After a couple of hours of driving, during which she quizzed him about his ranch and what had happened to all the people she had once known, she began to pay more attention to her surroundings. If she had misgivings, remembering the community they had both come from with less pleasure than she was showing, and having forgotten how very long this drive was, she stifled them, chiding herself because, after all, nobody could have everything.
“This is a little hard for a city girl to take in,” she said, gazing at the empty, snow-spotted landscape around them, and slid closer to him, pressing against him. He hadn’t been her first lover, but close; either second or third. That she couldn’t remember the order anymore – David, Walter Toews, Adolph, or was it David, Adolph, Walter? – didn’t really upset her. She hadn’t really been a promiscuous girl, just one all the boys were after. It led to opportunity that possibly she should have let pass. She was aware that the truck had swerved a little into the left lane.
“Icy this morning,” Adolph said, not showing any alarm, and she relaxed again, even allowing herself to rest her head against his wide shoulder. “Nearly there,” he added, and gave her that smile again. Warmth had settled into the cab that wasn’t coming from the truck’s heater, but from the two of them together, and she thought contentedly, turning her face into his worn, canvas sleeve: Maybe him; maybe he is the one at last.
Later, she would remember that next Adolph had said to his truck, “Whoa-oa-ohh,” and then they were in the ditch and rolling over and over, first cab over tailgate, and then again, and then sideways, and then bang, she saw a wall of yellow grass patchy with snow – somebody screamed – coming at them – she would say afterward, again and again, “If I hadn’t done up my seatbelt …” until someone, Maisie, she said she was, a face that Lucinda thought she knew, said, “Shshsh, Lucy; it’s all right now,” but tears were streaming down the woman’s face as she spoke. “You hit the approach; that’s a deep ditch and you skidded and rolled and slid, full force, blam, right into Wojinski’s approach.”
After the emergency ward and a sling placed on her arm, Maisie tried to take her home for the night, but Lucinda insisted on staying in the town’s only motel, telling her that she was too upset to be with people, which was true, and that she needed to be alone. When Maisie came the next day to check on her, and, as her bruised and twisted body was half-killing her, making it impossible just yet for her to ride a bus for four hours and then a plane for another four, she agreed to wait, and attend Adolph’s funeral, hard as it would be, and indeed was.
She didn’t know what to make of Maisie’s remark she had overheard at the funeral that “Adolph must have been off his game,” until she realized that he hadn’t done up his seatbelt, and besides that, a countryman, he should have had no trouble handling an icy road. She felt ashamed and even guilty, as if she had caused his death, and that perception warred in her with the one that said she was being ridiculous: the accident was hardly her fault. And all those strangers at the funeral looking sideways at her, plus his now-bulky sisters treating her as if she were from Mars, and evil itself.
Afterward, lying sleepless back in her own apartment in Hamilton, where she had moved after Sylvestre’s death, her French not being good enough to stay without him in Montreal, Adolph’s face and his touching yet thoroughly masculine shyness hovered around her every night, enough to make her wonder if he was haunting her because she had killed him. She couldn’t stop herself from thinking: so much for number four – or six. She had reached the end of her high school list. Now, as soon as she could muster the strength to do it, she would tackle the university list.
Lucinda had easily recalled the names of boys she dated in university, but found locating them harder because, once they had obtained their degrees in engineering or economics or medicine, they had moved all over the place. Then she had to find out if they were still married or not, or if they had live-in partners. Merrett Jacoby’s name came up. He had taken her to her first freshman dance, and what a lovely boy he had been: smart, good-looking, and mannerly, a full cut above the old high school crowd, back in Empire. She tracked him down in Denver, of all places, instead of the more likely Calgary or Vancouver, where he had retired from his own engineering consultancy business, and found out by trolling the obituaries and death notices in their alumni magazine that his wife, Myrna Snow, was long dead and that he hadn’t re-married.
Considering how best to approach him, she decided to phone him to tell him she was planning to holiday in San Diego, and, having a five-hour wait in Denver between planes, had thought to see if they might meet ‘for old times’ sake’. She felt a bit guilty about this minor deception, but then, how else to re-invigorate her relationship with him, if indeed it would be possible. She reiterated to herself that she didn’t intend to break up a marriage or even a relationship. She simply wanted to be married again, and to someone she could love, or at least enjoy living with. She was willing to engage in minor deceptions to achieve this goal.
On the phone, he sounded happy to hear from her, and, when she landed, was waiting at the arrivals gate. It took them a minute to recognize each other: He had only a fringe of white hair left around his tanned skull, and now wore heavy, dark-framed glasses, but he was still good-looking, and he had bothered to put on a tie, sports coat, and pressed trousers, as well as shined and elegant loafers. She could see he had done well in life. He put out his hand to shake hers, as the others had done. As with them, she pulled him close to her for a hug, and as the others had done, he acquiesced.
“You look quite marvelous, Lucy! You haven’t put on a pound. However did you manage that?”
“You don’t look as if you’ve put on any weight either,” she said, gazing up at him admiringly.
“I’m still running and going to the gym.”
“At seventy-five?” She couldn’t hide her surprise. They were both a few years older than seventy-five, but he didn’t correct her.
“You bet,” he said. “Myrna put on a lot of weight and her heart quit when she was only sixty-five. I’m not going to let that happen to me.” He led her toward the row of restaurants and shops near the airport’s glass entrances. When they were seated in the dark hush of what appeared to be a good restaurant, and he had ordered wine, she said, “So you never married again?” He shook his head, no.
“Bachelorhood has been good to me,” he declared, looking at her and laughing, with a touch of sheepishness that she found, well, charming.
“I can see why,” she said, using the upturned face, the steady, bright gaze again. She had never been an eyelash batter – so embarrassingly obvious – and wouldn’t start now.
He shrugged.“Whatever,” he said. “I like women. It was tough there, at the end, with Myrna. She couldn’t seem…” He paused, turned his face away to look across the nearly empty room. “She couldn’t seem to be happy.”
“Some people are like that,” Lucinda said. “Just born with a burr in their britches.” They both laughed.
“I haven’t heard the word, ‘britches,’ in many years,” he said. “Tell me about your life. I heard you married a Frenchman.”
“I did,” she said, nodding, “and he was a great husband. That’s why I want…” here she hesitated, embarrassed at enjoying herself so much she was forgetting to be vigilant, then, her turn to shrug, “to marry again.” He had been buttering a roll, and now his motions slowed; he cut the roll in half, and then in half again, as if he were solving an engineering problem.
She said, cheerily, but not trying to hide the wry note in her voice, “It seems to be getting chilly in here.” He gave a little, not-unfriendly, snort without looking up. This was going all wrong, and she found to her sorrow that she didn’t know how to fix it. Damn! And he was so clearly what she was looking for.
He looked directly into her eyes, “I’ve found that having women as friends works best.” She could feel her face flushing, her whole body was heating up, and she fiddled with her earring. Could it be? He
was adding her to his list!
“Denver and Hamilton are a long way apart,” she told him, refusing to meet his eyes. “It’s unlikely I’ll be this way again. Especially given our ages.”
“Now, don’t be that way, Lucy. I feel about sixty and the doctor says I’m in great shape. Look at you! You look fabulous! We could have a great time together. Change your ticket, and we could drive through the Rockies. Lots of nice inns tucked away in them.” She could imagine the inns, and the women he had already taken to them. She was collecting herself now.
“It sounds wonderful,” she told him, lowering her voice, and projecting warmth into it. This was now all about saving face. “I’m afraid not this time, though. From San Diego I’m flying up to Vancouver. My granddaughter is graduating from university and I wouldn’t miss that for anything.” She could see he wasn’t fooled.
“I think you’re missing a fine opportunity. At our age, how many of these do we get? Think of the fun we could have together.” Fun? Did that mean sex?
“Merritt,” she said. “I am not a promiscuous teenager. I want to be married, or at least, to live with a partner. Affairs I don’t need. They do more harm than good.” A long silence ensued, during which the waitress set the plates before them. They had both ordered pasta primavera, and occupied themselves eating and sipping their wine.
She flew back home again the next morning and, for a while, didn’t even look at her list, although she knew very well that Garth Whitney, also widowed and living in Victoria, was the next name, and after that she had only two more names to consider. If none of them worked out, what would she do? Give up, come home and live alone, and get used to being old, she told herself, and for a moment felt lost in her downheartedness. She could see her chances dwindling and dwindling again, and she wondered if she would even be able to muster the old charm to make a dent in Garth’s inevitable barriers.
They had dated in third year, and indeed, had made love many times, and had talked about marrying, but he had another four years in medical school, and she knew very well that if she married him she would have to support him – that’s how things were in those days – and the very minute he graduated and became a full-fledged doctor, he would dump her, worn out by then from her secretarial jobs and running the house and children, and marry the first good-looking young nurse he ran into. Everybody knew medical students were especially notorious for doing this. It had seemed to her, in those days – I always did have a calculating streak, she recognized now with some surprise – that she wouldn’t choose to engage in this battle, if in the end she would likely lose. And that after years of poverty while he finished his degrees and then went into a speciality. The kids would be teenagers before she had a minute to call her own, and then she would be left alone. Thinking of this, she kept putting off phoning Garth.
But one morning, when she woke and the sun was shining brightly into her bedroom lighting up the furniture and pictures, and songbirds were chirping away in the cherry tree outside her window, she thought, damn it! I’m going to give it one more try. Garth had always claimed she had broken his heart, so, remembering the awful Jimmy Sheehan, she decided to phone him first, and to be as direct with him about this venture as she was about it in her own mind.
“Garth, is that you?” when he answered the phone. “This is Lucy Moreau. I was Lucy…”
“Lucy Sutherland!” he said, so eagerly that she laughed. “It’s wonderful to hear from you after all these years. What’s up?”
“Do you know that Sylvestre died, that I’m widowed now?”
“No,” he said. “I’m sorry to hear that. How long have you been alone?”
They had a lively conversation, as if nearly sixty years hadn’t passed since the day she had walked away from him, and yet, unlike Jimmy, he seemed to hold nothing against her. Together, they decided that she would come to Victoria to visit him.
Now, on the plane to Victoria, remembering her neighbour Alicia’s unhappy attempt to reignite a flame with an old beau, Lucinda had to admit that if the truth were told, she was getting a little tired herself. Feeling her age, anybody else would have said. This last winter had taken something out of her that she didn’t feel able to get back. She had fallen ill with a bad flu after the Adolph thing, weeks passed before she was well again, the sling having been long since discarded, and then after the Merrett debacle, her hair had started falling out, and she had finally managed to find a too-expensive wig, which matched her own beauty-parlour blond perfectly, and which no one would ever know was a wig. Still, needing the wig somehow dampened her spirit. She cleared her throat a lot, too, not that it did any good, as the new, unpleasant-sounding rasp would not go away, nor would the pain that came and went when she swallowed, and no matter how much cream she put on her hands, she could not get that new gnarled, aged look to go away. Now her doctor thought she should have a couple of hearing aids. I mean, really, she told herself, setting her jaw.
Now, Garth, who was number what? Six, or was it seven? Truthfully, number eight or nine – could it really be that she had been through so many men? But she had to admit that he was one of those who had mattered most to her, whenever she allowed herself to think of her past.
She flew to Victoria a full day earlier than the day she she told him she’d arrive. Beside her usual trip-weariness, the time difference between the two cities was three hours, not to mention the difference in climate, all combining to leave her achy, thick-headed and tired, and it was imperative that she not meet him in that condition. A good night’s sleep in a better hotel still did wonders for her skin, and some expertly-applied makeup would bring out the brightness in her blue eyes and the beautiful shape of her full mouth. Shrunken a little, but nevertheless, exquisitely-shaped. She knew that if she didn’t look her best at least for the first week or two while he remembered that as a girl she had been full of life, funny, charming – the beauty queen with the winning personality, the yearbooks had said of her – all hope would lost before the relationship had begun. So she gritted her teeth, and put every ounce of feminine expertise into their first meeting.
He met her at his door leaning on a cane – she hadn’t expected that – and wearing fleece-lined plaid slippers. He still loomed over her though, and his bulk, in that lovely masculine way, had increased with age, so that for a second she felt like a little girl gazing up at her grandfather. The illusion passed when he spoke, though, in that same rich voice, and that gentle manner. “Lucy,” he said, softly, and before she could move he was leaning down, kissing her full on the mouth, so that she lost her breath, and nearly her balance – another of her abilities which had been deteriorating at a mildly alarming rate. “Come and sit with me on the sofa.”
It was late afternoon and a gas fire burned in the polished white granite fireplace. Across from the sofa stood a glass wall and then a balcony and beyond that, Victoria’s inner harbour with all the sailboats, launches and even a few small yachts. A gilt tray holding a carafe of dark-gold liquor and two matching crystal glasses rested on the coffee table before them. “Before we have dinner,” he said, pouring them each a little. She didn’t like to tell him that strong drink now wrought havoc with her digestion; she accepted the glass and they touched them together for a toast to their reconnection. The sound of the two glasses meeting, though, was more like that of a tiny crystal bell that seemed to ring something new into the atmosphere, or to signal something she couldn’t know. She half-wondered if she were dreaming.
“How are you, Garth?” she asked. “Do you still practice at all?” She had meant medicine, but he glanced over his shoulder at the grand piano. Had it been there when she entered the room?
“I play a little every day, although my fingers are getting stiff. I couldn’t live without music.” She became aware now that music was playing softly in the background: a string quartet, although she couldn’t name the piece or the composer.
“I forgot how well you played,” she said. “What a joy you were to listen to. I forg
ot that completely.” He was smiling at her, a gentle, almost fatherly smile, although he reached out like a lover to take her hand, and place it in his large one, cupping it softly with the other.
“How beautiful you were as a young woman,” he said. “I was never joking when I said I loved you, or that your departure from me broke my heart. I would never have left you.”
Outside the window, dusk was approaching across the gleaming water; the light in the room was deepening. In the dimness, it seemed to her that he was looking younger by the second, that he was the old Garth she had loved when they were young. “I was just amazed by your iron will,” he said, laughing a little, as if she were an amusing child. “Do you think now that you made a mistake leaving me?” He was teasing her; he still loved her: to her surprise, she knew that she loved him, and always had, and for an instant, she was consumed by a longing for what she had never had but might have if she had been less determined.
“I think,” she said, pleased to hear that the touch of an elderly croak had smoothed itself out; her voice was that of a young woman, full of girlish innocence. “I think that I probably did.” She was about to start telling him how now they might begin again, but he interrupted, speaking as if he had read her mind.
“Some things can’t be fixed,” he told her, touching her hair where it framed her cheek. He was leaning toward her again, his face coming closer and closer, and in his eyes, which had turned dark in the softly-shadowed room, she could see – what was it?
Outside the glass wall the sea breathed long exhalations, rising and falling, its moving surface gleaming like polished sheet metal in the last rays of light.
Season of Fury and Wonder Page 13
