Shelby

by McCormack, Pete;

  Lucy stood up from the couch and exited towards the bathroom humming a few bars from “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”—nary a week after she’d expressed her ambivalence towards the season.

  “You can’t sing that and walk out!” I yelled.

  “La la la.”

  “What’s going on?” I followed her into the bathroom. “If I guess will you tell me?”

  “Tell you what?” she said, breaking off a piece of dental floss.

  “It’s love, isn’t it? You want to tell me you love me.”

  “I hardly know you,” she said, flossing.

  “Ha ha.”

  “No more questions or I’ll kill you.”

  We spent the evening in a state of quiet euphoria: talking, reading, smiling.

  “Get up!”

  Heart pounding, I sprang forward to see Lucy roll off the bed and run out of the room, clothed only in a bra, socks and her gauzed hand. I turned to the clock. It was five past six in the morning.

  “Close your eyes!” she yelled from outside the room. I closed them. “Are they closed?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Close them.”

  “They’re closed.”

  I heard her steps get closer. “Okay,” she said, “open them.”

  And there before me was an unusual looking black case on the bed about the dimensions of a bassoon.

  “Open it,” she said with an enthusiasm reminiscent of when she lent me the money to reimburse my parents months earlier.

  Unclicking the buckles, I was shocked to find inside a saxophone—judging by the case and a few dents an old one, but nonetheless in excellent condition, lined in pinky-purple shag carpet, its body like buffed gold. I gingerly touched a couple of the keys. “My God.”

  “You like it?”

  “For me?”

  “No kidding.”

  “God. I adore it!” Inside was a note:

  Merry Christmas

  Thanks. A sexy instrument for a sexy guy.

  Love Lucy xoxox.

  “Me?”

  “Of course you,” she said with a laugh.

  I glanced up at her. “I’m not sexy.”

  “Can I pick presents?” she asked proudly. Sighing, my nose whistled. It made no difference. There was a poem, handwritten at the bottom of the note.

  If your house catch on fire, Lord, and there ain’t no water around, Throw your trunk out the window, and let the shack burn down.

  “I’m stunned,” I said.

  Lucy beamed. I reached over and hugged her. “Now you can jam with your brother,” she said doing something disco-like.

  “Derek?”

  “He plays the clarinet, doesn’t he?”

  “How did you know that?”

  “You told me about it months ago—when we first met.”

  I didn’t recall. I glanced back at the card. “Lucy, I … don’t know what to say. What does this poem mean?”

  Lucy tilted her head to read it. “I saw it in a book of Spirituals I was flipping through in the store where I bought the sax. It sounded cool. The card was there …” She shrugged her shoulders.

  I gave the saxophone a squeaky blow. “Three months,” I said.

  Lucy smiled.

  “I’m not kidding,” I said. “Music is very mathematical and I have a gift for math. Speaking of that, I have a gift for you, too.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. It’s not much. It’s … I’ll get it.” I trotted out of the bedroom and into the hallway by the front door, and removed from the hockey bag the wrapped photograph of Lucy. My heart momentarily fluttered. I walked back into the room and offered it to her gently.

  She unveiled it face down, flipped it over and stared.

  “Well?”

  She looked up, her face without expression. “Where did you get this?”

  “I borrowed it from your … photo album.”

  She looked for a few more seconds. “Oh yeah,” she said, her face lightening, “that’s where I’ve seen it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I found it on the top shelf of the bedroom closet when I moved in here,” she said.

  “What?”

  Lucy shrugged. “Homely little thing, isn’t she?”

  “It’s not you?”

  Lucy laughed and glanced back at the photograph. “Of course it’s not me,” she said, “look at her.” Lucy turned the photograph my way. She was still laughing but it seemed forced.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “I think there’s a resemblance.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course. I thought it was you! Why do you think I had it enlarged?”

  “Sorry,” she said with a smile. The saxophone glittered at my side.

  “I thought it …” I shook my head. “Give it to me and I’ll smash it.”

  “No. I’ll put it on my wall.”

  “What for? How stupid.”

  “It’s great.”

  “I feel like swearing!”

  “I love it, Shel, really,” she said, “it’s a beautiful photograph.” She leaned her face towards me, offering a smile and a kiss. We collapsed backwards on the bed and she caressed my ribby back with her bandaged hand. I was soon soothed.

  The morning was shrouded in the possibility of lovemaking. We had tea and toast in bed while outside the white sky sent forth snowflakes the size of cotton balls. Floating down, they’d land in the alley and then, poof, be gone. Lucy sat watching them for a good hour while I lay on the front room floor perusing Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew—Lucy’s book and surprisingly readable (albeit an unusual choice for Christmas Eve). Every quarter hour or so I’d peek into the bedroom and watch from behind Lucy gazing out the window. Though curious, I didn’t ask her what thoughts she held. I had a feeling they weren’t for sharing.

  Sometime into the early afternoon the snow stopped and the sun shone white through the clouds like a bright reflection off a silver tray. Lucy and I bundled up and trotted to the Safeway at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Vine. The trees and bushes were covered in a pristine inch of snow. The roads were clear. The air was cold on my face but my body felt wonderfully warm. Without provocation, Lucy slipped her hand in my jacket pocket and for the first time, I knew without question we were lovers.

  “Come to Revelstoke for Christmas,” I blurted. “We’d have such larks.”

  “Larks?”

  “Fun. George Bernard Shaw. We’ll go tobogganing.”

  “Yippee!”

  “You’ll come?”

  “No way.”

  “Don’t be afraid.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Come or I’ll kill myself,” I said. She laughed.

  XXI

  Sail forth—steer for the deep waters only!

  —Walt Whitman

  Groceries were irrelevant with the hand of the woman I loved in my pocket. We wandered aimlessly and contentedly around the store for a half hour or so and ended up with a box of Japanese oranges and two purple candles. Once home, we walked directly into the front room. Lucy lit one of the candles, put it on the coffee table and poured the oranges all over the floor.

  “Dinnuh is served,” she said. I ate four of them and I think Lucy ate two. We split a bottle of Muscadet, swig for swig. Towards the end of the meal we simultaneously lay down on the carpet and rolled oranges wrapped in green paper back and forth in the faded light; sometimes the paper fell off, sometimes an orange rolled under the couch, sometimes they rolled out of reach. Gorging the last one, I remembered the Christmas card I had bought for Lucy was still in the hockey bag I’d brought from home. Cheeks bulging, I offered her a one finger “Just be a second” gesture. Lucy rolled an orange beneath her hand and gave me a thumbs up. Entering the hallway, candlelight flickered, landing upon the wall like the shadows of a thousand ballerinas. And in that light I read:

  The valley spirit never dies;

  It is the woman, primal mother.

  Her g
ateway is the root of heaven and earth.

  It is like a veil barely seen.

  Use it; it will never fail.

  I started to tremble. That poem had moved me the first time I saw it, too, seven or eight months earlier saying goodbye to a Lucy I did not yet know, a migrained Lucy, a Lucy I did not yet love—or did I? I’d always reacted to it since, but suddenly the feeling was all-consuming. I turned back to the front room.

  “It’s time,” I said.

  Still rolling the orange, Lucy looked up. The candle flickered her shadow on the wall. She smiled. “I’m playing with an orange,” she said.

  I lay down and softly kissed the tops of her feet and then her ankles before standing up and undressing in front of her, my boney frame now only mildly embarrassing.

  “Look at you,” she said.

  I walked into the bedroom and lay on the bed. The mattress, at first cold on my back, warmed quickly.

  Lucy came in with a candle flickering in her hand. She placed it on the bedside table. Her footsteps were soft upon the hardwood floor as she undressed naked to her bra. I stood up and undid it, gently holding each breast, one at a time, kissing her nipples. And when we were on the bed I kissed her everywhere else I’d never kissed her before.

  If forced abstinence had taught me anything, it was that lovemaking was not about paying ten dollars at a toll booth on the way up the Coqhihalla Highway. Indeed, Lucy’s foreplay comment from months earlier had rung a true chord—and for the first time I knew it was not about connecting dots. It was about not knowing. I knew nothing. It was about timelessness. I took off my watch. It was about faith in the mystery. We had no destination. There was no map. There was no manual. I was lost, words from the Song of Songs playing over and over in my head, Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires, Do not arouse or awaken … Had I done that? What was right for my spirit? Was this the tantra? Let go, I said over and over, I mean hold on, I mean let go …

  Every time I’d begin to speed up, Lucy would put her hands around me and slow me down. Barely moving, I could hear our sweat breaking forth just as primordial sludge must have done, splitting in two, deep in our ancestry; separate, together, separate, together, the rhythm meditative, spreading outwards from the center, beyond the bed, into the night and farther. I moaned with pleasure, pulling my body upwards, gazing at Lucy. Pulling me in tight, we began to speed up. This time, Lucy didn’t slow us down. Collapsing forward, alive with exhaustion, our bodies inseparable and indecipherable, the only movement came outwards from the tips of my soul, pumping, yearning, flailing …

  I screamed at the moment of ejaculation; feeling both fully helpless and fully alive. Afterwards, we lay flat-out and exhausted, somewhere in the valley, our bodies gently moving, our mouths softly moaning, one step into the gateway (the root of heaven and earth), motionless for what seemed like hours …

  I woke up with a different kind of scream. It was quarter past eleven and I had to catch the 11:30 night bus to Revelstoke at the downtown depot. Lucy jumped out of bed, ran into the front room, ran back into the bedroom and threw assorted garments at me. A half-minute later I was half dressed and tumbling down the outside stairs with a saxophone in my hand, a bag full of presents over one shoulder and soiled laundry draped over the other. Lucy was milliseconds behind, fumbling to find the right key to lock the door.

  Driving was treacherous; I had to continually wipe the front window inside and out—a precarious stretch—and keep the side windows fully open to minimize condensation build-up. Lucy burst forth in song, singing “Leaving on the Midnight Bus to Revelstoke” to the tune of “Leaving on the Midnight Train to Georgia,” and when I attempted to add the background parts but became confused with their rhythmic placement—the his world is my world proving particularly difficult—fits of laughter took us both over. In a moment of reckless bravado I stuck my head out the window and, hair blowing, screamed for several seconds.

  We arrived at the depot three minutes before departure and just before my reserved ticket was transferred to an affable looking old man with a bulbous nose and a curious limp. I felt like Ebenezer Scrooge snatching a crutch from Tiny Tim Cratchet (as a pensioner). Truth is, if I’d have had reliable tread on my tires I’d have offered him the seat right there. Instead, all I could do was shrug and apologise. In disbelief he stared, dropping his cane when the bus driver verified me to be who I said I was.

  Lucy and I embraced in transit, a painful situation falsely romanticized by perfume commercials. Our hug, however, was suggestive of a force that could not and would not be denied. I turned away, climbing into the bus and taking the only seat I could find, six rows back. Wiping away the condensation, I saw Lucy through the hole, some twenty feet away, grinning. The bus lurched forward. She waved and turned around before suddenly yelling:

  “I can’t drive a standard!” Her hands slapped down on her thighs and she fell into a paroxysm of laughter. The bus pulled away; my eyes welled with tears of joy and sadness. I sat back picturing her wonderful smile, and proceeded to lambaste myself for not having coerced her into accompanying me.

  Within minutes, the woman next to me was snoring erratically while her Walkman projected its tinny sound at a level reminiscent of a pestering mosquito. Twice I lovingly asked her to turn it down. Half an hour into the trip and fed up, I reached over and clicked it off. She opened one eye and snarled at me. I retorted with a blank stare that seemed to unnerve her. The person in front of me was bothersome, too—his seat just far enough back to cut off the circulation below my knees.

  The rest of the passengers, however, most notably those sitting towards the back, were in festive spirit. We all bellowed out a cheer at midnight—and why not? It was Christmas. On the way back from the washroom a drunk man looking about as fun as a glass milkshake offered me a drink from a paper-bagged bottle. Hoping to avoid a knife wound, I smiled graciously and declined.

  “Come on, asshole,” he said, spitting and slurring, “it’s Merry Goddamn X-mas!” That was true. I took a quick snort and asked him what it was. He didn’t answer, instead throwing out his hand and yelling. “Puda here, asshole! Merry fuckin’ Christmas!”

  We shook. “And an injury-free Christmas to you,” I replied, which seemed to delight him even further. Returning to my seat and closing my eyes, I was soothed by the Hope-Princeton’s curvaceous route and the warm air vents blowing up my pant leg. As much as I despised having to ride the bus, there was something curiously romantic about hopping a lift on Christmas Eve with an assembly of other vagabonds going who knows where. Tilting my head to the side, a deep breath uncovered for me an awareness of Lucy’s fragrance all over; in my hands, my hair, my clothes, a reality enhanced with every inhale. I closed my eyes and recalled kissing her in mysterious places, wondering how at one moment life could feel as comforting as being sucked out of an airplane with its back end blown off in mid-flight, and at another like the earth and the sky are a uterine wall and our mutual existences are two and the same. Oh the good fortune to be hanging from that mysterious chord!

  A jerky stop awoke me in Keremeos. It was ten minutes to five and dark. Slapped by the freezing wind, I shivered as I made my way outside for a quick stretch. Snow abounded. The womb, it would seem, had frozen over. Returning for a second snort from the drunkard’s bottle, I was disappointed to discover he’d reached his destination an hour earlier. Glancing around, it was apparent there were two or three others capable of taking his place. I suppressed the impulse. Sitting back down at my own seat, I accidentally stepped on the foot of Walkman Woman and got snarled at a second time.

  “Idiot,” she said.

  “Sorry,” I said, with as gentle a smile as I could manage. I closed my eyes and thought of Lucy.

  “Idiot,” she said again.

  Opening my eyes we locked horns like disgruntled caribou. “Excuse me,” I said, “would you mind moving your thigh over a wee bit, please?”

  She glanced down at her leg which was as far over as it could be.


  “Oops, I’m sorry,” I said, “I mean your fat arm! Ha ha ha! Mind if I call you Redwood?”

  Tears erupted, reminiscent of Pompeii. And like those mortified Roman peons, I ran but could not hide—smothered by guilt at my inability to turn the other cheek and see in her eyes the divinity I had failed to see in Frank’s. An apology was my only recourse, and I proceeded to give one. The effects were remarkable. Within minutes barriers crumbled to where she was expressing to me in soggy detail the anguish of adolescent obesity. I sympathised, confessing I’d once been rejected by a fat woman—to whom I was wildly attracted—merely because she’d perceived my failure to rise above the neurosis of social stigma. An hour or so later, still engaged in our therapeutic tête-à-tête, I felt blessed to have witnessed the effects of a few kind words. Sometime thereafter, we drifted into slumber, Doris’ head on my shoulder, our bodies no longer an issue. Her subsequent departure in Osoyoos, although allowing me greater leg room, was bittersweet.

  Arrival in Revelstoke was a nonevent. No one else got off the bus, no one appeared to be in the depot, and no one was there to pick me up. It was twenty minutes to noon, the bus ten minutes early. I stood for a moment, stiff, punished somewhat by the beef jerkey, coffee and Nibs in Salmon Arm, gazing afar as “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” with flutes, strings and electric piano floated out of the backroom. A nippy draught from the doorway slipped up my sleeve and snapped before me the reality of what I was soon to face: Christmas without Gran.

  Mom and Dad picked me up a few minutes later. Pleasantries were bathed in melancholia and the drive home was, although tender, strained. Back at the house I called Lucy several times without success. Derek and Kristine showed up a few hours later and announced the baby news to Mom and Dad (and me, pretending). It was a joyous happening, everybody ecstatically teary-eyed. Larry wasn’t around, having boycotted (except for personal emergencies) the family and our worldly ways. Ironically, I missed him. He wasn’t so bad.

  Gifts were opened after dinner amidst sadness, laughter, Gran anecdotes and Dad and Derek, both having overindulged, breaking out in the theme song from Hockey Night In Canada.

  “Is that show still on?” I asked sarcastically and to much badgering.