But Emma appeared not to be listening. This irritated me. She had been moody lately, it came and went without resolution, and the only time I ever heard that gorgeous laugh was when she was on the telephone to a friend.
And I couldn’t smell her any more.
“Is there anything wrong?” I asked a bit testily.
Her young eyes watered and she said, “I can’t live here any more.”
And then I made a very grand mistake, although looking back now, I wonder if it would have mattered. I decided to call her bluff, to be firm but unsympathetic, as if this were a kind of self-indulged aberration, her being so unhappy.
“Then you mustn’t,” I said.
With theatrical briskness I got up, found my coat and went out to an afternoon movie.
When I came home hours later, the coat hangers in her closet were still clinking, as if there were a wind in the house.
She never reproached me for that scene at the hospital, although something she said a few weeks later still gives me goosebumps. We were in the bedroom, her stitches had just come out, and we were looking silently out the window at a child who was skating around and around on a small ice rink in the park below. The subject of her operation came up and she said, in a voice I barely recognized, “I learned that night that I had a soul. That I had a soul and it lives in my body.”
She didn’t say anything else or turn her glance away from the skater below. It seemed as if her attention had moved on to something else, that she was trying to solve that mathematical problem again. But I could feel something in my heart contract, and for a second I thought I knew what people mean when they say they can feel someone walking over their grave.
But let me come back to the night she left, the coat hangers still stirring in her cupboard. I had been, as I said, to a movie, and crossing the park toward home (how gloomy it was, the swings rusted and damp) I noticed something in the front window of my house. The Christmas lights! She had left them on and they twinkled merrily in the window, blue, green, red and amber. She had changed her mind! Yes, she had changed her mind and decided to stay after all. I broke into a fast walk, a lump developed in my throat, my eyes watered with things I was going to say. I pulled out my keys. Perhaps I should feign surprise—What! You still here?—but no, not this time. I unlocked the door and burst into the house. Emma! Emma!
But there was no Emma. The Christmas lights flickered over the chesterfield, my desk, the carpet, the notes for my lecture the following day.
Sometime near four in the morning I awoke and the full horror was upon me. I hurried into the bathroom and flicked on the light. In the unnatural brightness I looked like a man escaped from a lunatic asylum. I opened the medicine cabinet and shook a pair of sleeping tablets into my hand, tossed them into my dry mouth. Too impatient to get a glass from the kitchen, I cupped my hands under the cold water tap and sucked noisily. It took two goes.
I phoned her at work the following morning, my voice bounding between hysteria and false bonhomie. I spoke as if somehow this was a shared experience, a ghastly little misunderstanding we were both equally dying to reverse. Comrades in a close call, so to speak.
“So how did you sleep last night?” I boomed.
“What do you mean?” she asked simply. Her confusion was authentic, and in it I saw myself bouncing at the end of a rope like a freshly hanged man. If there was a moment when the devil whispered in my ear, “It’s over,” it was then. It was as if she had gone to sleep and woken up speaking a foreign language, a language I had no access to.
She came over that night. She came over a few times after. I wept. She wept for my weeping. And then she went home. She called it that, home, this bed in a friend’s apartment. She left our place and she went home.
Morning after morning I woke up too early, the snow blowing sideways, the day stretching ahead of me. Stretching and stretching and stretching all the way to the horizon where, if you looked, you could make out a tiny, crooked tree. I taught my classes. I stared into the fireplace and waited for the phone to ring. Days went by, then weeks. Hollowed out by worry and a kind of relentless anxiousness that cut through everything, I lost weight. My pants hung from my hips. I stabbed a new hole in my belt buckle.
One night, unable to last another second, I snatched up the phone and called her. “Where are you?” I cried. She hurried over; I proposed marriage; she diplomatically declined; offered sex instead, which I gratefully embraced. But she was so silent! Looking at her young body in the bed, I swear the notion of losing her forever made me feel as if I might go mad. And then she went home.
For a while, as long as I could smell her on my hands, I felt better. But then it all started up again. I could feel the panic seize me around the ribs, slowly, like a snake, and I could hear that dreadful whisper in my ear, “She’s gone,” the last syllable like a poof when a candle is extinguished. She’s gone.
I listened to opera. I listened to Bach. On Wednesdays I went to a Cajun bar; the music excited me. I’d have one, two, three mugs of beer, the accordion shrieked, the band reeled, and I could feel my shoulders coming down. The room softened; the lights glowed; I could breathe. Yes, she’d come back. She’d be back. Just be patient. Ah yes, be patient with her. But when I came outside, the winter bared its teeth at me; the wind slapped my face; giant icicles loomed like tusks overhead; and by the time I arrived home I was frightened and sober. And there was never, never, never a message from her.
Spring came, and one fragrant afternoon I sat in the park watching a child whisper to a cat and waited for Emma to come. I sat on a picnic table, the same picnic table I had kissed her on four years before, and watched her pedal toward me on her bicycle.
Upstairs in my house (God, she was beautiful), I leaned forward in my chair, she on the couch, my fingers steepled beneath my chin, and began a practised speech. I said that she had been gone for some three months now, and three months for someone who is waiting is a long time. She nodded in silent agreement. I went on to say that when we did see each other, it was always at my behest, as it had been again that day. More nodding. She too was prepared, you could see that. She’d been on the phone (that mother again) and from the way she listened, the measured patience, I had the feeling she had reached a final decision, had perhaps a long time ago but had only now consented to the language to describe it accordingly. I wound up by saying that I didn’t need kid gloves or kind treatment but simply the truth. I opened my mouth to say more, but nothing came out, which was good because there wasn’t any more to say.
She took a moment, looked at the floor to assemble her thoughts, and said, “I am leaning in the direction of not being in love with you any more.”
To this day I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of such a bizarre notice of termination, ever. Leaning in the direction of not being in love with you any more. But I had spent too many sweaty nights, smoked too many cigarettes, lost too many pounds to allow for any ambiguity. And so I said, slowly and deliberately, looking at her pale and beautiful face, “Does that mean you don’t love me any more?”
“Yes,” she said crisply. She was prepared.
“Does that mean you don’t want me any more?”
“Yes,” she said again.
“These are terrible words, Emma.”
“Yes.”
“Is there anyone else?” I asked. “Or did I lose you all on my own?”
“All on your own,” she said with a smile.
She offered me a sexual favour, which I accepted, but I had just begun a new medical prescription and I could not see it to completion. She stayed a while longer, although I can’t imagine what we talked about.
“I shan’t walk you downstairs,” I said as she hovered in the bedroom doorway. Those were my last words to her. I lay in bed, looking down on the park, and I heard the front door close and then creak open. She came back and pulled it to firmly. I fancied, a few moments later, that I heard the rattle of her bicycle chain as she unlocked it and pulled it through her s
pokes, circling her saddle with it and locking it again. Yes, the window was open, I must have heard it. Then absolute silence, a parking lot reaching all the way to the horizon.
C H A P T E R 4
For the first few days I wandered about in a state of relief. At least I knew. But then it started up again, waking in the morning too early, imagining her in bed with her boss, spread-eagled in ecstatic, name-calling abandon. I knew enough about bodies and their predictability to know that no matter how much a woman adores you, she will invariably end up repeating her favourite repertoire in the bed of the man who replaces you. A thought that, when it struck, made me want to sit down in the street.
I went to the doctor and got a dose of stronger sleeping pills. My appetite was gone and I continued to lose weight. Students began to comment on it. I told them I had taken up jogging. I began to worry that lack of sleep and weakness were going to cost me my job. At a spring book sale a chap from the Department of Semiotics took a photograph of me and pinned it up in the faculty lounge. With uncharacteristically high cheekbones and sunken eyes, my horror dwelt in plain sight.
Women were strangely drawn to me. On the subway one evening I noticed a dark-haired woman staring at me. Normally I’m very shy, but I struck up a conversation with her. It didn’t matter what she thought of me. When we arrived at my platform, I invited her with breathtaking nonchalance to take a coffee with me. Of course she accepted. We talked for an hour, she came back to my house and we went to bed. It went quite well. Aha, I thought, this is how to do it: cure a sexual wound sexually. But when I saw her a second time a few days later, I didn’t like her face when she laughed, her prominent pink gums. I wondered how I’d missed them in the first place.
Soon afterwards a high school teacher solicited my attention in the corner grocery store. I’d seen her many times before, a narrow-shouldered woman with skin so pale it was almost blue. Living with Emma, I’d often watched her wander up the street after school, always dressed in black, and I’d entertained some rather guilty daydreams about her. There was a particular thing I wanted to do to her. En tout cas, I took her to dinner at an Italian restaurant on Baldwin Street. We had a bottle of wine, then another. I drank most of it. It went splendidly, and near eleven, the wine glowing on my face, she drove me back to my house and parked her car in the driveway. We came in the side door, and something about the way I moved, the series of habitual movements from sticking my key in the doorknob and turning it simultaneously to pushing open the door, which made a very particular squeak, to clicking on the hall light with my right hand, the keys making the same jingle they always made, suggested to me, to my body, rather, that I was coming home with Emma after another night at our local restaurant. And suddenly the notion that I was taking another woman through this sacred ritual struck me as obscene and indecent. But I was too frightened to be left alone with my own thoughts, so I offered her a drink and we settled in the living room, on the same couch where Emma had read Anna Karenina. But when I kissed her, the high school teacher, when she leaned forward and closed her eyes in a manner I thought a trifle theatrical, she smelt funny. I don’t mean bad. I just mean odd. Different. The French get most things wrong, but they’re right about love: it really is a question of smell. And when I did that thing to her that I had daydreamed about doing, I was shocked at how extraordinarily different women’s bodies are, one from another.
She left shortly after that, but we stayed friends. We even had a drink together every so often until she got a boyfriend, and then things dried up and blew away the way they do.
It was the strangest thing, though; it was as if women could see the pain on my face and were drawn to it. I think they felt safe with me. Whereas men, men I avoided. They meant well, but in showing me they understood, they said terrible things. I know they were trying to lighten things up, but they did more harm. Once, at the end of an evening of cards, the host walked me to the door and, just as I was about to set off up the street, stopped me.
“How are things with Emma?” he asked.
I spluttered, I made light of it. I felt myself growing smaller and tighter with each sentence. Picking up on my mood, my host scrutinized my features with wide-eyed delight.
“One does move on,” I said finally, with a certain successful elegance, but even as the words issued from my mouth, I saw the image of her boss’s quivering bottom, complete, of course, with Emma’s ghastly “you’re-just-a-bad-boy-with-a-big-hard-cock” soundtrack.
I walked home double time, as if the motion of my body might stop the images from coming into too clear a focus.
It seemed as if I were radiating some peculiar kind of pollen. I went to New York to see an opera and came home with the stewardess from the airplane. Never in my life had I had such extraordinary luck with women. I can’t remember her name, I never saw her again, but when she left my bed, I lay in the dark in the unfamiliar smell of her perfume and felt a shiver of excitement, like a prisoner granted a new trial.
I slept like a dreamless dead weight that night, and in the morning I was famished. I hurried down the street and took breakfast in a new restaurant. I chatted happily to the owner, offered insights into the neighbourhood. In the middle of a sentence I looked out the window and saw a bicycle locked to a fire hydrant and thought to myself, Look, look at this, I’m looking at a bicycle locked to a hydrant, I’m not thinking about that other thing at all.
They were so kind to me, those women. How I would miss them later when the horror was gone from my face and they no longer saw me.
There were oddballs too, a hippie girl who followed me home from a lawn sale and after only the barest preliminaries asked me to spank her.
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Twenty-eight,” she said.
“Don’t you think this is, well, a little much for a first date?” She looked baffled. I went on. “Perhaps this is more like fifth- or sixth-date stuff.”
“All my friends do it,” she said.
“Is this a sort of generational thing?”
Her laughter spilt richly into the air. “How do you mean?”
“It’s a damn curious thing, that’s all. When I was your age …” But I stopped there. Just those words, this groaning overture, drained me, and I could feel myself fading, right in front of her eyes, like an old sign on an inn.
“That must have been some time ago,” she said. “No offence.”
I took none and obliged her, securing her feet to the bedpost with a Cambridge necktie, the rationale being that I might find in this unfamiliar landscape a distraction from Emma, the sensation of whose absence had returned like a toothache. Even as I lowered the young lady’s panties, even as I raised my hand to her backside, I was aware of Emma’s heart beating somewhere in the city. A parallel existence to mine.
When my little hippie left the house, massaging her smouldering pink fanny, she gave her hair a toss like a pony and asked if I’d buy a dog collar and a doormat for next time. “I have a fantasy,” she began, standing in the doorway. “I want to lie by your front door just like a big dog, an Afghan maybe, and wait for you to come home.”
“Really?” I said. This was astonishing, and for a second it really did stop me from thinking about Emma.
“When I hear something at the door,” she went on (it was all quite worked out), “I’ll jump up, like this”—now raising her hands to her chest and flopping them over like paws—“and if it’s just the mailman, I’ll be so disappointed! I’ll just have to go back to my mat and lie down and wait some more.”
I looked at her carefully. She didn’t seem insane. In fact, in her yellow summer dress, she was quite pretty, with a long face and freckles on her cheekbones. Perhaps it was a generational thing. Perhaps this was how young people got to know each other these days.
“I think you’re out of my league,” I said softly, and touched her gently on the elbow.
“Oh,” she said. “Goodbye then,” and she offered me her cheek to kiss.
A year later, when the spell had worn off and women were no longer drawn to me, I tracked her down in a small Ontario town and phoned her. Knowing ahead of time what the answer would be, still I asked her, a tad too gingerly, if she was planning on coming back to Toronto. No, she wasn’t. She was getting married. A local boy, no less, a pharmacist.
But that was still a long way off.
In the midst of all this a strange thing happened. Serrault knocked on my office door one afternoon and came in. He was wearing a dark shirt with a black knit tie, chic but not ostentatious, and I thought to myself, ah, he pays more attention to his clothes than I assumed. In a rather serious tone of voice—you could see he was uncomfortable—Serrault said, “Ah, look, Darius … Emma has phoned, and she wanted me to tell you to be sure to change the air filter on the stove.”
“What?” I said.
He waited a moment before answering. “Apparently there is some risk of fire if you don’t change it every year or so.”
“The air filter on my stove? À moi?”
“Yes.”
“But that’s rather bizarre that she would call you about a thing like that.”
He shrugged tactfully. He was going to add something, a pleasantry I’ll bet, but thought better of it.
“Am I supposed to phone her back or anything?”
“She didn’t say, specifically. But perhaps yes, for clarification.” Here a smile. “You know where the filter is?” he went on. He tilted his hands into a box as if to show me. “Right above the grill, there is a—”
“Non, je sais, je sais.”
“Well then …”
“Still, it’s very mysterious.”
He did that thing that Frenchmen do with their mouths, and shrugged. Sensing his presence might provoke still more questions (for which he knew there could be no satisfactory response), he withdrew.
Sparrow Nights (v5) (epub) Page 3