The Mystery of Right and Wrong

by Wayne Johnston

  * * *

  —

  A year went by without a word from her. Every day I went to work and I rode the bus home. One afternoon in September, as the bus headed south on Elizabeth Avenue, I was looking out the window at the northbound traffic—and there it was, the white Malibu, Hans behind the wheel and Rachel on his right, her body turned toward him so that I fully saw the sweetly smiling face I hadn’t seen except in photographs since she had gone away. She threw back her head and laughed—and then she was gone.

  I drew in my breath as if I’d been stabbed. That she and her father should be headed somewhere in the family car was perfectly reasonable, and yet it seemed impossible that it was her. That she should appear for an instant looking just as she always had and then disappear was maddening. That I could be so near without her knowing it, that she had not somehow heard me gasp or felt me staring at her, seemed impossible. Everything I’d felt when I read the note that she’d included with the sweater that, even now, I was wearing came rushing back as if no time had passed. Sorrow surged up in me until I thought my throat would burst. I pressed my face against the window and shut my eyes, my heart hammering, tears dripping onto my cheeks. I reached under the sweater, pulled out the tail of my shirt and used it to dry my face.

  It had seemed almost bearable to go on without her when she was far away, but now—I pulled the cord above my head and got off the bus many stops short of mine. How happy, how entirely rid of me, of any need of me, she had looked. More tears fell down my face. I walked along Forest Road, past the penitentiary and the nurse’s dorm that used to be a hospital, turned left at the entrance to the parking lot of my apartment building, hurried downhill to the door of my block and ran up the stairs. I could barely see the lock as I stabbed at it with my key. At last I managed to insert it, turned it and thrust my shoulder against the door, which opened with a crash.

  As I slammed the door shut behind me, an errant piece of paper fluttered up from the floor, almost high enough for me to grab it. It was a file card of the kind I often used for taking notes. I bent over and picked it up. The front was blank. I flipped it over to find a note in pencil on the back: “I came by but you weren’t here. I’ll come back soon. I’m home for a bit and thought it would be nice to see you. I’ve been taking bartending lessons, sort of, and I know how to make some fancy milk drinks. We could have some in front of the fire at the house tonight.”

  I was just about to throw her invitation in the trash when there was a knock on the door. I looked out through the peephole and saw her, grey-caped and smiling. “Who is it?” I said, to buy time to compose myself. And then there came that laugh of hers. I opened the door.

  “I missed you,” she said as if we’d only been apart for minutes. She grabbed me in a hug and leaned her head on my shoulder. “Did you miss me?”

  I was afraid to attempt a word lest it come out as a sob. I hugged her back, hard, and buried my face in her hair, which smelled just as it always had. I knew that if she was here in the hope that I would take her back, I would put aside all my misgivings and what-ifs and do so in an instant, but I wasn’t, in spite of her note and the fact and feel of her in my arms and the smell of her hair, certain of what she wanted. What fancy drinks in front of the fire might mean to her, or what she might assume it meant to me, I didn’t know. Could it be that she was merely proposing a meeting for old time’s sake—two one-time lovers who were so completely over each other they could reminisce in front of a fire, reflecting on the time when they were too naive to see that what they thought was love was just a fleeting crush? Or was this yet one more example of me not having a clue about things that to her were second nature? I was ridden with questions that I couldn’t bring myself to ask her for fear of sounding so needy and naive that I might provoke her into knitting me another sweater and writing me another inscrutably motivated Dear Wade letter.

  When we pulled apart, she could tell that I’d been crying. Her smile wavered, her chin wobbling just a bit. “So, um—”

  “I saw you and your dad from the bus on Elizabeth Avenue just now. I saw you in the car.”

  She nodded rapidly as if to assure me that I’d seen what I thought I had. “We drove home,” she said, “and then I drove back by myself. I was planning to wait in the car if you didn’t answer and try again.”

  “That would have been something,” I said, “to see you in the Malibu in the parking lot, waiting for me like you used to.”

  She smiled. “Do you wear that sweater every day?”

  “No. This is the first time I’ve ever worn it,” I lied. “I guess I had a premonition.” We were still just inside the door. “Come in,” I said.

  She put her hands on my shoulders and quickly kissed me, then patted my chest with both hands. “You get a bite to eat,” she said. “Let me go pick up some liqueurs and stuff and come back for you. Mom and Dad are going out tonight. They need the car by eight o’clock.” She left quickly, smiling at me as she closed the door.

  “I missed you,” she’d said so lightheartedly, as if it was all she would ever say about what she had done. Drinks in front of the coal-fed fire while we had the house to ourselves as we’d had so many nights before. What did she want?

  * * *

  —

  The second we pulled into the driveway, Hans and Myra came out of the house, Hans in an ill-fitting grey suit and Myra in an unmistakably homemade evening dress. Myra raised her hand to me and smiled as I held the car door for her, but never said a word. As usual, Hans seemed oblivious to my presence. “You’re late, Rachel,” he said as he got in the car. They were gone before we reached the front door.

  “Where are they going?”

  “I think there’s some sort of faculty event at the university,” Rachel said, shrugging. “They’re always going to them. I don’t know why they bother.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  * * *

  —

  “Bethany has a friend who’s a bartender,” she said as we stood in the kitchen. “She taught me how to make all sorts of drinks.” She placed a large carton of milk, a bowl of ice cubes, two large brandy glasses, a bottle of Rémy Martin cognac and several bottles of variously flavoured liqueurs—orange, strawberry, chocolate, cherry—on the counter. “There’s not as much alcohol in these as there is in rum or whiskey. And the milk soaks up what there is, so that should keep us from getting too drunk.”

  “For what?” I said. She only smiled.

  She mixed her concoctions and we went to sit on the floor in front of the fire. The drinks went down as smoothly as she predicted. The house was dark but for the light cast by the fire. We talked, but not about anything of consequence. Insisting that I stay put, she got up time after time and brought back more drinks for both of us, switching from one flavour to another.

  “We are going to be so hungover,” I said, but she laughed and shook her head. “We won’t. You’ll see.”

  “So what happened?” I said at last, not sure that it was not still happening.

  She took another sip from her glass. “Strawberry is my favourite,” she said.

  “Come on, Rachel, what happened?”

  She looked as startled as if I had shouted. Maybe I had.

  “There wasn’t someone else,” she said. “I implied that there was in my letter, but there wasn’t. You were good for me.”

  “Well, I’m glad I was able to assist in your personal growth.”

  That laugh.

  “You were a hard act to follow,” I said. “In terms of impressing my mother.” The laugh again. I hadn’t been with anyone since, but I guess I hoped she thought I had.

  She stared at the fire as if to assure it that what she said was true. “I’m so sorry. You’ll never know, never, how sorry I am. There wasn’t anybody. You and I…we’d become so close so quickly. Sex. God. You ha
ve no idea what a big step that was for me. I felt like I had drifted into some normal person’s life but wouldn’t be able to keep up appearances much longer. And then, in Halifax, Bethany got worse, not better as I told you in my letters. In hospital, out of hospital. She tried to kill herself with pills. I didn’t tell my parents, or you, or anyone, because she asked me not to. I did nothing but take care of her when she was out of hospital and visit her when she was in hospital.”

  “You could have told me. I could have come to Halifax—”

  “You don’t know much about anorexia, do you?”

  “No, but so what?”

  “You’ve read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, but you’ve barely heard of anorexia. Wade, Wade, what am I going to do with you?”

  “Rachel,” I said, “I’m the one who should be asking that about you.”

  Nodding, she took hold of my free hand but couldn’t meet my eye. “This past year,” she whispered, staring at the fire. It might have been the name of a book that, were I to read it, would make sense of everything. After a long silence, she said, “When they weighed Bethany in the hospital the first time I took her back there, the scales said that she weighed less than she had since she was ten, and she thought it was a trick. She thought that all the people who wanted her to eat more and the ones who thought she was too skinny were conspiring against her, including me.”

  “But why did you do what you did?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” Rachel said, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I was so scared. And Bethany didn’t want to go home and she made me promise not to leave her. I don’t know why I kept that to myself. I guess I was worried that you’d think that all of us were crazy. You probably do. Maybe you’re right. I can’t make any more sense of what I did than you can.”

  A whisper was the most that I could manage. “I missed you so much,” I said.

  She leaned forward and kissed me. I put down my glass, took her face in my hands and kissed her back. Eventually, she pulled away. “We can’t go upstairs,” she said, putting her fingers on my lips to keep me from protesting.

  “Then let’s go back to my place,” I said. “We could walk or take a cab.”

  She turned to stare into the fire again. “My parents are going back to South Africa. For good, they say, but they once said they were moving to Canada for good—anyway, Dad has finally admitted to himself that he’ll never be a full professor here or anywhere else, so he’s packing it in. He can’t keep himself from going to the dean with complaints about his colleagues, so he’s made a lot of enemies. He might even be making things up about them—that’s how frustrated he is. I know I shouldn’t say that, but anyway, he’s made up his mind. They’re going to sell the house.”

  “What are you going to do?” I said.

  “Well. So.” She tapped my chest with her index finger. “That depends on you.”

  I was relieved but still perplexed.

  “They’ve convinced Bethany to go to South Africa with them. Well, they’re more or less forcing her to go. They don’t want her living by herself when she’s so sick. My parents have convinced Max not to give her any more money unless she goes to South Africa, where they can keep an eye on her and where they think the medical system is better. The thing is, though—this is the big thing—Bethany wants me to go with her. My parents do too. They want me to keep her company. Well, to help look after her. Also, they don’t like the idea of me living alone again, probably because the last time they left me alone, I wound up in bed with you. And I have no money either. So.”

  I must have looked as disconcerted as I felt, because she kissed me.

  “Sooo, I’ve told them I’m not going unless you go with me.”

  She may as well have said she was not going to Mars unless I went with her. South Africa. “What would I do there? Where would I live?”

  “I’ve got this all worked out. I thought a lot about it, a lot.”

  “But I have a job. I still haven’t saved up enough to take any length of time off.”

  “I know, I know, Wade, but just please listen. Because of the way they handle money, Mom and Dad have always known they’d have nothing to leave to us, so years ago they took out life insurance policies for each of us. I’m the only one who hasn’t cashed hers in yet. It’s worth five thousand dollars. Combined with what you’ve saved, we’d have enough to live on for, I don’t know, a year or two? Not all of it in South Africa, necessarily. You wouldn’t have to work. You could write your book just like you planned, and I’d be there for Bethany.”

  “First you say you have no money and then you say you have five thousand dollars—”

  “Without Dad’s permission, I can’t cash in the insurance policy until I’m twenty-five. Dad altered my policy after my sisters squandered every cent of theirs.”

  “So you don’t have any money?”

  “Dad’s agreed to dole out my insurance money month by month.”

  “Where would we live? With your parents?”

  “No. We’d live together, you and me, in our own apartment.”

  “Your parents won’t mind?”

  “They’ll mind a lot, but I’m twenty-two years old. They’d rather I lived with you where they can keep an eye on me than five thousand miles away. They don’t like the thought of me all alone in Newfoundland, the only one of the family, their youngest, who is not without problems of her own, shacking up entirely unsupervised.”

  “Keep your friends close and your daughter’s boyfriend closer.”

  She managed to laugh.

  South Africa. Could I write there? I’d never done any real writing anywhere, so…I couldn’t imagine what living there would be like.

  “I know, I know, it’s a lot to think about, but Bethany really doesn’t want to go back there without me. I mean, she really doesn’t. I love her. I’m in love with you. I’ll pick you over her if I have to. I know that now.”

  “You’ve never told me you love me.”

  “I should have. I should have told you a thousand times. Especially since you may think I’m just saying it now to get you to say it back.”

  “I don’t think that. I do love you. I didn’t know how much I did until I lost you. I’ll go to South Africa with you. I’ll go anywhere with you.”

  “Thank God,” she whispered. “Thank God it’s not too late.” It seemed again that she was either talking to herself or to some third person to whom she said things she couldn’t bring herself to say to me. “Fritz and Carmen will be there, but they live pretty far from Cape Town. We wouldn’t have much to do with them. Fritz won’t try anything like he did before. You were a stranger and strangers make him nervous. You won’t be a stranger anymore. Gloria and Max live there when they’re not at work—did I tell you he’s a pilot with South African Airways? But Gloria and Carmen don’t get along, and Bethany doesn’t get along with either one of them or Fritz, so it’s a bit of a mess, except they all get along with me. Bethany says she thinks she won’t get better if she has no one for support but Mom and Dad. But you know what will be the best part of it, Wade?”

  Dazed, I shook my head.

  “I’ll be able to show you where I grew up. My city, my country. I’ve seen yours but you’ve never seen mine.”

  “Be honest with me,” I said. “If I had said no, would you really stay here? I mean, would I end up with another sweater in six months after you went off to Cape Town?”

  She laughed, then shook her head and frowned, then threw her arms around me and stamped my face with kisses. “You’ll love it there. South Africa—it’s not what people think it is. But you’ll see.”

  “When will we go?”

  “Just after Christmas, I hope. Mom and Dad have to sell the house first—it’s all they’ll have to live on.”

  We were in mid-kiss when the front door opened a
nd her parents came in, Myra first through the door, looking flushed and upset, Hans behind her, looking…was it sheepish? Chastised? Myra ran up the stairs without a glance at us. Hans gaped at Rachel as if he’d forgotten she’d come home from Halifax.

  “My ulcers,” he muttered, rubbing his stomach. “I have to drink my Horlicks.” He hurried past us to the kitchen.

  “I’d better go,” I whispered to Rachel. I kissed and hugged her. “I’m walking home,” I said. “I could use some air. I’m not so sure about those milk drinks.”

  From The Ballad of the Clan van Hout

  ANOTHER LIFE (1984)

  I hate those faculty events—

  I’d like to give them my two cents.

  Instead, we go and make small talk,

  ignore the knowing looks and walk

  about the room, pretending that

  the smirking faces of that lot

  have aught to do with Hans van Hout.

  Yet there are times, I must admit,

  I wish She’d loosen up a bit.

  If I could have another life,

  if I could have another wife…

  Ours was a short engagement—

  it was short for She was pregnant.

  Had I put up more resistance,

  not slept with her at Her insistence…

  I look around the room again,

  appraising all the other men,

  assessing fiancées and brides

  and soon I put all doubts aside.

  I realize we’re all the same,

  all playing at the same old game

  of matrimony, parenthood,

  all wondering if we should

  have found another game to play—

  there are no others, anyway.