The Chrome Suite

by Sandra Birdsell

  Piotr removes his glasses, lifts the binoculars hanging at his neck, and scans the sky. The landscape has once again opened up to the weathered silver wood of New England-style barns, gently rolling green hills. He’s searching for a bird in flight. In their frequent trips across the country, Piotr has followed the gliding flight of many birds and claimed that most of them are hawks. The cords in his neck grow taut as he twists away from Amy. She sees the pebbly flesh-coloured mole at his hairline near the nape of his neck and she wants to put her finger against it and transmit the message: I know you. I know the smell you leave behind in a room, strong, like that of a furry burrowing animal. How you travel constantly to deny that burrowing instinct and a niggling, unsettling suspicion that perhaps you are, after all, a very ordinary person.

  He senses her scrutiny and lowers the binoculars. He turns and smiles with a quick little nod and a wink, guessing at what she’s thinking. “It will be okay, don’t worry,” he says, as he had kept trying to reassure her throughout most of the previous night. Where love has ended, friendship will continue on and on. They have become too close, he says, for it not to. Like twins, they read one another’s minds. Fuck you, Amy thinks, and returns his wink, daring him to read her mind now. As he turns away his face drops with shock. “Amy! Watch!”

  Oh God, she thinks. She has strayed into the path of an oncoming car. Her reaction is immediate and swift as their car swerves sharply to the right and safety. The other driver leans on the horn and its sound is a banner of alarm flapping in passing. Or self-righteous indignation, Amy thinks. Sorry bub.

  Piotr breaks the silence that follows. “I think you’re tired.”

  “Probably. I didn’t sleep much last night.”

  “Oh, I see.” He turns away, eyes fixed on the passing landscape. “You think this is easy for me?” he asks.

  “Oh, yes, I do. I think so.” The words are spat and he shrinks from the sound of them. Just once she would like him to experience her savage anger, a seed which had lain dormant during their six years together, grown now, a hard stone.

  They don’t speak for several moments. Then he straightens in the seat, brushes invisible crumbs or lint from his pants; a signal that he is changing the tone of their conversation. “Would you like me to spell you off for a while?” he asks.

  “No, it’s okay. I was day-dreaming, that’s all.” She resolves to be more careful.

  “What were you day-dreaming about?” he asks, his voice firm, underlining his determination to set a new, safer course for discussion.

  “I was thinking about what I might write next,” she lies.

  “Well, I thought we’d agreed.”

  “Maybe we agreed.”

  Clean, she thinks, of the landscape, restful, pastoral. A bit of mist still clings to low ground in places, and beyond, in a pasture, cows drink from a stream. Green. A Constable landscape. Pasted on for effect. Impenetrable.

  She did sign a contract. Last night. She agreed to adapt a novel into a film script. She agreed for her own reasons, that while he goes off to research a project in Belgium, while he pursues his goal to become a Coppola or a Miloš Forman, she’ll stay behind and continue to spin his straw, his often convoluted and vague ideas, into words. A friendship of convenience, now that love is gone.

  “Are you having second thoughts? Maybe it would be better if you worked with someone else. Perhaps you want to.” His voice is hurt, worried-sounding.

  “No, no. It’s not that. It’s just that I think … maybe …” Amy stalls and her throat constricts. “Well, I think that it’s time I write something of my own. For myself.” The idea comes as a surprise to her.

  “What would you write?” He seems equally surprised.

  She doesn’t reply. She thinks of the journals lying in a trunk. The pages and pages of years put down, bits of poetry and crude attempts to turn her history into fiction.

  He drops the newspaper to the floor, reaches across the space between them, and turns on the radio, scanning through a series of stations until he finds the familiar voice of the CBC. He’s concerned about the threat of forest fires on the other side of Thunder Bay and the highway closing down. He has an airline ticket and an appointment with a film producer living in Brussels. He will travel to Belgium to meet her there. A woman he knows from film school in Poland. Elizabeth, an old friend, he explained. Amy feels the warmth of his arm as it brushes against hers. She looks down at the sweep of fine dark hairs on his skin and the sprinkle of moles across it. She wants to touch him. A man’s voice breaks the silence, drowning out the hum of tires against blacktop. “Where you white people have gone wrong is that you have forgotten that you are human,” his voice says with smooth inflections. “You have forgotten your children. You have forgotten where you have buried your fathers. You have forgotten that the earth is your mother.”

  You white people, Amy thinks, startled at being addressed in this manner.

  “It’s true. You white people don’t care about your dead,” Piotr says. He has often described All Saints’ Day, the day set aside to honour the dead with the placing of candles and flowers on graves.

  Amy knows and knows. At present all eyes are turned on the Soviet Republic states. But in the past, attention had been focused on Eastern Europe for an entire winter, and hardly a day had gone by when she hadn’t been reminded where the countries of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania were. She has seen countless dreary documentaries on “The Journal” of their religious and folk customs, including All Saints’ Day. These people all look the same to Amy, regardless of their nationality. Colourless. Drab. Smiling into the camera and displaying rows of teeth that look spot-welded. Jaws: the character in the James Bond movie with his deadly stainless-steel smile, a parody of the dental work of the people of Eastern Europe. She thinks that All Saints’ Day is a good day for those who sell candles.

  “I think the man was making a point about the environment. And there’s no country more polluted than yours,” Amy says. They don’t have anything to look forward to, she thinks, that’s why they put so much store in looking back, calling it culture or tradition.

  “Yes, I know.” He lifts the binoculars once again and begins his search for hawks. As he squints, the white scar at the corner of his eye disappears into folds of skin. A duelling scar, he’d said with irony when she first met him. She had perceived his enigmatic response, his self-protective nature, to be arrogance. He had puzzled her. It had never happened before that she disliked a man and at the same time became prickly-skinned with lust by the smell of him, sticky with desire at the sound of his voice on the telephone.

  The physical attraction would last about six months, Amy had thought. Six months of eating one another’s faces off. Hot, furtive hours snatched from work for rutting. It was laughable in its intensity, the stuff that inspires satirical comedy; they knew that and were secretive, like cats.

  But near the end of the first six months he fell asleep one night and stayed. This was a summer night, hot, humid. Amy went outside and sat on the deck in her bathrobe, the smell of him still clinging to her skin. And fingerprints, Amy thought, my entire body covered in fingerprints. She was unsettled by his presence in the room above her, asleep in her bed, as unsettled as he would be, she knew, when he awoke and found himself there in the morning. A light flicked on two yards down and then Daria, Amy’s friend, stepped outside. Amy shrank back into the shadows. Daria stood on the steps looking out over her newly landscaped yard. As she turned to go inside, she saw Amy and waved. Wonderful, Amy thought, as Daria tiptoed barefoot down the lane, she’ll see Piotr’s car and put things together. Daria pushed through the gate, clutching her robe against her narrow body. “God, what a night for sleeping, eh?” she said. Worrying, Amy knew, about her 5:00 a.m. call for work. She entered the yard, seemingly not noticing Piotr’s car parked beside the garage.

  They sat looking up at the sky, pink with the reflection of city lights. They heard a squeal of tires echo in the
street and it was quiet once again. Then Amy began to hear a rumbling sound, the sound of snoring in the room above their heads. Daria glanced up at the window and grinned. “Oh, you have company. I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know.” They were silent for several moments, listening as the snoring grew louder, a ragged guttural sound.

  “It doesn’t sound like anyone I know,” Daria said, and laughed. She leaned forward and patted Amy on the knee. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask who. But I am curious.”

  Amy knew she was expected to say who it was, but she remained silent. She’d aroused Daria’s interest with her reticence, she realized, as she sensed the tension in the woman’s posture, her surreptitious search of Amy’s face, eyes glancing away to sweep across the yard. Light dawned in her face as she noted the presence of his car. “Amy,” she exclaimed, “not the L.B.T.! Don’t tell me that you and the L.B.T.?” She began to laugh, her laughter saying that she was tickled by the idea. “I’m sorry,” she said as she dabbed at her eyes with the belt of her housecoat. “You’ll have to excuse me, but I thought you two didn’t even like one another.” She chuckled as she drew a package of cigarettes from her pocket, lit one. “My, my, you are full of surprises,” she said. She leaned back into the chair and studied Amy. “But you know,” she said carefully, searching for the right tone, “I’m really not. Surprised. I’ve always thought that there’s something quite charming about that man. I’m not sure what it is. Maybe it’s that he’s so civilized.”

  “So, what else don’t I know about you?” Amy had asked Piotr the following morning. “You snore like a chain-saw.” He was standing in the bathroom, a towel wrapped around his waist, holding a basket filled with the usual paraphernalia – various cosmetics, creams, colognes. He picked through the items, his expression one of bewilderment. “Amy, what are all these things for?”

  In the months following he began to tell stories about himself. The scar beside his eye wasn’t really a duelling scar but the result of a skiing accident, a pole-tip glancing the corner of his eye. He told her about growing up in Kraków. How he’d fantasized about being a North American Indian and that his favourite toy had been a tomahawk, which a friend of his father’s had sent as a gift from France. She was intrigued by his stories, especially the legends. The legend of Boruta, for example, the Prince of Polish devils, who had attempted to grab hold of the corner-stone of a church, to shake loose its walls and bring it down. Piotr had been to the Romanesque cathedral at Tum, the church where the devil had been, and had placed his hand into the imprint of Boruta’s hand. As she listened to his stories she grew aware of the paucity of her own, that she had nothing better or even of equal value to give him. And so she kept her history where it belonged. In the journals in a trunk upstairs in a closet.

  At the end of the first year, he told her that he loved her. He was drunk when he said it. They had just finished shooting a film and it was during the wrap party. She rode the handlebars of a child’s bicycle, a prop, and they weaved among the pillars of a cavernous warehouse, away from the echo of rock music, the smell of dope, a wild, fast ride down a tunnel-like corridor into a dark room. There they danced with their foreheads touching, mind mining mind. “I’m so tired of fighting with you,” she said. He picked her up and swung her around, his laughter on the edge of hysteria breaking in the back of his throat. When he set her down he licked her cheeks, slathering her face like a dog with his hot saliva. “Yes, Aimless Amy. No more fighting. I love you.”

  He was sober the following morning when he stood in the doorway watching her bathe. He was fascinated by all things female. “I do love you,” he said. Well, she thought, so this is it, then. This will be the end. Now he will lose his shine, his sex appeal. “But there’s no future in it,” he went on to say. “This doesn’t change anything. It’s what we agreed. I just wanted you to know that. I do love you.” He would tell her that often. It was as though once he learned to say the word “love,” he must use it over and over.

  “I understand,” Amy said. She grew shaky and her scalp tingled. Love, a transient wanting to stay for a time. But she was certain it was love because she hadn’t asked him to say it and he hadn’t asked for anything in return.

  They begin to catch glimpses of the sun on water on both sides of the highway as they head up the strand of the Bruce Peninsula. The air changes. It becomes lighter, moist, and as she relaxes her grip on the steering wheel the knot of tension between her shoulders begins to loosen. Sunlight flashes in the windshields of several vehicles approaching in the distance, and as the cars sweep around a curve towards them the angle of light changes for a moment and the vehicles become scintillating silver balls, shimmering balls of light which seem to bounce down the highway towards them. The angle of light changes once again and the vehicles suddenly become solid. Then the traffic grows heavier, a stream of cars travelling slowly, almost bumper to bumper. “I don’t like the looks of this,” she says.

  As they pull up beside the toll booth at the gates, the sound of the ferry’s horn quivers in the air as the vessel moves away from the loading dock. Amy swears silently as the attendant guides her into the outside lane. She’s thinking of the room she reserved in Thessalon at the Maranatha Motel and its kitchen closing down at eight o’clock.

  “Well, at least we’ll be first on the next one,” Piotr says. His dark eyes stare at her from behind his glasses, steady and unblinking. He grabs her hand, squeezes. “Thank you. You’re a good driver.”

  His formality is irritating. “Oh, I see. We’re practising at being friends.”

  They walk to loosen stiff muscles and enter almost deserted shops and poke about the displays of souvenirs. Piotr drops a Mountie hat onto her head and places a Maple Leaf flag in each hand and snaps a picture. What will he do with the hundreds of photographs he has taken? Will he find some way to edit her out of them?

  When they step out of the store they both notice the iridescent flash of colour, a hummingbird darting among flowers bordering the walk. They pause, Amy silently amazed, feeling that its presence has been arranged for their benefit, as have all the sightings of wildlife they have encountered during their six years of travels, the deer, the turtles, the beaver, the bears, a fox loping alongside a runway as their plane landed; animals stepping out from their natural habitat to view Piotr and Amy passing by. Raising their heads to greet the special children, eyes meeting eyes. They once saw a great egret gliding low above the marshes just outside of Winnipeg. Its presence was a rarity for Manitoba, a wildlife expert assured them. It had appeared, a white ghostly bird, its graceful wings unfolding against the emerald cloth of the marsh, just like that. For them. The egret was herself, Amy had fantasized, hovering above the marsh of Piotr’s body, touching, breathing her love into him, sweeping down the breadth of him until he rose up and cried out.

  They find their usual grassy knoll facing the water. The ferry’s stacks are two sticks disappearing over the horizon. They sit in silence as they eat the bread and cheese they had bought. Later, Piotr succumbs to the warmth of the sun and stretches out on the grass, head cradled in Amy’s lap. He dozes while she browses through his newspaper. She reads that a “professional, employed gentleman, early 50s, 6’, who enjoys the arts, is seeking a vivacious, slender, attractive, refined lady with integrity.” Forget it, Amy thinks. Six feet is too tall. Hank was six feet and all she ever got from him was a stiff neck from looking up. She reads that the Roman Catholic Church in Poland is winning the right to teach its religion to atheists. Power lines must be protected in Manitoba. They don’t say against what, but the inference is there. Protection against a group of people who might sabotage power lines in the middle of winter to make a point. The Tories seek billions for farmers, she reads, and thinks of the town where she grew up, how it has become reduced, looks so worn out and abandoned. She reads for almost an hour, all the bits and pieces of information that make up the world today. But not her world. It’s as though the events happen on another planet and don�
�t affect her. She reads to keep from thinking about Piotr, who is leaving her. When she closes the newspaper, the events vanish.

  Piotr shifts in sleep and settles down once again into her lap, his mouth slack, fists curled. She watches as his chest rises and falls in a deep sigh. “You will always be special to me,” he’d said last night. He had been sitting on the bed across from her, leaning forward, hands resting on his knees. He had been silent for almost half an hour, forehead slick and body shivering. Frightened, Amy thought. Shivering with fear. “This is not easy,” he said, he kept saying. “I’m still very fond of you.”

  “Then why leave?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” He stared at the floor, silent again for long moments, and Amy couldn’t bear the tension. She went to the window, which overlooked an alley below. She’d heard voices out there earlier, the sound of vehicles. When she looked down, she saw what was to be a scene for a film. Two H.M.I. lights at the entrance of the alley beamed eerily through heavy fog steaming from machines. “They’re shooting something,” she said but Piotr gave no indication that he’d heard. The fog thinned and Amy saw several people emerge at the entrance of the alley and gather around a camera. A pick-up shot, because of the absence of a full crew. “Action!” a voice called and a slight figure darted across the alley and disappeared into the shadows of a darkened doorway. A fugitive, likely, she thought. She watched several takes. She would have liked to drop something down into the middle of their scene, a bottle or the glass of Scotch she held. Just as Piotr had done. He’d dropped a bomb into her scene.

  “Why?”

  His shoulders sagged beneath his tan shirt. He had a closet full of identical tan and brown shirts and pants. “L.B.T.,” “The Little Brown Tub.” The tag, a jealousy-induced one, had been pinned on him at the film institute where she met him. “Oh, you mean the little brown tub in baggy pants who pretends he can’t speak the language? You mean him?” She’d told Piotr about it and he had laughed wryly, shrugging it off, saying that he was used to being disliked, and immediately he became interesting. She never told him, though, that it was she who had invented the label.