The Big Why

by Michael Winter

  47

  We arrived in New York like immigrants. No, we had left New York as émigrés and returned as exiles. Our children had not seen the city from this angle. Yes, it felt like my dream of a Newfoundland life had been attached to them, and now a new one was to begin in a foreign land. But this was where they were from. My life with Kathleen was near an end, but I loved my children.

  I took my son for a walk. I would travel with my son. There is a good church in New York that we visited — I liked it because the rain off the copper eavestroughs had painted the ears of the gargoyles green. The church had been under renovation for ten years. Buildings rust, I told Rocky, even when theyre being built. My son cannot remember the church without scaffolding. First one spire, then the other. All his life there had been a leg of scaffolding. I wanted the city to remove all scaffolding for one day, to restrain the repair of roofs in general. For the sides of houses to be finished with paint. For boats to remain untended. For gardens left unmowed. I would like to take a photograph of the city with no industry of repair. For a city is unlike a woods. We think a city finished and modern and alive. When it is a dead thing. A city presents an identity, whereas we have an identity at the end of our lives, in hindsight. Nature too. Sometimes I will look at the back of a yard and see the mature trees and think: Finally, it has come into its own, this yard.

  I explained to Rocky that hidden in the belly of the Statue of Liberty is an Eiffel Tower. Her raised heel is the root of permanent internal scaffolding. All of her weight is on one leg, a trick they learned from the caryatids in Athens. The left leg holding her right arm above. To the east, the other bookend, the Brooklyn bridge. And between them, the Flatiron Building. All fenestration. St John’s, I said, was a city that, a century before, had promised to be larger than New York. There were projections. There were plans and anticipation and investment. There was the consideration of a world of commerce and growth that would take place on that cold, foggy island in the north, a way station into North America that did not pan out. Someone had folded a map down the middle of the Atlantic, I said. They saw that Europe and America sat on top of each other. And Newfoundland is like England, a little island off the American coast. There was a promise, a potential, a world that did not get born.

  But Manhattan — this other island, nestled in the armpit of the Eastern Seaboard — this bloom grew and flourished and you are the one, Rocky, who will compare. You will grow up during a war and a revolution in Russia. You will see me work with Rufus Weeks, work and fail at a change here at home. It was difficult to realize that once you have returned home you can still be looked upon as an alien and a menace. You wanted to be different, Gerald Thayer said to me. You wanted to avoid repetition, and yet here youve gone and done the same thing. The truth is, people want home to stay the same as well. To always repeat.

  48

  We lasted another five years. As Kathleen said, everything takes five years. Then we separated. It was her decision. After three months apart we arranged a day of reconciliation. The day was ten days away. I had it marked and kept thinking about it. I was excited by it. I wanted the family together. I thought it could work. And then Kathleen called. She wanted to meet earlier, to relieve the pressure. How about tomorrow. I said tomorrow was bad, but how about now. And she said okay. I could come over.

  It was closing on four oclock. I knocked on the door that used to be my door. I had never had a reason to knock on it. The only thing new was the lock.

  The children were with Kathleen’s parents. Kathleen was wearing a lavender skirt, clingy, with a thin dark top. She looked great. She told me that she wanted to be alone for a year. That when she weighed returning to me or being on her own — the prospects looked dim.

  Kathleen: I should want to be with you, not resigned to it.

  We sat at the kitchen table. She by the wall. And I took it in. I said, Youre looking at me now with the same attention you gave me when I was young. That intimacy I offered, that flirting. That sense of openness, that willingness to talk and listen.

  Kathleen: That same power was the power that undid us.

  I did not realize that the force you trained upon me, Kathleen, you would then shift to others. The very same sly wooing you laid upon me you could just as easily manoeuvre onto someone else. I did not understand you were a wooer. I had thought I was the thing, rather than the wooing act being the thing.

  She was seeing a man named Finney.

  But now I know these things, Kent.

  We’ve spent three months apart, Kathleen, and I want us to try it. Have you thought about it.

  Yes, and I dont.

  Why not.

  Because it will offer false hope.

  Just tell me you dont love me. Do you love me?

  She shook her head.

  So you dont love me. And you dont think you could.

  Pause.

  Me: Youre sure of that.

  A nod from Kathleen.

  She was in the place of wordlessness. When she’s most wordless, that is when I want to talk the most.

  Me: How can you be so sure.

  Kathleen: I’m happy now. I dont want to return to that. I’m afraid of it.

  But I love you. And I dont believe you dont love me.

  Kathleen: Well, it’s true.

  It was six oclock now. She had to get a train.

  Okay, Kathleen. But you dont need to say you dont love me.

  Okay.

  She sat there with me for a long time, maybe another hour. Even though she was the one crying she knew I needed comfort. In fact her crying was a comfort.

  I said, I wish I’d been nicer to you.

  Kathleen: I feel it’s my fault.

  That’s odd.

  Yes, it’s odd.

  Everything we said was well-thought, considered. True, apologetic. It grew dark and I lit a candle. Her phone rang quietly. She did not like a loud phone.

  She got up from the cushioned chair near my old studio. And we hugged. She wore the amber ring I’d given her a hundred years ago and on her other hand a copper ring. Finney. She had some makeup. I asked if she’d lie down with me. And she did. We both cried. I said it felt as if something was drowning. As if we were drowning it. She was wrong, we had a good thing. I reminded her that we had children with little Kathleen and Rockwell faces, our own goddamn names. I said, pulling up, So we’re not going to grow old together.

  She did not react.

  I said, I hadnt realized I was harming you. I loved you and thought that was enough.

  She listened.

  I can change. I dont want to be an angry man. I can be so bullish.

  Kathleen: I dont want the things I love to be made angry at by you.

  She said this into the open faces of her hands. She was talking about her life. The way I criticized the things she enjoyed. I do have a meanness. But I wondered if there was a way for Kathleen to call me on it. To say, That hurts. Yes, she said. But she hadnt been able to do that in the past. And that was why she felt not big enough for me.

  Me: What I’ve realized is that you can’t just say what you want. You have to consider the other person. I thought you could just be who you are.

  I lay there with Kathleen. Our children with her parents. There was an old man next door, cleaning his soffits with a broom from the upstairs balcony. The sound exactly like the mailman opening the lid on a mailbox. As if he was continuously delivering mail. He had been doing it all afternoon and now at night.

  I miss, I said, how you brush your hair into a paper bag and then put the hair in the compost. I miss how you spread water on your thighs to stop static cling.

  When I was younger, she said, people’d stand next to me. They said they could feel the heat coming off me.

  She had to be on a train. She had to get the children. We sat on a bench outside. I’m plunged in love wit
h you. I dont want to move on. I want you in my life.

  Kathleen was very kind about this.

  She did not like how I interacted with the world. She found it abrupt. And tough to watch without judging me. The strength in my correction of things. She needed softer language. Some people, she once said, can argue to win a point. I dont need it.

  All of this is pushing the inside out. Or what we do is push the outside in. Kathleen had a gentle, private centre. I didnt care for it then, but I see the beauty of it now. In hindsight. I didnt appreciate the delicate restraint. Or anything hidden. We have mountains only because the seas are pursing their lips.

  49

  I noticed that Rocky wasnt good at figuring out, at the traffic lights, what was red and what was green. A doctor gave him a dot-pattern test. It’s a simple test for colour-blindness. Which is only, the doctor said, the inability to differentiate between shades of colour. As if that was a small thing. The son of a painter. It’s true it never bothered Rocky. And what did he do but study vision. We built a lab. Rocky grew up to work in spectroscopy, the analysis of materials. I said to him, Why. Why this. He said, It’s science, Dad.

  But it’s not artful.

  He was offended. Dad, he said, I’m tired of the surfaces of art. I’m interested in the spirit within. I spin electrons. I disperse energy. I deflect ions into thin slits and measure current. I study emissions and the absorption of different wavelengths. The nucleus of every element, it carries a charge. And I study that charge. I tell it where to go. I’m involved in chemical noise, in magnetic resonance. If that is not interesting, Dad. If you dont think that’s important.

  It is important, son. Youre studying light and pigment. Youre inside them. And as you say, I’m only on the surface of them.

  He got it from his mother, the colour-blindness. A weak X chromosome.

  50

  A year after my divorce I saw Jenny Starling. In New York. I was living alone, I said. I hardly saw the children. Jenny could tell I was lonely. She had left Luis Starling for good and had married Gerald Thayer. We met near my apartment during the last days of December. I had missed her birthday. She said Kathleen had offered me adoration and stability.

  These are the things one looks for, Jenny said, when one is aggressive and wants babies.

  I realized then that it was not Kathleen but me who’d want-ed children. It was me with the pattern and a fixed life. I wanted both the conventional and the exotic.

  Jenny: You were impressed with talent, and yet when youre impressionable, it means you can also be embarrassed. It is always better if one is not vulnerable to embarrassment.

  Jenny said my irises were betraying me.

  It had rained all morning. All the light from the world drained out to fight the rain.

  Gerald told me that if ever I saw you I could fuck you but not kiss you.

  Me: Jesus.

  Jenny: What do you think of that.

  Me: I dont know what to think.

  Jenny: I can’t figure out where Gerald is these days. He’s all over the map.

  Alma used to say the same thing.

  We were in the car the other day and he told me to pull over. He’d pissed in his pants.

  Was he, what was it.

  He was anxious. He said it just came over him.

  He should get that checked out.

  She took my hand. Are you going to invite me up?

  Jenny.

  I showed her up. My apartment was a place to crash. I was spending most of my time on a small farm in Ausable Forks.

  Jenny: Do you think people a century ago had similar thoughts to what they have today?

  Me: Probably.

  It’s just their public comportment that changes.

  Society, I said, was more polite and mannered.

  But the inner life remains the same.

  Yes, the inner life.

  Just fuck me hard, she said. Will you do that?

  Jenny. What’s wrong with you.

  And then I gave up. I pushed her into the bedroom. I pressed her into the mattress. I fucked Jenny Starling in an angry way. I said I’m going to break a bone, Jenny. And you’ll have to go to the hospital.

  The bad hospital.

  I thought about this. It will be the hospital where the janitor shits on you.

  Where the doctors in white cloaks walk around with their big cocks hanging out.

  That’s the one.

  They fuck the patients in packs. They have swollen veiny cocks.

  Here’s one now. He’s wiped the shit off your ass and he’s got a clipboard that he smacks you in the head with.

  I rammed her hard in the cunt.

  We fucked like this until she came. I pushed against the flex of her pelvis. Then we dressed and stood at the window and looked at the cold city. It rained a little more. Do you want to go outside?

  Jenny wore my green jacket. We walked to a little wet park. She said she didnt know that men thought that way. She had talked to a few women about fantasies. Gerald, she said, likes to make love gently. She said Gerald is a blend of arrogance and insecurity. And his arrogance, like yours, covers up his insecurity.

  You like the illicitness.

  The degradation comes as a release.

  We sat there in the park until she was hungry. I held her hand a little. Then we walked back to my apartment. We ate cherries while I cooked dinner. And I hugged her as she left. She was on the edge of staying. But I suggested she should go. Her boyish nice feet. She said, Youve gotten conservative and youre hard-working and you smell like soap.

  I smiled at this. Then she said, I decided to say something that did not belong within the assumptions we have of each other.

  I was rolling out pastry when she came back.

  Are you making pie for me?

  I always make pie at Christmas.

  And there I was, thinking.

  Happy birthday, Jenny.

  I forgot your coat.

  She reached her arms around my neck and kissed me. Blue eyes. She had a snaggly tooth. Sometimes, when her mouth relaxed, her lips rested raggedly, like an animal after it yawns. She was beautiful, sexy, and alive.

  I put the pie in and we got back into bed. We got into bed in a tired, comfortable way.

  Do you want more of the bad hospital?

  No.

  I had painted the bedroom red, but only one coat. The white primer had showed through. You could see the roller marks and the white like skin through a dark stocking. But the roughness appealed. It was not what I’d intended to do in painting the room. I was to be thorough and then had reconsidered thoroughness. There was something indicative of my thrust in the world, this rough colour. I was attracted to that which wasnt methodical. To what was fleeting.

  I went down to the lobby with Jenny, and then watched her walk away into the night. It was the last time I saw her. She had a buoyant step. I liked her shoulders — from behind she reminded me of Emily Edwards. There was a resilience in Jenny’s gait, a resilience that made me understand that there are some women in the world you never have to worry about.

  51

  You are, Kathleen said, a man who cannot look at a woman without contemplating the sexual. Youre awake to it. Youre a scallop with its shell lip unlocked, considering, a tendril out, testing. And now, looking back, and knowing, at least having a sense of how things lie, it’s safe to say that Bob Bartlett was a man who could not give in to his sexual side.

  I would bump into him here and there and stand him a drink. A man devoted to the North. He often spoke of the trouble with women. The women in his life. I’m a teetotaller, he’d say, as I poured him one. At least, back home I am. Which was true, for I knew him in both places. He did not drink in Newfoundland. But in New York, in those deadly years of the thirties and forties, Bob Bartlett drank. I’
ve seen him boast, as he drank, that he’s never touched alcohol. And in the next breath recalls falling in love with a woman in England. But did I ever see him come on to a woman?

  Bob Bartlett was, as they used to say then, inverted.

  I have seen Bartlett in the Explorers Club, drinking Guatemalan rum on the house, telling stories of Peary, polar bears, and shipwrecks. I have walked him home, to his room in the Murray Hill Hotel, and listened to him complain of the ignominy of it all, that he must exchange these delicious stories for a meal and a drink. He did not use the word ignominy. He said wrong. The wrong of it all. I join a circle of men, he said, and they begin to goad me into a Peary recollection. It is a fall of dignity. It is degrading.

  But this was all decades after, when Bartlett had been reduced to making coin off his name. It’s one thing to lecture and another to find yourself holding a glass of whisky, realizing you are the embodiment of the word regaling. To regale is fine, as long as the tone of your regaling is not the reason youve been invited. If your story has honourable rather than cynical intentions. The dinner and the salad and then desserts and coffee and then the nod over to the map room, the wooden cork smacking out of the neck of twelve-year-old whisky, and the interlude that signalled it was Captain Bob’s time. The fat cigars.

  He did it and the worst part was the agreeing. A man retains the structure of integrity, even after he has sold off the shelves of goods that integrity insisted should never be sold. And so Bob Bartlett walked about as a proud shell of a man. And that was when he drank. He drank as a youth and he drank in his forties. There was a ten-year period in the Brigus house, under his mother, when he drank nothing. And it was this period of life that he tried to spread over his entire life. It was his ideal of the good man, and he wanted to construct himself ideally. Maybe all men do. Perhaps that is our downfall.