Book Read Free

The Case of Lena S.

Page 9

by David Bergen


  “Show-off,” Margot said.

  “I’m fat,” Lena said.

  Emily giggled. “Big tummy.”

  “Naww,” Mason said.

  “My favourite boy,” Lena said, and she lifted her face and kissed him on the cheek. Mr. Schellendal was watching. Lena kissed him again. Mr. Schellendal said that they’d seen enough and he turned off the video. He stood in the middle of the room and said, “Well, Mason, it was wonderful that you could come. We always like to meet our daughters’ friends. Don’t we, Beth?”

  “Yes, Mason,” Mrs. Schellendal said. Then she turned to Lena, “Do you want to drive Mason home?”

  “Ahh,” Mr. Schellendal said, “He can go on his own. He looks in shape. Do you play any sports, Mason?”

  “Tennis,” Mason said. “Not now, though. In summer.”

  Mr. Schellendal seemed surprised. He swung his big head and said, “Tennis, huh.”

  Lena said she would walk Mason home halfway, up to the bridge. “Okay?” She took Mason’s hand and squeezed.

  Outside, Lena shivered in the late October air and said, “My sisters were jealous, my mother was jealous. Even my father was jealous. Nana liked you.”

  “She was very nice, defending me. I felt like an idiot. Why did Solomon have such a bleak view of life? Do you know that one? I couldn’t think. I mean I could come up with an answer now, just like that, but whoaa, when I was sitting there it was like an exam. He asked that question and I was looking at your sisters and thinking how they were all really pretty and how maybe they could help me with the answer but nobody said anything. Everybody just stared and I panicked. So I thought about your mother’s ring and how big the diamond was. She’s got hands like you.” When they reached the bridge they stood facing each other. Across the street the hospital sign glowed red and white. Lena’s breath rose into the air.

  “I should have warned you not to just dive into the Bible verses. My father likes to plan these things and you threw him off – which was nice to watch.” She said that no one ever passed the tests. She said that the most devout missionaries could not pass. “My father hates all the boys I date. Don’t worry, there haven’t been many, three, max. It’s just, my father likes to meddle.” She sighed then and banged Mason’s shoulder and said that overall she was happy with the evening. “My mother seemed to like you. And Rosemary.”

  “Your silent sister. She sat there and listened. Even when we were watching the video of her baptism she just sat there, like it was someone else up there.”

  “Rosemary’s so secretive. She slips in and out of the house and sees boys my father would hate. She floats through a dark world and my parents only see the light. Rosemary’s good at hiding.”

  “Maybe you should do the same thing,” Mason said. “It would keep your father happy.”

  “I don’t give a shit about my father’s happiness.”

  “Sure you do,” Mason said. He put his arm around Lena’s neck and pulled.

  “He doesn’t want me to see you any more,” Lena said. She was sitting beside Mason in a back corner at Cousins, which was located across from The Nook. Lena had just gotten off work and they had arranged to meet. It was cold, mid-November, and Lena was wearing an old hip-length coat that she took off and hung on the back of a chair. She still had her uniform on, a pale yellow dress, the hem of which she’d altered; this made the dress a lot shorter and she kept tugging at it and shifting her hips. Her lips were dry and cracked. Her face had an odd pallor; the whiteness of her skin had darkened in the several weeks since the dinner at her house and Mason had an urge to scrub at it.

  “So what are we going to do?” Mason said.

  Lena lit a cigarette and looked away.

  “What’s wrong with me?”

  “It’s not you. He just gets worried and of course I can’t be going out with some pagan. Who you are is way out there somewhere not even close to who I am and there’s nothing he’d like better than to find a perfect Christian boy for me who speaks both German and in tongues. The other day he saw you standing on our sidewalk and he said, “Who’s that?” knowing very well who it was and he asked me this. Got me from my room and pointed out at the sidewalk at you and said, ‘Who’s that?’ I said, ‘My goodness, it looks like my boyfriend, Mason,’ and he said, ‘I don’t want you seeing him any more.’ I figure you gotta stop mooning outside my house.”

  “Okay, I won’t. Jesus Christ. Your house is a fortress. No room for Mason Crowe.”

  “Do something then. Get a ladder and scale the wall. God, I’ve missed your little heathen body.”

  Mason took Lena’s free hand and pulled it across the table towards him and held it between his palms. He studied her face. “You’re kind of pale, like you were sick.”

  “I am sick.”

  He asked her if she was going to obey her father. “Are you going to stop seeing me?”

  “ ’Course not.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Run away. Or, we could get married.” She smiled. It was a mocking smile and it made Mason wary.

  He imagined Lena in a white dress and himself in a tux. Flowers. A garden. Photos. His parents off to the side. I do.

  “Say our vows and there we are,” Lena said. “I would be Mrs. Crowe. Huh.” She touched her nose and studied the scene around her. She said that the restaurant had an odd odour, that her sense of smell was very acute these days. It was the medication. “Did you know that every Tuesday I go talk to my psychiatrist. A fat woman who gets excited when I talk about sex.”

  “You talk about sex with her?” Mason asked. “Not about us, I hope.”

  “Sure I do. She thinks you’re quite a guy. Don’t worry, I call you Gustave.” She gave him a smug look and lit a cigarette and exhaled upwards. “You haven’t gotten me any books yet, have you? That’d be a reason to drop by. ‘Hi, Mr. Schellendal, I just happened to have this book, could you give it to your daughter?’ It’d make you look intelligent, rich, caring. Mason, my intellectual. He’s impressed by serious boys.” She put out her cigarette. Lifted his hand and bit his finger.

  Her hair was dirty and he took a few strands and pulled at them and said that he’d rather talk to her mother, who was much more approachable. Then he said she shouldn’t worry because he had nothing to hide and besides, her father couldn’t chain her to the bed in her room.

  They parted on the sidewalk by Sherbrook and Westminster. Lena looked up at Mason and touched his mouth with a mitten. “Bye,” she said and put her arms around his neck and held him, and he thought for a moment he might end up hating her. He wrapped his arms around her and said, “Lena.”

  The book was on top of one of the shorter bookcases by the window. Mason picked it up and looked at it. The Collected Poems of Robert Browning. The cover was green. A picture of Robert himself, a low beard and waxy face, bushy eyebrows, man long dead. Mason slipped it into his bag. Mr. Ferry came back from the kitchen and settled himself and asked, “How’s Lena?”

  Mason said he didn’t want to talk about Lena.

  Mr. Ferry said that that was no problem. He said that the way of the world was a mystery. He swung his hand at his wineglass. It tipped and spilled and broke on the floor. His head swivelled towards Mason and then back to the spot where the glass had been. “Did you move it?” he asked.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Could you clean it up, please?”

  Mason stood and went into the kitchen and searched for a rag and a dustpan and broom. “In the closet by the fridge,” Mr. Ferry called from the other room. Mason found what he needed and came back and pushed the broken glass onto the dustpan. He wiped up the wine and returned the rag and dustpan to the kitchen. He returned with a new glass and poured more wine for Mr. Ferry and set the glass in his hand.

  “Thank you,” Mr. Ferry said. “Did I spill on the books?”

  “No, they’re fine.” There was a stack of three paperbacks. A corner of the Browning peeked out from his bag.

 
; Mason read then, from a translated book of Russian poetry, but his tongue was thick and he stumbled over the words and the poems made little sense except for one about how speech is divided up into parts but by then he was tired and Mr. Ferry let him go early. He walked home, the stolen book tucked into his backpack.

  He put the book in his room where it sat until one night he picked it up and read several poems. The following week he took another book. The writings of Jakob Boehme. He felt no guilt, in fact he took pleasure in placing the book on his own shelf, reasoning that Mr. Ferry would not miss it. Over the next weeks he took twelve more books. He didn’t read them, he wasn’t sure if he even planned to read them in the future. He just took them, as if by possessing them he was making his way in the world. Once, when Mr. Ferry left the room, he pushed The Riverside Shakespeare into his backpack and later, walking home, its heft weighed on his shoulders and he thought, “All those words.”

  One Tuesday Mason arrived and Mr. Ferry had been drinking and seemed uneasy. He lifted his glass when he heard Mason and he said, “Here’s to all the necessary things.” He drank while Mason took off his boots and hat and jacket.

  “Is it cold?” he asked, tilting his head.

  “Yes,” Mason said.

  There had been a heavy snowfall, snowdrifts had built against the sides of houses, and the temperature had dropped. Car exhaust made objects disappear.

  “A drink?” Mr. Ferry asked. He motioned at the wine bottle.

  “No. Thank you.”

  Mason sat down and Mr. Ferry said, “I was thinking about Lena just this morning and her visit, what was it, several months ago? In any case, I was thinking she should come again, only stay a little longer. She ran off so quickly. How is she?”

  Mason said she was fine. She was busy working and he didn’t know if she’d have time to come back. He said she was shy.

  “Really. I thought she was more haughty than shy, but those two can be confused, can’t they? She’s got a beautiful name. All kinds of possibilities. Lean against the fence. Scarcity. Inclination. Fall. It’s perfect.” He paused, held up a hand, and let it drop. “You know, of course, that there will be others. They will accumulate like debts. And you will love each consecutive girl a little less. But there will always be Lena. You don’t want to hear this, do you?”

  Mason didn’t answer. He looked at the old man’s bare feet sticking out of his open slippers, his toenails, the bluish hue of his ankles.

  Mr. Ferry wasn’t finished. He said he wanted to talk about stories. He said that the goal of telling a story was not to amuse. The writer was not a magician sent forth to beguile, neither was the goal to teach as if a story were a map rolled out and held flat with weights and the reader a lost traveller bent over that map trying to find the way. The purpose of a story was to enchant, and the reason we like stories, he said, is because they are truer than our own lives.

  He said, “The story I will tell you is something you might have heard before. But that doesn’t make it any less important. In fact, in this whole world there are only a few stories to tell. It is how we tell them that is important.”

  Mason was watching Mr. Ferry, who was focused and intent on telling this story. He was hunched forward and his hands were folded in his lap. He appeared to be looking at a particular spot on the floor.

  “I once knew a woman called A.,” Mr. Ferry said, “who one October found herself at a hotel in Gimli which looked out onto the lake. She was married but she had come alone to take some time to gather her thoughts. She was unhappy and had told her husband this and her husband had sent her off to rediscover herself. These were his foolish words.

  “While there she met G., a man on holiday. The two of them spent time together strolling the boardwalk and looking out over the masts of the sailboats to the brown water of the lake which stretched eastward like a shallow ocean. They both had time to idle away and they did this indolently, as if the things of the world did not concern them. A week passed and one evening on the pier G. turned and kissed A. on the mouth and said with a quiet voice, ‘Let’s go to your room.’

  “After, G. sat at the table eating an apple and he studied his new lover who lounged at the edge of the bed, distraught, it seemed, because she had deceived herself. G. did not understand, in fact the scene bored him, but still he held and comforted her and later they went out along the pier. There was not a soul around. They sat on a bench. White clouds above the lake. The evening, the sky, the beautiful woman beside him, all of this enthralled G. and he thought that everything in the world was really beautiful, everything but our own thoughts and actions when we lose sight of our dignity.

  “In all this A. took obvious pleasure but she saw herself as a vulgar woman and when she left Gimli to return to her husband she told G. that it was a good thing. ‘It’s fate,’ she said.

  “But of course the affair did not end, and one day A.’s husband learned of the betrayal and found A. in her bedroom. She was sitting in blue panties before the mirror holding a powder puff. He loved her. He really did love her. He realized that he was jealous and he stepped close to his wife and clasped her shoulders. He saw his brown hairy hands on her white shoulders. He asked her to be honest and she half-turned, her upper body twisting at the hips and she sat, a lifeless being, a mannequin made of wax and silk lingerie and she said very slowly, ‘I never miss you.’

  “ ‘So you don’t love me,’ the husband said, and A. said, ‘No.’

  “ ‘Aha, I see,’ said the husband, and then he said, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ And A. said, ‘Kill me.’

  “The husband was filled with hatred, for his wife and for himself, and he thought he should do something, should bring some order back into his life, and the thought that he could make order gave him strength and he left his wife and went out into the city to look for the man who was the lover of his wife but he did not find the man nor did he want to find the man. The husband was pathetic and weak and if he had lived in a time when duels were acceptable he would have suffered shame rather than be shot. He loved his wife.”

  At this point Mr. Ferry stopped talking. His eyes were closed.

  Mason asked, “And so?”

  Mr. Ferry turned his head as if surprised by the question or as if he were only now aware that he had an audience.

  “Ah, yes,” he said, “what happened.” He lifted his hand and splayed his fingers. He said, “What would you have liked to have happened? For the wife to come back to the pathetic husband? For the husband to shoot the lover? Nothing happened. The couple grew old together. A. saw G. several times after that and then never again. That’s what happened. Then one day A. left her husband and he continued to live in his house by himself only he no longer saw what was around him. He cut himself off.” Mr. Ferry stopped talking.

  Mason waited. Then he asked a question to which he already knew the answer. “Were you in that story?”

  Mr. Ferry lifted his head. “Which?”

  “The story you just told.”

  “Did you recognize me?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure why you told me it.”

  “That’s good,” Mr. Ferry said. “To not be sure is good.” Then he turned his head to Mason and said, “I might be recognized. I was once foolish and sent my wife Anabel off on her own to be cured of something I didn’t understand. She fell in love and I was jealous and hated her. Did I threaten to kill her? Once perhaps. Though I didn’t do anything. Eventually she left me but not for the man she briefly loved. And now I am blind and I sit and live in the perfect world of other people’s stories.” He paused. Drank some wine, and then continued. “There you go, those are some of the facts. But it isn’t exactly my story. I didn’t put my brown hairy hands on Anabel’s white shoulders and she wasn’t sitting before a mirror in blue panties holding a powder puff. That image comes from a novel about the Hapsburg Empire. The Trotta family. Or G. thinking the world is really beautiful, everything but our own thoughts and actions when we lose sight of our di
gnity. That line I took from a Chekhov story. So, I stole from two stories. What do you think?” He folded his hands in his lap. “What do you mean?”

  “About stealing.” He turned his head like a bird about to strike.

  “What do you mean, stealing a story?”

  “For example, a story.”

  “I don’t care,” Mason said.

  “You should. It’s important to discern. The question is, is it okay to steal a story, or parts of it, if you let someone know it’s stolen? Is that better than just outright theft?”

  “Probably,” Mason said.

  Mr. Ferry wasn’t finished. He said, “Kierkegaard wanted to be a novelist. It was as if he recognized that a story was different from a book of philosophy. It has more possibilities. One of his ideas was about a man who wishes to write a novel in which one of the characters goes mad; while working on it he himself goes mad by degrees, and finishes it in the first person. He never did write a novel. But what if I did this? Decided to write a novel about a sixteen-year-old boy who reads Kierkegaard to a blind man and show the boy in all his innocence and guises and put a microscope on his love life and burrow into the mind of his girlfriend and, throughout the story about the boy and girl, I would scatter Kierkegaard’s words like seeds, only I wouldn’t acknowledge that these were his words, they would just appear, like signposts to the attentive reader. Every writer steals in some way from other writers, be it ideas, or specific lines, or inspiration. And indeed, my own theft is perhaps less harmful since it is more readily discovered, since I am confessing to the theft in advance. What do you think of that?”

  Mason didn’t know where Mr. Ferry was going with this. He supposed it had something to do with the stolen books but this didn’t frighten him. He recognized himself as the sixteen-year-old boy, at least he thought he did, and this piqued his curiosity and he wondered how Mr. Ferry could put a microscope on a teenager’s love life, what did he know, and he realized, as he had listened to Mr. Ferry, that he did not understand the man and in some ways he was alarmed by him.

 

‹ Prev