The Romantic

by Barbara Gowdy

  “Leverage,” I say. I have no idea what the word means.

  “Okay. One, two … three!”

  We push. We grunt. We rotate him a few inches but my arms turn rubbery and I let go.

  “Come on!” Abel gasps. “Keep pushing.”

  “I can’t.”

  The man groans.

  “Sir?” Abel says.

  I scramble to my feet.

  “Jesus Christ,” the man mutters.

  Abel stands and steps back.

  The man comes up on his elbows, grunts and works himself onto his knees. “Fuckin’ Jesus.”

  I move away, appalled.

  “Where the fuck—?” He has seen Abel. “Hey!” he says.

  “Are you thirsty?” Abel asks.

  “What do ya got?”

  “Grape Freshie.”

  The man mumbles something, slaps at his chest. “Ya got a smoke?” he barks.

  “No, sorry.”

  Somehow the man senses me and he thrashes around and barks,” You got a smoke?”

  I shake my head.

  “Ha!” He sits there leaning on his arm and smiling at me sappily. “What’s a matter?” he yells. “Don’t ya love me any more?”

  I look at Abel. He’s looking at the man. “They’ll have cigarettes at the factory,” he says.

  “What are we waitin’ for?” the man yells. He tries to heave himself up but drops onto his hip.

  “Here, I’ll help you,” Abel says. He takes hold of the man’s arm. The man grimaces. I’m afraid Abel is going to get slugged, but the man leans his weight on Abel’s arm and shoulder. Abel staggers.

  Weeks, months, years later I will think of his buttressing of the man. After he’s dead, I’ll think of it not as a feat of bravery or of strength, which, of course, it was (the man must have been four times his size), but as my first experience of Abel’s uncalled-for heroics. He’d have stood there until his spine snapped. And for what? The man would have gotten himself up one way or another. It was Abel’s misfortune—one of his misfortunes—that not-quite-helpless acquaintances, people he owed nothing to and who might safely have been left to their own devices, were the ones he could least resist.

  Right now, however, I’m just glad he’s here. I presume that, like me, all he cares about is getting the man to leave. “I’ve got you, I’ve got you,” he says. The man says,“Fuckin’, fuckin’,” until at last he’s standing and then he shakes Abel free and weaves around, inches from my teepee, knocking over the Thermos.

  “There’s a path down,” Abel says. “I’ll show you.”

  “Hold your horses!” He is looking at me, his face demolished again into that witless smile. He gropes between his legs, unzips his fly, pulls out what looks like a dirty pink sock, flops it a few times, then urinates.

  I spin around.

  “What’s a matter? Never seen a dick before? Didn’t your boyfriend show you his?” His laugh is a grinding, mechanical sound, like a motor that won’t catch. I can smell the urine from here. I keep thinking he’s done and then there’s more. “I got a gal in Kalamazoo!” he sings, bellowing. “Don’t wanna boast but I know she’s the toast of Kalama-zoo-zoo-zoo-zoo!”

  Finally I hear him zipping himself up.

  “If you want a cigarette,” Abel says,“we’d better get going.”

  He leads the way. The man stumbles and crashes after him. I don’t move. Even when I can’t hear them any more, I wait. Eventually birds begin crying out, like casualties. I go to where the urine is and kick earth over the spot, then I crawl inside my lean-to.

  I figure that Abel won’t come back, but he does. “Are you there?” he says from only a few yards away.

  I start to crawl out. Just beyond the entrance, while I’m still on my knees, I place my hand on a wet spot. I scream and jump up. “I touched his pee! I touched his pee!” I drop to the ground and grind my palm in the dirt. “It won’t come off!”

  Abel snatches my hand and pours Freshie on it. “Now rub it with dirt again.”

  “He’s wrecked everything,” I whimper. “The whole place is wrecked.”

  “There are lots of good places.”

  “No, there aren’t.”

  “There are.” He screws the lid back on my Thermos. “Places he could never find.”

  “Where?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  He’ll show me. I stop crying.

  “There’s even a cave. Have you been there?”

  I shake my head.

  “Do you want to see it?”

  I nod.

  “Do you want to see it now?”

  “Maybe”—I bring the quaver back into my voice—“maybe tomorrow.”

  “Okay.” He stands up.

  “Right now,” I say,“I want a glass of milk. Milk always makes me feel better. Except the milkman didn’t come by our place today.” This last part happens to be the truth.

  “He missed us, too,” Abel says. “But I think we still have a bottle. We can go see.”

  There it is: the invitation. Drums thunder in my head. Lights burst. “Really?”

  “Sure, why not?” He blushes.

  I jump up and gather my things—the box of Jell-O powder, my stone collection—and put them and the Thermos in my knapsack, which, without looking at me, he offers to carry.

  We set off.

  As an adult, whenever I move out of a flat or apartment (which will happen regularly enough that I’ll never have to defrost a refrigerator) I’ll feel exactly as I do now: that the place failed me in its promise of peace and impregnability. I’ll see myself following Abel down this slope with its broken branches and skid marks like exposed muscle, entire bushes trampled as if the hobo commandeered a bulldozer. It made the descent easier, I’ll remember that, too.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Throughout the summer and into the first weeks of September, Abel sticks to our deal—the one we made the morning after the party—of calling each other on alternate Sunday nights. When it’s my turn to call, even if one of his parents answers, he’s right there waiting.

  If it’s his mother who answers, her voice can still produce a small clutch in my heart. I love her conspiratorial-sounding “Hello?” Her enthralled and shouted “Louise, how ari? you?” I say that I’m fine, thank you, how is she? “Wonderful!” she cries. And then, like the host of a TV show, without further ado, she shouts,“So, here he is, he’s right here. Abel!”

  During our first two or three calls I do most of the talking. Unlike him, I have a hard time letting a pause stretch out. These calls remind me of my attempts to get to know him seven years ago, when I’d be chattering away while he stood looking at me politely and attentively, like somebody watching a performance.

  A consequence of such attentiveness is that you’re liable to reconsider what you’re saying, even as it’s coming out of your mouth. For instance, when I tell him about running into Tim Todd at a donut shop. This happened on the Labour Day weekend. Unfortunately, he saw me before I saw him, and he called me over and introduced me to the cashier and some other employee, then said he’d just been hired part-time to clear tables. He seemed like somebody else, all upbeat and friendly. “Well,” I said,“congratulations,” and I turned to go but he caught my arm and muttered he’d been meaning to phone me, he was coming very close to deciding I should be forgiven. “It wasn’t really your fault,” he said. “It was that hippy creep making you smoke marijuana. So”—back to his friendly voice—“I’ve got a new freshwater aquarium, you might want to drop by sometime and take a look at it.” To which I said,“I’d rather spend ten years smoking marijuana with that hippy creep than two seconds looking at a stupid fish tank.”

  When I’m only at the part where Tim called me over, I know this story isn’t as entertaining as I’d thought. “Where does he get the nerve?” I finish lamely. “We only went out for a couple of months.”

  In the long silence, distant voices from a crossed line flicker: “… A quarter cup of maple syrup �
� oh, hooey, you can just double up on the brown sugar.”

  “Are you still there?” I say.

  “I’m here.”

  “I couldn’t let him get away with calling you that. And you never made me do anything.”

  “It’s just that it was in front of his friends.”

  “They weren’t his friends.”

  But I am chastened.

  I keep forgetting this about Abel: how kind he is. When he talks about his friends, the ones he likes best seem to be the outcasts and eccentrics. One guy, Lenny somebody or other, has left home and is living in the Richters’ basement, where instead of going to school he spends all day drawing up charts of professional-sports statistics. “Underneath,” Abel says,“he’s like a cosmologist, searching for the ultimate logic.” In Abel’s opinion, everybody is somebody else underneath, somebody finer or at least deserving of our sympathy. Regarding my lifelong enemy, Maureen Hellier, whom he remembers from public school, he says he always thought that underneath she was “a frightened little kid.”

  “Well,” I blurt,“on top she’s a big fat bitch.”

  Silence.

  “But I know what you mean,” I say quickly. ‘You can’t really know who people are on the inside.”

  I try to believe this because I want to be like him. I look—as I stopped doing after he moved out to Vancouver—at the sky, slugs, dog dirt, old ladies’ freckled hands, and no matter what I see I marvel at. He tells me he’s studying Bach’s Goldberg Variations, and as soon as I hang up the phone I search through my father’s stack of albums and find a 1954 Glenn Gould recording, and I listen to it for the rest of the evening, but it’s Abel I picture at the piano, his muscular shoulders working in tormented yearning for me. My father, who ever since the party has had to put up with me endlessly listening to my “White Rabbit” forty-five, says,“You’ve moved on.”

  “Progressed,” I say. “Advanced.”

  “Made strides,” he says, playing along. “Blossomed.”

  “Effloresced,” I say.

  “Ah ha!” he cries. Because the word is proof that I’ve actually read the field guides I’ve been stealing from his study. I’ve more than read them, I’ve memorized entire sections: insect orders, the names of Jupiter’s satellites, the meaning of ovoviviparous and pinnate. And effloresce. On the borders of the letters 1 send to Abel I draw the plaid skin-patterns of snakes, the twelve variations of insect antennae.

  It’s in these letters that I pour out my feelings (portion them out is more like it, a minute-by-minute drip): “I woke up feeling carefree and sure. I knew in my heart that nothing could ever come between us again. Then, at breakfast, my father asked, How is Abel doing these days? and I could only tell him how you had been doing, last Sunday, five long days ago, and I realized there is something between us—two-thirds of a continent!!! And the loneliness came rushing back.”

  After mailing the first letter I tell him over the phone that it’s on its way. I say,“You don’t have to write back.”

  So when a letter arrives two weeks later, I’m almost afraid to open it. The envelope is small and robin’s-egg blue, the single page inside a matching blue and venting an odour of cigarette smoke. Not a letter, after all, but a poem, copied out in calligraphic script. “Romance,” it’s called. By Arthur Rimbaud.

  When you are seventeen, you aren’t really serious.

  —One fine evening, you’ve had enough of beer and lemonade,

  And the rowdy cafés with their dazzling lights!

  —You go walking beneath the green lime trees of the promenade.

  The lime trees smell good on fine evenings in June!

  The air is so soft sometimes, you close your eyelids;

  The wind, full of sounds,—the town’s not far away—

  Carries odours of vines, and odours of beer …

  —Then you see a very tiny rag

  Of dark blue, framed by a small branch,

  Pierced by an unlucky star, which is melting away

  With soft little shivers, small, perfectly white …

  Under this, in his own block-lettered writing, he writes: “You are not alone, so don’t be lonely. You are the lucky star, framed by a small branch. Love Abel.” And a little farther down: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”

  I cling to the tide, to the “Love Abel” and to the suggestion that I’m his lucky star.

  One other letter arrives that summer, at the end of August. Again on the blue paper, two sheets this time, and again featuring a poem by Rimbaud, whose writings I am now acquainted with, having found a volume of his collected works in a second-hand bookstore downtown and having therefore learned that, in the first letter, Abel wrote out only part of the poem. Why didn’t he write out the last stanza, which goes on to tell how the boy falls in love with a young girl of “charming little airs”?

  “I was getting to the end of the page” is his explanation.

  This next poem, called “Eternity,” is short enough that he includes the whole thing.

  It has been found again.

  What?—Eternity.

  It is the sea fled away

  With the sun.

  Sentinel soul,

  Let us whisper the confession

  Of the night full of nothingness

  And the day on fire.

  From human approbation,

  From common urges

  You diverge here

  And fly off” as you may.

  Since from you alone,

  Satiny embers,

  Duty breathes

  Without anyone saying: at last.

  Here is no hope,

  No orietur.

  Knowledge and fortitude,

  No torture is certain.

  It has been found again.

  What?—Eternity.

  It is the sea fled away

  With the sun.

  That’s more like it. More romantic, more obviously having to do with us. Eternity found again, satiny embers. No hope here, no hope out in Vancouver, away from me. The sea fleeing away is our forced parting. Flying off is getting stoned. Orietur? I don’t know what that is, I can’t find it in my French-English dictionary.

  At the bottom of the page is a pen-and-ink drawing of “A Proliferating Sea Anemone,” which resembles a bunch of worms spilling out of the top of a striped pouch. It’s extremely meticulous, he must have worked on it for hours. But the drawing on the next page, although it couldn’t have taken him more than a few minutes to do, is the one that thrills me. It’s the two of us. There’s my thin face and heavy-lidded eyes, his ringlets and thick eyelashes, and we’re smiling and wearing monks’ robes. We are, as he’s written underneath,“Abelard and Hell-Louise,” an old joke of my father’s. Under this is “The truth shall make you free,” and under that a brown blotch and an arrow pointing away from it to the words: “Beer Spilled by Lenny.”

  Beer Spilled by Lenny. As the day progresses, so does my resentment that the drawing should have even been seen by the slovenly Lenny. Who could just as easily have been an American draft dodger named Judd or a card sharp named Thumbs, or who knows who else? All the weird people Abel meets on buses and in parks and at a bar called the Parliament, where, even though he’s underage, he gets served draft beer. On the phone, when he tells me about these characters, I try to act entertained despite not understanding why he would prefer them to no one at all, or at least to his school friends, of whom he seems to have a staggering number. From being a loner here in Green woods he has gone to being Vancouver’s pied piper. Strangers follow him home, they move right in.

  For me to say that they sound like bad influences would come across as bourgeois. Still, I hint at it, releasing my disquiet in a parody of concern over his welfare. I can hardly admit to myself, much less to him, that the truth is I’m jealous. He seems abnormally interested in these people, far more so than he is in me. His having friends at all feels like a betrayal.

  Sunday night. His turn to phone.

  T
hree days ago I celebrated my eighteenth birthday. Mrs. Carver baked a mocha cake and gave me a pair of surprisingly fashionable patterned knee socks. My father gave me a biography of J. S. Bach and a double-record set of Glenn Gould playing Bach’s partitas. From Abel, though I’d dropped several hints, there was nothing: no letter or telegram, no phone call. This evening I have expectations of a good excuse and an apology.

  Ten o’clock arrives. Ten-fifteen. At ten-thirty, worried that something terrible must have happened, I call the operator and am put through.

  It’s Mrs. Richter who answers. “Louise!” she shouts. “How are you?”

  “I’m—” I’m unprepared for her good humour.

  “Hello?” she shouts.

  “Hello. I’m here.”

  “How ari? you?”

  “Well, I’m waiting for Abel to call. He should have called half an hour ago.”

  “He didn’t call?”

  “No.”

  She makes a guttural noise. “Oh, bad boy, he must have forgot!”

  “Forgot?”

  “Because, you know, he’s not here. He’s gone out.”

  My throat seizes.

  “Hello? Louise?”

  ‘Tes.”

  “We have a bad connection!”

  I ask if Abel said where he was going.

  “Where he was going? No, no. He could be anywhere! Just a minute and I will find out.” Away from the mouthpiece she shouts,“Karl! Karl! Did Abel tell you where he was going?” A pause, then,“Louise, he just vamoosed! But I’m sure he’ll be home soon, and he’ll call you.”

  He doesn’t. I stay up, waiting. In bed, I cry and endlessly review the possibilities: he was in a car accident; he was murdered by one of his weird friends; his friends got him drunk and he blacked out; he was caught smoking marijuana and has been thrown in jail; he ran into an old girlfriend, who seduced him; he got turned off by my telling him he was the only person on earth I could talk to, the only person I wanted to be with.

  Better dead than turned off! No, no, I didn’t mean that. Don’t let him be dead!