Oh, she wants the scene
Outside of time, Time’s rival
Pinned & held, the curved
Edge of the moth’s bright wing
Itself quite still, preserved,
The thing in everything.
On the night table was her old telephone, with the clear plastic dial. She stood and took the little piece of paper out of her jeans pocket, sat on the bed, and gazed at it. She murmured the word: can’t. She tried to parse the others. It was all just too blurred. What was it that the woman scribbling tightly on the little piece of paper said that she could not do, or see, or feel, or understand? The daughter who hadn’t spoken to her father in all that time. Can’t. Can’t. Can’t. How deeply Elaine wanted to know the answer. And the very depth of her desire to know it appalled her. She looked at the phone number.
Her mother came to the foot of the stairs, asking if she wanted something brought up there to eat or drink.
“No, thanks.”
“You coming back down?”
“In a while,” Elaine said. “I have to make a call.”
“Are you all right?”
“I know it’s hard to imagine I’d have anyone to call.”
“I can’t hear you, honey.”
“It’s fine,” Elaine said, loud enough to be heard. “I’m fine.”
“We’ll be out on the patio.”
“Okay.”
She sat on the edge of the bed and reflected that she was not fine, after all. Her hands were shaking. She looked at them. She would never have believed she could be so frail inside, sitting here shivering, the inner cloud settling over her.
She picked up the phone and dialed the number, and waited through five rings. No answer. No machine. She put the receiver back in its cradle, then stood and moved to the window. The street was melting into darkness, and the reflection of her face. She called the number again, and again there was no answer. Finally she turned the light off and lay down with her hands folded across her chest, as she used to do when she was a devout teenager, and wanted to pray herself to sleep. She thought of those nights she lay wide awake in the dark trying to dream up her life out in the world, wondering and worrying about where she might go, who she might come to be with, what she might find to do or be, and whether or not she would be happy there, so far away, in the magical distance, the future that was taking so long to arrive.
ONE HOUR IN THE HISTORY OF LOVE
Here are some people sitting in partial sunlight at one end of the Fresh Café patio, on Queen Street in the beautiful city of Toronto. Early fall, shades of burnt orange and red and bright yellow in the trees lining the street. The café is not crowded. The lunch hour hasn’t quite come into full swing. It’s not quite noon.
At one table two young couples sit facing each other: Dale and Tracy, Gabe and Martha. The two couples are having a reunion. Dale and Tracy are newlyweds, and Martha introduced them. They have come north from Niagara, where they now live. The girls have gifts for each other in little designer bags, and are exchanging them—soaps, scented candles, scarves. They’ve been friends since grade school. The men, who haven’t known each other that long, have ordered a bottle of Viognier, and while they wait for it they sip water from tall glasses, and talk about flying in the post-9/11 world. When Dale rests his elbow on the table, it wobbles toward him. He sits back and folds his ruddy arms. A moment later, Gabe leans on it, and it wobbles back. So Dale tears off the end of a book of matches, folds it tight, and reaches down to wedge it under the bottom of one leg. But the table’s still wobbly.
His new wife, Tracy, says, “We could move to another table.”
“It’s better now, isn’t it?” says Martha. “I don’t want to move. I’m tired.”
Tracy and Dale were married this past April, only one month after they met. It has been six months and four days since the wedding, and Martha’s the one who’s counting. She and Dale worked together for a time at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; she introduced Tracy to him on the three-year anniversary of her first date with Gabe. Gabe has yet to commit.
“Martha’s tired,” he says. “Call the media.”
There’s a beautiful windless warm cloudless sky above the patio, sun blazing on the shiny cars, reflecting in the sunglasses of passersby and in the windows of the stores across the way. It makes the shadows sharp under the angles of brick and steel and stone in the facade of the bank at the corner, where some men are lined up to use the automatic teller. A perfect day, and Martha’s all darkness inside.
“It’s supposed to be a mild winter,” Dale, the happy new husband, says, looking at the men stepping up one by one to get their money. He thinks of a place where you just say how much money you want and they give it to you. It looks that way. His present joy is such that thoughts like this enter his mind as possibilities. Why not?
The waiter brings the wine and presents it with the demeanor of someone who believes that it’s hardly worth the show. The wine is thin and watery and without character, and he knows it. He’s a middle-aged, divorced father of two grown children who seldom visit him anymore because of his failures when they were young, but his expertise with wine is impressive to everyone he knows. He pours a little in the bottom of Gabe’s glass, and Gabe, glancing at the others, tastes it, then nods. “Very good.” The waiter is certain that Gabe wouldn’t know if it was bad. He pours the two others’ glasses full, then comes back to Gabe’s. There are only three glasses, because Tracy has said she’s not having any wine. The waiter sets the bottle in its metal bucket of ice, arranges the white towel around it, and walks off, glad to be done with them. This isn’t his table.
Gabe offers a toast. “To the new married couple. Let’s hope they never become an old married couple.”
“Oh, that’s awful,” Martha tells him. “Listen to what you just hoped for them: divorce or—God—worse.”
“Okay,” Gabe says. “Happiness for the married folks.” He smiles out of one side of his mouth. “I think I hoped for them always to be as fresh and in love as they are today.”
“To us,” says Dale.
They drink, Tracy sipping her water.
When Gabe leans on the table, it tips again. “Hell,” he says, folding another matchbook and reaching down.
Tracy says, “I think we should get another table.” Her silky blond hair is tied in a bun at the base of her neck. The sun catches it, little filaments of fire. At the open collar of her blouse a small diamond ring hangs like a pendant on a little silver chain: her wedding ring, too big to wear on her finger. She hasn’t had time to get it sized. Dale put it on her finger at the ceremony, and then they took it off for the honeymoon. This is how she explains it proudly to friends.
“This wobble is fixable,” Martha says. “We’re all situated. Let’s ignore it. God.” She’s not told anyone, not even Tracy—especially not Tracy—about this, but she’s begun thinking she might break things off with Gabe. She slouches down in her seat, feeling the sun on her shoulders, and watches him try to improve on Dale’s effort with the table. She’s wearing sunglasses with wide mirror lenses. When she turns to Tracy, Tracy sees herself in the lenses, and drops her gaze.
She and Dale are expecting, and they haven’t told the other two about it yet. “I wish you wouldn’t wear those things, Martha,” she says about the sunglasses.
Martha grins. “I’m like one of those rappers with car windows you can’t see into.”
“Rappers,” Gabe says. “Where’d you get that?”
“There’s always rap music coming from those cars, right? Tracy, why aren’t you having some of this wine?”
“I listen to Andrea Bocelli,” Gabe says. “That doesn’t make me an opera singer.”
“You know what? Shut up,” Martha says in a honeyed voice, smiling sweetly at his back as he continues working the matchbook, folding it even tighter.
Gabe came east from Vancouver four years ago to work public relations at the art museum. He’s not an opera singer but has worked as a
musician, a guitar player—rock and roll—and he once wanted to make a career out of it. But he hasn’t played anywhere or even practiced in more than a year. Too busy with work. And Martha doesn’t really like the late nights. They’ve found other things to do in the city.
Tracy says, “I thought they passed a law against that kind of window on cars.”
“I think that was only in the States,” says her husband.
“Maybe they ought to make them illegal for sunglasses, too,” Gabe says, sitting up at last.
“Not two days ago you told me you thought they were sexy,” says Martha.
“I never liked them. I think of them as a sign of the times. You know, like those cars only one person can fit into. Selfishness personified.”
“Oh, boy, a theory from Gabe,” says Martha with a smirk.
“All those little gadgets and games and iPods,” Gabe continues, “that people use to shut themselves away, even on a city street.”
“Well, I like being inscrutable,” says Martha. “And pardon me all to hell. But the sun hurts my eyes.” She feels like crying. She can barely hold it back, a form of courage that is seldom appreciated. She wishes for love, craves light and laughter, and the sounds of the street seem oppressive and discouraging. She feels too small and dark, with her tight black curls and her chewed, unpainted fingernails. She looks at the red polish on Tracy’s and recalls that Tracy makes regular visits to a manicurist, even on her tight budget. She rejects the thought that there’s something shallow in that.
Tracy pats her arm. Martha smiles at her.
Tracy, smiling back, feels inexplicably sorry—sorry past the awkwardness of this little moment. Something is afoot. She turns and gazes at the shining street. She grew up here but spent several years in New York, and another in England, doing what the advertising executives call focus groups, a form of conferencing to sell products or services. She and Dale moved to Niagara only last month—he’s working for the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum as a ticket taker, and she’s still doing focus groups, only now it’s called group marketing. It’s true that she and Dale are a little worried about money, but they’ve made it a romantic thing, the charming poverty of young marrieds starting out. This visit is something they arranged, spending money they don’t have, to tell their friends the news. Dale keeps looking across the table at Tracy, wondering with his eyes when she’ll say it. She will when it seems right. But there’s something indefinable stopping her, having to do with the air between Martha and Gabe. Just now, oddly, it seems too big to say.
Martha says to Tracy, “Why aren’t you having any wine?” She feels, with her sinking heart and her dejection, that she knows.
Dale thinks that now Tracy will tell them. But his wife only shakes her head slightly and says, “Just didn’t feel like it. I’ll have some.” She pours an ounce or two into her empty water glass, and sips it. Dale stares at her.
A tall, big-boned waitress wearing a white bandanna over bright red hair approaches with her pad and pencil. She’s in late pregnancy, and she explains that the waiter was spelling for her while she took care of a small emergency involving her condition. She is having some contractions, she tells them. Braxton Hicks. She wears a black vest over a white T-shirt, and black jeans with an elastic front to allow room for the bulge of her belly. Tracy sees Dale, the expectant father, looking at her, and gives him a little wink.
To the waitress, she says, “When’s your baby due?”
The waitress, who lives alone in a flat above Bloor Street, smiles and runs one hand lightly over the tight cloth at the level of her navel. “Not for another month.” In the late nights she hears the Turks and the Armenians arguing below, smoking and drinking in the light of the all-night grocery, and she dreams of having her child somewhere far away. The father of this baby is a married man, an Episcopal priest; they’ve broken it off. He doesn’t know about the baby, and she wants to keep it that way. She’s through with him. She has what she wanted when she started with him—this child, from a healthy strong man. She’s determined that she’ll find some way to get to Tuscany, and she’ll be happy no matter what life presents her with. The baby keeps her focused on the future. She runs her hand under the bulge, and then back up, sighing softly, contentedly, and then asks, all business, what they wish to eat.
They order.
• • •
Three other people, two men and a woman, are seated across the opening to the sidewalk, near a large potted plant. The plant provides spiny shade, brittle-seeming, not enough to be true shade in the brightness.
These three actually got here first, and were seated first. On one side of the table are Jesse, a sharp-featured, slightly graying American in his middle forties, and Benjamin, a British-born Canadian in his late fifties. Across from Benjamin the woman, Laura, sits with her elbows resting on the table. She is thirty, very slight, with pretty dark almond eyes. Benjamin has a photography studio here in Toronto, and Laura was once his assistant. He has ambitions, but in fact he supports himself—has supported himself all along—working as a wedding photographer. He’s having a show now at a small gallery just down College Street. The American is a writer who hasn’t finished anything in several years and has managed his anxiety about this fact in the usual ways—drink, self-pity, aimless reading, idleness. Laura and he have been together for almost a year now. They’re going to be married, though they haven’t decided on the date. The plan is that they will move to the States and get married there. Recently, she helped him start something new, and she herself is also writing something. They are at that pitch of loving where the world seems to have been made only for them. They’re often filled with a kind of sympathy for everybody they see. They came down to College Street to make the gallery walk and to celebrate the new work they’re doing, and to shine the light of their happiness upon the world. They ran into Benjamin, who invited them to the café for a coffee. Jesse has never met Benjamin, and until a short while ago didn’t know he existed, had no idea of this aspect of his future wife’s past work life.
When they sat down, Laura put her bag in the chair next to her and placed herself across from Benjamin. Jesse noted this—it knifed through him—but said nothing.
“Jesse’s from America,” Laura says now, leaning a little toward Benjamin, because Benjamin has held out a print of one of the photographs he’s chosen not to exhibit at the gallery, but which he wants her to see. Jesse can’t see it clearly from this angle, so he looks at the street. An elderly couple make their way past, headed down toward the intersection, the woman walking slowly to compensate for the man’s unsteady shuffle.
“You’re from America,” says Benjamin. “Really.” He turns the print toward Jesse, so he can admire it if he wishes to.
Jesse looks at it as if at a passing car. “Yeah,” he says. It’s like the first one in the show, the one you see entering the gallery: all lurid colors, so bright as to seem almost out of focus: a very heavy dark woman in dominatrix getup—black stockings, black panties, black conical spike-studded bra that barely contains all her flesh—brandishing a whip and wearing a bridal train, standing in front of a wall poster of Niagara Falls.
“Jesse’s published three novels,” Laura says.
“Would I have read them?”
Oh, boy, Jesse thinks.
“Well, they’re published here, too,” says Laura.
“Titles?” Benjamin only reads whatever is on the best-seller list and is therefore quite certain that he’s never heard of Jesse, but he wants to try being polite.
“I don’t think you’d have seen them,” says Jesse. “They’re very specific. For a specific kind of reader.” This is what he says to people who ask him that question. If the other person persists, he’ll say, You know, somewhere past the fourth grade. He wishes Laura hadn’t brought up the books. He looks at the chair across from him, with her bag on it, and adds, “Actually, I haven’t seen them here. Not a single title, as a matter of cold fact.”
“Wel
l,” says Benjamin, “the booksellers are so timid these days. They want only tried and true stuff—major writers.”
“Danielle Steele,” says Jesse. “Right? Robert Ludlum. Masters of the form?”
“Jesse’s very well known in America,” Laura says quickly.
“Really. Do you mean, like, famous?”
“Famous among friends,” Jesse says.
“I’m writing now, too,” says Laura, a little shyly. She glances across the space of sunlight at the man trying to steady a table by stuffing something under one of the legs. The woman there who’s wearing mirror sunglasses looks this way and the reflection of sunlight is blinding. Laura turns her attention back to the next print Benjamin’s holding out for her to see. It must be from the same shoot: the same model. He shows it to Jesse. The backdrop in this one is a motel room in pink light, a heart-shaped bed, photos of brides and grooms on a low-slung dresser that looks like the slim-lined, self-consciously space-aged furniture of the fifties. It’s so pretentious, so studiedly ironic, that it’s funny. Jesse laughs. It comes from him involuntarily, and he covers his mouth. He sees from the expression on the other man’s face that this is a mistake.
“It’s so startling as an image,” says Laura, because nothing else comes of her search for words to describe it. And because this is supposed to be a friendly visit, she convinces herself that it is a startling image, or that its ugliness startles, and so must be a good thing. The artist’s intention.
“I’m trying to get an effect,” Benjamin tells her, believing that at least he has impressed her. He remembers having the feeling that she could be his if he wished. It seems to him that she admired what she called his work. The long hours he spent this summer photographing the endless sameness of weddings seem far away just now. “I want to take the forms of expectation and turn them upside down,” he tells her, speaking only to her.
In truth, the gallery show is something he’s paying the gallery owner for, renting the space for an appalling amount of money. He doesn’t know where the next dollar is or will come from, and he has already paid for the coffee—funds he intended to put toward cigarettes. All of this because he felt the desire to impress Laura. He knows she thinks he’s having this success and she’s beautiful and he wants to show off, especially with the American sitting here. The American is looking at him. So he presses on with his explanation. “I want to do weddings with a twist, you know—show the couple stark naked, say, in front of a picture of the Falls. Like that first print.”
Something Is Out There Page 19
