by Nino Ricci
Mrs. Amherst was travelling to England for Easter, with the thought of looking into her possible return there. Rita hadn’t spoken much about the trip; there had been some talk of her and Elena going along, but more, it seemed, as a matter of form than as a real possibility. The few times Rita had spoken about her previous trip, it had always been in a forced positive tone that had suggested its opposite.
“Elena was thinking of having a party at our apartment on Good Friday,” she said. “Since Mom won’t be around for us to go home. But I guess you’ll be going back to Mersea then.”
“I don’t know. Maybe not.”
“It’ll be her friends, mainly. Though I think she wants it to be a sort of birthday party for me.”
“That’s right. I forgot.”
There had never been any sort of protocol for us around Rita’s birthday. Every year it came around less as a day I remembered than as one I passed through: it seemed too intimate, somehow, to commemorate a birth which I’d seen the blood of, which our mother had died from.
“There’s someone I want you to meet,” Rita said. “Maybe he’ll be there.”
So she’d met a boy, then. I was surprised how casually she’d brought him up, how much her casualness hurt me.
“Is it someone you’re seeing?” I said, though in a tone gentler than I’d intended.
But she blushed.
“It’s nothing like that. He’s just a friend.”
There was an instant’s awkward silence.
“I’ve told him about you,” she said.
“What’s there to tell?”
“Oh. Stuff.”
It was already late afternoon by the time we arrived at Niagara Falls. The town looked smaller and meaner than I remembered it from when I’d come with my family as a teen, although then, too, we had come in the off-season, half the sights closed down and the town giving off an air of desolation like after the departure of a circus or fair. I remembered my father on that trip being in unusually good spirits, pulling wads of tens and twenties from his wallet to get us into museums and laughing with Uncle Alfredo over the exhibits in Ripley’s and Madame Tussaud’s. But it had already been years by then since Rita had left us.
There was a huge parking lot, nearly deserted, across the road from the falls. We pulled up there and stepped out from the comfort of the car into a bitter, mist-soaked wind. Even at this distance the spray from the falls fanned out in great, gusting sheets, rainbowing in the setting sun before falling frozen to the pavement. The path down to the observation lounge and shops at the edge of the falls was a treachery of ice despite the heaps of salt that had been sprinkled there. In one of the thicker patches Rita instinctively hooked her arm in mine for support, but then let go apologetically when the pavement cleared.
“I suppose it’s not the best time of year to have come,” I said.
“I don’t know. You could write something about it. The power of nature and that. Like the letters you used to write me from Africa.”
“You’re making fun of me.”
“No I’m not. I thought your letters were beautiful. Really. Sometimes they were the only things I had to look forward to.”
We had come to the falls. Out in the islanded shallows upstream, the river was covered with ice and snow. But here at the brink the water coursed freely. It was such a relentless thing, this surge and surge and surge, this aeons-ancient heaving forward like the bloodrush of a continent.
The spray had built up massive pillars of ice, great phantom shapes that loomed up from the folds of rock at the falls’ edges like rising spirits.
“It’s pretty amazing,” Rita said.
We stood a few moments without speaking. A sudden gust of wind sent a shower of spray against us, and Rita sank deeper into her coat. I stood behind her and instinctively opened my own coat to enfold her within it, holding her to me; and then for several minutes we stood like that without tension, staring into the falls, though it was clear in the way I held her, in the way she leaned in against me, that some line had been stepped over, that some emotion that had been hovering between us barely acknowledged had grown suddenly real. I remembered a picture in my grade-one reader of a young boy and girl, brother and sister, making their way along a rotting footbridge over a rocky chasm, and had the same sense of beginning a dangerous crossing. In the picture, a guardian angel had hovered over the two; but still the outcome had seemed uncertain, a matter of one careful step after another.
The sun had almost set.
“I guess we’ll freeze if we stand here much longer,” I said.
We walked back to the car in silence. For a few minutes the sense of our closeness lingered between us like a note struck in a bell; but then the strangeness began to settle in.
“Are you okay?” I said.
“Yeah. I guess so.”
We drove back through town toward the expressway. With nightfall, the town had taken on an eerie, dream-like quality. A few marquees had come on in neon blues and reds above some of the restaurants and museums; on the sidewalks a few straggling shoppers were making their way through the bitter cold toward home. At a traffic light an ancient big-finned Chevrolet crammed with teenagers wheeled out in front of us from the lot of a corner take-out, then rounded a corner and disappeared down a darkened sidestreet.
Out on the expressway there was nothing for us to focus on in the growing dark but the stream of tail-lights racing ahead of us. I caught a glimpse of Rita hugging her window, staring out into nothing.
“We could stop somewhere to eat, if you want.”
“It’s all right. I’m not that hungry.”
The wind had picked up. On the Burlington Skyway, a gust of it caught the car broadside and seemed ready to heave it over the rails. Then toward Toronto it began to snow, in small, blizzardy flakes that formed shifting patterns on the surface of the highway. For some reason the sight of the city’s skyline through the snow, something distantly hopeful in it, brought a lump to my throat.
The silence between us had begun to grow oppressive.
“Maybe we could catch a film or something,” I said.
But if was as if our parts were interchangeable, as if we were both merely trying to find the way to say no.
“I don’t know. There’s some work I should probably do.”
When I pulled up to her house, Elena was standing at the front window like a waiting parent. She stared out expressionless toward the car, arms folded over her chest.
“I’ll call you,” I said, and though conscious of Elena watching, still I leaned over and brushed my lips against Rita’s, the barest flicker of a kiss.
My heart was pounding.
“I’d better go,” Rita said, and then without looking back she was out in the cold, and home.
VIII
Sunday morning, early, there was a knock at my door. I hurried up out of bed expecting Rita again, but it was Sid Roscoe from upstairs.
“Sorry, man. I didn’t mean to get you out of bed.”
Sid had moved in above me in January. In his first few weeks he had come by to borrow things – tools, some paper, a bread knife, the knife coming back flecked with small, greenish bits of what I took to be hash. Then at some point I’d made the mistake of lending him a bit of money, and afterwards he had more or less dropped out of sight.
“I just wanted to leave that cash off,” he said now, and my first irritation at seeing him abated.
“Sure, sure. Come on in.” He was dressed in his usual street clothes, boots, jeans, leather jacket, but I couldn’t have said if he was just rising or just coming in. “You want a coffee or something?”
“Don’t mind if I do.”
He took a seat in the kitchen and went into a long explanation about why he was late with the money, something to do with a deal that hadn’t gone through and a late paycheque from the bar on Queen Street where he worked as a bouncer. I had developed a habit of only half-listening to him when he talked, to save the trouble of sorting trut
h from fabrication. Even this money he’d borrowed: when I’d first met him he had dropped comments about the large sums that passed through his hands from his dealing, and yet he had had to come to me for the piddling amount he was repaying now.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said when he’d finished, neutrally, not wanting to sound either encouraging or reprimanding. It was hard to tell with Sid when he might suddenly call up short my low expectations of him. Once, for instance, he’d mentioned that he did some writing, and then had actually shown up the following day with a sheaf of stories in hand, neatly typed with uniform margins and carefully whited-out corrections. The stories had surprised me, a bit crude in execution but with a real power to them. In one, a man went out on a weekend drinking binge that ended with his picking a woman up in a bar and then seriously beating her. What was chilling in the story was how it was presented utterly without judgement or excuse, stuck simply to the plainest telling of what had happened. Sometimes Sid would bring women home with him from work and I would think of the story when I heard their laughter on the stairwell, the thud of Sid’s fire-escape door.
“So I saw that woman you drove off with yesterday,” he said. “Pretty classy.”
It took me an instant to realize he was talking about Rita.
“That’s my sister.”
“Victor, my boy, you’ve been holding out on me.”
I felt the anger rise in me.
“She’s out of your league.”
He covered his hurt with a smile.
“I’m sure you’re right,” he said, his voice dripping false magnanimity.
The incident soured what little good feeling remained in me from my day with Rita. In my memory of it, the day had the dreamy ambiguity of something utterly hermetic and private, that had happened outside of time and space; it seemed a violation that there had been this witness to it. I felt like a criminal at the instant of a first crucial misstep; from this, all the rest would unravel.
It was afternoon before I’d gathered the courage to call Rita’s.
“Gone to the library,” Elena said. “At least that’s what she said.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She said the same thing yesterday.”
“We decided to take a drive.”
“So I hear.”
I felt a throb of paranoia.
“Just tell her I called,” I said.
By evening she hadn’t called back. I went out and in a few minutes found myself at the head of her street, then just across the way from her house. Through the front window I could see Elena seated at her desk silhouetted by the glow of her desk lamp; as I watched, Rita came to her doorway and stood leaning against the door frame in conversation. From where I stood I could just make out the movements of her face as she spoke. It was like reading directly through to a subtext: she was talking, smiling, responding, and yet beneath was this complex, subtle shifting of emotion as if I were seeing through to some darkness in her, some side of her where forces I knew nothing of contended.
I went home and phoned her.
“I tried to call,” she said. There was still a note of timid intimacy in her voice. “I guess you were out.”
“I went for a walk.”
Now that I had her on the line I had no idea what to say to her.
“I thought maybe we ought to talk,” I said.
I asked her to come by the following evening. But already we were getting too far away from whatever it was that had happened at the Falls, whatever the feeling had been between us then. It was the sort of feeling, it seemed now, that could only have been right for those few minutes it lasted, that had to have come out of nothing and then had to return there.
From the moment she arrived at my apartment, the two of us awkwardly sidestepping and shifting at the door as she took off her coat, everything seemed wrong. She had dressed as she might have for a first date, in nylons and a cream-coloured skirt and a silky white blouse. We both seemed aware at once how inappropriate this was.
“I shouldn’t stay long,” she said. “End of term and all that.”
I went into the kitchen to make coffee. I caught a glimpse from there of Rita sitting stiffly in the living-room armchair like someone awaiting a reprimand.
“There’s wine, if you want,” I said stupidly.
“Sure. I mean, if that’s what you’re having.”
I was stuck then not knowing whether to bring coffee or wine and ended up bringing out both, in an awkward flurry of glasses and cups that then sat incongruous and untouched on the coffee table.
“How are things with Elena?” I said.
“They’re all right.” The way her eyes avoided me reminded me of my visits to her at the Amhersts’ when she was a child. “I was probably just overreacting before. I mean, she’s always been really supportive and everything.”
There was a knock at the fire-escape door. Rita’s eye went to it with what looked like a mix of panic and relief.
“I guess you should get that,” she said.
It was Sid.
“Hey, Vic.” He was dressed in an elegant black overcoat I’d never seen him in before. “Just wondering if you wanted to grab a drink.”
But his gaze went immediately to Rita. It was as if he had been watching for her from upstairs, ready to pounce.
“So this must be your sister,” he said, flashing me a mock-innocent grin.
Before I could find a way to deflect him he was inside introducing himself.
“Wine. Very romantic. Mind if I stay for some?”
He had directed the question not at me but at Rita.
“I guess not,” Rita said, looking toward me uncertainly. “I’ll get you a glass.”
“It’s all right, I’ll find one.”
He put on a gallantry around Rita I’d never witnessed in him, pouring wine for her, asking her questions about herself. Rita seemed baffled by him at first, warily putting him off; but then slowly he managed to draw her in. He had a way of disarming people with the impression he gave that he needn’t quite be taken seriously, that he was someone you simply observed; and then suddenly he was the one in control.
“So I suppose you’re a brain like your brother here.”
“I dunno. Something like that.”
“I’m going back to school in the fall, eh. I’ve just got a few courses left for my degree. What I really want to get into though is film.”
He had never mentioned to me having been to university. But when he quizzed Rita on her courses he seemed to know the terminology well enough. It turned out – or so he said – that he’d actually done one of the courses that Rita was currently enrolled in.
“I’ve still got all the old exams and things, if you want to come up and have a look at them. It’ll just take a minute to dig them out.”
Rita’s eye went to me again.
“I guess that’s all right,” she said. But we both seemed merely at the whim of Sid’s momentum now. “I mean, if Vic doesn’t mind.”
“No, no. That’s fine.”
She was gone for more than half an hour. I heard the creak of their footsteps on the hardwood above, then the low reverberation of Sid’s stereo. When she came back down it was clear from her distracted air that she was stoned.
“I guess I better get going,” she said.
“Did you get those exams?”
“Uh, no, he couldn’t find them.” A pause. “He asked me out.”
“Oh.” It only occurred to me now, from the dead note in her voice, that she was probably thinking I’d planned all this, that I’d set her up. That that was my way of dealing with things. “What did you say?”
“I said yes.” She wouldn’t look at me. “I thought it’d be fun.”
We’d remained standing at the fire-escape door. She had gone up without her coat and now she removed it from the rack near the door and stood staring at it in her arms.
“So when are you seeing him?”
“Thursday, I g
uess. He’s off work then.”
“Just before your party.”
“Yeah.”
The stupidest, the easiest thing seemed to be to let things stand as they were.
“So I guess I’ll see you at the party then,” I said.
“Sure.”
I stood watching from the living-room window as she walked along College through the pools of light the streetlamps cast. At Spadina she paused, looked around and behind as if searching for something; and then instead of continuing westward and home, she turned south on Spadina and dropped out of view. It struck me that I had no idea where she was going. There seemed something vaguely encouraging in that, reassuring, as if she were a character in a book who had suddenly veered off the page, stepped into some secret life where there were other ways of working things, other possibilities. Without quite knowing what I intended, I grabbed my coat and hurried out after her – I could run into her, on neutral ground there on a night-time city street, and something would be different. But by the time I’d got to the corner she was nowhere in sight.
IX
I ran into Sid the following morning at the convenience store in our building. He was buying groceries – bread, tins of soup, canned salmon – though he could have got the same things for half the price at the market five minutes away.
“So you’re seeing Rita,” I said.
But he wasn’t playing the matter at all as I’d expected.
“It’s no big deal,” he said, almost peevish. “I’m just going to show her around a bit, that’s all.”
He seemed almost surprised now at his own good fortune, as if he thought of himself after all, despite his talk, his hopes, as simply what he appeared to be, a two-bit drifter trying to make his way. I thought of how his apartment had looked the few times I’d been up to it, how it had reeked of transience: dirty dishes piled up, dirty clothes strewn about, the furnishings mainly milk crates and planks and the windows tacked over with yellowing newsprint that let in a weird, sallow light.
“Anyway it’s none of my business,” I said.
