Lauchlin of the Bad Heart

by D. R. MacDonald

  “I’ve met a woman who’s blind,” Lauchlin said as they poked along the shore. Morag was long-stepping from one big sandstone rock to another. Some were emblazoned with iron oxide designs, swirls of red landscapes, like storms on Mars. With a sandalled foot she pointed to her favourite, a half-embedded stone decorated like a cave painting, mysterious and abstract. “Wild horses,” Lauchlin said, kneeling to admire it, its surface warm to the hand. “Rearing up, they are, like flames.” Morag’s foot, tanned from sunbathing, was near his face and he gave her toes a quick kiss.

  “Careful,” she said. “I’m ticklish there. Who is this blind woman then?”

  “Wife of a friend.” He plucked out from the stones the neck of a green beer bottle, flung it further where the waves washed out into foam. “You ever know anyone who was blind?”

  “Sort of. In Boston. He ran a cigarette and candy stall in a post office. We used to chat about this and that. He was there for years. You put a bill on the counter and he could tell what it was, a dollar bill or a twenty, he’d just brush his fingers over it.”

  “But you only saw him, you didn’t know him.”

  “How would I know him? That was his life, that stall. He almost lived in it.”

  “He might have surprised you, he was more than that stall.”

  “I don’t think he wanted to surprise anyone, Lauchlin. He had enough to deal with. Getting to know this blind woman, are you?”

  “You could say, a little. I’ve read to her. That sort of thing.” He wanted to hear what that sounded like. Was it so odd, as his mother had implied, just not done with a married woman? “I know her better than I did.”

  “And her husband?”

  “Fine with him, he knows me. It’s what she likes, so it’s fine.”

  “So you’re sort of like…what? A visitor of shut-ins? A social worker?”

  “A friend. Just a friend.”

  Morag gave him a skeptical smile. She sat down on the rock.

  “The man in the post office, he said one day, out of the blue, You’re pretty, I can tell. It shocked me. I blushed, and I don’t blush easy.”

  “Why? He was right.”

  “Was he? I wondered what made him think that. How could he possibly know anything about how I looked? He never touched me.”

  “He liked you, he wanted you to be pretty. Only natural.”

  “One day he just wasn’t there anymore. The stall was gone. No one seemed to know what happened to him. But he was older of course.”

  “Like me.”

  “Even beyond your years, Lauchlin, if you can believe that. How is old Frank, by the way?”

  “He wants me take a trip to Scotland with him.”

  “Well go, then. You always wanted to. Get off this island for a while.”

  “Ten days in the Hebrides.”

  “So? Take it.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Oh for God’s sake, Lauchlin, it’s the old country. It’s not like you’re flying to Morocco or someplace. What’s to keep you from going?”

  “Nothing really.” Lauchlin had been nowhere more foreign than the Nova Scotia mainland, and two trips to Boston by car back in his boxing days. People like his brother, expertly in transit, at ease in the larger world, who talked offhand about the landscapes of Europe, about renting cars and sailing through this city or country, fluent in the food and drink, the charming out-of-the-way lodgings and villages, made Lauchlin feel hopelessly bound to St. Aubin, unsophisticated, at his age he could never catch up if he tried. Boxing, he hadn’t needed to go off the Island, plenty of fighters and matches right here. If he had climbed high enough in the rankings, then sure, he would have gone beyond the Maritimes, west or to the States where the big fights were. But after his heart started to fail him, that was it for the ring, no fights at all, only memories of them. Still, Scotland had been different: he had always wanted to know what it felt like to be where his people came from, up there on Harris, and on Mull. Yet he couldn’t turn his mind in that direction, not now.

  “Maybe we should go back. The wind’s up,” he said.

  Up the cliff path, the sun was growing hazy behind them, fading above the sea. Spray leapt into the light as waves boomed over the rocks, foam scrambling upward. At the top of the cliff Morag took his hand and they said no more until they reached the house.

  He talked to her from the hallway door while she boiled the crabs she’d bought off the local wharf that afternoon. He told her about Clement, who’d moved here a few years ago, he had some family connections here way back, none of them left now, about his difficulties with his milling partner, and with caring for a woman who lost her sight after he fell in love with her, a turn he hadn’t been prepared for. How do you prepare for that anyway? Morag said, and Lauchlin said yes, he often wondered about that himself. But when Morag said, This woman wouldn’t happen to be a looker, would she? Lauchlin hesitated: in that instant he could see Tena so clearly, under that flickering fluorescent light the evening she first came into the store, a bit shy and uncertain but proud she had walked the road alone, not a looker the way Morag meant, there was nothing glamorous about her, but in her bearing appealing, her hazel eyes surprising in their light and warmth. Simple, unadorned beauty, like a woman he’d seen in a Renaissance painting. She’s okay, he said.

  Morag laid out the table, a meal Auntie Nell would never have made because snow crab was not fished until late in her life and never desired by her generation, and a salad with avocados and small shells of pasta would have been too strange, not what she’d have in her larder even had it been available. They cracked and picked at the long crab legs, absorbed in the task, murmuring, the meat was sweet and they dipped it in lemon butter. Morag preferred it to lobster, she said, and Lauchlin said he could take one just as well as the other, it wasn’t worth a debate. They opened a bottle of white Hungarian wine, I only ever drink wine when I’m with you, Lauchlin said, why is that? Their old, lingering problems stayed under the table, beneath the sheer pleasure of the meal, the growing glow of the wine, the easy carnal warmth that always rose between them when they were together like this, regardless.

  “Oh, Morag, you’re sleek,” Lauchlin said when they’d worked the wine down to an inch, still at the kitchen table where a west wind cooled them through the back door. He yearned to reach across the table and touch her but he didn’t. “Why did you hate your name, dear? It’s you.”

  “It’s not a city name, and I wanted the city, didn’t I? Fine for here, with the Gaelic and links to the old country, but it sounds like something in a churchyard, on an old stone.”

  “With lichen on it, limestone, all water-carved and blurry.”

  “That’s it.”

  “But that’s nice too, that kind of stone. Morag, dear, come over here to me. Please?”

  “You’ve said that oh so many times, Lauchlin.”

  “I mean it, I only say it when I mean it. I want to put my arms around you. Nobody feels like you in my arms.”

  “Lauchlin. Do you have any idea how much that hurts, after all this time?”

  “I love your face, the look of you now.”

  “And tomorrow? I wish you were lying, I wish you were just like other men I’ve known, they’ll say anything, and after it’s over, they got nothing to say at all.” She paused. “But I’m with a man now and I like him. He wants to marry me. I’m only here the week, then he’s taking me to Greece, to an island. I’ve always wanted to go there.”

  “Ah. Well.”

  “I’m sorry, I had to tell you. Don’t let it ruin our meal.”

  “You were married once, dear.”

  “Does that mean I’m finished then?”

  “First time sorry, second time sure, I guess.”

  “Don’t play with me, Lauchlin.”

  “I just hope he’s better than that first fella J.J., that’s all.”

  “You were the first fella, and if I don’t stay away from you, you’ll be the last. Good Lord, L
auchlin, we could have had a life together. What a horrible waste.” She put her face in her hands. She was never quick to cry and tried hard to hide it.

  “I don’t know what to say to you, Morag. It’s never worked out, has it. I didn’t want to go to Boston. I might have if I’d stayed in the ring, seen it out. But I lost that, and then I didn’t give a damn.”

  “Oh I’d have stayed here for you. You must have known that.”

  “Morag, think about it. Remember how you felt in those days, how badly you wanted to get away from here?”

  “I did, I did. Was that terrible?”

  “Well, God, no. But stay here for me? Oh hell, come over here, please. This is all we’ve got right now. That’s the truth of it, you in Boston, me down in St. Aubin, and still we meet up and we do our dance. We push the old furniture back, burn each other up, like we used to. Christ, that’s something. Come over here. Please. Am I right?”

  “No, not exactly, Lauchlin. Like you say, it’s not that simple.”

  “Yes. I know. Tell me, Peg Morag, have you done well for yourself?”

  “Am I working and making good money? Will I have a decent pension when my hair is white? Yes to all that, that’s what matters around here, isn’t it? But I am not married, I have no children. I wanted kids and now it’s too late. I wanted a man once but he wouldn’t have me. Is that doing well? I don’t know. Not bad for a pasture colt, I guess.”

  “Jesus, Morag. It was never that I wouldn’t have you. I couldn’t take myself down to Boston with a bad heart.”

  “Some have gone down with worse.”

  “You live a different life there, it’s nothing like mine. A Peg life. I’d have cut into that, now wouldn’t I?”

  “You don’t know how I live down there.”

  “You’ve had lovers down there, you have a man who wants you.”

  “I’m not supposed to? Listen to him. Maybe we should compare sins sometime.”

  “No, no, I mean you’d have wanted that anyway, other men, you were still young when you left here. Imagine being saddled with me in those days. Things had already happened to me. We weren’t the same age, in more ways than years. In Boston, we’d have pulled and pushed at each other worse than we did here.”

  “But here there’s never been anybody else. Not for me. For you? You can tell me, I’m a big girl. I won’t break down weeping.”

  “Nobody like you. Suppose you hadn’t gone away, that you’d stayed?”

  “I still wouldn’t be married to you, would I? I would for sure be married to somebody, I’d have done it to spite you, done it out of boredom, done it for a family of my own. You’d still be living with your mother. I never got to live with mine.”

  “You sound so sure of everything, Morag. Boston’s done that to you.”

  “Would you have married me if I stayed?”

  “Ah, Morag, this is impossible. I haven’t married, have I?”

  “You never would, you never will, so that’s little comfort to me.”

  “Well, if it’s comfort you’re after, maybe I can do something about that, depending.”

  “Yes,” she said with a bitter smile, “that comfort you’re good at.”

  “A man has to be good at something, if he’s to keep on going.”

  “I’m almost engaged, Lauchlin.”

  “I don’t see a ring.”

  “Greece. He’s giving it to me there.”

  “I bet he is. Be a fool if he didn’t.”

  “Lauchlin, now listen.”

  But she got up slowly and he pushed his chair out from the table so she could sit on his lap. She did, she lay her head on his shoulder and he held her, rocking her a little in his chair. She began to hum but so softly he couldn’t say what it was. He kissed her neck, felt in his lips the faint vibration of her voice. He slid her skirt higher so he could touch the soft skin of her legs. “God,” he said, “I love your legs, every bare bit of them.”

  She looked into his face, her eyes moving over it. “You have to be careful, Lauchlin. You’re getting on, you know. Look at those lines.”

  “Don’t worry about me, dear,” he said. “Pace is everything. Right? We’ll make it a slow round, a long one, no bell. A little dancing, fancy footwork, nice clinches. This is too happy, you in my arms, to be a risk to my heart. God wouldn’t do that to me, would He? Anyway, if I had to choose…”

  He kissed her hard and slow and then he said into her ear, “Where is that old green robe of mine anyway?”

  “Why are you whispering?”

  “Is it here, in the house?”

  She drew her face away from him, looked in his eyes. “In a trunk, upstairs.”

  “Put it on for me. Would you do that for an ailing man? This once?”

  “Oh, you’re ailing all right, I can feel it.”

  “Come to me in it, like you did that night.”

  “You on the bed?”

  “Me on the bed.”

  “Whatever’s to become of you?” she said, sliding off his lap. She kissed the scar on his brow. He smiled and got up. He still wanted to believe, vain though it was, that what Morag had with him she could have with no other man, but what else had he to offer her anymore but making love?

  HE LAY ON HER BED, listening to the soft flutter of the curtain. He reached lazily for its hem and held it. In Sydney, years ago, his room had been August hot, he had stripped to his waist, there in his trousers on the pale bedspread drawn neat and tight. Boxing had made him tidy, given him a care for space, for ways of moving well in it, fast. Things had their place or they messed with your mind. Your body is your equipment, his first trainer told him, put it away clean. He pressed his fingers lightly over the bones of his face, remembering the swollen cheek, the taste of stitches on his lip, the haze of hurt behind his eyes. He had imagined, that night, her skin cool under that stained green satin where, earlier, his own had been bruised and burning with sweat. And then the wonderful sight of her, unclothed there suddenly amid the savage ache of his loss. Lord, you could wake the dead, he told her.

  Morag came into the bedroom with only the faint light from the hall behind her. She stood beside him, the robe cinched around her waist, and though its folds draped her body gracefully, he saw the satin had dulled, satin was like that. He watched her solemnly as she offered him an end of the tie, its lightning yellow tip. Pull it, she said, like I did. He did, slowly, and the robe parted, slid liquidly to the floor. Ah, he said. God love you.

  When he woke in the morning, a squall of rain was beating grey off the sea, cooling his face through the open window. The skin of his back lay warm against Morag. But he was thinking, When would Tena expect him to visit? What book would he read from when she turned to him there, waiting?

  SIX

  LDROVE to their house two days later, early in the evening when Clement was home, two cassettes on the seat beside him. He’d taped one off a Caedmon record from the fifties he’d dug out, heavyweight poets reading their work. He’d listened to it in his room and thought that maybe he didn’t read too badly himself. He was no Dylan Thomas, true, but Auden was no great shakes, and Eliot a cold fish. A girl at Dalhousie, who saw poetry as a litmus test for a relationship, had given the LP to him after they’d spent an evening taking it in, Lauchlin supine and attentive on her bedroom floor, wearing a grave expression, she on the bed murmuring lines now and then while Lauchlin nodded sombrely. She liked brandy and he’d brought her a bottle, and somewhere after “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” she was next to him on the floor, their backs against the wall. She tried to stay on the high ground through Auden’s elegy to Yeats, but by the time “The day of his death was a dark cold day” faded into the cooler corners of the room, she and Lauchlin were listening to the sounds of each other.

  “I just wanted to drop these off,” he said to Clement at the back door, lingering to glimpse Tena at the kitchen table mending a red shirt in poor light.