Elizabeth and After

by Matt Cohen

  “I stopped.”

  “Me too.”

  “Looks like,” Chrissy said. Then she gave the little quicksilver laugh she’d always had. “Fred couldn’t come tonight. He goes to meetings now.” When she said Fred’s name her face seemed to go blurry and out of focus. Her head was cocked, eyes seductive, but in thirty seconds or one second or one-millionth of a second everything had changed from being full and warm to a feeling of dead grey cement.

  “Clunk,” Carl said. He turned towards the table. Either he would have one more beer, just to even out, or he’d leave right away.

  “Carl.” She was so close to him he didn’t know if she was talking, whispering, just sending his name right into his head.

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t go away now.”

  She was holding his arm with both hands. The room was exploding with noise: the band, people shouting at each other, waiters with red-and blue-striped canvas aprons full of change, round metal trays of beer on one arm, using the other to clear a path through the crowd.

  He turned back to Chrissy. There was a part of him, he guessed, that must still be in love with her. Surprise. Of course he was still in love with her. He had expected to be in love with her. He had risked being in love with her still. But now there was an unexpected change in the way he saw her. Her face had hardened and grown sharper and it made her look like someone who was doing things on purpose instead of letting them happen.

  Chrissy tugged at his arm and he let her lead him back towards the table. It was empty but there were new glasses of beer in the centre, clustered together like a bouquet. Carl dragged a glass towards himself; it left a small highway of condensation as it travelled across the varnished wood.

  “Hey,” Chrissy said.

  “What?” And then Carl put his hand up to his face and felt the wetness on his cheeks. He was crying. The tears were just leaking out of his eyes as if it was the most natural thing in the world for a man to be crying when he had a dance and a beer with a woman he used to love.

  “You want to get out of here?”

  The parking lot was almost as crowded as the road-house. Cigarette ends bobbing in the darkness. Laughter. They climbed into Carl’s pick-up. Before he turned the key he heard the band start up again, double volume, and even after the engine was going and he was driving slowly away, the languid beat of country music filled the cab and he was tapping his fingers against the steering wheel.

  He drove past the old Catholic graveyard near the high school, a place they used to go, then out of town, taking the loop down by the lakeshore. Luke Richardson’s spotlights were shining on his house—a white-pillared, north-of-Kingston 1980s American Colonial special with a three-car garage fronted by enough black asphalt to pave a supermarket parking lot.

  When the crescent rejoined the highway Carl turned around, drove through town again and this time started into a series of sideroads heading north. Also what they used to do: drive at random along the wooded sideroads until they reached an abandoned farm, a place with a driveway leading to an old barn or a burned-out house foundation.

  He’d turned the heat on in the truck cab and Chrissy had pulled out a flask of peach brandy that they were passing back and forth. Driving north of town, fence posts and page wire flashed in the headlights. Country music wailed from the melon-sized speakers he’d wired into the four corners of the cab ceiling, the bass stepping up and down his spine while the electric guitar stitched its way around the voice—which he wasn’t listening to though no one was talking.

  All he wanted was the feeling. The Chrissy feeling. Blood full of brandy, tires humming, road blowing through the centre of his brain. Chrissy beside him. It was like sitting beside a volcano of possible explosions, love, or maybe just the pure heat he needed. Pure heat. A man could be remade in the pure heat of Chrissy, or so he’d believed. Like the night Chrissy told him she was pregnant. She was at university, living in a Kingston apartment she shared with two other girls. He was at the community college, living at home, watching over his father who was trying to drink himself to death—and doing well enough to end up at the KGH vomiting blood.

  The night she told him, he’d had to leave Chrissy’s apartment to go check on his father at the hospital. The idea was that when visiting hours were over he’d go back to Chrissy’s and they’d celebrate. McKelvey was waiting for him, his little sad-sack canvas bag packed along with the news that he’d been released. Unwilling to share his own news immediately, Carl had allowed his father to insist that after a week of hospital food he deserved a drink. They ended up at the Royal Hotel, Carl matching his father Scotch for Scotch while McKelvey stared at the table, smoked cigarettes, talked about the old days in such apologetic tones that Carl suddenly realized his father hadn’t brought him here to drink, hadn’t drunk to get blasted or escape his ulcer but was in fact telling him something absolutely different from his words, was telling him that he was going to die soon. Was talking about the past not to chatter but in an awkward attempt to leave things right with Carl. Meanwhile Carl—sinking deeper with every drink into the wildly burgeoning dream of his own child yet unable to actually say it—was telling himself that this whole train of thought, his father’s impending death, was crazy; then he’d looked up at the old man and seen him staring straight at him, face red and stricken.

  “Chrissy’s pregnant,” Carl said.

  “Good.”

  And, so drunk they were weaving from table to table, they’d gone to the bathroom and stood side by side, pissing into the stinking hotel urinals.

  Chrissy had her hand on his knee. They always touched, driving. In town or at the mall, she would always be holding his hand or her hand would be in his pocket or sliding inside his shirt at the waist. From the time they first got together until he couldn’t exactly say how long after Lizzie was born, her hands were always on him, touching, possessing, comforting, exciting, shaping the world they inhabited together until some nights, watching her sleep, her body given over to his care, his breath wouldn’t come and he would get out of bed and sit in his bare feet in the living room, just smoking a cigarette and wiggling his toes and feeling the breeze on his soles and a pounding excitement with every breath.

  He stretched his legs in his jeans. Chrissy’s hand squeezed. Carl remembered a dirt road he must have been aiming for the whole time, and as the truck turned the lights swung from pavement and wire to a narrow vista of pocked dirt, crowded second-growth trees reaching out across the ditches.

  “Here,” Chrissy said, pointing to a gap between two oaks.

  Carl turned in, jolted down a dirt track for a few yards, then switched off his motor and the lights.

  There was just enough moon that he could see Chrissy’s mouth. Lips dark in this light, parting as though she was about to say something, then closing again. She stepped out of the truck.

  He hesitated for a moment before following.

  From the ground came a smell he’d forgotten, the smell of winter making a brief night inspection during the height of summer. Leaves starting to compost. The soil preparing to be locked into frost. There was a cool breeze, the skin on his arms and neck contracted. He had an old plaid lumber shirt behind the truck seat. He reached for it now, offered it to Chrissy. “I’m okay,” she said but moved to stand against him. “Don’t worry, nothing bad can happen here.” She was leaning into him the way she had on the dance floor. Then she turned, her hand cupping his jeans, her body against his. Her lips were on his neck. He slid his hand beneath her sweater at the belt. The skin of her back was softer than it used to be. She wasn’t wearing a brassiere. When his thumbs came to her nipples, they were swollen with waiting. She wiggled to settle the weight of her breasts into his palms and then she moved away from him and he was left leaning over empty space, his hands closing on themselves.

  “I’ll take one of those cigarettes now.”

  When it was lit she shook her head in a way that was new and said, “Carl, I don’t know what I’m doi
ng here.”

  Smoking made him feel drunker, more like drinking. After drinks with his father that night he’d eaten steak and eggs, coffee, while his father had a penitent bowl of soup along a small mountain of white bread. For the first time Carl had noticed the way the old man spread his butter. He would reach out with his knife, take a glob of butter which he’d set in the middle of the slice, then methodically spread in ever-widening circles until the whole surface was yellow-white and shining.

  “Lizzie’s glad you’re back.”

  “So am I.”

  She shook her head that new way again, not really looking at him. “I don’t know what I’m doing here, Carl. I really hated you, you know?”

  “I know.”

  “You don’t know, Carl. I mean, Carl, when you messed up, I didn’t have anyone to turn to. It was just Lizzie and me and all the mess you left behind you.”

  She was saying this in a voice that sounded the way her lips had looked in the truck, the way her nipples had felt against his hands, a dark and swollen voice that stirred him up but for which he had no answer.

  “I guess you couldn’t help it,” Chrissy said. “Your father did it to you and then you had to pass it on to me, to Lizzie.”

  “He didn’t mean to,” Carl said. Or so it had seemed that night in the restaurant, the old man meekly spooning soup into his mouth, eating his butter-loaded white bread, drinking coffee, every now and then looking across the table to Carl. His face so white from the week in hospital, shaved raw and white and creased like sheets that had been slept on for a lifetime.

  She was standing close to him again, her hand on his chest, pressing onto his heart as though she knew the exact place where the pain lodged behind his breastbone. He had his back to the truck, was leaning against the hood and she was still touching him and he thought Chrissy had all the power because in his absence she had learned to see life the way you could see any other landscape, with its unexpected trenches, its trees to be avoided, its hills that afforded the best views of the low points below; meanwhile he was still blindly stumbling about, hoping for the fog to lift. There were sounds of leaves rustling, a few bird calls, the slow plodding progress of a porcupine through the undergrowth. But through all that he could still hear, only too clearly, the echo of his own voice, the self-pity. He felt a small tearing inside his gut, a hollow space that wanted a drink. And if he drank to fill that space, he knew, soon there would be another and another and another; and if he drank to fill them all he would have to drink until he passed out and then tomorrow the tearing would start earlier, harder.

  “You want a drink?”

  “I’m okay,” Carl said.

  They were standing toe to toe, waist to waist, face to face. Their new bodies and their old seemed to be weaving in and out of each other, trying to decide if they were still the right size, if they still wanted to fit together.

  “Let’s say,” Chrissy said, and her face was so close to his he could feel her breath spreading over his mouth and cheeks, “let’s say something, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s say we forgive each other. Or pretend to. Let’s say there’s a little island where we can go every year or ten.”

  Her hands went back to his shoulders as she pushed against him; his arms slipped around her back. They were rocking back and forth, slow dancing, saving the last dance for each other. And his blood had become so heavy it just had to slip down with her onto the soft ground. Right there in front of the truck, with the smell of the engine and the sound of the porcupine in the underbrush. Their new bodies had decided they fit after all; they were dancing the last dance and everything was as it had been except that it was better because it was slower and heavier; they were dancing the last dance and he knew that tomorrow he would wake up and the empty space would be emptier.

  Ned was standing at the bar with Billy Boyce, drinking a beer and with a pocketful of change thanks to the fifty his mother had given him. Then, he couldn’t believe, in came Carl McKelvey. Carl drained a quick Scotch, so nervous his hands trembled, and went to sit at Chrissy’s table.

  Before Carl’s arrival Ned had been thinking of trying that table himself, trying to impress Chrissy with what a reliable person he was. Getting to Fred had become a project. Now Carl was sitting beside Chrissy and that was something Ned was sure Fred would be interested to know: that Carl McKelvey was back and was making up to Chrissy. They were practically in each other’s laps right in front of everyone.

  Ned ordered another beer. Billy Boyce, missing everything, had gone off to play video games like the little kid he was. Ned wrapped his fingers around the moisture-beaded glass. This was like being a detective in a movie; no, a real detective because there was real danger, even though he knew Carl McKelvey couldn’t see him watching.

  “Carl. I don’t want to talk about Carl,” Ellie Dean had said last night. The way she lingered on his name, the hurt in her voice like some wound he’d stumbled on from a war before his time—a war for which he’d been conscripted by coming into Ellie’s bed.

  “What’d he do to you?” Ned asked, an eager soldier, but she just lowered her eyes and this modest withdrawal made Ned feel important in an entirely new way. He was on the inside, he was inside; he was Ellie’s man now, her protector, her army, her weapon against the scum on whom revenge needed to be taken, that unworthy pretender, Carl McKelvey.

  The band was howling, the dance floor turning into a jostling mass—in its midst Chrissy and Carl were making a spectacle of themselves. Ned went to the pay telephone, searched through the book, called Fred’s number. After two rings he lost his nerve and hung up. He went back to the bar. Now there was a slow waltz and they were dancing like they were trying to make a baby.

  Billy Boyce came back from his video games. Ned pointed out Carl and Chrissy. “Christ,” Billy said. Ned finished his beer and ordered another. When Carl and Chrissy left he followed them to the parking lot. From behind a van he watched them climb into Carl’s truck. He went back into Frostie’s to the telephone and punched the numbers so hard his fingers hurt. Fred answered right away, his voice low and threatening.

  “It’s Ned Richardson,” Ned said.

  “What can I do for you, Ned?” Just like that. No “hello” or “how are you?” All right. Let him have it.

  “I was still thinking of coming to see you about that job,” Ned said.

  “Thanks for letting me know.”

  “There was something else I wanted you to know.”

  Silence.

  “I’m at Frostie’s and its dance night. Chrissy just took off from here with Carl McKelvey.”

  More silence.

  Ned plunged ahead. “I was going to do something about it.”

  “Then do it.”

  “I’ll see you next week,” Ned said. He hung up and returned to the bar. Billy was waiting for him.

  “I’ll buy you another beer,” Ned offered.

  “I already owe you.”

  “This one is free. Then you can start working off the other.”

  A plan was starting to come to him. He was thinking about a time he had watched Billy wriggle into the window of the school office.

  “What have you got in mind?” Billy Boyce’s voice already sounded scared. “You going to give me back my plate?”

  “First we do Fred a favour.”

  Ned followed Billy’s Pinto out to the Balfer place. He parked his truck on the road while Billy walked into the yard. The outside light was on but the house was dark. Soon Ned could see the lights going on in the house as Billy worked his way from the back to the kitchen. Then the lights went off again and Billy was out the kitchen door. He started up his Pinto, waved at Ned as he shot past. Ned waited nervously a few minutes before going through the door Billy had left open for him. He heard the faint sound of a cat meowing. He brushed the back of his hand where the cat had scratched him; the little ridges of scab had just started to peel off. The cat meowed again and it reminded him of the s
trangled sound that had got caught in his throat when Carl McKelvey had grabbed him. The cat was in the room with him now. Ned reached into his pocket for his switchblade.

  When Carl got home he stood outside his truck for a moment, aware of the cool air touching his body in all the places Chrissy had warmed it. Even as he entered the house he noticed the smell. He resisted the urge to call out, instead turned on the light. In the kitchen the smell was dark and musky, an odour that hovered between perfume and garbage. He opened the refrigerator, expecting it to be broken, but the light went on and the beer was ice cold.

  On the table was the note he’d watched Lizzie write to him:

  Daddy, Don’t forget Marbles needs food, milk, love, exercise. Your daughter, Lizzie.

  Lately Lizzie had taken to writing notes when Chrissy called or when she wanted to remind Carl of something. She would sign herself your daughter and call Chrissy your wife. As though if everyone could just be reminded of their official positions—husband, wife, daughter—the family would glue itself together again. Beside the note was a bowl of apples. Reading a parents’ magazine at the doctor’s office, he’d got the idea that the house would seem more welcoming if there was always fruit on the table. He leaned over to see if the apples had somehow gone bad without his noticing. They smelled just like apples.

  The telephone started. He left the kitchen, noticing the smell again, turned on the living-room light and began crossing the floor towards the phone. Just before he would have tripped over it, he saw Lizzie’s cat lying in the centre of the carpet, its throat slit and bulging, blood pooled all around.

  He buried the cat in the backyard, at the corner of what had been the garden. He used a clean part of the rug to wrap its body, then rolled the rest up tightly and put it by the garage to be taken to the dump on Monday. The amazing thing was how neat they had been. They had got in through the pantry window, pushing up the screen—the only trace.