We So Seldom Look on Love

by Barbara Gowdy

  “I can’t figure it out,” Cory said.

  Marion could. Cory scared the customers, not on purpose, but she was so forbiddingly tall and glamorous, slouched in the door, and her blaring “May I help you?” had old women patting their hearts.

  Driving home from the mall one day, it struck Marion that the reason John didn’t fire Cory was that he was in love with her. She looked at her stubby hands on the steering wheel and understood his craving for length. She pictured his and Cory’s light-red-haired, black-eyed, tall and short children. She saw these children, preordained, spectacular. But the following Wednesday, another salesgirl was lounging in the doorway, and when Marion asked her where Cory was, John came out of the back room and said she had quit. “She got a job stripping,” he said.

  “You’re kidding!” Marion said.

  He smiled. “Okay, dancing. You want a job?”

  “Dancing where?”

  “Ask her.” He kept on smiling. It wasn’t the smile of a broken-hearted man. “You want to go for a drive?” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “You and me. Get some fresh air.”

  Her eyes plunged to his shoes. In her mind one black pointed toe shot out and kicked a drug addict who didn’t have the money.

  “Ah, come on,” he said. “It’s like a summer’s day out there. Beautiful. Beautiful as you.”

  She laughed.

  “Hey, you’re blushing,” he said. “I like that.”

  He had a red convertible with the top down. Out on the highway the sun whipped her hair, but his black, combed-back hair didn’t move. Seated, he was no taller than her. Remembering what he had said about fainting if Cory slit her wrists, she wondered if all virgins bled. Her heart flapped in her stomach, but it could have been the murder. Out of the blue her heart sometimes rocked her whole body, and she put it down to aftershock. What haunted her these days was the second bullet entering a hole her mother was born with. Her mother should have been facing the other way, considering that Bert Kella pulled up the driveway in a car with a rusted-out muffler and then kicked in the door. “Why didn’t she turn around?” the police investigator asked. Nobody had an answer. “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” the investigator said.

  John Bucci drove to the provincial park, and they got out of the car to climb up the cliff. “Wait’ll you see the view,” he said, wrongly presuming that she never had. She followed him up the path, which had been railed with logs to provide a stairway. He loosened his tie. At the top of the stairs he opened his arms like an opera singer and made a slow, revelling circle that ended up aimed at her. With his tie off she saw the two gold chains around his neck. “Isn’t it beautiful?” he said. “I can’t believe I’m here and you’re here and it’s so warm and beautiful.”

  She could feel herself blushing again. She turned and looked across the valley, where the tin roof of a house signalled out of golds and greens. A dog barked, probably from that place.

  “Your hair is like music,” John said.

  “For heaven’s sake,” she laughed. She had tightly curled hair the colour of barn board.

  “Like pianos,” he said, stroking her head. “Like arpeggios.”

  She walked away from him, over to a deep crevice in the rock. Her skin felt as if it was being pelted by rain. She went right up to the edge of the crevice and judged the distance across.

  “I saw a porcupine down there once,” John said, coming up behind her.

  Marion stepped back twenty paces.

  “Hey, they don’t throw their quills, you know,” John said. She kicked off her sandals.

  “Good idea,” he said, and started undoing his laces.

  While he was still bent over, she ran past him.

  Fifteen years ago she had watched her brother make the same jump. She did it the way he did, in a long stride, in splits through the air, landing on a lip of rock that jutted out below the crevice’s other side.

  “Jesus Christ!” John shouted.

  She grabbed a sapling to keep from falling backwards. John ran around the crevice and reached down to help her up.

  “Jesus Fucking Christ,” he said. “Why’d you do that? I can’t believe you just did that.” She let him pull her onto the grass. “You could have killed yourself,” he said, dropping to the ground beside her.

  “No,” she said. “I knew I could do it.” In fact, she felt like doing it again.

  “But why the hell did you? I thought you were suddenly committing suicide or something.”

  “I just wanted to.”

  “You just wanted to,” he said, smiling, shaking his head. “In other words you’re out of your mind.”

  She lay back on the grass. “I don’t think I am,” she said seriously.

  He stroked her face. He kissed the scrapes on her hand. “You’re out of your mind,” he said. “I love you.”

  He took off all her clothes but removed only his suit pants. The intercourse was so fast and painless she wasn’t sure it had happened until she saw a coin of blood on the grass when he was off retrieving her sandals and she was getting dressed. She placed a yellow poplar leaf over the spot. He came running back, slapping her sandals together. Driving to the mall, he said that she was so beautiful, like a peach. He said again that he loved her. She couldn’t tell if she loved him, not until the next day when she went to the shoe store and saw him kneeling over an old woman’s foot and she remembered how as a five-year-old immigrant he had swabbed a ship’s deck.

  After she feeds the kitten she puts it in the bathtub and dabs a warm, wet washcloth under its tail. It bats at its pee streaming toward the drain. It jumps to feel her tears on its head. She picks it up and it sits alertly in her hand. She puts it on the pillow and opens the drawer of the bedside table and takes out the Bible. Whatever she turns to will be a message.

  “And a woman,” she reads, “having an issue of blood twelve years, which had spent all her living upon physicians, neither could be healed of any.”

  “Good heavens,” she says, and then covers her mouth with her hand because the door is opening.

  It’s Sam.

  “I came back,” he says sheepishly.

  She looks him over for a clue that could have told her. His narrow hands. Musician’s hands, she used to think. He walks to the chair and sits with his legs spread.

  “Did you always have an Adam’s apple?” she asks.

  He touches his throat. “Not like this,” he says.

  “Is that the hormones?”

  “Yeah.” He keeps his eyes on her. He’s been crying, she can tell from across the room. Twice before she’s seen him cry—when his dog, Tibor, was hit by a car, and when the girl picked up her father’s shaving mug in the movie A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Those times, instead of thinking “Men don’t cry,” she thought she was witnessing a side of the artistic temperament.

  She looks down at the Bible, at the word “Behold.” She says, “Well, I don’t hate you. I didn’t mean that.”

  “You have every right to.”

  Her throat tightens. “Is Sam your real name?” she asks.

  “It is now, legally, but it’s not the name my parents gave me.” He runs his fingers through his fine blond hair, which is thinning at the temples because of hormone injections. Four years ago he started the injections. Two years ago he had a double mastectomy. His flat chest is the second thing she asked about.

  “So what did your parents call you?” she asks.

  His mouth twitches. “Pauline.”

  “Pauline?”

  “Yeah.” He gives an embarrassed laugh.

  “Why didn’t you change it to Paul?” she asks, and the reasonableness and inconsequence of this question remind her of how she and her father used to dwell on why Bert Kella shot out a window in the living room instead of in the kitchen, and before Sam can answer her she cries, “I can’t believe this! I’m doomed or something!”

  “Honey,” he says, coming to his feet.

  “
No!” She waves him back.

  He puts his hands in his pockets and turns to look out the window.

  “You don’t even have hips,” she says, her voice snagging. She falls back on the bed. The kitten pounces over and purrs into her ear. They have no name for it because as soon as it weighs two pounds it will be for sale. When she can speak she says, “You should have told me.”

  “I know, I know,” he says. “I just love you so much. And I thought—” He taps his nails on the arm of the chair.

  “Thought what?”

  “I thought it would all be over by now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The surgery.”

  The construction of a penis, the last in a series of operations.

  “You mean you were never going to tell me?” she asks, twisting around to look at him.

  “Of course I was.” He taps his nails. “You’d see the scars,” he adds.

  “Who else knows?”

  He looks surprised. “Nobody. Well, the doctors.”

  “Does Bernie know?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Are your parents really dead?”

  “They’re dead,” he says softly.

  “You could have lied about everything,” she says.

  He looks straight at her. “Presenting myself as a guy might seem like a lie to you. But to me I am a guy. In every way except one, and that’s going to change.”

  “Oh, Lord.”

  “Look, I knew you’d be shocked,” he says. “I expected there’d be a big blow-up. But we love each other, right? I mean, I love you, I know that. And …” He blinks and looks down. “I can still give you pleasure.”

  She buries her face in the pillow. The hand that knew exactly what to do was a woman’s hand. “Let’s wait until we’re married,” he said every time her hand drifted down his body, down to what she flattered herself was an erection.

  She starts crying again. “I thought it was something spiritual in you,” she says. “A vow to be pure or something.”

  He taps one nail, a steady, agitating sound, like a dripping tap.

  “I feel so stupid,” she says.

  “I’ll never hit you,” he says quietly. “I’ll never shout at you. I’ll always love you. I’ll always listen to you. I’ll never leave you. I’ll never fool around on you.”

  She has to laugh. “One thing for sure,” she says, “you’ll never get Cory Bates pregnant.”

  She began to see John Bucci two or three afternoons a week plus Tuesday nights, when her father was at the Legion Hall. Because John lived with his aunt they couldn’t make love at his house, so they did it in his car. John wanted to marry her, or at least to see her more often, at nights especially, but he didn’t push her, not at first.

  “I admire you for putting your father’s feelings above your own,” he said.

  Which made her feel dishonest. All she was doing, really, was trying to keep everything on an even keel. Over the summer she had stopped sticking so faithfully to her mother’s routine, but she was still the woman of the house, and having a boyfriend felt like having an affair. “Maybe you can come for a visit in a couple of months,” she told John, thinking that by then her mother would have been gone a year.

  His family she had met many times—his aunt, his two sisters, his four nieces and three nephews, his brothers-in-law—because on Tuesday evenings, after they’d made love, he took her to his place for something to eat, and there was always a gang in the kitchen. The sisters raved about her the way he did. They told her she had the skin of a baby, and they said they hoped her and John’s children came out with her blue eyes and dimples. They just assumed that she and John would get married and build a house on their aunt’s property, as they themselves had done. They urged her to make John hire somebody named Marcel to dig the foundation. They affectionately counselled her to hit John if he didn’t get the ball rolling. “Hit him with a stick!” they cried. “Hit him you know where!” With them she talked about her mother, since they talked so readily about their own. She knew from John that their mother had died in a car accident, but they told her how she had flown through the windshield and how in the casket her face looked like Dracula’s, it was so stitched up. They cried, and she cried. “You are our sister,” they said, which more than anything John said, or did, had her dreaming of marriage.

  The aunt that John lived with, Aunt Lucia, wasn’t so friendly. She couldn’t speak English, for one thing. She glared from the stove and pointed at the chair that Marion was to sit in. She furiously circled her fist in front of her mouth if Marion ate too slowly. As Marion was on her way out the door Aunt Lucia usually thrust a jar of something at her—relish, spaghetti sauce—as if challenging her to take it, as if she knew that Marion would lie to her father about where it had come from.

  “From Cory’s mother,” was what Marion told him. Her father had never met Mr. or Mrs. Bates and he probably never would, given their waking hours, so it was a safe white lie. Marion had phoned them three or four times to find out about Cory, but there was never any answer. She had finally gone to the apartment and rung the bell and knocked on the door. Still no answer.

  “They’re there, all right,” said Mrs. Hodgson, the old lady who managed the pet store downstairs. “Every once in a while you hear a thump.” She said that Cory left one morning on the Greyhound bus for Toronto. “Gussied up like a prostitute,” she said without malice. “You know the way she does.”

  “What happened to that puppy?” Marion asked. “The German shepherd?”

  “Oh, it died,” Mrs. Hodgson said. “When I wasn’t looking somebody threw in a dog biscuit laced with, oh, whatchamacallit, oh—” She snapped her fingers. “Arsenic.”

  “But that’s terrible,” Marion said.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Hodgson said vaguely.

  “Did they ever catch the person?” Marion asked.

  Mrs. Hodgson shifted on her stool. “Shut your yakking!” she shouted at the parrot in the cage behind her. She turned back. “Poison’s an awful way to die,” she said. “Contortions and foaming at the mouth. But falling from a great height, that’s what I’d hate the most. Knowing in seconds you were going to splat. I heard of this man, he was like a mad scientist. He threw live animals from apartment balconies to see how they landed. Naturally, the cats tended to land on their feet, even if they died. But I’ll tell you the interesting part. The higher the cats fell from, the better chance they had of living. Because a cat has to straighten itself out in the air, and that takes time.”

  A couple of weeks later Marion was driving by the pet store and saw a Help Wanted sign in the window. On a whim she went inside and asked about it. It was part-time, Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings, and seeing as she never saw John before lunch anyway, she decided to take it. She was prepared to be alone in the store (Mrs. Hodgson’s plan was to do bookkeeping and chores at home), but more often than not, Mrs. Hodgson was sitting on the stool when Marion arrived, and she didn’t budge until Marion left. While Marion cleaned cages and fed the fish and birds and played with the puppies, Mrs. Hodgson handled the cash and told Marion—and any customer who happened to be listening—her ghoulish stories. Most of them she read about in Coroner’s Report, a magazine that her dead photographer husband had taken pictures for and that she still subscribed to, but she also had plenty of her own stories, many of which concerned animals. Cats put in ovens, dryers and dishwashers. Hamsters sucked up vacuums. A dog tied to the back of a car and forced to run to death.

  One day, after describing the murder-suicide of a husband and wife, she said, “You probably know about that teacher out at Marley Road School, the one that was carrying on with the janitor and he killed her?” Then, before Marion could speak, she said, “What slays me is his name was something-or-other Killer. Bart or Tom Killer. Anyways, her husband was starting to get suspicious, so she decided to call it quits. Which sent Mr. Killer off the deep end. He stabs her forty-seven times I think the number was. Then he drives
out to the cemetery on Highway 10, sits himself down on his own mother’s grave, and shoots himself between the eyes.”

  “Good heavens,” Marion said.

  “For a janitor he sure made an awful mess,” Mrs. Hodgson said.

  What struck Marion was Mrs. Hodgson having no idea that she was Ellen Judd’s daughter. She’d thought that everybody in Garvey either made the connection right away or was told about it soon enough. So that was a surprise, Mrs. Hodgson having no idea. As for her mother and Bert Kella being lovers, people had hinted along those lines before, but no one even slightly acquainted with her mother, or with Bert Kella for that matter, believed it for a second.

  Marion decided not to straighten Mrs. Hodgson out. Somebody else would, sooner or later, although that’s not why she didn’t say anything. And it wasn’t because she was too upset or too disheartened, either. Actually—and this was new for her—she felt disdain. “Stabs her forty-seven times,” Mrs. Hodgson said, getting that essential fact so completely and elaborately wrong, and Marion thought, “Nobody knows.” It was a thrilling, lonely revelation.

  Eventually they fall asleep, Marion in the bed, and Sam sitting in the chair. Near dawn, screeching tires wake them both up.

  Sam runs a hand over his face. “There’s no sense in staying here,” he says.

  Marion looks at him. His blue shirt holds its colour in the gloom. He has wide shoulders. You could draw his silhouette and pass it around and everyone would swear it was a man. Last night she believed she had no choice except to divorce him. Now she’s not sure she even has what it takes to send back all the gifts, let alone to come up with an explanation for the marriage ending on the honeymoon. “I guess we should just go home,” she says, swinging her legs onto the floor.

  “Okay,” he says carefully.

  “Glenda will think we don’t trust her with the dogs,” she says. Glenda is the retarded girl who works for her part-time.