“Naked wedding photos,” Jesse says flatly, staring.
Benjamin concentrates on Laura. “I think it might get to be a fashion, you know, taking these darkly candid pictures of bride and groom—and doing angles, too. I have one in mind where the camera angle is down low and you see deep shadows, all darkness and flesh, and it takes a moment to realize you’re looking at the genitals of the bride and groom. Unaroused, of course, but, you know, together.” He looks at Jesse, who simply continues to stare. “It’s going to be my next show, I think.”
“Well, I love your work,” says Laura, a little automatically. She has noticed that Jesse’s becoming agitated, biting the cuticle of his thumbnail and glaring out at the street. She doesn’t want anything to ruin the sweetness of this day. She had felt caught, running into Benjamin that way, had walked into the gallery because she was so surprised to find his name on the card in the window. “I know this photographer,” she said to Jesse. And Jesse followed. She hadn’t thought Benjamin would be there, in late morning.
Now Benjamin feels his cell phone vibrate in his pocket. “Excuse me,” he says, and moves off to take the call.
The other two watch him go.
“Jesus Christ,” Jesse says.
“Well, that’s Benjamin.” Laura remembers Benjamin’s neediness, and his tears, his troubles with his then wife, whose name Laura can’t recall. Benjamin had put his head on Laura’s shoulder and wept, looking at her all moony-eyed, and wanting love. She nearly gave it to him.
“And you love his work,” Jesse says. “Jesus goddamn.”
“I was being kind.”
“You volunteered that you love his work, Laura. That picture. That bullshit idiotic piece of naked pompous asinine pretension.”
She says nothing. She feels caught out, even a little ashamed. And she doesn’t deserve these feelings at all. It brings her close to anger, except that the morning has been so beautiful. She will let nothing ruin it; they’re going to America to live, and she used to think all sorts of ill about America and Americans.
Jesse says, “You want to tell me why you put your bag in the seat next to you and then sat across from him?”
This stuns her. “I—I thought you’d sit next to me.”
“You thought I’d sit on your bag.”
She glances at the bag, lying there like an allegation. “It doesn’t mean anything, Jesse. I didn’t know I did it. I’m sorry. I used to think he was a big deal. I was his assistant.”
“You mean you were with him?”
“No—I worked for him. That’s all. He used to confide in me a little.”
“What’s that mean? He’d cry on your shoulder?”
This shakes her, too, a little. She blinks, looks down. “I used to think of him as an artist. Okay? I was young.”
“You can’t tell me you like those pictures in the gallery.”
“Some of them, yes.” It’s true, she tells herself. It’s as if he’s attacking her taste, now, and by a strange implication her past, that she could ever have thought of Benjamin in that light, someone she might love.
“You’re kidding,” Jesse says. “Right?”
“Some of them are interesting, Jesse. Yes.”
“Jesus Christ.”
She stands and puts the bag in the chair she was sitting in, then sits across from him and takes his hands into her own. “I’m sorry. Okay?”
“What’re you sorry for? It’s your past. And your past adds up to you.” Jesse wishes he could feel the words as he speaks them, wanting all others, anyone else she has ever thought of as a lover to be obliterated, to have never happened. He understands the irrationality of the feeling—the huge selfish loutishness of it—and he gives her hands a little squeeze, forces a smile.
“There is no past with Benjamin, Jesse. I worked for him. That’s all. I thought he had talent.”
“There’s more talent in your little fingernail than in his whole fucking family tree.”
Benjamin, standing a few feet away on the sidewalk, sees them lean across the table for a kiss and decides that he has wasted the money for the coffee. He’s talking to Sheila, who’s on the other side of the city, lying in bed, not alone, though she hasn’t told Benjamin this. What she does tell him is that there isn’t any sense talking it out or trying anymore; she feels claustrophobic all the time around him. She wants out. The words feel automatic. She’s said it all before and he hasn’t believed her.
He says, “I’m so elsewhere right now, Sheila.” And she breaks the connection. He folds the phone up and puts it in his pocket, watching the slow progress of an old couple toward the end of the block. He watches them for a moment, until they get to the crossing. They go on out against the light, and across the street, and into the coffee shop there. The sight of them depresses him, and it’s something deeper than simply that they are old and slow-moving.
At the other table, Martha has consumed her sandwich and lighted a cigarette. She watches Tracy pick at her salad—it came with a lot of peppers, which she doesn’t really like. She’s putting the peppers on the edge of the salad plate. Both men also watch this, quietly.
Gabe says, “Every time I see someone light a cigarette I want one.”
“And a lot of the time you have one,” Martha says.
“I’d say two out of eight.”
“Is this one of those times?” Dale asks. He still smokes, and has pulled the pack out of his shirt pocket. He extends it to Gabe, who holds his hand up, and then takes one from Martha’s pack, and lights it, smiling across the table at her. There’s something mildly defiant in it.
“That’s rich,” Martha says.
They have been talking about the corruption that is apparently inherent in all forms of conservative government. To Dale, it seems that they are carefully avoiding the subject of their own future. He smokes his cigarette and looks at Tracy, one eyebrow up, waiting for her to see the question in it. Why haven’t we told them? It seems odd now, this delay in telling the news. He wishes he could contrive a way to get her alone, just for the few seconds it would take to ask her about it. He thinks there must be something she has perceived about Martha and Gabe, something that has made her hesitate.
Martha, having hardly eaten, fusses with the scarf that Tracy gave her, running it through her fingers. Then she puts it over her head, clasping the ends of it tightly around her neck, the cigarette dangling from her lips. “Look,” she says. “I’m the madonna from hell.”
“You look like a peasant,” Gabe says, blowing smoke. He wishes she could find a way to be less shrill. What frightens him is that, when they were first together, he liked this about her, liked the quick movements and the high pitch of her emotions, her high-strung reactions. All morning, he’s been thinking of asking her to marry him, and little incremental changes in how he sees her keep stopping him. Just now, while she holds the scarf over her head and smirks at his remark, he believes he sees how she’ll look in fifteen years.
“Should we order another bottle of wine?” Dale asks.
“Let’s,” says Martha, pulling the scarf off, crushing her cigarette out.
Tracy excuses herself and leaves them there, crosses to the entrance of the place, and asks the pregnant waitress where the restroom is. The waitress indicates an opening in the near wall, but then gives her a confiding little nod, a direct gaze. The refusal of the wine has not gone unnoticed by the waitress either. Within the space of a few seconds, Tracy feels as if she has made a new friend. She says, “Yes.”
“How far along?” the waitress asks. “Isn’t it the most marvelous thing? Have you been ill? I haven’t been—not once.”
Tracy says, “What’s your name again?”
“Stephanie.”
“We’re two and a half months, Stephanie. And I’ve felt a little nausea.”
“That goes away. Really.”
“I can’t wait for that.”
“Anyway, congratulations.”
Tracy accepts her little embrace�
�one arm coming across the bridge of her shoulders—then heads into the narrow hallway to the restrooms. The lady’s room is small, closetlike, smelly, and fairly dirty. There are iron-colored stains on the sink. She sees herself as if by accident in the smudged mirror there. She steps close to look into her eyes, and with the little finger of her left hand, removes a tiny kernel of sleep debris. It’s probably been there all morning. She shakes her head, steps back, and regards herself again. A mother-to-be. It’s time to tell Martha and Gabe.
Returning to the table, she finds them all engaged in a passionate discussion of the war in Iraq. Gabe believes that it is the right thing to do and that the Americans will eventually be vindicated by history. The militant Muslims are still in the eleventh century, held there by cultural mores that deny the new and the modern. “Imagine,” he says, “putting Hamlet on in Kabul. It’s like thinking of eating steak and drinking wine on the moon.” Dale agrees with this but sees the war as another Vietnam, America as the dinosaur being slowly sucked down by the quagmire. Martha has lighted another cigarette, and she disagrees with both men: the war is just the human appetite for some excuse to kill. She says this, then simply stares at the street, blowing smoke.
Tracy wants to tell them. She understands the necessity and the celebration, the fact that the longer she keeps it back, the more awkward it might seem. But the talk has turned to such dark matters, and in fact her nights are filled with trembling at the thought of bringing a child into this terrible world, with its mushrooming catastrophes, expanding horrors. She takes her seat, and watches the pregnant waitress pour more water for everyone.
Down the street a little, in the small coffee shop on the corner of Queen Street and Dovercourt Road, the two old people sit. His name is Patrick Glenville, almost eighty, still with all his hair, dyed brown and cut in a flattop, and all his teeth, too. At this moment he’s pretending to listen to his wife, Helene, who is two years older than he and wears a black wig. She’s complaining about their grown sons, three of them, all living far away—Dickie in Alberta; Roger in Calgary; William, the youngest, in Vancouver. None of them have called or written in weeks. He’s unhappy about it, too, but doesn’t want to let it become a thing, won’t complain when they do call. They have their own families, and nobody has a lot of money. For the first time in their lives, none of the boys have plans to come home at Christmas. Helene smokes a cigarette and talks about neglect; her voice has gotten so thick. They’ve been married fifty-three years. She’s hurting. He doesn’t want to think about it all now. It’s a pretty fall day; they are healthy and together. That’s true. He wishes to ease things for her and has tried to remark on the fine clear weather, the pretty turning leaves on the maples in the park, but he’s also growing weary of how she keeps tormenting herself. And the cigarettes, all these years, have given his darling the voice of a very gruff old man—a change so incremental that it seems, only this morning, to have caught him. This, too, grates on his nerves.
“You give them everything,” she says. “And what do you end up with?”
“Let it alone,” he says. “Please, dear. You’re not doing yourself any good.”
She blows smoke, and looks at her own hand holding the cigarette. It seems to her that he’s the reason the boys don’t want to come home anymore; he’s the one who grows contentious over drinks and the talk of sports, the very mention of politics. She says, “If you showed even a little more enthusiasm, they might change their minds.”
“Me?” he says. It’s all he can manage. But then the question occurs to him: “Have they said something to you?”
She returns his stern look with a passive fixed gaze.
“Tell me what was said.”
“All you do is criticize them,” she says. “They talk about that. William and Roger both spoke of it when they were here last Canada Day. And Dickie agreed with me over the phone when I asked him how he felt.”
Patrick waits as the waiter brings his sandwich and Helene’s soup.
“You know you squabbled the whole time.”
“You’re all talking behind my back?” he says.
She spoons some of the soup into her mouth, still holding the lighted cigarette. The soup tastes like the cigarette, so she puts the cigarette out. As long as she has known him, his worst temper has been roused by such little surprises as this. She wishes she hadn’t said anything. They eat quietly for a few minutes. He takes the tomato slices from his sandwich, and the lettuce, which looks wilted. Olive oil trails down the side of his palm. He’s staring out at the street, chewing.
“It wasn’t behind your back,” she says. “I’m telling you about it.”
“How’s your soup?” he asks.
“Now you’re going to pout.”
He puts the sandwich down, reaches into his pocket, brings out a twenty-dollar bill, and puts it on the table. Their whole lives together, the mornings and afternoons and nights, and the troubles with the children, and he has loved her through it all, been faithful and loyal to her even in conflicts with the boys, and they are all talking about him like a third party, someone to whom they barely owe the respect of direct speech. “Well,” he says. “You can go see them. One by one. Spend as long as you want with them.”
“Patrick,” she says as he rises and heads for the door. The anger has actually put a spring in his step; he’s moving faster than he has in days, head tilted forward, hands shoved down into his pockets, face grim with angry determination.
“I’m going to finish my lunch,” she says. “Just so you know.”
He pushes out into the street. Helene lights another cigarette, almost in retaliation. He moves to the corner, a big baby, she thinks. And she knows exactly how it will go. It’s the only time he moves with any alacrity or energy, now: when he’s angry. He’s on such a short fuse these days, this man whose patience was a quality she always admired and depended on; he’ll walk home alone, go in, and pour a drink. Maybe he’ll have several, and he’ll be waiting for her on the steps when she arrives, sloppy and sorry and wanting her to put her arms around him and saying he didn’t mean it, he doesn’t know what gets into him.
Back at the Fresh Café, Tracy says it out, in the middle of their talk of war: “We’re going to have a baby.”
Martha turns to her, and her whole face seems to open, mouth wide, dark eyebrows showing above the mirror frames, which she now takes off. She makes a sound, a yell, and throws her arms around her friend.
“I knew it!” she shouts. She looks across the table at Gabe, and in the sudden brightness of not having her sunglasses on, her eyes play a trick on her: his face has taken on an aspect of sharp-jawed leering, the cigarette smoke escaping from the corners of his crookedly grinning mouth. He looks cruel, and full of eerie joy, or a kind of evil satiation—someone happily contemplating terrible events, glad of suffering, and a proximate cause of it. She has a flash of thinking about depictions of the devil; but then his face rearranges itself. It is Gabe, putting out his cigarette and reaching across the table to shake hands with Dale.
“I’m so happy for you,” she says to Tracy, and begins to cry. She’s indeed happy for her friend, and this news has given her some resolve. She’ll go looking soon, and her mind constricts on the image of Gabe with the smoke curling from his teeth. She puts the sunglasses back on, offers her nearly empty wineglass for a toast.
At the other table, Benjamin shows another print to Laura. The breasts of his dominatrix model, Sheila, so close up and lighted in such a way as to appear to be landscape. But this is only a routine gesture now—how he is with everyone or anyone who will look at his photographs. He’s irritable, thinking about Sheila hanging up on him, the spent cigarette money, the hopeless hours taking photographs of people he thinks of as happier than they will ever be again, and now Laura says something else about Jesse, and America—how she would love to see his next show, the wild wedding photography, but that she and Jesse are moving to Montana. He can’t help himself. “You’re going to live ther
e? America? Everybody carries a gun there. Especially in Montana. You won’t be going out much, will you? I’d be afraid of getting shot, or worse. The Americans are so violent. They’re like children. They’re a holocaust waiting to happen, aren’t they.”
Jesse studies the side of the other man’s face during this little speech, and is at first rather surprised at the vehemence of it. Also, he’s faintly puzzled at the apparent deficiency of tact, until he realizes that, consciously or not, this tirade is aimed at him.
“They’re all so naïve about the world,” Benjamin goes on, as if Jesse isn’t there. “With their idiotic president, and their war. A holocaust in the making.”
“You’re from England,” Jesse says. “Right? Didn’t you say England?” he asks Laura, who nods, looking at him with a blankness. But she thinks she knows what will happen now.
“Yes,” Benjamin says. “England, yes.”
“Great little country,” Jesse says. “Really. Terrific little country.”
Benjamin looks at him, sees the brightness of his eyes, the intent there.
“I mean it. Marvelous little place,” Jesse says. “You can’t beat those plucky little Brits for fuck all. Believe me, and I’ve known a fuckload of them.”
“Well, I don’t—I didn’t mean any offense.”
“Oh, hey—no, really. I always said I thought England was a cool little fun place. With lots of interesting little things about it. Really.”
“Well, I should get back to the gallery.”
“Thanks for the coffee,” Jesse says. “Seriously. Great little fucking cup of coffee.”
Something Is Out There Page 20
