The Case of Lena S.

by David Bergen

  BOOKS BY DAVID BERGEN

  Sitting Opposite My Brother (1993)

  A Year of Lesser (1996)

  See the Child (1999)

  The Case of Lena S. (2002)

  Copyright © 2002 David Bergen

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Bergen, David, 1957–

  The case of Lena S. / David Bergen.

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-721-6

  I. Title.

  PS8553.E665C38 2002 C813′.54 C2002-902336-X

  PR9199.3.B413C38 2002

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Manitoba Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.

  An excerpt from this novel appeared in a slightly different form in Toronto Life magazine.

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  The Canadian Publishers

  75 Sherbourne Street,

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com

  v3.1

  For Mary

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  “The greatest danger, that of losing one’s own self, may pass off as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, that of an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc., is sure to be noticed.”

  –Søren Kierkegaard

  The year he turned sixteen, Mason Crowe met Seeta Chahal, a girl who was to be married in late summer to a man she had never met. They were in the same gym class where one of their blocks was tennis. She was not very good. He was. She asked him one day if he could teach her because her future husband, Ajit Dhaliwal from the Punjab, had requested, if not competence, than at least a little knowledge about tennis, English poetry, and philosophy. And so Mason became Seeta’s tennis tutor, and almost immediately introduced her to Keats and Donne. About philosophy, he knew nothing.

  They met twice a week in the late afternoon. Seeta wore low white runners and black jeans and a white flowing shirt that could have been her father’s. She implied, through their conversations, that she had chosen Mason because he was two years younger than she and ought not to have been seen as a threat to Ajit’s territory. She pronounced “territory” quickly, with clipped vowels. She said she liked the name Mason Crowe. Though crow ate carrion, she said, she admired their sleek blackness. She added that he looked sporty and his large forearms seemed tennis-y. He explained that his arms were strong because, on Saturdays, he was a bricklayer’s helper. He said he worked for two Portuguese brothers who were crude and cheap. They were so hard up they sculpted nudes in their mortar. Seeta ignored this detail; she heard it and smiled slightly, but still, she ignored it.

  By the second lesson Seeta had configured the velocity of a tennis ball to the straight-armed swing of a racquet but still, after half an hour, she fell breathless at the sidelines, the court littered with errant balls, the net her principle enemy. Mason had arrived with a head full of freshly acquired English verse that he threw in Seeta’s direction, usually just before a serve. He held the ball between his fingers and cradled the sweaty racquet. Beyond the haze of brilliant sunshine, Seeta bounced on her thin white treads. The seven bracelets on her right wrist jangled. “Love is beauty and beauty is love,” he sang out and lobbed the ball her way like a missive that contained an ode to her, the urn. He also memorized bits of Yeats and discovered that she liked the rhythm and language. He quoted “The Stolen Child” one afternoon and she tilted her head, paused, and said, “That, I like. Though it’s sad.”

  They were never alone. Seeta always brought her sister Sadia along, who would sit on a bench by the chain-link fence and read romance novels, lifting her head whenever Seeta squealed with delight, then looking away, returning to her book, a solitary sentinel.

  After one session, the three of them sat on benches in the shade and drank water and Seeta talked about “Nietzsche,” the man she was going to marry. She called him Nietzsche because he was a philosopher and she knew that the first Nietzsche, the real one, had said God was dead, and these days she felt that that was true. She spoke about her future husband as if this were not her life, as if she were describing an object that was passing by in the distance. When she finished, she held Mason’s hand, traced his knuckles, and said, “Do you think I am mad?”

  “Not if you don’t,” he said. “Obviously this was planned long ago. When you were three or four or something like that.”

  “Last year,” she said, “My grandfather chose him.”

  “Can you get out of it?” Mason asked, made bold by their arms touching and Seeta noting his knuckles, however absent-mindedly.

  “I’m not sure I want to.” The side of her mouth went up, a subtle smile. “I was offered several,” she continued. “A doctor, a shoe factory owner, and Ajit, the philosopher. I chose Ajit.”

  “You met them?”

  “No, I saw pictures of them. Along with biographies, family details, all.”

  “Shoes would have been nice,” Mason said. He made a motion with his hand at her runners and she pulled her legs away, as if he had violated some space. Perhaps the feet were sacred, he thought.

  “How about you?” he asked Sadia, who, though her book was still open, was obviously aware of the conversation.

  “Hah,” she cried out, “Never.”

  “Daddy will insist,” Seeta told her sister.

  Sadia shrugged. Compared to Seeta she was plain. Mason thought then that no man, being allowed to choose, would want her.

  It was May. They lived on Academy, a good distance from Seeta’s place. There were four of them in the house, mother, brother, Mason, and father, who was usually off seeking customers for unwanted sets of encyclopedias in Southeastern Manitoba and Northwest Ontario, around Rainy River, an area he frequented not for the local people’s willingness to buy, but because in the late afternoons, along the shore of Lake of the Woods, he could fish. Danny, the older brother, was rarely home. He was a head chef in a fancy restaurant and he dated girls who were very good-looking and he drove a red Mazda and was generally not very bright.

  Their house was small but it looked backwards toward the mansions of Wellington Crescent, and on warm evenings the sound of laughter and music came to them like signals from a faraway and unapproachable place. One evening there was a fight, with raised voices and the breaking of glass. A woman sobbed. Mason’s mother was pleased. She said, “Listen,” and she lifted her head and moved it back and forth like some kind of small bird. She was reading a thick book that sat in her lap and her legs parted slightly so that the spine of the book dipped between her thighs. The book was too heavy to hold up so she had to lean forward, neck bent, and this made her look childlike. She looked over her glasses and said, “Being rich does not make you smart or beautiful.”

  Mason didn’t answer. This was one of the typical puzzling statements his mother liked to make, as if by throwing out
nonsense she herself sounded smart. He was eating toast and standing by the screen door, listening to the night noises and thinking about Seeta. Earlier, he had looked up a recipe for chapatti and he planned to try making it that evening, after his mother was sleeping or had gone out. When Mason’s father was away she sometimes dressed up in a nice top and a skirt and pantyhose and dark high-heeled shoes and went out dancing with her friend Rhonda. Or someone.

  The rich cries had subsided, but the night noises continued – sirens, revving engines, the clatter of motorcycles. Mrs. Crowe rose and walked to the bathroom. When she came back Mason’s father telephoned to say that he was near the American border. He’d been chased by two dogs, been thrown off of one farmer’s land, but finally shared a meal with a family called Menke to whom he’d sold a set of encyclopedias. He was spending the night there. Mason’s mother told him this after his father hung up. When she had first answered the phone she did not seem happy. She listened and looked at her nails and at one point she said, “Good. Good. Don’t let them kill you in your sleep.”

  Mason imagined that his father chuckled then and said something provocative because his mother’s eyebrows went up and her face softened. Her tongue touched a top tooth and then pulled away. She bit a nail. She was wearing a white short-sleeved top, and a pale-green skirt. Her feet were bare. She said, “He’s okay,” and then she said, “Mason, it’s your dad,” and she put the phone down and walked away from it.

  Mason took the receiver. He could smell his mother on it, the same smell of the perfume he’d bought for her at the Bay. A little bottle that said Iliad. Mason waited a bit, then said, “Hello.”

  “Mason, how’re you doing?”

  “Fine.” The phone creaked in his father’s hand, like he was trying to crush it. “Where are you?” Mason asked. He was a polite boy.

  “Sprague, near the border. I found a buyer. Now we can eat steak.”

  “Good,” Mason said.

  “You take care of your mother, okay?”

  “I am.”

  “I’ll be there this weekend. We’ll do the family thing.”

  Mason said that that was nice. He said that Danny could cook and they’d all eat well. “Mom’ll be happy,” he said.

  His father laughed and asked if he was still working for Jack Costa. Mason said he was, though it wasn’t much fun and Mr. Costa was mean.

  “Whaddya mean, mean?”

  “He’s cheap,” Mason said. “That makes him mean.”

  “Huh,” Mr. Crowe went. Then he said, “It’s just Saturdays. It can’t harm you.” And then he said goodbye and hung up.

  Mason’s mother came back into the room holding a drink. She sat down and put her feet on the footstool. Mason looked at her heels, her insteps, the fine lines through the milkiness. She opened a bottle of clear nail polish and drew one foot up and leaned over it. The bare calf now and the blue bone of her shin. The little brush flashed and painted. A seed from the raspberry jam was stuck between his teeth. He sucked at it.

  “Don’t do that. It makes you sound simple.”

  Mason closed his mouth.

  “Your father is always so happy when he’s gone.”

  “He made a sale,” Mason said.

  “Even when he hasn’t sold anything, and we all know that’s common, even then he’s happy. Help me here.”

  Mason took the bottle and closed it and set it on the mantel. His mother had retrieved her glass of gin and water. He looked down at her and saw that one day he would be her age. He said, “If you like someone and you know that they might like you but can’t because there’s someone else, someone from another place, someone coming to take them away, what do you do?”

  “Is this true?” his mother asked. She seemed about to smile and Mason thought if he made this into a funny story it wouldn’t be as dangerous.

  “Her grandfather has chosen a man and he’s a philosopher and his name’s Ajit but she’s never met him. I told her it wasn’t fair because my name was never in the lottery and how can you win if your ticket’s not in the hat.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “Seeta.”

  “Have I met Seeta?”

  “She’s the girl I play tennis with.”

  “And you like her?”

  “I don’t know. I think so.”

  “And she encourages you?”

  “I don’t know. How do you know?”

  “Oh, Mason. Come here.” She patted the couch beside her and Mason sat and she took his head and looked at him and then pulled his face towards her shoulder and neck and he felt her heat and smelled the Iliad. “That’s not fair. You want me to call up her mother and put in a bid? Or ask her over. This weekend. When your father’s here.”

  “She wouldn’t come.”

  “She might. Ask her. She might.” She let go of his head and neck and looked at him and said there was always danger in love. She said that he was young and though his heart was swollen now it might not be next week. “The vagaries of love,” she said. “Distance does not make the heart grow fonder. I can’t imagine loving a man who arrives from a distance, like this Ajit. Isn’t there someone else? A girl your age?”

  Mason thought of Lena Schellendal, a girl he’d admired from a distance.1 He said, “I’m not interested in anybody else.”

  “I just don’t want your heart broken,” Mrs. Crowe said. She touched Mason’s face and he saw the underside of her arm and the crease of her blouse and he thought how he’d seen his mother naked just last week. She’d been changing her top and she wasn’t wearing a bra and he’d come into the bedroom and looked at her and she’d looked at him and she hadn’t tried to cover up, just said, “Maybe you should knock.” Her assurance had surprised him and the beauty of her breasts had surprised him; it was as if assurance and beauty were two halves of the same circle.

  The next morning Mason phoned Seeta. Her mother answered.

  “Mrs. Chahal,” Mason said, “it’s Charlie from Charlie’s. Seeta’s boss. Is Seeta there?” Mrs. Chahal responded with a yes and disappeared, and for a few minutes Mason heard scuffling and dark whispers and then, finally, Seeta said, “Hello?”

  “Seeta, this is Mason.”

  “Really?”

  “You said I could call there. I thought maybe you or your sister would answer.”

  “Really? My mother thinks you’re funny. ‘It’s that Mason boy,’ she says. Wouldn’t let me come near the phone. I had to wrestle her for it. Why don’t you at least lower your voice if you’re going to be Charlie. She knows Charlie. Likes Charlie. You she sees as a horny sixteen-year-old. You know that.”

  “My father’s coming up here for the weekend,” Mason said. “Would you come for supper Saturday night?”

  “I could.”

  “You wouldn’t have to be my date.”

  “I could be. If you like.”

  “I just thought, with everyone there, you know. My brother’ll cook. He’s a chef.” Mason could hear a jangle of bracelets as Seeta’s hand moved. He heard a quick breath and she said, “I’ll come. I’d like to meet your family, though I might have to bring my sister.”

  They talked some more, about Sadia, whom Seeta claimed was shy but seductive, about Mason’s mother, who was a math teacher, about Ajit and the food he would eat and what it would be like to sleep with a stranger. “At least he isn’t a doctor,” Seeta said. “Doctors have a funny smell. Ajit will smell like books.”

  “Is he rich?”

  “He has an inheritance. Not large. My uncle in Vancouver owns a community newspaper, he expects Ajit to work for him.”

  Listening to the rise and fall of Seeta’s voice, the intake of breath after each sentence, Mason concluded, after hanging up, that he knew nothing about love other than the desire to hear Seeta call out his name.

  Over the following days Mason thought about Seeta. Her willingness to come to his house had surprised him and though he anticipated her visit the possibilities for failure were enormous. His father could be
especially tactless. He liked to ask lots of questions and tell bad jokes and show off his limited knowledge of pop culture.

  The evening of the dinner there were seven people sitting around the table. They ate spaghetti squash and steak and baked potatoes and salad and they drank beer with the meal. Seeta had arrived halfway through the meal, her younger sister Sadia in tow. They’d come by bus and then walked the last distance and Seeta, especially, had been slightly out of breath. Her hair was wind-tossed. She didn’t apologize for being late, just sat down and after introductions and hellos accepted a steak and potato. Sadia said she wasn’t very hungry and took only squash. She drank water and lifted her chin and pointed it at each speaker and her thin mouth moved occasionally as if she were carrying on her own conversation. Her hair was in two braids tied with white ribbons. She was more angular than Seeta; her coldness, her distance, made her an enigma. Danny had brought his girlfriend, Maryann. They were sitting side by side, across from Seeta and Mason, and Mason was both proud and jealous of his brother, who was twenty-four years old and had a beautiful girlfriend and his own good looks. “He’s swarthy,” Mason would tell Seeta later, and she wouldn’t disagree.

  When Seeta arrived Mr. Crowe pulled out her chair for her and then he did the same for Sadia. “Voila,” he said.

  “Jesus, Dad,” Mason said.

  His father ignored him. He studied Seeta and asked her where she was from.

  “Give her a break, Dad,” Mason said. “Besides, that’s such a stupid question.”

  “That’s okay,” Seeta said. “I’m from Winnipeg.”

  Mason’s father seemed unfazed. He asked, “I mean, your parents. What country do they come from?”

  “The Punjab. That’s in India. I’m Sikh.”

  Mason’s father nodded. His mother asked, “Do you have family there?”

  “My future husband, he’s from there.”

  “Your husband?” Danny asked. He looked at Mason, at Seeta.

  “You thought I was Mason’s girlfriend.”

  “Yeah.”