Things As They Are?

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  He was always complaining that what he wrote didn’t measure up. She didn’t understand what he meant. Measure up to what? To whom?

  He swung round on her, eyes burning. “To me, goddamn it! It doesn’t measure up to me!” he shouted. Embarrassed by this outburst, he turned back to his contemplation of the canal, forearms propped on the railing.

  “If that’s really the case, Jack,” he heard her say, “it seems to me there are only two possibilities. Either you underestimate the quality of your writing, or overestimate your talent. If you want a life, you’d better make up your mind which it is.”

  The next morning they divided up the currency and travellers’ cheques in a cafe near the Concertgebouw and separated.

  It wasn’t long before Greer and Madox fell into a routine. By ones and twos more guests began to take up residence in the monastery, but Roland ignored their existence; he clung exclusively to Jack. The two men ate all their meals together, Greer helping Roland load his plate and manage his tray in the cafeteria-style line. In the evenings they played Trivial Pursuit, which Roland always won, earning him the nickname Mr. S.O. Teric from Jack. But it was the hour before supper that was sacrosanct, the hour devoted to solitaire – which Roland happened to be addicted to. As a boy it had been his substitute for Little League and Minor Hockey, later for the Teen Dance, rec-room parties, other excitements.

  There were times, however, when Greer grew short-tempered with his new friend. Of course, Greer blamed his frustration with his own work for making him impatient and peevish. He regretted the way he sometimes behaved, comparing the stubborn stoicism with which Roland, in public, silently bore pain, to his own outbursts of irritability. Although each morning Jack lay awake listening to the gut-wrenching noises from the hallway, he couldn’t recall a single occasion when Roland had allowed so much as a murmur to escape his lips when they walked together. And the effort to suppress his pain was often evident in his face, the waxy scars taking on a sullen, leaden cast, a shine like the tip of a bullet.

  Yet Jack couldn’t deny there were things about his new friend that drove him crazy, exasperated him beyond belief. With Chekhov’s example before him, Greer was attempting to cultivate the ability to see things lucidly, with nothing more than a pane of the clearest glass to put distance between himself and what he looked at, without even so much as the breath of a lie to mist and cloud the glass for his or anyone else’s benefit. The famous objectivity, the pitiless refusal to delude oneself, to see clearly and not lose heart was, for Jack, the mystery of Chekhov’s conscience as a writer and a man. The acceptance of things as they are. It was the gift Jack wanted most.

  So, naturally, Greer found Roland Madox annoying. It annoyed him the way he gushed about his life to come as a monk, sounding like some bride-to-be burbling about the prospect of a totally fabulously unique June wedding. He talked as if he were on the point of crossing the threshold of some never-never land of unfading, unfailing happiness. Was that likely? Because it was clear to Greer that Roland had not been accepted by the happy band of monks he was so determined to join. They obviously had as little to do with him as possible, grateful to leave him in Greer’s company and care. Wasn’t it Jack Greer who shuffled his cards, ate with him, listened to his stories, nodded over his plans for the future? Meanwhile his brothers in Christ didn’t pay the least attention to him.

  Jack resented that. He had come to this place to write a book, not to get saddled with responsibility for another human being. Besides, anyone who had fucked up his own life as badly as he had, had no business letting anybody get in the habit of depending on him. He owed it to Madox to keep him at arm’s length.

  When the situation became too much for him, Jack Greer took the coward’s way out and fled; struck out across country, knowing Roland couldn’t pursue him over rough, broken ground. Madox had tried once and taken some bad tumbles over ridges in a freshly cultivated field. Greer, returning to the monastery in the twilight, had found him collapsed in a furrow, panting, disshevelled, dirty, utterly done in. He had had to half carry him back to the abbey.

  But if he turned his back on the disappointed man watching reproachfully from the window and strode off in the direction of the shelterbelts and fields, he won a temporary freedom. Two things never altered on these expeditions. There was always brandy in his knapsack and he was always angry; angry about the guilt the figure at the window made him feel, angry at Roland for banking so much on becoming a monk. It wouldn’t heal his body, turn back the clock to the time he owned a face. Couldn’t he see that?

  Past the hot stench of the pig sties, past the black and white cows sedately lowing their way to the dairy barns for milking, past the market gardens, past the rippling fields of wheat and oats, he marched, trying to tramp the fury and frustration out of himself, slashing weeds with a stick, sweating until his shirt clung to his back like a leech. A couple of miles bled the anger out of him. By the time he reached the railway embankment and stood in the cinders looking down at the slough and the ducks, it was spent. In early evening light the flat sheet of water was a mirror. And what does it reflect? Greer asked himself. Bullrushes, sky, cloud, streaks of sun, the wind brushing and wrinkling the surface. Things as they are. Nothing else. The last light of day is the truest light.

  When he had had enough of ducks and water, he headed for the tennis courts. Some of the visitors on retreat passed the evenings there, playing a set or two. They weren’t aware he watched. The stand of evergreens planted forty years ago as a windbreak to ring the courts now towered over them, providing cover for a stealthy approach. Slipping from tree to tree, he reached his customary spot. Here the ground was thickly carpeted with dry needles, the resinous air was pleasantly sharp in his nostrils and he could comfortably prop his back against a trunk and view the court through the dark shelter of a screen of boughs. It was in bad shape, the asphalt surface heaved and split by frost, weeds bursting through its cracks, the lines practically obliterated by weather and wear, the net drooping and in need of mending.

  Tonight, as they did every evening, middle-aged men and women politely patted a tennis ball back and forth across the net. Greer quietly unzipped his knapsack, took out his bottle and glass, and poured his first drink of the day.

  There was nothing preventing him leaving the trees and standing at the fence. Nothing except that on his first visit, entirely by chance, he had overheard some of the other guests discussing him. One of them said: “Brother Ambrose mentioned he’s a writer – but not a Catholic writer. He’s certainly stuck-up. I have a feeling he’s keeping that poor boy from associating with the rest of us. What do you think could be the reason?”

  They played on late, until the edges of their shadows on the asphalt began to blur and flocks of sparrows whirled erratically from evergreen to evergreen, preparing to settle for the night. When the players did eventually go, their voices fading off into the darkening distance, Greer realized his hands were sticky with the resin he had nervously picked from the tree bark with his nails.

  Then the moon came up as it did in a Chekhov story and shone on the deserted, crumbling court and sagging net while he drank his second and third brandies. As Greer looked at this scene from behind the trees, a moon of loneliness rose in him too, a staring moon, as cold and bright and hard and huge as the one in the sky above.

  Knowing first hand the effect disappointment could have on a man, Jack Greer feared for Roland Madox. Wanting to spare him that, he did his best to interject an element of reality into Roland’s speculations about his future in the Order. It didn’t work. Some days Greer would have sworn Madox was already a bishop.

  “The abbot will probably want to make use of my degree,” Roland said one afternoon. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he assigned me to teaching.”

  Jack knew he ought to let it pass but didn’t. “Teaching where? The school’s been closed for five years. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but this place is evolving into Palm Springs for the pious Catholic and the budget-c
onscious bohemian. That’s the only growth industry in this place.”

  “There’s the library. He could make me head librarian.”

  Greer had surveyed the card catalogue one afternoon when he dropped in on Roland. It comprised devotional works, biographies of saints, apologetics, and old high-school texts, the intellectual equivalents of Father Bing Crosby movies. Jack considered it an act of extreme charity to call it a library at all. He raised his eyebrows.

  Roland tried again. “Few of the monks have any education. He won’t want to let me go to waste. The Order is short of priests. I could be sent to a seminary. I could be ordained.”

  Greer made no comment on the likelihood of that. The two men sat silently, pretending to be absorbed in a study of the cards spread on the table.

  After a bit Roland said, “Why do you have to pick holes in everything? Can’t you just be happy for me?”

  Greer reached for the deck. “It’s not up to me to be happy for you. Be happy for yourself.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Look,” said Greer, “who’s fooling who? If you’re so crazy about the monastic life, why don’t you show any sign of it? Why is it that you eat every meal with me instead of the brothers? Do you think by avoiding them at all costs you’re making a favourable impression on the abbot? If you’re their kind, why don’t you stick with them?”

  “I thought we were friends,” said Roland. “I eat with you because we’re friends.”

  “Yes,” said Jack, “we’re friends.” He had been on the point of saying something else, something cruel. He had almost said: The reason you choose to eat with me, cling to me, is that one misfit recognizes another. We’re both misfits and there’s no point pretending otherwise. Things as they are.

  Yet he let it drop. At the last moment, Greer had recalled Faust, and Mephistopheles’ claim to be part of that power which always wills evil and always works good. Was it also possible that there might be uncalculated danger in willing good?

  For nearly two days the sky wept grey rain, trapping Greer indoors, further dampening his spirits, deepening his melancholy. Hours at a time he stood at his window, one palm pressed to the glass, watching the dismal curtain of rain sweep the landscape on gusts of wind. Or he lay on his bed, forearm across his eyes; paced up and down the room until his knees ached; rehearsed sentences in his mind that he knew would never find their way to paper. After getting soaked to the skin on his way to lunch the first day of the downpour, he didn’t bother to cross the courtyard for meals, it seemed too much trouble.

  During the night, the sound of falling rain was magnified in the darkness. He slept in brief snatches, drowsing off to disconnected words, images, thoughts that were not his own but were provided by his reading of the past few weeks. He relived Chekhov’s description of Venice, the strangeness which invited a longing for death. Warmth, calm, gleaming stars. The movement of the gondola. The silence of the countryside in a city without horses. This was the silence which surrounded Greer until morning arrived, the bells rang, and Roland struggled his way down the corridor. Suddenly fearful of crying out himself, Greer bit his lips. All morning he did nothing but watch the hypnotic rain. His hands trembled uncontrollably – he hadn’t eaten in twenty hours and had no more than a couple of hours’ sleep the night before. Between eleven o’clock and noon he drank the day’s ration of brandy, emptying three shot glasses in rapid succession while standing at the streaming window. For the first time in several weeks he was on the point of losing it, was prepared to dive down the neck of the bottle and hit bottom. Then, suddenly, the rain stopped.

  Greer threw on a jacket and rushed outside, as desperate to flee that room as he often was to flee Roland. The problem was where to run. Striking across country was out of the question. The downpour of the past thirty-six hours had flooded the fallow fields, turned them into quagmires, soaked the tall grasses of the pastures. The road he found himself standing in might as well have led nowhere; the nearest town was twelve miles away.

  Then he thought of the church. He remembered overhearing Diane talk about it in the dining room, some story about a self-taught artist who fifty years ago had gone from prairie town to prairie town, decorating churches in return for room and board, a kind of Johnny Appleseed of religious art, very likely half-mad. One of his churches was hard by, just two miles up the road. Greer decided to check it out.

  The road he tramped through the flat landscape was a grid road, a pencil line on a sheet of paper. The clouds overhead reminded him of ones Miriam and he had seen in Holland, mottled grey and white, so oppressively low and heavy that they left him with the impression he could reach up and stroke their bellies with his hand. Despite there being no wind Greer could detect, the clouds kept rolling and churning, permitting a surprising amount of light to filter through, an odd opalescent light which turned the wet, yellow gravel crunching under his shoes to brass and lent the green of the crops of new oats and wheat an intense, smoky cast.

  After Greer had walked for twenty minutes, he saw the church appear on the horizon, a white structure set upon an unexpected knoll rising out of level fields vacant of any other buildings. As he drew near, as the ground rose, tilting his angle of vision upward, the church grew brighter in the strange, beguiling light, more and more luminous against the setting of dark, restless, changeable sky.

  Crossing the deserted parking lot, Greer realized he hadn’t thought out this visit very well. Surely the church would be locked on a weekday. Yet when he tried the big double doors, one pulled open in his hand. Apparently rural churches could still stand open and unattended. He went in.

  The first thing Greer noticed was a peculiar odour suspended in the motionless air, a blurred, sweet scent that struggled to mask a more insistent chemical smell which he associated with science laboratories of his high school days. Stale incense, he supposed.

  Greer entered the nave, footsteps echoing hollowly in the empty church. To his right, a depiction of Christ’s resurrection was painted directly on the plaster of the wall. To Greer it looked crude, Jesus rising before an incongruous backdrop – a fiery orange sun which improbably shared a night sky of incredible blackness with a moon and a multitude of blazing stars. The limbs of this God were too white, his hair too blond, his lips too caressingly pink and full. Smiling shyly, he held out to the viewer the red wounds on his palms.

  Greer cleared his throat. The strange, nasty, candied odour was stronger than at first. So strong, it was now a taste on his tongue. He began to move down the right-hand aisle from one picture to the next, forcing himself to halt and look. It was some of the most unpleasant, unsettling art he had ever seen. An oyster Saint Sebastian dripped gravy instead of blood; a dead-white Virgin suckled a blue-baby infant.

  The emptiness of the church, the hallucinatory pictures, the sickly odour was tightening his breathing, constricting his chest. The smell was everywhere. Linked in his mind to the unnatural complexions of the saints, it was as if he could taste the repulsive-looking flesh itself.

  Jack paused to catch his breath. Goddamn it, it wasn’t his imagination. The taste was in his mouth. Without thinking, he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, cleared his throat, and spat into it. Then, realizing what he had done, gobbed in a holy place, he swept the bare church with a furtive look.

  It was then he saw the open coffin before the altar, small and white, resting on a mortician’s portable aluminum bier. In a moment of blind shock his mind staggered, then the corpse of the little girl sprang sharply into focus. She had curls. Her upper lip had relaxed, baring tiny front teeth.

  The next thing Greer knew he was outside, taking the steps of the church two at a time, plunging across the parking lot, turning into the road in a panicky lope. Clear of the churchyard he tried to curb himself to a walk, but could only manage an undignified, stilted trot. Nor could he stop himself from darting a glance over his shoulder and, when he did, he blundered through a puddle, stumbling and nearly falling.

>   Looking up, he discovered himself face to face with a huge, coal-black dog. There was no explaining its bewildering appearance; the surrounding fields of grain were still too short in the stalk at this time of year to have hidden the approach of such a big dog, and there were no farmhouses or outbuildings from where it could have come. The two stood staring at each other. The dog did not pad up to make friends, nor slink away. Hollow flanks, matted, muddy coat and sore-looking, crusted eyes, it simply waited, motionless.

  A minute, two minutes crawled by and still neither moved a muscle. The blood surged in Greer’s temples, he could feel it throbbing in the ends of his fingers. A single thought was running round and round his mind like a toy locomotive on a circular track. The dog belongs to the little girl. Belongs to the girl. Belongs to the girl. Belongs to the girl.

  And then these words were replaced by others. He heard himself speaking aloud in a wheedling voice. “Go away,” he said. “Leave me be. I didn’t do anything.”

  His voice acted as a trigger for the dog. Suddenly it bristled, the hair on its neck rose in a ruff and its head began to weave from side to side with a supple, snake-like menace while it snapped its jaws. The clicking of teeth was the only sound the dog made.

  Rabies, thought Greer. The son of a bitch has rabies. Frantically seeking something with which to defend himself, his eyes fell on a large stone lying on the shoulder of the road. He bent to snatch it up and a roaring wind filled his ears, the stone turned unimaginably heavy in his hands, dragged him to his knees, and for the briefest of moments everything went black. Then his surroundings woozily squeezed back in upon him and he felt the stain of wetness working its way up out of the damp ground and through the cloth of his pants, the gravel biting his kneecaps. Sparking lights, swimming in a cloud, gradually extinguished themselves one by one, and his eyes fastened on the rock, lying where he had dropped it.