by André Alexis
She looked at his smiling face. There was something about it that made you want to scratch him. Perhaps it was his smile that turned her off.
– Very impressive, she said.
Then:
– I’m feeling a little unsteady.
– You shouldn’t have drunk before we ate, he said.
– I think you’re right. I wonder if we could have dinner some other time.
He surprised her. He rose from the table and said
– Let me get this.
He was, suddenly, all business: solicitous and efficient. He did not try to persuade her to stay. He became, at the end of the evening, the kind of man who might have held her interest. It was too late, though. She had left him long before they stepped out of the bar.
Of the dozen men with whom Fredrika tried to set her up after her divorce, Ronald Atkins was the most interesting. The others she saw were, by comparison, a faceless and uninspiring lot, none of whom had made the slightest effort to woo, let alone seduce. She slept with two of these others, but then the timing had been right and, more importantly, she had felt so desperate for contact that she had forgotten how true it was that “no sex” was, in fact, preferable to “bad sex.”
How could it have been anything but bad, bitterness and desperation being emotions that did not lessen her fear of engagement or vulnerability. The single time she managed to clear her thoughts, the only time she came close to letting go, her lover, a chartered accountant, had put on the music of The Miracles. Louise wept quietly at the first notes of “Ooh Baby Baby,” a song that intensely recalled her mother and father, their home. She might have recovered from her emotion but, sensing the degree to which she was moved, her lover stopped mid-caress, asked if she were okay, and, seeing her tears, began to weep himself: a moment of such vertiginous intimacy, it frightened him and he asked her to leave.
This was the last of Fred’s associates with whom she went out. From that time on, she discouraged talk of “appropriate” men or “distraction.” She thought it better she should find the way on her own. And so, without rancour or arrogance, Louise resolved to give up men for a year, a year being, she thought, the time she needed to reorient herself in the world.
However, six months into her moratorium on men, just as she was beginning to feel the quiet within her, she was reintroduced to Walter Barnes.
It was June. Fredrika had begun to insist that Louise needed company or she would lose the capacity for others; she would become a prematurely withered woman. It was not easy to say no to the near daily proposals that they go to such-and-such a bar with so-and-so who would bring the brother of this or that friend, a brother who was, inevitably
– A really interesting man.
But Louise did say no until, finally, because she could not stand to go on denying Fred the chance to do this little service, she decided to say yes to the next invitation to meet the next eligible prospect, whoever he might be.
However, it was not Fredrika who next proposed she go out on the town. It was Véronique; Véronique who had stayed out of her way, who had encouraged her to get as far away from Paul as she could, who had waited until Louise was clearly over her husband before offering a hand, not guidance.
– Lou, there’s this man. I’m interested, but I don’t want to go on a “date,” you know? I wonder if you’d mind coming out with us? I know you’re tired of blind dates, but if you could just keep me company. John’ll bring a friend. It’ll be four of us. I wouldn’t ask you, Lou. I know how you feel, the whole swearing-off-men thing. But you wouldn’t have to say much. I just don’t want to put any pressure on John. I think he’s serious, but I don’t want to scare him away. It’s easier if it’s not just two of us, you know?
Yes, she knew, and she would do this because it was for Vé and this was the first time in years, it seemed, she could do something for someone else.
They were all to meet at the Brigadier’s Pump. If she’d even vaguely suspected Vé of setting her up on some blind date, the place would have immediately dispelled the thought. The Pump would have suggested romance to no one save, maybe, a lonely student, and unless you were dying for fish and chips, you wouldn’t have chosen to eat here. Also, you could see that Vé was anxious on her own behalf, nervous about going out with a man for whom she had secret feelings. She had dressed on the verge of casual, on the verge of romance: a knee-length mauve dress that came in at the waist and then fell; over this, a jean jacket that was too big for her. And on her feet: low-cut, crimson leather boots, with mockingbirds embroidered at the ankles.
The women arrived early and Vé ordered a Strongbow, which she sipped from a pint glass. Louise did not want to drink. She ordered a soda, to be sociable, and listened as Vé’s conversation alighted on whatever subject occurred to her. Politics, fashion, books, the price of bread. There was something inexpressibly moving, seeing Vé like this: nervous and sincere. Louise felt she had been right to come along.
Then, John Patterson, Vé’s friend, entered, followed by Walter Barnes, whom Louise did not immediately recognize, Walter being the last person she expected to see on this evening, of all evenings, when she was out, principally, to accompany her closest friend.
For Walter, the encounter was as unexpected but not as surprising. John Patterson was a man he did not know well, a professor of comp lit with whom he had had two conversations at Rooster’s Pub; during the first, they had discussed Atwood and Hegel; during the second, Hegel and Tolstoy. Not the deepest of exchanges, but they had kept each other entertained long enough for a spark to pass from one to the other, and it was in memory of the spark that Patterson asked Walter if he would mind “tagging along” for a little conversation with a friend of his, Véronique, and a friend of hers.
– You need a chaperone? asked Walter. Is it love?
He was kidding, but Patterson answered
– Yes. I think so, yes.
To which there was no other response but to ask for the coordinates and to accompany Patterson wherever, love having preemptory precedence, even between men who did not know each other well. So, on the appointed night, Walter followed John Patterson into the Brigadier’s Pump, and smiled as he recognized Louise Dylan. Véronique introduced them.
– Walter, this is my friend Louise.
– So pleased to meet you, said Walter.
– Enchanté, answered Louise.
And she stood up, uncertain if they should embrace after, what, three years, was it? Or was it four? So much time gone, and yet…
It was an odd kiss. It wasn’t quite recognition or recollection. It was that, for a moment, their bodies failed to acknowledge the time that had passed. From their bodies’ perspectives, their kiss took place in 1983. He leaned down; she looked up. His right hand went, without thought, to the place on her waist where it always rested. There was nothing indelicate about their embrace, and nothing drawn out. Time returned as soon as they parted.
Patterson and Véronique congratulated them on their fortuitous reacquaintance and then, for an hour, ignored them, more or less, so pleased were they to be in each other’s company. One might have said, looking at the quartet, that John and Vé were the more intimate duo. They did most of the talking. They played host to the other two, made half-hearted efforts to include them in conversation and, after a time, shepherded them from the Pump into the Ritz, for pizza. Patterson and Véronique used talk as a means to test the bond between them. They were both wary of losing the friendship they enjoyed, so they made constant efforts to demonstrate friendliness, and what better way, under the circumstances, than with talk, through talk, and across talk? Their apprehension was successfully hidden by conviviality.
The case was, naturally, different for Walter and Louise. First, their proximity having abolished and then reinstated Time, it was as if they had unwittingly crossed a threshold, and they were both a little bewildered. Neither could b
e certain the other had felt as he had, as she had. There was no anxiety in their ignorance, though. Neither wished anything of the other, or not exactly. They sat facing each other, aware of the absurdity of their situation, and there was, in both of them, a desire to talk, there being so many things to say, along with the desire to say nothing at all but, rather, to touch, their first moment having been so…
What’s the word for it?
After the initial, erotic charge between them, after the fig and goat cheese pizza, after wishing farewell to Patterson and Vé (who walked off together, happily), Walter Barnes and Louise Dylan (née Lanthier) walked home together, along Rideau, along Wellington, along Bank: west, then south.
A lovely night in June, eleven o’clock. It had rained while they were indoors. It rained lightly as they walked home. Clouds covered the city, and so hid from them, first, Gemini, well above the horizon, and then Virgo, beneath whose feet the moon.
– It’s good to see you, Louise. I knew I’d see you again, but I wondered when.
– I thought you were trying to avoid me. Last time, you took off as soon as you saw me.
– I didn’t mean to. I wasn’t very happy back then.
– I’m sorry. What was wrong?
– Well, that would make a long story but, you know, after Paul put me in the hospital, I wasn’t a happy man.
– Paul? Paul who?
– Your husband.
They were at the corner of Bank and Slater, Prospero Books on one side, nothing much on the other. He touched her arm as they crossed against the light.
– I’m sorry, said Walter. Of course you didn’t know. He didn’t tell you. Why would he?
He recounted what he remembered, and it was as if she remembered some aspect of it as well. Principally, Paul’s finger: broken because…a car accident, wasn’t it? And so, on this night in June, years later, she felt guilty, as if she should have known Paul had done this to Walter. Her fault, because Paul had done this to her as much as to Walter, as she should have known he might.
– I’m so sorry, she said.
And they waited at another light, standing beside each other, until Walter, having said
– It wasn’t your fault, Lou
said
– Why don’t we walk a bit more.
It being clear that all this, from which he himself had long recovered, and which he did not wish to revisit, was newly traumatic to her.
They continued to walk along Bank, because Walter lived a few blocks farther on. Louise thought she might walk him home, and then go home on her own. Walter assumed they would walk a bit, and he would accompany her home. Instead, they walked on and, at 3rd, both of them turned, without speaking, towards Walter’s house, as if it were home to both of them.
Walter said
– Let me make you something
and they went in together.
It was as if two dreamers passed unexpectedly into the same dream, occupying not only the same forest of symbols but also, briefly, the same consciousness. Walter put on the kettle and prepared a cup of tea: Prince of Wales, her favourite, a sachet of which he must have (unconsciously) saved, anticipating her return, perhaps, since he never drank Prince of Wales himself. Louise sat where she could: in one of the two chairs at the dining-room table. They said nothing, until she had taken a few sips of her tea, and then she asked
– Where’s your furniture, Wally?
A simple question, but one that took hours in the answering, hours during which much that Walter did not want to recall was recalled and much that Louise had kept to herself was shared with Walter:
suicide (its failure)
divorce (its success)
displacement (hers)
the discovery of home (made by both)
regret and longing and…
confusion (of the emotions)
confusion (of the intellect) and
bewilderment (of the soul, always supposing…)
They talked until five fifteen in the morning when the sun began its ascent.
For Walter, who managed at last to be open and truthful with her, this night was both exhilarating and painful. He admitted, at last, that he had lied, that he had, in fact, loved her (if love is the word…a question difficult to decide, since he was a stranger to the emotion in question). And it was like confessing he was “slow.” How shameful not to have known these feelings until so late in life, and how shameful to have fled from them when they came. He had denied, all those years ago, that he loved her and, from that moment, he’d suffered as if he were wounded. He sincerely wished he could take his words back.
It was early, and it was late. Morning light came through the windows. Though she did her best to stay awake, Louise was exhausted. It was gratifying to hear, years later, what she might have wanted to hear at the time, but it was difficult to know what to think about the past, about Walter, about her own feelings. Though she was happy to see him, she had resolved her feelings for Walter long ago. She no longer felt for him as she had.
– We should maybe sleep now, said Walter.
– Yes.
Which they did, sharing Walter’s bed for a few hours until Walter, who did not dare sleep too deeply, for fear he would not wake in time, rose to make himself coffee: eight thirty. Three hours rest, and it would have to do because, as it was, he barely made his nine thirty class: summer courses, a handful of students, a review of his lectures on Thorsten Veblen.
Louise woke at noon, in a bed she did not immediately recognize, awakened by an unfamiliar silence. Even when they’d had their affair, she had rarely risen with Walter, in Walter’s house, and she found it disconcerting. She made the bed. She opened the bedroom window, though it was cool outside and a rude breeze mingled with the air inside. Yes, it was noon. A grey day, but noon nonetheless.
On the table, Walter had left a note, a nearly indecipherable scrawl on the back of a card:
Lou,
I have…house, but…
We should…anytime…
Love,
Walter
His hand had never been neat, but this scrawl was worse than usual. It took her ten minutes to make out as much as she did. She took the time, however, because it was thoughtful of him to have left this proof he’d been thinking of her as he rushed out. Anyway, whoever chose a man for his handwriting? If it came to that, whoever chose a man? She herself had never collected a set of characteristics that added up to the man she wanted, and it was odd to hear women speak as if they had, as if the ideal man were Frankenstein’s monster. No, now she thought of it, she had always imagined a place she wanted, not a man: a place with wooden floors, and tall windows that looked out onto a garden with hawthorns, wisteria, and willow trees, a west-facing garden on which the sun would shed its last light of the day. And in that imagined place she was happy, and part of her happiness was the presence of a man whose face she could not make out but of whom she could imagine, if she let herself go, strong hands, a muscular back and shoulders.
Did it not matter, then, who was with her in that place?
Yes, actually, it did. Paul had influenced her version of home, but his real presence had cut away from her imaginings all that was haphazard and mysterious enough to hold her interest. That is: she had surrendered her imaginings, for Paul. The home inside her changed to accommodate the man she had married. From the moment she married Paul Dylan it had seemed possible their life together would be an overcoming of difficulties she suspected they would have. She had lived with Paul Dylan as if he were her husband, husband in the particular sense of one whom one has encountered at the heart of oneself.
She might have said the same thing about Walter, that he had influenced her version of place, that she had wanted him because her imagination was more expansive when they were together. Strange: this was something she had not
known until now. (“Now” being early afternoon on June 16, 1987, as she made tea for herself and ate the closest thing to a meal she could find in the man’s fridge: a crust of bread, which she had toasted, and a solid piece of buckwheat honey that had rattled in its plastic container.) What she had always felt, with Walter, was this expansion of the possible.
Yes, but…
As she washed the dishes (her plate and knife), she thought of all she knew or imagined she knew and how little any of it had ever helped her. Better to let life take its course. If she and Walter were fated to be friends, they were fated to be friends. More than that she did not need. She’d wait until she knew what she would have to give up to keep this “friendship,” then they’d see.
As it was a day off from the library, she stayed until Walter returned from Carleton. She sat at his dining-room table reading King Lear (one of a handful of books she found, this because of Walter’s troubles, his self-indulgent sadness, though it wasn’t generous to think of unhappiness as self-indulgent. She wondered if it were possible to love someone one knew well, and then wondered if it were possible to know anyone well).
Walter returned to her life.
That’s easily said, as if the two took up where they’d left off four years previously, but of course their feelings for each other were not, initially, as vivid as they had been. They did not inevitably see each other, night after night, they did not mingle their finances or friendships, they did not know each other (biblically speaking) until a month had passed, and they did not begin to know each other (metaphysically speaking) for some time after that.
In effect, the two of them drifted towards each other, Louise cautious, Walter puzzled, Louise fearing more hurt, Walter unsure just how one lived with a woman to whom one has confessed one’s feelings. He had, of course, read of such situations and, by all accounts, it was his duty to woo (an obscure and peculiar word). And because he found the whole thing slightly perplexing, he went about it in a perplexing way. For instance, he’d heard that women appreciated chocolates or flowers. So, he bought neither for her, on the assumption she would have had enough of cocoa and pollen by now. Instead, he surprised her with the kind of thing he adored: a Japanese grasshopper in amber, a chestnut in which there was a small carving of Abraham Lincoln in profile, a pair of wooden earrings painted to look like Kronos eating one of his children.