The Strangers' Gallery

by Paul Bowdring

  The vacant house had been for sale since the spring, and at the end of August, seemingly overnight, it was no longer empty. There was terrestrial light in every window, a car in the driveway, a painting crew erecting scaffolding beneath the eaves—the clapboard was peeling badly—and a young woman sitting at an easel on the verandah, also painting. She looked as if she might have been painting my house. The moving van, I thought, must have come when I was at work. But there had been no moving van, Miranda told me, later on. She had moved all her stuff, what there was of it, in her station wagon. She had been house-sitting until the end of August and in September moved into a nearly empty house. There was a fridge and stove in the kitchen, a washer and dryer in the basement, but no bed, no tables, no lamps, no chesterfield set. She slept on the hardwood floor in her sleeping bag on several layers of quilts. She was in no hurry to furnish it, she said. It was a small house, anyway, practically identical to my own—two bedrooms upstairs, a bathroom halfway up, a small kitchen, living room, and dining room—no more than 1,200 square feet in all, and didn’t require much to fill it up.

  I was, I now realize, strangely drawn to her from the beginning, though in the long melancholy wake of Elaine’s departure, the thought that someone as young and vivacious as Miranda might have any interest in a work-obsessed solitary like me never really crossed my mind. Yes, she was the epitome of what I thought of as vivacious, but there was an undercurrent of sadness and fragility, it seemed, the shimmering vulnerability of a trembling aspen at sunset in the evening breeze, somewhere between a joie de vivre and a shudder.

  There is an old song, an old standard as they’re called, “Blue Skies,” in which the melody and lyrics seem to be working against each other. The singer’s happiness, as expressed in the words, is undermined by a rather melancholy tune, as if the singer cannot really believe his good fortune or is already aware that, like everything else, it will not last. Indeed, except where skies are concerned and, perhaps to a lesser extent, oceans, blue seems to be the universal colour of sadness—the blues. “Blue Skies” was the song that Miranda was singing.

  I soon discovered that she was of a rather solitary disposition herself—I hardly saw her at all that first autumn—though she had introduced herself to all the neighbours one Saturday morning, about a week after she had moved in. She had a full-time teaching job, of course, along with what seemed like a full-time avocation, painting.

  “I’m Miranda Michael,” she said, offering her hand on the verandah that morning and, as I hadn’t held a woman’s hand in so long, its softness and warmth were so inviting I remember wanting to hold on to it longer than I should have. For a moment, I thought that she already knew my name, that perhaps she had said, “I’m Miranda, Michael.”

  “Just moved in across the street,” she added.

  “Michael Lowe, Miranda Michael,” I said, to be sure I’d got it right. “We must be related.”

  She seemed to smile at my little joke, and we conversed easily for five minutes or more before she went next door to see the Morrows, who, I found out later, had known her deceased parents. Frank was the first to tell me about the tragedy that had befallen the family.

  “What do you do?” I asked her at one point.

  “I’m an art teacher,” she said, but if anyone had asked me later on, after I’d got to know her, I would have said she was a painter, for that is what she did morning, noon, and night—before she went to work, on her lunch hour, and after work. Teaching was just her day job, as artists like to call it. She had never exhibited her work, however, perhaps feeling insecure about being “palette-challenged,” as Anton was to describe it later on—or colour-blind, not to put too fine a point on it, like a writer with dyslexia or a composer who couldn’t dance. The great Beethoven was one, he told me.

  Yes, sadly and fragilely vivacious, I thought upon first meeting her, in much more emotional distress than I was myself, though for a very different reason. She’d lost both her parents in a tragic automobile accident that summer. She and her sister, Ilse, had inherited the family house, though they were both living on their own—Ilse, in Montreal; Miranda, in the west end of St. John’s—and neither of them wanted to live in it, so they sold the house and split the money. With her share, Miranda bought the house across the street.

  Yet throughout the fall of 1994—for an entire year, in fact, after her arrival—we had become little more than friendly neighbours, saying hello as we passed on our way to and from the shops in the Square, chatting on the street if we were leaving for work or coming home at the same time or putting out the garbage. In mid-December, though, she brought over a Christmas gift, a basket of oranges and grapefruit, and, taking courage, I invited her in for a Christmas drink. She invited me back for a drink the next weekend, into her still almost empty house. There was a pine table and hardwood chairs and a daybed in the kitchen, but only an easel and stool in the living room. The dining room was still full of boxes and other stuff. There was nothing in the bedrooms upstairs, she told me. She still hadn’t purchased a real bed, though the daybed was a step up, very comfortable, she said. And was there something inviting in the way she said it? Or was I just imagining it? Perhaps I was.

  It was only a few days before Christmas, but no sign of Christmas decorations inside or out. Then she told me that she was going away for Christmas, to be with her sister, and asked me to look after her cat. My first thought, an unkind one, was that I’d been set up.

  Now I’m sure some relationships begin with a request to look after a neighbour’s cat, or dog or parrot or plants, but in this case it felt more like the beginning of a relationship with the cat itself, Dorothy by name, for I would be asked to look after her again at Easter and again in July.

  I didn’t really miss Pushkin, a big, fluffy, orange, half-breed Persian (we weren’t sure what the other half was) that Elaine and I had adopted from the spca, and who had departed with Elaine. Though spayed, he was an outdoor cat, loved the great outdoors, even in winter, braved the ice and snow, the spring and fall rains and winds. Except for his eyelash-licking habit, which we’d cured him of, he was not needy, was indifferent to affection really. If you left his food and water on the back step, you hardly ever saw him. Sometimes, however, seemingly for no good reason, Pushkin would climb the backdoor screen and meow pitifully to get in, for he would get his lengthy talons caught in the wire mesh about halfway up. Hanging there, silhouetted against the light, he looked like a black pelt stretched and hung to dry. But when you saw him or heard him and let him in, he would look around the house as if he didn’t recognize it, or recognized it too clearly, and almost immediately would want to be let out again. He was always on the go. Neutering had certainly not made him sluggish or passive, as we’d been told it would.

  But Dorothy—how to describe Dorothy, my first single-parent experience? A slug with fur, and always shedding. No…slugs moved faster. She was a fifteen-year-old, neutered tortoiseshell who was almost as big as a tortoise. Miranda had inherited Dorothy from her parents. Spoiled obscenely, this basket potato rarely went out, hardly ever moved, and tolerated stroking with a feline superciliousness so refined and undisguised it hurt a human—this human, anyway. Dorothy fancied high-end grub like Friskies Chef’s Dinner pâté de foie gras, not as a treat, mind you, but for a week or more would eat nothing else. Then, for no good reason, she would stop eating it, refuse to eat at all till you searched the supermarket and found some other exotic tidbits that were to her liking. I discovered “sardine cutlets in lobster consommé” and “cat caviar.” Probably sculpins’ eggs, I thought, but who cares. She loved it, whatever it was.

  Little did I know, or Miranda, for that matter, that cat-sitting Dorothy was a nurturing, fathering test, or pre-test, that I was taking. Had I passed? With flying colours, if I were to take Miranda’s unbridled enthusiasm for my grades. Dorothy loved me, she had thrice proclaimed after she returned from her trips—almost two weeks at Christm
as, a week at Easter, and a whole month in the summer. How she deduced this, I’ll never know—perhaps because Dorothy was even fatter when Miranda came back. Dorothy hadn’t moved except to the food and water bowls and the litter box in the basement, though she did venture outside in the summer. But I myself could feel growing within me, even at this early stage of my parenting career, a kind of King Lear resentment toward this ungrateful feline-child. Not sharper than a serpent’s tooth exactly but…

  When Miranda returned from Montreal on the first of August, after my third babysitting stint with Dorothy, she brought me fresh croissants as a gift, a baker’s dozen from her favourite café in Montreal, the Duc de Lorraine, which was not far from where she had been living in her sister’s apartment off Côte-des-Neiges Road. Perhaps she had remembered the stale croissant and coffee I had served her the day before she left, when she had briefed me on my caregiving duties during her absence. These tasted as if they’d just come out of the oven when we sat out on my verandah having one with our coffee at four-thirty that afternoon. Not so the Maxwell House coffee, which was clearly not a recent roast. Nothing like the bowl of café au lait that she described with such delight, which she’d had for breakfast at seven that morning when she bought the croissants.

  Miranda looked different—I think it was her hair. Not tied up in the usual ponytail with a simple elastic and barrettes on the sides. It was cut short, Frenchified, as I thought of it, though it wasn’t what we used to call a French crop, or bangs—her brow was still bare—but something that I associated with les Français. It accentuated her high cheekbones, her dark eyes, her litheness, her angular features. She looked less troubled as well. Losing both parents at the same time, and so tragically, must have been quite a blow, not easy to recover from, but she had never talked about the accident, only mentioned it in passing. Perhaps she’d guessed that the Morrows had told me all about it. Frank had described the collision in morbid detail. Morbidity was fast becoming his normal cast of mind.

  “What did you do in Montreal?” I asked Miranda.

  “I cried a lot,” she said. “Ilse is very emotional, and when she cries I cry, too. I did a lot of sketching. Her apartment building is on the side of a hill, and at the very top is a little park like a wild wood. You can get lost in there. There were flowers I’d never seen before. I made dozens of sketches. I spent some time on the Plateau, in the coffee shops and bars with Ilse and her friends—actors and dancers, all of them—a wacky lot, stoned all the time, but very serious about their work. They laugh at everything except their work. But I spent most of the time by myself—in the park I mentioned, in the Duc de Lorraine, the Mount Royal Cemetery. That was also close by. An amazing place—a lot of tombs. Mom wanted to be buried in a tomb. She was so afraid of being buried in the ground, but she feared cremation even more. Dad dismissed all this with a laugh. They left no instructions in their will, so we had a traditional burial.”

  Her talk seemed propelled by an undercurrent of nervous energy—lingering emotional distress, perhaps—but she was suddenly silent and put her hands over her eyes. This was the first time she had spoken about her parents, and in such an intimate way. I thought she was going to break down and cry.

  “I guess it’s hard to talk about your parents…about the accident,” I said.

  “No, I don’t mind,” she said, recovering her composure. “Ilse took it a lot harder than I did. That’s why I’ve spent so much time with her this past year. She just turned twenty-three—she’s four years younger than me. I had to be the strong one, so that helped me cope. She was so close to Dad. He used to take her everywhere with him—fishing, camping, skating, hiking the East Coast Trail—but I was happy just staying at home, reading and drawing, listening to music. She was very athletic—a star soccer player, a gymnast, a runner, a figure skater, but not a dancer, strangely enough, which is what she does now.”

  Perhaps Hubert had been right, I thought. “What sort of dancing does she do—ballet?” I asked. “I have two nieces at the National Ballet School,” I added, proudly and paternally, as if they were my daughters, and as if I had forgotten my long-standing objection to the boarding school life.

  “Really?” she said. “No, Ilse does modern dance. She does mime as well. In the fall, she has a show that combines dance and mime—Pascal’s Pensées, with Surtitles, done to the music of Erik Satie. I sat in on some rehearsals and they asked me if I could design a set. But it’s all very abstract, very conceptual, what they’re doing. I can only paint what’s in front of my face, not what’s in my head. I was a bit of an outcast in art school. Simple old-fashioned representation is good enough for me, but realist painters are regarded as primitives these days.”

  “What do you like to paint?” I asked.

  “I’ve been painting flowers for years, mainly watercolours—wildflowers at the moment. I like to think they have individual faces, so I approach them as portraits.”

  “Have you ever done portraits of people?” I asked.

  She laughed. “I’ve done a few,” she said. “Ilse wanted me to paint her when I was there. Try getting a dancer to sit still. Even the muscles in her face were moving. And her tongue, of course. She talks non-stop. It was impossible. We had to stop after only an hour. At least it made us laugh—we needed that. I need a few hours of false starts just to get going, especially for a portrait. I was just beginning to clear my head of what she looks like—the picture of her I have in my mind, I mean—just beginning to see her as a stranger, someone I don’t know, which is what I need to do. It’s not much different from trying to paint a flower. To paint a dandelion, you have to get all the images of dandelion that you’ve seen, your idea of dandelion, out of your head and look at the one in front of you. It’s a bit racist, if you know what I mean, to think that they all look alike, if you’ve seen one dandelion, one pitcher plant, one sunflower, you’ve seen them all. You’re thinking of having your portrait done?”

  “Oh God, no. I don’t even like having my picture taken. Though I can sit in one place for as long as you like.”

  “Just like a flower,” she said. “Your name is in flower, you know.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “The name Lowe is in the word flower, though you can’t hear it. It’s hidden in there.”

  “That’s amazing,” I said. “I never noticed that before.”

  “I usually see words when I first hear them,” she said, “names especially, all the letters, and then I see images and hear rhymes for the sounds. Lowe, flow, flower….I see a woodland valley with wildflowers and a stream flowing through.”

  “Amazing,” I said again, not a word I often used. “That’s the sort of landscape I love.”

  “And why don’t you like being photographed?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t really thought much about it. No one’s asked me before.”

  “Dad was the same,” she said. “He would never pose. We have so few pictures of him, mostly when he wasn’t looking—one of him at his work table, one in an apron in the kitchen, one in a pair of shorts and boots mowing the lawn. The only time he ever wore shorts. Dad was sort of the mother of the family. He worked at home, cooked most of the meals, did most of the housework. Mom was a teacher, a dedicated teacher. She stayed at school late every day, went in early and stayed late. But she always helped us with our homework, and she was strict at home as well as at school. Dad was the easygoing one, the one we could always get around.”

  “What kind of work did your father do?”

  “He was a draftsman. He’d worked for an architectural firm but became a freelancer after I was born. I think that’s how I developed an interest in drawing, watching him at the drawing board for long periods of time, with music always playing while he worked. I remember the Chopin playing over and over, especially the nocturnes, vinyl records in a big box set, with a painting of Van Gogh’s Starry Night on the cover, t
he famous one with the swirling clouds and stars over a sleepy little town. It seemed to be alive, to be moving. It was scary to look at. Dad caught me colouring it one day with my crayons. There was a lot of white in the reproduction, if I recall. But he didn’t get mad at me as Mom would have, just smiled and let me go on colouring it. Then, for my next birthday—my fourth or fifth, I guess it was—he bought me an easel with paints and paper, which he set up alongside his draftsman’s table to keep me busy while he was working. I kept all his records, but I know I’ll never listen to them, not the Chopin, that’s for sure. The saddest music ever written, I think, and…”

  She choked up, covered her entire face with her hands this time, and when she removed them her eyes were filled with tears, small rivulets running from the corners along the ridge of her high cheekbones. She slowly wiped them away with her long, fine-boned fingers.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “That’s what I heard so clearly in my head, the nocturnes, as if someone were in the next room playing the piano, when Ilse and I sat on the sofa in our damp old house the day after the funeral, wondering what we would do with it and all the old heavy furniture. I knew I could never live in it, and so did she, so that same day we decided to sell it and just about everything in it.”

  Miranda and I had many more coffees and teas—iced coffees and iced teas—homemade lemonade and Mexican beer, her favourite, back and forth on our verandahs last month, a hot and unusually humid August. I must have told her everything about Elaine, and she told me about her ex-husband, Mark, an antiques dealer, “silent” auctioneer, and upholsterer. Their brief marriage had ended just a year before her parents died.