Asylum

by André Alexis

  Somewhere around two in the morning, the desire (the need) to ask her the name of her new (what was the word?) man became so keen, he thought to get up and see if she were still awake.

  If she were awake, he would ask her.

  If she were not, he would wake her, it being close enough to morning to make little difference. He sat up, thinking this through, for an hour, an hour during which he got up from bed a dozen times, getting as far as the door each time, before deciding that, no, it was too early and, besides, wondering if he had thought things through.

  Finally, he got up, opened the door to his room and walked down the hall to the guest room. He felt the carpet under his bare feet. He passed the bathroom, on his right, its door open, from which he caught the scent of a soap she used. (What was it called? Something from Neil’s Yard…London, of all places.) The whole house smelled, faintly, of his wife, as perhaps it always had, though he was only now aware of it. (No, it didn’t smell of her. It smelled of the commercial perfumes, powders, and nail polish she used. Those smells had become her. The thought disgusted him.)

  It wasn’t the moon that shone through the window in the hall. It was a light from his neighbour’s backyard.

  He opened the door to her room quietly.

  The curtains were drawn, but a soft glow illuminated the place where the windows were. It was, at first, too dark to make out much of anything, but, as his eyes grew accustomed to the dark, he saw that a bit of light thickened and narrowed, changing as the curtains fluttered, along the wall, towards the bed where she lay sleeping. After a while, he could clearly see her profile on the bed, and then he could see her, partially covered, her white cotton nightgown bunched up so her waist was exposed.

  The room smelled of her.

  He felt, at once, the desire to straighten her nightgown and a fear of doing so. He stood at the door, one hand on its frame, one hand on the door itself. He stood there for what must have been half an hour, scarcely breathing, unaware of thought, though somewhere inside him someone was thinking because he felt shame and longing, and he was aware of images (lamp, cord, letter, window) whose passage through his imagination disturbed him.

  He was about to leave. He had decided that, after all, it was too early to wake her, when she stirred. She turned from her back to her side, facing the wall, her back to him: an unpleasant reminder of the dream he’d had the night before, though she wasn’t exposed to him, having drawn the sheets over herself as she moved.

  And as she moved, she clearly said the words

  – Owl…(something, something, something) eyes sore…followed by others that were incomprehensible. And, for some reason, that is what he had come for, and he knew it, and, for a moment, he felt relieved, unburdened, not even angry. This woman was no one he knew. He turned on the lights, startling her from sleep.

  – What? What is it? she said.

  – I don’t want you here any more, he answered.

  – What? What’s the matter, Paul?

  – I can’t sleep with you here. I don’t want you here.

  She turned to the clock on the table beside her.

  – It’s four o’clock. What are you doing?

  She pulled the bedsheets up over her body.

  – I can’t sleep, he said. That’s all. You have to go.

  – I can’t go anywhere now. It’s four o’clock.

  – You can leave in the morning.

  Not before she spoke, but before he could make out her words, he closed the door and went back to his bedroom.

  They had last seen each other, briefly, in August. It had been months since then, and his feelings for Louise had hardened into something he carried about with him. It was November and grey, with Christmas at spitting distance. How would he deal with that, with snow and tinsel and his parents asking if he were “all right” and why Louise could not visit them, however she felt about him.

  – She’s like our daughter, his mother had said.

  His father added

  – You should try this new…what do they call it? Marriage counselling? Don’t know if it’ll do any good, but it’s worth a try, if you ask me.

  – It’s over, he’d said.

  And so continued the slow work of obliterating his wife, her memory.

  {24}

  HALLEY’S COMET

  It had been a sombre Christmas. Despite the comet that entered Aquarius on Christmas Day, it was a dull season for Louise Lanthier. It was her first Christmas without Paul in twenty years, her first Christmas alone. She now knew the season for all it contained of bitterness and solitude. The only acquaintance she met, and that by accident, was Walter. She’d seen him walking along Clarence the week before Christmas and had stopped him to say hello, but it was as if he were afraid of her. He’d lowered his eyes and walked on, relieved to get away from her, it seemed. And how odd that had been: exhilarating and wounding, wounding though she tried to see things from his perspective, it being impossible for her to hold anything against him, despite the time that had passed.

  All that Louise had known was an illusion. That was why she had left her husband. Claro. Yet, in looking about her, free from what she took to be the illusions of life with Paul, it seemed as if everything were illusory, as if life itself were an accommodation of the false. It followed, then, that there could be no marriage, no love, no home without disguise.

  Yet, there were some illusions worth tending, others not. Paul, for instance. Who was he who’d been her husband? A year ago, she would have said he was a good, if neurotic, man: faithful, obsessive, but caring. He had worked hard to give her what he thought she wanted. (She hadn’t known what she wanted, but something in her must have wanted the things he gave her. He hadn’t provided these things in spite of her, had he?) She would not have thought him capable of the kind of instability he’d shown, recently.

  Take the time, months ago now, when he had asked her to leave his house. She’d been fast asleep, dreaming of a field of birds, when he’d turned on the light in her room and asked her to go. Just like that, at four in the morning. So irrational. She had been more than upset. She had been frightened. Once she’d recovered from the shock of being awakened, she began to wonder how long he’d been there, watching her while she slept. She began to wonder at the violent need to be rid of her. Clearly, she had taken one side of him at face value. She had taken his kindness, his attentions, his tenderness for the expressions of love, believing that these were the signs of which he was capable. If she’d missed, throughout their marriage, an ease in him, an ability to be affectionate without demonstrating his affection, she had also accepted that this was the kind of man he was, demonstrative only in his own way.

  Now, however, in this dismal season, she was beginning to see him more clearly, and the clarity was humiliating. Years ago, she’d described some aspect of her life with Paul, and her friend Véronique had said

  – That sounds a little odd.

  Vé had not meant to be unkind, had not said anything to wound, yet Louise had been hurt. Again, years ago, when she’d casually mentioned that Paul would often come home from work, unpredictably, to collect whatever he’d forgotten, Fred had asked

  – Is he jealous?

  and she had answered

  – No, not all. He’s forgetful

  though she’d known very well he was jealous.

  Over the years, there had been any number of moments when Fred would look to Vé, or Vé would look to Fred, and the two of them would look away from her. Neither of her closest friends would have been entirely surprised at Paul’s recent behaviour. That she was surprised gave proof she’d spent years ignoring crucial things. Her husband had been her own creation.

  So, she’d been right, morally and emotionally, to leave?

  Oh, yes, of course, if you like.

  But, wait a minute: why had she asked to stay with him in May
?

  – Because her apartment was being painted.

  – Because her friends could not take her in for the week she needed.

  – Because she was not seeing anyone.

  – Because she missed Paul’s company.

  – Because, although she’d given up claim to it, she still thought of the house as theirs.

  It had never been her intention, in leaving, to obliterate all she’d known or all she’d been. Believing that Paul loved her, and knowing that she, in her way, loved him, why would she hesitate to ask him for a hand he could easily give?

  And then, he’d awakened her at four one morning and asked her to leave the house.

  Worse was to come, though. When, a week or so after he’d turned her out, she tried to take money from one of their joint accounts, she discovered Paul had taken all the money from all their accounts, including the account in which she’d put her contribution to their retirement: the money her father had bequeathed her, two hundred thousand dollars. She’d been living on the pittance she made at the library, just enough to pay for her basic needs, supplemented by her savings. She needed the money much more than he did, so she was devastated to discover what he’d done. As the one who’d left, the one who’d broken the marriage, she could not bring herself to insist on right, but still…reasonable was reasonable.

  So she’d begun to call him. At first, calling in the morning when she knew he would be out of bed, or in the evening when she knew he would be home from work. Then, because he did not answer the phone, she began to call late at night and on weekends. Then, because it was clear he would not answer, she wrote to him, and began to call for him at the office.

  He did not answer the telephone, and he would not speak to her at work. (It was humiliating to hear the placid voice of his secretary, Sharon:

  – I’m sorry. Mr. Dylan is in a meeting.

  – Do you know when he’ll be free?

  – I’m afraid not.

  – It’s very important. Can I leave a message?

  – If you like.

  – Please tell him his wife called. My number is…)

  So it was with some desperation that she’d returned to what had been their home. It was a Saturday in August, an afternoon because she hadn’t wanted to wake him. (Hadn’t wanted to wake him? After how he’d behaved?) He had answered the door, in his bathrobe.

  – Yes?

  he’d said, as if she were a salesman.

  – Paul, we have to talk. I know you’re hurt, but I don’t think it’s right to avoid me like this.

  (More emotional than she’d meant to be, relieved that she’d found him, still convinced he would respond to reason.)

  And he had shut the door in her face.

  That was the last straw. Like a fool she had rummaged in her shoulder bag, looking for her key, which she found in her coin purse, though, of course, because Paul was thorough, he had already changed the lock. She’d stood outside, on their front steps, ringing the doorbell, knocking at the door, until her index finger hurt and her knuckles were pink and she finally began to understand the magnitude of her miscalculation.

  If he had ever loved her, he did not now.

  Four months passed, months during which she’d lived at the edge of her capacities. She did all that her feelings of guilt and shame compelled her to do. She continued to write. She continued to call. And then, having heard not so much as a peep from him, she did the only thing left to her. Exhausted by her efforts to speak to a man who would not speak to her, feeling that her efforts had only made matters worse between them, she went, in late December, to Timothy Nenas, of Nenas, Anarosh, and Komala.

  – So, Mrs. Dylan, you want a divorce?

  – Yes.

  – You don’t mind if I speak frankly, do you?

  – No.

  – Good, good. I’m going to have to ask you some pretty personal questions, sooner or later, so it’s just as well if we just put them on the table. Know what I mean?

  – Yes, of course.

  – So, did your husband sleep with someone you know?

  – No.

  – So you’re the one who had the affair?

  (A brief, irrepressible memory of a pale-green summer dress, a warm night between Ottawa and Montreal, Walter’s raincoat across their laps, his hand moving furtively beneath the coat, his finger sliding along the lips of her, as she held the narrow strip of her panties aside…)

  – No. There was no affair.

  – Oh, gee, that’s too bad. I mean, infidelity’s common grounds these days. Pretty easy too, but…Okey-dokey. Let’s talk about the grounds then. There’s no infidelity, so you and your husband are just incompatible, eh? Long marriage. What? Twenty years? Wheels just fell off the wagon?

  – Yes.

  – Think he’ll say the same thing?

  – I don’t know. He won’t talk to me.

  – Oh? That’s not good. When was the last time you talked?

  – Three or four months ago, before he took all the money from our joint accounts.

  Mr. Nenas, a young man of Asian descent, raised his head.

  – Does he have a lawyer?

  – I don’t know. We used to have a lawyer…

  Mr. Nenas wrote a few words on foolscap.

  – Well, I guess that’s first things first. We need to know if he’s got a lawyer. You can’t do much until that’s settled, unless both of you were getting along, and it doesn’t look like you’re getting along…I mean, there’s the divorce and all…but you’d be surprised how many get along until the divorce, then it all comes out.

  He smiled politely.

  – Why don’t you leave your husband’s address and phone number with my secretary? We’ll get back to you in a week or so. Just out of curiosity, Mrs. Dylan, do you know what you want? You don’t have to answer just now, but you should think about it, eh. I mean, you’re entitled to half of everything, basically.

  – I want this to be as easy as possible, but I want the money my father left me, my two hundred thousand dollars. Mostly, I want that.

  – Good. So, we’ll talk in a week then?

  They shook hands and, as she was leaving the office, she noticed a framed print on the wall.

  – It’s nice, isn’t it? said Mr. Nenas.

  Louise looked, politely, at the reproduction of a drawing. A page from a yellowed sketchbook: it depicted a man and woman within a thin circle. Five semi-circles of flame surrounded the couple. The man wore a cap, his head bowed, his hands held up as if he had just thought of something. The woman wore a cape, fastened at her throat, one hand holding the fabric up at her waist, the other pointing off in the distance as she looks, not unkindly, on him. Near the bottom of the page, outside the circle, was the number 8.

  – It’s a Botticelli, Mr. Nenas said. I like to remind my clients about beautiful things. It gives them something good to think about.

  – Thank you, she said.

  And meant it. The Botticelli seemed to her, as she left the office, a mysterious but hopeful image to accompany her into the life she would lead from now on, la vita nuova, the new life.

  {25}

  FEBRUARY 24, 1986

  Little had changed and yet everything had changed.

  On this, the anniversary of his attempted suicide, Walter Barnes sat in one of the two chairs he now owned, reading one of his two books. Of the two, a Bible and the Arden King Lear, he had chosen the Bible, not for any consciously spiritual reason but rather because he found it beautiful and amusing, in particular the Pentateuch, of which he was reading Leviticus.

  He was not aware that a year had passed since he’d first tried to kill himself. If he had been, he would not have known whether to rejoice or mourn; though, in any case, he might well have chosen to mark the event in this way: reading, at home. The year had been dul
l, unworthy of commemoration. He had, for the most part, kept to himself and shunned contact with anyone outside the university. Much of his life had been conducted within the, what was it, three square miles that had for boundaries: the university, the canal, Catherine Street, and the river. And time passed without him being aware of it.

  Yes, but this home of his was a residue of the year that had quietly passed. Time had passed, but it had taken with it so much that had seemed important:

  telephone, television, cable, credit cards, magazines, newspapers, glasses, goblets, snifters, shoes, clothes, books, books, books…

  He had not chosen the life of an ascetic. It had not been in him to choose one style of life over another. Rather, he had decided not to have his house full of things that would eventually have to be dispersed. He expected to succeed at suicide, sooner or later, and he wished to be ready for his death at a moment’s notice.

  The two books he’d kept hadn’t been kept so much as found. They had fallen between the headboard of his bed and the wall. He’d found them in May, after months of living in anticipatory austerity; anticipation of death, yes, but also, after his third failed suicide, of life. He read them for distraction, and for amusement, and as a way to pass the time without company.

  So, little had changed?

  He had changed, it’s true, but in the scheme of things that was nothing at all. And he had not changed all that much. He still taught at Carleton, the books he needed kept on the shelves in his office. He still lived in his house on 3rd, however denuded it now was. He still regretted, though less poignantly, his failings, his childhood, his previous life.

  So, what had changed?

  For one thing, he now realized that death didn’t want him any more than life did. Who knew that his first attempt at suicide would be his most resolute? The second attempt was a sad debacle. It was mid-March, but he had convinced himself the river would not be cold enough to do what he wanted of it, so he bought rat poison, enough to kill a townful of rats. He made his own bread, sifting a quarter cup of strychnine into the flour and kneading it into something that could, if one were kind, be called a loaf. He then made himself spaghetti bolognese, boiling the pasta in water, to which he’d added a spoonful of strychnine. He fried the tomatoes, bacon, and rosemary in a cup of olive oil, to which he’d added two tablespoons of strychnine.