“I’ve signed a lease,” he reminds me.
Which he could break if he wanted to. Well, I can wait. I can scheme.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
A couple of weeks before Christmas the judge buys a fourteen-foot-high spruce tree for the living room, whose ceiling is twelve feet high. “I could’ve told you it was twelve foot,” says Howie, and he saws off the top, producing a second, little tree he mounts on a plank and gives to Abel for his room. That night, after coming back from the bar, Abel and I decorate it. I make aluminum-foil balls. He makes an angel out of cigarette papers and a Q-tip. On her tiny cotton-swab head he glues strands of my hair.
“She looks like a lunatic,” I say.
“All the best angels do,” he says.
A couple of nights later there’s a party to decorate the big tree. It turns out that the judge owns boxes and boxes of antique ornaments. He says that when each of his three marriages fell apart, these boxes were all he walked away with. In exchange, his wives got cars and houses, Limoges china, Waterford crystal.
“But I came out the winner,” he declares, holding a blue glass bird to the light.
About fifty people show up, and for a change some of them arrive bearing alcohol and food. The tap dancer, who is now studying opera, treats us to an inflamed version of “O, Holy Night.” Abel plays the piano. Somebody hands out carol sheets and we all sing with great gusto. I am happy. I am drunk on the crème de menthe an elderly woman wearing sparkly red slacks keeps pouring into my glass.
My hangover the next morning is a sore throat and cough by the time I’m ready to go home. Abel takes my temperature and says I have a mild fever. He phones for a taxi. “Don’t bother dragging yourself to the bar,” he says. “I’ll come by your place first thing in the morning.”
Outside my apartment, Norman, the guy who wants to make the documentary about an insect, is waiting for me. Last week I slipped him two hundred dollars and asked him to pick up a camera that I could give to Abel for Christmas. He found one and has it with him: a refurbished Nikon he claims is worth at least five hundred dollars. “A steal at a hundred and seventy-five,” he says.
I let him keep the change, simply to get rid of him faster. For the rest of the day I sleep, waking up once around dinnertime to eat an orange. When I wake up again it’s three o’clock in the morning. My sore throat and cough are gone. I’m light-headed, though, wound up, as if I’d drunk a glass of champagne. I get dressed and call a taxi. If I’m not going to sleep any more tonight, I may as well lie awake next to Abel. At the last minute I decide to bring the camera so that we have something under our little tree. Where’s the wrapping paper? I can’t find it. I empty the purple velvet Seagram’s bag I keep my pennies in and use that.
The house is unlocked, as it usually is. In the front hall the sleeping dogs lift their muzzles. “It’s only me,” I whisper. Buster, the Pekinese, barks once. Lights are on everywhere, but it’s quiet.
I climb the stairs.
There’s a line of light under Abel’s door. He must be reading. Or he fell asleep reading.
I go in.
The woman, curled against his back, opens her eyes. She sits up, pulling the sheet over her breasts. It’s the jazz bagpipe player. We stare at each other. I feel as though hands are cupping and uncupping my ears. She punches Abel’s shoulder and he wakes and pushes the hair away from his face. “Hey,” he says, drunkenly. “Louise.”
I approach the bed.
“When did you get here?” he says.
I hit him across the head with the Seagram’s bag. He lifts his arms to protect himself. I hit him again. I‘m yelling now. “Bastard! Bastard!” The woman runs to the wall. I throw the bag at the tree, which topples over. “Merry Christmas!” I scream.
Out in the hall I stagger. I slip on the stairs. Howie appears. His lean and worried face. “Louise?” He hurries over. I get to my feet and shove past him. Doors open. “What’s going on?” bellows the judge. I hear Abel now, calling, thudding down the stairs. I hurry up. The front door won’t open.
“Louise.” He’s right behind me. He touches my arm.
I swing around. “I hate you!” I punch his chest. “I hate you!”
He sways backwards.
“You’re sick!” I scream. “You’re evil! I hate you!”
The taxi I arrived in is still out front. I bang on the driver’s window. At home, on the mat in front of the kitchen sink, I collapse. The phone rings. The sun rises. I go to the bathroom and wash my face.
I feel as if I’ve been pulled back into a pit of loneliness, and everybody I’ve ever known is down here. Don Shaw. Troy, poor Troy. Tim Todd … did Tim ever get out? Mr. Fraser never did, this is where he died. My father and Mrs. Carver got out but it took them both a long time.
All the lonely people, all of them so much braver than I am. Alice, selling books door-to-door, Debbie with her bridge championships, Aunt Verna lugging her steamer trunk up from Texas. Even my mother, after she left us. Whatever else might be said about my mother, it took guts to traipse around the Prairies looking for work, never once breaking down and asking if she could come home.
Maybe I should leave. Jump on a bus and go wherever it takes me. Change my name.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
I don’t go anywhere. I stay at home and cry. I eat cereal and peanut-butter sandwiches and watch TV with the sound turned down because crying gives me headaches. Every few hours, from eight in the morning until midnight, the phone rings. On the third day I take the receiver off the hook. Not long afterwards there’s a knock on my door.
“Anybody home?”
It’s my father. I let him in and he hands me a bag of shortbread cookies.
“Mrs. Carver baked a batch yesterday. Thought I’d drop some by.” He’s peering at me. “Are you all right?”
“I think I’m coming down with something.”
He feels my forehead, looks at my tongue and swollen eyes and says that I don’t have a temperature, which means it’s probably a cold. Am I drinking plenty of orange juice? Do I have enough soup on hand? Yes, I lie, but he goes out anyway and comes back with two bags of groceries. So now I’m stockpiled for more days of crying.
The next morning, around ten-thirty, I’m woken up by another knock.
“Louise? It’s me.”
I lie very still, as if he could hear me move.
“Are you there?” He knocks again, four light taps. “I hate it that I hurt you. I hate to think of you …” Silence, and then,“If you’re there, say something. Tell me to go away, but just say something.”
A long silence. Will he use his key?
I hear him descend the stairs and then the faint thud as the front door shuts.
Later, on my way to the bathroom, I notice a piece of paper on the hallway floor. It laps against the baseboard beyond the shoals of unopened mail that one of my neighbours has been slipping under the door. I pick it up.
Here’s your key. Call me if you can. Abel.
The key is just inside, as if for a few seconds he gave himself the option of sliding it back out. I use my foot to nudge it further in. The paper I let fall.
Three days later I step on another piece of paper. This one is face up; I can see what it says without even bending.
If you call me at the house and the line’s busy, you can always leave a message at the bar. I’ll come right over as soon as Iget it. Abel.
No Dear Louise. No Love Abel. I pick it up and take it into the kitchen, and under his signature I write,“I’ll never trust you again. I never want to see you again.”
The mailbox isn’t far, only half a block away. I drop in the envelope with a sense that I’m killing the Angel of Love. But when I turn around I find I’m breathing for what seems like the first time in a week.
I spend the holidays at home with my father and Mrs. Carver. Usually, over Christmas, Mrs. Carver goes to Port Hope to be with her daughter, but this year Stella and her husband are visiting his family in Calgary
, so Mrs. Carver is staying with us. Not overnight, however. Nothing can persuade her to take my old bed, and as for sleeping in my father’s study, no, no, no—“That’s his room”—as if great scientific experiments were being conducted in there.
I don’t tell her about Abel. It’s too complicated and humiliating. Besides, she had no idea I was even seeing him again. I only say—because I can’t hide how miserable I feel—that I was going out with somebody and we broke up. She wrings her hands. I know that she’ll tell my father and that the two of them will take care of me now, and they do. I sleep in until eleven, and when I go out into the kitchen she pours me a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. All day she brings me cups of tea while I lie around reading and dozing. My father, who has the week off, buys a giant jigsaw puzzle called Autumn Splendour and we work on it together at the dining-room table. Sometimes the three of us play a version of charades where it’s everybody against everybody else. I tend to win but that’s only because I’m so good at deciphering Mrs. Carver’s gestures that when it’s her turn to act out a phrase I can tell what she’s thinking almost as soon as she lifts her hand.
I still cry in the bathroom and at night in bed. I don’t wail, though, the way I did at my apartment. Everything here is muted and gentle, as in an English manor. I could live like this forever, I think: the indulged daughter, the fragile spinster. It really seems possible, right up until New Year’s Day when my father and I are taking down the decorations and I find myself clutching a hank of drooping tinsel and staring at it with bleak astonishment as if it represented the sum total of everything I had. I sit on the edge of the chesterfield. “I need to get a job,” I say.
My father is standing on a chair to reach the angel. He twists around, and I expect him to say,“There’s no hurry, you’ve got your inheritance, you can stay here as long as you like,” or even,“Now might be the time to think about going to university,” but what he says is,“It helps to keep busy, keep yourself occupied.”
He even has a suggestion. A retired banker, somebody he met through work, has decided to write a history of his Welsh ancestors and is looking for a typist.
“Oh, I’ve done that,” I moan.
“Done what?”
“Worked for an old man.”
“Well, of course, he’s not young, but you wouldn’t know it to look at him. He’s one of those energetic types. Full of pep, always on the go. He still keeps an office downtown. I was there last week. He employs a full-time bookkeeper, a very friendly young woman, in her early thirties or thereabouts, very personable. I believe she worked with him at the bank, but either she can’t type or she’s too busy.”
“I can’t type fast.”
“I’m sure accuracy is the thing. Proper spelling and punctuation. You might find it interesting, learning about Welsh history. Anyway, it would be something to tide you over until you figure out what you want to do.”
“I suppose,” I say, only now appreciating what a worry I must be to him sometimes.
A week later I go to see about the job, and all I have to do is say that I’m Saw Kirk’s daughter to get myself hired. My feelings are mixed. True, there’s nothing elderly or frail about Mr. Roberts. He has a full head of reddish-blond hair, he stands straight and bounces on his toes, he’s hearty, he’s loud, he says “By God!” a lot, and after only a few minutes he’s calling me Kirk as if we’ve been working alongside each other for years.
Still, I worry about sinking into the twilight life I settled for the last time Abel broke my heart. Here I am again with a nice, semi-retired boss and a job that won’t ask very much of me. Fine if you’re looking for safety, and back then I was. I thought that my suffering obliged me to drift along until I met up with my fate, which I could never bring myself to fully imagine but which always included Abel, even if it was only as a temptation.
But—as I remind myself—that isn’t the case this time. No matter how far down my life I look, I can’t see him; there’s nothing to flare up any more. The damage is done, it’s in my bones, like a limp, and I’m going to have to stop raging about it. Well, I have stopped, almost. Up until a few days ago I kept telling myself, with decreasing faith,“He’s sick, he’s evil.” What I’ve come around to thinking—and it’s just as depressing—is that he simply can’t refuse certain people. Howie’s story about him fending off that redheaded girl is probably true enough. He can withstand flirting. It’s helplessness he collapses under. I’ll bet the woman I caught him in bed with did the propositioning, and because she was older, and he was drunk, he didn’t know how to turn her down. Right at that moment, confronted with the prospect of humiliating her, he let me fade.
The bookkeeper is a tall, lean woman with a wide seductive face and dark blond hair she wears loose to her shoulders.
“Kirk!” says Mr. Roberts, introducing us. “Slung!” “Suzanne,” she says, rolling her eyes at him, offering her hand—in a jangle of bracelets—to me.
“Louise,” I say. Her hand is warm.
She doesn’t really work for him, she works for herself; he’s just one of her clients, most of whom are likewise retired executives. Instead of talking to her on the phone, they prefer to drop by in person. They go into her office and shut the door. I hear them in there, laughing. Occasionally they show up when she’s out somewhere. “Should I wait?” they ask me. They are lost, slumped with disappointment. “When will she be back?” But I can never say for sure. Her hours are irregular because she’s also an actress and often has to rush off to an audition. Mr. Roberts keeps irregular hours as well. Where he goes, he never makes clear. To meetings, I presume, until Suzanne tells me he plays poker at an illegal gambling club. “Oh, he’s a bad, bad boy,” she says, smiling.
There are days when neither of them comes back, and I‘m left to answer the phone and to try to decipher Mr. Roberts’s handwriting. It’s in the evenings that he turns his attention to the family history, working here in the office until all hours, which means that every morning I arrive to find a stack of scrawled notes on my desk. Nothing of a personal nature yet, just general information about Pembrokeshire, Wales, in the mid-1700s: local industry, diet, religion, customs, that sort of thing. So now I know about corn dollies and byres and whinberries and that a cat born in May brings rats to the house and that, back then, if a husband was “impotent, a leper or had fetid breath” his wife could take half of his possessions and kick him out of the house.
Interesting work, as my father predicted. Well, interesting enough to keep my mind off Abel, at least while I’m typing. Still, if it weren’t for Suzanne I’d probably call in sick some mornings. When I wake up, the thought of seeing her is what gets me out of bed, and if for some reason she doesn’t show up that day, I’m as crushed as any of her clients. She is like a delivery of flowers, always a mild thrill when she comes out of her office and drops onto the reception chesterfield to light a cigarette and chat. The way she kicks off her shoes, crosses her dancer’s legs, leans back and shakes her hair seems both unselfconscious and contrived. Staged, in other words, but also entirely true to her nature.
“Well,” I say to get her started,“how did the audition go?” and cheerfully, ruefully, she’ll say how she knew she didn’t have a hope, they wanted an ingenue type this time (a couple of days ago it was a schoolmarm type, before that it was a wholesome type), but what the heck, she gave it a shot. If there hasn’t been an audition, I’ll ask about Howard and Roy, her two “gentlemen admirers.” Not “boyfriends,” because they’re both pushing sixty, but not lovers, either; she won’t have sex with married men. She allows hand holding, though, and lingering hugs. “Lucky them,” I say. No, she says, she’s the lucky one, and it has nothing to do with being extravagantly wined and dined. It’s the mature conversation, the wisdom and perspective. She hopes one day to fall in love with a widower who doesn’t worship his dead wife and who wants to start a new family. She says— and I can’t tell if she’s serious—“A distinguished older man down on his hands and knee
s with a bunch of little kids crawling all over him, that’s my girlish dream.”
It turns out that Mr. Roberts is a former gentleman admirer, something I find out after I catch him sliding his hand around her waist as he’s leaving the office. She says,“That’s exactly what ended it. All that pawing me in public. And he was always trying to get me to go to bed with him, but I wasn’t interested, even though he was divorced by then. This was, what? Five, six years ago now.” She starts bouncing on her toes. “Slung!” she yells. “We’ve already crossed the line! There’s a line, and we’ve crossed it!”
I laugh. She has him exactly. “What did he mean by that?”
“Oh, that once you’ve kissed a woman on the lips, there’s no turning back.”
“You kissed Mr. Roberts on the lips?”
“We’d been drinking. Slung!” She begins aggressively unbuttoning her blouse. “I’m going to take off my clothes. Now, you can stay or you can leave, but by God, I’m taking off my clothes!”
I laugh so hard I start to choke. I start to cry. (Shades of my first date with Troy.) She brings me a box of Kleenex and pats my shoulder. “Do you like Chinese food?” she says.
In her white Volkswagen we drive to a restaurant down on Dundas Street. “I love this place,” she says after we’ve both ordered the four-dollar chicken-ball special. “But for the longest time I avoided it because it’s where I met the man who broke my heart. He passed himself off as a lonely widower, and then one day, there he was on the front page of the Financial Post with his arm around ‘Margaret, his charming wife of twenty-five years.’”
“That must have been hard,” I say.
“It was. And now—” she opens her hands,“it isn’t.”
My turn. I know that’s why she told me her story, so that I’ll feel free to tell her mine. But I can’t. The thought of Abel is still such a weight, and I’m afraid I’ll start crying again. I notice some men at another table casting her glances. “You could have anybody you wanted,” I say.
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