A Jest of God

by Margaret Laurence

  His face turns away from mine. He puts his mouth momentarily on my shoulder. Then, still not looking at me, he brushes a hand across my forehead.

  “Darling,” he says, “I’m not God. I can’t solve anything.”

  Unaccountably, we are apart, maybe against both our wills. He untangles himself and begins searching, highly practical, for his cigarettes. We light two and then find we cannot bear to be together naked any longer, and so we put on our clothes, which mysteriously protect us against one another.

  “What are you thinking, Rachel?”

  “Thinking? Oh –”

  “Look up there,” he says, as though battling for distance. “Along the ridge. I never realized you could see the cemetery so well from here, did you?”

  “Yes. I don’t like it much, though.”

  “I don’t, either. I dislike graves on principle. I don’t know why I went there last week.”

  “Nick, why don’t you ever say what you mean?”

  “Don’t make a major production of it, eh?” he says, defensively. “I’ve said more than enough, about everything. Look – did I ever show you this?”

  He pulls out his wallet and extracts a photograph. It has been in there for some while, and the edges of the paper are softened with handling. It is a picture of a boy about six years old, not set against any background, just a boy standing there. A boy whose face and eyes speak entirely of Nick.

  Why is it that it should never have occurred to me, that he was married and had children?

  “Yours?”

  My voice is steady. When it actually comes to it, I can manage at least this much. Your son? What a nice photograph.

  “Yes,” he says, taking the picture away from me. “Mine.”

  Anyone in her right mind would have known this a long time ago. He is thirty-six. If a man intends to marry, he will usually have done it by then. The pain is unspecified, as though I hurt everywhere. Any seventeen-year-old would at least have wondered, before, and asked him.

  “Nick – I have to go home now.”

  As always, he accepts this with no question or argument.

  “Okay, darling. If you say so.”

  The peach-coloured nightlight is not on in Mother’s bedroom. She seems to be asleep. It’s so unusual that I’m worried, and listen at her door, and then I hear her breathing, a whispered snore, and know she’s all right. I can hardly believe that I’m to be spared her interested questions, her care. And yet, paradoxically, I wish she were awake. She often likes a cup of tea, late at night, if she’s had trouble sleeping. I don’t mind making it for her.

  In my bedroom, I undress in darkness. I lie down quietly, and place my hands on my thighs, and now I don’t remember and won’t remember anything except how it was tonight. All I will ever remember is that he arched over me like the sun. I won’t remember anything else. Nothing.

  It does not make any difference, his being married. It isn’t as though I ever thought it would come to anything. The idea hardly crossed my mind. Everything is just the same as it was. I still would have done the same, even if I’d known. I’m not so stupid as to imagine these chance encounters ever lead to anything permanent.

  Except that all of my life seems a chance encounter, and everything that happens to me is permanent. That isn’t a clever way to be.

  How much the boy looks like him. I wonder if she is glad about that, whoever she is. If she has any brains at all, she ought to give thanks every day of her – but I don’t suppose she does. She’s like my sister, no doubt, complaining every minute how tired she is, how worn out, until you feel you would like to take a woman like that and throttle her with extreme slowness, your thumbs on her neck veins, and her eyes very gradually blurring –

  Oh my God. I didn’t mean it. Honestly.

  I ought to be thinking of practicalities. I will have to do something, get out the antiquated equipment, sluice all traces of him out of me. Why now, when I didn’t a week ago? If I had got pregnant then, I wouldn’t even have told him. I’d never set that particular steel trap, never. I didn’t think of it as a weapon. I swear it. I thought of it, I guess, as a gift. If he found out (which, very unobtrusively, he conveniently would have done), he’d have been delighted. “God, darling, why didn’t you tell me sooner? Were you afraid to? That was foolish of you – but everything’s all right now.”

  The layers of dream are so many, so many false membranes grown around the mind, that I don’t even know they are there until some knifing reality cuts through, and I see the sight of my other eyes for what it has been, distorted, bizarre, grotesque, unbearably a joke if viewed from the outside.

  This I cannot take. This I could argue with You (if You were there) until doomsday. How dare You? My trouble, perhaps, is that I have expected justice. Without being able to give it.

  I’m evading again. Anything to put off the moment when I have to rise and do what now seems necessary. I can’t. I cannot. Oh yes, you can Rachel. Repugnance is for those who can afford luxuries. You’re not that wealthy now.

  NINE

  Why? What I can’t understand is why. What purpose was there in it? What was he afraid of? I wouldn’t have had the right to argue. Maybe he thought I’d splinter like a shattered mirror, create some unlucky scene, scatter sharp fragments which he could only stand and look at with embarrassment. I wouldn’t have. I never would have done that. Perhaps I would have, though. I don’t know any longer what I might or might not do.

  I waited ten days and then I phoned. I thought – I don’t care whether he is married or not. It occurred to me that he hadn’t phoned because he thought I’d mind too much and wouldn’t want to see him. I had to let him know. A woman’s voice answered, faintly familiar to me, his mother.

  “Hello.”

  “Oh, hello. May I speak to Nick, please?”

  “Nick’s not here. He went back a week ago.”

  “Oh. I see. Well – thanks very much.”

  “Who is speaking, please?”

  But I didn’t say. I put down the receiver and walked out of the phone booth in the bus station. I had the absurd thought – at least they can’t trace the call. As if they would have tried, anyway. I did not notice whether there was anyone in the bus station who knew me. People were sitting there, waiting, suitcases at their feet, but they had no faces. I had the conviction that since their faces were unfocused and hidden to me, I would be faceless to them as well.

  I noticed I had quite a severe headache, and I thought it must be due to the sun, although the day was nearly evening now. I stopped at the cigarette and candy counter and bought a small packet of aspirins. I don’t know why I did that, because we had plenty of aspirins at home. I was not thinking, I guess, or perhaps I knew I wouldn’t be going home for a while. I went to the Ladies. The machine that dispenses paper cups had run out, so I took a paper towel and folded it carefully to make a cup. My father showed me how to do that a long time ago. “You never know when it might come in handy,” he said, “but you have to drink quickly or it soaks through and gets wasted.” Probably he wasn’t meaning plain water by itself, now I come to think of it. I drank some water quickly and took three aspirins. I remember thinking I must get my eyes examined because maybe the headache wasn’t the sun.

  Maybe it wasn’t the sun.

  Two girls had just come in. One was in a toilet cubicle and the other was applying orange lipstick, holding her face close to the mirror as though she wanted to enter it like Alice and go through into an image world. Then I saw she was staring at me, in the mirror.

  “What did you say, Helen?” The voice from the cubicle.

  “I never said a thing,” the mirror girl replied.

  Then they both began giggling, and it was only then that I realized it was I who had spoken aloud. I dropped the paper towel-cup on the floor, and ran. In the long wall mirror I saw myself running, the white of my dress, the featureless face, the tallness, a thin stiff white feather like a goose’s feather, caught up and hurtled along by
some wind no one else could feel.

  I walked for some time. I thought – why shouldn’t I walk in the evening by myself? There are parts of this town I’ve hardly seen. Then I noticed where I was, and that what I’d been doing, actually, was walking on Japonica Street and around the block and back again. This became clear to me when I saw the blue neon sign dancing outside our place and recognized that I had seen it a few minutes earlier. I saw there was no use in this parade, so I went inside. I made the supper and then we looked at the TV.

  He might have had another flare-up with the old man, and left on impulse, not having considered it but simply driving away. If that was the case, he may write.

  – Darling – I left in a hell of a hurry, I know, but everything became kind of chaotic and I couldn’t stand it any longer. What I’m wondering is whether you’ll be coming here some time, and when. What about –

  No, Rachel. That has to be abandoned. Some poisons have a sweetness at the first taste, but they are willing to kill you just the same. He left because he could not bear their loving reproachful need for him to stay. He could not bear it even for the few more weeks he’d planned to be here. You did not figure at all in his going or his staying. That was not an aspect which he had to consider. He did not phone because it never entered his head to do so. It wasn’t significant enough to warrant a phone call. He was busy. He packed his suitcase and went.

  There. That’s stating it at its most brutal possibility. Look at it, Rachel.

  And yet I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it was completely nothing, for him. Do I deceive myself? More than likely. I don’t know – that’s the thing. I never knew him very well. We were not well acquainted. We talked sometimes, and I tried to hear what he was saying, but I’m not certain I did hear. I may have heard only guarded echoes of his voice. He never spoke of his real life, the one he leads away from here. Only the photography of the boy. Nothing else. If he had wanted to say more, I would have listened, but not necessarily with comprehension. And all he knows of me is what he has guessed, whatever that may be.

  August is nearly over. Next week we return to school.

  Nick – listen –

  They troop in, two by two, all the young animals into my Ark. And I must take an interest in them, because I’m the keeper. It wouldn’t be fair to them if I didn’t. They trust me very little, but at least they trust me this much – whatever happens, I will take charge, they believe.

  They enter sophisticatedly, because this is their second year here and not their first. They nudge and bump one another, daring to cry an astonished Hi! to long-lost comrades last seen yesterday, daring to stash around their persons pieces of noxiously pink bubble gum or black jawbreakers with an unidentified seed at the candied core. Maybe they are remembering, with condescension towards their ignorant earlier selves, the time when they entered mutely or shamed themselves by bawling for their mums. Now they are full of jauntiness. They swagger, make their aggressive declarations openly, and lord it over the cautious young. Most of them, that is. Here and there, I can already spot one who by nature is no joiner, and I wonder what’s there, curiously, as though they were codes which I might partially decipher if there’s enough time.

  I did not think I could muster any interest at all, and yet I have. No – it isn’t I. They’ve drawn it from me, being as they are – present and unaccounted for, here in the flesh, with loud voices which irk and beckon.

  I wonder who will be the one or ones, as it was James last year? All at once I know there will be no one like that, not now, not any more. This unwanted revelation fills me with the sense of an ending, as though there were nothing to look forward to.

  I don’t know. I don’t know what is the trouble. What I’m worrying about, underneath, isn’t really so – it’s an impossibility which frightens me so much that if I think about it I won’t be able to work. I have to concentrate. It’s my living.

  There. And the first autumn leaves come out, paper cutouts, crimson as no leaves have ever been seen hereabouts, yellow like goldenrod, the dream leaves we concoct to teach – what? That dreams are more garishly coloured than trees, perhaps.

  In the hall, at recess, I encounter James Doherty. I was looking for him, I guess, to confirm what I’ve always known – that I have nothing to do with him. I glimpsed him a very little, for a year, and that is that. He looks taller from the summer, but with the same quickness, in-held yet always ready to take off. The same auburn hair – hasn’t it darkened, though? What business is it of mine? And now I recall Grace Doherty, and how, then, I couldn’t bear to know she cared about him.

  “Hello, James.”

  “Hi, Miss Cameron.”

  That’s all. From now on, we will probably never say another word to one another. Maybe, after all, he has forgotten that I hit him once.

  After school, Willard Siddley comes paddling into my room in his built-up brown suede shoes. Still the same ostentatious briskness, the sloping smile that hints at wily meanings beyond his words.

  “Had a nice summer, I trust, Rachel?”

  “Very nice, thanks.”

  I’ve scarcely thought about Willard at all, these past two months, and yet it seems to me now that I’ve been considering him without knowing it, planning how I’d be with him, how different. There never was any need to be afraid. It was only my nervousness that invited his sly cruelties. This year it will not be the same. I hope he won’t stay long, though. Just this time, let him go quickly. Tomorrow I’ll be able to deal with it better.

  “Didn’t see you around very much,” he is saying. “We meant to ask you over, but Angela wasn’t feeling up to scratch, and then we went to the lake in August. I suppose, however, that you were probably fully occupied anyway.”

  What a choice of words. He couldn’t have meant anything by it. He could, though. He knows. He must. He could not possibly, and even if he did, so what? Yet I find myself fumbling, as I’ve always done, for the pencil on my desk, holding it between my fingers as though I meant to snap it. And my eyes turn towards the window, hiding or seeking, anything for a quick getaway.

  Suppose Willard was walking in the valley one evening, accompanying Angela who’d gone to catch the willows drooping paintably beside the Wachakwa, and suppose they came close to the place, and saw –

  Now I am forced to look at him, to examine his face, to detect. Behind his navy-framed glasses there is nothing, nothing lurking, nothing gathering itself to pounce. Only his whitefish eyes, hoping for some slight friendliness from me, possibly, while I sit here conjuring up dragons to scare myself with. How easily I slip back into the set patterns of response.

  “Yes, I was fairly busy. Did you have a good summer, Willard?”

  “Oh, so-so,” he says, placing his hands on my desk, just as he always has. “The lake was extremely crowded this year, which was certainly something of a disadvantage. We attended all the open-air sing-songs, however, and those were – oh, reasonably entertaining.”

  Suddenly I wonder if what he is asking for, really, is condolence, and if he’s asked for it before, and if at times he’s asked for various other things I never suspected, admiration or reassurance or whatever it was he didn’t own in sufficient quantity. I don’t know if he is speaking differently or if I am hearing him differently.

  I’m mistaken. I must be. I’m imagining things again. And yet – I wonder if he goes into all the other classrooms, after school? He couldn’t. There wouldn’t be time. I never thought of that before. I always believed he came in here because of the game he loved best to play, the delicate unacknowledged baiting for which I was such a damnably good subject. There was that. I know it. But now I’m not sure it was the only thing. Whatever the disparity in our heights, or maybe, perversely, because of it, he might –

  He might, quite simply, think I’m attractive, and want, in a mild way, some exchange.

  “I suppose at least it was cooler at the lake. You’re looking very fit, anyway, Willard.”

  He pre
ens with a gratitude so visible that I’m ashamed – ashamed of the trick’s ease, but also that I never did it sooner, if it could ease him.

  I suspect myself, though. I could be seeing the situation all askew. I so often have. And now I can think only of matronly maidens I’ve known, in whom solitude festered until it grew a mould as gay as a green leaf over their vision, and they would lightfoot around with a mad flittering of eyelashes, seemingly believing themselves irresistible to every male this side of the grave, and hankering after heaven so they might evolve into flirtatious angels and lure all those on the other side as well. Why did I speak? Why did I open my mouth? That’s what he’ll think – Rachel’s going the way they sometimes go – fancies herself as a –

  I must not think this way. I mustn’t. I thought I might have shed that tic. But here it is.

  “I was quite glad to get back,” Willard is saying. “To tell you the honest-to-goodness truth, I’m happiest when I’m here in school. One has a certain sense of – well, I suppose you could call it a sense of accomplishment.”

  “Yes.”

  “I think we’re going to have a good year. A rewarding year. We haven’t had to change any members of the staff, and I always think that’s a great asset, if one can carry on with the same team. Provided, of course, that the team is harmonious, which I think I can safely say ours here is. Oh, by the way, Rachel, you remember our little disciplinary problem just before the summer holidays?”

  “Yes.” I press my palms together and find they slither with a cold wetness.

  “I just want you to bear it in mind this year – if you have the slightest trouble with any of them, send them straight to me.”

  “I – I’ll remember.”

  “Positively no need for you to worry,” he says. “I’ll deal with them.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Not at all,” he says courteously. “It’s a – it’s no bother. That’s what I’m here for. To sort out these little day-to-day problems.”