Thorn-Field

by James Trettwer

  He orders two dark rum and cokes with lemon, which was her drink of choice. He sets one on the other side of the table and the server raises an eyebrow. She is young and chunky with cascading black hair. She wears a low-cut top and a fire tattoo leaps up her left ankle. He pays her with a twenty-dollar bill and tells her to keep the change. She gives him a broad smile. He needs to write a letter, he says. She nods and leaves him alone.

  He sets the magazine beside a pad of lined yellow foolscap so he can study Catherine’s photo; the brunette pageboy hairstyle, her round cheeks and full lips. She was at least six inches shorter than his six feet, but looks tall leaning against the gleaming desk, the Vancouver skyline visible through office windows in the background. Her professional, conservative, grey suit makes her look subtle, seductive.

  He intends to compose some kind of a plea. He taps the ballpoint pen on the blank yellow page, writes “I,” and stops. He stares at the light blue lines, which begin to waver like heat waves in the prairie distance.

  “I can feel vulnerable around you,” she had said one hot summer day at a nearby pedestrian mall. He bought her a single carnation. The flowers were two dollars each in support of some charity. She placed the stem between her middle and ring fingers with the flower-pod resting on her knuckles. They sat on the edge of a planter, cluttered with weeds and a lone thistle, mindless of the grey concrete walkway and buildings around them. He watched her smell the flower.

  She said, “You sure know how to cheer me up.”

  “What are friends for?” he replied.

  “Well, for one, for letting me vent all the time. How do you put up with me?”

  “I don’t know. You’re such a horrible person. The real question is, how do you put up with yourself?”

  She laughed and said he was her outcrop to lean against, providing shelter from a relentless sun. Her ex-husband — Mr. Misogune she had named him, a play on the word “misogynist” — kept telephoning, emailing, sending letters. The communiqués ran from toadying to pleading to threatening. He wanted her back; he begged; he would do anything. She was glad he still lived in Halifax. An impoverished and perpetual Dalhousie student forever working on a Masters Degree in Political Science, he didn’t have the financial resources to come after her.

  She told Walker she was glad she could talk to him freely and randomly without being judged. To talk without getting unsolicited advice, just to have someone to listen. He was totally unlike her ex-husband, she said.

  He never knew exactly what the man had done to drive her away, she never talked about that and he never asked. She lent him her copy of Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them, and their bonds of trust grew stronger. One thing he knew for sure was that he would never treat her the way the people in the book treated each other.

  He said, “So what does your current boyfriend — Marcel, is it? What does he have to say about your ex sleazing around you?”

  “Marcel doesn’t know. It’s none of his business. Besides, he’s not,” her inflection turned nasal, “my boyfriend.”

  “What do you mean ‘not your boyfriend’?”

  “Come on. You’re not naïve. We all have urges. And he satisfies a particular one. This relationship is on my terms.”

  “Well, I think you could do better. How is he for emotional support?”

  Catherine sniffed and said, “I don’t need a man for that. That’s what I’ve got Phoebe for. She set me up here. Helped me through the rough patches when I thought it was all my fault. Introduced me to Marcel. It’s her I can’t live without. You know, soul mates.”

  He only nodded. A song — recognizable as a Gryphonic Techno-Bastards’ number by the discordant guitars — played from a scratchy speaker outside the music store next to them. Soul mate, I can do that, he thought as they walked back to work. She said, “Besides, Walker, I can always rely on you to listen.”

  I can rely on you, I can feel vulnerable around you, sluiced around in his consciousness afterward. He forced those thoughts over the horizon and tried to feel nothing. Nothing, even when she cancelled that dinner date. She’d said, “So I told Marcel, ‘I’ll go with you to that funeral if you make it worth my while. Make it a holiday and I’ll consider it.’ But he just needs me to ‘attend him,’ quote, unquote. I told him to forget it. I’m not interested.”

  “Whatever will you do this weekend all alone?” Walker asked.

  “I don’t know.” She wiggled her eyebrows twice. “Any ideas?”

  “Maybe Saturday we can grab a bite somewhere? Check out a movie?”

  She thought for a moment. “You and I always go to a restaurant. Let’s see. You claim you’re a cook. Why don’t I come over and you can whip me up some fish. That pickerel thing you always talk about. Unless it’s too much trouble.”

  He swallowed hard. “No trouble at all.”

  “Good. Say, seven-ish then? What’s your address?”

  For the rest of that week he focused on planning the meal. Come the Saturday he set out early in the morning to North Lakes fresh fish to pick up miniature shrimp for appetizers and fresh pickerel for linguine in curried cream sauce. He bought fresh ground coffee and picked up a French Cabernet Sauvignon and an Italian Chardonnay, and dark rum and Bailey’s Irish Cream for afterward.

  He assembled a fruit salad with a honey cardamom sauce for dessert and put it in the refrigerator to chill. He prepared a pepper mixture and the miniature shrimp for a Brushetta appetizer. Once the mixture was simmering, he sliced a baguette and carefully re-wrapped it in its brown paper bag. He showered and groomed before grating parmesan for the Brushetta and crumpled blue cheese for a simple stuffed mushroom appetizer. The two appetizers would be ready at 7:00 so they could nibble and chat while he finished preparing the main course.

  He was carefully cleaning and de-stemming mushrooms when the phone rang. Catherine. Phoebe was having a crisis and couldn’t possibly be left alone. He knew it was none of his business so he didn’t ask. She said they would talk Monday and hung up.

  He wandered from the kitchen to the living room stereo. Blared The Gryphonic Techno-Bastards’ Catherineberg Sessions. He stood listening to “My Catherine” before selecting random play. He decided to go ahead with the meal, dining alone by candlelight. Except he didn’t. He didn’t light the candles. The singer crooned about always remembering his girl under “greyling prairie skies.” He sniffed the Brushetta after removing it from the oven, then placed it and the mushrooms beside the fruit salad in the refrigerator. He poured the linguini water down the drain and left the pasta in its box. He tasted a morsel of pickerel directly from the sauce pot, while telling the Chardonnay that everything was fine, just one of those things, then froze the rest of the fish and cream sauce. When the wine bottle was empty, he meandered into the living room with the rum, turned the CD off, and played a videotape from his collection. It was a documentary on the Battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in history, fought on the open Russian Steppe.

  He didn’t watch the show though. Instead, he studied the dark liquid sitting still and flat in the confines of the rum bottle on the coffee table. He saw himself exit a lone house surrounded by endless prairie and walk and walk until the sun set and the landscape became as black as the rum. Under a starless and moonless sky, he finished the bottle and wandered directionless in the pitchy blackness toward a merciful oblivion. The videocassette player powered itself off after the battle and the machine sat idle.

  After the cancelled dinner date it was a relief to be in his office Monday morning, looking down at the city’s tree canopy. From the tenth floor, he had enough elevation to see the prairie beyond as it fell over the edge of the horizon. With his door closed, he immersed himself in audits, variances, and reconciliations of the company’s various departmental operating budgets. Plunged in weekly ledgers and columns of numbers, he strained not to think of her three floors below, down in the Facilities Department. Then he got an email from her, an invitation for lunch at the Wascana Park Mar
ina Restaurant to make up for missing Saturday — her treat. A while later another email arrived. It simply said, “Running to a meeting, late. Meet you there at lunch.”

  “There” was where he waited, at a window seat overlooking the rough wooden deck and the lake itself. He watched a lone Canada goose leisurely paddle toward Spruce Island.

  His cell phone rang. “Hi, sorry. Still running late. Order me the fish special. Salad instead of fries. Be right there. Toodles.”

  He ordered two specials and they arrived ten minutes before she did.

  She sat down across from him and started eating. “Sorry I’m late. I had a meeting with Personnel on my contract renewal.”

  “Oh? You didn’t tell me your contract was up. How did it go?”

  “They don’t seem to know how valuable I am. We’ll see.” She suddenly looked past his shoulder, her face lit up, glowing. With a squeal of delight, she called out, “Phoebe!” She said to him, “Be right back,” and breezed past.

  He turned to watch her stride toward Phoebe, a stringbean of a woman with shoulder length, mousy-blonde hair. They hugged and kissed each other’s cheeks in European style. It appeared Phoebe had survived her weekend ordeal, judging from her grin.

  After the hug and kisses they leaned toward each other and spoke intently. He could see Catherine’s face and watched her lips move. If he concentrated, he could just hear her. At one point, Phoebe’s head tilted questioningly in his direction and, with the slightest glance in his direction, Catherine replied, “Just some guy from work.”

  He turned back, poked at his fish and thought over what he had intended to say. No problem with cancelling Saturday’s dinner. I understand. No, don’t worry about me. I wasn’t disappointed. I’m not disappointed over this aborted lunch, either.

  He looked out the window at Spruce Island again. The beautiful prairie surrounding the city and this small oasis of water was becoming hostile and inhospitable. The plain would soon evaporate the lake and leave him standing in a dusty expanse of dead weeds and thorn fields under a grey sky thick with clouds, a place where he wouldn’t even bother to try and get his bearings. He’d have nowhere to go.

  He looked at his cell phone and pretended to answer a call. Catching Catherine’s attention as he stood, he waved the phone, shrugged, and turned to leave. She nodded and mouthed the words, “I’ve got the bill. Go ahead.”

  He bolted toward the exit with only one quick glance backward. Catherine was leading her friend by the hand toward his recently vacated table.

  She didn’t phone or email that afternoon to ask how he was, why he’d been called away, or to apologize for missing lunch.

  They stopped going to movies and restaurants; when she sent an email invitation, he always found an excuse; his responses were curt yet civil, and then he began to delete her messages without even reading them. He focused on his work; ledger lines distracting and comfortable horizons.

  After a while of this, she appeared at his office one day at five o’clock.

  “Hi grumpy,” she said, leaning against the doorjamb. “I think it’s time we went to The Cavern and I bought you that meal I owe you. I won’t take ‘no’ for an answer.” Her blue eyes were as intense as a cloudless, hot afternoon sky.

  What was the point in defying her? His computer was off and he was clearly making his way out of the office. A couple of his accounting clerks were still at their desks in the common area. They didn’t glance up, but they obviously were dying to see what would happen next.

  He was not going to be the first to talk, so the elevator ride to the main floor and the walk across the street was in silence.

  In The Cavern restaurant, she took charge, asking the server for their usual table and then ordering their dark rum and coke on the way past the bar. She plunked down in their spot by the fish tank and said, “You’ve certainly been in a contrary mood lately. What’s going on?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing’s going on. It’s all just business as usual.”

  “I don’t believe that. There’s obviously something wrong. You’ve listened to me through crisis after crisis. Now it’s my turn to listen to you.”

  “There’s nothing for you to listen to.”

  “Why are you behaving like this?”

  Here it was again, that cloudy, endless plain, sun obscured, no particular direction to go. Now was the time to send up a flare for help. But what if no one saw?

  Or worse yet, what if someone saw and turned away?

  “Like what?” he replied after his moment’s pause. “I’ve got nothing to say. Or is that answer not acceptable to you? Are you going to keep picking at me until you hear something you want to hear? If you want someone to toady up to you, give that Marcel dude a call.”

  “Ooh, that stings. I’m offering to be here for you. If you need to talk. But I don’t put up with that kind of crap from anyone anymore. I’ve had more than enough of that type of attitude from my ex.”

  “I’m sorry this relationship isn’t on your terms.”

  He watched his drink; watched the ice float in flat blackness.

  So he missed whatever expression was on her face when, after what seemed like an hour’s silence, she simply said, “You’re scaring me.” That was when she moved her drink and left. Decision made, he wandered nowhere in that empty plain. Then, there in the far distance — was that a stone house on the edge of the prairie, teetering on the very rim of the horizon? Should he check it out? Perhaps, but the walk there would be eternal and ultimately pointless.

  He turns to the server hovering near him, her leg on fire.

  “Sorry to interrupt your letter. Can I get you anything else?”

  He waves at the two untouched glasses. “No. Thank you. Lost in thought here.” He picks up one drink, has a sip. He sets the glass down over the face on the magazine cover.

  She didn’t even say goodbye when her contract expired. He rips the page with the single letter “I” from the pad and crumples it up. The Gryphonic Techno-Bastards’ song plays in his mind and he jots the lyrics on the clean, flat page:

  lost in a dust storm of despair

  I can’t find my way back

  to my timeless stone home

  you’ll never see what became of me.

  This Girl Next Door

  THE EVENING BLAKE’S MOTHER SAID, “Don’t you dare bother with those people,” he waited until they’d both gone out and got his dad’s extension ladder and leaned it against the neighbour’s seven-foot back fence. The Castle Frankenstein rankled him. Why such a high fence? All the others in the neighbourhood were only about three feet high and were picket-style or had wide-gapped horizontal slats. Given his bony six-foot body, he could almost step over those fences. But this monster fence was impenetrable, with vertical slats butted tight together and no gaps for spying.

  The only break in the rampart-like caragana hedge surrounding the front yard was a bulky trellis at the end of the front walk, with a heavy wooden gate. The gate was locked, as he had discovered one night last winter, just after his thirteenth birthday when he tried to sneak in.

  His parents mostly didn’t talk about the people who lived there. No one in the neighbourhood did. The only things he knew for sure was that the place had once been a farmhouse before the city’s urban sprawl eventually surrounded it, and two women and a girl lived there. The house was two-storey, with garret windows on the second floor. It stood out like a citadel among the stock neighbourhood bungalows with their manicured and treeless yards.

  And just what was the deal with the girl always in sunglasses, and her long black hair and swaying hips? All he knew about her was she was picked up by taxi and driven downtown to the only private school in the city.

  The evening wind gusted gently and the leaves in the neighbour’s trees rustled just as Blake breached the top of the fence. His first look inside the yard lasted a second or so before he ducked. Too late. That black-haired girl stood nearby, hands on her hips, looking up at him. Her raven ha
ir, thick and wavy and hanging loosely past her shoulders, contrasted sharply with her pale face. Apparently in the shade of the backyard she didn’t wear her sunglasses and was way too Wednesday Addams for his liking. Suspended in time near the top of the ladder, he was certain he’d been seeing things. No normal girl should look like that. Right?

  He cautiously peered over the fence again. Well, she really was standing right beside the fence — staring up at him, hands still on her hips. He took in her long black T-shirt and black jeans; her bare feet made him think of lilies on a dark coffin lid. Her eyes were bright blue. He’d expected dark irises.

  “What do you want?” she said in a gravelly voice, neither accusatory nor hostile. She sounded more like a teacher asking if he knew the square root of nine.

  “I wanted to see what was behind this fence.”

  “What for?”

  “I’m nosy? This fence is way different from everyone else’s?”

  “Are you satisfied or would you like to come over for a better look?”

  His heart lurched, but he did not hyperventilate and his voice did not crack when he said, “Seriously?”

  “No. I said it to see if your face could get any redder. Of course seriously or I wouldn’t offer. I don’t want you gawking down at me like I’m a reptile in a zoo. Now put that stupid ladder away and meet me by the back gate.” She pointed to the middle of the fence along the back alley.

  “Okay. Sure. See you in a minute.”

  His foot slipped off the bottom rung and he scraped his shin. He dragged the ladder back to the garage and caught his fingers between the ladder and its hanger on the garage wall. What the hell was he doing? This simple reconnoiter had turned into an actual meeting with the girl next door. He had to stop and take a breath to calm himself.