A Population of One

by Constance Beresford-Howe

  Well, don’t let the word make you nervous. After all, people do get married all the time after capers like ours. There must be something encouraging in it. This happy, hopeful feeling — have you got it too? As if the mistakes, the frustrations, the failures of the past never happened, or don’t count. One of mine was a chap called Graham Foster. Shall I tell you about him? It’s not every day you hear about somebody whose first real sexual experience was with a Latin professor, now is it? Well, there you are, you see. If that wasn’t experience, nothing is.

  I was nearly eighteen, in my first year at university; he must have been, I suppose, about thirty. He taught Latin I, a course obligatory in those days for anyone planning “to proceed to graduate studies.” How the stately prose of the college calendar does bring it all back! The very first day he came into the lecture room in his gathered black gown and looked intently at us through his horn-rims (all us girls wearing the pearls and sweaters mandatory in the fifties) I tumbled into a schoolgirl crush of really violent intensity. It was so acute I worked like a fanatic over my translations, and soon he knew my name because I topped the class. (It’s not that women’s brains are different from men’s; just their priorities.)

  Anyhow, he took up permanent occupancy of my mind. Stalked through it on his long, thin legs like the Lord through Eden, reciting Catullus and taking off the horn-rims occasionally (oh, what that did to my personal syntax) to look at me with beautiful, myopic dark eyes. But week after week, no matter how often he said thrilling things like “Can you translate this sentence, Miss Doyle?”, nothing else happened. No progress made. At last I failed the Friday quiz.

  “What on earth happened to you?” he asked. “This isn’t like your work at all.”

  “Well, I just don’t understand this business of oratio obliqua.”

  This was, of course, a lie. But a functional lie. He suggested I come along to his office after class. Which I very primly did. This led to a number of further meetings when I had difficulties with the ablative absolute and my circulation; and after that we drifted into the love poetry of Catullus. Not long after that he offered one rain-soaked afternoon to drive me home. We proceeded to Rosedale via a web of wet country roads completely empty of traffic. He stopped, removed the horn-rims, and took me in his arms.

  “What gorgeous eyes you have,” I said.

  “My mother is Portuguese.”

  “But you were born here.”

  “Right here in Cabbagetown.”

  His lips began to travel from place to place on my cheeks, neck, forehead, in delicate, exploratory kisses that gave me a new and intense pleasure. It never occurred to me with any clarity at all that there might be more pleasure even than this. Not even when, on subsequent journeys out past muddy Mormon farms, he extended the field of his research as far as the removal of my sweater and bra. This added nothing to my happiness. In fact it made me both uncomfortable and uneasy. But I felt it would be impolite to stop him. Besides, if it made him happy, I was perfectly willing. Are you wondering what, if anything, I expected all this to lead to? Why, I no more expected it to lead to anything for me than algebra had. Like most educations, mine had prepared me for everything but the basic realities of life. The cautious Sex Education part of my instruction consequently seemed to me to have not the remotest connection with these long kissings and fondlings in Graham’s car, his glasses carefully put aside in the glove compartment and my sweater folded up with some of my inhibitions. I was quite sure pregnancy could not result from any of this; there seemed no other consequence to worry about. What with my reservations and his, we might almost have been a pair of celestial beings with wings, arms, and heads, and no lower parts whatever.

  Until, that is, one May afternoon with the sun warm on the windshield and thin young leaves of yellow-green shining in a gusty wind. For the first time his hand slid up between my legs. I shifted away, startled. Then he pulled my hand over and pressed it to a part of his anatomy whose condition very much surprised me.

  “It’s all right,” he kept saying. “Don’t be afraid. Don’t worry. I won’t hurt you. Just touch me. Touch me.”

  “But you’re married —” I remember saying like a fool.

  “That has nothing to do with this.”

  And a minute later the blind, thick column spurted a jet of clear fluid in an arc smelling of the sea. His face was buried in my neck and he breathed as if he had been running. A searching, terrible sadness like nothing I’d ever felt before crept through all my ignorant and foolish flesh. My eyes were sore with tears that could not fall. How strange that I should have thought about Ronnie all the silent way home. He was the little boy at the end of our street who shared a secret cave with me when we were five — a buggy and decrepit big-city grape arbour smelling a little of cats. There we retreated occasionally to eat bootleg candy and explore each other’s most interesting differences. Yes, as I drove home through that green day with my professor of Latin I remembered the tender little bud of Ronnie’s maleness and the lordly way he straddled to pee, while I had to squat. We agreed that his was a handy thing to have for a picnic. Our milk teeth were just beginning to loosen. We sometimes kissed, and laughed at the matching wobbles. We were not sad with this terrible sadness.

  Until the day his mother caught us, literally with our pants down. I was marched grimly home. I felt only bewildered. Then — and only then — guilty. My mother looked at me with cold disgust. “Never again, do you hear me — never again do anything so filthy,” she said. “I am ashamed of you.”

  Now I knew a climax of shame so bitter I could hardly look at Graham.

  That was the last time we drove out to the country. I refused to go again, though he tried several times to persuade me, and once, in a brief scuffle in his office, broke my string of pearls. They popped loudly onto the floor and rolled derisively into every corner. He collected them all with care and poured them into my hand. “Don’t want the janitor to find them here,” he said, with the rich Portuguese eyes looking into mine.

  And after that I never went to his office again.

  I got a First in Latin. He left abruptly at the end of that academic year; there was some scandal about a student — gossip about her pregnancy. From that day to this I’ve never seen or heard of Professor Foster, any more than I remember seeing Ronnie again. The two of them might have been made to vanish by a spell.

  Oh, my feet are giving out. Let’s catch this elevator down. Unfortunate that my parcels are so numerous and bulky; it’s hard to squash into the little cage already full of portly Westmount dowagers who like this store as much as I do. They glare at me, their hats trembling with indignation.

  It’s all very well, and perhaps preferable, for some men in one’s past to disappear; but it can be a problem when they don’t. Greg, for instance, didn’t disappear. He lived two doors down the street from us — actually he’s a second or third cousin of ours — but he was away at boarding school a lot of the time, and we didn’t notice each other till one hot summer when we were both about nineteen.

  I was intent on getting a tan that year, though all the sun ever did for me was bleach my hair and fuse all my smaller freckles into large ones. But in my scanty bathing suit I lay for hours on a rug in the garden, religiously anointing myself at intervals with sun oil. A clock (to check when it was time to turn over), books, dark glasses, lemonade, a small portable radio to bleat out Hit Parade tunes — all this was necessary equipment, and getting settled was an elaborate business. Among other things, I had to move with the angle of the sun, and make sure my nose was covered (it got red and peeled otherwise).

  One afternoon I caught a glitter from the bushes of the garden next door but one. Surely it was the rims of a pair of opera glasses. Quietly I slipped into the house and from Dad’s study got his big pair of racetrack binoculars.

  Back in the garden I put the glasses to my eyes and focussed the lens. Into the twin circles jumped a boy’s face, cheekily grinning behind a pair of binoculars. />
  A cracking laugh came from behind the bushes. I laughed too, though I was hot all over with blushing and sunburn.

  “Can I come over for some of that lemonade?” he called.

  “If you leave those glasses at home.”

  Though I hurriedly put on my clothes before he arrived, Greg and I from the start seemed to have known each other for a long time, in a basic and simple sort of way. He was a highly attractive boy with a zany laugh. We thought the same things funny — always a great bond. One of our mutual great-uncles died that fall, and Mother sent me to the funeral. I think she thought it would be educational for me. And so it was, though not quite as she planned. My first experience of the kinship of love and death. As the flower-heaped coffin waited beside a square of plastic undertaker’s grass, Greg whispered to me, his breath tickling my ear, “Uncle Wilf used to pinch girls.”

  “Did he?”

  “Well, he was ninety-six. Too old even to play chess.”

  I might have been able to cope with these footnotes to mortality if just at that moment one of Uncle Wilf’s ancient brothers had not boomed out in a theatrically solemn, biblical sort of voice, “Good. Bye. Wil. Fred.” Then the awful struggle not to laugh made me choke and gasp hysterically. I doubled over while perspiration came out like rain on my forehead. “That girl feels faint,” some aunt or other announced. “Push her head down between her legs.” Someone else mercifully said, “Take her back to the car.” And Greg, looking stern and solemn, very stiff in the shoulders and back, took my elbow and escorted me to the limousine, where we collapsed helplessly, stuffing our mouths with handkerchiefs.

  Just weeks later, Greg met Lou, home on holiday from the Harlow Academy for Girls. And that was that. I don’t know whether they ever laugh like that, or ever did. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. I’m very fond of Greg still, and I think he likes me, if anything, better than Lou herself does. No passion or anything messy like that on either side, of course. Just liking. Nothing the Prayer Book could possibly object to. And if you ask me whether I’m glad of that or sorry, I honestly am not sure.

  So you see, Bill, it really does all depend on what you call experience. You didn’t think we had so much in common, did you? But flow that you know, you’ve got to be as cheerful about us as I am.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  SOUNDS AND SWEET AIRS

  Monday is a morose day, with snow leaking down from a grey sky. Everybody at Cartier looks grim, or put-upon, or annoyed. I feel very out of place with my bright face beaming. On my way to class the caretaker detains me with a long and bitter complaint about student litter in the classrooms. He is a sad, crumpled, whining little man in a cotton jacket who looks rather like a bit of litter himself. I give him a pack of cigarettes and a pat on the arm before rushing off. The lecture fails to stimulate my class, which sits in apathy twirling its hair or gazing sadly at the floor.

  On my way to the library I pass bulletin boards posted with the exam schedule. Students mill around these, groaning and trading their favourite four-letter words. At the library I am in a hurry to get away, but Mrs. Salvatore, head of Circulation, keeps me there interminably, grumbling about the students who steal and vandalize books. She has an incipient beard which rivets my eyes, and her harangue goes on until I begin to feel like vandalizing her. Climbing the stairs at last to the haven of my office, I meet Molly coming down, her face squeezed up in a cross frown.

  “Having a hard day, love?” I ask her. “Cheer up. So is everybody else. Mrs. Salvatore has been gibbering away to me about vandals.”

  “I’m on my way to the library now, damn it. Trying to track down a plagiarist. Stupid bitch in my class has turned in an essay on Grove that I know damn well she didn’t write. I know because I’ve read it somewhere. That means pawing through back issues of Canadian Lit. for hours, just when I’m up to the neck in other work. Do you know a girl called Valerie Peterson? Great big cow with a heavy face.”

  “Val Peterson — yes, isn’t she the one that hangs around with Mike Armstrong?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Yes, she’s in my novel course. Not a very bright star.”

  “Too right she isn’t. Just wait till I get hold of that article she’s pinched. I’ll massacre her.”

  “Well, good luck on the hunt. Harry all right?”

  “Home with a cold, but okay.”

  “That’s great.” She doesn’t look as if she really agrees, but goes on her way with a harried nod. I pull out my office keys and finish the climb up, whistling.

  A quick glance along the corridor shows Bill’s door closed. Thanks to everybody, I’ve missed him. He’ll be in class for the next two hours. But something has been left on the floor close by my door: a small potted plant enclosed in a plastic puff tied at the top with red string. I take it inside, smiling with pleasure. There is no card with it, but only Bill could think of such a thing. What could be lovelier than live white violets on a grey March day? Bill, you are a sweet man. Carefully I give the sandy earth a little drink. I am touching the furry leaves fondly and counting the half-hidden green buds when a rap at the door makes me turn. Mike stands there with snow melting on the shoulders of his jacket. He is frowning. What on earth is the matter with everyone today?

  “Can I talk to you for a minute, Miz?”

  “Yes, of course. Come on in. Something wrong?”

  “Yeah, sort of. Not with me.”

  “Oh?”

  He shoots a cautious look at me as he closes the door. “Like I’m here as a friend, right? Everything strictly off the record, okay?”

  “If you like. You look worried, Mike.”

  In fact, however, he looks not so much worried as highly intent; even excited. I steal a quick look at my watch. Over an hour yet before Bill gets out of class.…

  “Well, what’s the trouble, then?”

  He has twitched round one of the heavy chairs and folded his tall, thin frame by stages down into it, legs over the arm, torso turned so I can see only his profile. “You know damn well what worries me,” he mutters. “You, that’s what, all the damn time worrying hell out of me. But that’s not really why I’m here. I think. Only some days I don’t know why I really do anything, if you see what I mean.”

  With some difficulty I keep my mind on this diffuse set of remarks and my eyes from wandering to the pot of violets. What was that Molly was grumbling about — an essay on Grove —

  “Has this got anything to do with Val, by any chance?”

  He looks slightly startled. “Sharp. How did you know?”

  “Want to tell me about it?”

  “So the word’s out already, is it? Look, can I trust you?”

  I hesitate. “Well, it depends a bit what — oh well, all right. Everything off the record.”

  He takes a long breath. “Well, Val’s mother moved out a few months back to bed down with a guy ten years younger than she is. But she keeps on seeing Val for lunch and telling her what a baddie her dad is. Get the picture?”

  “Go on.”

  “This makes it very tough on Val.”

  “Yes, it would.”

  “She’s been on sleeping pills. They zonk her out so much she’s been messing around with uppers — Benzedrine — to help her study. Not the best scene.”

  “No, indeed.”

  “So her grades drop, she can’t concentrate. Right now she’s way behind, and the exams are almost on our necks. This is her final year. Panic situation.”

  “I see.”

  Suddenly he flashes me a smile warm as the sun. His eyes linger on me and his fresh lips shape the ghost of a kiss.

  “Dear Miz. You —”

  “All right now, Mike. Is that it, then? Because you know the Student Counselling people can probably help Val. Once they know the situation they can notify her instructors that she’s under a lot of stress. Maybe get permission for her to write the exams later this summer. Can you persuade her to go and see them?”

  “Well,” he says, shift
ing in the chair, “you maybe know already, it could be a bit late for that to help much. Val’s done something dumb. She — sort of used an essay, on that prize pill Frederick Grove. Rewrote some of it, like; cut some parts out. But it isn’t her essay.”

  His cheeks are a trifle flushed. Frowning, he jerks and tugs at the laces of his grubby sneakers, with bony fingers that are not quite steady. My heart goes out to him. He cares more about that big-bottomed girl than he knows. I look at the plant to give him time, and in the silence we can hear big snowflakes patting the window-glass.

  Finally I say, “Mike, the best thing she can do — if I can offer a bit of advice — would be for her to go right away to Mrs. Pratt, and tell her the whole story. All of it. And hope for mercy. You understand I have no idea whether — well, the rest is strictly up to Mrs. Pratt and perhaps the Chairman.”

  “Yeah. But you see, it’s her pride. Having to spill the whole thing. I mean it’s like you say, asking for mercy. That’s tough to do.”

  “No doubt. But theft is theft, right?”

  “If you want to call it that.”

  “Well, what would you call it? Plagiarism is theft. Fraud. Dishonesty. Deception. I don’t like those names any better, do you?”

  “No. But you’re so terribly pure, Miz.” He is grinning now. The frown is gone. His feet dangle, relaxed. The bell sounds to mark the hour and he jumps up cheerfully.

  “Anyway, thanks. It helps to tell somebody. I’ll see what I can do about getting Val to see the counsellor. She’s pretty spaced out right now, but I’ll try.”

  “That’s all you can do. By the way, how’s your own opus coming along? Will you have it in this week?”