of oblivion came a mouth. And vocal cords. And a brain.”

  “And then one day the names drop away. They don’t matter. They don’t tell you anything.”

  “What is this?” I take hold of his foot.

  “My foot.”

  I’ve missed his point. He isn’t disputing th
at things have names. “Your cold bony foot,” I say, letting it go. I twist around to look up at him. “Try harder. Okay? Be strong. Why can’t you be strong?”

  “I’m not very good for you, am I?”

  ‘You’re horrible for me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Be infuriated.”

  “Be like you.”

  “That’s right. Be like me. Be exactly like me!”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Although I suspect Don Shaw knows it is over between us, everything is, including my job, I want to make sure he has no excuse for phoning me at home, so after rushing out of his apartment I head for the store.

  I leave the lights off. (I can see clearly enough in the pulsing glow from the plumbing-supply store across the street, its eternally dripping neon tap.) I go to the counter, find a piece of paper and a pen and sit on the stool. Between my legs I’m still wet. The spicy smell of his cologne is on my clothes. I think of the way he looked when he came, that deathly grimace, and it seems so funny and horrible. How could he have been surprised that I ran out? I feel guilty but also a little used, more than justified. Overall I have an efficient, virtuous feeling, as if I’d cleaned out a closet.

  What should I write? How about a rendition of my mother’s goodbye note? “I have gone, I am not coming back, Buddy knows how to work the adding machine.” Or,“The truth shall make you free.” Just that. Let him, who thinks he knows me so well, wonder.

  In the end, I write: “Dear Don Shaw. I’ve decided to take your advice and ‘Live Dangerously.’ Sorry about leaving you in the lurch. Here’s my paycheque back as partial compensation. Goodbye and good luck. Best wishes, Madame Kirk. P.S. Last night was beautiful.”

  The P.S. to compensate for the “best wishes.” Not even as a formality can I bring myself to write “love.” By “beautiful” I mean the night we walked through—the chicory flowers, the woman in the coffee shop. Of course, he’ll think I mean the sex. That’s all right.

  I fold the note and put it on top of the ledger. Outside, after I’ve locked the door, I drop the keys through the mail slot. The jangle of them hitting the floor gives me a moment’s pause in which I see myself living with Don Shaw, married to him, stuck at home with our chubby, sod-haired children. Could I bear it? Probably, somehow. All my futures, including these first meagre samplings, must be bearable, it seems to me, if I can picture them.