He spent a moment plucking out a rudimentary tune, then barked out:
I found Kitty in the alley
I found Kitty in the alley
Someone was being mean
Someone was being mean
Fuck that! I don’t like it!
Be nice why don’t you!
He fell back on the Murphy bed, a hand on his shirt, sapped by this burst of creativity. “God. These songs just pour out of me. I don’t know how. I don’t even try.” He propped himself up to look at me. “You can see what my dilemma was. With med school, I mean.” Then he laughed. “You make the funniest faces, Kitty.”
He had to study. “Hit the books?” The guitar put to bed in its case, he went for one of the tomes in his satchel, dropped it on the table. “Book,” he said. “Hit.”
I slapped my hand down on the cover.
“Hey,” he said. “You’re getting it.”
Joe was up till two humming “Fucked Up Ronnie.” I wondered how he could read and hum at the same time. Obviously he didn’t know he was doing it since he was reading in the kitchen so I could sleep. I liked him. Because I liked him, I was going to have to leave before he found out I was a fake. I tossed on the Murphy bed, sleepless and bored and fretting. If only I could have read. And Chekhov was so close, right under the bed!
Eventually, he retired to the bathroom. I heard him washing, the stallion-like voiding of his bladder. The flush. I waited, then got up and tore a page out of his notebook. Ya Jane, nye Kitty. Ya Kanadka. Ya govoryu po-angliski. Bolshoye spasibo. Ty kharoshoiye.
There was no way he would recognize a word of Cyrillic.
“Know what day it is today, Kitty? It’s Cadaver Day! I have to say I’m not really looking forward to it. When I come home tonight? If I look a little pale? That will be the reason. Are you staying? Here? Stay?”
I shrugged.
“Really?” He slumped a little though his spikes stayed pert. He’d showered and regelled them, had been firing up the hair dryer off and on for half an hour. Now he was talking at me while he finished dressing. It constituted a project, putting on those jeans. The outside seams had been slit, then pinned, pins being, I realized, something of an obsession for him. When he finally got the front of his pants attached to the back, he went to get his boots.
“What’s this?” He reached inside. “Ah! A clue!”
I blushed. I’d pictured him stomping around on my note all day, not noticing it until later, after I was gone. He unfolded it. “That sure looks like Russian. You’re sure you’re not Russian? Bulgarian? I’m going to ask around. So will you be here when I get back or not?”
I nodded yes.
“Uh-oh. I know for a fact that this”—he nodded—“is no in Bulgaria and this”—he shook his head—“is yes. So. You might be here or you might not.” He paused in the doorway, looking back. “If you’re not, I think I might get a cat.”
I was. I was still there when he got back that evening. Because he had to cut up the dead body. What a horrible thing to have to do. He’d been there for me so how could I just walk out? I regretted the note and worried all day that he’d somehow find someone to translate it.
Alas, I underlined in my book, the actions and thoughts of human beings are not nearly as important as their sorrows!
He knocked—as though I had some right to the place now too!—and looked so happy when he came in. So happy to see me. Yet there was something different about him too. He wasn’t making eye contact.
“Do you think that guy’s still looking for you? Is he your boyfriend?”
Ugh, I thought. It was easier just to clamp my tongue between my teeth so I’d remember not to answer.
“I mean, can we go out? Out?” He pointed to the window.
Outside the building the air felt warm, like a new season, like summer, though it was only May, an evening in May with birds twittering around the warehouses and the sound of distant traffic in the air. Now I saw the apartment from the outside, old and brick, survivor, along with a few slouching wooden houses, of industrial rezoning. He’d left his studded jacket behind and today’s T-shirt was full of holes, the ripped-off sleeves revealing his acned shoulders. He’d obviously forgotten about my note. Other things had happened to him that day, things more important than my confession. Clomp, clomp, clomp went his boots on the sidewalk. The few people we passed gave us a wide berth. They gave it to Joe in his blue crown of thorns.
“How was your day?” he asked. “Pause for you to answer. Question reciprocated. Thanks, Kitty. It was pretty disturbing, needless to say.”
He grabbed my hand and ran me across a busy street when there was a break in traffic. On the other side we intersected with another pedestrian, all of us performing the awkward ballet of getting out of each other’s way. Joe let rip a chorus, “We’re The Fuck Ups! We’re The Fuck Ups!” A cement truck rumbled by like a sound effect.
Under the concrete span of Cambie Bridge, boots dangling over False Creek, he patted the spot beside him. When I sat, he took my hand, squeezed it, let go. Held up his. “Hand.”
“Hand,” I said.
Here was where he told me about the cadaver. How he’d kept thinking about his old man. “Everybody was making jokes. From nerves, you know. It wasn’t very respectful. Here’s this guy. Gave his body to science and science is making cracks about his dick. Not that I wasn’t.” He inserted a finger in a hole in his shirt and scratched his stomach. “There’s quite a difference between being dead and alive. Beyond the obvious, I mean. This guy was clearly not just sleeping. He was dead. But the weird thing is, every day a thousand billion cells in your body die, Kitty. That’s a fact of life.”
We walked around for a while, then went for Chinese. The waiter slammed a teapot and two stacked cups on the lazy Susan. Joe, unnesting one cup from the other, asked for beer. He filled the teacups, rotated the lazy Susan in my direction. When I went to take my cup, he steered it out of reach. Every time I tried to grab it, the cup spun away from me. Our laughter brought the waiter hurrying back with the beer. He’d put us in the corner, near the kitchen, away from the other diners. Joe seemed unoffended. The food came faster. He was finally looking at me again.
“You probably won’t understand what I’m going to say, Kitty. You came along at just the right time. If you saw me last year when I dropped out of med school, you wouldn’t have known me. Of course you wouldn’t have known me. You didn’t know me. But you know what I mean.” He laughed. I laughed. Then he chopsticked a cube of crimson-sauced pork into his mouth, sombre again.
“A lot of guys would say this is an ideal situation. A girl who can’t talk back.”
When I bristled, he said, “You must be really intelligent. You always seem to know what I mean.”
Joe unlocked the apartment door. As soon as we stepped inside, he lunged for me and pressed the pin into my lips. It almost went up my nose and I shrank back. “Sorry,” he said. “I should have asked. Do you want to? Kiss?”
I wasn’t sure. The mechanics seemed daunting. Yet he’d been so kind! I leaned toward him, offering the corner of my mouth, but the various positions we tried were so awkward and I worried the pin would come undone. I told myself that was silly. It was a safety pin.
“Fuck it.” Joe bolted for the bathroom.
I’d hurt his feelings. I stood there trying to work up the nerve to knock, to finally speak, but he emerged a moment later without the pin, rendering me genuinely mute. Still in his boots, he took my face in his hands and placed his liberated mouth on mine. He tasted of garlic and tin. I wasn’t embarrassed or ashamed, which was strange for me. A strange new sensation. When we finally pulled away, I touched my own mouth and saw his blood on my fingers.
Joe sat down to take his boots off. I knelt and helped unlace them, pulled and pulled and when the boot finally released, fell back into giddiness. I had to struggle harder with the other one. Joe lifted me into his lap and we kissed for a long time, finally getting the choreography right. Whe
n we came up for air, he pointed to the bed. Blue exclamation marks all around his head, but on his face, a tender question.
He had to undo all those pins first. While he was occupied with them, I got in the bed and undressed under the covers. He turned out the light, got in too, and lay beside me in the dark.
“Did you read my note?” I asked.
Joe started to laugh. “Well, I couldn’t, could I? But I found someone who could. Not that easy. I had to hike all the way across campus where they have a department for that. Say something else.”
“Bolshoye spasibo.”
“In English.”
“My dog actually eats nuts.”
He laughed and laughed.
“I might be a lesbian.” I said it. Would saying it make me one?
Joe said, “Maybe we shouldn’t then.”
Strangely though, I seemed to want to.
I woke thinking of Sonia the morning of the action, so radiant as she floated down the steps. I’d thought saintliness had made her shimmer when really it was bliss. She’d actually done it. She’d shown Pascal how wonderful it was to be alive. That entire night with Joe, Reagan’s infamous briefcase stayed tucked under his bed. Nancy had taken the phone off the hook. And far away, across the vast Russian steppe, in the Kremlin, Chernenko put Shostakovich on low and popped a sleeping pill.
I got up and took a shower. I was sore from keeping the world safe all night.
When I came out of the bathroom, Joe was on the phone. He hung up and said, “I’m going to take you to see my parents. You’re going to need a better lawyer.” Then he practised kissing me again.
I felt twice as nervous when I saw the house. I couldn’t imagine that anyone who lived in Shaughnessy would want his son to have anything to do with me. Joe tried the door, then used the knocker. Loud, judgemental raps. His father probably knew all about me already.
He answered in slippers—leather, backless—and I liked him even before the landslide of relief happened on his face. Pulling Joe close, he said, “I know someone who’s going to be very happy when she sees you.”
“Dad, this is Jane,” Joe said.
The judge held out his hand. “Joe Sr. Pleased to meet you, Jane. Come in. Come in. Rachel’s all in a tizzy baking something.” By the time he finished shaking my hand, my arm was numb to the shoulder.
We went through a vestibule the size of Joe’s entire apartment, through a living room, then into a large rec room with windows all around it. There was a pool table, a bar at one end, and, at the other, more sittable furniture than in the living room. His father bellowed, “Rachel!”
“What?” from far away.
“They’re here!”
“What!”
“Joey’s here with his friend!”
“Oh!”
Joe went over to the pool table and started emptying the pockets while I sat on the chesterfield with my hands nervously clasped, his father smiling at me from his armchair, just sitting there, legs crossed and smiling, like someone waiting for the punch line. A minute later Joe’s mother appeared in the doorway, aproned and in slacks. She was tiny, her hair in a tailored bob. She glanced at me, then at Joe racking the balls, and her mouth opened and her hand struck her chest with an audible thump. Joe’s father began to laugh, then cough.
“Excuse me,” he said to me.
“Hello,” Joe’s mother said to Joe. Joe came over with the cue and hugged her, then pointed it in my direction. “This is Jane, who I told you about.”
“Jane!” She brisked over with her hand held out and squeezed both of mine. “Rachel Norman. So nice to meet you, Jane. So very, very nice.”
I was finding all this strange. Their behaviour seemed over the top until it occurred to me that maybe I was the first girl Joe had brought home.
“I’m just putting the tea together,” Rachel said. “Come and help me, Jane.”
Joe was bent over the pool table now, eyeing up the shot, not caring that Rachel was leading me away by the hand. The room was full of light from all the windows. His hair looked crazy and I didn’t want to go, but I left him there with his smiling father, the dying judge, swinging his slipper on the end of his foot.
Rachel brought me back through the living room and down the stairs we’d passed on the way in, through a dining room with china-crammed cupboards, into a surprisingly small kitchen that smelled of cinnamon. The timer was sounding and Rachel hurried to remove a loaf pan from the oven. She dropped it on a rack as though she didn’t give a damn about it any more, pulled off the oven mitts, tossed them too, then turned to face me.
“Jane?” She drew in a breath while I stood there, feeling awkward and too tall.
“I don’t know anything about you. I don’t know what kind of trouble you’re in. But let me say this, Jane—” and she took a step toward me. “I will never forget, never, that you were the one who got him to take that pin out.”
As soon as she touched me, both hands on my shoulders, a word came to me in my own language. Firmament. The way it sounded, so fixed and safe, I knew everything was going to be all right. Everything would work out.
Or so she thought.
Acknowledgements
Bolshoye spasibo Shaena Lambert, Zsuzsi Gartner, Patrick Crean, and Jackie Kaiser, who all endured early versions of this novel; Tanya Tyuleneva for checking my translations and putting up with my Russian; Joan and Graham Sweeney for keeping us all warm and dry; Bruce and Patrick and the Addersons for the love. And Larry Cohen for “the tea.”
All Chekhov quotes are reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. Quotes on page 15 and pages 147–150 are from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenin, translated by Rosemary Edmonds, ©Rosemary Edmonds, 1978. Quotes on pages 23, 85, 144, 145, 241, and 280 are from Lady with Lapdog and Other Stories, translated by David Magarshak, ©David Magarshak, 1964. Quotes on pages 29, 49, 174, 237, and 310 are from The Fiancée and Other Stories, translated by Ronald Wilks, ©Ronald Wilks, 1986. Quotes on pages 62, 65, 104, 146, and 301 are from The Duel and Other Stories, translated by Ronald Wilks, ©Ronald Wilks, 1984. Quotes on pages 122, 123, 144, 156, 201, 202, 237, and 238 are from The Kiss and Other Stories, translated by Ronald Wilks, ©Ronald Wilks, 1982. Quotes on pages 47, 105, and 304 are from The Party and Other Stories, translated by Ronald Wilks, ©Ronald Wilks, 1985. Quotes from The Cherry Orchard are from Plays, translated by Elisaveta Fen, ©Elisaveta Fen, 1954.
Quotes from Chekhov’s letters are taken from The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov, edited by Lillian Hellman, translated by Sidonie K. Lederer, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1955. Quotes from Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons are from the 1986 Bantam Classics edition translated by Barbara Makanowitzky. Jane’s Russian text is the 1962 edition of Russian: A Beginners’ Course by Ronald Hingley and T. J. Binyon. Helen Caldicott’s quotes come from the 1982 film If You Love This Planet, directed by Terre Nash.
The author gratefully acknowledges the generous and unexpected support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council.
Efforts were made during the writing of this book to preserve our diminishing Canadian lexicon. Please, when you sit down to read, sit on a chesterfield.
Table of Contents
COVER PAGE
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT PAGE
DEDICATION
CONTENTS
2004
1983
2004
1984
2004
1984
2004
1984
2004
1984
2004
1984
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
cale(100%); -ms-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share
The Sky Is Falling Page 29
