The Romantic

by Barbara Gowdy

  “So could you.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  She rests her chin on her palm. “What do you usually do after work?”

  “Go home. Read.”

  “You don’t go out?”

  “Not very often.”

  “Why not?”

  I shrug. She looks at me a little longer, then changes the subject to her great-aunt Olive, who lived somewhere along Dundas Street during the Depression. “She was an elevator operator at Eaton’s. All her working life confined to a box and a ten-line script: ‘Third floor, ladies’ apparel. Fourth floor, men’s overcoats.’ She loved it, though. She never married because back then you couldn’t marry and keep your job. She used to say, You never know who’s going to step through those doors.’”

  Three nights later we go out again. To a movie this time, Alice Doesn’t Uve Here Anymore, which is about a woman deciding to start a new life as a lounge singer after her husband dies.

  “She’s already ahead of the game,” I say afterwards. “She has an inborn talent. Like you.”

  “There are about fifty directors in this city who would beg to differ.”

  “Your imitation of Mr. Roberts, that was perfect. You’re an actress. You know you are. You have a stimulating profession.” I think of her laughing retired clients and add, “Two stimulating professions.” I sigh.

  She pats my arm. “I take it,” she says,“that the great Welsh saga isn’t making your heart beat faster.”

  “Oh, it’s okay. It’s just … well, working in that office isn’t like working as an elevator operator. I know who’s going to step through those doors.”

  “So what would you rather be doing?”

  “Working in some bustling office, I suppose.”

  On my lunch hour I start reading the classified ads, but all the jobs I’d qualify for sound like dreary slave labour. For about five minutes I wonder if I should go to university. To study what, though? And I’d be older than everybody else, and I was never very good at sitting still for a lecture. I’m toying with the idea of being a cocktail waitress (if my mother did it, I guess I could give it a try) when Suzanne tells me about a woman she knows—a child psychologist with a hectic practice—who’s looking for a receptionist-secretary.

  “What’s she like?” I ask.

  “A cross between Joan Fontaine and Ingrid Bergman. Soft and motherly but very elegant. Mid-forties. Divorced from a callow plastic surgeon named Blake.”

  “Do you think she’d hire me?”

  “Why not? Can you take shorthand?”

  “If the person talks very slowly.”

  “She talks slowly. Come to think of it, she talks very slowly.”

  I get the job and start two weeks later, with the blessing of Mr. Roberts, whose pregnant granddaughter has decided she’d like to be his typist. It’s late April, robins hopping around on lawns, yellow forsythia flowers burning through the morning fog. As I walk from the St. George subway station to the office, which is on the ground floor of a Victorian house near the University of Toronto, I have the brisk, wide-awake feeling that I used to detect, and envy, in the steps of other secretaries. Maybe it’s because I’m more than a secretary. From the very first morning I was comforting frightened mothers—“I’m sure Dr. Mclver sees this kind of thing all the time,” “Kids bounce back sooner than you think”—and taking weepy children on my lap. That day I didn’t leave until seven o’clock. The next day it was after eight. Katherine—she said to call her that when it’s just the two of us—told me I could go home as soon as the last patient was in her office, but I didn’t feel right abandoning my post while the mother or father or babysitter was still out in the waiting room. I used the time to read through case histories and try to acquaint myself with all the amazingly various, heartsickening behaviours of unhappy children.

  After six months Katherine gives me a good raise and I decide to find another apartment. I’m prone to changing residences in the fall, but the reason has more to do with Abel, whose ghost hasn’t vacated my bedroom yet. If I sleep in there (as opposed to in the living room), whether it’s on the bed or on the floor, I’m almost guaranteed to dream about him making love to another woman. “I don’t know what to do,” I say one day to Katherine, and she’s the one who says that the solution may be simply to find somewhere else to live.

  I first told her about Abel one sweltering July evening over take-out pizza. It had been an especially long day, we had our feet up on her desk, the fan blowing full-force into our faces, and we were talking about Nicole, an eight-year-old who kept taping her mouth shut and was threatening to sew it shut. I felt that the mother was somehow to blame because of her strange nonchalance, not to mention her failure to hide the masking tape. Katherine said that of course the mother came into the picture (she steers clear of words such as blame) but that the very concerned, very charming father was no doubt part of it as well. The conversation then turned to charming men in general, to philanderers, and then to the conduct of Katherine’s charming, philandering ex-husband, how one time, at a dinner party they were giving, he followed another man’s wife right into the washroom. To make sure there were clean towels, he afterwards claimed.

  “I’m sure he half believed it,” Katherine said. “As he was following her in, I’m sure he was saying to himself, ‘I’d better check about the towels.’ That way, he could say to me—” she smiled,“and he always did, it was the same story every time—that the sex just happened, he had no idea how.”

  This struck me as so infuriatingly like what Abel would have said, had I let him speak, that I launched into my story. But in comparison to what she’d put up with—the calculated innocence, the cruelty—Abel’s betrayal, as I heard myself describing it, sounded almost benign. “He never meant to hurt me,” I said. “I know that.”

  “Maybe not,” Katherine said. “All the same, you were right to end it. You acted bravely.”

  I took this to mean that she wished she’d kicked her husband out sooner.

  She is a gently ironic woman with large grey eyes. There is a dreaminess about her that makes you think she isn’t even listening until she says something so unequivocal or reasonable (such as,“Why don’t you find somewhere else to live?”) that your entire way of thinking is suddenly untangled.

  I am hoping to get a two-bedroom flat, but through yet another friend of Suzanne’s I end up with an entire two-bedroom frame bungalow. The owners, a retired couple named Stan and Ann Canary, have bought a mobile home in Florida and want to hold on to the house as an investment. There’s a rose garden, a sun porch, a turret from which you can see the lake, and two semi-feral cats that come and go. On the day I sign the lease, the cats are lolling on the lawn, Suzanne is flirting with Stan Canary, and it occurs to me that the cramp in my throat is from happiness. “I’m happy,” I think, as though it were a trick—like balancing on a wire—that I’ve unexpectedly pulled off. I’m wobbly, I haven’t quite got the knack, but it’ll come.

  It comes and goes, like the cats, whom I name Stan and Ann. It slips through the crack in my heart. I can be doing nothing, looking out my bedroom window at a squirrel clutching its chest in the manner of Mrs. Carver, and there it is: that surge in the blood.

  The following spring my father and Mrs. Carver announce their engagement. “Now that you seem settled,” my father says, and I say,“Don’t tell me I’ve been holding you up!”

  “No, no,” he says. “We just didn’t want to go jumping the gun.”

  “The way you always do.” I kiss him. I’m happy.

  The wedding takes place on a warm September morning at Old City Hall, with me, Stella and Stella’s husband, Joe, in attendance. Mrs. Carver wears a mauve linen sheath that I helped her pick out. Her bouquet is purple and white orchids. Afterwards, under a rented white tent in my back yard, there’s a reception for fifty people, including Suzanne, Katherine, Mr. Roberts and Alice Keystone, whom I haven’t seen or spoken to in years but who phoned only a week ago to announce th
at she had just got engaged, to a dog trainer, and because she said,“Oh, I used to just adore Mrs. Carver” (apparently the two of them met a few times, although I have no memory of it), I invited her.

  She arrives bearing a large, zeppelin-shaped bundle under each arm. One bundle is wrapped in baby-blue tissue paper, the other in pink, and before I realize that they’re wedding gifts—blue for the groom, pink for the bride—I think that, whatever they are, they are meant to match her dress, which has a pattern of blue and pink watering cans.

  “They’re bolsters,” she whispers. ‘You know, to support your back when you read in bed. I remember your father was always such an avid reader. My mother made them, I only did the ‘His’ and ‘Hers’ stitching.”

  “What a great idea,” I say. I laugh because it is a great idea, and who else would have thought of it? And because there she is, in her dress, with her flaming cheeks. “I’ve missed you,” I say, also truthfully.

  Later, after everyone has gone and I’m sitting in the sun porch eating the last of the wedding cake, I feel an odd wistfulness. It takes me a while to figure out that the feeling is connected to Alice, her engagement. I wish her well, I’m in no hurry to get engaged myself, God knows. But we were fellow outcasts in high school, and now she has somebody to love, and I don’t.

  Which must mean I want somebody to love. But do I? I’ve grown used to self-sufficiency. I know that loneliness will glide over you like a ghost if you keep still and quiet.

  And yet, if I were to meet a man …

  There’s a man who occasionally comes into the office to pick up his nephew, Peter, and give him a drive home. Peter stutters, except, I’ve noticed, when he’s talking to his uncle Matthew. I’ve overhead enough between the two of them to know that Matthew lives by himself and coaches Peter’s baseball team. He looks to be in his early-to-mid-thirties. Short and with a round, pleasant face. I caught him staring at me once.

  He comes into the office the following Friday. Just as he and Peter are about to leave, I ask if he’s looking forward to the weekend.

  “I sure am,” he says. “How about you?”

  “I don’t have anything planned.”

  “She could come watch my baseball game,” says Peter.

  So that’s our first date: me watching him coach Peter’s baseball team in a tournament. He could hardly have contrived anything to put himself in a more attractive light: the hearty, reassuring leader of young boys. Who is no less hearty or reassuring when they lose.

  On our second date, at a French restaurant, I learn that he’s an accountant who “came this close” to being married once. “It wasn’t meant to be,” he says easily. I am warmed by his optimism and by how his eyes soften when we talk about Peter, and yet, by dessert, it’s clear that there won’t be a third date. “I can’t believe it,” he says after I admit that Peter’s tournament was not only the first game of baseball I’d ever sat through but the first game of sports, period. He says,“You mean to tell me you never rooted for your high-school football team?” He sounds truly puzzled. What I find unbelievable is that the only books he owns are Ask a Handyman and The World Almanac of Natural Disasters.

  The next morning I say to Katherine,“It wasn’t a complete fiasco. At least I could feel myself hoping to be won over.”

  “Maybe it’s still too early,” she says.

  ‘You mean, I’m not over Abel? No, I’m over him, I think.”

  “Do you still love him?”

  “I’ll always love him. I don’t expect to see him again, I don’t even want to see him again. And I don’t think he’s the only man I’ll ever love, either. But I don’t just love him, the way you love an old friend. There’s more to it than that.”

  As I’m speaking I imagine holding my hand a few inches above a boulder. It’s twilight, summer, growing cool. The boulder gives off the heat of the day. My love for Abel is like the heat between the boulder and the falling night. That feeling, or that place.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Eleven months later, out of the blue, I get a call from Mr. Richter. I can tell something is wrong by his hello. I think it’s Mrs. Richter, that she has died.

  It’s Abel. Last night, alone in his apartment, he started vomiting blood. By the time the ambulance arrived he was going into shock. He is stable now.

  “I know that the two of you have lost touch with each other,” Mr. Richter says,“but his mother thinks a visit from you would do him good.”

  As soon as I enter the hospital room, Mrs. Richter bursts into tears. Mr. Richter helps her to her feet and the three of us go out into the corridor.

  “How is he?” I ask. I only got a glimpse.

  “Sleeping,” Mr. Richter says. He thanks me for coming. Mrs. Richter clings to my arm. We walk a little way down the corridor and then Mr. Richter gets straight to the point. He says that Abel has cirrhosis of the liver. “Because Abel is so young,” he says,“the doctors think that his liver must have been damaged to begin with.” He speaks gently, as if he were the presiding physician. “Anyway, the cirrhosis itself isn’t the problem right now. It’s the ulcers he has developed in his stomach, which the drinking makes worse. Sometimes they rupture, and that is what happened last night.”

  “He could have died,” Mrs. Richter sobs.

  She is too distraught to return to the room. “Why don’t you sit with him, Louise?” says Mr. Richter. “We will go to the cafeteria.”

  The chair Mrs. Richter vacated is still warm. I thought he would be yellow and drawn but he looks wonderful with his white face and long wavy hair, his serene expression. I take his hand. It’s cold. He opens his eyes. “Louise,” he says, and the hardness in me, what remained of it after the phone call, the clot of resistance that got me here dry eyed, just evaporates.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  In some ways, the year of trying to save him is much easier than the years of trying to forget him and the months of trying to hold on to him. Those times I was alone. All I had for a lure was myself. Whereas everybody he knows wants to save him, and the lure, this time, is the whole world.

  At first, he doesn’t oppose us. He checks himself into the Marwood Clinic. Despite relapsing, he continues to go to twice-weekly meetings for another three months. The reason he stops going is not clear, something to do with his counsellor quitting. “If he would only come home,” Mrs. Richter says,“we could watch over him.” Which is exactly why he won’t go home. He stays on in the basement apartment where he has been living ever since the rooming house sold in the spring of 1975. At around the same time, the piano bar at the hotel closed down, and that’s when he started driving a taxi. Does he ever drive drunk? I ask him this while he’s still in the hospital; I think it’s a question that needs to be asked. He says no, and I find I believe him. For one thing, I realize that he wouldn’t risk anybody else’s life. What he likes about the job, he says, is that he can set his own hours and travel all over the city, meeting new people, hearing their stories. He’s thinking of writing some of the stories down. He sounds hopeful.

  But then he always sounds hopeful. When he quits driving, and then when he starts spending almost all day in bed, he claims to be catching up on his reading, learning to meditate. “Everything is fine,” he says up until the day he dies.

  On my birthday I stop in to see him before going out to dinner with Suzanne. He has a gift for me. Some small thing he has wrapped, without tape, in a page torn from one of his books.

  “A rock,” I say, feeling it. I unwrap it, and it is a rock. “Just what I always wanted.”

  “It’s a meteorite,” he says.

  I look at it more closely. It’s black and rust coloured. Glossy.

  “A piece of the solar system,” he says. I reach for his hand and kiss it. “Where did you get it?”

  “I bought it.”

  “Really?” I didn’t think he had the strength to go any farther than across the street to the liquor store. “Years ago,” he says.

  I look at the
torn-out page. It’s Rimbaud’s “Romance.” All four stanzas. “At last,” I say.

  “‘You’re in love,’ “he says, quoting from it. “Your sonnets make her laugh. All your friends disappear.’ “And then he coughs and a jet of blood lands on my lap. “Oh, God.” I jump up. “Oh, God.”

  “Sorry.” He wipes his mouth with a handkerchief.

  The blood slides down my skirt. “Let’s go to the hospital,” I say.

  “I’ll clean it up,” he says, coming to his feet.

  “For God’s sake, Abel! This is an emergency!”

  He stands there looking at the floor, waiting for me to calm down. “I’ll clean it,” I say and head for the bathroom.

  When I come back out, he’s on his hands and knees, dabbing a sponge at a spot on the carpet. I sit on the bed. Every few seconds he separates the fibres with his fingers, then gets back to dabbing. He bites his lip. His arms shake. I should probably take over except I’ve fallen into a kind of stupor where I seem to be watching him as though he were a stranger in a movie. Who is he? Why is he so thin and pale?

  He glances up. “It’s better to get it out right away,” he says, and a feeling of pure, ungrasping compassion comes over me for this skeletal human being who is still trying so hard to protect everyone from himself. Not from his claims; he never made those. From his detachment. It occurs to me that the distance I seem to be holding him at right now is the one he has always maintained between himself and the rest of the world. How else do you preserve the illusion that the people you love are perfect? Or that you can bear to let them go?

  “I’m sorry,” I say. Sorry for the way things are, naturally, but as I speak I’m wondering, why is it that, between us, I got all the anger? I can’t believe I sent him that letter.

  He stops dabbing and gives me a tender look. “I’m fine now,” he says. “Everything’s fine.”

  I nod.

  “You’ll be fine, too.”