Jacintha

by Lorraine Davies

  “Culpability. Histories. Just words. What I can’t bear …” Carol’s voice cracked. She fought off tears. “What I can’t bear …”

  “What is it, dear? What can’t you bear?”

  Carol sobbed, trying to get the words out. “I can’t bear that he was in love with her.”

  “No. There’s no reason to think that. We don’t know that.”

  “I know.”

  “You can’t know.”

  “I saw him, Mother. I saw it in his face. That’s what’s so terrible. For him, too, don’t you see?”

  “No, you’ve imagined it. Any attraction was a passing thing, and now he feels nothing for her but anger. And he has a great fear of losing you, Carol. It’s you he loves.”

  “No,” Carol said, but she felt a faint tremor of hope.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  RICHARD PHONED JACINTHA two days after he’d told Carol what Jacintha was threatening him with. His hand trembled as he pushed the buttons. Jacintha answered on the third ring.

  “It’s me,” he said.

  “Richard, I’m very glad you called.” Her voice was eager.

  “No. No. Listen. I told my wife.”

  “Aah.”

  “So you’ve nothing … I mean, there’s nothing you can do …”

  “I have no leverage?”

  “Yes.”

  “I could tell her you’re lying, that something did happen. Or I could tell the university that something happened.”

  “I’m quitting, so the university doesn’t matter. But I beg you not to lie to Carol.”

  “I wouldn’t, anyway. I wanted to hurt you in the beginning, but you know how much I’ve changed. I just thought if Carol was the only one standing in our way … How did she take it?”

  Richard was shaking. He dragged the phone toward a chair, jerking the tangled cord, tripped, righted himself, sat down. How could Frances not have a cordless phone?

  “How the hell do you think she took it?” he said. “She was devastated. Horrified.”

  “Of course.”

  “Anyway, it’s none of your business. I want you to leave us alone now.”

  She was silent for several heartbeats. Then, “I love you, Richard. We can still go away together where nobody knows us, and start again. I know you love me.”

  “Haven’t you been listening? No, goddamn it! No!”

  They were both silent through several of Richard’s pounding heartbeats.

  “Don’t hang up, Richard.”

  “Did you believe any of it?” Richard asked. His anger felt good. It stomped on other feelings he didn’t want to allow to surface.

  “Any of what?”

  “Olympics protests. Saving the environment. All that.”

  “I believe in anything that upsets the stupid, greedy bastards of this world.”

  “But you’re not really committed to any cause, are you?”

  “I do care about the environment, but you’re right. I’m more interested in general shit disturbing. But I can let that go, for your sake. For you.”

  “I’m going to hang up now. Don’t contact me again. Don’t make it any worse.”

  “Not worse. Truer, better. I know you love me.”

  “No, I pity you. I regret that I’ve hurt you.”

  “You haven’t hurt me. You’ve given me —”

  “Get help, Jacintha.” It hurt to say her name.

  He hung up and sat for a long time, trying to calm himself.

  He prayed that she wouldn’t try to see him or talk to him again, and, eyes closed, his prayer was like a dark, protective shroud around him. And then the shroud was filled with her presence, and he groaned aloud.

  Two weeks went by without any calls or emails from Jacintha.

  He phoned Beth: “How are you? Has your wound healed?”

  “Yes. Yours?”

  “Yes, well, some wounds never heal.”

  “I know.”

  “Uh, Beth, how’s Jacintha? Is she … is she still living with you?”

  “No, she left without saying anything, about two weeks ago. I phoned her parents. They don’t know where she is, either. They said that in the past she sometimes went travelling without telling them. Maybe she did that.”

  Has she gone away with Skitch? Richard thought. But surely she wouldn’t take up with him again, after what he did? But he didn’t know what she might do, what she was capable of.

  “Good news, though,” Beth said. “The UBC theatre department has promised to help us stage our Tempest when John and Anna and I have finished writing it. Isn’t that great?”

  “Yes, great.” He was ashamed of how little he cared.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  RICHARD COULDN’T BE sure that Jacintha had given up on him, but it seemed she had, and because of that hope, he resumed his routine at Frances’s more calmly than before. After his daily walk, he spent an hour on chores — vacuuming, doing laundry, cleaning the bathroom. He liked the mindlessness of the work, could stop thinking about himself as he scrubbed, sorted, folded, and pushed and pulled the vacuum cleaner. It was literally mind-numbing. Poor stay-at-home housewives, he thought, and felt a flicker of self-approval for having sympathy for someone outside his immediate concern.

  He made lunch, which was engaging rather than numbing because he looked forward to it so much — the sizzle of a steak or a hamburger in the pan, the pungency of onions as they fried. He’d taken to eating mostly meat, fanatically and slaveringly. He sometimes sliced a tomato or threw a few lettuce leaves on the plate, mostly to please Frances, who warned against constipation and high cholesterol. If Frances was there at lunch, she made herself a large salad and accepted a few thin slices of meat. She urged Richard to eat fruit. A full bowl of oranges, apples, pears, and kiwis always stood on the table. Sometimes he would eat half an apple or pear.

  “Is it a childhood thing, I wonder,” she said of his meat gorging, “or something atavistic?”

  “I don’t remember liking meat very much as a child — not beef, anyway — so it must be something else. A new taste for blood, perhaps,” he said with a grim laugh.

  After lunch he always walked again, going farther afield. Sometimes he walked to within a block of Jericho Beach, but he always turned back before he got there. As in a waking dream, he would see a madder version of that mad night, see himself lying bleeding as Jacintha and a crowd of wild-haired women danced around him, and men drummed and shouted, and the moon poured down too brightly, making sharp, frightening shadows.

  On his way home, he picked up more meat and planned dinner as he walked. He’d never cooked much before, so he kept it simple. At first Frances objected, partly in self-defence, to his cooking all their lunches and dinners, but quickly realized that cooking was the one thing that gave him some small pleasure, and so she put up with the house smelling constantly of beef and bacon.

  Frances had started teaching watercolour painting at the Carnegie Community Centre at Main and Hastings, two afternoons a week. Richard didn’t know exactly what she did on other afternoons, and he didn’t ask. Most evenings she was either in her bedroom or her studio. Sometimes she sat with him and they talked a little, or she read while he watched TV, but he preferred to be alone. (Being indoors felt relatively comfortable now; somewhat safer than being outdoors. The claustrophobia he’d suffered after the landslide had disappeared.)

  He watched TV for hours at a time, but avoided anything romantic. He couldn’t bear to see people either happy or unhappy in love. Comedy programs were banal and maddeningly cheerful, and movies were almost always about love and sex when they weren’t about violence. And there was always too much plot. He found he couldn’t stand stories, he who had been an avid devourer of plays and novels. He couldn’t read anymore. There was poetry, of course, but if a poem had even the slightest whiff of a narrative, the emotion was usually too intense for him.

  What he’d discovered were reality shows. Hoarders was the first one he found: men and women drowning under pile
s of their useless possessions. They were all seeking security. No one could get to them without wading through garbage. And since no one could heal their broken hearts, there was no point in letting anyone reach them.

  Richard thought of them as unwitting gurus who demonstrated the futility of lusting after security in things. They took the quest to its absurd end, mocking the rich who attempted to buy security with cars and mansions and diamonds. All were things to wade through. None impenetrable. You could triple-bolt doors, carry a gun, build a seemingly solid house, but there were battering rams, other gun-wielders, and cliffs that could fall and bury you; storms that could drown you.

  He watched Hoarders until any episode became too confrontational, mother or father against son or daughter. Then he’d turn to a sports channel and watch hockey, basketball, car racing, whatever he could find, often with the sound off. Tonight he’d just turned to TSN when Frances called down from upstairs.

  “Richard. Will you make sure the front door is locked?”

  “Sure,” Richard shouted. (He checked the door frequently. The irony didn’t escape him — a modicum of security against one small woman.) “And the back door and all the windows, too,” he added.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Good night, Frances.”

  Richard sat on Frances’s front porch, watching a film crew working outside the house, across the street. Hardly anything was going on, but he found it fascinating, nevertheless. A high energy stirred the air and belied the casual postures of the men and women standing around the parked vans. The vans had wheezed and roared into position the day before, and soon the workers clanked lengths of metal and cables and other pieces of equipment onto the sidewalk and carried them, along with furniture and lights, into the house. The movie had two stars, neither of whom interested Richard. Anyway, they’d probably be whisked in and out of the house pretty quickly.

  A lot of the time, the crew members were quite idle, waiting for something. He liked the mystery of it, and the unaccountably high energy that persisted in spite of the endless waiting. He waited, too, but after a while he didn’t care whether anything happened or not.

  The workers seemed to him like magician’s helpers who knew how the illusion was being created but weren’t jaded, still felt the magic the way a future audience would feel it. After a long while, he heard a voice from on high saying, “Quiet, please. We’re rolling.” The atmosphere shifted slightly — ears pricked, noses lifted, bodies shifted.

  Richard thought of the actors in the house. One would maybe feel lucky to have got the role. He would move to his mark, speak the line until he got it right. It didn’t matter what the line was. It had been written by someone else, and another someone had positioned the light and shone it on him. And maybe on the third reading he would start to believe he was the character he was playing, and a heat, a bliss of satisfaction, would fill him. He’d done what he came to do.

  Cut! Good work. You nailed it!

  Why, Richard asked himself, was he enjoying this whole thing so much? He’d seen hundreds of movies and he knew how they were made, but still, this was in the nature of a revelation. He couldn’t dismiss the feeling that he’d been shown something important as he sat watching a world being created behind closed doors a few short steps away, a written and directed world with the actors saying and doing what they must.

  He had always thought he was the main author, if not the sole one, of his life — as did most people. He had set the terrible events in motion when he chose to have sex with Jacintha’s mother, a woman he had no love for, and then walked away, knowing she was pregnant. If only there had been an author and director with a better plot.

  But then immediately he thought, If there’s a scriptwriting god, here is his plot for me: I abandon a pregnant woman, which results in me eventually almost sleeping with my own daughter.

  And here is Scriptwriter God’s plot for most of the men who abandon a woman: they never hear from her or their child again, and if they do, it’s all open and above board, and it’s for uniting a family, or for medical or financial reasons.

  Why is our hero singled out? Answer: I’m not, because there is no omnipotent goddamned scriptwriter, and I’m no hero. But couldn’t Jacintha just as easily, in the vast world of possible endings, not have been bent on revenge?

  Maybe the god who had stepped into his life was Eros, and not a scriptwriter but a rogue director, by turns mischievous, treacherous, enchanting, and punishing. “I’m ready for my heartbreak, Mr. Eros.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  JACINTHA WAS VISITING Skitch in a farmhouse in the Fraser Valley, an hour’s bus ride from Vancouver.

  She hadn’t seen him since the day after he attacked Richard, when he had told her how he’d found the DNA test result and lost his mind over her sexual relationship with her own father. She’d told him that day she had had no sexual relationship with Richard. And she’d told him about her revenge scheme and how it had changed, how she had fallen in love. She had been very angry with Skitch and he had begged for forgiveness.

  “At least nobody died,” Skitch had said.

  “No, nobody died.”

  He asked if she was going to turn him in.

  “No,” she said. “For the same reason you are not going to put out gossip about this anonymously. It would harm Richard and his family if information about me and him became known, and I don’t want that. It would harm me, too. And if I got you arrested, it would probably come out in court. Besides, I don’t want you to go to jail.”

  He had said how shitty he felt, especially about Beth, and asked if she was okay.

  “They’ll both be all right. Physically,” Jacintha said.

  The next day, Skitch had apparently left the city.

  Now, all these weeks later, he had phoned Jacintha and asked if they could talk. She told him she was leaving the country and would like to come and say goodbye to him in person, and could she have his address.

  “As long as you have forgiven me, at least a little,” he said, with a nervous laugh.

  “A little,” she said. “At first I hated you, and hated that I couldn’t punish you somehow, but …”

  “But you noticed revenge could bite you in the ass.”

  “Yes, fuckin’ right on, my little Skitch.”

  He was quiet for a moment, then said softly and sadly, “I would have lost you anyway. You were never going to tell him the truth, were you?”

  “No.”

  She had arrived with a suitcase, saying she planned to go straight to the Vancouver airport later that day.

  “Whose house is this?” she asked.

  “My grandfather’s. He died a couple of months ago, and my parents wanted a house-sitter while they get organized to sell the place.”

  “Sorry about your grandfather.”

  “We weren’t close. He was a nasty old bastard. Good timing, though. I needed a hideout.”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, I didn’t want to run into Richard on some street.” He said Richard with a sneer. “He might have changed his mind about having me arrested.”

  “I already told you why he wouldn’t do that. And anyway, I’m pretty sure he takes full blame for what drove you to it, and I take full blame, too.”

  “And I stuck in the knife, so that’s three full blames. Bad arithmetic.”

  “Geometry.”

  “What?”

  “The triangle. Not intrinsically bad, but bad in this case. And I put you into it.”

  “There you go again with the big words.”

  “Don’t play dumb.”

  They sat down to eat microwaved pizza and drink a passable cup of coffee made by Skitch. Jacintha avoided talking any more about the past over lunch. Not good for the digestion and, besides, she saw how vulnerable Skitch was. He had let his hair grow into short, soft spikes, and looked so young — a boy with too-pale skin and large, worried eyes.

  “You look like a hedgehog,” she said.

 
After a moment of confusion, Skitch smiled and patted his head.

  “I’m worried about you, you know,” he said.

  “I’ll be all right. I don’t have another long-lost father to fall in love with,” she said, and laughed.

  “Jesus, don’t joke about it.”

  “I worry about you, too. Promise me you will never do something so foolish and violent again.”

  “I promise. But listen, what if you stayed around and got to know your father in a different way? Shit, I’m assuming you aren’t still with him.”

  “I’m not, but I can’t stay.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I made him love me in the wrong way and he wants me out of his life. If I don’t go, he might grow to hate me more than he hates me now.”

  “I don’t think he hates you.”

  Jacintha said nothing, eyes downcast.

  “Shit, what a screw-up. But fucking hell, Jacintha, what made you do it? Go after him like that, and then get so hung up on him?”

  “Let me tell you about a woman from the southern U.S. that I met on my travels.”

  “Don’t dodge the question.”

  “I’m not. Just listen. This woman told me that her teenaged son used to get into her bed and try it on with her. She said she just told him to get out every time. I asked her if that made her very upset, and she said — and here is the killer sentence — ‘No, he was just a highly individualistic kid,’ in her heavy drawl. Haaaly individooolistic. So can’t you think of me as just a highly individualistic kid?”

  “Shit, that’s funny. But you are kind of dodging the question.”

  “There’s a kernel of truth there that applies to me. And I can’t cry all the time.”

  She let Skitch take her in his arms then. He held her close and said, “I love you.”

  “You’ll find someone else,” she said.

  “I know, but why couldn’t it have been you?”

  “I don’t know, but that is one of the saddest questions in the world.”

  “Don’t cry,” he said. “Do you have to go? You can stay here with me as long as you like.”