•
Now—Karel, Renata, me. Karel seemed to feel she might like him better if he became constructive. He said, “I hope Shirley was smart enough not to talk to the police?”
“She couldn’t,” said Renata. “For one thing, she was my accomplice. She found the doctor for me.”
She pushed his hand away from her face. Renata likes her dramas short.
From the pile of ski boots in a corner a shadow moved and floated toward the doorway. Renata sat up, her hair on her shoulders and her eyes opened wide. I don’t know if you know it, but the only thing that can frighten her is rats. Why, then, does she live in a house full of rats, on a ratty street?
I said, “It wasn’t anything, darling. It was just a little thing about the size of a hamster.”
Karel rolled over and said casually, “Oh, it’s a rat.” He looked around for something to throw at it.
After that the three of us went to sleep.
I can’t think of anything else about that night that would interest you.
I wish we could talk, but we can’t talk unless you come back here. Perhaps you are dreading the conversation. We could decide beforehand which subjects to avoid. The only questions you’ve asked me have been: Who? When? How often? This way or that way? With Frenchmen? With Asians? With blacks? With ski instructors, taxi drivers, teachers, civil engineers? With politicians? Married, single, girls, boys?
I don’t care for the life in cities. That’s all I’d like to talk about. I am sick of chance encounters. I’d start off by saying it’s a lousy way to live.
2. ABOUT JAMES
James noticed me long before I saw him. He would send me notes full of praise and anticipated pleasure. He’d leave the notes under the door. I thought he was the rather fat man who had his front door blown in by the OAS last year. Then he said who he was and where he lived. I went up to his flat. I didn’t know you then. When he answered my ring he looked like a black fox. I think he is an architect in his own country, but his real interest is women. His sole activity seems to be the pursuit of women, and like all men of that kind he is supremely silly. The difference between James and other men like him is that sometimes he is funny and sometimes he is kind.
James worries about the purity of young girls. He can’t bear to think of anyone touching a young girl. He is afraid about being impotent. He thinks he owes me something. Why?
James would not miss me if I moved away, but he would be sorry for a long time if he heard I had died.
3. PETE, ONE OR TWO THINGS
Well, as you know, he died. There was an English clergyman in the Italian town where it happened who tried to do all he could for me. I was tired and I didn’t always know what people were asking me. The clergyman lent me a pencil and I wrote:
PETER HIGGINS
CALGARY 1935—ITALY 1956
There was room for more on the stone. The clergyman said, “Is there nothing else, child?” He meant, “Wasn’t he someone’s husband, someone’s son?” But I felt that Pete had renounced us, left us behind. “Husband of . . .” seemed presumptuous—we had been married such a little time. I can’t say I was thinking it then, the day I decided. I am thinking years later now. His mother has died since and no one will ever ask me about him, or wonder what he was like. If I had to describe him I couldn’t tell much. His mother knew some things and I knew some. Even put together the information we had would not describe a man. She had the complete knowledge that puts parents at a loss finally: she knew all about him except his opinion of her and how he was with me. He didn’t know all about her. How could he? She was a grown person with the habit of secrets before he was even conscious of her. He only knew what he could expect of her. She said later that she and Pete had been friends. How can you be someone’s friend when you have had twenty years’ authority over him and he has never had one second’s authority over you?
He didn’t look like his mother. He looked like me. In Italy on our wedding trip, we were mistaken for sister and brother. Our height, our glasses, our myopic stares, our assurance, our sloppy, comfortable clothes, made us seem related and somehow unplaceable. Only a North American could have guessed what our families were, what our education amounted to, and where he had got the money to spend on traveling. Most of the time we were just pie-faces, like the tourists in ads. The tourists are always clean and the Europeans are peasants or chefs or postmen. They smile, they look at strangers fondly. It isn’t true. In real life Pete and I were grubby and the others clean, and no one smiled.
We didn’t seem to be married: we made love in hotels, in strange beds; we ate our meals in cheap, bright little restaurants; we seemed to be prolonging the clandestine quality of love before. It was still a game, but now we had infinite time. I became bold, and I dismissed the universe. “It was a dirty little experiment,” I would tell him, “and we were given up long ago.” You know about my mother. To be able to say “we were given up” shows how far I had come. Pete’s assurance was natural, but mine was recent. It had grown out of love. He was more interested in his parents than in God. There was a glorious treason in all our conversations. Pete wondered about his parents, but I felt safer belittling Creation. In her atheistic way, my mother had let me know quite a lot about the strength of the righteous; I still thought the skies would fall if I said too much.
What struck me about these secret exchanges was how we judged our parents from a distance now, as if they were people we had known on a visit. The idea that Pete and I could be natural siblings crossed my mind. What if both of us were adopted? We came from different parts of Canada, but we were only children and neither of us looked like our so-called parents. I used to watch him as if I were trying to trap him in mannerisms I could claim. I saw my own habit of sprawling, of spreading maps and newspapers on the ground. He had a vast appetite for bread and pastries and sweet desserts. He was easily drunk and easily sick. Yes, we were alike. We talked in hotel rooms while we drank the drink of the place, the grappa or wine or whatever we were given, prone across the bed, the bottle and glasses and the ashtray on the floor. We agreed to live openly, without secrets, though neither of us knew what a secret was. I admired him as I could never have admired myself. I remembered how my mother had said that one treeless, sunless day real life would overtake me, and then I would realize how spoiled and silly I had always been.
The longest time he and I spent together in one place was three days, in a village up behind the Ligurian coast. One night we walked the length of the village with a black cat leading the way. He said the cat would bring us luck. When we came to the end of the village street I knew that the only success of my life, my sole achievement, would be this marriage. The night before he died I dreamed he brought me the plans of a house. I saw the white lines on the blue paper, and he showed me the sunny Italian-style loggia that would be built. “It is not quite what we want,” he said, “but better than anything we have now.” “But we can’t afford it, we haven’t got the capital,” I cried, and I panicked and woke: woke safe, in a room the details of which were dawn, window, sky, first birds of morning. Pete was still sleeping, still in the dark.
•
We packed and took a bus down to a town on the coast. We were to catch the express to Nice, then Paris, then home. This last Italian town of our journey was nothing—just a black beach with sand like soot, and houses shut up because it was the middle of the afternoon. We left our luggage at the station, with a porter looking after it, and we drifted through empty, baking streets, using up the rest of a roll of film. By now we must have had hundreds of pictures of each other in market squares, next to oleanders, cut in two by broomstick shade, or backed up, squinting, against scaly noonday shutters. Pete photographed a hotel with a cat on the step, in honor of the cat up in the village, and a policeman and a souvenir stand, as if he had never seen such things in Canada—as if they were monuments. I never once heard him say anything was ugly or dull; if it was, what were we doing with it? I think he was one of the pe
ople who could say, truthfully, “I am never bored.” We were often stared at. We were out of our own background and did not fit into the new. That day I was eyed more than he was. I was watched by men talking in dark doorways, leaning against the façades of those inhospitable little shops. I was traveling in shorts and a shirt and rope-soled shoes. I sensed that this costume was resented but I didn’t know why. There was nothing indecent about my clothes. They were very like Pete’s. That baffled resentment—I’d seen it before. I remembered my mother holding a copy of Vogue at the end of a stiff, sunburned arm. I was about twelve, I suppose: it was the year when, without warning, skirts dropped to the ankle. “Honestly, Mrs. Norrington,” said the neighbor who had brought the magazine. “Did you ever see anything like it?”
“No, never,” said my mother, “and I, for one, shall not be stampeded.” Her finger stabbed the page, smote the wide-eyed model. It was the Last Judgment, the Final Word.
Pete may not have noticed the men. He was always on the lookout for something to photograph or something to do, and sometimes he missed people’s faces. On the steep street that led back to the railway station, he took a careful picture of a bakery and he bought a crescent-shaped bread with a soft, pale crust. He broke off a piece of the bread and ate it there on the street. He wasn’t hungry; it was a question of using time. Now the closed shutters broke out in the afternoon and a girl appeared—girls with thick hair, smelling of jasmine and honeysuckle. They strolled hand in hand, in light stockings and clean white shoes. Their dresses—blue, lemon, the palest peach—bloomed over rustling petticoats. At home I’d have called them cheap and made a face at their cheap perfume, but here in their own place they were enravishing. I thought Pete would look at them and at me and compare, but all he remarked was, “How do they stand those clothes on a day like this?” So real life, the gray noon with no limits, had not yet begun. I distrusted real life because I knew nothing about it. It was the middle-aged world without feeling, where no one was loved.
He tossed away the bread he hadn’t eaten, and laid his hands on a white Lambretta propped against the curb. He pulled it upright, examining it. He committed two crimes in a second: wasted bread, and touched an adored mechanical object belonging to someone else. I know these are crimes now, when it is no use knowing. The steering of the Lambretta was locked. He saw a bicycle then, and thought it belonged to an old man who was sitting on a kitchen chair out on the pavement. “This all right with you?” Pete pointed to the bike, then himself, then down the hill. He tried to show with a swoop of his hand that he would come right back. The pantomime also meant that there was still time before we had to be on the train, that up at the station there was nothing to do, that eating bread, taking pictures of shops, riding a bike downhill and walking it back were all doing, using up your life; yes, it was a matter of living.
The idling old man Pete had spoken to bared his gums. Pete must have taken this for a smile. Later, the old man, who was not the owner of the bike or of anything except the fat, sick dog at his feet, said he had shouted “Thief!” but I never heard him. Pete tossed me his camera and I saw him glide, then rush away, past the girls who smelled of jasmine, past the bakery, down to the corner, where a policeman in white, under a parasol, spread out one arm and flexed the other and blew hard on a whistle. Pete was standing, as if he were trying to coast to a stop. I saw things that were meaningless now—for instance that the sun was sifted through leaves, that there were trees we hadn’t noticed. Under the leaves he seemed underwater. A black car, a submarine with Belgian plates, parked at an angle in front of a change office, stirred to life. I saw sunlight deflected from six points on the paint and chrome. My view became discomposed, as if the sea were suddenly black and opaque and had splashed up over the policeman and the road, and I screamed, “He’s going to open the door!” Everyone said later I was mistaken, for why would the Belgian have started the motor, pulled out, and then flung open the door? I saw him do it, and I saw him drive away. No one had taken his number.
Strangers made Pete kneel and then stand, and they dusted the bicycle. They forced him to walk—where? Nobody wanted him. Into a pharmacy finally. He said to the policeman, “Don’t touch my elbow,” in a parrot’s voice. The pharmacist said, “He can’t stay here,” because Pete was vomiting, but weakly—a weak coughing, like a baby’s. I was in a crowd of about twenty people, with two cameras round my neck. In kind somebody’s living room, Pete was placed on a couch with a cushion under his head and another under his dangling arm. The toothless old man turned up now, panting, with his waddling dog, and cried that we had a common thief before us, and everyone listened and marveled until the old man spat on the carpet and was turned out.
When I touched Pete, timidly, trying to wipe his face with a crumpled Kleenex (all I had), he thought I was one of the strangers. His mouth was a purple color, as if he had been in icy water. His eyes looked at me, but he was not looking out.
“Ambulance,” said a doctor who had been fetched by the immaculate policeman. He spoke loudly and slowly, because he was dealing with idiots.
“Yes,” I heard someone say, in English. “We must have an ambulance.”
Now everyone inspected me. I was plainly responsible for something. For walking around the streets in shorts? Wasting bread? I was conscious of my sweaty hair, my bare legs, my lack of Italian—my nakedness—and I began explaining the true error of the day: “The train has gone, and all our things are on it. Our luggage. We’ve been staying up in that village—oh, what’s the name of it, now? Where they make the white wine. I can’t remember, no, I can’t remember where we’ve been. I could find it, I could take you there. I’ve just forgotten what it’s called. We were down here waiting for the train. To Nice. We had lots of time. The porter said he’d put our things on the train for us. He said he would meet us at the place where you show your ticket. I guess for an extra tip. The train must have gone by now. My purse is in the duffel bag up at the . . . I’ll look in my husband’s wallet. Of course that is my husband! Our passports must be on the train, too. Our traveler’s cheques are in our luggage, his and mine. We were just walking round taking pictures instead of sitting up there in the station. Anyway, there was no place to sit—only the bar, and it was smelly and dark.”
No one believed a word of this, of course. Would you give your clothes, your passport, your traveler’s cheques to a porter? A man you had never seen in your life before? A bandit disguised as a porter, with a stolen cap on his head?
“You could not have taken that train without showing your passport,” a careful foreign voice objected.
“What are you two, anyway?” said a man from the change office down the street, in a tough, old-fashioned movie-American accent. He was puffy-eyed and small, but he seemed superior to us because he wore a spotlessly clean shirt. Pete, on the sofa, looked as if he had been poisoned or stepped on. “What are you?” the man from the change office said again. “Students? Americans? No? What, then? Swedes?”
I saw what the doctor had been trying to screen from me: a statue’s marble eye.
The tourist who spoke the careful foreign English then said, “Be careful of the pillows.”
“What? What?” screamed the put-upon person who owned them.
“Blood is coming out of his ears,” said the tourist, halting between words. “That is a bad sign.” He seemed to search his memory for a better English word. “An unfortunate sign,” he said, and put a hand over his mouth.
•
The real owner of the bicycle could not have Pete fined, as he wanted to. It was too late. The man from the change office was fined instead: he should have had the Belgian’s name and passport number because he had done business with him. He cursed my life and Pete’s death. The doctor said casually, “I hope you are not superstitious. A male-diction has no power unless you are afraid of it.” What I remember of the night was a vague consular person who said in the hospital corridor, “Why the hell didn’t he use the brake?”
&nbs
p; I sent his mother and father a cable. They flew over from Calgary as soon as they got it. They made flawless arrangements by telephone and knew exactly what to bring. They had a sunny room looking onto rusty palms and a strip of beach about a mile from where the accident had been. I sat against one of the windows and told them what I thought I remembered. I looked at the white walls, the white satin bedspreads, at Mrs. Higgins’s impeccable dressing case, and finally down at my hands.
They had not understood until now that ten days had gone by since Pete’s death.
“What have you been doing, dear, all alone?” Mrs. Higgins said to me gently.
I said, “Just waiting, once I’d cabled you.” They seemed to be expecting more. “I’ve been to the movies.” From this room we could hear the shrieks of children playing on the sand.
“Are they orphans?” asked Mrs. Higgins. They were little girls, dressed alike, with soft pink sun hats covering their heads.
“It seems to be a kind of summer camp,” I said. “I was wondering about them too.”
“It would make an attractive picture,” said Pete’s mother after a pause. “The blue sea and the nuns and all those bright hats. It would look nice in a dining room.”
They were too sick to reproach me. My excuse for not having told them about the accident sooner was that I hadn’t thought of them, but they didn’t ask me for it. I remember saying, “I don’t want to go back home just yet,” which must have hurt them, because it meant I was already in the future. “I have a girl friend in the embassy in Paris. I can stay with her.” I scarcely moved my lips. They had to strain to hear. I held still, looking down at my fingers. I was very brown, sun streaks in my hair, more graceful than at my wedding, where I knew they had found me maladroit—a great lump of a Campfire Girl. That was how I had seen myself in my father-in-law’s eyes. Extremes of shock had brought me near some ideal they had of prettiness. I appeared now much more the kind of girl they’d have wanted as Pete’s wife.
A Fairly Good Time Page 23
