by L. R. Wright
He had recently decided that it was time to devote himself full-time to poetry: he would write his first book. A series of poems, a collection, differing in length and tone and style, linked only by a common theme.
It was an exceptionally clear day. Gazing away out to the west, Hamilton glimpsed the Gulf Islands and, beyond them, the long purplish rising that was Vancouver Island. He spent a lot of time looking at his view, feeling like a bird in a nest up there. In strong winds he imagined he felt the building move. Someday, he knew, there would be an earthquake, and he would die in it. Not many people knew how they would die, but Hamilton Gleitman did. It had come to him in a dream several years ago. He had awakened covered in sweat, his heart thrashing around in his chest: he had felt the earth fracture beneath his feet and fall away and vanish. After a while, when he had calmed himself enough to deliberate upon the dream, he had decided that he was glad to have been given this knowledge. With it came an immense amount of freedom, because knowing how he would die, he also knew how he would not.
He lived up there, yes, like a bird in a nest, isolated and private.
Hamilton went back to his desk and the application form.
“Amount requested: Subsistence (maximum of $2,500 a month):” Hamilton wrote, “12 months at $2,500 = $30,000.”
He had to find three references, which he figured he could do. There were a couple of magazine editors who could be depended upon to say good things about him. And of course he’d ask the guy who’d taught the writing course in prison.
He grinned to himself. The Canada Council would love it that he’d learned to write in the slammer.
***
Several blocks away, an acquaintance of Hamilton’s named Harry was sitting in the sun in his living room with the TV on, watching a rerun of Magnum, P.I. on the Arts & Entertainment channel. It had become hard to see the screen, because the sun was shining almost directly upon it, and it was shining on Harry in his easy chair, too, making him warmly, cozily sleepy. He got up to close the curtains. He stretched, scratched his belly, and lay down on the sofa. He managed to focus on Magnum for a few more minutes and then dropped off to sleep.
Harry was thirty-seven.
There wasn’t much furniture in his apartment, which he considered only temporary accommodation. In fact, it seemed that his had always been a life in waiting. He had grown up rich—or at least knowing he would be rich eventually. And for a long time he didn’t clue in to the fact that despite this, his parents expected him to exhibit a certain amount of ambition. They displayed an insistent curiosity about what he was going to do with himself that Harry at first found sweet. Touching. But while he was still in high school he had realized that they meant it, that he was seriously expected to come up with some kind of career goal. So he had poked around halfheartedly at school, looking for something he liked and was good at. He took English and French and history and biology and math. One year he tried physics, which he found frighteningly incomprehensible. Cutting open a frog in biology turned his stomach. He couldn’t get the accent right in French. Mathematics was a foreign tongue. He was just barely able to remember enough stuff in history to pass the exams, stuffing his head full of facts until it bulged, then vomiting them out upon the examination paper, regurgitating just barely enough to pass and instantly forgetting it. English was boring. Virtually everything was boring.
Once he told his parents that he was going to be a doctor. His dad never did swallow that, but his mother tried hard for a day or two, until she recalled his marks. “Well, geez,” he’d said in his own defense. “Geez.”
He started looking around among the extracurricular activities—nothing athletic, he didn’t have the body for athletics. The only thing he sometimes did well was volleyball, and then it was just good enough to get by. He joined the choir because any fool could sing, right? Apparently not, Harry discovered. Next he tried out for a couple of school plays. He got cast and made people laugh, which at first gave him an excellent feeling. But he was never given any other kind of part, and he got tired of being laughed at after a while.
He managed to graduate from high school and he went on to college, because his marks weren’t good enough to get him into a university. Even at college, though, Harry always felt that he was marking time. Waiting for the day when his life could really get going, get off the ground. He’d fantasize about what he’d do when he was well financed. Saw himself paying cash for a brand-new BMW. Putting himself in the hands of an experienced salesman at some fancy men’s store. Buying himself a forty-foot powerboat, maybe. Getting a big-screen TV: he’d have a VCR, a big-screen TV, a pile of rented movies, and an enormous bowl of popcorn. His wants were few.
As an adult, Harry continued to have an ambivalent relationship with his father. In a perfect world his old man would have been the one to die first. Harry would have moved back into the house then and looked after his mother in her old age. Taken over everything for her. Hired somebody to clean, hired somebody else to look after the grounds, kept her financial affairs in order.
But he had almost stopped thinking this way now. More than two years had passed since his mother’s death, and Harry had more or less accepted his lot. The old guy couldn’t last much longer, and in the meantime Harry was really a pretty happy fella. Everett said he watched too much TV, and maybe he did, but so what? There was a lot to learn on TV.
Harry awoke after a twenty-minute nap, refreshed. He stretched, catlike, on his warm sofa and noticed the glow the sunlight created in the middle of the dark green curtains. Magnum was over and The Rockford Files was about to start, but Harry was too restless now to watch TV. If his old man had been any decent kind of a father at all, it would be time for Harry to go over there for Sunday dinner now. But no.
Harry decided to head over to Everett’s place. Everett Danforth managed a bookstore, and he was also kind of an actor. But the most significant aspect of his personality was his love of gambling. It was fortunate for him, Harry thought, giving his face and hands a cursory rinse, that Everett wasn’t gambling at the moment. When he was in the thrall of his addiction, you couldn’t talk to the guy about anything but the horses.
See, he thought, going out into the hall, locking his apartment door behind him, that was another aspect of TV that was very useful. It distracted a fellow from stuff that could screw up his life. He had tried to get Everett to watch more TV, but it had been too late by the time Harry met him: Everett was hooked. The problem was, Harry thought, descending five stories in an otherwise empty elevator, that sometimes Everett actually won—and this just fed the fire. A lottery ticket here and there turned out to be a winner. Or else he’d go to the track and bet on some damn horse that had his mother’s maiden name or some damn thing, and once in a blue moon the damn horse would actually win, and there you go, Everett would be in the money again. These things didn’t happen often. Just often enough to keep Everett hanging in there for the big score.
Fortunately, Harry acknowledged, crossing the lobby toward the street, Everett was (unlike Harry) extremely frugal, except when it came to gambling. He lived, oblivious of his surroundings, in a cramped and gloomy basement suite that would have driven Harry nuts. Harry was not happy at the prospect of inviting himself for dinner in that place. He would drag Everett out of there, to Flora’s, probably, even though he knew he’d have to foot the bill. A guy just didn’t feel right eating alone on a Sunday, when he had a father whose house he ought to be going to.
Jesus, he thought. When the fuck was the old guy finally going to croak?
Chapter 11
WHAT WOULD HER MOTHER do, Maria wondered, if she were to stand right in front of her, make sure she had her attention, and then say, “Mother. Help.”
It was late Sunday afternoon, and they were driving to her mother’s house.
Richard began humming to himself. Maria imagined that she felt the vibration of his humming in the cushiony part of her own lips, closed upon themselves. It was an aimless, tuneless creat
ion that he was humming. Maria thought it a pity that they weren’t a family that sang together. Instead they took turns, while driving: Richard would hum for a while, then Belinda would sing to herself, gazing out the side window and daydreaming about fame, fortune, and what she would call love, although it was really sex. Then it would be Maria’s turn, but by then she would no longer be in the mood, or the other two would have decided they wanted to talk.
She didn’t know what kind of help she would ask of her mother, were she to ask.
Maria shifted on her seat and leaned close to the window. She didn’t like riding in a car that was being driven by somebody else. Driving was one of her favorite things. Why was it that male people, most of them, anyway, always assumed that if there was driving to be done, they were naturally the ones who’d be doing it?
Ignoring Richard’s humming, Maria began to sing. “‘Moonbeams shining,’” she sang, “‘soft above, let me beg of you; find the one I dearly love, tell him I’ll e’er be true.’”
Richard glanced at her, and even though she didn’t look at him, she knew it was a look of surprise that was about to become disapproval.
“‘Fate may part us,’” she sang more loudly, “‘years may pass, future all unknown.’” He had stopped humming now. “‘Still my heart will always be faithful to him alone.’”
“That’s pretty, Mom,” said Belinda from the backseat.
Maria turned to smile at her and aimed the rest of the song in her daughter’s direction. “‘O wandering wind, won’t you quickly find my dear one where’er he may be. And give him a message I fain would send; I know that he’s dreaming of me. Fate may part us,’” she sang (and Belinda sang along, “‘La la la-la, la la la’”), “‘years may pass, future all unknown. Still my heart will always be faithful to him alone.’”
“You pick one now, Dad,” said Belinda, leaning toward the front seat.
Maria, looking again out the window, had a spasm of heartache. She touched the inside of the glass, following with her fingertip the trail left on the outside by a drop of rain. It was probably some hormonal thing, this apprehension that had come to afflict her.
“‘There was a man,’” said Richard. “This isn’t a song, mind you. Because I don’t sing.”
“I know, Dad,” said Belinda. “It’s a recitative.”
“Precisely,” he said. “‘There was a man’”—Belinda joined in—“‘whose name was Mertz.’”
Maria gazed at him in astonishment. He hadn’t sung this in years.
“‘His wife bought him. Some colored shirts. He bought a goat. To please his kids. And this is what. That poor goat did. He ate the shirts. Right off the line. But Mrs. Mertz caught him in time. She tied him to. The railroad tracks. And swore she would. Those shirts get back. He coughed and kicked. With might and main. Coughed up the shirts. And flagged the train.’ I don’t know if we got that altogether right,” said Richard to Belinda. He reached across the seat and took Maria’s hand. She let him hold it; they were pulling up in front of her mother’s house.
Maria’s mother lived in the Dunbar area, not far from Forty-first Avenue, in the house in which Maria had grown up after they’d moved to Vancouver from Winnipeg. Her mother’s name was Agatha. She was an angular woman of sixty-nine who had recently taken up speed-walking. Her husband, Thomas, Maria’s father, was dead.
Agatha kept very busy with her speed-walking (she was a member of a club) and volunteer work with Mothers Against Drunk Driving. She had once been a teacher and enjoyed conversations with Richard in which he would tell her about innovations in education and she would say that these weren’t innovations: innovations had to be new.
She met them at the door, wearing tights, a long black cardigan over a white T-shirt, and a headband. On her feet were clunky black walking shoes. “You’re early!” she exclaimed, but they weren’t. Maria knew that Agatha had just wanted to be sure they saw her in her speed-walking gear.
“We can drive around the block a few times, if you like,” said Richard. Maria’s fondness for him was never greater than during visits with her mother.
“No no no, come in, come in.” Agatha kissed Belinda on both cheeks and bent to do the same to Maria.
They were all crowded together in the tiny foyer, from which a narrow staircase led upstairs. There were three bedrooms and a bath up there, plus a large square hall.
Agatha ushered them into the living room. “I have to dash upstairs and quickly shower and change,” she said. “Sit down, sit down.”
“Mother, how about if I make some coffee?” said Maria, and not waiting for a reply, she went through into the kitchen.
It had been years and years since she’d lived with her mother, but it still surprised her that Agatha lived alone apparently happily, and quite differently from when she’d had a family. Maria pondered this, staring into a cupboard. Things were put away differently. The house was messier. There was a patina of carelessness over everything. But maybe her mother was more carefree than careless, Maria thought, brooding. Agatha was to Maria an inscrutable person. There was more to her than that which Maria was willing to know. She wondered if Belinda felt the same way about her.
She put the coffee on, then sat at the table in the sunny alcove that overlooked her mother’s backyard. She was thinking about what life with her parents had been like when she was a child, a teenager, a coming-and-going adult, a married person. The life she studied was, of course, a Maria-centered life: it was mildly shocking to realize that things had been going on in her mother’s life, too, all those years. She felt slightly guilty not to have thought about this much earlier. And slightly irritated that her mother had not thought to tell her. The point was, did she really know her mother? Where had all this speed-walking come from? Did Agatha miss having sex? Maria stared thoughtfully out the window, absently noting the mess that was her mother’s overgrown back garden. She herself thought that she would be able to do without sex quite well. But maybe that was only because it was, theoretically, always available to her.
In the living room, Belinda was playing the piano. Richard would be standing, hands clasped behind his back, watching his daughter’s hands on the piano keys. But soon he would move to the front window and then out the front door, to check something in the car or to walk to the corner and back. Richard hated to be idle. Idleness soured his digestive system. Which was why he had a problem with holidays. Christmas was especially bad. Maria had established several rituals for Christmas Day, most of which were designed to keep Richard busy, to give him a sense of purpose. Richard really wanted to feel a sense of destiny, but purpose would do.
Agatha came downstairs smelling like Pears soap and Yardley’s lavender. Maria could just see her, standing there on the bathmat, vigorously toweling herself dry, spreading deodorant in her armpits and slapping talcum powder all over her aged body. She was surprised and depressed to realize that she envied her mother, who was active and fit and, as far as Maria could tell, without a care in the world. Maria felt wan and driven by comparison.
“Have some coffee, Mom,” she said, but Agatha opted for fruit juice.
They sat in the living room, making conversation, and it felt to Maria that the three of them had dropped in unannounced: you’d never know, she thought, that the woman had invited us for dinner.
Upstairs there was a bedroom that used to be Maria’s. Now it was what her mother called her “ideas room.” It was full of projects, some new, some old, some abandoned. There was a sewing machine in it, and a knitting machine, and a computer.
Maria would have liked to have a nest somewhere—a den—another home—a refuge, for her imagination as much as for her self—a hidey-hole—a place to which she could flee. She thought about this, idly watching her mother drink her orange juice, and noticed that Agatha had lost more weight.
She looked more closely at her mother, and Agatha must have felt this, because she gazed back at her. Richard was talking, Belinda was yawning and taking peeks into the
kitchen, as if wanting to find out whether dinner were actually happening. Maria studied her mother’s face, and Agatha looked back, steadily, calmly.
And Maria knew in that moment that Agatha was dying.
Chapter 12
SHE WAS ACTUALLY WAVING to him from the porch. Hamilton Gleitman glanced back at the house as he unlocked his car door, and there she was, waving. He imagined that he could see tear traces on her cheeks, silvery, like slug trails, and as he returned the wave he marveled, thankfully, at the naïveté rampant in the world around him.
He drove a block or two away from the woman’s house before pulling over to the curb to jot a few things in his second notebook: the vulnerable arch of her neck when with head bowed she made her confession; the powerful fragrance that had emanated from a pot of dark blue hyacinths; the tired wail of the child she had put down for a nap; her bitten fingernails; and the way she pushed her hair away from her face and tucked it behind her ears.
Most of the people he interviewed for his magazine pieces were pitiably trusting. Most didn’t even ask him for any identification. But even the few who did were no problem because he was legitimate; he was always working on an actual story and could always refer them to an actual editor to verify this.
Usually they were women. If they were working women, he’d arrange to see them on the weekend or during an evening. He didn’t care if there was a husband around, or kids; it was amazing how happily people chattered away when you were taking notes. He took two kinds of notes, one set for the story he was writing (how Family A were managing to exist happily on a single income or how B has made a success of going into business for herself or how C organizes life as wife/mother/employee/amateur actor—Hamilton wasn’t particular, he’d take any assignment going: it was this that kept him in steady work) and a second set for Hamilton the poet.
