Exit Lines

by Joan Barfoot

  Ha ha ha. But maybe that’s the kind of thing that made Ruth think they too could do anything and still get off the hook. That they’d help her because they’re old and she’s old and nobody would notice or care.

  “My point,” Ruth is saying, “is that what I’m talking about is just more immediate than some of the things we’re already responsible for. Only one step past knowing.”

  “Rather more than a step, I think.” Sylvia, chilly.

  “You know,” as if Ruth didn’t hear, “there was a time when I assumed human nature had to be on an upswing, give or take the occasional genocide, the kind of mass insanity that causes a holocaust.” She glances at Greta, then away; ordinarily she wouldn’t make such a reference. “But mainly I figured that in the evolutionary nature of things, humans had to be improving. Now I can’t imagine why I thought any such thing. Now I think, no, we know more—we can know practically anything we set out to learn—so in some ways we’re smarter than, say, your average Neanderthal, but we’re no better. And there’s nothing better to look ahead to. There’s no chance of a magic moment when people will realize they could stop causing grief, there’ll just be the same old famines and slaughters and, okay, some rescues and acts of generosity here and there, on and on. Nothing, nothing at all, will ever be new, except perhaps in the details.”

  As if everyone is so wicked. What about goodness, the good acts people perform, their goodwill, is that nothing? Why, some people give their whole lives to goodness. Not Greta, of course, and not George or Sylvia, either. Maybe that’s why Ruth thinks they’ll help.

  “So as I say, as you see, I’m just about done. Nearly out of steam. I’m not depressed in the ways doctors talk about, and I don’t actively hate my life—in fact it’s quite lovely much of the time, and even especially lovely these days, with a deadline coming up, as it were, and there’s a great deal I’m fond of, including you three. I realize it’s unusual to feel this is it, but I assure you, it isn’t unique. I want to be clear, I wouldn’t like any misunderstandings.”

  They’re four people in a room; of course three of them aren’t going to entirely hear what Ruth must think she is saying—how could she have spent a lifetime with other human beings and still, even now, not know that? Even a golfer, a bridge player, a board chair, much less a mother or a father, knows more about misunderstanding than that. Still, no point saying so if Ruth is as finished as she says, with no more to learn. “Tell me,” Sylvia says instead, “did you cultivate Greta and George and me because you thought from the start we’d be likely candidates? Was there something when you first clapped eyes on us that made you say to yourself, There’s a bunch of killers, if ever I saw a bunch of killers?”

  Even with its morsel of truth, that’s just crude. “If you remember,” Ruth says, “we drifted into the lounge at roughly the same time that first week, no mystery about it, just serendipity. But now there’s nobody else here I would trust to ask, and we’ve shown how we’ll look after each other, as best we can.”

  Sylvia wasn’t a lawyer’s wife, or for that matter a lawyer’s lover, for nothing. She wouldn’t have minded being a lawyer herself, come to that. “So just to be straight, you’re reasonably pleased with your days and your friends, you’re not depressed, but you’re discouraged by human nature, there are wars, lies and tortures, and enough carelessness and greed that the earth itself is on its last legs, and you can’t see anything getting better, if anything only worse, and you’ve decided you’re done, finished, ready to shuffle off this mortal coil altogether, preferably with our help and at least in our company, because even if just about everything else on earth is doomed, we are friends—is that a fair summary, do I have it right?”

  Ruth frowns. How fierce Sylvia sounds. “More or less.” Less, really.

  “Then I’d have to say that’s all a pretty big crock, wouldn’t you?”

  18

  NOT AN IMPOSSIBLE ACT…

  A CROCK. RUTH SMILES AT THEM, then stops smiling.

  What a liar she is.

  No, only an incomplete teller of truth; presumably a lesser form of fraud. Technically, catastrophe on every conceivable level should be sufficient, shouldn’t it, to an aim which in that light might even be self-sacrificing and noble? Noble, however, is not one of the words springing so far to anyone’s lips, nor, unfortunately, is sufficient.

  So call it half a crock. The rest, the part Ruth has left out, is something else entirely.

  The trouble, one trouble, with what she has not said is that words spoken aloud can be much like a foot placed slightly wrong, weight shifted slightly to one hip rather than both, one shoulder raised slightly higher than the other—she could easily send herself crashing. Even now, that would matter. She would like to leave, if possible, in fairly composed fashion, not flailing through air.

  The most important thing in the end, any end, is to know a person has done the very best she knows how to, and could not have done more. At least twice, though, Ruth has allowed desire to overwhelm duty. Once was when she was very young and chose tumbling and vaulting over her parents’ fears for her bones.

  Bernard was her second. He can still send her flying.

  When he knocked at her office door, she looked up from her desk to a pleasant-featured, medium-sized, round-faced, blue-eyed, blondish, freckly man, close to thirty, as she was herself. She was disinclined to welcome this new colleague, since she was disinclined to share her office. Certainly there was little sanctuary at home, where Ruth now cooked the suppers for her parents, watched TV in the evenings with them, played rounds of cribbage or hearts. She wasn’t the only daughter in town who’d deferred life in the interests of parents (sons rarely deferred anything, and if they did, they tended, she thought, to be strange, pitiful men), and the tight tweedy lives of those daughters were not reassuring; were, in fact, as disheartening as just about any sadly mistreated child who might crop up in Ruth’s work. “I feel bad you made such sacrifices for us,” said her mother, and Ruth noted the past tense: case closed. She no longer spoke of someday returning to another life, having seen their fluttering panic, and tried not to dream of it, either.

  Once, they’d been good at survival: a lesson in holding a portion of courage in reserve, since it seems the need for it arises at any time, right up to and including the end.

  “Hi,” Bernard said from her doorway. “I’m sorry about this. I bet the last thing you want is some stranger suddenly taking up half your space.” She stopped frowning. “I hope you like coffee. I brought us both some, in hopes it’d make you think well of me anyway.”

  So it did, somewhat.

  He too was to work with the fractured, but unlike her had deliberately sought out this small city after several years of doing similar work in a large one. When he spoke of the beauties he admired and looked forward to exploring in surrounding nature, the rivers, rocks, lakes, fields and woods of the region, she took him to be one of those naive urbanites who considered rocks merely romantic. When he said he figured opportunities would be greater here than “getting lost inside a bigger bureaucracy,” she was relieved to hear hard-headed ambition. “There’s more management layers back there,” he told her, “which slows down the decisions, and you know, bad things can happen to kids while you’re waiting.”

  Apparently one or two very bad things had happened, it wasn’t just the splendours of rivers and woods that brought him to her door. Nor was it only an ambition to be in charge, although eventually he was, which by then was both more and less awkward than they might have supposed. Like Ruth, he was burdened in his work by single-mindedness. That toddler who’d been plunked on a hot stove-top by her mother’s boyfriend?—Bernard was as fierce as Ruth, in agency meetings and in court, about keeping the child from being returned to what had passed for a home. She thought his fervency brave considering his ambitions—zealots don’t get promoted—but when he was engaged in the fight for a child’s well-being, his whole body seemed to rise up and sharpen, growing bony and tense
, a dog on the scent transformed from roly-poly puppy to lean, hungry hound. To have this ally…Ruth began waking in her pink-wallpapered, white-trimmed childhood bedroom each morning keen to be up and out, trading cases and stories and coffees, giving advice, offering tactics. What had made her think she did not need help, and could go on unsupported?

  Plus he asked how she was, what was new, how her parents were doing. He mentioned it when she got a haircut, or a new dress. He paid attention. He fell into her life like, oh, something hard and feathery both, and she found herself moving again like a gymnast, with a rediscovered once-upon-a-time, look-at-me grace.

  Until out in the parking lot on a spring after-dark night, about to head home, Ruth to fragile parents, Bernard to solitary apartment, he caught at her hand instead of waving good-night, and pulled her closer, and bent, and they kissed.

  She’d forgotten lips. She’d forgotten shoulders, a body. “Should we?” she asked nevertheless; was this wise, she meant, for two people working together?

  “We should. Definitely we should.”

  With this, so simply and swiftly, she acquired brutality—the second time desire overwhelmed duty. “I’ll be out,” she told her parents as she settled them in the living room with the TV after dinner. “But I won’t be late, don’t worry.” How, after all, could they stop her, those two little people?

  As long as she didn’t look in their faces, she was free, for a few hours, for regular life, the kind regular people conducted. She imagined this must be something like an animal—a chipmunk, a bear—emerging squinting and blinking out of dark hibernation into the light. Because in the company of Bernard, even this familiar town dazzled; something of a miracle. They went to movies and held hands and went afterwards to the customary Ritz on the main street for coffee or, in the backroom bar, for a drink. Bernard packed picnics and they drove to beaches and parks where, he said, he enjoyed hearing of Ruth as a child in those same unaltered places, with her since-much-altered mother and father. She showed him the side-by-side clothing stores they had once run, where she’d played among the long legs of customers. They walked around town in the evenings looking into open-draped windows, glimpsing lives, pausing on sidewalks to remark on people’s choices in art, pointing out good taste, making fun of the bad. They talked about cases and work, and their histories and ambitions; about how they had been when they were young, and how they had changed. They cooked late-night meals together in Bernard’s apartment. She picked up, and put down, photographs of him with his family: a mother, two older brothers, all living far away on the western edge of the country, and a father, already dead. “I left by leaving,” Bernard told her, as if that was the only way it could have been done. He called his mother “a hard worker—well, she had to be.” He didn’t care for his brothers. Once he’d been engaged, “but we found we were too different. For one thing, she wouldn’t move.” For another, and another? He didn’t say, and Ruth admired his reluctance to discuss that other woman’s shortcomings. For her part, she could tell him she’d had three boyfriends, lovers, in her years away at university, but was free to be similarly close-mouthed on the details. Which anyway were long past and didn’t matter.

  His apartment was not only a location for food and talk. It was where they grew acquainted too with how well her body retained the powerful and flexible qualities of the gymnast, and how receptive his was to experiment and delight. How lightly the word love is thrown around. I love your dress, I love spinach, I love my child. Love is a radiation. It alters temperature, vision, every cell of the body.

  Children weren’t the only people whose lives Bernard saved.

  They had their brief, unceremonious wedding within a year of her thirtieth birthday, Ruth in pastel pink suit, Bernard in then-modish charcoal.

  And two mournful witnesses. “I’ll come by every day, I promise,” she told her mother and father when she and Bernard pooled their resources and bought their small house, “but we need our own home.” At some point, sauve qui peut, as Sylvia no doubt would say.

  A decade after his first, her father had another big heart attack, except this one killed him in a moment of sliding sideways in his recliner. Ruth thought—she thinks—what a reward and relief it must be to die in a sudden, unprepared instant. Like that, or in a head-on high-speed crash on the blind brow of a hill, with only a single last horrified thought; maybe just a single last horrified view, no requirement to rise, or not rise, to an occasion from which there is no possibility whatever of rescue. Daddy, Ruth thought at his funeral. Her father looked almost young; healthy, even. Ready to leap up and start his whole once-brave life all over again. What had happened to that? How she wept.

  So did her mother. Who, no less helpless and lost as a widow, eventually moved in with Ruth and Bernard, who was more patient than Ruth always managed to be. Her mother got cancer—breast, then lung and liver—and went into hospital and finally died. Bernard embraced both the dying woman and Ruth. These aren’t tendernesses that pass from the mind, they are not small, forgettable gestures. Sylvia, who of course knew Bernard, if only in passing, said once, hearing some of this, “He sounds quite the saint.”

  Ruth found her tone offensive. “He was a damned kind, smart man,” she snapped. With his freckles, his soft flesh, his round face and good heart, Bernard, she could see, was not the type of man Sylvia would have been drawn to; nor probably Greta. But men like Bernard try harder than those who can rely largely on their skin, bones and charm. “He was sexy, too,” Ruth added. “Very creative and clever. Totally satisfying.” Take that, Sylvia Lodge, connoisseur of bad and good men.

  She would always be fierce on Bernard’s behalf; as he would be on hers. A marriage is bound to be mysterious. Hers was certainly different from Greta’s cut-short one, and Sylvia’s come-and-go one, and who knows about George’s? The point now is that from beginning to end, one way and another and by one person and another, Ruth has been luxuriously, thoroughly loved. And she has repaid, if not perfectly, as best she could, in as many ways as she could. And love is not an unmixed blessing. Its loss and absence can in some circumstances feel startlingly free, quite a relief.

  What can she say, as Sylvia and Greta work away at the exercising of George’s limbs, pushing and pulling, so they’ll feel Bernard? Without dangerously feeling too much herself, can she make plain any of the thousands of individual moments of joy? Can she speak about the smooth skimming of her hand over his body, soft as skin cream? Of the delicious, remarkable splendour of the rising penis, which anyway they must know? Of tracing moles—two close together high on his left breast, three on his shoulder blades, one on his left buttock, round and readable as Braille—and of adding up a confetti of freckles scattered top to toe, back and front, infinitely uncountable? How about the two of them after a hard winter storm, out shovelling the driveway together, lifting and lowering, lifting and lowering, growing warm and humid under their woolly hats and puffed jackets, pausing, laughing, taking each other’s hands and throwing themselves backwards into the snow, creating a single multi-armed, multi-legged angel? Or Saturday afternoons in the kitchen together—how he enjoyed food, how securely stocky he grew—making salad dressings and pickles, mixing cookies, baking a cake? Sunday mornings in bed?

  Or weekdays in the hard labour of salvaging children? When Bernard became her supervisor at work, things were sometimes tricky between them, with some matters they each couldn’t discuss—a difficulty she might have with a colleague, a budget dilemma that had to stay at his desk, and of course there was the particular care to be always professional on the job. Bernard used to say, though, to everyone, not just to her, “Our job is the kids. If we keep our eyes on that ball, it’s hard to go wrong.” Mistakes might get made, but he meant that they shouldn’t be made for wrong reasons like office politics or bad moods or personal problems or lazy days. It was always “consider the kids.”

  Greta asked once, in that context, “But did he also not want to have children?” apparently never supposing
that was a very rude question.

  If Greta hadn’t had children, she would probably have gone back home to her family when her husband was killed, and then she’d have had an incomprehensibly different life and would now be an ocean away from the Idyll Inn. It really doesn’t do to imagine alternative lives. “We liked what we had,” Ruth told her. “Remember, we were in our thirties when we got married. Obviously that’s not too late to start a family, but by then we didn’t want to mess up what we’d finally found. Our own families weren’t entirely happy, and we wanted to do what we wanted, not have to look after anyone else any more.”

  A blessing still. How can parents, grandparents—Sylvia, Greta and George—not be in a pure panic when fresh catastrophes arise all the time, and unforeseen dangers; when antes keep getting upped, further extraordinary shocks and deprivations soon lie ahead, and who wants to leave loved ones living on into all that destruction and turmoil?

  Who wants to live into all that destruction and turmoil themselves?

  Ruth tried that argument, and Sylvia called her bluff. A crock, as she put it. Although it’s not; not entirely. But Ruth sees that before they’re done, she’s going to have to dive right to the bottom of the pool. Well, she knew that. It’s a deep one. Might as well be now.

  “You know one thing I miss? The aftershave Bernard wore, from the first day he appeared in my office till almost the end of his life. I’m glad nobody here wears it. I’d hate to smell it on anyone else.” She’s susceptible to scents anyway. If she concentrates, her mother’s bath powder can be resurrected as a floweriness trailing through evenings. Or there’s the city-stink, sharp and metallic—the smell of freedom—when she and Bernard took off for a weekend. The tang of warm flesh, too, in the night—oh, that can still make her reach out.