The Romantic

by Barbara Gowdy

  In the middle of September, I find a place to live. A studio apartment on the top floor of a three-floor building and in a corner at the front, so there are windows on two sides. It’s not much bigger than the place Don Shaw tried to foist on me but it’s in a far better neighbourhood and close to a subway stop. It has more character, too: dark wainscotting; one of those old, round-shouldered refrigerators from the fifties. And a bed that drops from the wall when you open a pair of double doors. “A Murphy bed!” exclaims my father upon seeing it. He says its creator, William L. Murphy, also invented the grip in the hairpin, a comment that draws a scornful huff from Mrs. Carver, and I remember that her dead husband, the genius whose every idea got stolen out from under him, invented the electric curling iron.

  The huff is telling. She used to be so nervous around my father, dashing out of rooms he ambled into, clutching her heart when he exclaimed. Whether he realizes it or not, they are starting to act like a married couple, and if that leads them backwards into romance, I won’t mind. I’m already being mistaken for her daughter. On the day of the move, my landlord refers to her and my father as “your parents,” and I let the assumption ride. For the rest of the afternoon I find myself looking at her, this energetic little woman who is helping lug boxes into the elevator, and I think, as if I were the landlord, that you can see where I got my dark eyes from.

  Anyway, thank God my father has someone at home. Though he watched me pack, my actual departure stuns him. Though I told him I had rented a U-Haul trailer to transport my dresser, desk, chair and the glass tea table from the basement, when he sees the trailer parked in the driveway, he says,“Now what do you suppose that’s doing there?” Only the Murphy bed perks him up. Otherwise he sighs and observes that I’m leaving the nest, striking out on my own, sallying forth into the big world. Twice he gets out his wallet and starts peeling off bills, and I push his hand away, telling him I’m fine, I have plenty of money. I have a job!

  Not yet, I don’t. But I applied at a brokerage firm the Friday before and felt I made a good impression on the personnel manager, Miss Penn, a glum woman who, for most of the interview, sat turned toward the window, gazing out. That I barely passed the shorthand test was apparently not a concern. “Oh, well,” she said, dropping my transcription into the garbage pail. Also she spoke witheringly of my two competitors: a university graduate with “a chip on her shoulder the size of that typewriter” and a “love child” with “hair out to here and dirty fingernails.” Still, I didn’t think much of my chances until, in answer to the question “Why do you want this job?” I came out with,“My aunt, who was like a mother to me, she worked in a brokerage firm” (Was this the reason? I wondered as I spoke), and Miss Penn, smiling wanly in profile, said,“Yeah, I had an aunt like that.”

  She phones Thursday with the news. I’m to start on Monday. I use the time to practise taking dictation from newsreaders on the radio and to let down the Scotch-taped-up hems of my mother’s skirts and dresses, which I emptied out of her closet while my father looked on without comment (the most telling sign, so far, of a turn in his romantic affections). The man I am to work for, Mr. Fraser, is a senior partner whose secretary of thirty-seven years died after a long batde with cancer. I have some apprehension about filling her shoes but don’t think too much about it until Sunday night when I’m in bed and then I try to picture myself on the job and can’t get past turning on the typewriter. How many copies of a letter are you supposed to make? Do you use carbon paper or the photocopying machine? What is a stock, exactly? What kind of thing? And what’s the difference between a stock and a bond? Between a stenographer and a secretary, for that matter? I writhe around and the Murphy bed bounces on its thin metal legs and I start to worry that it’s going to flip back into the wall and crush me.

  My illuminated bedside clock says ten to one. Ten to ten out West. I hate it that Abel is still so much with me that I half live on Vancouver time. I’ll be eating breakfast and think of him asleep. Around noon I’ll imagine him loping off to school or sitting at the piano in his pyjamas, picking out some moody piece. I can’t stop doing this. It’s a form of obsessive, psychic voyeurism. No, it’s more active than that, more depraved, it’s me trying to control him through long-distance hypnosis. I veto sex and girls but not melancholy. The melancholy I exaggerate.

  I get up and go into the kitchen to make myself a cup of warm milk and honey. Warily, keeping weil back (the only other time I used the stove I singed my hair), I turn on a burner. Flames fly up. I turn it down, but that just turns it right off. I turn it on again, and now there’s only hissing. I try another burner. More hissing. The pilot light, wherever that is, must be out. I turn everything off, including the kitchen light, leave the milk in the pot and go sit at my desk, on my only chair. The church clock across the street tolls the hour. I picture Abel sprawled on his chesterfield and listening to a record, something dismal and intellectual. Eric Satie. A phone rings next door. Five, six, seven rings before it stops. I look at my own phone. I chose a black model because white or pink—the alternatives—seemed too frivolous for the possible instrument of my undoing. It would be so easy to call him. Nobody to overhear, no incriminating Vancouver number turning up on my father’s bill.

  I lift the receiver. In drifts the Angel of Love. I dial zero and immediately the operator comes on, startling me. I answer her questions, act as though I really intend to make the call (I’ll hang up as soon as she puts me through), but at the other end, instead of ringing, somebody starts talking.

  “Pardon?” I say.

  “Your party must have moved,” the operator says.

  “Moved?”

  “Changed residences.” She repeats the name and number I gave. “Is that right?”

  ‘Yes, but—”

  “If you hold one moment I can find out if they left a forwarding number.”

  In the pause, I fight for breath. I envision their abandoned ranch-style Vancouver house, the blank curtainless windows.

  “It’s a local number,” the operator says. She starts to reel it off.

  “No,” I say. “That’s all right.”

  “Don’t you—?”

  I hang up. Frozen, I wait for her to call back. When that danger seems over, I stand and go to the window.

  He’s here, in Toronto. And all these months I’ve been monitoring his life in Vancouver. I feel foolish, outmanoeuvred. Why hasn’t he tried to see me? Oh, I know why. If he called, if my father gave him my new number and I picked up the phone and it was him, would I even let him talk? Maybe. But he doesn’t know that.

  Just as well.

  I stay at the window, looking at the empty intersection. The streetlights go on changing. A cat crosses against the red. I count the seconds allotted each colour; I have nothing better to do. I am alone, cut off, living in an apartment whose bed, oven and phone can’t be trusted. In a few hours I will start a job from which I’ll almost certainly be fired. I’ll wear a pleated yellow skirt and matching bolero jacket that went out of fashion twenty years ago.

  Does he ever think about me? Does he look at the sky and think,“Louise is seeing the same sky”? Then you see a very tiny rag of dark blue, framed by a small branch, pierced by an unlucky star.

  I go to the front-hall closet and take down my jewellery box from the top shelf. I have no jewellery, I don’t wear it. What I keep in here are the two letters he sent me before I went out to Vancouver. I don’t know why I’ve saved them. I haven’t looked at them in almost a year.

  I read them both through, expecting to feel something different this time but getting caught up in the same old irritation and perplexity. Why these poems? And why tell me that beauty is truth, truth beauty, and that the truth shall make me free? The truth, when I stumbled upon it, made me suicidal.

  Then I get to the drawings. The sea anemone. I never really appreciated it before, but it’s quite beautiful, so intricate. Well, he’s talented, I never said he wasn’t. The other drawing is the one of him and me d
ressed in monks’ robes: “Abelard and Hell-Louise,” as he’s written underneath.

  “No, we aren’t,” I think. “We’re not them.” Abelard and Héloïse’s love was indestructible, and everything they suffered came from outside that love. With Abel and me, the assault came from within. From him.

  “He doesn’t love me,” I think. It’s a thought I’ve had so many times I hardly hear it any more as a statement of fact. It has become a kind of mantra, what I say to remind myself never again to get my hopes up.

  I return the letters to the box, put the box away, then pull my blanket and pillow onto the floor. I lie on my back, looking up at ribs of light fanning in through the blinds onto the ceiling. I’m not worried any more. I’m not even irritated. I suppose I ought to feel lost, or depressed, and maybe I do underneath. All I’m aware of feeling, though, is a tender curiosity about the person I’ve become, a recaptured calmness that vindicates this room and this night but isn’t influenced by them. It begins with me. I can feel it leaving my body in waves, like a signal.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  In the schoolyard Abel and I go on acting as if we don’t know each other, though I never let him out of my sight. He stays by the fence and is generally ignored, except when he catches the attention of Jerry Kochonowski, he of the square head, blond brush cut and walleye. Last year Jerry would yell,“Hey, Kraut! How many Jews did your Nazi father kill?” Now it’s,“Hey, Nazi! Killed any Jews lately?” or,“Show us your swastika!” His friends seem tired of this game but none of them speaks up. Jerry is a bully from a family of bullies, older brothers in and out of jail, a father who hits him with a board.

  “Bashes me right across the noggin,” he brags, unwittingly offering an explanation for how he came to have that eye.

  Nobody, probably least of all Jerry, expects Abel to answer the taunts. I don’t say anything either, hard as that is. It would only make things worse, a girl of my lowly status coming to his defence, although what keeps me quiet is not wanting Maureen Hellier to know that he matters to me. Of all people, she’s the one who tells Jerry to leave him alone, and she’s so sure of herself, so impervious to ridicule, that Jerry will occasionally back down. When he doesn’t, she reports him to the teacher on yard duty. She and her girlfriends then troop over to Abel—there’s no escaping them—and start going on about how awful Jerry is and how adopted children are just like other children and they bet Abel’s real parents are Canadian but even if they aren’t, that’s okay, lots of people have German relatives. “Rudeness is why there are wars,” Maureen invariably announces. Later, when Abel and I meet, I try to get him to admit that she’s a stupid know-it-all. He pretends to be suddenly interested in some insect or leaf. If we’re in his kitchen he goes into the living room and starts playing the piano.

  I slide onto the bench next to him. The Angel of Love is there, too, leaking light along the keys. Usually he plays something by Bach, who is his favourite composer, and mine now, as well. I like how crisp and mysterious the music sounds; it reminds me of the ravine, lying under the pine trees and the sun coming down in splinters through the needles.

  I can’t believe that anyone could play better than he does, but I never tell him because then he’ll make me listen to a record of the same piece and try to get me to hear the difference. It isn’t the flattery he minds, it’s the laxity of perception, the inaccuracy. When I call a frog a toad, or a damselfly a dragonfly, he is just as anxious to straighten me out. When I spot Jerry across the ravine and say,“There’s fathead!” he still corrects me, but indirectly; he says,“Blond boy at four o’clock,” as if this neutral way of putting it were only a confirmation.

  With the shorter days and colder weather and with the snow already deep by mid-November, we see less and less of Jerry, or of anyone, in the ravine. We ourselves still go down after school, although not as often. Abel prefers what he calls night prowls, and once, maybe twice a week I sneak out to join him, provided no bad weather has been forecast. It isn’t easy. I’ve got to smuggle my snowsuit, hat, scarf, mitts and boots into my bedroom, stay awake until midnight and then climb out the window without alerting my father.

  In the summer when we did this, there were crickets chirping, maybe someone’s dog barking. In the winter, there is no sound that doesn’t come from us. The unavoidable whistling my leggings make as I walk shears through a world in suspended animation. We keep our flashlights off until we’re in the ravine, and then we start searching for animal tracks. Along ridges and down by the river, we sometimes come upon the neat, straight tracks of a red fox. The same tracks, sloppy and meandering, mean it’s a dog. Prints like little human feet mean skunk. We look for abandoned birds’ nests and visit the ones we found before. In the spirea bushes there’s a sparrow’s nest threaded with blue fishing line and with what we think is the red string you tear off a Band-Aid wrapper. Nearby, dangling from a branch and threatening to fall but always still there, is an oriole’s nest in the shape of a Dutch boy’s shoe.

  At around two o’clock we start heading back. More often than not, as we enter the subdivision, we hear his mother calling.

  “Where does she think you go to?” I asked the first time we heard her.

  He said he didn’t know.

  “Doesn’t she say, ‘Where were you?’”

  “She’s just glad to find me. I always let her find me.”

  “And she’s not mad?”

  “She’d probably be out for a walk anyway. She’s an insomniac.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A person who can’t sleep.”

  “But doesn’t she worry that you’re not getting enough sleep?”

  “I’m an insomniac, too.”

  Under my window he makes a step of his linked hands and I climb up onto the ledge. He waits until I’m inside, then sets off in the direction his mother is calling. I always feel a little desolate then. He never looks more unconquerable or more completely himself than he does from the back, at night, walking away.

  By early June it seems that Abel has made it through another school year in one piece. He doesn’t act relieved, however; he doesn’t talk about the near brush with death. He talks about the success of his strategy, as if Jerry Kochonowski were only an element in a successful experiment.

  “I completely ignored him,” he says. “I played dead. When you play dead, it dulls a predator’s killer instinct.”

  Or sharpens it.

  One day I have a dentist appointment after school and so I don’t make it to the ravine until four-thirty. Abel said he’d be in the sumach grove but he’s not there. I use the crow call, the loudest and most urgent in our repertoire. No answer. I run around cawing. I go to the cave, back to the grove, down to the river. I climb up to the ledge and look inside my old fort. I keep on climbing to the top. From here I can see the river and the sludge factory. Men are beginning to leave for the day. Maybe Al knows something. Al, the manager, who gave us a bag of green mints once and had such a wrinkled, mischievous face that I could no longer think of him as a spy. I start hurrying down. I am at the ledge when I spot a boy racing across the Camp Wanawingo clearing. Not Abel, a blond boy.

  Jerry Kochonowski. By himself.

  I stumble the rest of the way down. I run screaming,“Abel!” It doesn’t matter who hears. My legs feel like tree stumps. The bridge is too far away. I run straight into the water, which is only knee deep at this point but so putrid I’ve never stuck a finger in it before.

  He appears from behind a bush. His shirt is off and he’s holding it above his right eye. “It’s okay,” he says, coming to the bank. “I’m okay.”

  “What happened?” I slog out of the water. “What did he do?”

  “Threw a piece of brick.”

  “Let me see.”

  He takes away the shirt, and there’s a saw-toothed gash.

  I cover my mouth with my hands.

  “It’s starting to coagulate,” he says.

  I don’t know what that means, but it s
ounds bad. “Come on,” I say,“let’s go to the factory before they close. They might have bandages or something.”

  “I don’t need bandages. I just need to keep applying pressure.”

  “We’d better go home and call a doctor.”

  “I’ve got to sit down.” He drops onto the sand.

  I drop beside him. “I saw him running away. I knew he’d hurt you. I—” My voice catches.

  “It’s okay. I’m okay.”

  “But what happened?”

  “I was looking for that bullfrog we saw yesterday. I heard rustling in the bushes over there and thought it was you—”

  “I wouldn’t rustle,” I say desperately.

  “I went over to see and it was Jerry crouched down, trying to hide, so I thought I’d better get away fast and I started to run but he yelled ‘Help!’ so I ran back and he threw the brick and took off.”

  “That stupid fathead. I hate him. I hate him. We have to call the police.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s all over now.” He takes the shirt from his face. “How does it look?”

  “Awful. Oh, your shirt’s all bloody.” I am wearing a pale blue cotton jacket over my blouse and I pull it off and give it to him.

  “Are you sure? The blood might not come out.”

  “Then I’ll burn it.”

  He folds the jacket into a square. “Don’t cry, okay?”

  “Didn’t you hear me calling?”

  “I blacked out.”

  “Blacked out?” I jump to my feet. “I’m going to the factory right now!”

  “No.” He reaches for my hand and draws me down. My hand in his silences me. He says,“Before you came I was doing mental exercises. Counting backwards from a hundred by intervals of seven. I’m pretty sure I don’t have brain damage. Do I sound normal?”