Elizabeth and After

by Matt Cohen

  Luke Richardson was voted to the town council the same week John F. Kennedy was elected president of the United States. Luke didn’t hesitate to identify with the glitter and excitement of the Kennedy accession. The Kennedys were glamorous, surrounded by the famous and the prestigious; their parties and their cheerleaders and America’s love affair with them filled the newspapers and the television screens. Luke would put his hand on Adam’s shoulder and confide that when he saw Kennedy on television, he knew he was seeing his own future.

  One Friday afternoon in early September Luke stopped by Adam’s office at closing time to ask him to telephone Amy, tell her he wouldn’t be home until midnight or morning because he had an emergency committee meeting in Cobourg. It was six o’clock and the sun was already low enough in the sky that Adam could see its reflection off the big plate-glass window of the Timberpost. When he called Amy, knowing Luke had put him up to this to avoid her anger, she thanked him coldly and hung up abruptly. A few minutes later she called back and asked Adam to join her for dinner since she had already marinated the steaks.

  Adam paused. He’d been having barbecues with the Richardsons all summer and the prospect of being released for one night was not unpleasant. His dining-room table was still piled with papers from his mother’s estate and he’d begun renovations on the second floor—finally giving away his parents’ clothes and redoing their room with the intention of turning the house from a mausoleum dedicated to his youth to a place he could either make his own or sell.

  “We’ll have a good time,” Amy said, her voice pleading. Adam gave in. On the way to the cottage he found himself dreading the evening alone with her, the inevitable confession of unhappiness. But he arrived to find she’d made a giant pitcher of martinis she seemed already to have sampled. Martinis! The Infant Voice of the Inner Circle of the Church of the Unique God had never allowed such a vile concoction to touch his holy tongue. By sunset Adam was lying face down on the living-room couch, looking out on the dark mirror that was Long Gull Lake while Amy massaged scented oil into his back.

  Then it was Adam’s turn to do Amy. She was wearing tight white pants and a brassiere he couldn’t unhook. “If you don’t know how, you’d better learn” was the only help she’d offer. When he finally got the brassiere open, its two narrow wings lay limply by her sides like a fallen bird of modesty. This was definitely not a Ladies of the Inner Circle situation.

  “What next?” Adam asked.

  “Now you put on the oil.” She handed him the bottle. The massage oil was a dark amber fluid with a sharp minty odour. He poured a small quantity into his palm, tipped the oil from his hand onto the centre of Amy’s back. “You have to rub it in,” she said. West Gull’s most eligible bachelor had never touched the naked back of a woman other than his mother. He found Amy’s skin was soft, if vaguely rubbery. As Adam pushed down she gave out a little sigh and the sound startled him because a few evenings ago, at the Knight house, Maureen had also sighed, and in that sigh Adam had heard a loneliness even more lonely than the time she’d been the single mussel on the guest platter. “Both hands,” Amy instructed. Adam pushed and pulled. The room filled with the scent of mint mixed with Amy’s sweat. After he’d rubbed in several palms full of oil, carefully working his way from the small floating shoulder blades he was beginning to see as the lost islands of her innocence down to the thickly muscled small of her back, Amy asked him to put on the kettle. Drinking his coffee in the darkness, watching the stars grow denser as night fell, Adam could feel—even more than during the actual event—Amy’s touch on his back. Her hands had been small and delicate and as they rubbed the oil into Adam’s skin he’d felt his muscles bunch up in resistance, first twisting away from the unprecedented touching, then giving in to the invasion of a peculiar floating warmth—something dangerously close to gratitude. Amy sat silent, entirely calm and self-possessed, as though in Luke’s absence people were always coming over from the New & Used to exchange a backrub or two.

  By the time Adam got home the martinis were starting to wear off. He made some more coffee and switched on the television news. One segment was a special look at the incoming presidential couple. The camera zoomed in on Jackie’s face: her eyes softly luminous, her bones perfectly honed, her cheeks hollow with unknown sorrows, her wide eager mouth flashing its brilliant smile to all in need of her light. That must be, Adam thought, what Luke wanted from Amy: poor Amy who walked around town in her bulging white sweaters and over-tight pants looking as though she was about to burst into tears.

  The camera went to John F. Kennedy, the legend himself, the war hero, the carnal embodiment of the American Empire. Empire, yes, if ever there had been Empire, this was surely Empire itself, the most powerful the world had ever known, and when Kennedy raised his hand in what seemed to be a wave to the crowd but was in fact an effortlessly graceful salute directed to the entire population of the entire planet, Adam could almost hear the electronic roar sweeping through the skies: Caesar! Caesar! Caesar!

  Suddenly Adam felt an unexpected tender stab for Amy; somehow—despite his half-contempt for her because she, like him, was under Luke’s dominion—she had effortlessly seen his invisible chains, undone them with a lot less fuss than he’d made over her brassiere, yet known where to stop so there would be no hangover of guilt. Why, Adam suddenly asked himself, could he not in the same spirit supply Maureen with what she needed, yet do so in a way that left them free of obligation? After all, what did Maureen want? Just a bit of company and some face-saving ritual.

  Elizabeth thought about him sometimes. Dorothy Dean, her friend from the Inner Circle who credited prayer for taking her from subbing to full-time Grade Three, told her that he was being set up with Maureen Knight, the doctor’s daughter. Maureen came to the school three afternoons a week to teach the senior classes French. Elizabeth found her stilted and artificial, as though she was keeping her real self back—a real self that judged them all provincial and wanting. “I don’t know if I can see them together,” Elizabeth said, immediately ashamed of herself. “Two old maids,” Dorothy shrugged. “They’ll be slow but sure, believe me.”

  That September Elizabeth discovered she was pregnant again. She treasured every minute of it and she was so desperately happy that she almost had to laugh at the way she kept checking her panties for stains. One night she woke up, her stomach convulsed with cramps, the sheets soaked in blood.

  “Bad luck,” Dr. Knight said, “but at least we know you’re still fertile.” He admitted her to hospital to have her womb scraped in case some irregularity was preventing a secure implantation. Elizabeth took a month’s sick leave, got a book on nutrition and much to McKelvey’s disgust began eating yoghurt and wheatgerm. But aside from a false alarm, which made her realize she wanted a baby so much she was afraid to get pregnant for fear of another miscarriage, nothing happened.

  Adam didn’t see Elizabeth again until the next New Year’s party. He was looking out on the township’s celebrants from his usual station at the mantlepiece when Elizabeth and William McKelvey came into view. She was wearing a long navy gown that fell elegantly from her hips and made everyone else look as though they’d forgotten to dress for the occasion. But before Adam could greet them the McKelveys moved off. Adam, determined to make it through the party, braced himself. Having learned to live without so much else, he could surely survive his feelings for Elizabeth.

  He had joined another conversation when there was a hand on his elbow, a touch so light he wondered if he’d really felt it.

  “Look, I’m really sorry about what I said last summer. It just—”

  “Don’t worry about it. Anyway I’m not what you thought.”

  “You don’t have to say that.”

  “I know. But I am. Because I’m not.”

  “I’m glad. I mean—I’m glad you told me. Would you accept my apologies?”

  Her voice was back to its usual intimacy and Adam’s face was as flushed as when he’d spied on her across the lake.
“Why don’t we just forget it?” he said.

  “I felt so terrible when you stopped coming to the library committee. I was afraid I’d offended you.”

  “No. Really. I was just busy helping Luke get elected.”

  Whenever a tray came by she would change their empty glasses for full. Gradually the room shrank and nothing was left but Elizabeth’s voice, Elizabeth’s face looking up to his. By midnight he had drunk so many glasses of wine that most of his weight was on the mantlepiece. The orchestra was playing, Elizabeth had folded herself into McKelvey, and the whole room, except Adam, was joined in a circle singing “Auld Lang Syne.” Amy finally dragged him into the circle, inserting him between herself and Luke, and as the voices raised in a chorus Adam joined in, his own voice loud and grateful to have been rescued from a moment he was still shaking free of, like a saved swimmer who’d already given himself up to the despair of loneliness. That was when he looked across the room and saw Maureen Knight, bracketed between her parents, her eyes reproachfully on his.

  That January Adam started going to the movies with Maureen. Once a month plus occasional holidays or special features, he’d call on her and they’d drive into Kingston. First it would be dinner at one of the hotels accompanied by a half-bottle of wine. During dinner Maureen would talk about her father’s various cases, the adventures of her two cats, the birds they did or didn’t kill. After a post-dinner cup of tea which Maureen always took with lemon and a trip to the washroom, they would go to see whatever was showing at the university film club. Often it would be a European movie and when there was subtitled dialogue Maureen liked to whisper her own translation. Then it was time to drive back to West Gull. Near the beginning there were some uncomfortable pauses when they arrived at Maureen’s door. Should he progress from the customary handshake to a chaste kiss? Delay the decision by going inside? Somehow without discussing it they settled on a peculiarly vigorous method of shaking hands, a rough dance that involved all four hands jumping up and down followed by Maureen saying, “See you soon.” Adam felt proud of himself, a virtuous Samaritan who’d offered a bandage to a wounded fellow-traveller.

  With Elizabeth his role was less clear. Sometimes she would meet him at the office and they’d commiserate about library problems over lunch at the Timberpost: the heating, the volunteer staffing, the fact that more people used the library to dispose of old books than to take books out. Every week or two it would be Elizabeth on the phone about something or other. “Adam,” she would start. Adam. That was how he knew he was alive, hearing Elizabeth say his name. Or so he thought.

  Between his dates with Maureen and his vaguely illicit conversations with Elizabeth, Adam began to see his passage from the traumatic moment of being three cubed to that of his comfortable early thirties as the triumphant story of an emotionally crippled youth who had somehow thrown off his shackles and become a charming sophisticated ladies’ man, secretly in love with one woman while doing his duty with another. Certain mornings while knotting his tie in front of the mirror, he would even catch himself whistling and winking at his own image as he prepared for another day of flattery and deception.

  But one Sunday in December 1965, one of those Sundays after a Saturday when he had taken Maureen to the movies, the accountant took over. The accountant had had enough. The accountant started talking numbers and the first number was zero. Zero was what Adam’s idea of being a ladies’ man added up to. Zero was the amount of romance in his life. Zero was the number that best corresponded to his sexual activities. Zero, zero, zero, the accountant decreed. For his next number the accountant took out Adam’s agendas for the past several years and calculated that between Saturdays, holidays and special features, he had just gone to the movies with Maureen for the sixty-fourth time. 4×4×4. The fateful end of the fateful cube. In their journey through those cubes their partings had not increased in passion. Although now he sometimes came into the house with her where they would sit in the Knight living room—always alone as the parents, Albert and Elspeth, would have discreetly ascended—and in the hinting rosy glow of the tiffany lamps Adam would feel for Maureen something approaching a very strong fondness.

  He had discovered she was not unamusing. On the contrary. As they’d got to know each other and as she got to know West Gull, it seemed to Adam that much like him she was an independent and detached observer of the town’s affairs. Instead of haltingly making their way through dinner and a half-bottle of wine, they doubled their alcohol dosage and often got so involved in gossiping that they risked missing their movie.

  Sixty-four. Adam wrote the number in large figures on a pad in front of him. Sixty-four = 4×4×4. That was a lot of dinners, a lot of Saturdays and holidays and special-feature nights. At the rate he was going he would be sixty-four years old, moving from his very last complete cube into the unpredictable loose change and still wondering when it was that slow-maturing Goldsmith gene was going to drag itself over the finish line. And he remembered something peculiar about the sixty-fourth Saturday night. While trying to put his coat on in the Knight hallway, his arm had caught in his sports jacket and Maureen had moved close to help him. There was absolutely nothing sexual in her gesture, just an assumed familiarity that had left them standing face to face touching each other with no need or desire to move away. Adam thought about this moment, the microscopic micro-moment buried within it like a speck-sized mussel on a gigantic platter, a microscopic micro-moment he had perhaps tried to hide from himself. Within that tiny irreducible moment in time, he now remembered he had come very close to creating yet another irreducible moment by putting his arms around Maureen Knight. A sudden flare had filled his belly; an inner voice had commanded him to wrench his hands apart, spread them wide, then rejoin them behind Maureen’s back. Adam Goldsmith had been on the very verge of this action, his arms had even begun a slow surround, when a noise from upstairs had frozen him. At the memory Adam’s heart thumped so loudly he thought someone must be knocking at his door. No one’s there, the accountant said. Zero is the number of people coming to your door. And that was when Adam Goldsmith resolved that in a week and a half, at the Richardson New Year’s party, he was going to ask Maureen Knight to be his wife.

  He spent the whole day cleaning his house and feeling quite pleased with himself. It was only in the evening, standing in front of his stove stirring a can of soup and preparing the exact words of his proposal—Before I begin let me assure you that even the most negative, hostile or shocked reaction to these words will in no way decrease my esteem for you or my desire that our friendship continue—that he found himself envisioning Elizabeth in the place of Maureen. A warm melting glow suffused him and into his mind came the blurred image of Elizabeth he couldn’t let go of—Elizabeth, hair streaming like a goddess, diving white and naked into Dead Swede Lake.

  By the evening of the party Adam had refined his plan. Early on he would ask Maureen Knight if he might walk her home after midnight. On this walk, fortified by a few drinks and the fact that he’d already prepared the way by requesting this extraordinary interview, he would pop the question.

  To bolster his courage Adam decided to buy a new suit, hand-tailored from a shop Albert Knight had once mentioned at dinner. In front of the full-length mirrors for the final fitting, Adam hardly recognized himself. In his perfectly tailored suit, his hair that with the years had become a dark chocolate brown—except for his sideburns which were now a snowy white—he no longer resembled the old pictures of the bony-faced Hank Goldsmith. Now he had the sleek look of the sort of man he would expect to see in a movie about an expensive ocean liner. “You’ve got the figure for clothes,” the tailor said in a contented voice and Adam decided this was where he would buy his wedding tuxedo.

  At nine o’clock on New Year’s Eve he was at the Richardson mantelpiece, wondering if anyone would notice his finery, when the Knights arrived. Maureen, too, was in costume: she was wearing a low-cut black dress with a layer of lace netting stretched modestly over her décollet
age and her hair was swept up in a way Adam had never seen, leaving her ears and neck exposed. It unnerved him, the way her thin naked arched neck seemed to be offering itself to some invisible guillotine, and he thought he might lose his courage. But strolling with Maureen towards the dining room, which had been transformed for this year’s party into a casino palace complete with velvet-covered gaming tables ruled over by girls of the graduating class costumed as croupiers, Adam stopped and took hold of Maureen’s elbow. He could feel the flesh giving under his fingers and he almost let go for fear he was hurting her. “I was thinking,” he said, “I might walk you home after midnight.” Before he could retract this outrageous statement Maureen gave her anxious smile, inclined her head and said, “Of course,” as though she’d expected exactly this, and moved on.

  He was back at the hearth wondering what his mother would think of his marrying Maureen, when he heard his name. “Adam.”

  “Elizabeth.” If there was one person in whom he could confide his happiness, it was surely Elizabeth.

  “Adam, this isn’t white wine, it’s a martini. Why are we drinking martinis?”

  He explained to her that the gaming tables and martinis were a celebration of Luke’s new passion: money. He had decided to leave politics—“a loser’s game,” Luke had confided—to make his fortune in real estate. Just as Adam was about to change topics and tell her about Maureen, Elizabeth began talking about the problems she was having with a mother who was convinced the school was plotting against her child, and another who was incensed Elizabeth was reading Pride and Prejudice to her Grade Six class—“You can tell by the title it isn’t suitable”—and then they were on their third martini and discussing a censorship movement in another school district; meanwhile the band was playing and they were on their fourth martini and Elizabeth was telling Adam about the time her father had insisted they celebrate New Year’s at the Holiday Inn but walked out before midnight because he didn’t like the way the bandleader looked at her mother. “Adam, Adam, I’m drunk.”