by Brian Moore
Looking at me as he said it: his mad eyes. I thought of earlier, my robe open, those eyes of his glazed over as he stared at my breasts.
‘Styles change,’ Tee said. ‘A few years ago topless men in blue jeans were all the rage at the box office.’
But Ernie was not to be deflected. ‘You were an actress,’ he accused me. ‘Would you take off your bra if a director asked you to?’
I looked at him and Mad Twin rose up inside me. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said to him. ‘There are plenty of actresses who won’t do those things.’
‘Then they won’t get any parts.’ Horseteeth showing. Horrid laugh. ‘No, nowadays, it’s strip or get off the pot.’
I got up and said I had to put the chops on. As I went into the kitchen his voice pursued me, booming, fading, coming up again . . . ‘Like or not like . . . I don’t know about that . . . Take me, I was one of those children other children just don’t like. And you know, Terence, that has carried over into my adult life. I am not someone that other people like.’
Correct, I thought, but, oh, why did Tee give him so much to drink, I swear he’s getting drunk. Canadians get drunk, they seem to glory in it. Tee never understands that, he doesn’t know them as I do.
‘You mean in Montreal?’ I heard Ernie say.
‘Yes,’ Tee said. ‘I believe the city is very much changed?’
‘Yes, indeedy, you wouldn’t know the place nowadays. Exciting things are happening in Montreal. You should come up for a visit. You could stay with me, both of you.’
Some mumble from Terence and then the boom of Ernie’s reply, ‘No, no, I’d love to have you as my guests, both of you. It would be an honour having the famous Terence Lavery stay with me.’
‘I’m-not-famous-don’t-be-silly,’ Terence said in an embarrassed rush.
‘You’re not stuck up, I’ll say that,’ Ernie assured him. ‘I’ll tell you a secret. I have a photo of you pinned up on my wall. One that appeared in the paper, of you and Maria, the time you were married. I had a print made up of it and, if anyone asks me, I say I know you. Not true, strictly speaking. I know Maria. But now, it will be true. Because I’ve met you at last.’
Mumble from Tee.
‘I mean it’s sort of like a pin-up, this photo,’ Ernie said. ‘You know. Pretending about girls.’
‘But you weren’t pretending,’ Tee said. ‘You do know Mary and you said she’s in the picture.’
‘Looking lovely. Just beautiful.’
There was a silence and then Terence mumbled something and a moment later was beside me in the kitchen, raising his eyebrows, jerking his head towards the living-room. I looked and saw Ernie out there, his back to me. He seemed to be blowing his nose.
Terence whispered, ‘We were talking about you. He said you were lovely. Then he began to weep. What’s going on?’
I said, ‘Please. Go back in. I’ll serve dinner in a moment.’
It was a stupid thing to say, that thing about the dinner. But I was flustered. I gave Tee an imploring look and he nodded and went back in. I began to rush the dinner, all the time trying to see and hear what was going on in there. Tee went back and sat on the sofa, his long legs crossed, his arms spreadeagled along the sofa’s back. Ernie, facing him, sat forward in his chair, eager as a job applicant. And, as I carried plates and dishes into the dining-room, I heard Ernie say, ‘Yes, my own writings. Yes, that was and is my ambition. Like Hat, Mary’s husband. We both hoped to write something worthwhile.’
I thought: I must keep him off Hat, I’ll announce dinner. I went in and, as I did, Ernie stopped talking and rose up with exaggerated politeness, gesturing for me to sit down. He staggered slightly.
‘Ernie’s been telling me about his writing,’ Tee said.
‘My unpublished novel,’ Ernie said. ‘You’re in it, Maria. Yes, yes, you’re in it, all right. I have this marvellous scene between you and Mackie McIver. She still asks after you, you know.’
‘Oh,’ I said, very cold. ‘How is she?’
‘Oh, same as ever. Any time I go to Toronto, I always drop in to see her at the library. And we talk about you. Funny. She’s very fond of you, in a strange sort of way.’
‘Mnn,’ I said. I turned to Tee. ‘Tee, will you help me with the plates? Dinner’s ready.’
‘Tee?’ Ernie said. ‘A pet name, is it? I know Maria’s a great one for pet names. Remember, Maria, you were the one who christened Mackie “Mackie”. For Mack the Knife.’
It had nothing to do with Mack the Knife, I thought. Where did he get that idea? And then, as we settled in at the table, Ernie still holding on to his Scotch, he took a drink and said, drunkenly, ‘Yess-sss, it suited her too. She put the knife in you, didn’t she? You know, telling Jimmy about you and Hat.’
Quickly, I snatched up the redcurrant jelly and offered it to him. ‘Try some of this with your lamb.’
He stared at the dish. ‘What is it?’
‘Redcurrant jelly.’
‘With lamb? I never heard of that.’
‘Perhaps it’s a British taste?’ Tee suggested.
‘Mint sauce is British too,’ Ernie informed us. ‘That I do know. I must say, however, to be perfectly frank, I prefer mint jelly. That’s the Canadian thing to have with lamb.’
Tee stared at his plate. I thought, why is it always my friends who are the really giant bores? Ah yes, Ernest Truelove, what a brilliant conversationalist you are. Will you please shut up?
But, oh, no. He was off again.
‘Yes, I’ve noticed that about the British,’ he said. ‘They like those made-up sauces. HP sauce and A1 sauce and Worcestershire sauce and another one, let me think, yes, I remember, Lea and Perrin’s sauce. Funny, isn’t it, that they’re so fond of all those sauces?’
‘The cooking’s so bad at home,’ Terence said, rising and pouring wine.
‘Is that a fact?’ Ernie said. ‘I’ve never been there, you know. Of course the poor eat very badly, right?’
Terence looked startled. ‘Yes, they do. As they do in most countries, I suppose.’
‘Ah, but in England you have this class thing. I hope I’m not offending you.’
‘Should I be offended?’ Terence said, smiling.
‘Well, you’re upper class, aren’t you?’
Terence laughed. ‘My old mum would be very pleased to hear you say that. She’s an awful snob.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And she’s a char at the Ministry of Transport offices in London.’
‘Char?’ Ernie’s head went up. ‘What’s that?’
‘Charwoman. Cleaning woman,’ Terence said.
‘Ah, come on. You’re having me on.’ Ernie laughed his horse laugh and gulped at his wine, but I saw that he was angry. ‘I may be a professional hick,’ he said, ‘but I do know an upper-class British accent when I hear it. You can’t tell me you’re working class. Because I am working class. My dad’s a plumber in Brockville, Ontario.’
‘Well,’ said Terence, switching accents, ‘I do talk ever so nice, but you mustn’t pay no heed to that. I’m a bloody great fraud, mate.’
But Ernie was not amused. His face was red with drink and discomfiture.
‘Honestly, Ernie, it’s true,’ I found myself saying. ‘Terence won a scholarship to Oxford.’
‘Exactly,’ Ernie said. ‘Oxford University. It’s a long way from Sir George Williams College where I went. In Montreal. A YMCA school.’ He turned on Terence. ‘So, let me say this. I don’t know whether you’re joking about your mother being a cleaning woman. But I am not joking. I am not middle class. No one could ever take me for middle class.’
He turned to me. ‘You, Maria,’ he said. ‘You’re middle class. Your father was a stockbroker, wasn’t he?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘He was not a stockbroker, how could he have been, you don’t have stockbrokers in a place like Butchersville. My father was a small-town businessman with a lumber business that went bust and if it hadn’t been for the war, God kno
ws what would have happened to him.’
Terence had begun to laugh, seesawing over his plate of food. ‘My old man, yes my old man’s a bigger bust than your old man . . . talk about snobs.’
I looked at Ernie, sure that this would be the final insult, but there he was, beginning to break up himself, old Ernie, turning, pointing to me, ‘Isn’t that funny, her boasting about her old man – failed, lumber – yes, I agree, that is rare. Rare.’
I sat and stared at them and felt as I did long ago when boys laughed at me because I was a girl and I said to myself Terence is not disloyal to me, he’s just trying to smooth things over, but it seemed disloyal and I found myself with tears coming into my eyes and, then, worse, their laughing stopped and they looked at me, concerned.
‘It was just a joke,’ Ernie said. ‘Just a joke, Maria.’ And I saw Tee look worried and I thought, he believes I’m mad, yes he does and anything to stop him thinking that, so I began babbling, sounding rambling and disconnected, I suppose. I don’t remember, but I remember lying and saying my tears had nothing to do with their laughing at me, it had to do with something unpleasant that happened to me earlier, something I’d just remembered.
Of course, they both asked what was it, this unpleasant thing and, I don’t know why, I found myself starting to tell them about the man who insulted me in the street this morning. And when I said this man, a well-dressed, normal-seeming man, had said something filthy to me, Ernie’s face went suddenly eager. ‘Said what?’ he asked. ‘I mean what exactly did he say?’
‘Oh, just something obscene.’
‘But what?’ he persisted, and, angry with him, I thought, all right, Ernie Truelove, you asked for it. I leaned in Ernie’s direction, stared into his blind, amber-flecked eyes, and said, ‘Well, this man said to me – I’d like to fuck you, baby.’
Ernie’s face tightened. I mean I actually saw the skin tighten, saw his ears go flat. He put down his fork, very deliberately, and sat, his blind stare fixed on his plate. A perfect blush spread from his jaw up his cheeks as he contemplated again what the stranger had said. ‘Gosh,’ said Ernie. ‘Gosh – and yet –’ he turned to Terence – ‘Do you know, Terence, I sometimes say to myself, well, there but for the grace of the five hundred miles that separates me from a woman like Maria, well, there go I.’
I don’t think Terence understood. ‘What?’ said Terence, pouring wine in Ernie’s glass.
‘I mean, I could be that man,’ Ernie said. He looked at Terence, then at me, as though daring us to contradict him. He picked up his knife and fork and cut a piece off his chop.
‘I’m mentioning this,’ he said, ‘because it might interest Terence. Creative persons are often interested in hearing about abnormal states of mind.’ He laughed and raised the piece of meat to his mouth. ‘Such as love,’ he said. He put the meat into his mouth and began to chew and talk all at once. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Love. Let me tell you, Terence, what happened to me nine years ago. I’d come down to Toronto for the day for a meeting at our main office at Canada’s Own. After my conference with McKinnon, our chief, I went into the library to look up something. And there she was.’
Still chewing, he turned to me, his mouth half open, showing the food particles. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Maria. I can even remember what she was wearing. It was what they call a shirtwaist dress with red and black – no, it was pink and black – candy stripes. I remember the pink matched the pink of her lips. And I remember I asked her for some files and she brought them to me, but, you know, I didn’t do a stitch of work. I just sat there until plane time. And let me say this. I was in love. Yes, indeedy.’
‘Of course,’ Terence said, trying to make a joke of it, ‘that famous Dunne mesmerism.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Ernie said. ‘And, do you know, although I didn’t see her again for four months – four whole months – I don’t think there was a single day I didn’t think about her. And you’d better believe this. I didn’t even know she was married. I never even noticed her wedding ring. Isn’t that something?’
‘Umm,’ said Tee.
‘I guess I’m talking too much?’
‘My ears are burning,’ I said. ‘Come on, let’s change the subject.’
‘Change the subject?’ Ernie fixed me in his stare. ‘Why, you changed this subject, all right, all right. Me. You changed my whole life.’
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘What an exaggeration.’
He shook his head, staring at me. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘Oh no, it’s not.’
He stared at me. I stared at him, at this forgotten admirer who said I changed his life. In the carnival hall of mirrors which is our memory, we distort what we see. In Ernie’s mirror image of me, I am magnified, elongated into a girl who led him on, the object of his great, unhappy, unfulfilled love. While he, in the equal if opposite distortion of my mind’s mirror, is reduced to a squat manikin from my past, a dull stranger, remembered only for his minor quirks.
I stared at him as, guiltily, he gulped his wine. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’ll bet I’m boring Maria. In the past she often brought it to my attention that I bored her. And it’s true, I’m not very interesting. I know. But perhaps Terence would be interested?’
In the living-room the phone began to ring.
‘I’ll get it,’ I said to Tee.
‘No, I’ll get it, it’s for me, most likely.’
There was no escape, Tee was up and out of the dining-room. The phone stopped ringing and Ernie and I sat there, embarrassed. Tee’s voice from the living-room: ‘Hello? . . . yes, how’d it go? . . . mnn . . . mnn.’
While Ernie slewed around in his chair. ‘Alone at last.’
‘What did you say?’ I said, making my voice as cold as I knew.
‘Philadelphia?’ Terence said on the phone. ‘Why not New Haven?’
‘Why did you never phone me when you went back to Montreal?’ Ernie asked.
‘I forgot.’
‘Are you mad at me, Maria?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘wouldn’t you be, if you were me? Going on about my not phoning you. I’ve only been back in Montreal twice, both times on very short visits. I can’t phone everybody. I’m sorry.’
‘Am I everybody?’
‘How many weeks?’ Terence said on the phone. ‘Five?’
‘Ernie, don’t be silly. I told you. I forgot.’
‘All right, then you forgot. I suppose, gosh, I suppose that’s the ultimate, yes, the ultimate insult. You forgot. That takes care of me, doesn’t it?’
‘Please,’ I said. ‘I’m not feeling well tonight, let’s not start some big thing.’
‘Put Jack on,’ Terence said on the phone.
‘I still love you,’ Ernie said to me, glancing back surreptitiously into the living-room as he said it.
‘Oh, that’s nonsense.’
‘I do.’
‘Oh, shut up. How could you?’
‘How could I? Because I can, because I do, because I can’t help myself. I told you all that. Don’t tell me you don’t remember?’
‘But I don’t.’
‘Oh, come on, Maria.’ He stared at me reproachfully.
‘Look,’ I said, and now I, too, was glancing back furtively at the living-room where Tee was. ‘All I remember is you took me out to dinner a few times while I was waiting for Hat to come back from Europe. You knew I was going to marry Hat. I told you.’
‘You did not,’ he said, nearly shouting. He peered drunkenly over his shoulder at the living-room, then faced me again. ‘You did not,’ he said, more quietly.
‘Well, I thought I did, but never mind. There was nothing between you and me. What business was it of yours what was going on with my private life?’
‘I was in love with you,’ he said. ‘That’s what business it was.’
‘No, no, put Jack on again,’ Tee said to the phone.
‘All right,’ I said to Ernie (thinking this is stupid, it’s degrading, how did I ever get into it?). ‘But I never said I was in love with
you.’
He hung his head. ‘You let me think you were.’
‘When?’
‘Those times I took you out.’
‘I don’t remember anything of the kind.’
‘But you do remember I took you out?’
‘So have a lot of other men.’
‘Oh, Maria,’ he said. ‘Don’t, please. That night you stayed over at my place, we discussed it all night long. I’ll never forget that night, Maria. Never. I’ve never been the same since.’
I did not answer. I looked into his drink-stunned eyes and thought: I don’t remember. What does he mean I stayed over at his place? I did not remember.
In the next room, Tee’s voice said, ‘No, that was the first option, I believe. Check it and you’ll see.’
I thought: nothing ever happened between me and Ernie, that’s nonsense. And then, in panic, I thought: what if there is something wrong with my memory, some Jekyll and Hyde thing? What if I’ve done things I simply don’t remember?
I sat, staring at him. I heard myself say, ‘Ernie, that was, well, it was a long time ago.’
‘For you, maybe,’ he said. ‘For me, it, gosh, it’s, gosh, it’s as clear as the night it happened.’
‘When what happened?’ I was shaking and he saw that I was shaking and that seemed to excite him. ‘You may say you don’t remember,’ he said in a loud, indignant voice. ‘You say you don’t remember it, gosh, you say you don’t remember what was the most important and most, gosh, the most emotional evening in my whole life.’
His eyes, glaring, it’s catching, hysteria, I could feel it starting up in me as we faced each other, hysterically aroused, the food forgotten, even Terence forgotten. It was as though Ernie and I were alone in the apartment. And then, very deliberately, in the loud, over-emphasized voice of a drunk person, Ernie began to speak again. ‘Oh, yes, Maria, I suppose you’d like to forget that. You have a talent for forgetting what really happened, haven’t you? You use people, then you let them drop. Yes, my Lord, when I think of it, the rollcall of the fallen, yes, the ones who’ve fallen out of your favour, like Jimmy Phelan. I only met him once or twice, but he was a very nice guy. A very nice guy. And poor Mackie McIver, all right, so she said somethings about you and Hat, and why not, she was fond of Jimmy too, but anyway, dammit, that woman was like a mother to you, she put you through acting school, you lived in her house, oh yes, you let her drop, just like you let me drop, just like you let Hat drop. Poor Hat, waiting for you all those months. God, when I think of it. Goddammit, Hat was my best friend.’
