Elizabeth and After

by Matt Cohen

  Adam looked at his watch. It was only an hour until midnight, his last bachelor’s New Year’s Eve midnight. “There’s something I must tell you,” he said, because while listening to Elizabeth’s accelerating chatter and keeping pace on the martini front, he had become ever more determined to divulge his secret.

  “I must tell you something,” he repeated.

  “I know, Adam, I know. And I must tell you … my story … Adam, I’ve hardly started but I’m so drunk I need to go home. Adam, show me where the coats are.”

  “You’ll drive yourself into a ditch,” Adam said, twice, but Elizabeth kept shaking her head and insisting. “Adam, I know what Im doing.” He decided he would humour her, then tell McKelvey Elizabeth was sick and needed to be taken home.

  They went upstairs to the guest room where Elizabeth knelt on the bed and began sorting through the mound of ladies’ coats. Finally she dragged hers out. It was a cast-off from her mother that looked, as she’d said to Adam a couple of weeks before, as though it had been made from underprivileged raccoons. She struggled into it, straightened up and suddenly her face was so stricken Adam was sure she was about to be sick.

  “Kiss me, Adam,” Elizabeth said. Her voice was dry. Adam bent down and gave her a peck on the cheek.

  “Come on, Adam, I want your best. Give me your number one.”

  This time he pecked her on the lips. Elizabeth wrinkled her nose and sighed with disappointment, the way she sometimes did after ordering dessert at the Timberpost.

  “Let’s go, Adam.” She got off the bed, took his hand and led him out of the bedroom. But instead of heading downstairs she continued towards the back of the house. She pulled him into an empty room, locked the door and gave him her number one. Adam stood there, stunned. It was as though another universe had wrapped itself around his face, the universe of Elizabeth’s lips, her eyelashes, her breath. She’s drunk, he suddenly thought, but even drunk she’s going to realize—hey, God, I’m kissing old Adam, how embarrassing. Instead she unbuttoned her blouse and put his hands where his hands had never been. They lay down on the carpet in the dark and soon his whole body was surrounded by what he had once mistaken for a blurry white mermaid.

  At first he came to consciousness thinking he must have dreamed the whole thing. He was lying on the bed alone, his pants in humid disarray, his shirt unbuttoned, and with his eyes closed he could still feel Elizabeth’s body on his, his on Elizabeth’s everything. He stood up and reassembled himself. “Wait a few minutes” had been her last words. He patted his shirt smooth, tried to slap the wrinkles from his new tailored trousers. The strains of “Auld Lang Syne” were beginning to rise from the hall. He pushed at his hair—luckily his hair had always been easy to smooth into place—and opened the door. When he got downstairs the music was over. Elizabeth and McKelvey were chatting with the Boyces, Maureen was standing slightly apart from her parents, her white neck gleaming sacrificially beneath the chandelier.

  It was early May when Elizabeth told Adam she was pregnant. “It happened at New Year’s. Can you imagine? Bill got too drunk, the way he always does at the Richardsons’ and when we got home—well…” She said all this while looking Adam straight in the eye. They were at the Timberpost. Since January Elizabeth had been stopping by for lunches as though nothing had transpired. No coy hand-holding, no whispers or winks. Nothing at all to relieve the terrible secret Adam felt weighing on him the whole time, a secret so literally, physically heavy, he felt, especially when he saw Elizabeth, that it could send him crashing through the earth.

  He had thought of that secret as an actual stone expanding inside him; when Elizabeth told him about the baby his first impulse was to point out this comical connection. And yet there was that other smaller lighter secret, the one he had already tried to tell Elizabeth; in fact, the coincidence was that Adam had been planning—that very same lunch—to let Elizabeth know of his engagement to Maureen Knight. For months he and Maureen had been keeping it “to enjoy it for ourselves,” as Maureen had put it but now that they were about to tell Albert and Elspeth, Adam had decided he must first inform Elizabeth. But with her eyes on him—daring him to contradict? begging him not to?—he felt his tongue begin to tremble with the words he couldn’t find. Tremble, then tingle and swell. That old feeling had come over him, his face was layered with sweat and he was gripping the table, terrified by what was coming. Elizabeth started again: “When I got pregnant with McKelvey the first time, I changed my whole life, which turned out to be a mistake. So this time I’m not changing anything. I’m just going to go on as I am and hope the baby gets born alive. That’s what I want and I want it very much.”

  Adam could feel the sweat pooling in the hollow of his collarbone and armpits. Elizabeth pushed her glass of water to him. Eventually he was able to let go of the table and take a sip. “I … I…” he started but had to wait until his tongue was almost normal. “I wish you every happiness.”

  That night Adam sat in his kitchen drinking Scotch and asking himself what it would be like to be married to Maureen while watching the baby he might or might not have given Elizabeth become a man or a woman. That would be a secret big enough to fill a whole house. Then Adam asked another question: what might Maureen think of being married to a man who’d made another woman pregnant on the night of their engagement? Of course there was no need for Maureen to know. But if he told her it would be her secret, too. They’d both have their guts filled with it. Until it killed them or dissolved or wore away or turned them into something else—whatever it was such secrets did.

  When Carl was old enough to start school Elizabeth started teaching again. In the meantime Adam saw her only at the New Year’s parties; as always Elizabeth and he would lean against the mantlepiece and drink, though the martini experiment was never repeated since half the township had ended up in ditches. The first year she was back teaching, on October 1, Carl’s birthday, Elizabeth called Adam to suggest lunch. He hadn’t expected it and had to break an appointment which of course he did. As always they went to the Timberpost. It was strange to sit across the table from her again. Over the years her face had grown narrower, her eyes brighter. Although she’d had and nurtured the child she wanted so much, it was easy to imagine that whatever had been driving her before was now beginning to consume her. There was a new way she had of folding and unfolding her hands, as though they didn’t quite know what to do with themselves. But meanwhile she talked easily, as she always had, this time about the changes that had transpired at the school and in West Gull since she’d last been teaching.

  “Walk me back to the school,” she asked on the way out. And then, a block away from the restaurant, she said in a low voice, “You might as well know he’s yours.”

  Adam kept walking.

  “Did you hear me?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Well?”

  Adam turned. Elizabeth was smiling wistfully. She was someone out of a life he could never have imagined. “I’m very happy,” he said.

  Mysteries begin with the body but sometimes the mystery is not death but love. There is so much to love. Cats. Bits of dust caught in the light. Colours. Unexpected waterfalls. And of course: the body. Warm skin on cool sheets. The blood’s night hum. Summer heat seeping through damp moss. The raw smell of an oak tree opened in winter. A long-missed voice over the telephone. So much to love that life should be made out of loving, so many ways of loving that all stories should be love stories. This one is about a man and a woman. Adam and Elizabeth. They’re on a library committee and on their way to buy cut-rate cookies for a fundraising tea. It’s the winter after she told him about Carl.

  The car is dark green, freshly waxed and polished to a gleam that sends the slate grey February sky flickering back into itself as the car pulls off the highway and into the shopping centre parking lot.

  “You know,” Elizabeth says, “I have a crazy idea.”

  This is a long time ago. It is 1972. Elizabeth is in her late thirties. C
reamy skin with a slight cast, high cheekbones, a thick fall of chestnut hair that curves suggestively over the shoulders of her black wool coat, hazy blue eyes she turns inquiringly towards Adam. A beautiful woman: almost elegant and almost exotic, a woman difficult to place. A woman from somewhere else who is beautiful and used to being thought beautiful but who finds the question of her physical appearance, all things considered, uninteresting.

  Adam takes the key out of the ignition and slowly strips off his gloves. He has big hands that go with his height, long white fingers, soft.

  “Did you hear me?”

  “Yes. You said you had a crazy idea. What is it?”

  “I thought that instead of buying cookies we could go to a motel.”

  Adam looks down at his gloves, his hands, the key. He sets the gloves on the seat between himself and Elizabeth, slides the key into the ignition. Very slowly, very carefully, he backs the car out of its parking place, drives out of the lot and eases onto the highway.

  “We don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Elizabeth says. Though of course she knows he wants to, she has only to look at his face, normally as pale, as cool, as transparent as his eyes. Her own skin is also flushed. She can feel her earlobes tingling, the corners of her mouth.

  They pass two sets of traffic lights and come to the first cluster of motels at the edge of town. “We’d better keep going for a while,” Adam says, “if keeping things secret is part of it.”

  Then he does something exceptional in the extreme: he lifts his right hand from the wheel and puts it on Elizabeth’s sleeve. She undoes her seatbelt, moves closer to him, takes his hand, slides it under her black wool coat, squeezes her thighs together until he can feel her nylons digging into his skin.

  “Don’t wait too long,” she says and settles down to watch the road.

  About a month later she called him at night.

  “Take Anna Karenina,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Used to be my favourite cow. Before she ruined her life over a man who wasn’t worth it. Some people would say that’s a mistake. What do you think?”

  Adam was at home. He had never read Anna Karenina but knew his mother had. The book was in the walnut case upstairs, the one with the glass doors, beside War and Peace. They were in matching leatherbound editions, thin paper with gilt edges. He could picture the faded chocolate-pebbled leather, the raised ridges across the spine.

  “You wouldn’t want to ruin your life,” Adam said. Nor he supposed would he have wanted to ruin his. Although it was a dilemma—him ruining his own or others’ lives—that had occupied him for the past several years. Without conclusion.

  “You disappoint me,” Elizabeth said. He strained to understand.

  “You mean she wanted to ruin her life and ruining it over a man was the only available way?”

  “Almost but not really,” she said. “Because a man was the only available way, ruining her life was all she could do. There was nothing else.”

  In the middle of the night Adam woke up. Or realized that he hadn’t yet slept. He put on his dressing gown, a threadbare once-turquoise satin fantasy with a tasselled belt that had belonged to his father and went to the bookcase to find Anna Karenina. It was so many decades since anyone had taken it off the shelf that it had stuck to War and Peace. They came apart with a sad dry popping sound. He brought Anna Karenina down to the kitchen and set it on the old pine breakfast table he always ate on—the dining-room table and most of the chairs were permanently mounded with papers and bills—and heated himself a pot of milk. He mixed his chocolate the old-fashioned way: two teaspoons stirred into a few drops of cold water to make a smooth paste, adding the hot milk just after it began to bubble at the edges. As he poured, it scalded on the lip of the pot and the familiar smell soothed him right away.

  Adam opened the book to the first page. “All happy families resemble each other, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way…” And suddenly he could hear Flora reading those words to him. He was back on the gold-brocaded couch, long gone, wedged into the corner formed by the arm with the woollen doily and the back cushion that bulged, his feet tangled with his mother’s. She was lying down, her head on the other arm, and after she read those words she repeated them. She continued: “Everything was upset in the Oblonsky house.” Unlike their own where nothing was ever upset. Now, after a gap of merely thirty years, he understood what she was trying to tell him. “Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” In the Oblonsky house “everything was upset.” But his mother’s unhappiness, an issue he had never previously considered, expressed itself by being covered over. By the smooth seamless surface of the everyday. Unexpected: to be sitting in your kitchen in the middle of the night when you are thirty-nine years old and what you are thinking about is whether or not your mother was unhappy.

  But of course she had been unhappy. Her husband at war, no job, only a few friends and a bizarre child that tied her to this life of waiting. He was sitting there, sipping his hot chocolate and feeling guilty about having been that bizarre child that tied his mother to her unhappy life when a completely different question, equally obvious, arrived: all those happy families that “resemble each other”—what are they like? But of course he knew: they are like something seen from outside—a light-strung Christmas tree glimpsed through a curtained window; a bicycle carelessly abandoned on a lawn; a group standing around a barbecue, sunburned, beers in hand, children tugging at them. The happy families are always seen from a distance because when you get close the illusion melts.

  Then Adam thought about his own family, himself and his secrets, those huge rocks that the passage of time and a certain amount of Scotch had worn down to something smooth and almost bearable. There was Carl—now six—who at various moments he was able to believe might be his. There was Maureen whom, in the end, he couldn’t decide to sacrifice. There was Elizabeth for whom he was the sacrifice, constantly offered. Or then again, perhaps he had no family at all, just a few people he wished he could call his own.

  The next afternoon Elizabeth telephoned again. “You wouldn’t happen to be free…,” she began. He looked out his office door to the showroom, pale blue eyes locked as he calculated how many minutes it would take to make a necessary deposit at the bank. He had no idea what Elizabeth had in mind: some library emergency he supposed, or perhaps something about Carl. “It would be better if we went in separate cars this time. You could meet me at the shopping centre where we went before, pick me up in the parking lot,” she suggested.

  It was four weeks since that first trip to the motel and they hadn’t spoken of it since. Like that first New Year’s Eve it simply stood as an event, completely unique, beyond anything else he’d ever known, impossible to judge or evaluate. They’d gone, they’d done, they’d bought cookies. Afterwards they’d driven home, hardly touching but for their hands, which stayed locked together the whole time, fingers constantly stroking, caressing, turning on each other in a last continuing echo. He’d brought her to the school where her car was parked and after slowly drawing her hand from his, she’d got out. She hadn’t offered a kiss, a goodbye. She’d just climbed out of his car and walked away, her shoulders ever-so-slightly hunched with shame or regret—or was he only imagining that, the way he might have imagined her eyes burning for McKelvey? He’d waited for a moment to make sure her car started before driving back to his house, free to think whatever he wanted. The possibly imagined set of her shoulders had discouraged him from the idea that it might happen a second time. Now his face glowed its lighthouse red. He stood up and closed his office door, returned to the phone.

  “I have to go to the bank,” he said. “I could meet you in an hour.”

  “Don’t sound so enthusiastic.” She had a teasing note in her voice that he was coming to recognize. How it could have taken him so long, he didn’t know. All he knew was that he felt eager. To please, to be pleased. That was a novelty he suddenly knew he could count on: being pleased by Eliza
beth.

  “I am very enthusiastic,” he said. “My enthusiasm is without limit.”

  “That’s better.”

  At the bank he stood in line twitching nervously, hardly able to speak even about the weather. His business accomplished, he drove too fast, worrying the whole way that she would crash or change her mind or get a flat tire. The sky was brilliantly clear, the sun a shivering yellow splash on his shining roof. He stopped at the liquor store to buy a bottle of white wine and a corkscrew but still arrived at the shopping centre fifteen minutes early. He got out of his car, paced around nervously thinking she might be parked in a different section. In this unimpeded sunlight his hands looked whiter than usual. And even though he’d done nothing but replay in his mind the two hours of that first forbidden afternoon, he now remembered something different: the sight of his long white hand on her ribs, the way with the heel of his hand resting against her hip bone, the tips of his fingers landed just beneath her breast. How bizarre it had seemed that so many diverse and various landscapes of her kingdom—hip, belly, ribs, breast—could be encompassed by something so insignificant as his hand. To satisfy himself this memory was real he twisted to place the heel of his hand on his own hip, just to see how far his fingers would stretch. He was doubled over sideways, trying to estimate the exact necessary compensation for the fact that she was much shorter than him, when a car pulled up.

  Two women got out, looked at him oddly, started off towards the supermarket.

  It was another half-hour before Elizabeth arrived. By this time he was back in his car, drenched with sweat, reading a newspaper he’d bought from the coin box. She came towards him, running, her coat open, purse slung over her shoulder, a blue and red kerchief knotted around her neck; and he thought nothing in the world could be more desirable than her throat.