Mr. Jones

by Margaret Sweatman

  Weeping, she went to the kitchen. It was empty. Clean. Her purse on the table, her wallet still inside. The coffee cup. The key. She took out her Brownie and as she began to photograph these things in the even light, her sorrow evened, became quite blank. She photographed the bedroom, the bed. His closet, a pair of tanned shoes. His drawers, three leather belts rolled — that he rolled up his belts, that they were of such quality, made Suzanne again feel desperate. She considered staying here tonight, but her courage didn’t go quite that far.

  It was time to leave. Yet she opened the kitchen cupboards and photographed the glasses there and then the forks in the drawer. The forks were beautiful; when she brought the camera close enough they could be the span of a bridge, a fence. She was an amateur, as a woman, a lover, a photographer. So be it. She didn’t wish ever to be cured of John.

  She was very tired. She went back to his bedroom and this time she pulled the covers back, intending to climb in, to get warm, maybe to sleep. That was when she found his notebook. Lying on the sheet near the foot of the bed. As if he’d intended her to find it.

  When it was time to leave, she locked John’s door, returned the key to the superintendent (keeping her own key in her purse, a hedge; finality did not suit her) and bundled out to the street. And there was Emmett Jones, standing across the street, looking at her.

  Suzanne’s nerves were frayed, and she warmed to Emmett’s solitary vigil. Emmett belonged, she felt, among safe, reasonable people. It was snowing heavily now and milder; big flakes were falling, the cars mumbling congenially over deep tracks of snow, the red light where she waited to cross to join him refracted through moist air.

  Emmett didn’t move, though he twisted his body slightly to watch her approach. When she got to him, he looked down at her — they were both tall people, Emmett and Suzanne, but Emmett was six-foot-two — neutral and intent. He let her come right up to him without speaking. He had snow in his hair. She said, “He’s not there,” and waved at the apartment building across the street.

  Two men in a beige Chrysler parked at the corner turned to look.

  A man in a hat tucked his newspaper under his arm and hailed a cab driven by an ordinary fellow in his fifties.

  Suzanne shifted her bag to the other shoulder, conscious of John’s notebook tucked in among her few things. “Do you know where he is?” Then she regretted that she’d asked. Something leaked out; some reserve fantasy of her own stoicism. She shook her head. “Never mind. Forget it.” She smiled sadly at Emmett. “I always knew this would happen.”

  She started to walk, assuming that Emmett would accompany her, which he did. Suzanne felt pain spooling from her solar plexus, like fishing line. She said, “Can I ask you something?”

  Emmett nodded.

  “Why were you standing there?”

  “I got a phone call. From John. He asked me to come. To see if anybody was around.”

  “And was anyone there? Besides me?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know how to look for those things.”

  Suzanne didn’t really know either. But she would learn. Looking had become her domain. She had nowhere else to live.

  Chapter Seven

  Suzanne did become a photographer but not in a shop; her father put an end to that. Her father said, “Start at the top and take it from there,” and paid the rent for Suzanne to have her own studio at the front of a low, single-storey building on Avenue Road, with her own suite in the back, looking out onto a small, overgrown garden. She hung out a sign: “McCallum Photographs.” She was finally pretty independent.

  She felt she was strong because she was broken. Not merely broken-hearted; she’d broken faith with life. Until she’d seen John Norfield’s face, witnessed his loneliness, his sexy and cursed loneliness as it found expression in the way he smoked a cigarette, till she’d been so affected by his cool elegance, his vice, Suzanne might have anticipated a future as smooth as a golf green: a marriage to someone a little older and a little wiser, a few children, annulated maturity by means of Christmas turkey, Easter ham, the dinner rituals of the Christian calendar, the cadence of the beautiful and the good. But now she appeared to be rejecting her own tribe.

  After John’s disappearance, she was initially in a state of shock, under a spell, an interdiction. She felt she’d driven him away by wanting too much of him. In the myth of Cupid and Psyche, Cupid — a male creature of terrible beauty — forbade Psyche to look at him, and made love to her only in complete darkness. And when Psyche lit the forbidden lamp to look at her beautiful lover, he punished her by vanishing. Suzanne had only the photographs she’d taken of John. She became obsessed with the darkroom, she could control her fate by making his image rise, make it rise again and again to the surface.

  She was skinny in those days and drank brandy at dawn. Word got out about her studio, and people started to drop by to see her work; even a few strangers came to buy her photographs. The “art photos” made her parents’ social circle feel sorry for the McCallums; they thanked god that their own daughters were interested in the newly minted lawyers or men starting out in the financial sector, solid young men working for banks and accounting firms or in upper management in manufacturing and sales. Friends of her mother’s said that Suzanne had been ruined by education. They predicted that she would end up an anxious little spinster, after the family money ran out.

  Suzanne’s was a Toronto of unhappy childish images. A wedding veil on a naked mannequin through a smashed window and the inevitable bald dolls. But her work improved. A chipped china bowl overflowing with a bushy coleus — even her mother’s friends thought it beautiful, but one asked the other while Suzanne pretended not to hear, “She shows the roots and not the flowers? Those are robins’ eggshells?” “They are potato peelings. With orange peel, and mould. It’s not coleus, it’s red cabbage.” “So much colour in a black-and-white picture, I’m amazed.” “I’m reminded of Wyeth.” “Oh, go on, Wyeth is an artist who makes art.” “It’s a still life, isn’t it? And death lurking under us, informing our lives. I surprise you. You forget, I’ve had some training.” “Oh you’re deep all right, as far as it goes, but she’s just a sex maniac having a nervous breakdown.”

  Her father sat for a portrait of himself posing in a gubernatorial chair before a black velvet drop, well and proper. “The girl could make a decent living, taking portraits of our best people. Like Karsh.” “Sure. But she thinks she’s some big eccentric.” It was only lonely, balding Miss O’Brien, the Catholic spinster who used to teach piano, who could possibly be pleased with Suzanne’s portrait of her in the Irishman’s butcher shop beside the bloody shank of lamb.

  Half-price Suzanne McCallum. “Don’t you dare feel an ounce of pity for her. She could have married Dirk Dupont and had all the money in the world.”

  Chapter Eight

  At the time of John Norfield’s disappearance in January 1950, Emmett was supporting himself by translating Japanese documents from the Russo-Japanese War for a professor at the university. The Russo-Japanese War was initiated by Japan in a Pearl Harbor–style attack on the Russian navy at Port Arthur, Manchuria, in 1904, and it was like a rehearsal for World War One, fought hand to hand in the mud with bayonets, with anywhere between one hundred and thirty thousand to more than two hundred thousand soldiers killed in a year and a half — no one bothered to keep an exact count of the dead. Emmett was translating love letters written by a high-ranking Japanese officer to his mistress, letters filled with explicit, erotic descriptions of blood and guts, erotic carnage. Perhaps it was the love language of the Japanese officer that led to Emmett’s nightmares.

  He worked at home, and didn’t speak with anyone for days on end, drinking countless pots of tea during the hours he sat writing, and after dark he would walk for miles until he thought he could sleep.

  This work paid him enough to live on. But he needed a career. Several professors at the university, seeing Jones flounder, had suggested that his language skills could get him
a job in the civil service, with External Affairs if he wanted it.

  The vets were still being celebrated, but nobody talked about Bomber Command; he would be a source of shame to his professors, if they’d known that he’d bombed German civilians. Bomber Command violated the ideal that permeated peacetime versions of the war; he’d been one of those who had behaved like the fascists who’d bombed London.

  So when his bearded professors suggested that he “try External” for a career, when they said that his internationalism combined with his (no doubt) heroic deeds in the war would make him a prime candidate for a role with the Canadian civil service, he would go silent in their book-lined offices. Privately, he did not believe there was such a thing as a civil government. He was unmoored. He read Marx’s essay called “The Perversion of Human Needs.”

  “Alienation,” Marx wrote, “is apparent not only in the fact that my means of life belong to someone else, that my desires are the unattainable possession of someone else, but that everything is something different from itself, that my activity is something else, and finally, that an inhuman power rules over everything.”

  Someone had described Emmett’s condition. Everything is different from itself. An inhuman power rules over everything.

  He was bored in an ugly way. Bored by surfeit, bored by indecision, a buzzing hovering boredom that would not land. He missed the action of the war and hated himself for it. He had liked the chemistry of skill and fear in his blood when he was a pilot, and now he had to discover whatever would replace it. He missed John, he missed Leonard, he didn’t think he could love anyone but Suzanne. John’s disappearance had made Suzanne almost into a haunted widow. No word came from Leonard; maybe he’d actually made it to Russia, his communist paradise.

  Emmett wrote, drank tea because he couldn’t afford liquor, walked, and slept. He dreamed about Germany. He dreamed of the burnt people, dreamed that they had gladly given themselves to the fires that destroyed them — their minds, their faces above their charred bodies were coherent and ordinary, and they spoke to him casually, even cheerfully, though he couldn’t understand their language.

  His duty was to sample their flesh. In his dream he could taste the meat beneath the oily, roasted crust. He ate the flesh of one big man, his chest, the fat around the middle, then the thighs. He tasted the meat, which he found gamy, like venison, and he thought, I don’t like wild meat. The next burnt body offered to him was of a woman, and when he tore the crust with his teeth and bit into the roasted flesh, she tasted dark — rich and very dark, like wild fowl. He had only taken one dutiful bite when he decided he really couldn’t stomach anymore; he did not like the flavour. But there was the problem of the bite taken from her chest. He covered her with green leaves because he couldn’t bear to think that he’d spoiled her for the next man who might enjoy her.

  He awoke and dressed and made tea and toast and began to work. The taste of wild game persisted and he felt sick. Downstairs, he heard the chime of his landlady’s grandfather clock, and then the doorbell; he heard her open the front door, and the old house shook a little when she slammed it shut again. He thought she must have gone out. But a moment later, there came a knock at his door.

  A voice whispered urgently from the landing, “Emmett! Open!” He opened the door and there was Rachel, Leonard’s cousin. His landlady shrilled below, “Mr. Jones! Really!” He looked over the banister to where the landlady stood with her hands on her hips. She cried, “Disgraceful!”

  “She’s my cousin,” he said. Even from three flights up he could see the disgust on his landlady’s face.

  Rachel was puffing furiously. “A harridan,” she said. Then, loudly, so the landlady could hear, “An anti-Semite!”

  Emmett ushered Rachel into his attic suite. She was dressed in grey wool with a white blouse buttoned high at her throat and a black hat with a band of red satin. She unpinned the hat and her hair fell around her shoulders. She’d become even more beautiful. He squeezed her arm and offered the chair at his kitchen table, moving aside his papers.

  “The old sow didn’t want to let me in.”

  “I’m not supposed to have women here.” He liked the sound of that. As if he sometimes “had” women anyway.

  “Is that what she meant by ‘your kind’? ‘I don’t want any of your kind in my home.’ She meant Jew.”

  He realized this was true. “I’ll move out.” Ashamed. He should have been aware.

  Rachel smiled at him and put the cool palm of her hand to the side of his face. “Still the innocent.” She surveyed his small quarters, took in the documents stacked on the table, her square fingers stroking a page of Japanese script. “So learned, Emmett. I’m in awe.”

  He offered tea and put the kettle on, feeling neither innocent nor learned. “It’s good to see you,” he said. He’d been solitary too long and didn’t have anything to say, but he was glad to see her, he was afraid his loneliness would show. He asked her if she’d heard from Leonard.

  Rachel pursed her lips. “Yes, in a manner of speaking, I have heard from Leonard, the most incomprehensible palaver. Honestly. I don’t know if he’s happy or miserable, starving in the desert or working happily in the People’s Eden.”

  “You got a letter from him?”

  “It was his handwriting for certain. But I couldn’t hear his voice in the words he wrote, and he wrote the strangest things. ”

  “Where is he, Rachel?”

  “Russia, I’m almost certain. Though the stamp was from Holland. That didn’t stop the police from opening the letter. They didn’t even pretend it hadn’t been opened before it got to me.”

  “Is he in Moscow?”

  “I don’t know. I worry, Emmett. His words went around and around, but I don’t know what he’s doing or if he’s really all right.” She watched him pour the tea. “One thing, I came to discuss. In his letter Leonard wrote ‘thank you for watering the plants.’” She watched Emmett’s face and, though he didn’t say anything, she nodded, “I know. When did Leonard ever have any plants? I turn it over in my mind, and I wonder, what would be the same as a plant in Leonard’s life? Then, lightning strikes. His friends. His friends. And his books. Those are the plants he’s asking me to care for. You know him. Friendship and books matter more to him than anything — more than the Communist Party, if truth be known. He is at heart a lonely soul, betrayed, hungry for hope, starving for ideas, starving for friends to share his ideas. Tsk. So much trouble men will go to because they won’t admit they’re lonely.”

  She put her hand over his, where it lay on the table between them. “Oh, Emmett. Thine eyes are upon me, and I am not.” She sighed tremulously. He didn’t know what she was talking about.

  She went on. “I didn’t come here to trouble you. I know that Leonard asked you to take his books from his apartment. He told me he was going to ask you to do that. Did he?”

  Emmett felt seared by embarrassment. Leonard had told him to sell the books if he didn’t return, to give the money from the sale to Rachel. He’d forgotten this entirely. He indicated the several crates side-by-side in a corner beside his bed, serving as a table, nailed shut against his landlady’s incursions, and admitted, “I forgot they were there. What do you want me to do with them?”

  “The police watch me, you know.”

  He thought this sounded incredible.

  “They’re probably watching you too, Emmett.”

  He turned his back, looked out through the frost on the window. “They wouldn’t be interested in me.”

  “I don’t want you to suffer for Leonard’s sake. And Leonard would sooner die than be the cause of harm to you. A friend is coming to take the books away. With your permission.”

  It was such a gloomy morning the streetlights were still on. There were two cars parked across the street; only one of them had snow on its roof. “What about the risk to you?” he asked.

  She sighed. “It makes me sick to be a dumb handmaiden to the Revolution. I must be useful. Can you
imagine how hard it is? To accept a government that allowed the Holocaust to happen? What was the Canadian government doing to help us, while Hitler carried out his plan? Emmett? What did our government do while we were being — exterminated?”

  He turned again to look at her. Her face was beautiful, serious, her mouth drawn down, her heavy eyes lowered, he could not match her sorrowful weight, he’d avoided weight, he’d been trained since birth to avoid weight. His nightmare came back to him, the taste of wild meat in his mouth.

  She looked up at him trustingly and continued, as if he’d agreed, as if he would especially appreciate her view: “It wasn’t enough. It was the wrong kind of help and it wasn’t enough. I’m finished with compromise. I’ll go to prison if I have to. Now,” she patted Emmett’s hand in rhythm, “may I take Leonard’s books?”

  He said yes, of course, and she took up her hat with its red satin band, went to his window, opened it, and waved the hat in the cold air, then she closed the window and returned to sit, drumming a drill pattern with her fingers on the table.

  They heard the doorbell and the squawking protests of the landlady and the thud of boots on the stairs. Rachel opened the door and let in a burly man whom Emmett had never seen before.

  Rachel introduced him as Max. Max sat on the edge of his chair. Emmett guessed that Max dreaded a delay in action, dreaded polite conversation with the irrelevant man who stored Leonard’s books. Max’s eyes wandered over the papers on the table, the Japanese script, then looked back up at Emmett with brown-eyed suspicion.

  Max resembled the man in his nightmare, the one whose body Emmett had eaten. The table wobbled when Max leaned on it with his elbow; Emmett’s translation of a Japanese military sensualist rippled in dry air from the radiators. Rachel was talking and he understood that she was telling Max that Emmett was wonderful, her flattery prickling like hives in his skin, self-contempt hauling him down. He felt old, he would soon be thirty. His body understood sin even if his mind didn’t. He’d been tricked into killing German families while they slept. Now he was translating fascist eroticism for academic fascination, for rent money.