“Nice party,” I say to a tall, cadaverous child in a headband. He is wearing a large badge that says Make Love Not War; but he looks totally incapable of doing either.
“I’m Mike Armstrong,” he says kindly. “I take your novel course.”
“Oh, do you?”
“Eh?”
“What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
“Have you seen Molly?”
“Who’s Molly?”
I look up at his beardless face and feel baffled. What can I say to him? To anybody here? Tell them that Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter, on her travels, wrote home about the dear Alps? Would that amuse, you, Mike Love? No it would not. “Never mind,” I say, “I’ll try the kitchen.” But he has already disappeared.
Once more I squeeze past the hallway contingent. The same couple (I think) is still interlocked against the wall. Somebody says bitterly, “Man, my father can’t even relate to Trudeau,” and somebody else knocks over a beer bottle, whose contents foam briefly over the faded carpet. Nobody mops it up.
The kitchen (what can be seen of it for a forest of people) is a catastrophe of dirty pots and plates stacked hastily in the sink. On the only chair sits a colander brimming with vegetable peel and coffee grounds. The drainboard is covered with empty crisp packets, filmy milk bottles, a sandal, and a big pot of paper flowers. Around a little table serving as bar in one corner is a crowd of eagerly chattering people, none of whom I know. Something touches my breast and I jerk away. A young man is perched on top of the fridge. His far-from-clean bare feet dangle down — it’s one of them that has touched me. I think by accident, but it’s hard to tell.
“Hey-hey,” he remarks grinning down at me.
“Same to you,” I mutter, moving away.
“Hi there, Willydoyle,” calls Molly, suddenly appearing as fresh and clear-eyed as if someone has that minute invented her. She wears a long Indian dress of dull red, and her hair, unpinned, hangs down her back. She looks different like this; younger, irresponsible, vulnerable. “Where’s your drink?” she demands, tugging me toward the table with a warm, small hand. “Beer or wine?”
“Oh — wine, I guess.”
“Have you met everybody? Julie, Carla, Pete, this is Willy, she just joined our department. Be nice to her. She’s written a book about Mrs. Gaskell.” With this she turns and is at once lost in the crush.
“Fuck Mrs. Gaskell. Hi, Willy.”
“Hi.”
“No kidding, you’ve written a book?”
“Fuck books.”
I see little future in this conversation, so I take charge of a bowl of peanuts and move away to offer it around as an excuse to circulate. This also gives me a welcome opportunity to tilt the muddy contents of my wineglass down the sink where they belong. After that I hover on the edge of one group after another, where pellets of argument and comment rain around me and bounce off like fragments of some code I can only partly break.
— “so I said watch it, there’s fuzz —”
“He’s a member of the R.I.N., what else?”
— “been busted a dozen times —”
“But she just doesn’t turn me on.”
— “like ask me who’s the biggest shit disturber, and I’ve got to say Mike.”
— “and one other chick went to this Stones concert —”
“That guy’s been so fucked over by the shrinks that he just —”
Soon I have the feeling they are unreal, or I am. The noise and the sour smoke in the air are making me feel vaguely ill. I hide the peanut bowl on the windowsill. A slim young black cat oozes from under a chair, stretches his back, and glances up at me with golden, oriental eyes.
“Oh, come and talk to me,” I coax, squatting down and holding out my hand. But apparently I don’t speak his language, either. With a bound and a switch of his long tail he leaps away and leaves me hunkered down there among the crumbs of potato chips, the long, ragged skirts, the bottlecaps, and the skinny legs in jeans. For a moment I wonder, squatting there alone, whether I’m the only adult at a children’s party, or the only child among inexplicable grown-ups.
A hand hoists me up by the elbow. “Hey, Wally, come on up here and join us. You look great. Smashing. Where’s your glass — here, try this; it’s madeira.”
Trying to conceal a shudder, I recognize the taste all too well, but I return Harry’s broad smile, until I see it is directed not at me but directly at the cleavage. He appears to find it something of a joke, which is disconcerting both for me and for Vogue. Molly in her red dress now suddenly reappears and edges into the group.
“We’re character-assassinating the Principal,” Harry says to me, vaguely indicating his friends. “You met him yet, Wally? He generally gives new people a little chat about the Cartier Family. The Prince of Bastards. You could put him in a book, but nobody would believe him.” He thrusts a hand around Molly’s waist.
“The guy is dangerous, you see, because he doesn’t want anything. Only power.” This from a beautiful Indian girl in a sari.
“Well, what about Archie — he’s worse, because he doesn’t want even that.” It’s Mike, the Love-Not-War boy.
“Yeah, well, the poor old guy has no balls any more, what do you expect.”
“I mean even without balls, you can’t be apolitical any more.”
“At McGill two years ago —”
“Yeah, how do you like Clarke trying to tell us the student radical movement is over, we’re like behind the times —”
“No, don’t get him mixed up with those fucking Governors,” says Molly indignantly. And I slip away. There is something about the code I don’t like on her lips, I don’t know why; it sounds both nasty and false. And for some other obscure reason I don’t like Harry’s hand pressed casually under her little breast.
Rock music is now blasting out of a stereo set, and there is dancing. Couples twist and sway opposite each other, fists lightly clenched, faces closed and expressionless. It is like tribal dancing, without the joy or the purpose.
Suddenly I spot Bill across the room; the edge of his curly brown head, the straight, clean line of his back in a tweed jacket. I press and shove through the crush to reach him. I call out “Hi, Bill!” and when he turns I see too late that it’s a perfect stranger.
And that’s the end of the party for me. I can’t stay here any longer, though my watch insists it’s only eleven o’clock. If I go now, quickly, I can escape and no one will notice. And if I continue to move fast enough and do no thinking about it, I can get home without remembering the empty apartment, the vacant queen’s bed.
Once more I negotiate the hallway, where the same groups are squatting, drinking, arguing, smoking. The lovemaking couple has vanished, but I find them in the dark bedroom, prone among the coats. I drag mine out and hurry away, my face blazing. I am so flurried I’m halfway out of the house before I remember that I haven’t thanked anyone for the party.
Well, I don’t feel grateful. I even feel annoyed with my poor dead mother. It seems unfair that I’ve obeyed so many of her instructions and still had such a rotten time. But of course it’s not her fault. I’m old enough to know by now that parties make it not better, but worse.
All the rest of that week, I see nothing of Bill Trueblood. His office door is always closed when I go by, and there is no answer when I knock. It rains and rains. The trees stand up bare as fishbones against the dark sky. Eventually, one morning on the stairs, I say casually to Molly, “Where’s Bill these days?”
“Oh, I think he’s having trouble with his teeth or something.”
All the rest of the day it pours dark rain. The weekend looms up like a menace. That evening I pick up my red phone.
“Hullo, Bill. How’s it going? I hear you’ve been having dental trouble.”
“God, yes. My gums. You wouldn’t believe the misery — I’ve been home here swollen up like a toad all week long.”
“What a shame. Is it any better now?”
> “Yes, much better. But so depressing.”
I hesitate only a second.
“Look, Bill, are you doing anything special tomorrow night? If not, why don’t you come over here and have a bite of dinner with me. About seven, maybe? Can you eat anything?”
“Willy, how very nice of you. I’d love to come. Yes, anything except maybe steak. What’s your address?”
I tell him and ring off. My heart is thumping.
Saturday is deliciously busy, what with cleaning the apartment, getting my hair done, and planning the meal … avocados, a casserole of lasagna, green salad, fruit and cheese, coffee. I’ve bought the lasagna ready-made from a little take-out place around the corner, so there’s no need for frenzy in the kitchen, and no bourgeois smell of cooking to spoil the cocktail hour. The table looks charming with its Danish pottery and steel flatware on red linen mats. Lou’s housewarming present months ago was a thick, many-coloured candle of scented wax. I light it now, but leave the zebra curtains undrawn to frame the jewelled pins of city light twinkling below. The whole effect is lovely.
At half past six I change out of my long jersey dress into the satin pantsuit. After all, this is an occasion. At ten to seven, assailed by a sudden memory of Harry’s leer at the cleavage, I hastily change the suit for my blue wool dress and a string of pearls. Yes, that’s better. No point in making us both nervous.
The bell rings. I clap the casserole into the oven and hurry to the door. There he is with a bottle of wine and two huge yellow chrysanthemums in a tissue cone. He has a soft blue sweater on under his tweed jacket. His face is slightly puffy in the cheeks, but he looks marvellous anyway, and his smile is warm.
“This is so nice of you, Willy. You can’t think how low I got, moping at home with the mouthwash. What a nice apartment — and wow, what a view. My place is a hole next door to an all-night garage; I’m moving out right after Christmas.”
We sit down at each end of the long sofa. There is a short but terrible silence. Desperately I hurry to fill it up with erratically punctuated nothings.
“Do tell me if that gin’s all right, I wasn’t sure what kind to get. Well, I couldn’t help missing you all week at the college, I still feel terribly new there, it’s hard to get used to so much all at once like computer cards. I’ve never had any doings with computers before, also the kids; of course they’re interesting and all that, bright, some of them, too, but I never expected to feel this terrific generation gap; it’s hardly fair. Because I’m not all that old, but when I hear them talk about things and people they think are neat, like Janis Joplin, I feel just exactly one hundred years old, do you?”
“Not to worry,” he says easily. “We all do. Is it okay if I —” and he holds up a pipe. “Tell me what’s been going on at the old salt mine this week.”
I put away the glass of warm ginger ale I have been clutching and sit back.
“Well, I’m getting to know some of my students a bit. The other day a quite intriguing boy came along after class to see me.… His name is Mike Armstrong. You know him, by any chance?”
“Armstrong … wait, is he a terrifically tall, thin boy with his hair tied back in a tail? Goes around with a fat girl covered in acne. He’s in my poetry class; they both are.”
“That must be the one. He wanted to talk about his term-paper topic for the novel course. A bright kid. He wants to trace the fathers or father-figures in nineteenth-century fiction who are corrupt or inadequate — right from Austen to Samuel Butler. Says it’s the theme of the whole century. He’s right, too. The only problem will be to contain it, or he’ll be all over the place. A rather remarkable boy, I thought. Actually I first met him, believe it or not, at a party Molly gave last weekend. There were thousands of people there, nearly all of them students, as far as I could tell.”
“Yes. Harry’s twenty-nine, but he can’t face it. Some sort of awful Peter Pan complex got him several years ago, and he’s been in those jeans ever since.”
“I suppose they’re — he and Molly —”
“Oh yes, that’s been on for months now. I can’t quite figure Molly. After all, she’s thirty, you know.”
“Is she really.”
“And I,” he adds, tilting his curly head toward me with a grin, “am an old, old man of thirty-two. As you can see by my grey hairs.”
“But so well preserved.”
“Thanks to this” (raising his glass). “And nice people like you. What’s that good smell?”
A few minutes later we are at the table, the lighted cube of the candle flickering between us.
“Delicious,” he declares, tucking into the lasagna. “You can cook too, I see.”
I fiddle nonchalantly with my pearls. “Nothing to it.”
“Eggs are all I can manage, boiled, scrambled, and fried. Horribly monotonous.”
“You live all by yourself? — do have more of the wine — one glass is all I ever —”
“Yes, my family’s in Halifax. Married sister — and my mother.” He refills his glass. A flick of the candlelight in a stray draught touches his face. “She re-married ten years ago.”
“Oh? She was a widow?”
“No. My parents divorced when I was nine.” He looks, frowning, into his empty plate. “It hit me very hard.”
“Well, maybe it’s worse when your parents don’t get divorced. That happened to me. Better a broken home than the one my sister and I had.” I’m astonished to hear myself saying this. Did I really never know it was true before now? And where has the courage come from to admit it like this now, to someone who’s almost a stranger? But there’s something so kind and yet so vulnerable about him …
“Why didn’t they?” he asks.
“I’ll never know. Perhaps because of Mother. She was a very high-church Anglican; called herself Catholic, in fact. But I honestly don’t know why.”
“Any more than I’ll ever know what possessed my mother to marry this big meathead of a railway engineer. She’s a woman who reads Proust, loves Bach.… He likes to sit around in his undershirt and drink beer out of the can.”
“I guess no one’s a more total stranger than your own parents, after all. Isn’t it queer.”
“Isn’t it. I haven’t actually seen my own father for years. Or wanted to. I bore him, and he bores me. It’s always been like that. He wanted the kind of son who plays hockey.”
“Well, my dad was an alcoholic. You can never begin to know people like that; they’re too locked up inside their own problem. But he was a funny, clever, charming man. Lonely and in his way wise. Terribly honest, with a crazy sense of humour … actually I look a lot like him. That’s why I’m a teetotaller.”
He smiles at me. “You’re not a weak person, Willy. Only weak people take to the bottle.” With a wink he pours himself more wine.
“I suppose you don’t see much of your mother, then.”
“No, visits are pretty ghastly. But I phone her every week. And we write to each other. Her letters are wonderful. I keep them all.”
“Won’t you have more cheese? No? Then I’ll make some coffee, shall I?”
“Great. If you’ll excuse me a second, I’ll just —” and he goes off in the direction of the bathroom.
When he comes back, his eyebrows are high on his forehead, and I have to snort with laughter, bending low over the coffee tray to hide my hot face.
“Yes — well — next door, they — er — use the shower a lot, and the damn walls are so thin — I’m terribly sorry.”
“Not a bit. Do you think it was their own idea, or have they been reading Masters? Dear Willy, you’re blushing. I thought there was nobody left to blush in this corrupt old world. That coffee smells grand.… Is this the sugar? Tell me, how’s Archie been this week? I thought he was going to pop a gut at that meeting we had. Only a few years back he had a heart attack, you know.”
“Why was everybody in such an uproar, anyhow, that day?”
“Oh well,” he says vaguely. “Harry’s tactics
are so obvious. It insults Archie to be manipulated so openly, and yet he can’t — or won’t — outmanœuvre the guy.”
“But what is there to manœuvre about?”
“The chairmanship, among other things.”
“Oh! I see.” (But I don’t).
“Poor old Archie gets very depressed since his wife died. At the end she was completely paralyzed, you know, and he looked after her all alone for months in that huge old house of theirs. Before that they used to give parties all the time, and she’d wander around in full evening dress and long gloves, with her white hair sticking up all over like dandelion fluff. She was a darling. Tiny little creature like a hummingbird. Everybody adored her. Anyhow taking care of her like that gave him something important. Dignity. Whatever. But now she’s gone.… His career has never been what it should, when you think what a mind the man has, and the quality of his scholarship.… I don’t know what brought him to a second-class place like Cartier, but I know what keeps him here.”
“Tell me, has Archie got a drink problem, by any chance?”
“No, but he has a problem, all right, and it sometimes makes him drink, the way I might take a lot of Aspirin for pain. But he’s a crusty soul; won’t let anybody near.”
“There can’t be many people dying to cuddle up, I shouldn’t think.”
“Willy, for God’s sake it’s midnight. What a wonderful evening. You can’t think how you’ve cheered me up. It’s been so wretched being all alone with my gums. Tell me, would you by any chance like to come to the theatre next weekend? The Théâtre du Nouveau Monde is doing Tartuffe. They’re awfully good.”
“Oh, I’d love to come. My French isn’t up to much, but I’ll read the play ahead of time. Thanks very much.”
“Good. I’ll see you at work, though, before then. Thanks so much for the lovely dinner, Willy.” And quite easily and casually he tips up my chin and gives me a light kiss on the mouth. I’m much too surprised to respond. Long after he has gone, I can feel the cool touch of his lips. I linger a long time over the washing and tidying-up, thinking over every detail of the evening, from the moment he arrived. For once, there are few, if any, revisions I want to make in the text. Before I finally go to bed I bend over the yellow chrysanthemums and breathe up their soft, cool, spicy smell.
A Population of One Page 6
