The Chrome Suite

by Sandra Birdsell

  At the end of the first year, she finally took Piotr to meet Margaret in Carona. Amy walked behind them in the garden at the back of the Grandview Apartments and watched how Piotr thought to offer Margaret his arm as they walked along the path between the strawberries. Amy thought it was strange how Margaret, who had never in her entire life grown a garden, demanded one then. She requested that the developer, who owned a vacant lot behind the apartment, have it ploughed up for the tenants who wanted to grow gardens. Piotr, attentive and soft-spoken, leaned forward to catch Margaret’s every word as she poured tea and served sponge cake and strawberries in her tiny apartment.

  He was thinking about his own mother, Amy realized, by the way he scanned the room, his expression extraordinarily tender as he took in the stiff crocheted doilies spread across shiny surfaces, the bric-a-brac carefully set down in their centres. He had just learned that his passport would not be renewed and had received an official letter requesting that he return to Poland. He had decided to ignore it. He didn’t believe in Gorbachev’s new word “perestroika” and he thought then that he’d never be able to return to his country. He rose to examine the photographs on the buffet. “My children’s school pictures,” Margaret explained as though Amy wasn’t one of them. Margaret joined him to point out a young and well-scrubbed Mel; Amy, pug-nosed and buck-toothed. Her voice dropped when she said “Jill,” and Amy felt the air in the room quiver.

  When Piotr first heard the word “glasnost” he said he didn’t trust it. But Amy thought that he both wanted and didn’t want to believe in the immunity of the demonstrators they had watched, thousands of people teeming through the streets of Warsaw. Part of him wanted it to be true because he remembered too well the tanks rolling in and martial law thwarting his desire to study filmmaking in the United States. But he also didn’t want to believe in the word “glasnost” because it changed things. It interfered, she suspected, with the vision that had driven him: of earning the stature of a major filmmaker and of fame affording him special status, the privilege of being able to move freely between his home country and the free world. Now, supposedly, the whole world is free.

  He’s lost in the flickering images of people milling about in the market place, complaining that prices are climbing too fast, beyond their means, and so Amy gets up and goes over to the bed that is heaped with their belongings. She clears it off in the event that this is one of those nights when he’ll sleep alone with a pillow over his head, body tucked into the fetal position and twitching with nightmares.

  “Want a beer?” He nods quickly, indicating his desire for silence so that he won’t miss any of the news. She goes into the bathroom and puts on her robe. She fluffs her wet hair. She believes that she looks younger than she is. In any case, she often tells herself, her body is young. The absence of cellulite, stretch marks, is reassuring. She didn’t breast-feed Richard and so the skin of her breasts is still fairly elastic and smooth. She dabs gloss on her mouth, plucks two beers cooling on ice in the sink, and steps back into the room. Piotr is gone. She sees him then, through the window, his silhouette against the sky as he stands out on the rock. He’s walked out as far as he can to the edge of the outcrop with its sheer fifteen-foot drop into the water. It’s dark, she thinks. He might trip over a fissure or a lichen-encrusted node. Don’t fall. Don’t jump.

  Piotr turns, places his hands on his hips, and looks back into the room. The bathroom light shines behind her; he can see her, she knows. His citizenship card, the airline ticket he purchased in Toronto lie on the foot of the bed. Maybe, she thinks, he’s brave. The brave arrow in Rilke’s Elegies, collecting his energy to free himself from this, his first love. Shooting away, not remaining, being brave enough to have “no place to stay.” All right then, Go, she thinks, and nudges him with her eyes over the side of the rock.

  June 25, 1991, Amy writes the date in her notebook. Piotr is in the shower, face turned up to its tepid stream, eyes closed. She must be careful how to write about this day. She wants to get it straight, to be a knife paring down to the bone of this day so that when she rereads the entry she can trust it to be an accurate recording. They are both marginal people, she has come to realize. He, living in a culture he was not born into, she in one of her own making; Piotr has become her country. She smells him in the mound of clothing on the chair beside the desk. The room is dark except for the light of the lamp spilling across the clean page. She turns the lamp off for a moment, listening to the stream of water in the shower, the sound of a television in the unit next door. As her eyes grow accustomed to the darkness, the outside landscape emerges. A faint wash of light bands the horizon above the water; to the right, headlights press through the darkness on the highway. A car approaches and for several seconds she sees captured in the headlights a person standing beside the road. The hitchhiker? she wonders, and tries not to feel smug about being where she is, in the clean, friendly room, while he, the matted-haired slightly weird person, must face the night in the open, alone. God, she thinks, and turns the light back on, don’t do that. She must not forget what it was like to be him, on the road and alone.

  Piotr comes out of the bathroom and stands naked beside the bed. “Aren’t you tired?”

  She looks down at the pen between her fingers and at the blank page. Maybe that’s it, she thinks, the attraction of Piotr is like the attraction of a clean page. I thought I could write myself on him.

  “Amy.”

  “I’m coming.” Sometimes she imagines a “Made in Canada” stamp on his buttock and, beneath it, a tiny red maple leaf, She wishes she could tattoo her name onto his rear, a message to the women who might come after her that they have Amy to thank for whatever sexual prowess he now possesses. She slides in beside him. His body is cool from the shower, while hers, she knows, is hot. His cock is already stiff and so she grasps it and then rises to her knees beside him and kisses its shaft and then spreads his legs and kisses his moist, mushroomy-smelling testicles. He sucks air between his teeth. “Don’t please. I want it to last all night.”

  She rolls away from him, laughing. He moans and then turns to her, climbs on, and enters. She winds her legs around his waist. “You’re up to here,” she says. “I can feel you in the back of my throat.” He swells inside her, comes quickly, and collapses against her.

  “I’m sorry.” He kisses her again and again.

  She strokes the mole at the nape of his neck. When this happens, when he comes too quickly, she knows that he’ll rest. Have what he calls his love nap and then he’ll make love to her. He rolls off onto his back and she moves away to a cooler spot in the bed. “No, stay.” He draws her into his side. She listens to the thud of his heart in his narrow chest as he falls asleep almost instantly. So much for the love nap. She moves away from him and lies still, hearing the sound of water running in pipes, the murmur of a television from another room, feeling not the least bit sleepy.

  She gets up and goes out into the bathroom. Nytol or Scotch? Or will she stay up and write in her notebook? She sees the high rosy flush of desire in her cheeks and when she passes her hand across her pubic mound her swollen nub rises to the touch. As if her need for him was only that. She needs him for all of herself, all her bones and muscles and her heart. She hears the rumble of air in his chest and the small puff of the explosion as it passes through his lips. Wake up, Amy thinks. I have lived longer than you and so I know. This is about as good as you’re ever going to get. She widens her eyes, leans towards the mirror, and makes her face go flat, clear, willing the lines to disappear and wanting to see herself as twenty-five, not forty-one, but it’s no use. Tonight she is what she is.

  They slept together for the last time with their limbs entwined and curled towards each other, foreheads almost touching. While they slept, the hitchhiker walked beneath the northern sky, which blazed with lights that appeared to have been flung randomly across it; the systems of stars and planets of unfathomable numbers and age, their presence a taunt, a reminder of our inconstancy.<
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  But the man didn’t look up at the sky as he walked or see the meteor streak across the northern sky. He looked straight down the highway, hands shoved into his jeans pockets to warm them. His ears are sensitive to loud voices, the pitch of the “s” sounds when the radio is set just slightly off the station, to the wind. He may have, as a child, had severe ear infections that went unattended, and there’s been some scarring in the tissue. He left Lethbridge, Alberta, where he grew up, because of the wind. But the wind that night was light – intermittent cycles of warm air becoming cool, moist, and the traffic was sporadic at that late hour, mostly tractor rigs. The force they created when they passed by threatened to push him off the shoulder. He wasn’t hoping for a ride, though. He preferred to walk at night. Sometimes he’d walk as much as forty miles at a good steady pace.

  The hitchhiker is no one, really. He’s like many who go unnoticed, who appear to be steady fixed on a goal, whether that be simply to move between two cities every month or so in a straight line as she thought she had been doing, beginning with the birth of her child and continuing until he was launched into adulthood. Yes, she too was supposedly fixed and steady, like many who don’t recognize their own inner aimlessness and are as surprised as the people around them when they explode suddenly one day in a seemingly senseless act. Violence. A random shot by a random man.

  This is as much as she cares to surmise about this man’s life. Except that she supposes he has spent some of the time on the road thinking about his parents. Perhaps on birthdays or Christmas he had mailed them a card that said “Good luck. Robbie” and a Lotto 649 ticket. But if he’d sent them a picture of himself they wouldn’t have recognized the inward-turned person who had gradually quit hiking into town to shoot pool on a Friday night and then eat Chinese food before hitching a ride back out there to his cinder-block room beside the dark highway. Perhaps it didn’t make him feel good when he sat at his table in the restaurant watching families and listening to their conversation. It didn’t make him feel normal.

  A beam of light appeared in the distance and then that single beam of light split into two, headlights of an approaching vehicle. He veered off down into the side of the ditch because it happened at night mostly, when at the last moment the vehicle would swerve in his direction as though the driver deliberately aimed for him. It was an older model car. A GM product. A Pontiac. Green. Alp 985. Friendly Manitoba licence plate. “Pardon me, ma’am,” he could have asked her once. “Do you drive a silver Nissan?” Again he was enveloped by the darkness, and while she and Piotr slept, the lights of the sky fell down around him.

  PART TWO

  9

  t is almost impossible to erase the memory of a child’s face when from the very beginning you are drawn to study it, compelled to memorize the pucker of its milk-flecked mouth, the sweep of delicate eyelashes, the slightly squat nose. As you turn away from it, the face remains in your mind’s eye. Even as the child leaves for adulthood, you retain the image of a younger face.

  She can recall her son, Richard, perfectly. She can conjure him up as a five-year-old sitting out on a back stoop beneath a clothesline. Dark, thick curls tumble across his forehead. His tongue slides across his bottom lip as he concentrates on his task of stripping leaves from a twig because he wants to turn it into an airplane like the one he stops to watch as it passes low over their house. Look, Richard says, as he pushes the twig across the sky. I made an airplane and it’s flying, he says, and, because he thinks so, it is.

  Where was she then? Oh, reclining on the chaise lounge probably wearing her new zebra-striped two-piece bathing suit, watching the garden Hank had planted, grow. Or else she was lying on the lounger on the tiny patch of grass between the house and the garage, swaddled in a blanket, gulping shallow little breaths of air and waiting for the pain that attacked her body from time to time to subside.

  Whenever she stops moving long enough to look into her mind for her son, she sees him out there on the stoop behind the house. She can imagine him at age ten, with large square teeth and a longer neck, glancing off to one side, looking puzzled. Or at twenty in a denim jacket and blue jeans, tall like his father. She can see the intelligence in his eyes, the questions he will never ask.

  For Margaret, it is different. It is two years since the death of her child, and as she leans into Timothy’s side while they drive across open country, she envisions Jill in the cumulus clouds banking above the gravel road, their flat slate-blue bottoms threatening freezing rain or an early snowfall. She sees Jill in the billowing white tops of the clouds, transfigured, the substance of butterfly wings now, or angels, she thinks, silvery, almost translucent. Margaret doesn’t wish to recall Jill as flesh and blood, as she was when she danced in the kitchen, her slender, tanned arms swinging wildly at her sides, her wide grin. If she did, she would be engulfed in raging grief. Unlike Timothy, who makes a point of stopping at the cemetery on his trips in and out of Carona, Margaret has only visited Jill’s grave once, and that was to inspect the headstone her mother had purchased, a white marble lamb with the inscription “Safe in the arms of Jesus” that Margaret had insisted upon. She finds peace in her image of Jill, a larger-than-life face smiling down at her as they drive along the road.

  Timothy and Margaret have been driving for almost an hour in the countryside. The intervals between their safe, flat murmurs grow longer as the minutes pass, and eventually they are lulled into silence by the drift of warm air from the car’s heater. Outside, the trees, their limbs stripped clean of their foliage during the night, stand naked in the chilly wind. It happens that quickly, Margaret thinks, a big wind and overnight the landscape changes. The road they travel cuts up through tarnished-looking fields of stubble, past brightly painted red and green barns.

  The drone of the car’s engine and the unchanging panorama of the beige late-autumn landscape have a hypnotic effect and Margaret feels as though she is going nowhere, that she has not set out from anywhere and is not about to arrive. She’s in between. It’s a comfortable state, not having a beginning or an end – like not possessing a body. Let’s keep on going, she wants to say to Timothy. She imagines dust collecting on furniture and her two remaining children, Mel and Amy, wandering through rooms and wondering where their parents have gone.

  “We’re almost there,” Timothy says, as though he were soothing an impatient child.

  No, please, let’s not arrive, Margaret thinks. Let’s just aim the car and keep moving. They could sleep in it and quiet their hunger pangs with nips and fries, live like gypsies. She’s not certain if it’s right for her to want this. Whether the desire is a spiritual or carnal one. Anyway, it’s impossible. Tomorrow is Sunday. On Sundays she must get up early and meditate and bathe and dress with exquisite care and hurry off for her tryst with the Lord, her new lover. She will rise up among all the others around her in the Alliance Gospel Church and receive with open arms His sustaining manna and drink from the fountain of His love until her thirst is quenched and her heart swells with joy.

  The car skids as Timothy touches the brakes suddenly, jerking Margaret out of the circle of his arm. “Almost missed it.” He points to a plastic ribbon tied to a stick. Beyond it, the faint hint of a path curves through tall grass, ending, it appears, in a thicket of trees. The car sways as Timothy eases it down into the shallow gully beside the road and up the other side of it. He grabs his gloves from the dash and pulls them on.

  “You want to come?”

  She shakes her head no.

  “Well, I won’t be long. Keep the car running so you don’t get cold.”

  She watches him wade through the grass and then stop to examine a sun-bleached log lying directly across the path into the clump of trees. He rocks it and then stoops to try to lift it, but it appears to be too heavy. He waves, turns, and enters the grove, and his yellow jacket becomes a splash of colour moving among the trees. And then she can no longer see him at all.

  “I suppose you’re busy,” he’d said, referring
to the Bible lesson she was studying at the dining-room table. It was her turn to lead the discussion at the weekly prayer cell she attended at the Hardy house. She’d seen the wish in his eyes, the heavy drooping lines at the corners of his mouth, the defeated look of his thin shoulders, his hands, scoured from his scavenging among cast-off rubble, flesh gouged at the knuckles in various stages of healing. “Of course I’ll go with you,” Margaret had said, closing the lesson book, and immediately Timothy had regretted asking. She doesn’t realize that he has grown to despise her constant cheerful acquiescence, how her expression has become self-satisfied, almost smug. Her belief that there’s a larger reason for every incident in their lives makes him seethe with a feeling of impotence.

  Beads of moisture cloud the car window, but through it, in a field beyond, Margaret sees the sudden flare of a fire in a distant field, a farmer burning off stubble, she realizes. She reaches for the keys in the ignition and the engine shudders and dies. The outside world rushes forward in the sound of wind moving in waves across the couch grass. A barren and miserable sound, Margaret thinks, and feels her eyelids grow heavy. She wraps the car blanket around her shoulders and closes her eyes.

  When she awakens a few minutes later, it’s to the sound of honking. A flock of Canada geese passing overhead. Only a thin band of daylight encircles the horizon. She gets out of the car, hugging herself against the chill of the wind. Although she can still hear the geese, they’re no more than black specks in the distant sky. She calls for Timothy and hears a sharp crack of a branch underfoot as he emerges from the trees instantly, as though he has been standing hidden the whole time, watching and waiting for her to call.