Losing It

by Alan Cumyn

  He was not large but he had the strong, blunt hands of a workman. His face had strange marks on it, small welts and pimples, his nose twisted. His hair was wiry and sparse and his eyebrows joined in the middle of his forehead. He looks like a toad, Julia thought. A kindly, gentle sort of toad.

  She said, “Don’t bother about your boots,” which were mud-spattered, and he immediately kicked them off. His right big toe was sticking out of his black sock, which was inside out.

  “No, really, the house is a mess,” she said.

  “It’s a beautiful house,” he replied. “Just needs some attention.”

  “Wait till you see the kitchen.”

  They walked through to the back. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands, whether to clasp them in front or behind or shove them in his pockets. But when they got to the kitchen he squatted expertly and inspected the sorry tiles. He looked like an old-time woodsman reading tracks in the mud or a farmer touching the soil.

  She explained what she wanted, as far as she knew, about pulling up the tiles to the pine floor below, about wanting it repaired and sanded and then painted and varnished. She even got as far as the Mediterranean colours, but the way he was looking at her was unsettling and she found her words faltering.

  “It’s Carmichael, isn’t it?” he said finally, straightening up, only slightly taller than Julia’s five and a half feet. “Julia Carmichael.”

  “Yes. That was my maiden name,” she said.

  “From Brookfield.”

  “High school. Yes,” she said. “Did you go there?”

  He swallowed before answering and his face suddenly went red. “Donald Clatch,” he said, moving his head up and down as if coaxing her. “Donny.”

  “I’m sorry. You did go there?” she said.

  “I sat behind you in homeroom. Every year.”

  “Ah,” she said, her face brightening instinctively, but she couldn’t remember him at all.

  “Mr. Wigs. He wore that brown suit every day, the same one, with either the brown tie or the green. Clatch. I was right behind Carmichael. Every day from 9:00 a.m. to 9:10.”

  “Oh yes, of course,” she said, nodding now, but still uncertain.

  “You don’t remember me,” he said.

  “Yes, I do. Of course. Hi!” she said, and thrust out her hand again. “I was just – well, I was never a morning person,” she said. “Homeroom was a blur. Mr. Wigs. Yes, of course. I wonder whatever happened to Mr. Wigs?”

  “He died of testicular cancer two years ago,” Donny said. “I kind of kept up with the family. I used to hang out with Bill until he went out west to work on the rigs. His son Bill.”

  “Oh. Yes.”

  “He didn’t go to Brookfield, he went to Hillcrest. He didn’t want to be in the same school where his dad taught. But I knew him through hockey. We played together from squirts to midgets.”

  “Hmmmm,” said Julia.

  “I remember you,” Donny said, his face very red now, eyes bright. “There was a scent you used to wear. I’d get to homeroom early and wait for you to sit down. It was … I don’t know what it was. But I just couldn’t wait. It was like, the start of my day.”

  Now Julia was flushed.

  “I smelled a touch of it just now when I walked in. I thought, shit, what’s that? Is that ever familiar! And then, you know, when I saw you. Julia Carmichael. You are still -”

  He didn’t finish the thought. Julia didn’t want him to finish it.

  “So you do – you do floors, is that it?” she said.

  “I do everything,” he said, proudly. “I do walls, and bathrooms, I do landscaping and painting. I’ve done roofing, it’s not my favourite. Basements! I’m great on basements.” He paused. “You knew that Billy Marcello was killed?”

  “Uh,” Julia said. “Was he?” She had a vague idea who Billy Marcello was. Perhaps.

  “In prison,” Donny said. “He’d murdered a man seven years ago. It was a bar in Hull, he was drunk, it was predictable. And then in prison he got stabbed himself. I know his sister Ramone. She’s doing great now, she works for a lawyer, has four kids, and has this business on the side selling cosmetics. She really does well. She could come by, you know, if you like buying things out of catalogues. I’m sorry. I never got to talk to you in high school, I was too shy. So I guess it’s just pouring out! So what does your husband do?”

  “That’s sweet, Donny,” Julia said softly. She thought maybe now she remembered him. He had tried to ask her out once. At least that’s what she thought he was trying to do. He’d ended up muttering something in the general direction of the floor until the bell rang for class change, at which point he’d fled. “He’s a university professor,” she said. “In English literature. That’s where I met him.”

  “God,” he said, staring at her.

  “Anyway,” she said, “I’m sorry I’m going to have to hurry us along but I need to see my mother very shortly. So what I want, really, is to get rid of this floor …”

  “Julia Carmichael,” Donny said, shaking his head and whistling softly.

  6

  There’s a trick to getting through most of life’s absurdities, self-imposed or not: stay still, keep breathing, and eventually terrible moments turn into less extraordinary ones, then are in the past. Calmly, without panic, Bob retrieved his luggage and, in the safety of an airport washroom that did not lurch and buck at crucial moments, changed into new underwear and clean, dry trousers and socks.

  Sienna was waiting for him outside the washroom. She stood tall and straight and bright as a beacon, had strong shoulders and luminous skin. “That’s better!” he said as he approached her, limping slightly from his wounds, pulling his luggage behind him, clutching closed his broken briefcase.

  “You should complain,” she said.

  “Absolutely!” he exclaimed. “That kind of mechanical failure is unconscionable! I’m going to send them my dry-cleaning bill and an invoice for, well, what can we call it? Psychological trauma! What if I’d had a weak heart? Or some kind of serious medical condition? Trapped in the washroom with water blasting out at me. Did you know there are no seatbelts in the washrooms? What are you supposed to do -?”

  And on and on, all the way to the cab. New York was sunny and cool and settling into October with steel-grey clouds massing on the horizon, ominous as traffic build-up before rush hour. Feeling better now, Bob watched Sienna across from him in the taxi sitting wide-eyed and silent, taking in the sky-scrapers, the dirty ones and the gleaming, the rivers of cars, buses, taxis (it looks like a reverse volcano, Bob thought, the lava flowing up into the hulking crater), the occasional, surprising tree, leaves thinning, pale yellow or washed-out red at best, not the vivid colours of home, but somehow in New York any colours at all seemed unusual.

  “Have you been here before?” Bob asked.

  “I was born here,” she said. “But we left when I was five, so I don’t remember much.”

  “Ah.”

  “My father was an illegal immigrant. He came from Shanghai on a boat, in secret, and worked three restaurant jobs for seven years to pay off his debt. He was a mechanical engineer and had taught himself English from BBC broadcasts during the Cultural Revolution when he was sent to the countryside. He always wanted to go to England.”

  She nodded slightly as she talked and her jaw tightened so that Bob could imagine her father had impressed upon her what it meant to escape Mao’s China, to take on menial labour in a strange land.

  “And your mother?” he asked. “You told me once she was Irish, I think.”

  “Yes. She was a nanny. She would come to one of my dad’s restaurants on her day off and spend hours at the window writing home.”

  “She came to see your dad where he worked?”

  “Well, he started working there and then after a while he owned it. I’m not sure how that happened. But it happened more than once. He ended up with all three restaurants by the time he was ready to leave. My mom was supposed t
o marry a rugby player back home, but Dad wooed her with won ton soup and ginseng tea. She maintains that I was conceived after she had eight bowls in one afternoon. Supposedly it had nothing to do with my father – he was just the guy standing by at the right time to marry her.”

  “Are they … still together?”

  “Oh God,” she said. “Like two barnacles on a boat.”

  They were immersed in the streets of Manhattan by then. An immense billboard showed a thin, blonde, washed-out-looking model in the act of pulling down her panties for reasons unexplained but apparently having something to do with a particular brand of soap. Bob let the unfamiliar streets and traffic pass through his consciousness like a series of waves that he would not try to grasp or control in any way. Their taxi driver, Ravjinder Singh, whose blurry face stared at them from the identification card on the sun visor, and whose immense blue-turbaned head seemed to take up most of the front of the car, would bring them safely to the Central Heights Hotel.

  “How about you?” Sienna asked. “How about your … wife?”

  Although he wore a wedding ring, Bob had never mentioned Julia. Not in any of the notes he had exchanged with Sienna, starting in early September when she had come to see him about his course and building when she submitted her project outline, then her poems; not a word about Julia during their quick lunches at the cafeteria, sometimes with other students and faculty, lately not; nothing about her or Matthew during their several long walks in the park at the edge of campus in the late afternoon. It wasn’t, as far as Bob was concerned, a deliberate omission. Julia simply wasn’t part of that universe – if that was the word – the universe that Sienna brought with her. It was one of poetry and light, of energy and youth and dreams and potential, the possible, as Bob thought of it, nothing ground down or stuck in the mundane mould of reality. Nothing of bills and groceries and weekends spent traipsing from home store to home store looking at tiles and glazes, cupboards and counters, doorknobs, sinks, pantries, faucets, on and on ad nauseam to repair the allegedly disgraceful kitchen. Nothing of laundry and garbage, no recycling, no lawn to tend, no muffler that sprang a hole one turn of the dial past the 10,000-kilometre warranty. There was no middle-aged spread, no decay, no brain cells falling out overnight.

  And no touch. It was pure that way. They walked and they talked of Heidegger, Proust, of Orwell in Spain and Hemingway in Africa, of Jane Austen calculating the winds of courtship, of Melville and Hawthorne and Poe. Such talk. Pure and full of energy and life, of history and literature. There was no touch, no ignoble sweating in back rooms, no furtive kisses instantly regretted, no dresses stained with executive semen.

  “Bob?” Sienna said.

  “Ah,” Bob said. “You asked about my wife. She is a very … capable woman. Quite a good … mother and, in her day, an … able scholar.”

  “You have children?”

  “One. Yes. A boy.”

  She asked his name and he told her, felt quite uncomfortable. Home was home, a different sphere, distinct, important in its way, vital. But it would be wrong to have the two intersect. They were like the positive and negative worlds of some science-fiction novel, simultaneous and opposite, not meant to know of one another. Explosions would result and it was dangerous to talk of these things, to risk disaster; the real world was tiresome and inflexible and unable to cope with ambiguities the way one could safely within one’s personal privacy.

  Bob had no problem keeping the two worlds separate in his own mind. But he was having trouble keeping Sienna in her small space. She was overwhelming that way; by far the most beautiful, original, and approachable of the undergraduates he’d taught in the last several years.

  Since Julia, in fact.

  “My wife and I,” Bob said, “have been married seven years now. It’s a very – well, it’s a conventional union,” he said.

  “Conventional?”

  “We’re doing the things we ought to be doing,” he said, with something of a sigh. “And for now, that’s how it feels.”

  “Conventional.”

  “Yes.”

  Poe betrayed Virginia too, Bob thought. As soon as she was dead he downplayed any love he’d felt for her. It was so easy. Bob wanted Sienna too badly. He wanted to stay in the bubble of her universe. He didn’t want it to hold him but he wanted to stay and so the words had come out in a tone of voice that gave the impression all was not well with his marriage, not as it could or should have been. He hated himself for doing it but didn’t stop himself either, then didn’t correct the impression afterwards.

  I’m a slumper, he thought, and slumped in his seat, in self-acceptance and resignation.

  But then at the Central Heights Hotel, a tall, bright, impressive building with an atrium in the lobby and glass stretching to the heavens, Bob felt much less of a slumper. Of course, they had booked separate rooms, on separate floors even. His was quite small, a generic North American hotel room but on a corner, with windows looking out on traffic in two directions. There was a miniature plastic bottle of Scotch in the courtesy bar that he drank down immediately to help stop the slumping. Then he carefully took his special package – his ludicrous Internet purchase – wrapped it in a plastic bag and stuffed it in the wastebasket along with the female clothing he’d brought with him.

  Enough slumping, he thought.

  The courtesy bar contained vodka as well as the now-empty Scotch. It would be stupid to mix the two, Bob knew. Especially in the middle of the day.

  Still, the Scotch had gone down very smoothly. They were such small bottles. And it was going to be a heavy afternoon.

  “So, briefly, it would be useful to recapitulate, to rough out the broad outlines of Poe’s situation in that doleful, contradictory January of 1849,” Bob said. He cleared his throat, shifted his weight, took a careful gulp of water from the glass provided and leaned close to the microphone. His notes lay open on the lectern in front of him, typed up several years before by the departmental secretary, Helen. He had delivered this lecture at several forums over the years. Occasionally he looked down at the notes and noticed something he’d quite forgotten, but for the most part he simply spoke from memory. This was an accomplished group: the feminist Solinger was there and the critic McMurphy, the French scholar Jean-Yves Rémy, who worshipped Baudelaire as well as Poe, Christopher Hindle from Yale and Dorothy Turman from Harvard and Columbia’s Professor Windower, the conference organizer. Hindle was looking a little dotty. His head bobbed badly and his mouth yawned, as if the old man had lost control of it. A new professor from Oxford was there, Saddle-something, a doublebarrelled name. And many others he didn’t know, the younger generation of Poe enthusiasts.

  Sienna sat in the front row. She had changed at the hotel into a micro-skirt and ankle boots, and was not always managing to keep her long legs together. Sometimes she shifted in her seat and revealed … well, a darkness that Bob refused to stare at but which occupied his thoughts nonetheless, fuzzy as she was beyond the range of his reading glasses.

  Something wasn’t quite right. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but perhaps it had to do with his traumas at the customs booth and in the airplane. The universe felt tilted in a way, nothing exactly where it should have been. His breathing was a little ragged; he was more nervous than usual delivering his lecture; he had a feeling that something dramatic was going to happen but he didn’t know what.

  “Poe’s wife and young cousin,” he said, “Virginia – Sissy – dies of consumption in early 1847. They had been living in abject poverty with Sissy’s mother, Muddy, in the little cottage at Fordham. Muddy was a frequent visitor to publishing houses begging for money for the family. After Virginia’s death, Poe, who has just turned thirty-eight, is lost for a time, then seems to shift gears and quixotically starts to court three different women more or less simultaneously: Jane Locke, Nancy Richmond, and Sarah Helen Whitman, then later a fourth, his old flame Elmira Royster. He is clutching at straws, hoping a good marriage can provide him the finan
cial stability that has eluded him his entire life. And yet, being Poe, nothing is simple and he seems to throw himself in all directions at once, to create the conditions in which, as Silverman has pointed out, failure is the only possible outcome. Jane Locke writes to him expressing sympathy for Virginia’s death. They correspond, feel one another out. Poe thinks she’s a widow but can’t be sure. He goes to visit her in Lowell, Massachusetts, and to his horror finds her matronly and middle-aged, married to an attorney, mother of five, a doggerel-writing parlour poet desperately fantasizing about him. So he flees to their friends the Richmonds and here he does fall in love with Mrs. Nancy Richmond, also married but twenty-eight, beautiful, tall, simple, a Christian, charitable woman, mother of a three-year-old girl. Her husband, a paper manufacturer, does not seem to mind having this vagabond poet of uncertain reputation sit by the fire night after night holding hands with his wife. She becomes Poe’s ‘Annie,’ his ethereal creature.”

  Bob took another sip of water. Hindle was completely asleep, his eyelids fluttering now and again from some dream. It was a bad sign, but the rest were with him. He had, usually, a natural ease in telling a story. His voice was deep and resonant and he loved his material. Sienna was hanging on every word, rocking slightly with the rhythm of his delivery.

  “If Jane Locke was a mistake, then, and Nancy Richmond unattainable, Sarah Helen Whitman – Helen – remained Poe’s best chance at a favourable union, one with an intellectual peer, a poet and critic in her own right, a bona fide widow six years his senior but handsome, with financial security enough for the two of them. She lived in Providence and they carried out a careful, oblique correspondence. Helen had survived a difficult marriage already, was in poor health, and did not necessarily feel up to any sort of new romantic attachment. She was also part of the Transcendentalist movement, of whose members, like Emerson, Thoreau, and especially Longfellow, Poe was so contemptuous. Her friends were his enemies, and no one seemed to have accumulated enemies quite like Poe. But, I am digressing.”