The Romantic

by Barbara Gowdy

  Our own tracks we cover. When we need to relieve ourselves (or “go,” as we call it; “I have to go,” one of us will say, and the other will turn and wander off a respectful distance) we use a stick or stone to scrape out a toilet cavity, which we afterwards cover up. Any footprints we make in soft ground we disguise by retracing our steps, or by just walking backwards in the first place. We move like Indians, at least he does. I can’t get the knack of stepping silently over pine needles and twigs.

  He says I should pretend that I’m hanging from strings: “Like a puppet. Your feet hardly touch the ground.”

  That doesn’t work.

  “Okay,” he says then,“pretend there’s a layer of antigravity surrounding the entire planet, and it’s impossible for your feet to touch the ground unless you wear special gravity boots.”

  That doesn’t work either.

  Late afternoon we go to his house, taking separate routes. At the kitchen table we eat strudel or tarts, drink milk, sometimes iced tea. Abel reads. I spoil my supper and listen to the sound of Mrs. Richter’s voice, although I am now bold enough to offer the occasional response, so it might be said that we have something close to a conversation. I praise her baking and needlepoint. One day I work up the nerve to say I wish somebody would teach me how to bake: “But not Mrs. Carver. Her pastry is chewy. Yours is so light and flaky.”

  She fails to take the hint. “Such compliments!” she cries. “I will have a swell head!”

  “Swelled,“ Abel says, without looking up from his book.

  “I will have a swelled head!” she cries.

  I smile. I smile continuously, what I hope is a brave, sweet smile. I hunch to appear frail and motherless. I have begun to talk about my mother. It gets their attention, I’ve noticed that. Abel stops reading, Mrs. Richter sets down her needlepoint. I am anxious to explain why my mother left, to discredit the slander I’m convinced is being spread about me by Mrs. Dingwall. At the same time I am shy of broaching the matter. I need an invitation, a cue.

  It comes one afternoon when Mrs. Richter says that the Fuller Brush man showed up on her doorstep and she bought two brushes she didn’t need because he was such a “stealer-dealer.”

  “Wheeler-dealer,” I say, sitting straighter.

  “He was such a wheeler-dealer!”

  “I know all about wheeler-dealers,” I say.

  “You do?”

  “My mother ran away with one, that’s why.”

  Mrs. Richter blinks. “Ah!”

  “He lured her away.”

  Mrs. Richter clicks her tongue.

  “She wrote a goodbye note, and she said she really didn’t want to leave us.”

  There’s no proving otherwise. As far as I know, the note is long gone, probably Aunt Verna took it. Anyway, I can’t imagine my father divulging the contents to a neighbour.

  I say,“She said she loved me very much.”

  “But of course she loved you very much!” Mrs. Richter cries. “What mother does not love her child very much?”

  It’s a sultry, stormy August, black clouds heaving up from the southwest almost every day just about the time we finish eating our lunch. At the first rumbles we head for the cave, where a few of the bats will already be flying around. I’ve stopped being frightened after all these weeks of not even getting brushed by a wing tip. They swoop within inches of us, though; you feel the small swipes of air, like somebody blowing out a match. Their squeaks perforate the darkness and give a sense that it’s the cave itself squeaking, shifting under the force of the thunder.

  There’s no wind yet. It arrives just ahead of the first slaps of rain on the ledge. The downpour, coming seconds later, sounds like loud radio static and sometimes Abel pretends it is, he says,“Communications tower is down,” or,“Headquarters is still trying to get through.” Sometimes the rain gusts in, which creates a commotion among the bats that still cling to the roof. At especially loud thunderclaps a few fall away and join the flyers. “That was close,” Abel says, fantasizing artillery fire. “Direct hit!” he calls when the lightning and thunder strike simultaneously. We duck down.

  He looks dramatic in the lightning flashes, the bats arrested in mid-cyclone above his head, which is just inches from mine. As this happens only in the cave, this proximity, it is only here that I become conscious of him as a boy. What if he kisses me? What if I kiss him? It shocks me that I have such thoughts about somebody who is practically my brother. And yet it doesn’t shock me at all that when I’m at home, by myself, I have thoughts about him getting hit by a car or shot by a burglar, and Mrs. Richter clinging to me for comfort. I am lovelorn when I’m by myself, full of yearning. When I’m with him, I go in and out of elevated states of expectation. Something is going to happen, it has to. The regular commotion of thunderstorms is a clamouring for this thing. Which is? I don’t know, I don’t know what it is, but crouched beside him in the cave I am ready. I wonder if he feels the same. I see, as I never will again, an almost offputting fragility in the curve of his back, or maybe it’s his curly hair or his full lips, I can’t hold the impression of it in one place. Otherwise, I see him as superior to every boy I know. I think, not caring in the least, that most of the girls at school must be secretly in love with him.

  These are the days. The nights are warm and windy, thick with the whirring of crickets. When the streetlights come on, and children of less lenient parents get called inside, Abel and I rescue moths. Like ghosts of the bats, the pale moths flutter in a magical zone where a collision between them and us seems inevitable and yet we couldn’t touch one if we tried. Hence the net, which requires skill in order not to cause injury.

  I leave that part to Abel, also the transferring of a moth from the net to one of the jars. I stand there looking up, begging: “Don’t! No!” Nothing is so frustrating as watching a moth’s jerky, exhausted climb back up to the light.

  “We only want to help you,” I say. “We want to save your life.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  From Abel’s essay “Oblivion,” page 10:

  “How can we know that every living thing is not aware? Perhaps the order and symmetry we perceive in Nature result less from genetic determinism than from an awareness, between one like thing and another, that they are alike and to exactly what degree this is so. The branches on trees grow to a length that results in the mature foliage having an overall bloom shape, with no single branch shooting out conspicuously, because each branch is so perfectly aware of its neighbour as to be in perfect agreement with it. Hair, fur, grass and petals grow only so long and no longer. Similarly, intelligence and aspiration, in all creatures, are constrained within consensual limits. If it were possible for a hair or a branch or any creature to live its entire existence from conception onward in a complete isolation of which it were completely unaware, who knows how far it might reach?”

  This stymies me, this paragraph. On the one hand he seems to be praising observation and conformity. The more attention you pay to everything and everybody around you, the less risk there is that you’ll go “shooting out conspicuously” and upsetting the natural balance.

  On the other hand he calls this kind of diffuse appreciation a constraint. Not a constraint to a deeper appreciation, though, to the possibility of—for instance—finding just one person so remarkable you can’t tear your eyes away. It’s the stifling of individual potential he regrets. “Complete isolation”—I can never read those words without sighing. What is he suggesting if it isn’t that attachment interferes with fulfillment?

  I think of the emptiness of outer space, and men in their little pods going up there alone, wives and girlfriends left behind. I think of Abel and me lying on the grass, looking up at the stars, and how great that was, but, still, I was always waiting for him to turn his head. To look at me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The hard, metallic feeling persists. I lie face up on the barge-sized bed, arms rigid at my sides, eyelids heavy as coins, and immediately fall asle
ep. My dreams feature glass high-rise buildings and insidiously clean bathrooms. Nine hours later I haven’t moved, except for unclenching my fists. I now notice that gold stars are stuck all over the ceiling, some clinging by a single point and some already fallen but commemorated by the glue mark. This sight is not disorienting. I have woken up knowing exactly where I am (the Water’s Edge Hotel, room 1014, Honeymoon Suite) and why (Abel, that bastard).

  I take a shower. While shampooing my hair I sense a plunge of dim light behind my left shoulder. “The Angel of Love,” I think wearily, and let myself dwell on the prospect that I have some kind of eye disease that causes me to hallucinate light in my peripheral vision. Either that or I’m delusional. I believed Abel loved me, didn’t I? I look at my belly and remember I was going to say,“A little you in there.” Well, the mad-scientist abortion doctor in Buffalo can have the little him in there. Wrench out its tiny black heart.

  I put on my blue jeans and T-shirt, tug the ballet slippers over the bloodied bandages that, despite the shower, hold fast, and limp down to the dining room, where I eat a stunningly bad breakfast of rancid orange juice, undercooked bacon, rubbery scrambled eggs and soggy toast. All the other guests are complaining and spitting mouthfuls back onto their plates. When a woman at the next table turns to me and says,“You must have a cast-iron stomach,” I say,“I can’t really taste anything,” although I can. It’s just that for the first time in days I’m not even slightly nauseated, and so taste is a negligible sensation compared with the relief of effortless swallowing. “Anyway,” I say, touching my belly,“I’ve got to eat. I’m eating for two now.”

  Why do I tell her that? Because I want to shock her, I guess (and there it is—the blank expression, the eyes scanning me up and down, then zeroing in on my naked ring finger before she says,“Well, congratulations”). Also because I am eating for two, however reluctantly, however temporarily, and I’m in a mood for looking at things dead on. An hour later, in the taxi on my way back to the airport, I admire the scenery but I don’t try to see the mountains as metaphors for some noble sentiment, and I don’t worry about forgetting what geological era they belong to, either. I think,“This is how it feels to have Abel out of my life.” Everything truer to my own experience of it. In his letters he was always going on about the truth—“The truth shall make you free,” “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—as if betrayal and pools of vomit were fabrications. Or, even more ridiculous, as if even these things, because they aren’t fabrications, must be counted as beautiful.

  I read the J. S. Bach biography. Flying out, the idea was to pick up interesting details for the sake of smartening up my end of the conversation. Going home, I find myself gripped by what now seems to be a cautionary tale about the perils of involving yourself with brilliant, artistic men. Passages such as “never would he use words to explain or justify anything he had done of a personal character” have me nodding and snorting, although I’m just as contemptuous of the saintly, obtuse Anna Magdalena and her serial childbirths (thirteen!) and then her weepy amazement at discovering, after Bach’s death, that he’d made no will. Bach, it seems,“gave no thought to his wife’s financial position.” Had he done so,“she would possibly have escaped life in an almshouse and a pauper’s grave.”

  As it was, and if you ask me, she got what she deserved.

  We land at sunset. Since my wallet still bulges with money, and since my feet feel like burnt stumps, I treat myself to a taxi. My father is under the impression that a chartered bus is dropping everybody off at the Greenwoods plaza, but if he happens to be looking out the window when the taxi pulls into the driveway, he’ll just assume that the bus must have broken down, some mishap. That I might have lied to him—about anything, ever—won’t enter his mind.

  He’s in the kitchen. As soon as I open the front door, he springs out, face all alight. “How was it?” he asks. “How’s our nation’s capital?”

  “Still standing.” I pry off the slippers. “Which is more than I can say for myself.”

  “Good lord, what happened?”

  “My new shoes rubbed the skin right down to the bone.”

  “Let’s go into the kitchen.” He takes my arm. “I’ll have a look.”

  We sit at the table, and I lift my feet onto his lap. “Did you do this?” he asks of the bandaging.

  “A lady did. A nice lady. She gave me the slippers, too.”

  He gingerly unpeels one of the Band-Aids that covers the big toe on my left foot. “Some swelling,” he says. “But starting to heal over. She applied iodine, I see.”

  ‘Yeah.”

  “Who was she? A nurse?”

  “No. She was just passing by when I noticed the blood gushing out. She took me to an infirmary but the nurse isn’t there on Saturdays, so she did everything herself. We never found out her name but my teacher thought she might be Judy LaMarsh.”

  Judy LaMarsh is the only female politician I can think of, probably because I used to have a teacher named Miss LaMarsh. My father looks up. “No kidding?”

  “She was ordering everyone around like she was a big wheel.”

  “Dark hair? Glasses?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, what do you know?” He smiles. “I thought she’d left Parliament Hill but it’s possible she was back for some reason, visiting someone.”

  I hadn’t intended to keep the lie going. On the plane, and even walking up our driveway, I was determined to tell the truth, right down to saying I wanted an abortion. And then I put my feet in his lap.

  No, I broke before that: coming into the kitchen and seeing his Sunday dinner of warmed-up meat loaf, nothing else on the table except for the Globe and Mail cryptic crossword, a chewed pencil and his reading glasses, whose missing hinges he has replaced with twisted paperclips. That lonely little scene. Added to which he’s wearing the ugly purple-and-green diamond-patterned sweater-vest I know he thinks my mother would approve of because he bought it out of the Eaton’s catalogue.

  How do you drop a brick onto that house of cards? Oh, he’d turn himself inside out trying to be understanding and helpful; there’d be no lectures or demands. He’d probably even drive me to Buffalo if I said my mind was set on going. Afterwards, he’d brood, but not for long. In spite of everything, he’d believe himself to be blessed.

  He goes to the bathroom and returns with the first-aid kit. As I watch him dab my blisters with a cotton ball soaked in iodine I feel an almost painful surge of love. He’s talking about Ottawa, a city I’ve never been to and can scarcely picture. He makes it easy, though, by phrasing his end of the conversation in such a way that all I have to do is agree: “Some people think it’s too staid, even for a capital city, too institutional, too grey.”

  “They have a point.”

  “A shame you missed seeing parliament in session. I presume they at least let you in.”

  “Yeah, we got in.”

  When I’m cleaned up and rebandaged and my feet set back on the floor, he gives me a probing look that makes me wonder if, after all, he suspects something. Except I’ve had these looks from him before and never felt myself to be at their crux. Those other times I felt either that he was searching for my mother in me (a resemblance, a clue to her behaviour) or that my eyes, because they’re so much like his, had ricocheted him back to himself and his thoughts. Being pregnant, however, I may now be radiating a quality he recognizes but can’t put his finger on. “What?” I say finally.

  “Oh …” He shakes his head. “Nothing, nothing. Are you hungry?”

  I tell him I ate on the plane and just want to go to bed. “I think I’m still fighting off the flu,” I say. “No—” leaning away as his hand reaches for my forehead,“I don’t have a temperature. I’m just a bit weak. I think I’d better play it safe, though, and stay home from school tomorrow.”

  Near dawn I creep down to the kitchen, where he’ll be less likely to hear, and throw up in the sink. I then go back to sleep until Mrs. Carver sits on the edge of
my bed, sometime around ten o’clock. She, too, gives me a probing look, her third in less than a week. But where my father seemed to be trying to locate something, I sense that Mrs. Carver is urging me to confess the thing she has already figured out. So I say,“The father isn’t Tim Todd. It’s Abel.”

  She blinks.

  “You thought it was Tim.”

  “What do you …?” She touches the rim of her glasses. “What are you …?”

  “You know I’m pregnant.”

  Her mouth opens and shuts, opens and shuts.

  “I’m pregnant,” I say. “I thought you knew.”

  She shakes her head.

  I sit up. “Then why do you keep looking at me like that?”

  She comes to her feet.

  “Just now. I wake up, and there you are looking at me.”

  Her eyes circle. She clutches her chest. “I thought …” She gasps.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I thought … you … were on … on …”

  “On what?”

  “Drugs.”

  “Drugs? What drugs?”

  “Mrs. Sawchuk saw you.”

  “Mrs. Sawchuk?”—her friend, a middle-aged legal secretary who claims to have been covered in warts before rubbing herself with one of Mrs. Carver’s concoctions.

  “You were with a …” She twirls her fingers down each side of her head to describe long, curly hair.