Vital Signs

by John Metcalf

  On his way to work, to his pots and pans as Alan called them, he drove down to the main post office and mailed the letter. He had thought of driving to a post office in Outremont, where she lived, and posting the letter there, but realized that all mail probably went first to the main branch for sorting.

  He did not doubt that she would reply.

  He was working now on the catalogue, his desk covered with numbered file cards bearing descriptions of each item—dates, hallmarks, troy weights, factory marks, furniture labels, repairs noted, flaws and defects noted, provenance.

  Pots and pans.

  Thoughts of Anna Stevens possessed his mind.

  A bedroom in Madrid full of sunlight, a red-tile-floor. Breakfast late, and then, in the afternoon, beer and tapas at a sidewalk café, she in a blue-and-white cotton frock, sunbrown legs. And, at five in the afternoon, the black bulls in the bull ring, the yellow-and-magenta capes. And then, through the warm and quickening streets, strolling towards dinner at eleven.

  He would take her to his favourite places, the farmlands of his childhood, Madrid, Angôulème, to the rows of dealers in Amsterdam in their ancient, leaning buildings, to the Hebrides, to his student rooms in the rue de Vaugirard.

  Yes.

  They would walk in the Jardin du Luxembourg eating lemon water-ice.

  He thought again of Paco Camino, slim in a silver suit of lights, and counted the years in shock. He had seen the boy take his alternativa, followed him in those sun-filled student days through San Sebastian, Bilbao, Huesca, Pamplona, down through the orange groves to Seville, watched him work the bulls with mad and terrifying grace.

  So many years ago like yesterday. What had become of that nobility? Dead now, perhaps, or fat, or fighting bulls with shaved horns like the rest.

  Was he too old, Peter wondered, too old to start again?

  File cards. Pots and pans.

  The day bore on.

  On the way home from work he bought the Montreal Star. His mailbox contained a mangled New Yorker and a letter from an insurance company informing him that he had been chosen from thousands to receive a prize. He poured himself a drink and sat in his living room. He got up and put on a record he’d bought in a Greek store on Park Avenue, bouzouki music and a man singing, very sad-sounding and Eastern, but after a couple of minutes he took the record off.

  The apartment, cleaned and now quite neat, was somehow oppressive. He stroked the intricate surface of the cloisonné vase that stood on the bookcase. Pots and pans. He stood at the window looking out and feeling restless. He wanted to be a part of the life out there but if he went out he had nowhere he wanted to go. The glass of the window was cold. He went into his bedroom and called Alan, but there was no answer. Ray, too, was not back from work.

  He sat looking through his address book. So many names crossed out, friends of Pat’s, acquaintances fallen by the wayside since his divorce. He stared at her familiar handwriting, numbers from their old locality—grocers, beer, laundry, dry-cleaners, diaper service.

  He thought of Jeremy last summer and the summer before, of those desert hours in the sandbox in the park, the suspicious stares of the suburban mothers and their huddled conversations, the sun crawling towards the hot tears of bedtime.

  He saw himself in the living room at night, stupefied with exhaustion, listening to the child’s breathing, waiting for a sigh or a cry, drinking Scotch too fast, too tired to eat.

  He was unable to concentrate on the news in the Star and he found himself doing something that he never did, working his way through the classified section, through the columns of houses for sale. Outremont, lower Westmount, Montreal West.

  He pictured them together, a family again. Anna and Jeremy, on picnics, at the seaside, in fields full of flowers.

  After the third day of waiting, Anna’s reply arrived. He had known that it would be there, had dawdled deliberately on the way home doing some unnecessary shopping. He did not open the letter in the elevator. In his apartment, he hung up his coat. He took a beer from the fridge and poured it into a pewter tankard he rarely used. He took the beer into the living room and set it down on the table by his chair. He hunted for the brass letter-opener, which he never used, a gift from someone once, its handle the three monkeys. He slit open the envelope and drew out the letter.

  He read the note quickly, then read it through again. He could feel the smile stretching his face. He raised the tankard and said aloud, “Your health sir! Your very good health.”

  He felt so happy it was as if he’d breathed in as much as possible, then a bit more—he felt full. He blew a kiss to the drawing that hung near the door—gorgeous grainy charcoal, a backview of a nude brushing her hair.

  “An army,” he said sternly to her back, “marches on its stomach.”

  He took the dog-eared copy of Where to Dine in Montreal from the bookcase and started to thumb through it. He felt he could compile a better guide himself, one which named names, which exposed corruption in high places, which advised of the venerable patisserie, the Bisto sauces, the crêpes manufactured from Aunt Jemima at $6.50. It was mildly depressing to think of the procession of women he had squired to most of Montreal’s many restaurants. He wished he could think of some other socially acceptable way of meeting her, of meeting Anna, something less used.

  He needed a meal that would be lengthy with no pressure from waiters seeking to seat the starving hordes. He considered the St. Amable—tables too close together. Chez Bardet? Too oppressive, too much conscious good taste, everyone on his or her best behaviour. His own favourite going-out place was the Symposium, but it was not a restaurant for intimate occasions—at nine o’clock it filled with rattletrap drummers, amplified bouzoukis, and men who danced intensely and alone.

  He needed, then, an unhurried restaurant with a relaxed atmosphere, but not too festive, with tables decently separated, and, as he was dealing with unknown tastes, a cuisine not aggressively ethnic. The idea came to him of the Port and Starboard; if she didn’t like seafood, the meat dishes were more than passable, salads good, wine list reasonable, the whole place nautically silly with portholes and pleasant and comfortable.

  He felt that, even now, it would be safer to write again with day, place, and time but he knew that he could not stand more writing, more waiting, more hours, days, mailmen and letterboxes.

  The conversation was brief, the most convenient arrangement made, and even the part he’d been dreading was carried off with the minimum of awkwardness.

  “This is rather ridiculous,” he said, “like spy stories—but how will I recognize you?”

  “I’ll be the one,” she said, “carrying a copy of Pravda and a saxophone and wearing a red coat.”

  He laughed deliberately and gratefully.

  “Red coat it is,” he said. “Until tomorrow, then.”

  Peter sat the next night, half an hour before the appointed time, in the Crow’s Nest drinking a nasty drink called a Capstan. The Crow’s Nest was a small bar just outside the main dining room of the Port and Starboard, which gave a view of the staircase, the cash desk, and the cloakroom. The tables in the Crow’s Nest were made of barrels and the seats were fashioned from kegs. Special low prices were being offered on drinks called the Capstan, Bluenose, and Blow the Man Down.

  Since his last visit, to his horror, the restaurant had fallen prey to a prodigal decorator. The overall effect was of an end-of-lease sale at the premises of an unsuccessful chandler. Every nook, recess, and area of wall had been jammed, plastered, and festooned with nets, buoys, bollards, binnacles, belaying pins, barnacle-encrusted brass bells, anchors, cutlasses, hawsers, harpoons, lanterns, strings of bunting, and lengths of rusted chain.

  Peter imagined the whole restaurant as a bad stage set for a musical. At the entrance to the Crow’s Nest, facing the wide staircase, stood a ship’s figurehead in the form of a mermaid. The sequence for
med before his eyes—a muscular matelot in striped jersey and canvas bellbottom pants dancing down the staircase, leaning forward from the waist, arms akimbo, to plant a chaste kiss upon the mermaid’s carmine lips, and then, whirling away into the restaurant proper to dance on tables for Annabelle, the Admiral’s lovely daughter.

  Peter felt nervous and looked frequently at his watch.

  His drink was becoming nastier and thicker as he neared the maraschino cherry.

  He felt constrained in his newly pressed suit and the white shirt he had bought that morning, dressed up, costumed. He fiddled with the knot of his tie. He fiddled with his silver cigarette lighter.

  And then, on the stairs, a flash of red movement, legs, red coat, a girl standing on the bottom step looking about her.

  He got up from the table and moved towards her. She was tall and had long black hair tied at the nape with a red wool ribbon like the ones that Nancy bought for Amanda. Her eyes were large and dark. She was beautiful.

  She turned again and saw him coming towards her.

  He raised his eyebrows.

  She smiled.

  “Anna?”

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said. “There’s a blizzard starting out there—cars abandoned all over the road.”

  “I have a table through here,” he said. “Thought you might like a drink while we’re waiting.”

  “Lovely,” she said.

  “Shall I check your coat.”

  “No, thanks. I’m still freezing.”

  As she manoeuvred round the barrel and kegs to sit down, the hood of her coat caught on the fluke of an anchor and he had to disentangle her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, gesturing at the walls. “It wasn’t like this the last time I was here.”

  “I like silly places once in a while,” she said. “What’s that?”

  “I’ve been wondering,” said Peter. “I think it’s a donkey engine.”

  She undid the wooden pegs of her coat, slipped her arms out of it, and then settled it back over her shoulders. In the bar’s half-gloom, pretending not to be watching, Peter saw that she was wearing a black turtleneck sweater with some kind of large silver pendant over her breasts.

  “Drinks!” said Peter. “What would you like? I’ll wade through the lobster traps to the bar.”

  “Sherry, please. A fino. Tio Pepe, if they have it.”

  “This,” said Peter, “is a Capstan, as advertised, and it is unbelievably vile and I’m going to get a Scotch to take the taste away.”

  When he came back from the bar, he raised his glass and said,

  “Well, Yo-ho-ho!”

  “It does all crowd in on you a bit, doesn’t it?” she said.

  “I hope the food’s still as good,” said Peter. “If the decor’s anything to go by we might be eating hardtack and tapping out the weevils.”

  “With lashings of putrid salt pork,” she said.

  “And dumplings sewn up in canvas,” said Peter.

  She sipped the sherry and smiled at him.

  “I like dry sherry,” she said, “but I don’t like it as much as martinis but if I drink them before I eat I get tiddly and can’t taste the food.”

  “Half-seas over, as it were,” said Peter.

  “Three sheets to the wind,” she said.

  “In irons on a lee shore,” said Peter.

  “You made that up,” she said.

  “I swear,” said Peter, “by all that’s nautical. I got it from a Hornblower book.”

  “What does it mean, then?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, making a severe face, “but it’s not good.”

  She giggled.

  “You’re silly,” she said.

  “Far from it,” said Peter. “You behold one who is Captain of his Fate.”

  “Men who play,” she said, “are more to be trusted than men who do not play.”

  “Is that one of your Laws?”

  “The Third,” she said. “And I don’t feel so nervous now. Can I have a cigarette?”

  “Me neither,” said Peter.

  They occupied themselves with cigarettes and his lighter and the ashtray.

  “Can I ask you something I shouldn’t?” said Peter.

  “What?”

  “Why did you come tonight?”

  She shrugged.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It was against my better judgement but—well, I wasn’t doing anything else. And your letter, I liked your letter. Curiosity. Who knows?”

  “Meeting people is sort of sordid, isn’t it?” said Peter. “I’m sorry.”

  She laughed.

  “I didn’t mean to be funny.”

  “I know you didn’t,” she said. “You just are.”

  They looked at each other, smiling.

  “When that wretched little man in the library sent in my name to that thing . . .”

  “Why did he do that?”

  “I think he thought it was funny,” she said. “Men who work in libraries tend to be strange—not all of them, of course—but quite a few are eccentric or homosexual or just childish—I suppose like men who choose to teach elementary school or become nurses. The way things are, it’s a strange occupation to choose. Shouldn’t be, but it is. But you wouldn’t believe some of the things I went through. Breathers and panters and abuse and men asking me how much I charged—”

  “Good God!” said Peter.

  “Someone kept sending religious tracts and one man kept sending me postcards—always the same one. On the writing side it always said I MEAN TO HAVE YOU and the picture-side was always a reproduction of a sort of scroll that had a chant or a prayer by Aleister Crowley on it.”

  She looked enquiry at him and he nodded.

  “Always the same thing,” she went on, “one of those ‘Do What You Want Shall Be All Of The Law’ Crowley things—gibberish, horrible—murder being good if you feel like doing it, you know? I was getting really frightened.”

  “I’ve always thought it was funny,” said Peter, “that the Great Beast was cremated at Brighton. He should at least have disappeared in a clap of thunder and forked lightning.”

  “I didn’t think any of this was very funny,” she said.

  “True,” said Peter. “I was just thinking about Brighton.”

  “One man,” she said, “even sent me a sheet of paper—foolscap—with some obscene doggerel at the bottom and with a drawing of his—his apparatus on the rest.”

  Peter laughed out loud.

  “Really,” she said. “And there was an asterisk by the, well, the tip of it and beside the asterisk it said ‘Actual size.’”

  She joined in his laughter.

  “Did he need foolscap?” said Peter.

  “But what was funnier than that,” she said, “if you stop to think about it, I mean, and sad too, it was a Gestetner stencil.”

  The maître d’ appeared at the doorway of the Craw’s Nest, menus cradled in his arm, and inclined his head in stately summons. They followed his measured pace and majestic bulk towards the dining room. In the more brightly lighted foyer and corridor, Peter was violently aware of the swing of Anna’s skirt, the trimness and tension of her body beside him.

  The dining room itself was less ravaged; the prints of Ships of the Line remained and the decorator had confined himself to blocks and tackle and a few flurries of swords. They quickly settled the details of the meal; Anna decided on crepes stuffed with shrimp, clams, mussels, and oysters and baked in cream and cheese; Peter on a dish of herring and roe. Anna traded in an hors d’oeuvre for a dry martini and Peter ordered another Scotch. Much ado was made with a wine cooler, napery, and the solemnities of label-inspection.

  “I was meaning to ask you,” said Peter. “Which library do you work in?”

  “McGill,” sh
e said. “In the Rare Book and Special Collections.”

  “Aha!” said Peter. “I’ve had dealings with them. We once took some medieval manuscripts there we’d had in an estate sale—sort of contracts or leases—bits of parchment with wavy edges?”

  He made scissors with his fingers.

  “They’re called foot of fine,” she said, nodding.

  “We wanted them dated,” he said, “and not a soul in that place had even a clue.”

  “You aren’t surprising me,” she said.

  “What’s more than one of them? Feet of fine? Foot of fines?”

  “Lovely,” she said, putting her hand over his for a second. “You don’t know how lovely it is to be talking to someone who you know won’t say, ‘What’s the point of first editions when you can buy it in paperback?’ Or, ‘Is it fair to students to buy things they can’t read?”’

  “They,” said Peter, “are always with us.”

  “I try,” she said, “but I don’t like they.”

  “Isn’t it nice,” he said, raising his Scotch in salute, “you with your squiggly old manuscripts and me with my old pots and pans, isn’t it nice to have two us’s together instead of an us and a them?”

  “Yes,” she said, “it really is nice.”

  A busboy arrived with wine glasses, a water pitcher, bread basket and butter dish and they drew apart as he busied himself.

  “So tell me,” said Peter, “what are the Special Collections?”

  She laughed.

  “The two main ones,” she said, “are Winston Churchill and books and pamphlets relating to the Boy Scout movement.”

  “How depressingly Canadian,” he said.

  “And of course,” she said, “even those were a bequest.”

  The cork was pulled, wine tasted, glasses filled.

  Salads arrived.

  “So it’s not entirely fascinating?” said Peter.

  “I often wish I’d stayed in London,” she said.

  “What were you doing?”

  “Well, after university and library school here, I went there to King’s College—I was taking the diploma course in palaeography.”

  “And then?”