The Romantic

by Barbara Gowdy

  “He tried to kill you.”

  “We’re not going to tell anyone, okay?”

  “What about your parents?”

  “I’ll say I tripped and fell on a rock. A jagged rock.”

  “You’re going to let him get away with it?”

  “He won’t do it again.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do. Promise you won’t tell anyone.”

  Sobs punch at my throat. His expression is confusingly sympathetic, as if I were the bleeding one. When I can speak I say,“Only if he leaves you alone from now on.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  He lies back. So do I. He turns his head toward me, keeping the jacket in place with his elbow. We are still holding hands. He says,“You’d better wash your feet and legs when you get home. You’d better wash your shoes, too.”

  “I will.”

  “Don’t cry.”

  “What if I cry because I love you?”

  He blinks. But he doesn’t look away. He’s thinking, considering the question. “Do you?”

  I kiss him on the mouth. He shuts his eyes. I kiss him harder. He lets go of my hand and brings that arm around me and we roll to face each other. We push at each other’s lips and bodies. I can’t get near enough to the feeling this produces. When we stop, the coat has fallen from his forehead. The gash, which I’d almost forgotten about, gives me a start.

  “Is it still bleeding?” he asks.

  “A little. It’s swelling.”

  He repositions the coat. “I might need stitches after all.”

  “We’d better go, then.”

  “In a minute.”

  “Doesn’t it hurt?”

  “Not too much.”

  He is staring at me. His face seems years younger. I say, ‘You love me, too.”

  He nods.

  ‘You love me very, very much.”

  He nods.

  We kiss all the time. We will be collecting stones, picking wild strawberries, and a look will pass between us, as if we’ve both just heard a strange noise, and wherever we happen to be, we’ll start searching for a private place. We don’t speak; there are no preliminaries. As soon as we lie down, we’re kissing.

  We have progressed to opening our mouths. We touch tongues, suck on each other’s bottom lips. I have a rough idea about sexual intercourse but I can’t imagine doing anything more sexual than this. When it’s over, before we stand up, I might tell him I love him and he’ll say,“Okay.” So then I’ll say,“You love me,” and he’ll redden and say, ‘Yes.” We never talk about the kissing.

  Or about the scar. He refuses to. It is a sideways Z, which I suspect secretly pleases him, as it could be the mark of Zorro. Nine stitches were required. We stuck to our lie, but his father seemed to know that if there was a rock, it was thrown. He said, ‘You didn’t break the fall with your hands?” and Abel slid his hands into his pockets and shook his head.

  “Where exactly was this rock?” Mr. Richter asked then.

  Again Abel hesitated, so I said,“Where they’re building the new house, on Spruce Court,” and Mr. Richter looked at me, a stern and unconvinced but not unkindly look. Mrs. Richter, who would have walked by that house many times and seen the piles of excavated stones, cried,“Abel, what if Louise had fallen into the pit?”

  “Louise is careful,” Abel murmured.

  “Louise is good,” Mrs. Richter cried, hugging me,“to let you ruin her jacket.”

  I am not careful. I am not good. I am vengeful is what I am.

  I have thought, since Abel died, that by always being furious on his behalf I allowed him to take the high road. Or else I gave him no other choice. In my company, he would never admit that somebody was even exasperating let alone obnoxious or mean. But then why should he, when I could be counted on to say the worst? Unlike him, I required an accounting. I understood perfectly the eye-for-an-eye argument. The turn-the-other-cheek argument struck me as wrong in an almost physical sense, a threat to natural order and balance.

  I find it maddening, then, when I see Jerry in the ravine, unpunished and unafraid, fishing off the bridge or setting campfires he never properly puts out, which means we have to pour water on them later. These days he is usually by himself, his gang having mysteriously dropped away, and I say to Abel, why don’t we capture him and tie him up in the cave? Make him swallow ground glass? Shove twigs under his fingernails? In the ravine, Abel and I no longer bother putting any distance between ourselves, but when I start going on like this, he tries to move out of listening range. Or he tries to make a deal. “Let’s set a deadline,” he’ll say. “In one week you never talk about Jerry ever again.”

  “Or what?” I’ll say.

  “Or you pass the deadline.” As if this were dire, and “deadline” itself has a forbidding enough ring that I am temporarily silenced.

  And then a real, comprehensible deadline comes along. He tells me that on July twenty-first he and his parents are going to Vancouver for three weeks to visit Mr. Richter’s brother, Uncle Helmut, who’s trying to get them to move out there.

  “Are you going to move out there?”

  “I don’t know.” He shrugs. “Maybe.”

  So there it is: a line, like death to me.

  On the morning that they leave, it rains. I help Mrs. Carver prepare a stew by chopping carrots and celery into the pill-size pieces she requires. After that, I watch a movie on television about a composer who dies young, bleeding all over his piano in the last scene. I cry silently as the composer’s girlfriend, George, cries. By the time the movie is over, the rain has stopped. I decide I may as well head down to the ravine.

  I go into the cave and just sit, my mind empty of thought. Behind me, where the bats sleep, is a steady ticking sound. Water dripping. Deadlines passing. Eventually I move out onto the ledge and consider getting Abel’s gardening gloves and cutting back more nettles to enlarge our lookout post.

  But I only stand there, watching the path. And not five minutes go by before I see Jerry Kochonowski wending his way up.

  I seem to wake from a spell. I creep into the cave and grab a spear. Creep out. He has stopped and is looking all around, though not up at me. The tenseness leaves my chest. He goes over to a pile of rocks and sits. A calm feeling comes over me, a simple understanding of what needs to be done. I move to the other side of the ledge. Holding the spear up and aimed, I start climbing down. A step, then a pause to see if he heard, then a step. I am right behind him before he turns around.

  “Oh,” he says, standing. “Hi.”

  His face is flushed, his bad eye veering off as if to a conspirator. Instinctively I glance that way.

  “Do you have any water?” he says. “I’m dying of thirst.”

  I draw back my arm.

  He glances at the spear. “What’s that?”

  I hurl it at his chest.

  “Hey!”

  I get him in the shoulder. The spear dangles, then falls out.

  “What did you do that for?” he says.

  He’s not even bleeding. I scan the rocks. I snatch one up and throw it as hard as I can. He tries to dodge but it hits him above the ear and he stumbles. Now there’s blood. He doesn’t seem to realize. His good eye has a look of witless, struggling confusion. The savagery is in his other eye. I pick up the spear. He looks at me and then at the pile of rocks. Then he turns and staggers down the hill.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  I wake up rigid, jaw clenched, the names MacLellan, Fraser and Eliot running through my mind. Who are they? I think, bewildered. Friends of my father’s? Famous explorers? Then it comes to me. Today is my first day of work.

  I take a shower, fix my hair, put on my yellow pleated skirt and matching bolero jacket. But I am only observing the formalities. I now understand why condemned prisoners eat a last meal: you just do what comes next. It’s simple enough. Out on the street I join the mass of office workers draining into the subway. I let myself be shuffled onto a packed car.
I grab a pole. It’s stifling in here but everyone seems cool and unruffled. The men read newspapers, the women paperback books. There is a dignified atmosphere. The train makes sudden puzzling stops, creeps forward, screeches, thrusts ahead. As one, pretending not to notice, we lurch and sway.

  Half of the train empties at the King station. Hundreds of us walking fast in a single direction. I find it bracing while it lasts, like singing the national anthem. Back up on the street, we fan out into columns, mine heading west toward a new black office tower. I enter the revolving door on the strength of someone else’s push. Enter the elevator and fix on the ascending numbers: the reverse countdown to my humiliation. At thirty-seven, I step onto a dove-grey carpet that holds the footprints of earlier arrivals. The brokerage firm takes up the entire floor, and two others besides. This foyer, with its four elevators, is their lobby.

  “Louise Kirk?”

  It’s the receptionist. She seems far away and lonely down there at the end.

  “Yes?”

  She smiles and holds up a finger. “Good morning. MacLellan, Fraser and Eliot.” I go over to her. On her large presidential desk, aside from the phone, a pen and a pink message pad, there is only a tubular glass vase holding a single purple orchid. Behind her, attached to the wall, is a box of cubbyholes that looks like those birdhouses you see on farms.

  “One moment,” she says,“I’ll check if he’s come in yet.” She rolls her eyes as if at the comical gall of people who phone before nine o’clock. She has short blond hair layered like petals, like a petalled bathing cap. She’s very pretty. “Good morning, Mr. Gage,” she says. “Should I put Mr. Webster through?” Her coral nail polish matches her lipstick and blouse. On the fourth finger of her left hand is a stripe of white skin where a ring was. “Hi there”—speaking to me now—“I’m Debbie Luke.”

  “Hi.”

  “Pat, you know, the personnel manager, Pat Penn, she called a few minutes ago to say she won’t be coming in today. She’s got a migraine. Poor thing, she gets at least one a week. More when the weather’s like this. Kind of muggy like it is? She has to lie perfectly still with the cold cloth, the ear plugs, the black eye patches, the whole bit. It must be just awful.”

  All this said in a thrilled, confidential manner, looking up at me and quickly away and therefore giving the impression that there is far more to the story than she can tell, a surprising, even romantic, complication. I start to speak but she lifts her hand. “Good morning. MacLellan, Fraser and Eliot.”

  I wonder what I’m meant to do. Miss Penn instructed me to report to her office first thing. Maybe I can go home. My stomach tightens. If I go now, it’ll be a jailbreak. I won’t come back.

  “I’m afraid he’s out of the country until next Tuesday. Could I take a message for his secretary?” There follows a silence during which she writes on her pad while casting me a series of furtive looks that describe what she’s hearing: something perplexing, now exasperating, now reasonable. “Okay,” she says when the call is over. She swivels to poke the message into a cubbyhole. “We just have to hold tight”—swivelling back—“until one of the other girls shows up to take you to Mr. Fraser’s office. It’s way at the other end. He’s already here. He’s here every day at seven. He’s old, you know, a widower, up at the crack of dawn. I don’t want to call him to come and get you, it’s such a long walk, and he’s all bent over. But what a sweetheart.” She turns as the door behind her opens. ‘You’ll just love him. Oh. Speak of the devil. Good morning, Mr. Fraser.”

  “Good morning, Debbie.” A deep voice, full and resounding, like a stage actor’s. He glances at me. “I’m expecting a young lady….” Another glance.

  Debbie, bursting, as if at the reunion of long-lost relations, nods in my direction.

  “Ah!” the man says. “Louise Kirk?”

  ‘Yes,” I say. “Hello.”

  He regards me frankly, taking his time. He is tall, still a tall man though stooped to a degree that obliges him to tilt his neck back just to see forward. His face is long; his frank look may be partly the result of his chin jutting out. A bald head splattered in liver spots the colour of peanut butter. Eyes the same shade. That expression he has, of both terrible sadness and a private, indestructible joy, is one I’ve noticed before in old men.

  He comes toward me, smiling. “Pleased to have you on board.”

  We shake hands. “I’m pleased to be here,” I say, trying to sound upbeat, like Debbie. I hate it that I will disappoint him and we will both be embarrassed by all this initial goodwill.

  Sometimes I’m lucky. Of all the possible bosses in this city I end up with Mr. Fraser, who—it immediately becomes obvious—needs a secretary only to keep up appearances, which, of course, is perfect, considering that until I learn a few things I’m a secretary in appearance only.

  There is very little for either of us to do. In this way, oddly, the job resembles my last one, except that at the bookstore our uselessness was spoken of and ridiculed, whereas here, the situation goes unmentioned (at least it does between Mr. Fraser and me) although not unacknowledged. That we come to work for the sake of inventing businesslike activities with which to fill our days is nothing we can keep from each other. And yet I don’t feel wasted or unnecessary. I feel as though I am involved in the preservation of certain lofty but no longer fashionable virtues. Civility and contemplation.

  That first morning, at least a half-hour is consumed by his acquainting me with the contents of my desk. Betty’s old desk. It’s an oak antique, sticky here and there from something spilled. Mr. Fraser and I examine the paper drawer first, its three trays, one for letterhead, one for plain bond, one for the yellow tissue you use to make copies. “I prefer white,” he says of the tissue. “But the fellow who does the ordering tells me it’s no longer available.” I close that drawer. “They don’t make it any more,” he says. I open the top drawer. “Stapler, pencil sharpener,” he says, launching into an inventory. “Glue, Scotch tape, paperclips, thumbtacks.” His deep voice and thoughtful delivery lend each item a fleeting stature. He points a wavering finger at the cardboard thumbtack box. “Is that right? Thumbtacks?”

  I open the box. ‘Yes.”

  “Now what the Sam Hill did she use thumbtacks for? What’s in that green box there?”

  I open it.

  “Now what do you suppose those are?”

  “They look like those plastic tabs you put on file folders.”

  He clasps his hands, pleased. “That’s it.”

  I am seated at the desk. He stands beside me, bent forward at an angle that would be alarming if he weren’t so naturally stooped. He presses his tie against his chest to keep it out of the way. It is navy with maroon dots. Very tasteful. His navy pinstripe suit is too large and I wonder if he has recently lost weight, if perhaps Betty’s death took a toll. He is unprepared for the personal items we find in the bottom drawer, though they aren’t much, just a nail file, a pair of reading glasses, a tube of lip balm, a jar of rosewater hand lotion and a white comb. “Ah,” he says. He strokes his tie. “You see, I should have emptied this out.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  I go to shut the drawer but he says,“No, you’ll be wanting to put your own things in here,” and he reaches in and fumbles around, trying to pick up the nail file, but he can’t get a finger under it, so he picks up the glasses. I take out the rest and hand it to him and he thanks me and puts it all in his jacket pockets.

  “Now, then,” standing straighter. He frowns. He seems to have forgotten something. He turns to face the filing cabinets.

  “You sure have a lot of filing cabinets,” I prompt.

  He perks up. “Twelve in all. Forty-eight drawers.”

  They are grey metal, far from new. Four are in his office; the rest have been lined up out here in the alcove to form a wall against the vacant corridor. We’re in an outpost, and there is no escaping a feeling of banishment, but perhaps it is an invited banishment, a compromise, because nowhere else on
our long trek from the reception desk did I see any furniture like this, not just the cabinets and my desk but everything: his great hulk of a desk, the wrought-iron coat rack, a magnificent marble-topped credenza, the glass-doored bookcases in his office and the oil paintings he has in there, four or five from the quick glance I got, all of sailing ships.

  He waves toward the filing cabinets and says,“One drawer for every year I’ve been in the brokerage business.”

  “Forty-eight years,” I say. I can’t even imagine living that long.

  “June the sixth, nineteen twenty-one, that’s the day I hung out my shingle. It’s just a coincidence, though, the drawers being the same as the years. I mean to say, we file alphabetically by client name. Do you want to take a look?” He asks this doubtfully.

  “Sure.”

  We go to the nearest cabinet, the uppermost drawer, whose label reads “Nyman – O’Farrel.”

  “Should be two l’s in O’Farrell,” he says, peering. He pulls the drawer open with effort, a grim ferocity jumping to his face. “Runners need greasing,” he says. Inside, the files are jammed and disorderly, papers sticking out of folders, name tabs falling off. He closes it and tugs opens the one beneath and it’s just as chaotic. “I suppose they could do with some tidying up,” he says.

  “Get rid of all the inactive ones,” I offer, surprising myself. I didn’t realize I knew about inactive files.

  “Well, now,” Mr. Fraser says,“if we go that route, we’ll empty them out. Ninety percent of these people are no longer in the land of the living.”

  “Oh.”

  He smiles. His lips are as thin as string, quite red. His smile is amused but sympathetic, and the thought comes to me that he requested a secretary who was inexperienced and uncertain, although he wouldn’t have been so explicit. “Who will put up with me,” he might have said.

  The following weeks are a lulling, protected time reminiscent of the dreamlike days after an illness when the worst is over but you’re still in bed. At work the phone rarely rings, few people drop by. Mr. Fraser himself leaves me alone once he has established that for the next several hours I will be reasonably occupied. On my desk, when I arrive at nine o’clock, there are always several letters waiting to be typed. He has written them out on lined foolscap in a slightly shaky but legible hand and included the date and the person’s address, though I could easily have found the address on his Rolodex.