The Ivory Swing

by Janette Turner Hospital

  Well? demanded the haughty eyes. Do you think you’re any smarter after four thousand years? Have you figured out a better solution?

  As Juliet formulated her answer she realized that the Quattrocento man was moving on. It was like an eclipse.

  “Oh please don’t go,” she said impetuously, catching hold of his arm. “I feel as though you’ve peeled cataracts off my eyes.”

  He was decidedly embarrassed, exposed, stripped now of the protective instructional role. She saw that he was not as young as she had first thought, that he was a number of years older than she, and that a network of fine lines radiated out from the black and mesmerizing eyes.

  “I was going to the concert,” he said awkwardly.

  “Oh.”

  “Of course, you could come.” He seemed appalled that he might have been impolite. “It’s free, you know. Every lunch hour, in the third-floor music room.”

  In the music room a group of students played on shawms and crumhorns and viols. Music of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

  “It’s beautiful,” she whispered. “Though I don’t know what to listen for. I know nothing about it.” Tempting him to offer instruction. And he did. Over coffee afterwards. Over dinner that night. Over lunch the next day, His name was David, he said. She thought: I knew it would be a saint’s name.

  She did not tell Jeremy about him. Why should she? Their rules did not require it. And how could she explain him? It was like finding a unicorn in a city park. He beckoned her into a world hung with intricate glowing tapestries and haunted by the melody of extinct instruments.

  One day he called her at her apartment and Jeremy answered the phone.

  “For you,” Jeremy said neutrally.

  David spoke in a rush of confusion. “I’m sorry … I didn’t think … I had no idea … Please forgive me.” He hung up.

  She called him back. “What did you want to ask me?”

  “It’s nothing. I had tickets for a concert … But it really doesn’t matter.”

  “Where should I meet you?”

  “Are you sure?” He seemed both nervous and reproachful.

  And later, after the concert, he said stiffly: “It was presumptuous of me. I don’t wish to interfere in your private life.”

  “You’re not interfering. I live with a guy on and off, that’s all. His name’s Jeremy. We don’t police each other.”

  “I see. Are you in love with him?”

  “He’s an exciting person,” she said. “Brilliant, I think. Politics and ferment, that’s his thing. Mine too, I guess. I mean, I’m doing my doctorate in history but paying my way as a researcher for a politician. Housing statistics, watch-dogging government spending, speech-writing, that sort of thing. Gathering material for a book as I go. I love it.”

  Amazed, as though a long telephone conversation had turned out to be a wrong number, David said: “But the art gallery? The concerts? I simply assumed you were —”

  “I’m a hybrid. Or maybe just a dilettante. As an undergraduate I had a terrible time choosing between history and political science and literature and art history. I had to toss a coin, more or less.”

  “I see. Then of course you have a lot in common with … with this man.”

  “He stretches my mind. Gives me wings.”

  “And you are … it seems you are in love with him?”

  “That’s a state of being he considers anachronistic.”

  “But are you in love?”

  “It’s amazing!” she said. “You can say the word without the least trace of embarrassment. The way the rest of us say sex, or fuck, or something”

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “I don’t know how to answer it. I suppose, if love is measured by the degree of pain I feel when I know he’s with someone else, then yes, I suppose I’m in love with him.”

  “I see.” David rested his elbows on the table and rubbed his eyes jerkily with his fingers. “I think it would be better if we didn’t see each other again.”

  “But why ever not? I love being with you.”

  He looked at her sadly as though she were the bronze dancer in the glass case, as though an immense mystery of time and cultures separated them.

  “When the code on the Indus Valley tablets is deciphered,” he said, “I might be able to explain. I’ve enjoyed knowing you.”

  She could not believe he would walk out of her life. She leaned towards him, flinging a net of seduction. What would it be like to make love to David? She and Jeremy made love like animals in heat. But with David, she thought, it would be like Tristan and Isolde, splendid, languid passion against a backdrop of Celtic music — harps and viols and haunting wooden flutes.

  “David,” she murmured, her eyes bright, “do you think I wouldn’t make love to you because of Jeremy?”

  She might have struck him across the face.

  He said sadly: “I think we live in different worlds and speak different languages, Juliet. In another age I would have been a scholar priest, I suppose”

  And he did walk out of her life. When she called, he was never home, or else didn’t answer.

  So, she thought, shrugging. One more loss to absorb, I’m an expert. And the sunless weeks passed — weeks without unicorns or sacraments of history or viols, although she went regularly to museums and concerts and galleries from which he perversely stayed away. Until the day she saw him again on the subway …

  “David!” she called with gauche abandon, pelting down the platform. “David, I’ve missed you terribly.”

  He could not disguise his agitation or delight and she felt triumphant.

  “Couldn’t we have dinner together?” she pleaded. “Please.”

  “How can I refuse?”

  And on the lurching subway car she rocked against him, wanton as Mary Magdalene with her harlot’s heart, hoping to scorch his body.

  From above he said into her ear: “The subway is unbearable at this time of day. Like a circle in Dante’s hell.”

  “Oh no! I love it! You never know whom you’ll meet. And look at the faces. I wish I could paint.”

  “I hate it,” he said. “The ugliness, the pushing and shoving … I love small towns and green and open spaces.”

  “Oh well then,” she said blithely, secure in her power, “we’re incompatible. I couldn’t live without a subway.”

  But he looked so stricken that she said quickly: “I don’t necessarily mean that literally. I do like ferment, though.”

  “Actually,” he said, “I’m leaving next month. I’ve been offered an assistant professorship at a small university.”

  “You’re leaving?!” Even in the harsh artificial light of the subway there was a sense of rain clouds massing, of the sun shrouding itself. “Oh, I suppose congratulations are in order. Where are you going?”

  “It won’t interest you.”

  “What a statement! I’ve been desolate for lectures on art history and for crumhorns and shawms, and you tell me I won’t be interested in the fact that you’re leaving!”

  “It’s the middle of nowhere. It doesn’t have a subway or even a museum. It’s exactly the kind of place you couldn’t stand.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Winston, Ontario.”

  “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Exactly.”

  “How do you know I couldn’t live there?”

  “Are you interested in trying?”

  “Are you asking me?”

  “Would you marry me?”

  “Oh!” she said, dancing on the toes of other passengers, flinging her arms around him. “Yes, I would!”

  Later he said: “It’s crazy, you know. You’ll hate it. And then you’ll hate me.”

  “Impossible!” But feeling the first chill of small-town disorientation, she asked uneasily: “If I do hate it, do we have to stay there forever?”

  “Of course not. Let’s give it a trial year. Or you could even stay here for a year and then I
could come back …”

  But the thought made both of them nervous.

  “I have some loose ends to tie up,” she said.

  Neither of them mentioned Jeremy.

  But Jeremy himself was incredulous. “You’re moving out just like that?”

  “You always said that was the way it should be. No rules, no shackles.”

  “Yes, but I didn’t think … I assumed we were both sufficiently civilized … Well anyway,” he shrugged, “at least I am. Your half of the bed will be waiting when you want to move back in.”

  “We’re leaving town. We’re getting married.”

  “Married!” She might have announced she was having her feet bound. Or being measured for a chastity belt.

  “Why should you care, Jeremy? In the past month you’ve stayed out more nights than you’ve stayed in.”

  They stood staring at each other. Jeremy looked like an animal wounded but belligerent. His pride is hurt, she thought. He did not mean for the rules to be played both ways.

  He had his hands on his hips, his feet apart. An urban buccaneer.

  If the city were to be bombed, she thought suddenly and we were all survivors crawling out of the rubble, Jeremy would grab a megaphone and stand just like that on top of a pile of smashed history.

  We’ll rebuild here! he would shout. Right here! Let’s get organized, everyone pitching in. I’ll start off getting rid of this debris …

  And David would be sifting through shards with the care of a jeweller.

  Look! he would whisper with excitement. (And the news would pass from mouth to mouth like rumours, like music.) The basement of the old art gallery, it’s survived! Look! Paintings and tapestries and bronze figurines. Come and sit, everyone, and admire and give thanks. It is a sacrament …

  And where, Juliet thought urgently, do I really want to be? On a dais with a megaphone, directing history? Or dreaming in the grotto of art?

  And the real trouble was: she wanted both, she had always wanted both.

  “Is that what all this is about?” Jeremy asked finally. “My staying out for a handful of meaningless nights?”

  “No.” (Absolutely not! Surely not?) “It’s about” — she took a deep breath and flung the words at him like a convent girl swearing at a nun — “it’s about my falling in love with David.”

  “David. That guy who phoned?”

  She nodded.

  He spread his hands in a gesture of incredulity then placed them on her shoulders.

  “Well,” he said. “What can I say? I hope you’ve made a sensible choice.” He brushed her forehead with his lips. “Be happy, Juliet.”

  Over the years she had come to realize there was no such thing as the right or wrong choice. Only a road taken and a road not taken.

  What was truly amazing, however, a never failing source of astonishment, was where the road taken led. Who could have dreamed it would lead to India, to a house in a coconut grove from which she would write letters back to her past? To a house and courtyard swept daily with a tuft of palm leaves? To a place where she would pound out laundry in a manner used by women since the time of the gaunt bronze dancer of the second millennium BC.

  She went out to the courtyard. If the sheets and towels were left to broil in the sun ten minutes too long they became as rigid and body-punishing as a fakir’s bed of nails.

  One of the cows was contentedly munching its way through the bedding.

  “Oh no!” she cried, exasperated, seizing a stick and running into the courtyard. “Stop it! Stop it!”

  The three children came running, and Prabhakaran, a look of horror on his face, flung his arms around the cow, crooning and scolding in Malayalam.

  Her raised weapon stilled itself in mid-air.

  “Naughty cow! Naughty cow!” he said. “O bad little one! O sweet little trickster! O naughty darling!”

  The cow continued to devour the sheet with calm indifference. Jonathan and Miranda began to laugh.

  “It’s all right, Prabhakaran,” Juliet said. “I won’t hurt it.”

  She thought ruefully: Cow molester! Even my sins are becoming unrecognizable.

  10

  It was not just the rank smell of curried breath and sweating bodies that caused David to sway with nausea in the lurching university bus. He was too tall for Indian buses and every time the driver careened through a pothole his head would bang harshly against the metal roof. He was rammed so tightly into the men’s section that he could not even free an arm to protect his head. He had tried, merely calling forth a grunt of discomfort from the student against whose ribs his arm was trapped.

  But he was used to this by now and would scarcely have noticed it if he had not slept so badly, if the ghost of a fear, like an ugly black furry creature, had not scuttled into the corners of his night.

  She had called out in her sleep again. Possibly someone’s name. Possibly a name he had not heard for twelve years, but had never forgotten. Jeremy. But of course he could be imagining it. It was absurd to think after all this time … but then how could he be certain? Sometimes a small shadow — a fleeting thing like the grayness thrown by a wisp of cloud — passed over the long miracle of his happiness.

  Yet he had only to summon up the sight of her reading to the children or feel the flamboyant orchid of her body opening to his, to know that all was well.

  But yet again there were those moments when she seemed to retreat from him, when her abstracted eyes roamed through some unfocused middle distance, suggesting secrets. And what did he really know of the deceptions of which human beings were capable? What had he known, what had he ever dreamed possible, of his own capacity to deceive? Once he would never have believed that there had been lurking within himself, within the clear pool of his own life, a wild amphibian thing, predatory and libidinous. One night it had astonished him, rushing forth like a pterodactyl (something primeval, something he had believed extinct) swooping out of some uncharted swamp within him, blinded by the searchlight of a casual young explorer.

  It had seemed to him, after that, that he should never presume to comprehend intention or cause and effect or the inflections of another’s thought. His own motivations baffled him sufficiently. So what could he expect to know of Juliet who was simply the most intimate of strangers? And what did he know of himself? Of how he would defend himself against past ghosts or future losses?

  In any case, perhaps it hadn’t been a name she called out. Just gibberish. For weeks now she had been tossing and moaning at night. Lying in bed with her was like trying to sleep on a small boat whose jib has flapped loose from the bowsprit.

  It’s the heat, he thought. And the isolation.

  “What are your nightmares about?” he had asked once.

  And she had looked startled. “I don’t have nightmares.”

  She claimed to remember nothing. She did not seem to know he had held her, whispering comfort while she shuddered and cried out, feeling the sheets become drenched with sweat.

  Isolation and lethargy. Perhaps she feared losing her place in the world, slipping from civilization without a trace. It was a fear that smoked around him like fog each evening when he re-entered the coconut grove. The toothless old women who sat under the trees would look up from the braiding of palm leaves, peering at him through the evening mists, and he would think: The same ones, surely, watched the ancient passing of Mahabali, the great king. Time is but a wink of their weathered eyelids. And he would feel relieved that in the morning he would be meeting with university colleagues who had visited London and Toronto and New York.

  India had probably been a mistake. Not the adventure she yearned for. No paradisal retreat. More like a narcotic. I couldn’t live without subways, she had said long ago. And he had always been amazed that she had chosen him. He had always known it was a miracle. He liked to think he had taught her a tranquility which was new to her and valuable, but it was always possible that he had taken her statements of discontent too lightly. It was hard to know
. She did everything, even speaking, so extravagantly.

  Last night he had held her tenderly sheltering her with his arms from the marauders of her sleep, when she called for help.

  Not to him.

  Is it happening then, he had wondered, turning away, staring into the past. Did she see him in Montreal, that man from the past? (I live with a guy on and off.) Was it the sort of thing that was never concluded? Had he, David, been holding her against her will all these years? Should he begin to prepare himself for change?

  He had let Susan twirl in his mind like a lucky charm at a carnival, trying to infect himself with her circus gaiety

  Like that astonishing time, the night of the pterodactyl. He had been working late in his office, reference books spread around him, the room littered with drafts of a paper he was writing. It was after midnight and even other night-owl colleagues had gone home. He was alone in the building.

  Late spring rain was pattering against his window. And then some hail. Hail? He turned, and for a mad moment thought he saw a ghostly face pressing against the pane. But his was a second-floor window. He turned back to his desk and began stacking books. Definitely time to go home to sleep.

  The tapping on the glass became more urgent. To jolt himself back to reality he crossed the room and opened the window. It was the old sash kind, with an aluminum storm-screen combination more recently installed in the outer frame. And there, nose pressed against the screen so that it ballooned inwards to touch the inner glass, was Susan.

  “Good god!” he said, sliding the screen open.

  She was clinging to the fairly substantial branches of ivy that had been smothering the building for a hundred years, and now came clambering into the room.

  “I’ve been working late on my term paper,” she said. “I was just passing by and saw your light on so I thought I might as well hand it in now.”

  “Good god” he said again, helplessly retreating to his desk and sitting down.

  She was dark and dazzling as a gypsy, her wet black hair slicked around her cheeks and neck, light breaking in the raindrops on her lashes, her damp jeans steaming, her blouse soaking wet and hugging her like an advertisement for breasts.