Elizabeth and After

by Matt Cohen

  Carl looked down at his hands. Always rock steady, they were trembling now, an uncontrollable high-frequency shudder that he couldn’t will to stop. He forced himself behind the counter, gripped his pen tightly, numbly registered the videos and took the money. Adam Goldsmith was still standing at the Academy Awards shelves. Carl could see him out of the corner of his eye; he was planted in the aisle, reading and playing with his coffee. From the moment Carl had told Chrissy he was coming home he had known this was the bargain, the price he’d have to pay to be in his own place with his own daughter: getting the accident thrown in his face whenever he was least ready. And it would never end. For the rest of his life he would be Carl McKelvey, the boy who drove his mother into a tree.

  The customers kept coming until after eleven. It got so busy he didn’t see Adam leave, nor did he notice Arnie Kincaid arrive—he just came upon him standing at the end of the counter with his usual cup of coffee, a pile of videos ready to check out, while he leafed through the magazine of future releases. When Carl started cleaning the store Arnie hung in for a second cup of coffee and Carl had to lend him the key for the supermarket washroom. Finally it was closing time. Carl locked up, then went outside to his truck and stood for a moment in the darkness.

  The town had slowed down to a few clusters of voices, music coming from an open window. An almost peaceful feeling though Ellie’s visit had left him anything but. He got into his truck and drove slowly past Adam’s.

  The modest two-storey brick house with its sharply peaked gable would have looked like a small face with a big nose had it not been for the tall pine tree that blurred the effect and scattered the light glowing from the living-room window. Beside the house was a garage with a covered walkway connecting it to the side door and in front of the garage—no one in West Gull seemed to use their garage for its intended purpose—was parked Adam’s car, a dark forest green that matched his tree.

  From Adam’s house he continued down to the lake and around the crescents of the old section of West Gull until he reached the R&R. He glided to a stop beneath a big oak that sheltered his truck from the street lamp. In the R&R’s bedroom wings all the windows were dark. McKelvey would be in his bed, the way he’d seen him often enough at the farm, splayed out and snoring, dreaming whatever old man’s dreams he had left. Last Sunday Carl had brought Lizzie to visit and the three of them had sat on the porch having what Lizzie had decided was a little tea party. She was always offering McKelvey something, passing more cookies and sugar and buttering slices of bread for him. When he took out a package of cigarettes Lizzie looked so disapproving you would have thought his clothes had flown off. She took the pack right out of his hand and asked him in a very serious voice if he had considered the health consequences of smoking.

  “The health consequences of smoking,” McKelvey had repeated. “Where did you learn words like that?”

  “In school this week,” Lizzie said primly, “and I know what’s good for you. My mother and father have both pledged to stop smoking and you can, too.”

  “I have,” McKelvey said. “Dozens of times.”

  “That’s not funny to your loved ones,” said Lizzie, then she had raised her rear end and sat on his pack.

  When Moira came by Lizzie gave her the crushed remains of McKelvey’s vice and asked her to throw them in the garbage. Carl, sitting on the steps, found himself watching Moira’s calves as she walked away.

  In the converted barns where some of the staff lived and in the kitchen and great hall of the R&R itself, the lights were still on. Moira lived in, Carl knew. McKelvey had told him she was a lawyer’s daughter from upstate New York. The family had vacationed in the area. She could well be in the kitchen having a last cup of coffee. Years ago, after Lizzie was born and things had started to unravel with Chrissy, he’d had a habit of getting in his truck and driving around, looking for something. Late at night you could believe almost any lit doorway or window was an invitation waiting to be accepted.

  Carl started up his truck again, went back to Main Street, past the Long Gull Lake Inn and headed out to the highway. On nights he worked the late shift and didn’t have Lizzie he would either go home or visit Ray Johnson. He’d never spoken to him about the business he’d imagined because Ray had told him he was saving to start a family. Who with, Carl didn’t know but he always called before he dropped by, though Ray was always free. They’d sit on Ray’s new screen porch and drink and watch the water. Sometimes they would gossip. Ray could do a good imitation of Fred squirting overly hot coffee from his mouth, even if it was a waste of good beer. And Carl could work up a hoarse whisper that sounded a lot like Nancy Brookner asking him if he had any sex films suitable for kids. Eventually Ray would pick up his old gut-string guitar and pluck away at some song while Carl moaned along on the harmonica. At the senior high-school concert they’d brought down the house pretending to be Bruce Springsteen drunk and crying on the streets of West Gull. When Ray had collapsed onto the stage he’d fallen so hard Carl had to drag him off.

  It was before midnight but Carl didn’t feel like seeing Ray. His blood was still crawling with what Ellie had said. Even though he was halfway home he turned around and headed back into West Gull, and when he got to Ellie’s house and saw that the lights were on but she had no company he switched off his headlamps and parked beside her car.

  He got out of his truck the way he used to, wondering if he would be hating himself when he got back, closed the door softly. Her curtains were drawn but there was a small gap and he was just looking through it, thinking she must have gone to bed and left the lights on, when she appeared, her blonde hair wet from the shower and hanging close to her skull the way it did after swimming, a towel wrapped around her waist.

  Carl backed away so quickly he tripped on a shrub and fell to the ground with a thud he imagined loud enough to wake the whole town. But as he scrambled to his feet nothing happened. No dogs barked, no sirens wailed, no Ellie Dean came to the door.

  He’d closed that door behind him more than once but now he went back to his truck, eased out of her driveway and glided slowly down her road towards the highway and the Balfer place. There was no one he was planning to tell but the news was that Ellie Dean was looking pretty good. Narrow waist, not a hint of a fold in her belly, full pale breasts with a crescent of suntan extending down from her throat the way it always had. Come to think of it, there was a whole world of women out there—an extremely small world—women he’d wanted and held and known, women with whom he’d groaned and moaned. If his ad-hoc survey was any indication, every one of them was probably looking as good as ever, every one of them was more grown up than she used to be and every one of them knew he was only the fucked-up drunken teenager he’d always been who’d got older but not much else. Yet, if Chrissy, Ellie and Moira were any examples, every one of them was one way or another on the loose, so desperate that even he was an attraction. But here he was driving home alone. Tonight, seeing Ellie in a towel had been enough to settle him down. Maybe he would tell Ray Johnson about this after all, this late-night non-knightly non-tryst, this aborted late-night lonesome wolf howl, where if Ellie Dean had walked into her own living room dressed in the jeans and sweatshirt she’d been wearing earlier that evening, he might have knocked at her door. Instead, seeing her undressed—but no more undressed than they would both have ended up—he had for some peculiar reason lost interest and driven home, happily ensconced in the nothing that had happened, so content that the only drink he needed was a half a glass of cold water, which was strong enough to send him straight to bed and to nine of hours of sleep that ended only when Lizzie telephoned to tell him he was four minutes late.

  Sunday nights were the slowest. At the Movie Barn, the end of the weekend was a low tide that deposited a few returned movies and a lot of empty time before retreating completely. A beach littered with garbage. That’s how Ellie Dean had left him feeling the other night. He poured himself a coffee from the machine, always a sign of boredom,
and as penance paid the styrofoam cup two loonies.

  Ellie Dean: he should have known it would be her. In high school she’d been the cheerleader type, always behind the bench at hockey games or hanging around with girls who bantered with boys like him, boys who were better at sports than studying. She was blonde, petite, not exactly pretty but there was something eager about her that made her easy to talk to so when she asked him for a drive home he thought nothing of it. Back then she lived right in West Gull; her father had taken off for Toronto, her older sister had gone to the Maritimes and her mother was working the long shift four days a week at the Zellers.

  The first time she had invited him in was to help him with geometry. Walking into her house with her he felt as though his body might fall apart from all the electricity jumping around and when she turned to close the door such a jolt went through him he couldn’t move. But she was just fixing the lock. After that she led him into the kitchen where they spread their books on the table and she made them a snack of grilled cheese sandwiches in the frying pan.

  He’d never actually been in a bed with someone. She was shy, made him close his eyes while she undressed and insisted on pulling the sheet over their heads. In their pale illuminated tent filled with the fragrance of her milky skin and the sweetly sour remnants of her perfume, he lay on top of her the way she wanted him to, unmoving, waiting, her chin dug into his shoulder and her arms wrapped tightly around his back while he stared down into the pillow. “Don’t move until I tell you,” she instructed. Her hands slid down his back and then her fingers hooked into his buttocks, locking him into position from both ends. Every time a car went by he thought it was her mother home from Zellers and that he’d have to jump up and hide in her closet until morning. “Are you hating this?” she asked him. “No, no, it’s great.” Her stomach muscles were banded against his, he raised his head and looked down at her face. Her eyes were squeezed tight, tears trickled down her cheeks. He kissed her tears, her eyelids, ran his tongue along the narrow ridge of her nose. “This is crazy, isn’t it?” she said. He pushed up to look down at the V where their bodies joined. In the light that strained through the sheet her pubic hair was a delicate damp pale gold. Lying in Ellie Dean’s bed, covered by a sheet and wedged between her teddy bears, as well as being inside that place surrounded by those beautiful golden curls, Carl was again gripped by the same overexcited electric buzz that had hit him as they walked in the door. “You’re trembling,” Ellie said. She had gone from leaking tears to weeping and Carl was just about to offer to withdraw, electricity and all, when whatever it was inside her unlocked and she began a long liquid shudder that made Carl close his eyes again as they clung together like two sailors trying to survive an unexpected storm.

  Two minutes later they were back at the kitchen table for another round of grilled cheese sandwiches and apple juice. “These theorems are incredibly easy,” Ellie said, a bit of beard burn on the left side of her chin and jaw but otherwise entirely restored and ready to face the news from Zellers. “All you have to do is concentrate on the first few, make sure you really understand them, then the rest will make sense on their own.” Concentrate. There was something about the way she said “concentrate” that reminded Carl of his mother looking over his shoulder as he worked at the kitchen table.

  In the end what he liked best with Ellie was lying under her tent, those few times they felt free to, looking at her naked body in the filtered light. Just being there with that cool skin, the spun gold hair that surrounded everything nervous and needing about Ellie, breathing easy after the frantic locking together, then pushing back the sheet and feeling the air dry the moisture on his belly and thighs.

  The only time she truly relaxed with him was talking. Sometimes they would walk out from school to go sit by the lake and she’d chatter on about the different families in West Gull. For two years after her father left, her mother had made ends meet by cleaning houses. For every household with enough money to afford to pay someone else to do the dirty work, Mrs. Dean had apparently found more than enough dirt, which was why as soon as Ellie was old enough to come home alone, she had grabbed the sales job in Kingston.

  Perhaps Chrissy “stole” Carl, as Ellie later put it, though if there was an actual moment when he decided to switch, Carl had missed it. He knew only that he’d gone to that last New Year’s dating Ellie, then danced with Chrissy and had to fight Fred. The next day, after the accident, it was Chrissy at the house, Chrissy by his side, Chrissy somehow having taken possession of him when he didn’t know he was available to be owned. Even at the funeral Chrissy clung to his arm as if the grief was equally hers, while all he could remember of Ellie was looking up once and seeing her in the crowd. Her eyes had been on him and they didn’t move away but the drawn accusing face hadn’t even flickered in recognition. At that moment it seemed to Carl whatever he was in with Chrissy, this life-and-death drama, was a planet away from those baby steps he and Ellie had taken together. By the time a week or two had passed and he’d seen Chrissy every day, the event he hadn’t noticed was over: he’d become Chrissy’s and Chrissy was his. Losing themselves in each other’s bodies had become what they did all night and all previous ties had burned away.

  Eventually he started to see Ellie Dean again: when losing himself in Chrissy had gradually been replaced by losing himself in drink; Ellie had been through a quick marriage and divorce, and her mother’s sharp tongue had become her own, turned with a bitterness that Carl found satisfying. It was as though because just a few years ago they’d shared the innocent protective cocoon of Ellie’s sheet, they could now find comfort with each other in this new place—not a tent filled with pale golden light but a purgatory of self-hate and uncertainty where the only sure thing was that another few drinks and another few cigarettes would use up some of those empty hours after midnight. Sometimes they would go to bed together but with Ellie, by this time, Carl felt old—not just older than they’d been in high school but old, old like an apple with thickening skin and a rotting core, old in a way he didn’t want to feel with Ellie or even expose her to; surely she’d had enough poison from him the first time around. By the time he moved in with Ray Johnson she was just an occasional stop on a desperate night, a place he’d cruise by once in a long while and if he saw her light on he’d park the truck quietly and look through her window to make sure she was alone before knocking.

  He was just picturing how he used to find Ellie those nights—lying on her back on her couch, holding a book stiff-armed above her eyes because she’d been told this position was good for her posture and would ward off dowager’s hump—when Nancy Brookner came in. Her hair was windblown, her face puffy as though she’d been drinking.

  “Isn’t that a scandal about the new dump site? You’d think the township would be smart enough not to get held up on something like that. Bob says they were looking for a place twenty years ago.”

  Carl nodded.

  Nancy set her return movies on the counter. Two martial-arts ball-breakers—“for the kids,” she had explained—and an old Barbara Stanwyck black-and-white for herself because Bob had spent the evening at old-timers’ hockey practice.

  “How’s business?” Whenever she asked a question she raised her eyebrows. “Did it rain over by your place the other night? The way everyone’s talking drought you’d think the whole town was going to blow away like a pile of sticks.”

  “You’d think,” Carl said. Though those storm clouds that never stormed had been coming and going all day and when Nancy opened the door he had smelled rain in the wind.

  “What are you so happy about anyway? Out dancing last night?”

  The fact that she had seen him leaving the dance with Chrissy was something Nancy referred to whenever she got the chance. “I just drove her home,” Carl had told her the first time, repeating it twice more before giving up. If Nancy Brookner wanted to think he was the town stud, why not? She rented three movies a day and lately that made up a big part of his business
.

  “People ever ask your advice on sexy movies?” Nancy now asked.

  “Like man, give me something with some action?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No.”

  “Just wondering.” She was moving along the aisles. “I think it’s wrong that people take pictures of each other doing those things. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned but I like strangers better with their clothes on.”

  Carl had no idea what to say. He tried, “Takes all kinds.”

  “What’s that mean, takes all kinds? I wish there weren’t all kinds. I wish there were just people like … you know what I mean.”

  “I guess,” Carl said.

  Now Nancy had made her selection and he was writing it down in the log.

  “They should get you a computer for this.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “I would have thought this would be the most boring job in the world. You don’t even watch movies any more. When I first started coming in, you always had something on at least. You reading books now? Or does that newspaper last you all day?”

  Carl kept writing. He didn’t know what it was about Nancy Brookner. One morning he had been sitting at the kitchen table eating his toast and doing a crossword, and it had come into his mind that he could dial Nancy’s number and she would most likely be at home eating her own breakfast, nothing better to do than wait for him to open the shop so she could come and ask questions. Or look at him and wonder whatever it was she wondered about him. He could just call her up and say he was home alone for another couple of hours. He’d even taken out the telephone book and found her number. Now she was leaning over the counter, so close to him he could see the fluorescent lights reflected in her eyes. Grey eyes, a dark bitter grey that made him feel the way he had when he’d been leafing through the phone book.