“If only we were higher up.” He opened his briefcase.
Under new mgmt.
“That’s you!” Silently Julie teased the hidden kicking child. “You get the second BR.” Jeremy’s desk, electric typewriter, file cabinet lived in the master.
The elevator too was soundless. Eyes closed, Julie couldn’t tell whether the movement was up or down. The little tale she made of this uncertainty failed to amuse her husband after his stressful day in court.
“Do you mean that?” Jeremy asked.
He asked the question again when the baby’s crying made Julie worry about the neighbours. “This building’s solid concrete. I guess construction is another thing you just can’t understand?”
Still Julie couldn’t forget his pallor after the delivery, his joyful tears as he phoned long-distance to tell his parents and hers about James, while she trembled after a labour not much like that in the natural childbirth book.
Nor did she forget how they two began, at her sunny Kits bach gt view. Unusually for a girl, she’d had her own apartment. Jeremy had been surprised.
As Julie walked home from her little job in the weeks before their wedding, the pavement went all wavery rivery till she sped like a hydrofoil to the soaring elevator, the hall, her own door, and the engulfing heat of Jeremy’s body. She’d been the initiator. He, taken aback. Shocked? Julie, though her mother and all the books warned against premarital activity, knew no doubt.
What was that view, anyway? The only one of her class to leave Victoria after secretarial school, she was just proud to have her own address.
Perhaps the sex was why the ceremony didn’t change her?
After their honeymoon at Expo 67, the Kitsilano place felt cramped, wrong. Not even a nook for Jeremy’s work.
He found, first, the stately spacious 1 BR at a good address, a fine old Dunbar mansion chopped into suites. Tall graceful trees darkened the place. Leaking radiators, mice. Julie and Jeremy shivered till he located the distinctive building.
“Where we’d still be, if you hadn’t been careless.”
She didn’t remember much about Expo either. The hotel room. Fireworks, sugar, glitter, crowds. French actually spoken.
Now this high-rise.
The developer had built three towers close together, so Jeremy and Julie’s living room in The Buckingham observed one in The Kensington where sofa, stereo, TV, and coffee table were similarly configured. The occupants were two men. Older, Julie thought, early forties.
The man with curly hair sometimes waved at the baby. Julie would raise James’s tiny hand, smile. The overweight man didn’t wave. If he noticed her across the airy gap he snapped the Venetians shut, even in sunshine.
Jeremy did the same. “I’m not paying rent to watch a couple of queers day in day out. We need our own house.”
More things Julie hadn’t understood.
James filled her hours. His certainty amazed her. Now! He cried with his mouth so wide his throat made a quivering red tunnel.
The neighbours Julie encountered in the elevator and by the mailbox were mostly retirees with little dogs, or young singles. Once just heading out of the lobby was a bald man in crisp shirt and shorts who held a placard, Out of Vietnam Now! Wasn’t that an American war? He strode away. Was he old? Seeking other mums, she pushed James’s stroller along the concrete walkway by Sunset Beach.
At the inadequate corner grocery she met the queers. Sam held back at first while Curly warned her never to buy the ground beef, but soon all three were picking through the faded vegetables together. Walking back, they smiled at the towers’ palatial names.
One morning in The Buckingham’s laundry room, Julie was giving James his bottle while waiting for the dryer to finish.
An old woman came in and smiled at the baby. “It is my lucky day! Mostly the people here have these foolish dogs. But you do not breast-feed? Is best.”
Julie explained the theory of parents sharing equally in baby care. Under-thoughts about Jeremy rushed counter to her words.
In her tailored maroon dress, Mrs. Schatz moved about briskly, high heels clicking. Her wrinkles broke into new webs when she looked at James.
“So, how you like it here?” she asked. “What floor?”
The Schatzes lived on the view side of the eleventh.
“We will drink coffee. My husband will enjoy to see James. Also I invite Mr. Alexander, on the sixth. He appreciates art.”
Before that happened, Julie met Sam and Curly again. This was at Sunset Beach, in the pause when the bridge’s lamps begin to reflect on the greying water yet daylight still hovers over False Creek, stippling the waves pink or apricot.
Under a fine rain they ambled talking along the pebbled sands. James, held in his Snugli against Julie’s warmth, kept tilting his head back to get the drops on his face. He smiled. So did Curly and Sam and Julie.
“How did you meet?” she asked as they left the beach. The bridge lamps were now shedding gold circles on the salty darkness.
The men exchanged looks and snickered, snapping the Venetians down. Both spoke. At last Curly managed, “We’d both been around enough to know what we wanted. We were ready.”
As Julie with James rode up in the air she thought how the magazines said things just like that about deciding in the right way to get married.
“Where’ve you been? You’re soaked. No umbrella again?”
She described their pleasant walk.
Jeremy made a face. “Queers are useless. That’s why I don’t like them.”
“Is a tax accountant useless?”
“Who does Fatty work for? Other queers? And what does Pretty Boy do?’
Julie quit, though in fact Curly was the numbers guy and Sam the waiter.
“We need to get out. This isn’t what I had in mind.” He shoved a newspaper at her and stood waiting by the door into the master.
After skimming Houses Julie studied Furnished Suites. Some buildings said Small child accepted. What size might that be? How could she pay? She perused Board & Room. Water dripped off her hair on to the baby’s smile.
“Nothing today.”
The door closed. Shut out.
Now Julie did feel changed, though she still waited greedily for Jeremy to come to bed. Sometimes he slept on the sofa.
Time went on being.
James grew bigger, bigger. With pain he acquired teeth. He looked about, inquiring. He shook and pulled at his playpen’s bars. Visiting the eleventh floor, he demonstrated how he would crawl soon.
Mr. Schatz chuckled. “He reminds me.”
Julie silently ached to ask Of whom?
“Today Mr. Alexander is tired. He fights cancer,” his wife sighed. She pointed at the tiny poppyseed pastries veiled in powdered sugar. “His favourites.” For James she had baked rusks.
“He also is exile by a war,” said her husband.
From the Schatzes’ windows, the distant Olympic Mountains shimmered aquamarine. The stereo was playing classical. Nearer, Mount Baker shone like pearl. Victoria was clouded in drifts of white, invisible.
On leaving, Julie felt revulsion at the prospect of entering the apartment where she lived. She pressed James’s thumb on L for Lobby.
By the mailboxes stood the bald man. He held a map.
“An impossible city,” he said. “Vancouver’s a simple place, the mountains are always north. Even New York’s mostly a grid.”
He was Julie’s age. So thin in his sharply pressed Bermudas, paler even than bone. The map showed London, England.
“Are you going there?”
“Paris too. New York on the way back, if I’m not arrested.” He tucked the map into a travel agent’s folder. “See the galleries one more time.”
“Are you Mr. Alexander?”
“Gary.”
“Julie. T
his is James.”
“Dear Mrs. Schatz,” he said, “always wanting to feed me. Their sadness is unbearable, but I’ll see them before I go.”
“I hope you have a good time.” What else could be said?
“Thank you.” He inspected the baby. “Such sharp teeth! A little animal. So Julie, where are you off to?”
After a moment she said, “I have no idea.”
Gary’s eyebrows went up. “Better get one! Up and down, to and fro, then suddenly it’s all over.”
They shook hands warmly.
Soon after this, Jeremy began again about the oral contraceptive.
“You have to. We can’t risk it. I insist.”
Three things just like that with no breath between.
“You know it makes me sick.” In disbelief she heard the shaking voice.
“Then I won’t have sex with you.”
After that there was only the morning dialogue before he departed for office or court.
“Will you?”
“No.” Again, again. “No.” Julie gripped James so he howled and shoved his head into her armpit.
In the mirror, her lipstick looked wrong for the face she had now.
She still longed for sex with that changed man. Or had the persons called Julie & Jeremy not ever recognized each other? Had two others used their names to get married? She winced.
Daily his mother pushed James for hours through the West End to see the lines of bright windows in high-rises, low-rises, and to imagine their views. The Buckingham, later, seemed like nowhere she’d visited before.
Gary had reached London now, to stand alert in front of paintings. On the postcard he sent, a stern man wore olive and brown. Why was he painted? She did not show the card to Jeremy.
Mrs. Schatz said, “That is Bacon.”
James stayed with her once while Julie went out to walk alone, a novelty. Along Denman and Davie she examined closely what was on offer in each store window.
On her return the child’s lips were red with happy jam.
“Must he go?” asked Mr. Schatz. Julie didn’t tell that either.
Every day she and Jeremy did the dialogue.
Every day she feared saying, “All right, I’ll do it.”
And his loud voice shook. “I’m never having sex with you.” Was the assertion wearing thin? Fear grew. She tried to imagine telling this. Who could hear? Mum, unthinkable. Her high school friends in Victoria knew nothing, were only engaged. In that too she’d led the way.
One morning Julie was so terrified that she pulled a dress over her head and gathered up James and went barefoot down to the beach.
The tide was ebbing; the water went west in a silver rush. The baby she held strove to move freely. Every pebble had a different shape. They hurt her feet. Why had she got married? When would Gary die? A dog chased sticks, plunged in and out of the water, shook rainbows. Julie waded. Cold first, then refreshing. She held James so his toes dangled in the waves. He kicked, chuckled. A long time went by, a short time.
Back at the palace, Julie pressed B and prayed.
She was folding her husband’s socks.
“How is Mr. Beautiful?” Mrs. Schatz inspected Julie. “Rose is a good colour for you. Also it is a shade never out of style. But you do not wear shoes today?”
“In a hurry.” Julie couldn’t articulate.
“To leave. I see.” Mrs. Schatz’s manicured fingers stroked James’s hair, tenderly. “Sometimes is best.”
Julie carried the wicker laundry-basket out to the elevator.
“Thank you, my dear. You know where to find me.” Today her smart outfit was in navy. Every curl lay in place. How could she and Gary look so neat?
Julie whispered, “I do.”
“Be careful,” said Mrs. Schatz, and disappeared.
Jeremy had gone to his work.
James banged and grumbled in his pen while Julie did hers. With Dutch Cleanser on a toothbrush she toured the base of the toilet. At the sink, her Q-tip winkled out guerilla dirt-specks crouching where faucet met porcelain. She emptied the medicine cabinet, washed each glass shelf. A hand took up a remnant disk of The Pill. Seven/pink, twenty-one/blue, each pellet snug in its cell. Then the other hand held a glass of water.
“Can’t risk it,” she told James, who screamed from behind his bars. “We must be careful.”
Soon Julie visited her doctor. Graciously he renewed her prescription but gave her a critical look.
Jeremy asked later, “Can’t you even button your blouse right?”
The card Mr. Alexander sent the Schatzes from Paris showed a sculpture of a pregnant goat. She looked lustful and witty.
Mrs. Schatz said, “He says he will go home very soon. His lady-friend from before has a place in Ithaca, New York. He can be ill there.”
War, love, art, cancer. How did someone her age get such a history?
Though swallowing eagerly, Julie still defied her husband. His daily shouts seemed an omen of rape. Were they both crazy? She had no answers, only a baby.
In James’s room stood a chaise longue for night feedings. Julie now slept there. Once crying woke her, but James was asleep, her own cheeks dry. Another time, getting up to pee, she saw Jeremy prone on the sofa. Their own double bed was smooth, its pillows plump. None of this could appear in any magazine.
Julie took James to visit her old workplace.
Wanting to look well, she wore her rose dress. Its length was out of style, she saw on reaching the office.
Julie told various lies while she and the girls had their happy time catching up in the coffee-room, the table a cosy dither of cookies and doughnuts and James’s applesauce. Julie’s replacement was friendly. They giggled together over the manager’s limited Dictaphone skills.
He himself was amiable, tickling her boy under the chin. “You got a really important job here, Julie!”
Then the girls must get back to work.
The bus stop was across the road that once led to sunny Kits bach. Headache. Exhaustion. No umbrella. The bus was slow to arrive, slow crossing the bridge. James squalled and flailed as they neared The Buckingham, not the right place, Julie knew that at least, though in the downpour she couldn’t find her keys, scrabbled in her purse again, couldn’t, was spiralling into a tizzy when Sam and Curly appeared.
“Come up to our place.”
The Kensington’s murals showed Mediterranean waters of a sultry indigo not possible to imagine in English Bay.
“What’s in The Windsor’s lobby, I wonder?”
“We got in, to look. South-west,” Curly answered. “Reds, pinks.”
“Your elevator’s quiet too,” Julie remarked.
“Yes. Hard to tell if it’s up or down.”
As they started along the hall, Sam gestured towards their door but stopped himself. “Of course you know your way, Julie!”
When he took off his hooded rain-jacket, on one temple was revealed a large bruise. Julie didn’t ask. He pointed. “You’d think they’d attack Curly, he’s so cute, but more often it’s me. Because I’ve got him, I guess.”
After his bottle, James slept among the sofa cushions. Julie found her keys. Curly brought coffee, shoving comics and beer cans away to make room for the tray. Sam smoked. Julie inhaled her first cigarette since meeting Jeremy.
In their bathroom were far more bottles tubes jars than she and he owned. His contempt twanged in her ear. On the door hung two silky robes. Emerging, she managed a glance into the bedroom. The mattress was bare, with fresh folded linen stacked ready.
“We’d like to paint it purple,” Sam said, “but when we go we’d just have to do that boring beige again.”
“Go where?”
“We’re planning to buy a house.”
Curly chuckled. “To be as purple as we like.” He touche
d Sam’s head.
Back in the living room, Julie collected her essentials. How strange, to look out from here towards her present address. Not that there was much to see. In a lower suite, a coffee table displayed a big platter, elliptical and brightly glazed. It drew her eye.
In The Buckingham’s lobby stood Mrs. Schatz, dressed for lunching out. That morning the expected news had arrived from Ithaca. Also the Schatzes had decided to get a little dog, to care for.
One Two Three Two One
“Why get so worked up, Ellen?” My mother often asked that.
Also, “Why don’t you just find someone and move out?”
And, “Why should you get special treatment?’
My father said, “Don’t slouch dear, you’re too pretty,” or, “Don’t sigh so,” or, “Those maraschinos are for my old-fashioneds.”
“Ellen, leave his cherries alone.”
Standing in their kitchen by their huge fridge, I was twenty-nine. Thirty was clearly in view, other things not. While my Dad spoke on and on, I considered old-fashioned. Whip cream. Log trucks. Fly zone.
“So sweetie,” he finished, “buy your own.”
“Really, you two,” my mother said. “How you do go on.”
I didn’t see any two, but this isn’t the kind of story that describes ad nauseam the characters’ feelings, so no more on that. Events only. An old-fashioned. Noun omitted, adjective solo. Then such isolated linguistic phenomena interested me, discrete, unlinked by storyline.
My mother wrapped up her presentation. “You make me tired.”
Later I carried home from the grocery a jar of maraschinos so large it’d need subdividing to fit into my bar fridge.
By the sidewalk a man on hands and knees examined a stone on the grassy verge. Gently he touched a curl of grey lichen, smiled up at me. Lawrence Whatsit. We’d gone to the same high school, he a year ahead. Didn’t the Whatsits live nearby? And wasn’t his mother dead? Lucky Lawrence.He laughed at the cherries. We ate, sitting on the grass, and licked our sticky fingers and laughed. The lichen frilled up like egg white on a frying pan. (That’s the first simile, of very few.)
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