A Population of One

by Constance Beresford-Howe

  “Well, it’s going to be a busy summer for you, that’s sure. Look, why don’t we go up to Montreal together next week — I could stay a couple of days and help you apartment-hunt. Mrs. Chan could look after Dougie.”

  And have you try to decide everything for me? No thanks.

  “No, thanks, Lou; I’ll be able to manage fine. Come up for a few days when I’m settled. You know I spent quite a bit of time exploring Montreal when I was up there in the spring. I know just where in town I’d like to be, and what kind of place. A nice modern high-rise with a view of the city, and underground parking for my nice new Porsche.”

  “Look out, Willy; rapists love that kind of setup. And if you’re planning to drive, for God’s sake watch out on the 401, it’s like a raceway. Also Quebec drivers are a special breed, you know.”

  I pause to control myself. “I’ll watch it.”

  Well, I couldn’t wait to call her; now I can’t wait to hang up. Why is it that I love the bitch and yet she annoys me so? In ten minutes chat she’s managed to squeeze most of the joy out of my wonderful news. I’m full of qualms and doubts now. I even wonder (though of course I’ll write and accept the job before dark) whether I’ll really be happy at Cartier College, working with Acid Coughdrop Benson-Clarke, who made it so clear he disliked me.

  Highway 401 to Montreal is as broad as the road to destruction, but much more monotonous. Its four lanes cut straight as a paper knife through flat, empty, forgettable countryside so featureless you have to stop occasionally just to break the numb grip of boredom. But nothing in the fake-colonial triteness of the restaurants along the way tempts you to linger there, either. The coffee is bad and hot, the Muzak is bad and loud — it’s a relief to climb back into the car and put your foot down. Then the excited feeling of adventure comes back, and I’m happy.

  The new white Porsche zips along smoothly and I enjoy the envious and admiring glances it gets. When various salesmen asked what kind of sports car I had in mind, I told them whatever was in. I have been out — out of everything — for so long. Now I want to be in. Of course Lou disapproves. “What was wrong with your nice little Volks? It’s barely a year old.” But there’s no use trying to explain. Greg comes closer to understanding, maybe. His face spread into a broad grin when he saw it, and he asked at once, like a kid borrowing a new toy, if he could run it around the block. On the other hand, maybe Lou does understand. “You can’t even get out of the thing without showing your pants,” she said to me severely. It might almost be Mother’s voice. Oh, how good it is to be streaking at seventy-five miles an hour away from Toronto, away from everybody I know at the Red Cross and the Alumnae Society, away from those dead years. How wonderful to be running toward something new, a future with possibilities.

  Just as I cross the bridge onto Montreal Island a heavy rain begins to stream down; but it is still so hot I leave my windows open, and the asphalt streams like a jungle trail. The traffic thickens, and I creep by inches into the centre of town, competing for space with other drivers of impressive ferocity and lawlessness. But I am enjoying myself. The garish jigsaw of neon signs reflected in wet black pavement pleases me. So does the gassy, polluted, saturated air that tangles my hair, and the nervous, hustling crowds on the streets, who push across intersections without the slightest reference to the current colour of the traffic lights. Every word of Lou’s about the trip has proven true; and I don’t care.

  I arrive at the Queen Elizabeth hungry as a wolf and overtip the parking boy for remarking “Voilà un neat char, là.” I’m still happy, even when I discover the only hotel room I can have is a cubicle overlooking noisy Dorchester Boulevard, and the elevator whining outside my door guarantees a sleepless night. But I sing in the shower. Nothing can depress me.

  The first thing I do in the morning (without having consciously planned anything of the kind) is to open the Yellow Pages to Real Estate and begin calling the bigger companies in alphabetic order. Each time, I ask to speak to Mr. George MacKay. Well, why not? There wasn’t a speck of harm in the poor soul. He could find me the ideal apartment in half the time it would take me alone. Perfectly sensible to contact him. Besides, I liked him. And he liked me. Well, I think he did … if he remembers me at all. The thing is, having met him, I can’t waste him, can I? Lucy Snowe didn’t waste a single soul among the men she met that first night in Villette …

  On the fifth call, I’m lucky. That is, up to a point. Mr. MacKay, it appears, is on holiday. They don’t expect him back for ten days. But at least now I know where to find him. If I want to, I can give him a call some time, just to say hello. Friendly, he was. Lonely. And I think he liked me.

  I spend some time over coffee studying a city map and the classified ads in the Gazette. There are several apartments for rent on the mountain slope near Cartier College. Cheerfully I set out in a taxi to inspect them. As we draw up to the first building, I note that right next door to it is a huge service station, full of metallic clanging and drilling. Feeling clever, I tell the driver to move on. The next place on my list sits behind a strip of lawn and a bank of bright flowers. It is white as a many-tiered wedding cake, with a long, festive canopy sheltering carpeted steps. Wide doors of thick glass lead to a lobby carpeted wall to wall in purple broadloom.

  I buzz Sup’t. After a considerable pause, he appears, a thin, rather stooped French Canadian who needs a shave and, from the sexy look in his hooded, impudent eyes, a whole series of cold showers. His shirt is open halfway down, and two religious medals are tangled in the hair on his chest. Without troubling to remove a hard-worked toothpick from his mouth, he assures me this is a very chic apartment house. The night-club singer Danielle lives here, and several newspapermen from Le Devoir; lots of lawyers, musicians, very swinging people.

  He takes me up in an elevator, whistling faintly while he analyses my figure in close detail. When he unlocks the door of 1204 I edge past him rather apprehensively. It distracts me as I walk through the two big, empty rooms, to know he is still inspecting my legs and bottom with the eye of a man whose hobby never palls. A huge window occupies one whole wall of the sitting-room, and outside it runs a balcony with a white, curly-iron perimeter. Inside, the walls and woodwork are a dreary, dog-biscuit beige, but the bathroom is tiled in black and white, and the tub and basin are black porcelain. This I like very much.

  “We gon’ decorate all new,” the janitor remarks, shifting the toothpick expertly to the other side of his mouth. “No need for air-condition, neither, because you get a cross-draft from dese bedroom window, very cool.”

  I wander across the hollow sitting-room floor again. The big window frames a large vista of the city spread below. The kitchen is just a narrow galley separated from the main room by a waist-high bar. Good. I don’t intend to do a lot of cooking. My decision is as good as made.

  “Well, it’s quite nice.… What did you say the rent was?”

  When he tells me, I’m surprised, but not shocked. He eyes me with a half-smile. “You like?”

  “I like.”

  Five minutes later, M. Louis-Philippe Mackenzie and I are sitting across from each other in his tropically hot little business room downstairs, where he produces a six-month lease for me to sign and asks for a month’s rent in advance. I can occupy the place in two weeks, after the decorators have finished. He is very businesslike now and seems to have lost all interest in my anatomy. He explains that I will have to pay a water-tax in addition to rent, as well as a monthly charge for window-cleaning and another for cable TV. The management (an Italian company, it turns out to be) also requires a deposit against possible damage. (With all those chic tenants?) “But if anyt’ing go wrong wit anyt’ing, mademoiselle, you just call hup, night or day. Always ’appy to do my possible for all nice people here, specially ladies like you.”

  “I’ll bet you are,” I think; and then blush up to the top of my scalp because I can see he’s caught my thought and is grinning broadly in his leering way. Damn. Why can’t I keep a more ins
crutable face; everything shows on it. I hasten to collect my oversize straw bag, say good-bye, and depart, trying to freeze him with an air of calm hauteur. I’m not terribly successful.

  After sending the taxi away I walk downtown for a tour of the big shops. This gives me time to reflect how ashamed I ought to be to admit that Mackenzie’s kind of insolent male appraisal is obscurely exciting, even while it repels. It can’t be dismissed as it ought to be, ignored as silly, or put aside as insignificant. Not by me, at any rate.

  These rueful thoughts soon melt away, though, in the fun of looking for new furniture. Soon I’m deep in negotiation with a diffident young man in a Scandinavian shop, who soothes me with his large Adam’s apple and nervous stutter. He couldn’t make me blush if he tried. (Indeed, I make him laugh once and colour up a bright pink.) I am happy choosing a free-form coffee table topped with black glass; so happy I could laugh out loud. In a department store I buy a shaggy white rug like yak fur, and roughly half a mile of zebra-striped fabric to curtain the sitting-room. These will look grand with my new Swedish furniture. I also buy a queen-sized bed and some psychedelic sheets, all huge red and pink flowers. If all this isn’t in, nothing is. A tremendously satisfactory day. The only remaining problem is how to wait for two long weeks until I move into my new apartment and begin serious work on my job. And on The Project.

  CHAPTER TWO

  COLLEAGUES

  If life were only more like literature, there’d be a whole lot more satisfaction in living. No self-respecting Victorian novel, for instance, would at this interesting point come up with an anticlimax. But the fact is that once I am settled into my bright, paint-smelling apartment (where the zebra curtains, the yak rug, and the queenly bed look marvellous), time seems to stick. The slow evenings creep past; the long days are flat and empty. Nothing happens. It’s bad art. It’s also very depressing.

  Of course I spend hours every day at the library preparing my courses, and I do a lot of conscientious re-reading of the nineteenth-century authors I already know almost too well. But mealtimes gape, open and vacant as three yawns, and in the late evenings, with the electric glitter of the city spread out below my window, I feel enclosed in glass and silence, suspended outside both world and time. Not an agreeable sensation. Partly because it’s not what I expected; though exactly what I did expect isn’t really clear to me either.

  For one thing, when I presented myself early in July at Cartier College, in all the dignity of my new Faculty status, I found the Department of English deserted, brooding stuffily in its own dust and hooded with yellow blinds drawn against the heat. All the office doors were inhospitably closed. The silence was so thick even the air seemed asleep. I followed a dim little corridor in pursuit of one faint noise — “Ya. Ya. Ya.” repeated on the same flat note — and found a young woman in a tight pink pantsuit with the phone cradled under one ear to free her hands for a manicure. Without hurrying, she wound up the conversation and, when I identified myself, stuffed my hands full of mimeographed papers and forms. She added a few sketchy directions about the location of the library, bookstore, washrooms, and other useful institutions. As an afterthought she produced a key and unlocked the office I’d been assigned — though it is so tiny it must surely have begun life as a broom closet. Pinky then wiggled off, and a moment later I heard her again. “Ya. No kidding. Ya. Ya.” In short, at the moment, there isn’t much at Cartier to encourage loitering.

  The smouldering heat of Montreal makes exploration on foot very wearing; but I blister my feet anyway on long walks. My reward is to discover a number of charming little squares with trees in heavy leaf, where green statues of generals and other heroes lift chins and swords bravely into the hot, traffic-throbbing air. I climb narrow, cobbled streets; I gaze at pagoda-shaped telephone booths in Chinatown and am diverted to find notices for Mass on a church wall in Chinese. In a downtown square in Old Montreal I discover a large statue of Nelson and wonder how it got there. Across the street is Rasco’s Hotel, where Dickens once stayed. (He hated it.) I visit St. Joseph’s Shrine on the mountainside, picking my way tactfully among the faithful, who clot the long stairway as they climb to the top on their knees. I am suitably impressed when I discover part of the establishment is a museum with relics of the saintly life of Brother André. In one glass case his truss has been reverently preserved.

  When the blazing sun becomes too much, I take refuge in the marble dignity of the Fine Arts Museum, where there is a magnificent El Greco, or cross the street to have tea in the recessed garden of the Ritz-Carlton, where a fountain and glass-topped tables give an illusion of coolness. Another refuge is the wildflower-and-bird sanctuary on the flank of the mountain, where a bold young pheasant pecks some of my picnic crumbs. And yet, for all this, it’s hard to fill the time. As for The Project, it recedes rather than advances.

  Unfortunately, there are many things I cannot do. I can hardly bring myself to read newspapers, for instance, because all those chronicles of cruelty, stupidity, and wasted time fill me with horror. I persist only in the hope of understanding the world better — and the dimmer hope of finding a place for myself in it. Nor can I often watch TV, because the regular alternation of gunfire and advertisements for deodorant makes me twitch. The wide-screen movies showing locally are even worse; you have to choose Disneyland or the kingdom of sado-masochism — though I suppose anything in between would be even worse. The concert season doesn’t begin till autumn, and there is little or no live theatre even then, except in French.

  Churchgoing might be one answer; but not for me. I believe absolutely in God, without understanding a single thing about Him. And I love the stately Tudor music of the Book of Common Prayer. But go to a new church and you are likely to find that a thankless Anglican establishment has flattened that noble prose into Basic Modern English — an outrage, like reducing Goya to paint-by-numbers. Another serious drawback to church is my lifelong affliction of irrational, violent seizures of giggling. The last time I went, the visit was sabotaged by a dim small boy in the pew ahead, beguiling away the sermon by putting on his mitten. He got it on the wrong hand, and puzzled long over the enigma of the thumb sticking out of the wrong side. After deep thought he took the mitten off, inspected it, put it back on. The thumb still protruded on the wrong side.… I had to sneak out rapidly, under cover of the blessing.

  That leaves people as the only remaining pastime. The trouble is that in this city I literally don’t know anybody. I live as solitary as Crusoe, though my island contains a million souls. Louis-Philippe Mackenzie is, for obvious reasons, not somebody I’m keen to cultivate. When I ring Bill Trueblood (he’s not hard to locate, with that name) there is no answer. And for some reason or other, I now can’t bring myself to call George MacKay, though several times I lift my bright new red phone and look at the lighted dial before putting the receiver back on its hook.

  Such neighbours as this building affords seem to consist mostly of brisk, well-groomed young men in the bright shirts and wide ties of the moment. They all carry briefcases and a look of profound preoccupation. The smart little women who whisk in and out are mini-skirted, their eyes outlined in green, blue, or purple, their lips coated with whitish-pink gloss. They look unreal to me, like Barbie dolls, with stiffened eyelashes and tiny clothes made to take off at a moment’s notice. If you say “Good morning” in the elevator to any of these people, he or she is likely to give you an incredulous, almost angry glance, and few of them make any distinguishable answer.

  Lou and Greg did come down one weekend in August to inspect the apartment and take me out to dinner, and that crammed one day wonderfully full. It was grand to see Dougie stumping around my rooms on those fat legs that kiss at the inside of the knees. He pulled open all the drawers, rolled on the yak rug, jumped on the bed, his fair hair flying. He filled the whole place up with life, God love him. When he saw a bird on the balcony railing, he pointed a stubby finger at it and shouted “BUIDIE,” his funny, hoarse voice loud with joy. Before he l
eft, we two had a good round of a chase-and-tickle game my father long ago invented for me, called Let’s Be Two Horses Laughing.

  It was so good to see them all that I didn’t get irritated once, not even when Lou said Good God to my wonderful curtains, or when Greg advised installing a special bolt on the door. When they left, I gave Dougie three hard kisses on the head. I could hardly say good-bye for the fat lump in my throat. It was so nice of them to come. But that night I couldn’t sleep because I buzzed all over with a restless, meaningless overcharge of excitement. Probably Crusoe felt the same after his first visitors.

  Insomnia is an old friend, of course; for years I’ve sat up reading most of the night. Even when I do sleep, by six in the morning I’m always awake and ready for the day. It’s been this way for so long that the night feels like my private environment now. It’s good to be alone while everybody else sleeps. The dark is tranquil and undemanding, restful in its silence. Even in the Rosedale house there was a truce in the small hours, most nights.

  There are times, though, when the friendly dark turns traitor and twists dreams around my neck; dreams made of long chains of remembered words, pictures, faces, silences, from those closed years. My father drunkenly singing the most sentimental of Moore’s songs — or noisily vomiting — or cursing the world in a long, lyrical, violent stream of obscenities. Mother’s silver crochet hook flashing through a delicate web of lace as she sat behind her door, her mouth pressed into a tight and final line. These things twist and hold me prisoner yet, on some nights.

  Yes, it’s always good when daylight comes, whether I’ve slept or not.

  When the phone rings I’m on my knees scrubbing the bathroom floor. My hands are a bright, spongy pink and smell of sour cleaning powder. In all these weeks I’ve had no calls whatever, except from a peremptory woman who always asks, “C’est toi, Yvette?” and seems unfairly annoyed, not with herself but with me, when I deny it. She invariably hangs up with such crisp finality that I’ve named her Madame Guillotine. So I expect nothing better now and let the phone ring several times: I want to get on with my scrubbing. However, I haven’t enough fortitude, of course, to ignore the call entirely.