Where She Has Gone

by Nino Ricci

  But her resistance to me seemed to be losing its edge, as if she’d expected some betrayal that hadn’t come.

  The places we saw that fell within their budget turned out mainly to be rooming houses. There was a whole string of them along Spadina Road north of Bloor Street, run-down places with shared kitchen and bath where roaches scurried for cover when lights were turned on, or shoddy renos parcelled into tiny “self-contained” bachelors with two-burner hotplates and beds that folded into the wall. There was a smell in these places of transience, of decaying humanity, though some of the residents, the old men who stared out from doorways, the women who came in dressed in tight skirts and stiletto heels, looked as if they had never known any other idea of home.

  We saw a promising place on St. George, a one-bedroom on the tenth floor of a highrise with a view of the city skyline and beyond it of a shimmering sliver of lake.

  “I keep a clean building,” the superintendent said. “No niggers. No Pakis.”

  “Thanks, asshole,” Elena said, and turned and walked out.

  On our fourth day out we looked at a place on Robert Street not far from my own. The house was a pretty Victorian painted in deep and pastel blues. But the apartment, which had been advertised as airy and bright, turned out to be in the basement, the ceilings so low I had to hunch to move beneath them.

  “I’ve got something open on the ground floor as well,” the landlord said. He was a man in his early thirties perhaps, slick, well-dressed. When we’d arrived for our appointment his eyes had gone immediately to Elena. “It’s a little pricier than this one but very nice.”

  The apartment took up the whole of the main floor, living room, dining room and kitchen and then a small, carpeted bedroom in an addition at the back. The previous tenants appeared to have left in a hurry – there were still odd bits of furniture and debris strewn about, a tattered armchair, an old rug, a few blackened pots and pans in the kitchen cupboards.

  “All it needs,” the landlord said, “is a coat of paint.”

  “Will you be doing that?” I said.

  “Well, I suppose I could. For the right tenants.”

  The living room had a fireplace in bare brick, and a semicircle of stained glass above the window; the kitchen was slightly run-down but had space enough for a table. Off the back bedroom was a walk-out to a large and secluded garden, a few evergreen shrubs pushing up through the blanket of snow there.

  “There’s been quite a bit of work put into the garden,” the landlord said. “Very nice in the spring.”

  Rita and Elena and I conferred out back.

  “It’s more than we can afford,” Rita said.

  But she and Elena had clearly been taken with the place after some of the other ones we’d seen.

  “I could help out,” I said. “You might as well have a place that’s decent.”

  The two of them exchanged a look.

  “The landlord seems like a bit of a scumbag,” Elena said.

  “You don’t have to live with him, just pay him your rent.”

  “I dunno,” Rita said. “Maybe we should keep looking.”

  But when we did a second run-through, I could see the two of them already picturing themselves living here, figuring the placement of things, the little order they could establish. Before we’d gone I’d made out cheques for first and last months’ rent.

  “We’ll pay you back when we get our refund from residence,” Rita said.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  They were to take possession at the end of the month. Coming back from Centennial the next day I went out of my way to drive past the house – it didn’t look quite as pretty, as trim, as when I’d first seen it, simply one of a long line of narrow semi-detached Victorians of which it was perhaps the least graced, for better or worse, by renovation. But still it had an air of welcome about it, of long-lived-in solidity. Perhaps some tradesman or clerk had first owned it, before the immigrants had come and then the speculators, buying up his tiny plot to build what would have been back then a shady suburban retreat.

  On a whim one day, shortly after we’d taken the place on Robert, we followed up a listing we’d seen earlier for a place on Toronto Island. A ferry took us out across a steely stretch of lake to where the island’s houses were clustered at its far eastern point. There were no cars here, no sounds of the city, only small, placid streets and little houses in clapboard or painted cedar shingles like cottages in a fishing village. There had been a snowfall the previous evening and a blanket of white lay over everything like sugar coating in a fairy tale, drip-dripping from eaves and gurgling in hidden runnels as it melted in the morning sun. It turned out that the place we were looking for had been rented that very morning; but the owner, white-haired and bearded and burly, invited us in for coffee nonetheless. His house was only a tiny place after all, with just a living room and kitchen and then a glassed-in loft up above. But he had set it up so cosily, with knitted rugs all around and bits of bric-a-brac in every cranny, that it seemed as much as a person could ever need in the world.

  Walking back to the ferry in the sunlight and snow we began to wonder aloud what it would be like actually to live in this place.

  “I could buy a place from my inheritance,” I said. “Just the three of us.”

  I had put the thing as a joke but for an instant we seemed silenced by the idea’s suddenly taking on this reality. I had an image of us gathered around a fireplace in our house with a view of the lake while outside the city, the winter, the world, were made distant and small by the surety we formed against them.

  “You could afford that?” Elena said.

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  But then in a few minutes we were already back on the water and the island was just a thin strip of white against the water’s grey.

  We drove home together to Mersea at Christmas. Only a few months had passed since I’d last been there and yet in the interim I seemed to have crossed some absolute divide, the point where going back was impossible. I stayed with my Aunt Teresa – she had finished building a scaled-down version of the house my father had started before his death and had established herself there like a matriarch, the farm stretching away behind her and her brother Umberto and his sons spread out in their various houses on either side of her like her minions. Nothing in her house had any associations for me, any history, the new furniture she’d bought, the unpainted walls, the ceramic and marble. It was as if with my father’s death my own past on the farm, whatever place I might have once had there, had been erased.

  My aunt belonged to a church now that didn’t recognize Christmas, some sort of evangelical sect whose services she attended across the border, in Detroit. What little Christmas I had consisted of a lunch at Uncle Umberto’s and then a few afternoon visits to cousins for liqueurs and sweets. By Boxing Day the time had already begun to hang heavy on me. Then in the evening, Rita called from the Amhersts’.

  “We thought we could leave tomorrow, if you wanted. To get a head start on moving and all that.”

  I came by for them in the morning. There was a load of things waiting piled in the front hall, towels and bedclothes, old pots, a toaster-oven, an old beanbag chair from the rec room, an old black-and-white television. Mrs. Amherst, in a floral pantsuit of Christmasy reds and greens, greeted me at the door.

  “They might as well have a few things if they’re going to start out on their own.”

  But there was a tentativeness in her as if she realized that she was losing them now, that they had never been hers. What had once seemed such a solid thing, the household the Amhersts had formed, now appeared merely provisional, come down to these two young strangers taking their leave, to this heap of borrowed possessions on the hallway floor.

  Mr. Amherst had come up from the basement. He looked aged, at once boyish and frail, hovering timidly by while Rita and Elena and I made trips out to the car.

  “Let me give you a hand with that stuff.”

  �
�It’s all right, I think we can manage.”

  And then we were off, the back seat piled high with Rita’s and Elena’s things and the three of us sharing the front. As we pulled out of town there seemed a tangible sense of relief among us.

  “No place like home,” I said, though no longer certain whether we were moving toward it, or away.

  V

  We moved Rita’s and Elena’s things into their apartment on the last day of December, along with two mattresses and a kitchen set we’d picked up at the Sally Ann. The landlord had had the whole place repainted in white; in the blaze of snow-reflected light coming in through the windows the apartment looked charmed, incandescent. We made tentative order and then shared a bottle of cheap sparkling wine on the living-room floor, our New Year’s Eve.

  “You did all right for yourselves,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Rita said. “Thanks.”

  Within a few days the apartment had taken on the rough shape of home. Elena had claimed the front room as her bedroom, Rita the one at the back. It was the first time since they’d lived together that they’d had separate rooms. With the split, their tastes seemed to have veered from one another’s as if the collective aesthetic bred of their years of closeness had suddenly broken down, Elena’s room spare and obsessively ordered, Rita’s girlish and cluttered. Rita’s room had the air of a cottage, with its low ceiling and panelled walls, its windowed view of the still snow-filled back garden.

  We stood a moment staring out her window at the snow.

  “So how do you like being on your own?”

  “I dunno. I keep expecting Mom to come in and make me clean my room.”

  The middle room, closed off from the front one by pocket doors, had been arranged as the living room, the television in a corner on top of a plastic milk crate, and a large corduroy sofa, apparently new, positioned to face it.

  “Nice sofa.”

  “We thought we’d splurge a little from our residence refund,” Elena said.

  She seemed to be making a pointed reference to the money that Rita had offered to use to repay what I’d fronted them. It was as if she were marking off territory, downplaying the help I had given.

  “It wasn’t very expensive,” Rita said. “There was a sale.”

  “Anyway it really sets the room off,” I said, and let the matter drop.

  I got into the habit of coming by on weekends or on my way home from classes, to help with little jobs around the apartment at first but then staying on for meals and maybe a couple of hours of TV. There was no explicit invitation for these visits, more an understanding, an instinctive accommodation even on Elena’s part to the notion that we formed a sort of household, one that stood like the inevitable coalescing of the shadowy alliance that had existed among us in childhood. The days, with their cold and snow, their after-Christmas somnolence, gave their apartment the feel of a winter retreat. The heat there was a bone-soothing radiator heat that left a throb in the air like after music had played; when it came on, the rads clicked and clanged the way the steam pipes had in the greenhouses on my father’s farm.

  Rita and Elena had worked out a schedule of TV shows they allowed themselves, trashy sitcoms mainly or bad detective dramas like “Charlie’s Angels.” The shows seemed to function like a common language or code between them from the years they’d spent watching them together. Elena would install herself in the old beanbag chair from their childhood with her cigarettes and a can of Coke at her side and a bowl of popcorn or chips in her lap and focus in on these shows like someone in the thrall of a hated rival, looking never more vulnerable than she did then, sitting there in her scruffy house clothes and stockinged feet so obviously at war with herself, so taken in.

  “I can’t believe this crap,” she’d say, but there was always the same wordless single-mindedness in her whenever one of the shows from their schedule was coming on.

  Sometimes when I came by, Elena would have friends over. These were women she’d apparently met in her classes or in a discussion group she was part of, a few who came by fairly regularly and then a changing roster of others. Some were prankish and loud, full of bravado, punked up in leather and spiky hair or wearing oversized Arrow shirts or rolled-cuffed blazers obviously culled from the Goodwill; others had the same terse, sardonic air as Elena herself, which when joined with hers made everything they said seem part of some ongoing inside joke. Toward me, these women tended to show not so much hostility as a kind of willed indifference, the making a point of excluding me from their conversation. Elena would neither support them in this nor discourage them, allowing me a place of sorts as if I were a roommate passing through but in the same way suggesting I was extraneous, not a part of them.

  These women would change the mood of the apartment like some fleeting shift of light, leaving afterwards always the small, not unpleasant bruise of their presence, the dim, background sense of something known and not, never quite put into words. You could almost smell them in the place, their particular energy, the almost cultish air of agreement that bound them in their little circle like a haze of cigarette smoke. I was always aware of their bodies, not so much as sexual things, but more like phrases or words in some unknown language; the word “maternal” kept urging itself on me but it wasn’t right, was perhaps just a way of explaining a physicality that had none of the usual messages or points of reference. I kept wanting to please them in some way, as if in so doing I could gain access to this secret energy, get in on their joke, but it didn’t take long before I’d been put off by the little pools of silence that tended to stretch out around any comment from me.

  Rita and I didn’t talk much about these friends, even though their import began to grow less and less mistakable.

  “They’re quite the troupe,” I said. “A little forbidding.”

  But Rita wouldn’t engage.

  “I don’t know. They’re all right.”

  “Do you get along with them?”

  “Sort of. They’re Elena’s friends, I don’t really know them very well. And then they’re pretty political and all that.”

  “So that kind of thing doesn’t interest you?”

  “It’s not that. It’s just – they make it seem like I’m a part of them somehow, like I’ll just go along with them. It can get a bit weird sometimes.”

  Then one day I came by to find that Elena had had her hair cut, short, her long feminine tresses and curls given way to a kind of homely featurelessness. The change was so dramatic that it seemed she’d switched personalities overnight.

  “It’s a pretty big difference,” I said.

  “Maybe that’s the point.”

  It was as if a whole layer of her had been stripped away to reveal this stranger beneath. Only now did it occur to me that this thing, this difference in her, might have to be dealt with in some way. In Rita, too, there had been a shift: she kept the slightest distance between herself and Elena now as if Elena were charged, electrostatic. I’d make joking references to her about Elena’s “political” friends, trying to break the ice, but always the same screen would get thrown up, the same clouded look would come into her eyes. She had grown up with this woman, traded make-up and clothes, been a sister to her. Perhaps there were things about their relationship she preferred not to know, entanglements she didn’t want to look into. Or perhaps the thing was simpler than that, for her as for all of us, just a matter of what was easiest, safe, what would least disturb the comfortable calm we’d settled into.

  Toward the end of February we got the news that Mr. Amherst was ill. Everything happened very fast: the word came that he’d gone into hospital and then a few days later that he’d been transferred up to special care in London.

  “The Big C,” Elena said. “Not that Mom would ever come out and say it.”

  There was a bitterness in her I couldn’t place, whose object I couldn’t decipher. As a child she’d always been the good one, the well-behaved one, Rita’s foil. But now she never spoke of the Amhersts withou
t this undertone, this air of dismissal.

  I drove them down to London. Stretched out in his bed Mr. Amherst looked small as a child, his body just a frugal hieroglyph against the bedsheets. His skin was so jaundiced it looked as if it had been painted up for a gag.

  “You cut your hair,” he said to Elena.

  “Yeah. For a change.”

  “Well I always wanted a boy,” he said.

  He had pancreatic cancer. Elena learned this not from Mrs. Amherst but by making enquiries at the nurses’ station, passing the information on to Rita and me when we went down to the cafeteria for a smoke.

  “That’s why he’s yellow like that,” she said. “The bile or something.”

  But back in his room, where Mrs. Amherst sat in grim, smiling guardianship next to his bed, no one made any reference to his condition.

  Rita and Elena stayed on in London through the weekend. But then they’d been back at school only a matter of days before Mr. Amherst died. His death had come so quickly it seemed unreal. It was hard to gauge what it meant to Rita and Elena, who Mr. Amherst had been to them.

  “It was stupid of her to send us back to school,” Elena said. “We should have been there.”

  “Maybe she thought he was getting better,” Rita said.

  “Right. She could have looked it up in a medical book, for Christ’s sake. He was lucky he lasted as long as he did.”

  We drove back to Mersea for the funeral. There was a viewing the night before at the funeral home, Mrs. Amherst sitting in stony composure between Rita and Elena in the receiving line yet seeming afflicted beyond words. The casket was open but they’d been unable to hide the jaundice in Mr. Amherst’s skin. It felt indiscreet somehow to see him like that, shrivelled and yellowed like a dried reed, so much slighter in death than he’d been even in life.

  When I went by the house after the funeral the next day, Mrs. Amherst’s breath reeked of liquor.

  “It was very kind of you to come,” she said, her face drawn up in false self-control like a mask.