“What would you like me to do?”
“When you leave here, tonight, tomorrow, whenever, I want you to take the ashes with you. I can’t stand the idea of people poking through my affairs, opening the lid, going, ‘What’s this?,’ maybe flushing it down the toilet or packing it up in a cardboard box and sending it to Chloe in California.”
Four
Skinny, sharp-chinned Chloe. A dead ringer for Arthur Rimbaud. Dagger tattoo on her arm. Sally’s dark eyes. A lanky girl drifting along the sidewalk on a Sunday morning.
I said, “Tell me a little bit about Chloe. How old is she now?”
“Twenty-six.”
“And she’s in California?”
“She calls it Cali. You know Chloe—she can’t leave the English language alone.”
“And doing well?”
“So I gather.”
“You sound uncertain.”
“She’s grown rather secretive. With me, anyway.”
“Is she single?”
“She has a friend. That’s all she’ll tell me.”
“Who is it?”
“That’s what I asked.”
“And?”
“She tells me, in the nicest way, that it’s none of my beeswax.”
“Beeswax. Her expression?”
“Who else?” Sally fell silent for a moment. “They move on, don’t they? It’s sort of shocking. You always think it must be something you did. Or did too much of.”
“I’m not following.”
“Well, put it this way.” Sally moved her crutch to a more stable upright position. “She was such an easygoing kid, the kind of teenager who hums while she’s doing her homework. Tapping her pencil and humming and watching TV all at the same time. Then one day she came home early from high school, drank half a bottle of Marek’s vodka, called her English teacher and told him she was dropping out, that she was tired of being a suck and an asshole. Her words. ‘A suck and an asshole.’
“Then she put on her pyjamas, got into bed, threw up so violently that she popped a vein in her throat. The sight of blood on the sheets totally unhinged her. She called an ambulance, which carted her off to the hospital on a gurney. Apparently she waved at one of the neighbours on the way out.
“They didn’t pump her stomach or anything. They just gave her a stern talking-to and sent her home that evening. I waited a day or so and then, when she was back on her feet, I said, ‘What the hell were you thinking, drinking like that? Phoning Mr. Reed.’ And she kept saying, over and over, ‘I’m so sad. I’m so sad.’
“And I said, ‘What are you sad about?’
“She said, ‘I can’t say. I don’t know. I’m just sad.’
“‘Is it me? Do I make you sad?’
“‘No, no, Mama,’ she said, ‘don’t be silly. You make me happy. This has nothing to do with you.’”
“And you never found out what it was?” I said.
“No, not really. But she was different after that. She changed her mind about going to university here. I said, ‘Well, you could stay in residence downtown on the main campus,’ but no, no, she wanted to get out of town—get away from me, I think. She sent out a raft of applications, all out of city. McGill offered her a scholarship. So off she went. Marek and I packed her into a yellow van with two school friends and watched her drive down the street one late summer day, and that was that. She was gone.”
“Was that painful?”
“Yes, at first. Very painful. Surprisingly painful. I sat in the living room with Marek and drank a bottle of vodka and smoked a whole pack of cigarettes. But that’s the way it goes: The healthy ones leave you behind. It’s only the sick ones that stay home.” Pause. “The truth is, I think she just outgrew her mother.”
“And you didn’t outgrow her?”
“You never do. It’s a bit one-sided that way.”
“Do you see her? Talk to her?”
“Oh yes, scads. That’s not a problem. But she’s guarded now. There are certain things I’m just not permitted to ask about. I’m not even sure there’s anything to know.” She carefully lifted her drink and took a sip. “Unless you know something.”
“Me?”
“You talk to her a bit. I know that,” she said.
“I do. But not much.”
“Tell me. I’m hungry for it. I’m hungry for news about her life.”
“It’ll probably surprise you.”
“Tell me, please.”
So I fixed myself another drink, a good stiff belt, and told her what I knew. “It must have been during her second year at McGill. Yes, that was it. She was doing a degree in Russian literature and had this giant apartment on rue Sainte-Famille in the student ghetto. She was the house social director. Lots of parties. So many, in fact, that the police were on a first-name basis with her. But you know Chloe: when she turns it on, when she gives you that sun lamp smile, she’s irresistible.”
“Go on,” her mother said. “I’m loving this.” She was watching the movie of her young daughter living out in the world for the first time.
“I had some business in Montreal that weekend, a misunderstanding with a supplier—I was in the pharmaceutical supply business back then. I gave her a call, saying I was going to be in town, would she be free. I knew better than to accept an invitation to stay with her. I need eight hours of sleep and I sensed that I wouldn’t get that. Besides which, one of the girls she shared a flat with, Miranda Treece, a skinny Texan, was far too sexy to be around for a whole weekend. I’d met her once in front of the Park Plaza in Toronto, and the image of her wandering around the apartment with dirty hair in a ripped T-shirt and raggedy-ass jeans—well, you know what I mean. Forget it.
“I took the train from Toronto—it seemed like a romantic thing to do—and got a room at the Hôtel Nelligan in the old part of the city.
“Chloe, it turned out, was in love that semester with the trombone player of a university swing band. She wanted me to go see him that same night. You heard about this guy?”
“Not the romantic part.”
“At nine o’clock, I was sitting in my hotel room on the rue Saint-Paul, waiting for her to pick me up. Then it was ten o’clock, then eleven o’clock, then midnight, at which point, more pissed off than offended, I took the phone off the hook, got under one of those fluffy white French-Canadian duvets and fell asleep.
“Or I must have. Because I remember I had a little dream. I was walking along a quiet street in Amsterdam when a tree cracked and collapsed into the canal near me. Of course, there was no tree—it was the sound of Chloe banging her bony knuckles on my door. It was two o’clock in the morning. I peeked through the peephole. An unblinking eye circled in black makeup peered at me from the other side. The stuff Keith Richards wears.”
“Kohl.”
“Right. I opened the door and said, ‘Chloe, this is a ridiculous hour to turn up.’
“There were four beautiful young women in the hallway. Made-up faces, jangly party dresses, perfume wafting off them. They looked like movie stars.”
Sally listened, motionless with attention. “God, she’s beautiful, isn’t she? Even if you divide it in half because I’m her mother.”
I went on. “I suspected they were martini girls, which are an expensive breed. I was worried about money that year. You may remember our family stockbroker, Clyde Meadows?”
“No, I never got any of that money. But go on, go on.”
“Anyway, Clyde Meadows, that poor son of a bitch, shot himself in the wine cellar of his Rosedale mansion. But not before losing almost all of my inheritance. Jake’s too.”
Sally said, “Was he the guy whose wife disappeared for a few weeks with the Mexican masseur?”
“Same guy. Anyway, I was pretty broke. Ergo that stupid job with the pharmacy company. And I knew that by heading out with these
four swans, I was tacitly agreeing to pay for everything.
“Still, they were irresistible—their excitement, their beauty, the smell of them. Miranda, my God. She wore a noodle-strapped dress with a feather boa around her neck. I can’t remember where the club was, just that the band was in full session when we arrived. They were swinging through a Glenn Miller standard, ‘Moonlight Serenade.’ It was like stepping into a Woody Allen film.
“Chloe pointed out the trombone player. He was a classic nightmare for a young woman: lush lips, thick hair, rosy cheeks, a savvy, effortless way of holding his horn between riffs. You could see he took it all for granted—his outrageous beauty, the girls lining the front of the stage, the eternity of his youth. He was a star, and I knew he was going to make her suffer.”
“And did he?”
“You never heard this?”
“Not a peep. I think by then she thought she’d already told her mother too much. As if, by even mentioning it, she might put a jinx on it.”
I took a sip of my drink. I was quite drunk. “You have to be old to say that there’s a good side to suffering. But there often is.”
“How so?”
“Well, I suppose it was because of the trombonist that Chloe and I got to know each other that winter.
“She phoned me long-distance the following Sunday morning. On the surface, it was a courtesy call. Thanks for coming out, for giving everybody such a swell evening. Two hundred dollars! Jesus. But there was something just a little bit sour hanging over the conversation, and I sensed she was in some kind of discomfort. I hesitated to inquire, though. I generally try to avoid asking young women about their romantic woes—the intimacy is somewhat neutering.
“Still, I felt she was on the edge of something, that all she needed was a small, encouraging push and she could get rid of it, like pulling a splinter out of her finger. And sure enough, after a while it came out. The three of them—she, the trombonist and Miranda Treece, the girl with the feather boa—had shared a taxi home at the end of the evening at the jazz club. They stopped first at the trombonist’s. He got out. Miranda, who was sitting in the front seat, got out, Chloe thought, to change places. She couldn’t see what was happening, but it was taking longer than it should to just say good night, and a few moments later Miranda popped that long neck of hers into the window and said she was going to hang around for a bit. See you back at the flat.
“So there she was, our little Chloe, in the back of the taxi all by herself, going home to nothing on a Saturday night. Just hearing the story broke my heart. It really did. It reminded me of my own disappointments. Everyone has them. You with Terry Blanchard, me with that German girl in university, now Chloe. In a way, the specifics never matter, although at the time they seem to do nothing but matter. They seem so unique in a creative, cruel way. But they’re not, of course. In the end, all romantic complaints come down to the same thing: You want somebody who doesn’t want you. Or doesn’t want you as much as you want them. A million variations, but always the same wound. And while Mr. Trombone may have been myopic, while he may have been headed for a bad end fifteen years down the road, for the moment the truth was the truth, which was that he liked the skinny girl from Texas more.
“That should have been punishment enough in itself. But life can be imaginatively spiteful—it’s almost enough to make you believe in a malevolent deity—so not only did Chloe have to observe in the brown eyes of the young musician his waning interest in her, but she was forced to listen to the nightly shrieks of pleasure from Miranda Treece’s bedroom, which sounded, according to Chloe, ‘like they were murdering a hog in there!’
“I gave the impotent advice that the non-involved invariably offer. I suggested that the next time at bat, she might make herself a little less available—lay off the phone calls and neighbourly drop-ins. Chloe is an excitable creature, you know that better than I do, and it makes her impatient for things to go her way. I tried to explain to her that Sunday morning that men don’t like fish that jump out of the lake into the boat. I was expecting a rewarding burst of laughter. Instead, I encountered granite silence.
“‘Chloe, dear,’ I said, ‘I’m just trying to add some lightness to the situation. It’s not life or death.’
“‘It is to me,’ she said softly.”
“Did she say that?” her mother asked.
“Yes, but hang on, hang on. The story isn’t finished yet.”
I got up and poured myself a glass of water and plopped a handful of ice into it. I could feel a tiny hammer tapping against my right temple, with worse things to come. I even contemplated keeping back one of Sally’s sleeping pills for the brutal hangover that was coming up behind me like a silent train.
I sat back down. “I confess, I could feel my heart constrict for Chloe, for the agony she was suffering, and for its probable outcome, which was that things would go on for a while, this nightly scorching, but then, like all unrequited passions in the body of a healthy soul—and Chloe is, if nothing else, a robust soul—it would fizzle and fizzle and fizzle into a state of bemused bewilderment. A state of What was I thinking? But it would take a while. The clocks slow down for the heartbroken. It’s like watering your fingernails: they grow at the pace they grow and not a second faster.”
“Did you say that to her?”
“Yes, but it’s like that conversation you had with your mother in the car about Terry Blanchard. It made Chloe feel better for a bit. She even hooted with laughter now and again about the whole situation. But I knew that after she put down the phone, she was going back to feeling shitty.
“Sometimes on those nights, when I forgot to click off the ringer, my phone rang at three o’clock in the morning. ‘Uncle M.?’ a young girl’s voice said. But I was happy to hear her voice. Even if it was just to tell me that the trombonist smelt like bananas if you stood close to him, or the latest stupid thing Miranda said. But it was a lonely time in my life. I was single again, my American girlfriend having returned to her Arkansas roots, and I was beginning to find it tiresome to make new friends. Too much work, all that—the dinners, the conversation, the old stories trotted out once again. Like going to the gym.
“I spent my days on the back roads of Ontario delivering newfangled toilet seats, compression stockings, ankle stabilizers, blood pressure units, walkers—with and without wheels—to small-town drugstores. It didn’t last long, this season in hell, but it’s always seemed like a failure of nerve on my part to have embraced such a ludicrously unsuitable activity even in a moment of financial panic.”
“Surely you don’t still see it that way? It sounds rather admirable to me,” Sally interrupted.
“What’s admirable about it?”
“Just doing it. Just getting up and doing it and not whining about it.”
“I whined plenty, don’t worry about that. But anyway. To snatch up the phone and hear Chloe’s voice, the vibrating aliveness that I had felt so vividly that night in the hotel lobby, made me feel as if I were not standing at the side of life, but that I was engaged, however vaguely, at the heart of it.
“She got over the trombone player, and over the next while there was a string of cheerful melodramas, other boys with other trombones. I say cheerful because even while Chloe complained about this boy’s cockiness or that boy’s insensitivity or this guy’s tiresome addictions, there was a quickness to laughter, an easy teasability. ‘Uncle M.,’ she’d protest, ‘je vous en prie! You must desist!’ Which meant, Give me more, give me more. She loved the attention, I think. In the darkness of my bedroom, I imagined her raising her face to the ceiling with uncontainable laughter, as though she were expelling a lungful of smoke.
“Privately, to be candid, I sympathized with these young men as they politely eyed the exit sign. How exhausting Chloe could be, this high-voltage being! It was as if she was born without a middle gear. Either asleep or hysterical.”
S
ally laughed, and then I did too.
“‘Perhaps,’ I said to her one evening on the phone, ‘you should try for older men.’ I was thinking of someone like the French actor Gérard Depardieu. Do you know him?”
“Yes, yes. Divine.”
“A large, big-boned man whose physical and emotional weight might give our little humming-bird the perch she required.” (I also—and this I didn’t mention to my sister—had a mild fever for Chloe myself, and had awoken on a few mornings entertaining fantasies that don’t need to be described and certainly didn’t need to be acted upon. Besides which, I believed then that Chloe’s orientation was toward tall, pretty boys of ambivalent sexual orientation. You like what you like, and there’s the end of it.)
“‘Maybe you should lay off the gays,’ I said on a different occasion. (I’d been drinking.) My suggestion produced a pleased chirp in which I detected a hint of gratitude. Maybe it let her off the hook. It’s one thing to get dumped by a lush-lipped young man with a trombone, but quite another for a homosexual to take a pass on you.
“‘Okay, Uncle M.,’ she said, ‘no more fags, I promise.’ And again hooted a cloud of invisible smoke at the ceiling.
“I didn’t hear back from her. Maybe she got what she needed from me and moved on, I don’t know. But I spotted her on the sidewalk in Toronto a year or so later. It was Thanksgiving, a cheerless, Herman Melville kind of day. She was home for the long weekend. I pulled my bicycle over to the curb. Her face lit up. She was on her way to a dress sale at Holt Renfrew at that very moment. A large shopping bag dangled from her wrist. She’d already been at it for a while. Shopping, I mean.
“I noticed, though, that the rouge on her cheekbones was uneven, the small pink circles didn’t quite match one another. Perhaps she’d been in a hurry when she left your apartment that morning and had done a rush job. But there was something about the way she looked, this hastily applied rouge, that made me sad. Maybe it was the fall day—fall has always been a time of haunting nostalgia for me. Perhaps I was projecting my own disappointments onto her. But I don’t think so. It was, I think, the image of this young woman out shopping, as if her young body was somehow misspent on this activity. That instead of lingering on a dull morning on the sidewalk with a shopping bag, her young body should have been instead lying in the shadows of a bedroom, the curtains stirring, the warmth of a lover’s body only inches away. Such a waste, her capacity to love and to be loved and no one to share it with.
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