But what made him think they weren’t his was the subtle change in his wife, Debbie. She’d been happy the last few months before the pregnancy. She’d taken to kissing him the moment he came in the door from a trip. She’d drag him everywhere when he wasn’t on the road.
One Saturday morning he’d been lying in bed, dozing, and she took a phone call in another room. The long and the short of it is, she took that phone call and something changed. It happens when you’re not paying attention so that in retrospect it seems sudden — a barely heard voice, a new habit clung to out of love, a surprised physicality — she’s your wife but you are a stand-in for her new lover. She’s been tender but only because it overflows. And one morning, she is crushed by a phone call while Bob is half-asleep. Then after the twins were born, she was happy again and it happened suddenly.
One day, it was tax day, he was getting more and more frustrated, adding the numbers. I don’t know what happened next, but fair enough. I got tired of listening. The sun was going down outside. The long sky was stretching pink, the colour of candy.
The gist of poor Bob’s story was his wife had moved them to this little town, this minor spot where I’ve lived my whole life. She wanted, now, after this long, to be near the kids’ father. Bob was trying to do the right thing.
I stood there by the door while the world outside changed colour. Bugs were killed in zappers. Other bugs whined nearby.
Now Bob was here with us. Bob was trying to do the right thing. It’s unnatural, it’s not right. Like ill-fitting clothes. Like a child swimming in his father’s fucking jacket. Where has the man gone?
“As long as it’s not my fault,” I heard Bob say.
“Nobody would blame you,” Gord said.
“You guys are a big help,” Bob said, trying to smile.
But no, they are not. There is a tremendous lack of understanding here. Blame has got nothing to do with it. We are already blamed. We cannot get around it.
My own mother blamed me for everything when Lena left. I went over it in my mind. No, I said, I did nothing wrong. She said I could have done more.
It does not change one fucking thing, thank you.
She apologized later, when we drove by Penny’s. Lena was somewhere inside. My boy Jasper sat on the stoop.
It never rains in this town. I turned the wipers on accidentally. Don’t smile. Don’t cry. I wanted to be a good example in my mother’s car, so I tried to signal as I turned away from my boy on the stoop. The wipers waved. I honked, though I’m sure it seemed like a mistake.
I lived two blocks from Penny. Where was my wife?
My mother said she was sorry, she said she saw how much it hurt me. Doesn’t change a thing, I know, but I listened. I said nothing because I knew it would lead to more listening. I was tired of listening. To be honest, I thought of horrible crimes I had seen on TV. I could picture myself cleaning my gun, looking out to the street through a wrecked door.
I held it in the best I could. Now, with Bob and Gord and Jamie supporting each other behind me, the air was not getting cooler but the darkness was there. It was another night of still, hot, air. The windows were all open everywhere, I knew. Television lights were on everywhere, porch lights, dim basement lights, but it was to be avoided; everyone is afraid of the heat even a small bulb will give. It is one more absurdity.
There was a light on upstairs at Penny’s and it was in my mind but I heard twin voices praying. These voices were clean. The wet hair was parted in the middle. They’d found gifts in their little beds of new pajamas, just for boys who were leaving their father. This was the charity you might find beside the fucking penny tray at the Lucky Dollar.
Bob was talking and Gord and Jamie just listened.
“I can’t take this,” I said.
They had all forgotten I was there. Jamie looked at Bob and waited for him to continue.
“Something’s got to be done,” I said. I walked around the gym and closed all three fire exits. “All this does is let the bugs in.”
I went over and stood in front of Bob.
“Something’s got to be done, Bob. I’m going now,” I said, shaking his hand. “Good to meet you. Good luck. You guys stay here all night. You talk the fucking thing out, Bob.”
“Larry, sit down,” Jamie said, but I couldn’t.
Standing in front of Penny’s, I couldn’t think of what to say. She had no doorbell. I banged on the door. It was like balsa wood. It was like an airplane kit. The driveway was empty and a light switched out upstairs.
“The sun’s been down for an hour,” Bob said. I turned and saw his waiting face. I thought I heard a sound behind the thin door — a child, or children, padding down the stairs for a drink of water after a nightmare — as Bob put his hand on my shoulder and walked me out to the street. “I can’t believe this place,” he said. “Does it ever get cooler?”
He was waiting for some kind of explanation from me, some kind of defense of what went on here. But I was through talking. There was no light whatsoever on that street. There were no distinct shapes and I was not talking. I was tired of talking. Enough talking, Bob, I wanted to say, but I was tired of talking. There was no more.
Everything Is Loud
RAY HELD THE EDGE OF THE table to lower himself into the chair. He knew he’d become old slowly, as everyone did, but sometimes, like now, he felt he’d taken one huge leap away from his youth. He was aware of how he must look to the boy at the counter.
His hands shook when he didn’t concentrate. His ears were full of hair. He had to carry a hanky to wipe the corners of his mouth because his bottom lip hung down. He still smiled, but it was an awkward thing. He still had a good smile — better than ever, actually, since his false teeth were beautiful and straight. But he had to cough sometimes as the excess saliva was flushed into his mouth by his bottom lip tightening in the smile. It was like when he was a child and had to swallow, for some reason, a viscous and dirty medicine that numbed his tongue and made him cringe at the same time.
The horrible medicine was always followed by the comfort of heat spreading from the ugly taste in his mouth down to the ache in his chest. He’d made his children drink the same stuff, and it worked, though one of them was dead, he remembered, but not from a chest cold. Now, after a smile and the indignity of a little dribble from the corner of his mouth, or a tiny and, he hoped, inaudible and otherwise unnoticeable slurp, he felt no comfort, though the medicinal taste remained. He paused and brought the hanky up to his mouth just in case. He smiled again, but okay — nothing happened.
Glancing down as he stuffed the hanky into his right pocket, he saw some newspaper on the floor. It was some kind of flyer and he had to adjust again. He leaned on his left hand, still on the table, and pulled his cane from where he’d tucked it under his right arm. Now he had to be very careful
He’d seen this happen before — you believe you’re on solid ground, but you’re not. You put your weight on it and it’s gone. What was the flyer for anyway? With the rubber tip of his cane he pulled it out into the aisle a bit, out of the way of his foot. What were they selling? He couldn’t tell, but he could see next year’s date in huge numbers written boldly and knew he wouldn’t have to pay until then. Until sometime in the hypothetical future which he didn’t know he wanted to believe in.
Finally seated, he sighed and dabbed the left corner of his mouth. He laughed about the hypothetical future. It had all been a theory, of course — no promises — but he’d believed in it as a certainty, and did his eighty-second birthday prove he’d been right to let it slide, to believe in his future without doubt, to believe it was his right?
His wife was in the casket in the other room. Nancy. His wife’s name was Nancy. He was not so old that he’d forgotten her. What he remembered and what he forgot was always surprising to him.
But the sun shone in and warmed his hand as it lay on the table. You can still take pleasure in simple things. Like when he’d come in out of the rain in his youth,
when he’d changed from his wet clothes into dry and clean in the hotel room. That was the simplest thing he’d ever loved and he’d tried, sometimes, to recreate it in the summer, when he’d had money and no need to work in the rain. But you couldn’t. You needed to suffer in the cold rain to appreciate the dry wool socks and the heater in the truck as you drove to get dinner.
But it was his wife he was thinking of. Nancy. She was in the next room, in a casket, and even then, over forty years ago, he’d known he would live and this was his burden to bear. Not a burden, really, but there was some difficulty. He would have wished the burden on Nancy, he would have wished her still alive. He did.
Oh, had everyone he ever remembered really died? It seemed impossible with the world going on around him, and his head warmed by his thick toque. The woman behind the counter seemed familiar.
He remembered a vacation, early in the summer; before she’d drowned, his daughter wouldn’t go with him to the races in the town by the lake. They’d driven up to the race track a little late, because it had been a bad day for Nancy. The drag races had already started.
“Are you afraid?” his daughter had said, sitting straight on the seat beside him.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said, and smiled at her.
“No.”
“They’re loud, that’s all,” he told her. “Not dangerous.”
“I know, but I don’t want to go,” she told him, and it was true. He could see it in her hazel eyes that just got wider and waited for his response. They never took their seatbelts off, and when they pulled out of the parking lot he saw his daughter looking fragile and neat after all day at the beach. He was glad he’d looked into her eyes.
“I don’t know why everything has to be so loud, anyway,” he told her, and she smiled.
He set his coffee down and wiped his chin. This child at the other end of the doughnut shop was blushing. The two boys with her were quiet, but she was loud.
“But why do you think I’m pretty?” she asked, and if they did answer it was too quiet for Ray to hear.
Here was a problem that could not be solved.
When Nancy, his first wife, was in the other room in her casket, he was accosted by all sorts of people. He remembered only a few of them but one in particular stood out, even now, in this Tim Horton’s.
He didn’t know what the purpose of the memory was. He was here to celebrate finalizing his will, getting all his affairs in order, which had not been easy. Seldom had he felt especially proud of his life and, in fact, given the way his ruminations had become increasingly out of his control, he had not felt a thing that could be clearly recognized as pride for a long time, and today he wanted to enjoy it.
But his wife, Nancy, kept lying, still, of course, in a casket in the other room, while her estranged friend accosted him, where responsible people stood by the coffee urns set on a long collapsible table against the windowless wall painted some kind of peach, which he wasn’t sure was faded, or was it supposed to be that dull and flat, and someone’s idea of comforting? And while he received the words of these well-meaning, responsible people, including one cousin who lived in the same city but was a stranger, except to Nancy and Nancy’s pastor, who did his best not to make Ray feel guilty for not attending church, ever, he marvelled at the way vague things about tragedy came out of their mouths and he couldn’t get his own ideas of tragedy out of his mind. Had his wife’s life, had Nancy’s life, been a tragedy or was his life the tragedy? If everyone’s life were tragedy, if we all should just remain seated and weep at the end of each and every person’s inevitable failure to live forever, then the word, and the world, lost all meaning.
Of course, he couldn’t believe his life was the tragedy just because he was in his early forties and alone. He had enough money by then and he felt he could go on — no disrespect to Nancy. In fact, the tragedy was that she could not go on. Her life had been truncated, not by the full stop for which any sane person may hope, but by an ellipsis, as the disease worked slowly. It was efficient, mind you, it was not sloppy; it worked slowly and inexorably; it had time to spare and it shut each system off so smoothly — if it had been some kind of craftsman, if he could personify it in any way, he wouldn’t know whether to respect its attention to detail and deliberate work or hate it for milking it, for piling on the billable hours when the end result required nothing so methodical — and by the time she died there was so little left for the disease to kill.
One night they’d spoken about Madge, this friend who accosted him now, in his memory, as she had accosted him that day in the refreshment room at the viewing, and both he and Nancy had tried to think of other, more positive things. The love Madge had for their daughter who drowned — but they couldn’t get past her blaming Nancy. His wife was in the next room and still. She looked uncorrected, unreal, smooth and plastic, though she was not. He’d known by dressing her for the last time. This was her body, it was not plastic, but there is no way they could correct what the disease had done, no way to add weight, nothing to awaken.
Madge stared at him stupidly, her eyes big in the huge upside-down plastic frames that certain women of the era favoured, and Ray became angry, and for a moment forgot that he was still firmly anchored in the present, simply waiting a moment for his coffee to cool, and for the woman to bring him his slice of pie. He was angry for something so simple and stupid: why was it that he couldn’t enjoy a memory without imposing the views of the present upon it? Not that he was actually enjoying it, if he were honest with himself — the woman was infuriating — but was it fair to focus some of his anger on the stylistic choice she’d made when most women around her made the same choice? Were the stupid-looking glasses just a distraction or were they part of the problem? Even at the time he may have felt that there was something wrong, something even despicable, perhaps, about a person who chose, continually, the path of least resistance, especially in terms of aesthetics, where taste was all that mattered and nothing was really at stake. So maybe it was part of what had made him angry back then, over forty years ago, though he appreciated the fact that she didn’t say “It’s such a tragedy.”
If she had said “It’s such a tragedy,” as so many did, he would have been spun one more time into considering the tragic, and he always thought of tragedy as requiring a hero, and then who was the hero? Of course, Nancy had fulfilled partially the role of the modern tragic hero at the end of her life — and this is what brought tears to his eyes — when her eyes showed too clearly and easily the quick movement that used to belong to her body. This is not me, her eyes seemed to say, but without pity, without fear. He knew that. At least he knew. She didn’t have to worry, but with all that time to sit and wait, he was afraid there was nothing else for her to do.
And that was fine, for despite the Hollywood movies, despite the stoic hero dying on the beach or in the water — despite movies ruining life, she was a hero. Anyway, who else could be?
He didn’t believe in the noble person with the tragic flaw. And this woman, Madge, accosting him now . . . Of all the things that bothered him about aging, it wasn’t the blue-spotted skin on the back of his hands, or the way his thick nails always looked yellow and already like the nails of a cadaver — he turned his hand over now in the sunlight and tried to see its palm as it had been, years ago, when he was a child, but how could he? He sputtered out a small laugh, then picked up the white china mug by its handle, amazed in this context that his fingers could commit to such delicate movements as this and he brought the cup to his mouth for a sip of coffee. Of course what would happen in even two months was too much to say — he remembered his grandmother needing two hands to hold a tiny cup of tea to her lips and everything wobbled. He gently lowered his mug to the table as he remembered her taking such care and trembling so much.
But it was his wife, Nancy, he was thinking of, and he remembered that he was sorry he was aging, though how regret entered into it he wasn’t quite sure. He simply wished that he wasn’
t forgetting what he hated about the woman, Madge, or was hate too strong a word? But regret? What to regret about aging — that he was doing it, that he was alive? He couldn’t regret his life, but there was something, and he remembered what it was: Why had he taken Nancy to Vancouver at the end, and — that’s it! He hated Madge because she’d blamed Nancy, and he slammed his fist on the table. It shocked him, and he felt his eyes widen and he thought he might cry.
“Dammit! Where is it?” he said, loudly, and surprised himself with another fist on the table. He couldn’t find the one thing he wanted to think of and stick to it. Then in his anger he might start to cry because the goddam movements of his own body startled him. He tried now to regain his composure. He put his elbows on the table and covered his eyes with his hands. What is the world going to think of him?
“Sorry about that,” the young woman from the counter said, as she set a slice of chocolate pie on his table. “I forgot about your pie.”
“It’s okay,” he said, looking up at her. “I wasn’t upset about that.”
“It’s okay,” she told him, and smiled, and he could see it was true even if he was an angry old man waiting angrily for some pie and slamming his fist on the table like some kind of baby. He saw that it was okay to her. She had other things on her mind, her own things, and he bet she shuffled through them like they were a stack of colour-coded index cards and, no matter what, the right image came to her mind, and that’s why she was sure, and that’s why she could be kind. He imagined what he must seem like to her and his eyes felt large and open. Everything was right out in the open.
But when he said no, and shook his head, he was sure she thought the gesture was just the normal shaking of a palsied old man. She went back to the counter and he looked for some of the other young people, afraid they were angry at him for causing such a scene, and one of the boys was gone, and the girl was less happy, and not blushing. He could tell the boy she liked was gone. It was a shame the boy still there didn’t see it.
We Don't Listen to Them Page 7