by John Bemrose
Liz’s invitation tipped him towards buying the coat. He had been eyeing it for weeks, fearful it might disappear from Art Blostein’s show window: a windbreaker-style jacket with a body of rich chocolate suede and beige, knitted arms. Propped in front of the headless torso that wore the jacket was a little card carrying the silhouette of a rabbit’s head and the message: AS ADVERTISED IN PLAYBOY. The coat, when he tried it on, seemed too large for him, but Art Blostein assured him that was the style, and as he gazed at his three selves in Art’s triple mirror (each looking a little different, each claiming to be genuine), it seemed he had changed: he looked bigger, more relaxed, more in the know. “It’s you!” Art said happily, and his rubbery clown’s face sent a laughing smile of approval over Joe’s shoulder.
He crossed Shade to the bank. At the wicket, he couldn’t help looking around, worried his mother might come in. He had never taken money out of this account before, not since he and his mother had opened it ten years before. Wearing her best coat, a heavy English tweed (he could still see its houndstooth checking, its infinite repetitions like the interference swimming up a television screen), she had announced to the teller and anyone else who cared to listen (it had seemed to him that the whole bank was listening) just how well Joe was doing in school, how someday he’d go to university: that’s what this account was for, to save up all his allowances and gifts and payment for small jobs. Afterwards, she’d practically made a ceremony of handing him the little book with its stiff red cover. “This is your future,” she’d said. “Take good care of it.” He’d carried his future through the streets of Attawan, his hand sweating, it seemed so important. When they got home she’d relieved him of it and put it in her dresser drawer.
According to the book — which he now kept in the battered blue dresser wedged beside his desk — the account contained more than a thousand dollars, most of which he’d earned himself, working summers in the mill and filling shelves at the A&P after school. He took the money — four new twenties and a ten — back to Art’s, and Art folded the jacket into a box, turning two wings of tissue paper over it with the tenderness of someone burying a baby.
That evening, after he got home from the A&P, he smuggled the box up to his bedroom and hid it in the back of the closet. It was critical that his family not see the coat, which was like a new skin to him, tender and vulnerable. After supper, he felt he had to look at it again. His parents were watching television — the rumble of canned laughter was floating up the stairs — so he opened the box, slipped on the coat, and went swiftly down the hall to his parents’ bedroom, where a full-length mirror hung on their closet door. In its icy rectangle, the coat looked fine, too fine, with its bulky arms like knitted chainmail. It outshone everything else: his green slacks with their shiny, shapeless knees, his tired desert boots, even his face. Yes, the coat was perfect, but his mouth was too thin and his ears stuck out. He gazed at himself suspiciously and disapprovingly, as if he had run into a disreputable cousin.
Leaving the room, he met his father in the hall. As they passed, his father threw out his hip in a friendly bodycheck.
His father seemed not to have noticed the coat at all.
“Say, Joe,” his father said. Reluctantly, Joe turned back to him.
His father looked tired these days, hollow-eyed — Joe’s mother had mentioned he wasn’t sleeping well — and now he drew back his lips in a kind of wince, as if his words had to be tugged from his flesh, like a sliver.
“You’re going on to university —”
The coat suddenly felt huge on him, almost clownish.
“That’s right.”
“I was wondering,” his father said, as he drew his hand over his balding head, “are you doing it for the money? I mean, is money your main purpose for going on — to make a lot of money?”
“Not really,” Joe said, bewildered. In truth, he had never thought about money per se. What he thought about, in that line, was a different way of life: a house with a library, maybe. But even that wasn’t the whole story.
His father’s eyes flashed out at him. There was something shy in his father, a youthfulness that had never grown entirely used to the world’s light. “It’s history, I guess, that attracts you?”
“That’s right.”
His father motioned with his hand, as if tossing away a fistful of sand.
“You love it, I guess.”
“Uh-huh.”
They were both uneasy now, at this mention of love. Joe was reminded of the time, years ago, when his father had tried to tell him about sex. They had both been mortally embarrassed by his “And you put your body inside the woman’s” delivered with grimly set jaw and averted gaze. Joe had already known that.
But now his father looked at him directly, and for a moment the blue eyes blazed out not in shyness but in strength and glad discovery.
“Good,” his father said. “That’s good.” And he nodded and nodded, in awkward, fond approval. “You keep on then.”
Joe went back to his room and stripped off the jacket. He did not understand what had just happened, but he felt like weeping. He felt like a fraud. His jacket was a fraud, and he was a fraud for thinking it might make a difference. His dad loved him. He hated to be reminded of it. The knowledge of this love flooded through him like a weakness, dissolving everything that a moment before he had been reasonably certain of. Who was he? What in hell was he doing? He stared at the new coat with remorse and hatred.
Two days later he went back to Art Blostein’s and bought tan slacks, a pale-blue, button-down shirt with faint pinstriping (just like the shirts Brad Long wore, he noted with satisfaction), and a soft, navy-blue cardigan. At Jarrod’s, down the street, he bought a new pair of Hush Puppies in chocolate suede. He hid these items in his closet, and on the evening of the party smuggled the new jacket, still wrapped in its box, into the trunk of the Biscayne. Then he went back to his room to change.
At nine o’clock, he was ready. Wearing his old poplin wind-breaker over the new sweater, he crept down the stairs. But his mother must have been listening. She came down the hall in a fluster of excitement to see him off. A week before, when he’d told her he was going to the McVeys’, she’d barely been able to contain her pleasure. A day later, she’d announced that she’d washed his best slacks and shirt; she’d even cleaned his church shoes.
And now she would see what he had done. He stood in the little entrance hall and watched her eyes — her wide-set eyes in which he could read every nuance of her inner weather — watched them brighten as she took in the new slacks. And the cardigan, peeking out below his jacket.
“Joe, what have you done? Let me see!”
He was ready to do battle, to tell her, It’s my money, I earned every penny, but she was delighted.
“Oh Joe, open the jacket! Let me see!” She stood back, her gaze roaming and glowing.
“Yes, that’s wonderful, you’ve got wonderful taste. Where did you get them?”
He told her the story. She stood close to him, too close, really, for comfort, gazing at him in a fever of admiration and picking microscopic bits of lint off his sweater, pushing his hair off his forehead. “I got a new jacket too,” he told her sheepishly. She made him fetch it from the car. She seemed less delighted with the coat — he thought her face darkened when he told her the price — but the tide of her enthusiasm could not be stopped. Suddenly leaning up, she planted a kiss on his cheek. For a moment, smelling her familiar smell, feeling her lips brush his skin, he sensed the vanished world of the 1930s come flooding up in her. His mother, too, might have been eighteen.
The streets of the town were lit with bonfires, where householders had raked leaves to the curb. Some of the piles flared as he passed in the Biscayne; others smouldered till the gust from the car fanned them, sending bright sparks tumbling across the road. Occasionally, a heating chestnut popped. Smoke rose in tottering pale columns, and the smell of it at his open window was the joy of the world burning, life-giving and s
harp. He parked on Robert and walked past a dozen other cars towards the McVeys’, glancing at the open garage where the windshield of the Lincoln gazed out with imperial calm. The car was one of the chief shrines of the many he had created wherever Anna Macrimmon had sat, walked, spoken to him. In his chest another fire burned.
A small window gave a view into a large hall covered with an Indian rug. He saw the flowing, curving base of stairs carpeted in deep green and a long, panelled hall leading towards the arctic glow of an empty kitchen. Music pulsed distantly — he thought he heard Diana Ross’s voice cakewalking to heaven — but no one answered the rap of the heavy knocker. He was wondering if he should try the back of the house when the door opened and Doc McVey stood before him in a silky black-and-red dressing gown, worn — Joe found this odd — over his shirt and trousers. At his throat was a dark-blue ascot, in his hand a glass filled to the brim with ice.
“A late reveller,” Doc said in his mild, slightly fey voice as he peered with cheerful irony through his round glasses. He was a tall man with a babyish face and a habitual look of playful bemusement, slightly scornful. He was a doctor, and though he no longer practised, he kept his old office downtown at the head of steep stairs over Maggie’s Beauty Parlour. He had inherited money — Joe had this from his father — and made a great deal more investing it in the stock market, as well as buying and selling properties in the area. For several years — this was an open secret in the town — he had been having an affair with a woman called Babs Wilcocks, who worked as a secretary in Bannerman’s General Office.
“Aren’t you Alf Walker’s boy?” Doc McVey said, ushering Joe in.
Suddenly his past, his family, seemed all too vividly present, as if they had trudged in behind him. The music was much louder now, but he could see no signs of a party.
“Your dad and I went to school together. He was very fast on the track, your dad. He gave me a lot of trouble in the hundred.”
“Is that right?”
“Oh yes, he was fast,” Doc McVey said suggestively, as though some scandal were associated with his father’s speed. As his large eyes — magnified, it seemed, by his glasses — fixed Joe with a look of amused watchfulness, Joe had the sense he was being tested, as though Doc McVey were waiting to see if this interesting creature, Alf Walker’s son, might perform a trick or two. Joe looked away down the hall. Sally, Liz’s younger sister, was approaching with a bowl of popcorn. She acknowledged Joe with a shy smile and, sticking her neck out awkwardly as if to facilitate her escape, started up the stairs, followed by a fluffy white cat. Doc McVey was still looking at Joe. “Down there, through the kitchen,” he drawled, gesturing with the ice.
As Joe reached the kitchen, Liz McVey climbed from a dark room sunk beyond it — from a babble of voices and the wail of Dion complaining, once more, about Runaround Sue.
“Joe! I was afraid you weren’t going to make it!” She came towards him with that overly intense look of hers, almost tragic, and leaned up to kiss him on the cheek. He caught a whiff of something musky, arousing. Taking his coat, she tossed it over several others on a chair; as she turned away, the pile toppled to the floor. “Can I get you a drink?”
While she rummaged in the fridge, he restored the coats to the chair, hanging his own over the back, and turned to the doorway that led, he saw, to a large room packed with shadowy bodies. The only light came from the kitchen and from the outdoor lights shining through a wall of French doors, from the deserted patio. He could not see Anna Macrimmon.
They lingered talking in the kitchen. Liz stood with her back to the counter, with one arm planted on her hip, the other stretched along the counter. It was a bold pose, and it suited her, suited her look of blazing candour. Below her knee-length skirt, maroon stockings complemented the deep cherry red of her blouse. She wore more eye makeup than usual, a touch of Cleopatra. He found her attractive, in a provocative, almost vulgar way.
“I liked what you said yesterday in Mann’s class, about war not being good for anybody. Very beautifully put.”
He muttered his thanks. He’d been rather embarrassed by his own comments at the time, his argument with Brad Long in front of the whole class, in front of Anna, about the benefits of war. Brad had bragged that his father, an officer on a destroyer, had gone away a boy and come back — this had raised a laugh — “a real cool guy.”
“War must be so horrible,” Liz said, looking at him with deep concern. “Don’t you think?”
He said, “Did your dad go overseas?”
“Oh heavens no!” Her hand with its three rings splayed over her chest. “They would never have had him, not with his eyes. My God, he couldn’t have told which end of a gun was which. Oh no, he missed it all, thank God. Or I think, thank God,” she added ominously. He glanced at the dark door to his right. He was expecting Anna to appear at any minute. Someone turned up the music. In the cupboards, glassware was beginning to dance. Liz said, “Why don’t we go somewhere where we can actually hear each other?”
Reluctantly — yet half-glad of the distraction — he let himself be led through the dining room, where a vast table gleamed in the dimness. Then into a large living room, past a long couch with carved, shapely legs, upholstered in some striped fabric. Two identical, moss-green wingback chairs faced a fireplace with a marble mantel. There were Indian rugs scattered over the broadloom, while oil paintings glinted under little tubular brass shades: bright, ornately framed landscapes showing winding autumnal rivers, a red northern sky stamped by a V of geese. He had never been in such richly decorated rooms before. From this moment on, he would never think his own house anything but shabby and second-rate.
But the living room was apparently not to Liz’s taste. She led him on, through the hall where he’d first entered, through a heavy door into a den. This room looked more lived-in. Photographs in gilt frames hung over a carved desk where a stack of papers was pinned with a rock of raw glass. There was a small television and a wide couch covered in a beige material, with throw cushions in green and blue. Liz curled up at one end of it, drawing up her legs in their maroon stockings. He sat at the other end, but had difficulty finding the right posture. To match hers would have committed him to a directness and intimacy he did not feel. He sat at an angle to her, his attention diverted by a large book resting on the coffee table. On its cover, a racing yacht tilted under full sail.
“So,” Liz said, as if they were two old friends who at long last had found time to talk.
“Your dad likes sailing?”
“Oh yes,” she said, a bit impatiently. “He’s already got one boat, up at the cottage. But he’s threatening to get one he can go around the world in —”
“Really?”
“I hear you broke up with Sandy,” she said, ignoring his question. “Or do I have that wrong —”
“No, you’ve got it right,” he said, a bit surprised. He looked into her face, all sympathy and concern, though in her eyes the brightness danced: wasn’t life hard and wasn’t it fun?
“A very pretty girl,” Liz said. “I hope it wasn’t too painful.”
“Well,” he said, shrugging. It had been painful, but not in the way she perhaps meant.
“When Bob and I broke up — this was over a month ago — well, it’s not something you want to go through every day.”
“No,” he said. It occurred to him she might be vetting him, for Anna. Anna would have to know whether he was free. “No,” he repeated, more strongly. “Not every day.”
Behind him, though the closed door, he heard someone come into the house. He looked around.
“Just ignore them,” Liz said sharply. “They can find their own way.”
“Is Anna here?” he said.
“She was,” Liz said, without missing a beat. “She and Brad got here first. They went off about twenty minutes ago —”
“Oh they’re here together?” he said, feigning a mild interest.
“Together!” she cried. “The original Bobbsey Twins! We
were running out of beer and Brad said he could get some from a friend, although of course knowing Brad they probably went by way of the gravel pit.” She was watching him with a straight-on innocence now. The abandoned gravel pit to the east of town was a favourite parking spot. There were nights when the spring-fed lake at its centre was completely ringed with cars.
Later, she drew him onto the dance floor for a slow one. Her hand was cool in his, and as she snuggled in, her pelvis brushed against his thigh. His own excitement — the stirring in his trousers — seemed a distant thing, a nuisance, really, and he pushed her back a little. It was clear now that Liz had never been fronting for Anna, she was only fronting for herself, and though he found this flattering, he could not stop thinking about Anna, Anna out there in the night somewhere, Anna with Brad Long. He refused Liz’s view of them as inseparable, because it didn’t square with what he knew. It was true, Anna and Brad had gone out together, at least once, but to Joe’s mind she was more at ease, more content, with him. He didn’t trust Liz. All he needed was to have Anna find him all wrapped up with Liz and he could kiss his chances with her goodbye — which, maybe, was Liz’s plan.
After three dances he left her on the excuse he needed a washroom. The one off the kitchen was in use, so Liz directed him to the second floor. Returning downstairs, the sound of a cabinet door squeaking in the den tempted him to look in. Anna Macrimmon was there, leaning forward to peer into a tall bookcase. She wore a rather short, pleated skirt of green plaid, which he’d never seen on her before, green stockings, and a tight-fitting white blouse with long sleeves.
“Anna,” he said, going right up to her. Beer had given him confidence. “I thought you weren’t coming. I was heartbroken.”
“Go on!” she cried, catching his bantering tone. But she put her arm through his and drew him to the books. He was suddenly giddy and, at the same time, stone-cold sober. She had never been so physical with him. His right arm weightless.