The house was one of the featureless two-storey boxes thrown up by the streetful in the years after the war when there was a housing boom and materials were scarce. It was stuccoed with a greyish gravel Morrison found spiritually depleting. There were a few older houses, but they were quickly being torn down by developers; soon the city would have no visible past at all. Everything else was highrises, or worse, low barrack-shaped multiple housing units, cheaply tacked together. Sometimes the rows of flimsy buildings – snow on their roofs, rootless white faces peering suspiciously out through their windows, kids’ toys scattered like trash on the walks – reminded him of old photographs he had seen of mining camps. They were the houses of people who did not expect to be living in them for long.
Her apartment was in the basement. As they went around to the back and down the stairs, avoiding on the landing a newspaper spread with the overshoes and boots of the family living upstairs, Morrison remembered vividly and with a recurrence of panic his own search for a place, a roof, a container, his trudges from address to address, his tours of clammy, bin-like cellars hastily done up by the owners in vinyl tile and sheets of cheap panelling to take advantage of the student inflow and the housing squeeze. He’d known he would never survive a winter buried like that or closed in one of the glass-sided cardboard-carton apartment buildings. Were there no real ones, mellowed, interesting, possible? Finally he had come upon an available second-storey; the house was pink gravel instead of grey, the filth was daunting and the landlady querulous, but he had taken it immediately just to be able to open a window and look out.
He had not known what to expect of Louise’s room. He had never visualized her as living anywhere, even though he had collected her and dropped her off outside the house a number of times.
“I finished the bookshelves yesterday,” she said, waving at a wall-length structure of varnished boards and cement blocks. “Sit down, I’ll make you some cocoa.” She went into the kitchen, still with her fur coat on, and Morrison sat down in the leatherette swivel armchair. He swivelled, surveying, comparing it with the kind of interior he thought of himself as inhabiting but never got around to assembling.
She had obviously put a lot of energy into it, but the result was less like a room than like several rooms, pieces of which had been cut out and pasted onto one another. He could not decide what created this effect: it was the same unity in diversity he had found in the motels on the way across, the modernish furniture, the conventional framed northern landscapes on the walls. But her table was ersatz Victorian and the prints Picasso. The bed was concealed behind a partly drawn dyed burlap curtain at the end of the room, but visible on the bedside rug were two light blue fuzzy slippers that startled, almost shocked him: they were so unlike her.
Louise brought the cocoa and sat down opposite him on the floor. They talked as usual about the city: they were both still looking for things to do, a quest based on their shared Eastern assumption that cities ought to be entertaining. It was this rather than mutual attraction which led them to spend as much time together as they did; most of the others were married or had been here too long and had given up.
The films changed slowly; the one theatre, with its outdated popular comedies, they had sneered at. They had gone to the opera together when it had come, though: local chorus and imported stars – Lucia, it had been, and really quite well done, considering. At intermission Morrison had glanced around at the silent, chunky audience in the lobby, some of the women still in early-sixties pointed-toe spike heels, and murmured to Louise that it was like tourist brochures from Russia.
One Sunday before the snow came they had gone for an impromptu drive; at her suggestion they had aimed for the zoo twenty miles from the city. After they made it through the oil derricks there had been trees; not the right kind of trees – he had felt, as he had on the way across, that the land was keeping itself apart from him, not letting him in, there had to be more to it than this repetitive, non-committal drabness – but still trees; and the zoo once they reached it was spacious, the animals kept in enclosures large enough for them to run in and even hide in if they wanted to.
Louise had been there before – how, since she had no car, he didn’t ask – and showed him around. “They choose animals that can survive the winter,” she said. “It’s open all year. They don’t even know they’re in a zoo.” She pointed out the artificial mountain made of cement blocks for the mountain goats to climb on. Morrison didn’t as a rule like any animal bigger and wilder than a cat, but these kept far enough away to be tolerable. That day she had told him a little about herself, a departure: mostly she talked about her work. She had travelled in Europe, she told him, and had spent a year studying in England.
“What are you doing here?” he had asked.
She shrugged. “They gave me money; nobody else would.”
Essentially it was his reason too. It wasn’t the draft; he was really over-age, though here they kept wanting to think he was a dodger, it made his presence more acceptable to them. The job market had been tight back in the States and also, when he tried later, in what they called here the East. But in all fairness it hadn’t been only the money or the dismalness of the situation back home. He had wanted something else, some adventure; he felt he might learn something new. He had thought the city would be near the mountains. But except for the raw gully through which the brownish river curved, it was flat.
“I don’t want you to think of it as typical,” Louise was saying. “You ought to see Montreal.”
“Are you typical?” he asked.
She laughed. “None of us is typical, or do we all look alike to you? I’m not typical, I’m all-inclusive.”
She let her fur coat fall down from around her shoulders as she said this, and he wondered again whether he was expected to make a move, to approach her. He ought to approach someone or something; he was beginning to feel isolated inside his clothes and skin. His students were out of the question. Besides, they were so thick, so impermeable; the girls, even the more slender ones, made him think of slabs of substance white and congealed, like lard. And the other single women on staff were much older than he was: in them Louise’s briskness had degenerated into a pinpointing, impaling quality.
There must be a place where he could meet someone, some nice loosely structured girl with ungroomed, seedy breasts, more thing than idea, slovenly and gratuitous. They existed, he was familiar with them from what he had begun to think of as his previous life, but he had not kept in touch with any of them. They had all been good at first but even the sloppiest had in time come to require something from him he thought he was not yet ready to give: they wanted him to be in love with them, an exertion of the mind too strenuous for him to undertake. His mind, he felt, was needed for other things, though he wasn’t quite sure what they were. He was tasting, exploring: goals would come later.
Louise wasn’t at all like them; she would never lend him her body for nothing, even temporarily, though she had the fur spread out around her now like a rug and had raised one corduroy-trousered knee, letting him see in profile the taut bulge of her somewhat muscular thigh. She probably went skiing and ice skating. He imagined his long body locked in that athletic, chilly grip, his eyes darkened by fur. Not yet, he thought, raising his half-full cocoa cup between them. I can do without, I don’t need it yet.
It was the weekend and Morrison was painting his apartment as he habitually did on weekends; he had been at it off and on since he moved in.
“You’ll have to have it painted, of course,” he’d said smoothly to the landlady when inspecting it, but he had already shown himself too eager and she’d outfoxed him. “Well, I don’t know, there’s another boy wants it says he’ll paint it himself.…” So of course Morrison had to say he would too. This was the third coat.
Morrison’s vision of wall-painting had been drawn from the paint ads – spot-free housewives gliding it on, one-handed and smiling – but it wasn’t easy. The paint got on the floor, on the fu
rniture, in his hair. Before he could even begin he had to cart out the accumulated discards of several generations of previous tenants: baby clothes, old snapshots, an inner tube, heaps of empty liquor bottles, and (intriguingly) a silk parachute. Messiness interested him only in women; he could not live surrounded by it himself.
One wall of the livingroom had been pink, one green, one orange and one black. He was painting them white. The last tenants, a group of Nigerian students, had left weird magic-looking murals on the walls: a sort of swamp, in black on the orange wall, and an upright shape, in pink on the green wall, was either a very poorly done Christ Child or – could it be? – an erect penis with a halo around it. Morrison painted these two walls first, but it made him uneasy to know the pictures were still there underneath the paint. Sometimes as he rollered his way around the room he wondered what the Nigerians had thought the first time it hit forty below.
The landlady seemed to prefer foreign students, probably because they were afraid to complain: she had been aggrieved when Morrison had demanded a real lock for his door. The cellar was a warren of cubbyholes; he was not sure yet exactly who lived in them. Soon after he had moved in a Korean had appeared at his door, hopefully smiling. He wanted to talk about income tax.
“I’m sorry,” Morrison had said, “some other time, okay? I have a lot of work to do.” He was nice enough, no doubt, but Morrison didn’t want to get involved with someone he didn’t know; and he did have work to do. He felt picayune about it later when he discovered the Korean had a wife and child down in his cubbyhole with him; often in the fall they had put fishes out to dry, stringing them on the clotheslines where they twirled in the wind like plastic gas-station decorations.
He was doing the ceiling, craning his neck, with the latex oozing down the handle of the roller onto his arm, when the buzzer went. He almost hoped it was the Korean, he seldom saw anyone on the weekends. But it was Louise.
“Hi,” he said, surprised.
“I just thought I’d drop in,” she said. “I don’t use the phone any more.”
“I’m painting,” he said, partly as an excuse: he wasn’t sure he wanted her in the house. What would she demand from him?
“Can I help?” she asked, as though it was a big treat.
“Actually I was about to stop for the day,” he lied. He knew she would be better at it than he was.
He made tea in the kitchen and she sat at the table and watched him.
“I came to talk about Blake,” she said. “I have to do a paper.” Unlike him she was only a Graduate Assistant, she was taking a course.
“What aspect?” Morrison asked, not interested. Blake wasn’t his field. He didn’t mind the earlier lyrics but the prophecies bored him and the extravagant letters in which Blake called his friends angels of light and vilified his enemies he found in bad taste.
“We each have to analyze one poem in Songs of Experience. I’m supposed to do the ‘Nurse’s Song.’ But they don’t know what’s going on in that course, he doesn’t know what’s going on. I’ve been trying to get through to them but they’re all doing the one-up thing, they don’t know what’s happening. They sit there and pull each other’s papers apart, I mean, they don’t know what poetry’s supposed to be for.” She wasn’t drinking her tea.
“When’s it due?” he asked, keeping on neutral ground.
“Next week. But I’m not going to do it, not the way they want. I’m giving them one of my own poems. That says it all. I mean, if they have to read one right there in the class they’ll get what Blake was trying to do with cadences. I’m getting it xeroxed.” She hesitated, less sure of herself. “Do you think that’ll be all right?”
Morrison wondered what he would do if one of his own students tried such a ploy. He hadn’t though of Louise as the poetry-writing type. “Have you checked with the professor about it?”
“I try to talk to him,” she said. “I try to help him but I can’t get through to him. If they don’t get what I mean though I’ll know they’re all phonies and I can just walk out.” She was twisting her cup on the table top, her lips were trembling.
Morrison felt his loyalties were being divided; also he didn’t want her to cry, that would involve dangerous comforting pats, even an arm around her shoulder. He tried to shut out an involuntary quick image of himself on top of her in the middle of the kitchen floor, getting white latex all over her fur. Not today, his mind commanded, pleaded.
As if in answer the reverberations of an organ boomed from beneath their feet, accompanied by a high quavering voice: Rock of a-ges, cleft for me … Let me HIIIDE myself … Louise took it as a signal. “I have to go,” she said. She got up and went out as abruptly as she had come, thanking him perfunctorily for the tea she hadn’t drunk.
The organ was a Hammond, owned by the woman downstairs, a native. When her husband and nubile child were home she shouted at them. The rest of the time she ran the vacuum cleaner or picked out hymn tunes and old favourites on the organ with two fingers, singing to herself. The organ was to Morrison the most annoying. At first he tried to ignore it; then he put on opera records, attempting to drown it out. Finally he recorded it with his tape recorder. When the noise got too aggravating he would aim the speakers down the hot air register and run the tape through as loudly as possible. It gave him a sense of participation, of control.
He did this now, admiring the way the tape clashed with what she was currently playing: “Whispering Hope” with an overlay of “Annie Laurie”; “The Last Rose of Summer” counterpointing “Come to the Church in the Wildwood.” He was surprised at how much he was able to hate her: he had only seen her once, looking balefully out at him from between her hideous flowered drapes as he wallowed through the snow on his way to the garage. Her husband was supposed to keep the walk shovelled but didn’t.
Louise came back the next day before Morrison was up. He was awake but he could tell by the chill in the room – his breath was visible – and by the faint smell of oil that something had gone wrong with the furnace again. It was less trouble to stay in bed, at least till the sun was well risen, than to get up and try the various ways of keeping warm.
When the buzzer went he pulled a blanket around himself and stumbled to the door.
“I thought of something,” Louise said tragically. She was in the door before he could fend her off.
“I’m afraid it’s cold in here,” he said.
“I had to come over and tell you. I don’t use the phone any more. You should have yours taken out.”
She stomped the snow from her boots while Morrison retreated into the livingroom. There was a thick crust of frost on the insides of the windows; he lit the gas fireplace. Louise stalked impatiently around the uncarpeted floor.
“You aren’t listening,” she said. He looked out obediently at her from his blanket. “What I thought of is this: The city has no right to be here. I mean, why is it? No city should be here, this far north; it isn’t even on a lake or an important river, even. Why is it here?” She clasped her hands, gazing at him as though everything depended on his answer.
Morrison, standing on one bare foot, reflected that he had often since his arrival asked himself the same question. “It started as a trading post,” he said, shivering.
“But it doesn’t look like one. It doesn’t look like anything, it doesn’t have anything, it could be anywhere. Why is it here?” She implored; she even clutched a corner of his blanket.
Morrison shied away. “Look,” he said, “do you mind if I get some clothes on?”
“Which room are they in?” she asked suspiciously.
“The bedroom,” he said.
“That’s all right. That room’s all right,” she said.
Contrary to his fear she made no attempt to follow him in. When he was dressed he returned to find her sitting on the floor with a piece of paper. “We have to complete the circle,” she said. “We need the others.”
“What others?” He decided she was overtired, she had be
en working too hard: she had deep red blotches around her eyes and the rest of her face was pale green.
“I’ll draw you a diagram of it,” she said. But instead she sat on the floor, jabbing at the paper with the pencil point. “I wanted to work out my own system,” she said plaintively, “but they wouldn’t let me.” A tear slid down her cheek.
“Maybe you need to talk to someone,” Morrison said, overcasually.
She raised her head. “But I’m talking to you. Oh,” she said, reverting to her office voice, “you mean a shrink. I saw one earlier. He said I was very sane and a genius. He took a reading of my head: he said the patterns in my brain are the same as Julius Caesar’s, only his were military and mine are creative.” She started jabbing with the pencil again.
“I’ll make you a peanut butter sandwich,” Morrison said, offering the only thing he himself wanted right then. It did not occur to him until months later when he was remembering it to ask himself how anyone could have known about the patterns in Julius Caesar’s brain. At the moment he was wondering whether Louise might not in fact be a genius. He felt helpless because of his own inability to respond; she would think him as obtuse as the others, whoever they were.
At first she did not want him to go into the kitchen: she knew the telephone was in there. But he promised not to use it. When he came out again with a piece of bread on which he had spread with difficulty the gelid peanut butter, she was curled inside her coat in front of the fire, sleeping. He laid the bread gently beside her as if leaving crumbs on a stump for unseen animals. Then he changed his mind, retrieved it, took it on tiptoe into the kitchen and ate it himself. He turned on the oven, opened the oven door, wrapped himself in a blanket from the bedroom and read Marvell.
She slept for nearly three hours; he didn’t hear her get up. She appeared in the kitchen doorway, looking much better, though a greyish-green pallor still lingered around her mouth and eyes.
Dancing Girls Page 5