Jacintha

by Lorraine Davies

  When Carol could speak again, she asked, “Will you have a funeral in Montreal?”

  “In our church, yes,” Gordon said.

  “It is your fault,” Amanda said, every icy word precisely separate.

  “Amanda!”

  “No, Gordon, I will say it.” Again she mouthed the carefully separated words, then went on. “You and your husband should have had the risk assessed, living at the bottom of a cliff like that. What kind of fools are you?” Her voice became high pitched. “It was criminally careless. Criminally. Oh, yes. But I can’t make a criminal charge against you. Or even a civil one. My lawyer advised me neither would hold.”

  “Amanda! When did you talk to our lawyer?”

  “I thought about it on the flight and this morning I phoned him and told him the house must have been unsafe, that these people should have known, and he said it would be too hard to prosecute successfully.” She stopped to suck in air, a drowning woman. “And anyway, it won’t bring Jenny back. But I want you to know. I blame you. I want you to suffer, knowing that it’s your fault. And that I’ll always blame you.”

  Carol was unable to speak.

  Gordon raised his wife out of her chair and held her close. “Amanda, Amanda,” he crooned, and kissed her eyes, wet again with slow tears.

  After a minute, she pushed him away and left the room, a room now seeming to be emptied of whatever air and light there had been.

  Carol continued to sit in stunned silence.

  “I apologize for my wife,” Gordon said. “Grief can make savages of us all. Did someone say that? Is it a quote? Anyway, it’s true. I know I seem to be bearing up all right, but if I break down now, I won’t be able to help my wife.”

  “Yes, it’s all right. I understand,” Carol said. I can’t tell Richard this, she thought. He already blames himself. I can never tell him this.

  Dear Mr. and Mrs. Walker,

  I’ve phoned you several times to offer my condolences but haven’t been able to reach you. I can understand you wanting to be quiet in your grief.

  I’m grieving, too, very much. Jenny was a bright light in what seems to me a world growing darker and darker. A shining girl.

  I know from our conversations that she had an excellent mind and was very insightful. We sometimes discussed her courses and I was particularly pleased with her love of Shakespeare’s plays, which I have taught for many years.

  I won’t make this too long — please call me sometime when you want to talk about Jenny. I’d like to share some memories with you. You can reach me in the hospital at 555-233-9495. I’ll give you my home number when I know where I’ll be living.

  With my heartfelt sympathy for your great loss,

  Richard Wilson

  A week later he phoned again and got the Walkers’ answering machine. He left his name and number again. Another week went by without a reply.

  “Maybe they don’t want to talk to me,” he said to Carol. “Maybe …” The truth hit him suddenly, a hammer to his gut. “Maybe they blame me for her death.”

  “Don’t read too much into not hearing from them, Richard. It’s only been three weeks and they’re devastated and probably are talking only to friends and relatives.”

  “No, no. They blame me. Oh god, they do, don’t they? They blame me.” It should have been obvious to me, he thought, had I not been wrapped in my cloak of self-pity. “Did they say something to you about this?”

  “First of all, if they blamed anyone, they’d blame both of us, not just you. But they said they blamed no one, that it was a tragic accident.”

  “Oh, Carol, is that true?”

  “Yes. It’s true.”

  TWO

  THEY’D LOST EVERYTHING. Everything had been buried in mud and rubble or was too water damaged to salvage, and even if it had been salvageable, they couldn’t have got to it. The house had been declared out of bounds, yellow-taped like a crime scene, waiting for the bulldozer.

  Carol had done the tedious job of replacing their social insurance, health insurance, and Visa cards, as well as other necessary papers and cards. They both bought new laptops. They’d had no cellphones, having agreed that such devices were great for herding teenaged offspring, of which they had none, but highly unnecessary for phoning to say that you were ten minutes from home, unless someone ill was waiting for you, or, as Carol joked, “someone was pining for you as strongly as a Norwegian blue parrot pines for the fjords.”

  They both taught at the University of British Columbia — Richard, English literature, and Carol, art history — and their lesson plans and lecture notes had been lost with the computers. Since they’d both been teaching their courses for many years, though, it wasn’t difficult to replace them.

  Carol felt now like she’d lost her anchors, that she was floating dangerously without her collection of art books (nice and heavy), her antique sideboard (nice and heavy, too), her vintage velvet coat, the elegant shoes she had bought in Venice. All of these, and more, held precious memories and had the gravity of beauty. But her biggest loss was Richard. He was there and not there. She hadn’t thought she owned him (had she?), but he had in some essential way been hers, she knew him, and now he too was floating away into some darkness of his own, becoming a stranger.

  Richard took a long time to recover physically. He was in casts for two months, on crutches for a month, and then reliant on a cane. Now, except for a slight limp, he seemed all right.

  The big thing, the worrying thing for Carol, was that they hadn’t made love since the landslide, and to make matters worse, her desire had increased greatly. She often had almost electrical surges of desire that took minutes to subside and left her aching for sex, sometimes for hours, even after masturbating. In the first months she hadn’t said anything about her frustration, realizing Richard was often in pain, and depressed and tired, but lately she’d been begging him to make love with her. She’d told him about her “surges,” but he hadn’t seemed to really grasp what she was saying; hadn’t understood the intensity of her need.

  One night he finally said yes, but without much enthusiasm. He lay on his back and she leaned over and kissed him. There was no heat in his response. She stroked him, but he remained soft and continued to lie passively, except for making a few limp passes of his hand across her back. She decided to tell him one of her stories, an occasional variation in their foreplay. She started with one that she knew he liked, about one of her first lovers, when she was eighteen, in which she’d kept pretending she didn’t want him as things got more and more intense, and Richard would be aroused and ask questions. This time he said nothing, but she went on. “I kept resisting until he was frantic, and so was I.” Still no response.

  Carol lay back, discouraged, and noticed how musty the room smelled, probably from the old floorboards. Her mother, Frances, was renting them this house in East Vancouver that she had bought years earlier as an investment. It was all they could afford, having had no landslide insurance. One of the best things about it was that there were no cliffs anywhere near.

  Carol missed their airy North Vancouver bedroom. In the winter a witch hazel tree had perfumed the room, and in the summer the intense sweetness of pear blossoms took over. The curtains were never closed there, and moonlight streamed in every night, it seemed to her now, although in rainy winters that couldn’t have been possible.

  Too dark. She turned on a bedside lamp so she could see Richard. And be seen. Her breasts were bare, and they were beautiful, maybe less beautiful now than when she was younger, but still fine — full curves underneath and lovely indentations above from the gentle pull of their weight. One lover had said upon their parting, “It’s your breasts I’ll miss,” and she knew he had meant it. Richard had never made such a fuss over them. That was all right. She didn’t want to be reduced to body parts.

  He glanced at her now, but didn’t reach out.

  “I was tight, aching, getting so wet,” Carol said, having decided to keep trying.

 
Here, in the past, Richard would say something like, “You’re wet now, aren’t you? You’ll let me in, won’t you?”

  “No,” she’d say, and Richard would say, “Yes,” and she’d resist until Richard pushed her legs apart, saying he must have her, and it was wonderful after that. This time he didn’t respond.

  She slid down, kissed his nipples, his belly, but when she tried to go further, he said, “No,” loudly, grabbed her by her shoulders and pushed her up.

  Stunned, she said, “Shit, Richard. What the hell’s wrong? I’m so frustrated. Tell me, please. Are your legs still hurting? You’ve been saying you’re feeling all right. Are you in pain?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then, tell me what’s wrong. Why don’t you want me anymore?”

  “That’s putting it too strongly. It’s not … I don’t know … not that definite. Sorry, Carol, sorry. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “I know you’re still grieving and still healing, and so am I, but you’ve gone so far into yourself, you seem to be falling into a full-blown depression. I don’t know why you refuse to go to a therapist. Please, Richard, it’s time. Medications …”

  He had been avoiding eye contact, but looked at her now and shook his head impatiently. “No. I need to feel … all of it. A therapist would just tell me … dull me with drugs.”

  “You don’t know that. He might help. Drugs might help. Just for a while.” She felt a bit hypocritical, remembering that she had refused tranquilizers when she went to her doctor about her sexual overdrive. But depression was different — more serious, surely. “Anyway, I don’t know … don’t know if I can go on this way.”

  Fear widened Richard’s eyes. “You’re not leaving me?”

  “No, no. I love you, but I need … the way it used to be.” She was leaning over him, willing him to keep looking into her eyes, but he touched her arm, looked at the ceiling as though there might be an answer there.

  “Who said, ‘You must change your life’?” he asked finally.

  “Oh, Richard. Rilke, I think.”

  “That’s how I feel,” he said. “Must. Something else entirely.”

  She looked with stupid fascination at a strand of her hair, curled like an offering on his chest, red-gold against his pale skin. He swept it off, absently, with the flat of his hand.

  “I feel half-crazy,” she said, and he seemed then to really see her for the first time since they’d gone to bed, and he smiled at her ruefully.

  She lay down, arm across his chest, hot cheek against his cool shoulder. “Don’t stop loving me. When you change.”

  “No, I won’t. Be patient. Please. Will you?”

  She kissed the damp hollow of his neck.

  “Let’s sleep now,” he said, gently moving her arm and turning onto his side.

  She lay looking at his back, moved closer to smell his skin. He had three moles, brown and velvety, in a triangular pattern on his neck. She resisted the impulse to touch them one by one. His slim waist and nicely rounded butt were covered now, but she knew them by heart and turned away with a groan.

  In the living room, she lay down on the couch and brought herself to orgasm, thinking of him.

  THREE

  RICHARD GOT UP at ten o’clock, after Carol was safely away to UBC. She’d chosen to teach a summer course, which was just ending. Richard’s course was due to start next week. He hadn’t wanted to face Carol after his failure to make love to her. He couldn’t stand the prospect of her sadness, and anger, too, at what seemed to her to be pigheadedness in not getting help as he drifted further and further away from her. God knew he needed her. If only she could stand by like a nurse who feeds and bathes her patient, smiles sympathetically, never makes judgments, never expects anything in return. He laughed at the unreasonableness, the infantile nature of his vision. If only Carol would wait until he’d sorted himself out. If only she’d wait.

  He’d had his recurring dream about Jenny. They walked into the ocean together, the warm water climbing from ankles to knees to thighs, to chests and mouths, until they embraced and kissed underwater and came up laughing. And then she was floating away, staring at him, frightened, one arm reaching out. He started swimming to her frantically, but he could get no closer, no matter how hard he tried, and then she disappeared and he woke crying out. And his first thought, when he’d calmed down, was, as always, that he should have asked her to leave, made up some excuse, anything — a relative needed her room — as soon as his feelings for her, even occasionally, became inappropriate.

  He’d never touched her, was appalled by the idea, and had been ashamed of the stirrings he felt for her when she sat at the breakfast table across from him, her dark curls a bit wild after her shower and smelling of lemons, her brown eyes lively, her skin damp and glowing. She’d made him think of a beach after rain, the sun’s sudden heat.

  If I’d asked her to leave, she’d still be alive.

  But how would he have explained asking her to leave to Carol? He could have said that Jenny had become flirtatious, but if Carol had confronted her, Jenny would have felt hurt, betrayed. But she’d still be alive.

  What he had said to Carol, after the disaster, was that they should never have rented to Jenny, that by renting to her they’d killed her. They’d assumed (why, oh why, had they assumed?) that the cliff above them had been checked for stability before houses were allowed to be built below, and that the cliff had been inspected periodically after that. Carol stared at him, hesitated as though she were about to agree with him, but finally replied that he was thinking crazily, suffering from survivor’s guilt, and that he should go for therapy. And he’d said, “Maybe you’re right,” but hadn’t meant it. Survivor’s guilt implied one wasn’t guilty of anything.

  He’d stopped trying to reach Jenny’s parents. They didn’t know him and didn’t want to know him. Better to let them grieve in peace.

  The only course he had this coming semester was his third-year Shakespeare seminar. He’d asked Gabe, the head of the English department, to excuse him from his other classes on health grounds, with a vague promise — a lie, in fact — that he’d go back to his full load in the new year.

  He was going to teach The Tempest as an homage to Jenny, who’d told him she was planning to write a version of the play set in present time, with an environmentalism theme.

  Richard greatly regretted that he hadn’t learned more about Jenny’s vision for the play. She’d said, as best as he could remember, “I love The Tempest. It’s a wonderful story of forgiveness. And I’d respect that in the rewrite. But Prospero does take over the island and makes a native of the island his slave. Prospero doesn’t harm the island, it’s true, but his sort of colonialism was and is guilty of destroying or degrading many parts of the world.”

  And then she had said, “Of course, there is the love story of Miranda and Ferdinand, which is important. And there is also the love between Prospero and his daughter, whom he has raised and protected. Love is as central as forgiveness.”

  Richard had said, “I’d like to hear a lot more about what you’ve planned, it sounds wonderful, but I have to rush off to an appointment.” But he never had another chance.

  He would give his class the task that she hadn’t lived to fulfill. Jenny had had a sweet earnestness about her, and like so many of her generation, believed she should help to save the planet, and that her play would be a small contribution to the cause. He hoped his new students would have a similar belief.

  A note from Carol on the fridge said: Don’t forget we’re invited to Mum’s for dinner tonight, 6:30. Hope you have a good day, darling.

  Richard was grateful to Frances for providing them with a place to live. The landslide had left them with a ruin of a house, a pile of rubble they’d had to pay to have cleared away. Underneath was a piece of property that was going to be very hard to sell, and would probably not sell for much if they did manage to find a buyer. They were going to have to start saving money in earnest if they e
ver wanted to buy a house again. Richard wasn’t sure he cared but he knew Carol did.

  What to do with the day? He found it hard to read anymore. His attention tended to wander now, and books made him feel claustrophobic, as though he were trapped in their airless world. Just being in the house too long made him claustrophobic, too, maybe because of the fear he’d experienced during the landslide when he was pinned down, not knowing if he’d live or die. Well, no “maybe” about it, but it was more than that. His mind went round and round, never settling peacefully anywhere, trying to convince himself that Jenny’s death was an accident — only that — but it was remarkably hard to reason himself out of irrationality. And the pressing need to radically change his life? Was that irrational, too?

  Anyway, he needed fresh air. He needed to walk.

  One day he’d taken a bus to Stanley Park and walked for hours, until his legs became painful. This despite the fact that he was taking more painkillers than Carol knew about. But parks were beginning to make him feel anxious — all that beauty giving itself to him, and him giving nothing but his sadness and restlessness.

  It was a hot beginning to September. He dressed in cotton khaki pants, a short-sleeved white shirt, socks and sneakers, and set off. He’d decided to walk down Powell Street, all the way to Main, several miles. The street was an industrial one, and its grubbiness and starkness suited his mood.

  For the first six blocks or so after Nanaimo Street, bland, boxy apartment buildings lined the streets, their wrought-iron-railed balconies holding bikes, boxes, and green garbage bags stuffed with who-knew-what.

  A man who looked a bit like Richard walked toward him. He wore clothes like Richard’s, too, except the man’s white shirt, khaki pants, and running shoes were stained and dirty. As they passed each other, the man nodded, smiled a gap-toothed smile, and tipped an imaginary hat.

  “Watch out,” he said. “It’ll bite you in the ass.”

  Christ, he’s like me, if I sink to my lowest. Or he’s me now, a physical representation of my soul.