I Don't Want to Know Anyone Too Well, and Other Stories

by Norman Levine

  Then George said, “When you come on a visit she doesn’t want us to know you are in Ottawa.”

  Another silence.

  “Selina thinks we should sit shiva here,” Sarah said.

  “What’s wrong with her apartment?”

  “It’s too small,” Selina said. “Three people in there and there’s no room to move.”

  “But here—it’s miles from anywhere.”

  “All the people who would come,” George said, “have cars.”

  I thought I knew what was not being said. My mother’s apartment was not only small, it was in a senior citizens’ place. And I could see it was no longer going to be private, a small family thing, but a social occasion.

  “I’ll be here for the funeral,” I said. “But I won’t sit shiva.”

  “Why not?” Sarah shouted. “It’s therapy.”

  “I don’t believe in it.”

  “But for Ma.”

  “To remember someone,” George quietly said to Sarah, “you don’t have to sit shiva.”

  He had, on marrying Selina, converted to being a Jew.

  “You don’t have any feeling for this family.” Selina was angry. “You just don’t have it.”

  In my mother’s apartment I couldn’t go to sleep. I finished reading the Citizen. There were no books. Only those I gave her that she kept hidden, in the bedroom, in drawers. They were in mint condition signed to my father and to her. Then only to her. She is the only one in the family who reads my things.

  I was looking for a photograph of my father—a studio photograph of how he looked before he came to Canada—and couldn’t find it. But I did find a glass jar with the small pink shells that she collected on the beach in St. Ives. And faded cuttings—from the Journal and the Citizen, of my early books—that I had forgotten. Some large boxes of chocolates unopened. Horoscopes that she cut from the paper. (Sarah was also an Aries.) A flyer that said, “Your psychic portrait rendered by the combined skills of an astrologist and of an artist. Strategically placed in your home, it allows for meditation on self, and to work out one’s destiny.” And it gave two telephone numbers.

  In her clothes closet, at the bottom, large leather purses. Brown, beige, black. And none looked used. Inside they had loose change and a wrapped toffee or two. There were small yoghurt containers filled with pennies. One had American pennies. The others Canadian. Some were bright as if newly minted. I saw a small hand-mirror. The glass was cracked. I remember it because of the black and white drawing on the back—a woman’s face and neck and dense black hair. I last saw it as a child on her dresser in the bedroom. Now, the drawing didn’t look right. I turned the hand-mirror upside down. The drawing became another drawing. A woman had her hand in her pubic hair. I felt an intruder. I didn’t want to look any more.

  Next morning I walked to Rideau Street and to the Rideau Bakery. On visits I always drop in to buy some bread. I bought a rye, to take back to Toronto, when one of the owners came in from the back. (We both went to York Street School.) He was talking to a well-dressed woman when he saw me.

  “Going to see your mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Mrs. Miller’s son,” he introduced me to Mrs. Slover, a furrier’s wife.

  “Your mother,” said Mrs. Slover, “is a very nice person.” Then looking directly at me, “Are you a nice person?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Give her my regards when you see her. She is a lovely lady.” And walked quickly away.

  The owner of the Rideau Bakery looked confused.

  “And remember me to your mother,” he said quickly.

  “She is in hospital,” I said.

  She was asleep when I entered her room. There was only the drip. I went out in the corridor, towards the reception desk, when I met the surgeon. A stocky man with glasses from Newfoundland. He was in between operations. They were, he said, still trying to find out why she wasn’t eating. I told him I had someone coming from England. Would it be all right if I went back to Toronto? How long would I be away? About five days. He hesitated. “That should be all right.”

  I returned to the room. When she opened her eyes I gave her some Ensure and said I would be going to Toronto as Henry, a friend from St. Ives, was due tomorrow evening. I’d stay the weekend. And be back to see her the following week.

  “The surgeon has my phone number.”

  “Did you have a nice time at Selina’s?”

  “Yes.”

  We remained silent.

  “I’m going to close my eyes now.”

  After she woke, I said I would leave, as I wanted to pack and close the apartment.

  On the open front door I saw the name-plate.

  “Who is Mr. Thomas Sachs?”

  “A bachelor,” she said.

  In the Union Station, waiting for Henry to arrive, I was early and having a coffee. And think how lucky I was to have grown up with painters. Painters are much more open than writers. They seem to enjoy their work more—more extrovert. And Henry was like that. When I first knew him he and his wife, Kath, were working in a café opposite Porthmeor Beach. And Henry painted when he could. He had one of the studios (large, spartan) facing the beach. And let me use it. The tall end-windows (that looked out on sand, surf, the hovering gulls) had a wide windowsill. I had my typewriter on the sill and wrote while Henry painted behind me. I could hear him talking to himself. “Look at that green . . . That red sings . . . “And when the work was going he would sing quietly: “Life is just a bowl of cherries.” Just that line. And when a painting was finished he wanted me to see it. I said I liked it. “But it is so still. Quiet.”

  “All good paintings,” he said, “have a feeling of calm about them.”

  Henry began to paint in Germany as a prisoner of war. “I got canvas from the pillowcases. Oil from the odd tin of sardines.” He also went hungry. After the war he married. Left a struggling working-class home in the provinces to come to St. Ives. He had a thing about those who were (like us) in St. Ives but who had private incomes or parents with money. This didn’t bother me. I guess you have to be English to have this love-hate with class. I remember when one of our lot (money behind him) won a prize for one of his paintings. We met in the pub by the parish church and the War Memorial Garden. He bought Henry and me a beer.

  When we left the pub Henry was angry.

  “A half-pint of bloody beer. Christ, if I’d won that money I’d have bought everyone double whiskies.”

  After that summer, and those early years, we moved apart. I heard he was teaching in an art school near London. I read about his exhibitions in the paper. Sometimes I saw him, briefly, in London. It was still a struggle.

  More years passed.

  Then in the spring of 1980 I came to Toronto. I was living in a modest high-rise in Yorkville when Henry phoned. He was in Toronto. He had flown from Alberta and was on his way back to England. Could I come to this restaurant and join him for dinner.

  The taxi brought me to a seedy street near Kensington Market. I went up a narrow worn-out staircase. Turned into a barn-like room. Lots of tables. No customers. A man was behind a small bar by the wall near the door. A woman, in a simple all-black dress, came towards me. I asked for Henry. She led me through a door to a room in the back.

  It was all red. The wallpaper was a deep red. Red lights were on the walls. The tablecloths were red. The small lights, on the tables, had red lampshades. There was only one person in the room. Henry, sitting by a large red table and smiling.

  “It’s a brothel,” he said.

  We had a platter of seafood. We drank and talked. About our friends, our children, and what we had been doing. He had been a guest lecturer at Banff for two months. Things, he said, were beginning to pick up. But he still had to hustle.

  After the meal we went into the other room, stood at the b
ar, drank with the proprietor and his wife. Neither could speak much English. She was telling me that her husband played football for Portugal when a slight man, in a light-grey summer suit, joined us. He must have had his meal somewhere in the large room. But we didn’t notice. He said he was an American. After a while he said he worked for the CIA. Still later, Henry and the CIA man began to dance. I danced with the proprietor’s wife. Then we all put our arms over the shoulder of the person on either side. The proprietor joined us. And we moved around the empty restaurant as a chorus line. Henry singing, “Life is just a bowl of cherries.”

  Out in the street we asked the CIA man where he was staying. The Windsor Arms. So we walked to the nearest main road and waited for a taxi to drive by. The grey light of early morning. It was cold and shabby. A gusty wind. Loose newspapers. And no cars. The CIA man began to take out dollar bills from his jacket pockets and threw them up into the air. The wind blew them away. Henry and I went after the loose bills . . . on the road . . . the sidewalk . . . across the street . . . and stuffed them back into the man’s pockets. Then he took them out again and threw them in the air. And again we went after them . . . Until a taxi finally came along.

  Since then Henry has called that night magical. A word I never use.

  This time he had flown from England to New York. Spent four days looking at galleries and museums. Then took the train to Toronto.

  “It’s marvellous,” he said in the taxi. “I don’t have to lecture or teach or flog my paintings. I can do just what I want to do. Enjoy myself. And I have enough money not to pinch and scrape. From here, I’ll go to Vancouver. See Expo. Then fly back.”

  He liked Fred. I showed him his room. We both got dressed up. Henry in a light blue silk jacket, a silk shirt, light blue trousers, a black beret.

  “How’s your mum?”

  “Dying.”

  “She knows you know,” he said.

  Henry is tall and stocky with a grey moustache and glasses. A woman I know, who saw us walking down Yonge Street, phoned up after he had gone and asked, “Who was that policeman you were with?”

  We were having a drink before going out. His eldest son was acting in the West End in a Stoppard play. His youngest was studying languages in Munich. “And playing cricket for the MCC.”

  “I didn’t know he was that good.”

  “The Munich Cricket Club. After a game if he’s done well he will phone. If he doesn’t phone I know he didn’t get many runs.”

  It is only after we have told each other about our families that we get onto work.

  “I’ve never been so busy,” Henry said. “I can barely cope. I think it’s to do with age. It is so strange to be so busy that there is never a minute to spare. Not until I sit down in the evening and fade out in front of the TV. I can hardly believe it. My early work continues to sell. I am so confused. I don’t know whether to stop letting the last few things go or just treble the prices.”

  The taxi arrived.

  He was excited.

  “Where are we going?”

  The taxi stopped on a badly lit street by some garbage. There was an open door, a worn-out staircase.

  Henry was smiling. “It’s the same place.”

  There was the man and the woman. They said they remembered us. I don’t know if they did. The front barn of a room had no customers. We asked if we could go to the back. She said, in poor English, it was closed.

  We sat, by a table, against a wall. And all those white laid-out empty tables stretched in front of us.

  The proprietor sat in front of a large TV screen. It was raised and could be seen all over the room. Benny Hill was chasing some girls who kept dropping their clothes.

  The woman in the black dress came to take our order. In a firm but friendly voice Henry said, “We’ll have champagne.”

  The woman went away.

  Henry looked relaxed and happy.

  She returned to say no champagne.

  “No champagne,” Henry said. “Bloody hell.”

  “Last night a wedding. No champagne.”

  He looked upset.

  “Shall we have a Scotch?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She went away.

  We were silent.

  “You know,” Henry said, “I wanted to come and see you. Go to a restaurant. And just say: We’ll have champagne. I remember at The Tinners . . . I was strapped for money . . . I was nursing a half-pint of bitter . . . When in walked John Friel. And it was the way he said, in that arrogant plummy voice of his, a bottle of champagne. I thought, someday I’m going to do that.”

  We started with Portuguese sardines.

  I told him that last summer I went to Paris and Marseille with a woman who opened up France for me. And it was in a small fishing place near Marseille, called Cassis, where I had the best sardines.

  “I was in Marseille,” he said, “before France fell. I was in the cavalry. We went to a brothel. There were three of us. All young. We kept coming back. They began to charge us hardly anything. They were glad to see us. I wondered why.”

  “Did you come back to the same girl?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I decided that they had two-way mirrors. They made their money from those who watched my ass going up in the air.”

  “Did you like the girl?”

  “Oh yes,” he said. “I liked her.”

  Next night I took him to an Italian restaurant, on St. Clair West, where I knew the food was good, and Henry said he liked Italian food. And the same thing happened. He asked for champagne. The proprietor, who was our waiter, looked sullen.

  He came back with a bottle of Asti Spumante.

  “I don’t believe it,” Henry said. “That’s no champagne.”

  We drank bottles of Asti Spumante and were having a fairly good time.

  The proprietor remained sullen. Finally he walked out.

  “He probably has a mistress,” Henry said. “Or else he has gone gambling.”

  His wife was the cook. A small pretty woman in a low-cut dress. Black hair, very white skin, large dark eyes, perspiration above her top lip. She had to finish serving the meal.

  “I stayed in London with Adrian Oakes,” Henry said. “The night before flying over. He had a girl staying with them that he had just before breakfast. His wife doesn’t mind. It’s the upper classes. His father gave him a mistress when he was twenty. He’s been used to it since. Not like us.”

  When we got back we walked Fred around the park. Ahead, in the sky, I could see Orion.

  Back in the house we drank and talked about Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron, Terry Frost, Alan Lowndes. And the crazy things we did.

  “I remember,” I said, “how we all got dressed up in suits to go to Peter’s funeral. And one of your sons saw us walking in the street. ‘“You look like a bunch of gangsters,’“ he said.”

  “Who is normal?” Henry asked. “Do you know anyone who is normal? My mother’s sister was called Ida Bolt. As Ida Bolt she was quiet and passive. And no one took any notice. But she also called herself Jennie Dempsey. And as Jennie Dempsey she would wiggle her hips, pretend she was dancing to the radio, jump with excitement. A complete extrovert. When she died the only people who came were those she played the piano for in a mental hospital.”

  Near the end he said, “There’s hardly anybody left in St. Ives. No one to talk to. Oh, I talk to a lot of people—but we don’t go back very far.”

  Next morning, before seven, Henry was up. And we took Fred out for his morning walk. I have to give Fred a tennis ball so that he doesn’t bark and wake up people. He gets excited as I open the door. And will leave the ball for me to throw. He doesn’t wait but starts to run fast ahead. Then stops, crouches. And looks at me. When he was young, when I pitched the ball, he would catch it in his mouth. Now he misses. So I throw it over him or to one side so
he can chase it. He also chases the black and grey squirrels. They always get to a tree before he can get to them. I don’t think he would do anything. He just likes chasing. Then he goes off into his own world and will sniff the grass and not move for several minutes. I whistle. I call, “C’mon, Fred.” Finally he does. Or else he goes on his back and twists his body on the grass.

  Walking with Henry, he was noticing shapes and I was noticing colours . . . then he saw Fred was waiting for us.

  “He’s smiling.”

  “He always has that expression on his face,” I said.

  We went to the galleries in Yorkville. Saw some early Hans Hofmann. “I wouldn’t mind having one of those,” he said. At another gallery he liked the Borduas and the Riopelles. As we came out from a gallery on Scollard we came out above the street.

  “There’s a painting right here,” he said.

  I saw a red mailbox, a green metal container beside it, a cluster of three glass globes at the top of a lamppost, a cherry tree in blossom.

  “What do you look for?”

  “Surfaces,” he said. “That green beside the mailbox. That has a flat top. The red mailbox has a curved top. Then the cherry tree. The shape of the streetlights.”

  We went to the Art Gallery of Ontario. I knew some of the paintings. Van Gogh’s Woodcutters in Winter. A lovely little Renoir landscape. We go up a ramp and, on the wall, beside us, Patrick Heron’s Nude of 1951; Peter Lanyon’s Botallack of 1952; and Henry’s A Snow Day of Grey of 1953.

  Henry looked pleased. “I didn’t know it was here.”

  For lunch, in The Copenhagen, we ordered duck with red cabbage.

  “Gino came to see me in Cornwall,” Henry said. “I can’t remember his second name. It’s my memory. He was in the Italian army. In the last war. He fought on the other side. He came to see me because he likes my work. When I told him I would be in Toronto, he said to go and see a sculpture of his. Here’s the envelope with the address.”