by John Bemrose
She sipped at her tea, avoiding his eyes. She had no way to convey, did not want to convey, what lay behind her husband’s gaze.
“What do you mean — a bad way?”
“It’s nothing specific. He’s just — well. It reminds me how he was, after the war. Not really himself at all. The children feel it. I suppose it’ll be all right.”
She shifted in the hard chair. Her time of month was coming on and for a moment her digestive tract seemed crammed with nails. She felt all this must show in a general unattractiveness. Yes, it was a mistake to have come.
“If he’d like to drop by for a talk,” he said. His tone had hollowed, professionally sympathetic now. But he had actually withdrawn, she felt. It made her feel even more the pariah. “Would you like me to speak to him?”
“No, no. He’d know I — he wouldn’t thank me. He’s very proud,” she said, and a flash of love went through her, for her husband. It was something she did not often think of, but now rediscovered as true. In her husband’s isolation, which she deplored, was something else, which she did not deplore at all. He was better than all the rest, better than Jack Ramsay with his endless, friendly chatter.
“No,” she said, suddenly protective. “It’s all right. Just let it be, for now.” And thinking she must give Jack something for his time, she managed a smile and added, “It’s been helpful, though, just talking to you.”
“Not at all,” he said. “Grief,” he said, and the word sounded theatrical on his tongue, “it can take a long time to work itself out. You just have to be patient with him. Pray for him,” he told her. “I’ll pray for him.”
“Thank you,” she said. She had been praying for Alf, but this mention of prayer unsettled her. Prayer was such a private thing, the words leaping and stumbling from the heart. She felt that in talking openly about it, he had turned it into something vaguely shameful.
Yet prayer, really, was a joy to her. To feel the leap of her silent words, the leap of them in the dark bedroom, as she lay beside her husband: an electric current of joy, as fine, and finer in its way, than singing. Prayer was a kind of singing. What she wanted, almost more than anything, was for Alf to know the same joy. But he had never taken kindly to her suggestions that prayer might help. She suspected he did not pray. Watching him in church, from her place in the choir, it seemed to her that he was set against the place and everyone in it: his mouth not moving during the prayers or hymns, his eyes looking straight ahead without any discernible emotion. And in bed, in the dark, she had no sense of him praying, in the dark beside her. It was disheartening, to think he did not know this joy. But then again, perhaps he did. He was so private, and prayer was the most private thing of all.
She left Jack Ramsay’s office feeling uneasy, and followed the mob of children into the church. She separated the angels from the shepherds, the shepherds from the wise men and the animals. A few lights had been turned on against the leaden day outside. She noticed Penny, slumped by herself at the end of a pew. Her daughter looked forlorn. Since getting diabetes, Penny seemed more prey to these moods: Margaret was perpetually wondering if her blood sugar was all right. She picked up a shepherd’s crook and approached her daughter. “Is this yours, love?” Looking up out of her abstraction, Penny appeared not to recognize her. Those eyes simply looked at Margaret, out of their alien blue.
Later, at home, she found Alf on the bed, lying on his back with his shoes sticking out from the bottom of the spread. The top was pulled up to his chin. He had been lying there, as the light grew dim, for God only knew how long, in the cold bedroom.
Changing her dress, she snapped on the light on her dresser: an act of aggression, to make him stir. After a while, he threw back the spread and sat on the edge of the bed. He was wearing his trousers and an undershirt and his hair was splayed every which way. She was hopeful, but he stuck there, staring at the floor and scratching at his thigh. It infuriated her, the way he had given in to his sadness — if that’s what it was. Even more than she wanted him to talk, she wanted him to bury his sadness, like she did. She wanted him to drive sadness out of the house, by force of will.
“Supper will be a bit late. I just put the meatloaf in.” She went past him quickly and out. Turning at the top of the stairs, she glanced back along the hall and saw that he had not moved. He was looking at her now: his shadowed eyes agleam. It was his postwar look, definitely, when he would watch her, backed by such a fund of dark knowledge she had felt she must scream or suffocate. There had been days when she wanted to leave him, to go back to England. One day she actually packed her bags and carried them as far as the front door. But leaving was no longer a possibility. There were the children now, and there was something else: she was married to him, in a way she had never been married at twenty-three. Over the years, like two trees twining together, their trunks had fused. Perhaps they did not belong together, perhaps their natures were all wrong for each other (she had considered all such possibilities), but there it was: their marriage was a fact, a fact that had somehow made its way to the core of her being and lodged there.
She met his gaze frankly. She would not be cowed by his look, as she had been, years ago. Even though she understood nothing about it, about what he was feeling or thinking or remembering, she refused to be cowed.
“Come down soon,” she said briskly. “I’ll make you tea.”
25
DEEP IN THE LINCOLN the transmission shuddered gently and they were floating, Joe and Liz, past the parking meters and the strolling pedestrians and the show windows with their banners announcing post-Christmas sales. That night her parents were holding a New Year’s Eve party, and he and Liz were off to Johnsonville to buy her a new dress.
He was in love with the car, the luxurious sweep of the seats sheathed in tan leather, the easy tug of power as he touched the gas. It was his first time behind the wheel and he was driving almost gingerly, wary of what the car might do. It floated so smoothly, almost without a sound, and yet under the wide, placid hood he sensed the reserves of power, something alive, even conscious, as if it were asking to be unleashed.
On the Bridge Street bridge, he laughed out loud.
“You like it?” Liz asked, with suggestive coyness.
She swung one leg over the other, with a whisking sound of material rubbing, a stretch of tweed skirt emerging from the soft, falling weight of her fur coat. In her violet, too-bright eyes was a triumphant knowing. She might have just presented him with wings.
He glanced at her legs, shapely and exposed nearly to the thigh in rose stockings. And her legs, too, became part of his excitement, as if her body and the luxury and power of the car were one. They passed onto the Flats. He was starting to accelerate, when suddenly Vern Melling’s garbage truck was in front of them, stopped by the curb as Vern and his son loaded up an old couch. The opposite lane was blocked with oncoming cars. Joe hit the brakes and the Lincoln lurched to a stop. On the sidewalks, Bannerman’s employees were streaming home for lunch. As he waited for the lane to clear, Joe saw his father appear past the end of the truck. He was walking by himself, wrapped in his thoughts, it seemed, his coat flapping open, his green workshirt partly untucked, and his hair, which was long overdue for a cut at Benny’s, blowing wildly. Just then Alf looked up and saw him. His face registered recognition, but Joe, hardly knowing why, looked away. A moment later, Joe wheeled the Lincoln around the truck. In the rear-view, he saw his father stalking off down Bridge.
Joe turned past the mills and accelerated down Willard, scarcely aware of Liz talking beside him. She leaned forward to turn up the radio, and the Beach Boys swept up to wrap them in their frantic falsettos.
On the Johnsonville Highway, he opened it up a little. Effortlessly, the Lincoln took the long hill and fled down the winding road that people said had once been an Indian trail: past farmhouses and grey, leaning barns and low modern bungalows and Kanter’s Miniature Golf and Driving Range and the skeletal towers of hydro lines, stalking away over the snowb
ound fields like giants, arms outstretched under a lowering sky. Nudging the gas, Joe kept glancing into the rear-view at the salt-stained asphalt unrolling behind them. He was sorry they were only going to Johnsonville. He would liked to have kept heading south indefinitely, swept along on the keen-throated voices of the Beach Boys, calling from their land where everyone was young and without regrets.
From narrow windows, the Victorian mansions along Johnson Avenue surveyed the changes that had engulfed them: their lawns paved, their facades littered with signs and advertisements. Downtown, many of the old stores with their decorative brickwork and huge show windows were boarded up, their life sucked away by the malls on the city’s edge. But a few of the city’s old businesses persisted. Out of loyalty, and a kind of conservative good taste, the McVeys continued to shop at Cardy Brothers, a large, high-class establishment on Russell Street. Joe found a parking spot and they entered the vast, dull, tasteful store, with its ash-coloured counters and beige carpeting. The place was nearly deserted.
Joe sat on a low hassock while Liz tried on dresses. She would disappear for minutes at a time into the change room, leaving Joe and the saleslady to share an awkward silence while the tepid music played so faintly it might have come from a sunken ship. Then Liz would burst from cover, striding out decisively in a new outfit, her eyes meeting his with blazing directness, as if to say, Well? He liked this moment, the energy she brought back to the room, and the authority she placed in him, the freedom to scan her body. They had slept together only once, but now everything they did, he felt, was leading them again to sex. His anticipation lent an excitement to every new dress, and kept his interest flowing as she stood in front of the triple mirror, turning studiously this way and that, cocking her head or twisting to glance at her reflected back, while the saleslady murmured comments, or leaned in discreetly to flick at a hem.
Unable to decide, Liz took two dresses. The saleslady folded them into low boxes, whose lids bore the slashing, stylized signature Cardy Brothers, tied them smartly with string, and handed the boxes to Joe. “The man’s job,” she said, turning up the corners of her small mouth and all of them laughed, though the remark had not been funny. Liz thanked the woman effusively and turned away.
“Aren’t you going to pay?” Joe said. He had remained beside the cash register.
“Daddy pays,” Liz sang to him over her shoulder.
Joe was mortified, hoping no one had heard; he despised her for these airs. And yet, there was something about her that held him, something more, even, than sex. She had a power that drew him in her wake and when she stopped by the perfume counter he stopped too.
“I’ve just had an idea,” she said, touching him on the arm. Her eyes were on his, huge and direct, filled with an exaggerated show of inspiration. He had a distinct sense she had planned this moment. “Why don’t we take a look in the men’s department?”
“I don’t think —”
“Please? For me? Just a look?” Her gaze dropped to his mouth.
The men’s department was even emptier than the women’s. A few solitary people — half of them clerks — wandered about looking lost in the maze of counters and racks. Liz guided him to a place where shirts were arranged in armless rows, under glass. She asked a clerk to measure him. The clerk was a slim little man of about thirty, with an eager-to-please expression that Joe found oppressive. The world would never appreciate the service this man seemed so ready to lay at its feet. But he managed the tape with an expert gentleness, and it wasn’t long before Joe felt a kind of collusion with him: they both had to endure the brisk, confident stream of Liz’s instructions. She draped ties across folded shirts. She called for sweaters. She cajoled Joe into trying them on. The clerk and he exchanged looks, ironic and tolerant. Women.
Yet the clothes were so fine, he half-enjoyed the process — the make-believe. For that was what it had become for him, a kind of theatre. He was pleasing her, by doing this, and pleasing himself, by pretending that he could afford to shop here. Yet the whole time he was aware that he had only ten dollars in his wallet and this knowledge began to bother him: he felt he was getting into a situation that must leave him uncomfortably exposed, in the end. When she’d sent the clerk off on another errand, he told her he’d had enough.
“Couldn’t we look at some trousers? I’d like to see you complete.”
Her eyes filled with pleading sincerity.
He frowned.
“Look, I don’t have any money.”
Immediately he felt heat sear his face.
“We don’t need money,” she said, drawing her finger over his chest.
When he understood what she meant, his face burned hotter.
“No —”
“But it’s Christmas,” she said, her baby mouth pouting.
“It’s after Christmas.”
“You won’t let me buy you a Christmas present?” She was still picking at his chest.
“No. I mean, I don’t have anything for you.”
He had just thought of this defence.
“I don’t care. I just want —”
The clerk had come back and was hovering discreetly.
“We’d like to see some trousers,” Liz told him.
Joe couldn’t find the escalator, which made his escape rather awkward. He blundered around Overcoats and finally had to ask another clerk. Outside, the cold, damp air sharp with exhaust fumes hit him like a blast of sanity.
It was nearly ten minutes before she appeared. Under one arm were the two dress boxes. Hanging from the opposite hand was a large bag, also bearing the store’s logo. She marched grimly past him and when she got to the car she waited for him to open the door for her, on the driver’s side. She flung the packages onto the back seat, slid in behind the wheel, and pushed a key into the ignition. The Lincoln roared. He half-expected it to take off without him.
But she waited. He got in and slammed the door shut. Neither of them spoke.
She drove too fast, with a fierce competence. He was the first to break the silence.
“Did you buy those things anyway?”
She was steering almost carelessly, the fingers of one hand at the bottom of the wheel, chin lifted. The car took on momentum.
He stretched over the back of the seat for the bag, but it was just out of reach and he gave up.
“You did, didn’t you?”
“I’ll buy what I like,” she said.
“Sure. But I won’t wear them.”
They were at a standoff. They sped past the School for the Blind, past the vast, rolling lawns covered with snow, the great maples and spruce. As a child, he had wondered how the blind children managed to avoid running into the trees. He had practised being blind, by closing his eyes and feeling his way around the backyard. He remembered this now: the lost feeling at the core of darkness.
They were in the outskirts, with the open fields ahead. The speedometer touched seventy-five.
“Slow down,” he told her. She ignored him.
He settled into a stoic silence, hating her. Mercifully, the road was bare, though banks of frozen snow often obscured the view on both sides: the shoulders had all but disappeared. He glimpsed fields, stubbled with last year’s corn, a swaybacked cow, standing in miserable immobility beside a steaming manure pile. He decided they were finished, he and Liz. He would tell her when they got home.
She was doing eighty now.
“C’mon, slow down,” he told her, with a show of carelessness. “It’s not worth this.”
She glanced at him, her eyes empty of their usual drama and wilfulness and small lies. Now they were cold and appraising and absolutely without fear. He felt as if she had reached across the seat and casually stuck a knife in his arm.
The high rear end of a dump truck was coming up fast. She had no choice, he felt, but to slow. He could make out the bulge of the truck’s axle, a gourd caked in salt. And the crudely painted letters on a flapping board: G. MARONI. PRESTON, ONT.
“Li
z, for God’s sake!”
She braked, and simultaneously flung the wheel over, pulling the car onto the narrow, icy shoulder where it scraped a snowbank and lurched back onto the road. He was yelling at her now, ordering her to stop. A few hundred yards farther on, she turned the Lincoln into the parking lot of a garage where a line of new cars sat blanketed in snow. When she finally stopped, he tore the key from the ignition. They sat in silence behind a snowbank.
He realized she was weeping: a thread of eyeliner on her cheek, she kept on staring out the windshield, in apparent defiance.
“Why did you do that?” he said. “I mean, for a few shirts.”
“I knew what I was doing.” All her patina of sophistication had crumbled.
“You could have rolled us back there.”
“Well, I didn’t,” she said. Like a little girl, winning a point in some schoolyard argument.
“That’s pathetic,” he said, after a moment. “You’re pathetic.”
He had come up against her will — something childish and stubborn and dark. It was still in the car, frightening him and fascinating him and holding him in fury and wonder, as if some spell had caught them there, in the shrouded white parking lot. His throat was sore; a deep weariness had seeped into his limbs. “What were you trying to prove?” he said, rousing himself. “What would crashing us prove?”
“I didn’t crash us,” she said.
She glanced at him: a little girl, wary and beaten.
“All right,” he said, gently enough. “Maybe I should drive.”
He got out and circled to the driver’s side, while she moved over. Before he could start the car she slid over to him with abrupt violence and burrowed into his shoulder.
She sought out his mouth with her own. At first he resisted but she caught his wrist and drew his hand between her legs. He worked aside her soaked panties, while she moaned extravagantly and tore at his hair. In the end, she huddled against him with her ruined face, sniffing and saying she was sorry.
