The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories

by Victoria Hislop

  Telemann. Not likely. But she played it, to hear what he had been hearing. She drank coffee from what she believed to be his dirty breakfast cup. She covered the casserole of Spanish rice from which he had taken his supper the night before. She sought out traces of his presence (he didn’t use an electric razor, he used old-fashioned shaving soap in a wooden bowl), but she believed that his life in that house, Jocelyn’s house, was all pretense, and waiting, like her own life in Patrick’s house.

  When Jocelyn came home Rose felt she ought to apologize for the cleaning she had done, and Jocelyn, really wanting to talk about her fight with the psychiatrist who reminded her of her mother, agreed that it certainly was a cowardly mania, this thing Rose had about housecleaning, and she had better go to a psych herself, if she ever wanted to get rid of it. She was joking; but going home on the bus, with Anna cranky and no preparations made for Patrick’s supper, Rose did wonder why she always seemed to be on the wrong end of things, disapproved of by her own neighbors because she didn’t pay enough attention to housework, and reproved by Jocelyn for being insufficiently tolerant of the natural chaos and refuse of life. She thought of love, to reconcile herself. She was loved, not in a dutiful, husbandly way but crazily, adulterously, as Jocelyn and her neighbors were not. She used that to reconcile herself to all sorts of things: to Patrick, for instance, turning over in bed with an indulgent little clucking noise that meant she was absolved of all her failings for the moment, they were to make love.

  The sane and decent things Clifford had said cut no ice with Rose at all. She saw that he had betrayed her. Sanity and decency were never what she had asked of him. She watched him, in the auditorium of the Powell River High School. She watched him playing his violin, with a somber and attentive expression she had once seen directed towards herself. She did not see how she could do without.

  In the middle of the night she phoned him, from her hotel to his.

  “Please talk to me.”

  “That’s okay,” said Clifford, after a moment’s silence. “That’s okay, Joss.”

  He must have a roommate, whom the phone might have wakened. He was pretending to talk to Jocelyn. Or else he was so sleepy he really thought she was Jocelyn.

  “Clifford, it’s me’.”

  “That’s okay,” Clifford said. “Take it easy. Go to sleep.”

  He hung up the phone.

  Jocelyn and Clifford are living in Toronto. They are not poor anymore. Clifford is successful. His name is seen on record jackets, heard on the radio. His face and more frequently his hands have appeared on television as he labors at his violin. Jocelyn has dieted and become slender, has had her hair cut and styled; it is parted in the middle and curves away from her face, with a wing of pure white rising from each temple.

  They live in a large brick house on the edge of a ravine. There are bird-feeders in the back yard. They have installed a sauna. Clifford spends a good deal of time sitting there. He thinks that will keep him from becoming arthritic, like his father. Arthritis is his greatest fear.

  Rose used to go to see them sometimes. She was living in the country, by herself. She taught at a community college and liked to have a place to stay overnight when she came in to Toronto. They seemed glad to have her. They said she was their oldest friend.

  One time when Rose was visiting them Jocelyn told a story about Adam. Adam had an apartment in the basement of the house. Jerome lived downtown, with his girlfriend. Adam brought his girls here.

  “I was reading in the den,” said Jocelyn, “when Clifford was out. I heard this girl, down in Adam’s apartment, saying no, no! The noise from his apartment comes straight up into the den. We warned him about that, we thought he’d be embarrassed—”

  “I didn’t think he’d be embarrassed,” said Clifford.

  “But he just said, we should put on the record player. So, I kept hearing the poor unknown girl bleating and protesting, and I didn’t know what to do. I thought these situations are really new, there are no precedents, are you supposed to stop your son from raping some girl if that’s what he’s doing, right under your nose or at least under your feet? I went downstairs eventually and I started getting all the family skis out of the closet that backs on his bedroom, I stayed there slamming those skis around, thinking I’d say I was going to polish them. It was July. Adam never said anything to me. I wish he’d move out.”

  Rose told about how much money Patrick had and how he had married a sensible woman even richer than he was, who had made a dazzling living room with mirrors and pale velvet and a wire sculpture like blasted bird cages. Patrick did not mind Modern Art any more.

  “Of course it isn’t the same,” said Rose to Jocelyn, “it isn’t the same house. I wonder what she has done with the Wedgwood vases.”

  “Maybe she has a campy laundry room. She keeps the bleach in one and the detergent in the other.”

  “They sit perfectly symmetrically on the shelf.”

  But Rose had her old, old, twinge of guilt.

  “Just the same, I like Patrick.”

  Jocelyn said, “Why?”

  “He’s nicer than most people.”

  “Silly rot,” said Jocelyn. “And I bet he doesn’t like you.”

  “That’s right,” Rose said. She started to tell them about her trip down on the bus. It was one of the times when she was not driving her car, because too many things were wrong with it and she could not afford to get it fixed.

  “The man in the seat across from me was telling me about how he used to drive big trucks. He said we never seen trucks in this country like they got in the States.” She put on her country accent. “In the Yewnited States they got these special roads what they call turnpikes, and only trucks is allowed to go on them. They get serviced on these roads from one end of the country to the other and so most people never sees them at all. They’re so big the cab is half the size of a bus and they got a driver in there and an assistant driver and another driver and another assistant driver havin a sleep. Toilet and kitchen and beds and all. They go eighty, ninety miles an hour, because there is never no speed limit on them turnpikes.”

  “You are getting very weird,” said Clifford. “Living up there.”

  “Never mind the trucks,” Jocelyn said. “Never mind the old mythology. Clifford wants to leave me again.”

  They settled down to drinking and talking about what Clifford and Jocelyn should do. This was not an unfamiliar conversation. What does Clifford really want? Does he really want not to be married to Jocelyn or does he want something unattainable? Is he going through a middle-age crisis?

  “Don’t be so banal,” Clifford said to Rose. She was the one who said middle-age crisis. “I’ve been going through this ever since I was twenty-five. I’ve wanted out ever since I got in.”

  “That is new, for Clifford to say that,” said Jocelyn. She went out to the kitchen to get some cheese and grapes. “For him to actually come out and say that,” she yelled from the kitchen. Rose avoided looking at Clifford, not because they had any secrets but because it seemed a courtesy to Jocelyn not to look at each other while she was out of the room.

  “What is happening now,” said Jocelyn, coming back with a platter of cheese and grapes in one hand and a bottle of gin in the other, “is that Clifford is wide open. He used to bitch and stew and some other bilge would come out that had nothing to do with the real problem. Now he just comes out with it. The great blazing truth. It’s a total illumination.”

  Rose had a bit of difficulty catching the tone. She felt as if living in the country had made her slow. Was Jocelyn’s talk a parody, was she being sarcastic? No. She was not.

  “But then I go and deflate the truth for you,” said Clifford, grinning. He was drinking beer from the bottle. He thought beer was better for him than gin. “It’s absolutely true I’ve wanted out ever since I got in. And it’s also true that I wanted in, and I wanted to stay in. I wanted to be married to you and I want to be married to you and I couldn’t stand being ma
rried to you and I can’t stand being married to you. It’s a static contradiction.”

  “It sounds like hell,” Rose said.

  “I didn’t say that. I am just making the point that it is no middle-age crisis.”

  “Well, maybe that was oversimplifying,” said Rose. Nevertheless, she said firmly, in the sensible, down-to-earth, countrified style she was adopting for the moment, all they were hearing about was Clifford. What did Clifford really want, what did Clifford need? Did he need a studio, did he need a holiday, did he need to go to Europe by himself? What made him think, she said, that Jocelyn could be endlessly concerned about his welfare? Jocelyn was not his mother.

  “And it’s your fault,” she said to Jocelyn, “for not telling him to put up or shut up. Never mind what he really wants. Get out or shut up. That’s all you need to say to him. Shut up or get out,” she said to Clifford with mock gruffness. “Excuse me for being so unsubtle. Or frankly hostile.”

  She didn’t run any risk at all by sounding hostile, and she knew it. She would run a risk by being genteel and indifferent. The way she was talking now was a proof that she was their true friend and took them seriously. And so she did, up to a point.

  “She’s right, you fucking son-of-a-bitch,” said Jocelyn experimentally. “Shut up or get out.”

  When Jocelyn called Rose on the phone, years ago, to read her the poem Howl, she was not able, in spite of her usual boldness of speech, to say the word fuck. She tried to force herself, then she said, “Oh, it’s stupid, but I can’t say it. I’m going to have to say eff. You’ll know what I mean when I say eff?”

  “But she said it’s your fault,” said Clifford. “You want to be the mother. You want to be the grownup. You want to be long-suffering.”

  “Balls,” said Jocelyn. “Oh, maybe. Maybe, yes. Maybe I do.”

  “I bet at school you were always latching on to those kids with the problems,” said Clifford with his tender grin. “Those poor kids, the ones with acne or awful clothes or speech impediments. I bet you just persecuted those poor kids with friendliness.”

  Jocelyn picked up the cheese knife and waved it at him.

  “You be careful. You haven’t got acne or a speech impediment. You are sickeningly good-looking. And talented. And lucky.”

  “I have nearly insuperable problems coming to terms with the adult male role,” said Clifford priggishly. “The psych says so.”

  “I don’t believe you. Psychs never say anything like nearly insuperable. And they don’t use that jargon. And they don’t make those judgments. I don’t believe you, Clifford.”

  “Well, I don’t really go to the psych at all. I go to the dirty movies down on Yonge.”

  Clifford went off to sit in the sauna.

  Rose watched him leave the room. He was wearing jeans, and a T-shirt that said Just passin thru. His waist and hips were narrow as a twelve-year-old’s. His gray hair was cut in a very short brush cut, showing his skull. Was this the way musicians wore their hair nowadays, when politicians and accountants were bushy and bearded, or was it Clifford’s own perversity? His tan looked like pancake makeup, though it was probably all real. There was something theatrical about him altogether, tight and glittery and taunting. Something obscene about his skinniness and sweet, hard smile.

  “Is he well?” she said to Jocelyn. “He’s terribly thin.”

  “He wants to look like that. He eats yogurt and black bread.”

  “You can never split up,” Rose said, “because your house is too beautiful.” She stretched out on the hooked rug. The living room had white walls, thick white curtains, old pine furniture, large bright paintings, hooked rugs. On a low round table at her elbow was a bowl of polished stones for people to pick up and hold and run through their fingers. The stones came from Vancouver beaches, from Sandy Cove and English Bay and Kitsilano and Ambleside and Dundarave. Jerome and Adam had collected them a long time ago.

  Jocelyn and Clifford left British Columbia soon after Clifford returned from his provincial tour. They went to Montreal, then to Halifax, then to Toronto. They seemed hardly to remember Vancouver. Once they tried to think of the name of the street where they had lived and it was Rose who had to supply it for them. When Rose lived in Capilano Heights she used to spend a lot of time remembering the parts of Ontario where she had lived, being faithful, in a way, to that earlier landscape. Now that she was living in Ontario she put the same sort of effort into remembering things about Vancouver, puzzling to get details straight, that were in themselves quite ordinary. For instance, she tried to remember just where you waited for the Pacific Stage bus, when you were going from North Vancouver to West Vancouver. She pictured herself getting on that old green bus around one o’clock, say, on a spring day. Going to baby-sit for Jocelyn. Anna with her, in her yellow slicker and rainhat. Cold rain. The long, swampy stretch of land as you went into West Vancouver. Where the shopping-centers and highrises are now. She could see the streets, the houses, the old Safeway, St. Mawes Hotel, the thick closing-in of the woods, the place where you got off the bus at the little store. Black Cat cigarettes sign. Cedar dampness as you walked in through the woods to Jocelyn’s house. Deadness of early afternoon. Nap time. Young women drinking coffee looking out of rainy windows. Retired couples walking dogs. Pad of feet on the thick mold. Crocuses, early daffodils, the cold bulbs blooming. That profound difference of the air close to the sea, the inescapable dripping vegetation, the stillness. Anna pulling on her hand, Jocelyn’s brown wooden cottage ahead. Such a rich weight of apprehension, complications descending as she neared that house.

  Other things she was not so keen on remembering.

  She had wept on the plane, behind her sunglasses, all the way from Powell River. She wept, sitting in the waiting room at the Vancouver airport. She was not able to stop weeping and go home to Patrick. A plainclothes policeman sat down beside her, opened his jacket to show her his badge, asked if there was anything he could do for her. Someone must have summoned him. Terrified at being so conspicuous, she fled to the Ladies’. She didn’t think to comfort herself with a drink, didn’t think of looking for the bar. She never went to bars then. She didn’t take a tranquilizer, didn’t have any, didn’t know about them. Maybe there weren’t such things.

  The suffering. What was it? It was all a waste, it reflected no credit. An entirely dishonorable grief. All mashed pride and ridiculed fantasy. It was as if she had taken a hammer and deliberately smashed her big toe. That’s what she thinks sometimes. At other times she thinks it was necessary, it was the start of wrecks and changes, the start of being where she is now instead of in Patrick’s house. Life making a gigantic fuss, as usual, for a small effect.

  Patrick could not speak when she told him. He had no lecture prepared. He didn’t speak for a long time but followed her around the house while she kept justifying herself, complaining. It was as if he wanted her to go on talking, though he couldn’t credit what she was saying, because it would be much worse if she stopped.

  She didn’t tell him the whole truth. She said that she had “had an affair” with Clifford, and by the telling gave herself a dim secondhand sort of comfort, which was pierced, presently, but not really destroyed, by Patrick’s look and silence. It seemed ill-timed, unfair of him, to show such a bare face, such an inappropriate undigestible chunk of grief.

  Then the phone rang, and she thought it would be Clifford, experiencing a change of heart. It was not Clifford, it was a man she had met at Jocelyn’s party. He said he was directing a radio play, and he needed a country girl. He remembered her accent.

  Not Clifford.

  She would rather not think of any of this. She prefers to see through metal window-frames of dripping cedars and salmonberry bushes and the proliferating mortal greenery of the rain forest some small views of lost daily life. Anna’s yellow slicker. The smoke from Jocelyn’s foul fire.

  “Do you want to see the junk I’ve been buying?” said Jocelyn, and took Rose upstairs. She showed her an embr
oidered skirt and a deep-red satin blouse. A daffodil-colored silk pajama suit. A long shapeless rough-woven dress from Ireland.

  “I’m spending a fortune. What I would once have thought was a fortune. It took me so long. It took us both so long, just to be able to spend money. We could not bring ourselves to do it. We despised people who had color television. And you know something – color television is great! We sit around now and say, what would we like? Maybe one of those little toaster-ovens for the cottage? Maybe I’d like a hair blower? All those things everybody else has known about for years but we thought we were too good for. You know what we are, we say to each other? We’re Consumers! And it’s Okay!”

  “And not just paintings and records and books. We always knew they were okay. Color T.V.! Hair dryers! Waffle irons!”

  “Remote-control birdcages!” Rose cried cheerfully.

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Heated towels.”

  “Heated towel racks, dummy! They’re lovely.”

  “Electric carving knives, electric toothbrushes, electric toothpicks.”

  “Some of those things are not as bad as they sound. Really they’re not.”

  Another time when Rose came down Jocelyn and Clifford had a party. When everyone had gone home the three of them, Jocelyn and Clifford and Rose, sat around on the living-room floor, all fairly drunk, and very comfortable. The party had gone well. Rose was feeling a remote and wistful lust; a memory of lust, maybe. Jocelyn said she didn’t want to go to bed.

  “What can we do?” said Rose. “We shouldn’t drink any more.”

  “We could make love,” Clifford said.

  Jocelyn and Rose said, “Really?” at exactly the same time. Then they linked their little fingers and said, “Smoke goes up the chimney.”